This is a true story.

I was about 7-years-old when Donkey Kong Country came out. It looked insane, and more than any other game for the system, it was the one that left me the most jealous of SNES kids. I needed to play it, but the only one I knew who had a copy was a boy on my block who I didn't get along with. I tried to suck up to him, but he knew I had a Genesis. He saw through my deception.

One day while riding my bike, I saw him run out of his garage to go over to a friend's house. With the garage door still open, I saw a golden opportunity... And so I snuck into his home and made my way to his bedroom, popped in Donkey Kong Country, and started playing. From the hallway, I could hear his mother approach, asking him a question that I cannot recall, clearly assuming her kid decided to stay indoors. As she turned the corner and peered into his room, she saw me on his bed playing the Super Nintendo. I'll never forget how loud she screamed as she chased me around his house and out into the street.

Just me doin' a little B&E because I love Donkey Kong Country so much.

Lies of P copies from Bloodborne and Sekiro like a child does from his friend's homework, it has all the answers but it doesn't understand the assignment.

Developer Round8's main takeaway from Dark Souls is that you die a lot, and everyone seems to really like that about it. After all, it's telling you to Prepare to Die right in the title, so clearly that's what people show up for. Well, Lies of P would like you to die too, only it's not so invested in making anything about that loop fun. Round8 has not read deep enough to figure out what makes Dark Souls so engaging and has produced a frustratingly clumsy imitation for it, one that is at times mean-spirited and cheap because that's what Round8 assumes Souls to be.

Lies of P's combat system places a significant emphasis on perfect-parries, which are initiated by hitting the block button a few frames before the enemy's attack lands. Against normal field enemies who throw out one or two attacks at a time, this feels pretty good. Bosses, however, love to initiate absurd 15-hit combos full of staggered animations and straight up fake-outs intended to trip you up and punish you, and that's where I start to fall off with how Lies of P operates. The speed at which your parry is initiated and the level of precision involved makes this system unreliable against flurry attacks, and a severely neutered dodge roll gives you little to fall back on. The game also takes a very Dark Souls 3 "poise for me but not for thee" stance, so I hope you don't mind watching Timothee Chalamet slowly get his wooden ass back up until you save enough Quartz to upgrade his P-Organ so he can dodge while prone.

Perfect-parries, fable arts (see: Dark Souls 3's weapon arts), and charge attacks are all necessary for quickly building stagger damage, because of course this game has a stagger mechanic. It also makes no attempt to convey when you should be pressing the attack or playing defensively, because it obfuscates its stagger meter for absolutely no good reason. Almost all bosses have a second health bar, too, because they all want to be the giant monkey from Sekiro so badly. At this point, I think Sekiro's impact on game design has been a net negative.

Round8's rote copying doesn't end there, however. The door knights from Dark Souls 2, giants from Dark Souls 3, sawtooth blade from Bloodborne, and animation for attempting to use an out-of-stock consumable from Dark Souls are all here. A veritable greatest hits. Round8's wholesale theft isn't limited to Fromsoft, however. Skip this next paragraph if you don't want to spoil some late game character beats and reveals:

Lorenzini Venigni, a friendly NPC who upgrades your Legion Arm (think Sekiro's shinobi prosthetic), is an orphan turned playboy millionaire whose parents were murdered after watching a fantasy-adventure film with their son, leaving him in the care of his faithful butler. The identity of his parent's killer? The King of Riddles, of course. Italian Riddler saying "riddle me this" is as funny as it is brazen, but the biggest laugh Lies of P's borderline-litigious character writing got from me was the post-credits reveal of Giangio being a double agent, which is presented in an extremely Metal Gear-esque way, complete with a "Mr. President..." level name-drop that sets up a potential series of public domain Souls-likes.

Doing something new with something old seems to be the overarching theme of 2023, and Lies of P plays hopscotch on that thin line between inspiration and mimicry. Thankfully, Round8's attempts to recontextualize Carlo Collodi's Adventures of Pinocchio do often result in success, and a strong emphasis on narrative helps pull together borrowed and original ideas to tell a cohesive story that builds upon its primary source material in interesting ways. I was way more invested in the lore of Krat and its inhabitants - yes, even Italian Batman - than I thought I'd be, and some solid art direction and excellent music left me flirting with the idea of a second run.

I also had a great time with the crafting system. You can strap a gigantic blunt wrench head to a pole and use it like a spear, which is exactly the level of stupid I want out of something like this. Hilts determine scaling and attack animations, while blades affect speed and raw damage. Being able to configure a greatsword that's usable on a dexterity build made me feel more inclined to try out weapons without ever feeling like I built my character wrong or locked myself out of something. It's also nice that throwable items remain viable throughout the game, meaning I always had them in my kit whereas I typically phase them out pretty early in most Souls games.

I'm sure this game will attract some annoying people that are very good at video games who will insist Lies of P is beyond reproach, where every flaw is in fact borne from a lack of skill, asserted in a way that reads more as veiled self-aggrandizement than serious criticism. Par for the course with Souls games and the "get good" crowd they attract. I firmly believe that Lies of P is a deeply flawed and derivative game in dire need of re-balancing and new ideas, regardless of how long it took for me to realize I needed to continually dodge left to beat the King of Puppets.

Anyway, I should've stolen Larry Davis' review and changed one or two things about it. Really give you all the true Lies of P experience.

Free superchats on sign up means you can blast "wearing my james sunderland c o c k ring" on screen and change the canon of Silent Hill.

Spending real money to vote on what cutscenes you want to watch already sounds like a terrible premise for a 'game,' but adding a battle pass to a Silent Hill product with fun stickers that say things like "IT'S TRAUMA!" and khaki's for your loser Silent Hill OC are proof positive that Konami hasn't changed and nobody with any direct influence over the IP knows what the hell to do with it. At least Jacob Navok, CEO of developer Genvid, shows up at the end of each episode to die a little more in front of the cameras. Everyone keeps voting for the options Jacob doesn't want, and it's all the result of some cabal of bad actors that apparently nobody could've accounted for or put functional moderation in place to curb. Watch as a flawed man withers away, night after night, trapped in a nightmare and punished for his deeds.

Jacob would like you to believe that the monetization is intended for you to save time, and is useful more to bypass puzzles than rock the vote. I guess that's a fair point, I mean these puzzles have to be designed bad on purpose, that's how you monetize them! Eurogamer's article about Ascension's economy is a great read, just let all these numbers and stats wash over you and remind yourself it's all for a Silent Hill game.

Oh well, at least we have a Bloober Team remake of Silent Hill 2 to look forward to...

Memento mori -- remember, you will not have enough time to complete all your Social Links if you focus on the old couple and their stupid persimmon tree the second you start the game. Do any of these kids even go to school!?

Apologies to FES devotees, but the "Persona 5-fication" of Persona 3 has, in my eyes, been nothing but a net gain. Sure, it's upsetting that the only other legally accessible version of Persona 3 is a ho-hum port of a compromised portable release, but I'm no stranger to the base game, and when stacking it up side-by-side with Reload, it's hard to not internalize the remake as being the superior way to play the game.

Pretty much every facet of the original is improved or otherwise preserved, and nothing has been downscaled or infringed upon in a manner I would view as harmful. That extends to giving the player direct control over their party, a choice that was originally made to suit Persona 3's themes of communication and bonding by treating each member of SEES as their own individual with their own will. You could largely avoid Mitsuru's habitual casting of Marin Karin by engaging with command presets, my issue is not with the AI. I just think having input over 25% of my team in battle makes the game a little too passive and boring. Well, not anymore. Now I have total control, me, and I'm using my newfound agency to... habitually cast Marin Karin-- wait what the hell

An expanded list of spells and abilities adds a lot more variety to combat, and having more input over how your Personas are built permits more strategic planning over the original's randomized inheritance. All quality-of-life changes that are more or less standard parts of the modern SMT experience, effectively bringing Persona 3 on par with Persona 5 and Shin Megami Tensei V. It is likewise as easy as those games, but being accessible to new audiences isn't necessarily a bad thing. I opted to play through Reload on hard and found the difficulty curve to be more enjoyable this way, though by the time you reach the end game you'll still likely be overpowered. Armageddon is basically the "bully The Reaper" button, and I feel a little bad about it, but that's free EXP so what're you gonna do?

Even the individual blocks of Tartarus, Persona 3's massive procedurally generated labyrinth, are fleshed out in a way that makes navigating less rote and tiresome... though it doesn't completely alleviate some of the tedium. This is perhaps one area where Reload is a bit too slavish to the original game. Enemy designs are turned over and recycled constantly, and the limited number of blocks ensures that even though the geometry is more varied, you'll still probably get sick of exploring before reaching a border floor.

Though I've seen people upset that Reload recasts everyone (except Tara Platt, who apparently had the one unassailable performance), I do think the new cast is excellent, and emotional beats that I found affecting when I played the original game were even more impactful despite anticipating them thanks in large part to better voice direction, more emotive character models, and more dynamic cinematography. I've seen mixed opinions on the soundtrack and changes to Persona 3's aesthetic, but I'm way into all of it. These are my favorite versions of familiar songs, I think the character portraits are a clear step up and I adore the hard lines segmenting areas of shading, I am 1,000% down with the water theming in the menus, and I think the new SEES uniforms are great and actually make the party feel like a well-backed force.

I also have nothing but praise for the new Not S. Links Reload adds, which provides the male members of SEES additional screentime for their individual stories to develop. I think this helps bond the player with each member of the core party even more than the original did, something that Persona 3's two sequels got right by giving each member their own dedicated Social Links. Strega and their ideology are also given a greater amount of time to develop, which helps build them as a credible threat and enhances their presence in the story. However, I must dock points for not being able to date Takaya, I can fix him

Reload might be me at my most defensive of remakes, and at my most insistent that changing material is not inherently bad. The few ways in which Reload does lack is still a noted step up from the original, and the content which is outright excluded is material I didn't care about anyway (I think The Answer is the closest any expanded content has come to essentially being an IGN "ending explained!" article, and unfathomably boring besides.) That said, I think it's possible to feel this way about Reload and still lament the fact that the original game is only accessible through piracy or by overpaying on the aftermarket, and that even more Persona 3 media is outright lost to time.

"The US military does not condone the killing of unarmed combatants. But this isn't real, so why should you care?"

I began collecting physical copies of Xbox 360 games almost a year ago, anticipating seventh generation releases might suffer from the same degree of inflation that's plagued earlier console libraries in the aftermarket. This was perhaps a foolish concern as many seventh gen games are still widely available on digital storefronts, but occasionally there's an exception, a game that gets delisted and which sees a hike in value that makes it highly sought after and prohibitively expensive. I picked up Spec Ops: The Line last March, and I'd say the near five times increase in its market value is a damn good ROI. That's why they call me Mr. Money.

Being delisted and thus becoming more relevant also served as a great motivator to finally take the game off my Xbox shelf and fight the good fight, oorah! shoot a bunch of unarmed civilians. My curiosity for it had been mounting for some time anyway, in no small part to the march of retroactive playthroughs and ensuing Hot Takes that have ended up in front of me with increasing frequency. Some of the more disparaging opinions I've seen cast Spec Ops as boorish, weakly imitating the broad strokes of its inspirations, most notably Heart of Darkness. Hell, the main antagonist, John Konrad, shares a name suspiciously similar to author Joseph Conrad -- it doesn't get more on-the-nose than that.

Indeed, when you compare Spec Ops: The Line to the quality of meta-narrative games releasing today, it seems downright quaint, maybe even oafish in how it makes its case against the institution of war and the distressing consequences of "justifiable violence." With a setup that amounts to "respected military leader has gone off the grid and established a cult" that uses borrowed imagery from Jacob's Ladder, and story beats that are undercut by the repeated pop of achievemnts, I can get where people are coming from.

However, Spec Ops is very much a game of its era, and it's easy to take for granted what it's doing when you aren't being mindful of the climate of gaming circa the late-aughts and early 2010s. This released during the height of Call of Duty's popularity, in a time when military shooters played more like propaganda for America's actions in the Middle East. These games frequently cast the player as the hero, whose actions were unassailable or at least justifiable enough that the player was never made to see or consider the consequences of what they'd done. America's Army was allowed to hit the mass market roughly around this time, for chrissake.

Spec Ops is a military shooter about military shooters, and directly addresses the way gaming culture insulated players to the violence of war by glamorizing it. It accomplishes this in ways both subtle and heavy-handed, typically within the same set piece, like the infamous white phosphorus scene which is set up like a typical mortar firing mission that then forces you to slowly walk through the aftermath and survey the horrific results of what you've done. Kid Coolout angrily yelling at Nolan North for having yet another mental break might functionally serve as an awkward statement of intent by the writers, and other games before Spec Ops looked into the camera and stated in no unclear terms that "war bad," but the very specific and pointed way in which Spec Ops attacks its particular brand of shooter makes what it's doing both novel and necessary.

I especially enjoyed some of the ways Spec Ops preys on how players might approach a game of this type during this era, too. The opening sequence has one of your squad members attempting to reason with a group of insurgents by speaking their language, leaving you in the dark as to what is being discussed while another squad member gets in your ear about an interactive piece of the environment. "Hey, that bus is full of sand, if you shoot it you can take them out..." Yeah. Yeah, what's a little war crime in my shooter? This is a video game, I'm doing that all the time. I see a window flashing yellow and a prompt that says "shoot" and I squeeeeze the trigger...

Of course, a lot of these choices - and those that are larger and more narratively driven - are an illusion. "I didn't have a choice," is something Walker repeatedly states to make peace with his actions. It's a video game, you did what was expected of you, so why should you stop and feel bad about it? The more you progress and the more Walker deteriorates physically and mentally, the more you're hit with these excuses. Even the loading screens trade helpful gameplay hints to press you on what you've done or otherwise steep you in Walker's headspace.

"To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless."

None of this is particularly special when viewed strictly through a modern lens, but as a piece of work so heavily characterized by when it came out, I think it's pretty damn great. Less great, however, is its gameplay, which even by 2012 standards was about as dry as a cover-shooter could possibly get. This is partly the result of being hit with delays, one of which was to force a multiplayer mode into the final product, as was the trend at the time. I didn't bother to mess around in that, but having watched a few videos, it does appear very tacked on and lacks the core game's subversive spirit. If only that time were spent elsewhere, like incorporating more dynamic elements to the sand that's blanketed Dubai as was originally intended... oh well.

I think there's a lot of fair criticisms out there about Spec Ops: The Line, but I also think some of them are perhaps too colored by what is expected of a game today rather than appreciating the atmosphere of the time. There's enough of value here that I think it's worth playing even outside its notoriety as a delisted game, and as my pal Larry Davis pointed out to me in private, it's also crazy that this is where a series of 10$ PlayStation 1 games eventually ended up.

"You are still a good person."

(Sad "oorahs")

Sonic Superstars is so bad that it has me questioning the narrative of Balan Wonderworld.

Yuji Naka was famously booted off the Balan project by Arzest, an effort that supposedly involved former collaborator and creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, Naoto Oshima. Naka has since alleged that his ouster was the result of speaking out against the unauthorized use of fan music in one of Balan's trailers among other things, but a long history of abrasive behavior and eventual arrest for insider trading has cemented him as the villain in Balan's story. However, to see how poorly Sonic Superstars turned out has given me perspective on another of Naka's accusations: that Arzest was intent on putting out a buggy game and that he was trying to do his best to save it. I think the son of a bitch might've been telling the truth. Yuji Naka is being held as a political prisoner.

On paper, a classic Sonic game produced by series veterans Iizuka and Oshima sounds like a good idea. Even people with more functional neurons than me looked at Arzest's catalog and thought it might still turn out good. Great even. Sonic's pappy is back, it's a real meeting of the minds over there at Sega HQ. I'm sure they're both great guys, but I'm to the point where I think they're about as capable of leading a project as Keiji Inafune, they're so far from their lanes they're driving through a corn field. Nothing about Superstars captures the magic of the classic games or Mania for that matter, but instead parades around in its physics, no better at displaying reverence or understanding for the material it is inspired by than Sonic the Hedgehog 4.

Any sense of spectacle provided by Sonic's speed is dulled by bad stage design and an overuse of set pieces, which are applied cookie-cutter between levels along with gimmicks and enemies, even those that might at first seem bespoke in the way a classic Sonic game ought to be. The creative bankruptcy is astonishing even when viewed in a vacuum, two whole zones reuse the same pinball trope and one of them even has an extra act. The last level's second act is just the first act in reverse, and watching the counter tick down from the seven minutes it took to complete act 1 made my stomach hurt.

Zones have an inconsistent number of acts, with some getting two, some three, and others one single monstrously sized act that can take as long to beat as a full zone. These single act zones play like a gamified lobotomy, with stage elements both unique and borrowed stagnating under their average clear time. Everyone who talks about Superstars likes to bring up how bosses can at times take as long to beat as a level, and this is both a true and fair criticism, but I think it's indicative of a larger problem the game has with its pacing.

You can speed these fights up somewhat by using one or two of your chaos emerald powers, and I do mean literally one or two. Most of these powers have such specific use cases that they're rendered all but useless outside of a small handful of instances, but the rush attack you get for collecting the first chaos emerald is good for getting two or three hits in the second a boss' invulnerability drops. That's my tip to you. Actually my tip to you is to not buy this game, and if you feel compelled to do so, smash all of your fingers with a brick so you cannot.

Superstars doesn't even get music right, man. Tee Lopes is credited among others, and you know how badly I'd love to say he's got another hit on his hands, but the dude just sounds like he's phoning it in on this one. I've never heard a single piece of music Tee has done feel quite so tired as some of what he's contributed to this game. Jun has also broke fucking containment AGAIN and is still pumping out dogwater 10 second loops that sound as close to real Genesis music as La Croix does to flavor.

There's a lack of cohesion across the entire soundtrack which also bothers me. You go from Tee's stuff to Jun's mess and then a bunch of other composers that are churning out crap that sounds like Mr. Blue Sky with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (this joke was submitted by Appreciations, age 9.) At least if you buy this game on PC - which, again, you should not - you can mod the soundtrack so it actually become listenable.

When Superstars was announced, I made a comment that the game looked like some tripe you'd download off the app store. I got pushback over this and changed my tune so I could fit in, a little lie I told because I didn't want to seem like an annoying pessimist. I should've held my ground because Superstar's art direction is pretty flat and its fidelity weak. Some zone have backgrounds that, without hyperbole, look like Nintendo 64 textures. I'm not even sure what I'm looking at here.(source.)

Iizuka recently made a statement that "pixel art isn't viable", and that does speak to an uncomfortable truth about how consumers view sprite-based games. Take a look at the Game Awards, which faced controversy after Nexon's Dave the Diver got nominated for Best Indie. A cynical assessment would be that it got the nom because it uses sprites and sprites = indie which means you can't reasonably charge full price. Counterargument: nothing about Sonic Superstars is worth 60$, it looks bad and plays bad too. I paid 35$ because, true to form, Sega put this out near Black Friday and their games drop in value faster than the coconut that hit me in the head and made me think it was still worth buying for nearly half price. I bought Sonic Mania four times, I'm willing to shell out for sprite games that I think are good, I am straight up mad I paid 35$ once for Superstars and I think I should be allowed to grab Oshima and shake him by his ankles until I get every cent back.

So, yes, you could say I went into this with some pretty negative biases. That's a fair criticism of me, the player. The fool, as it were, stepping in big mud pies for the amusement of everyone else. But somehow, Superstars managed to sink even further below my expectations. I thought I might walk out of this a little poorer, but that I may think the game is a 2.5. You know, mediocre. Didn't think I'd have a great time, but had no reason to believe I'd like it less than, say, Knuckles' Chaotix or fucking Sonic Frontiers. I didn't just step in another mud pie, I slipped on it and fell head first into a ravine. I got a neck brace on and I look all fucked up now.

You hurt me. We're not friends anymore.

I haven't so much been following Sonic Frontiers as I have been suffering it. The algorithms (and popular opinion, it seems) are against me on this one, and have been force feeding me this game on Twitter and YouTube no matter how many times I click on their little drop downs and tell them I'm "not interested." It's a wonder Sonic hasn't shown up at my doorstep to personally shove a copy of this game down my throat. Alas, here we are. Sonic Frontiers is out and like the mark I am, I bought a copy for 35$ on Black Friday. My condolences if you paid full price for this one, but you didn't abide by two of the immutable laws of game collecting: never buy a new game in the months of October and November, and never pay full price for Sonic.

This is going to be a long review. I'm going to cut Sonic open like a frog and teach you how every part of him works. If you don't have the time or the stomach for that, then the short version is this: Sonic Frontiers reinvents the series by trading substance for scope, morphing Sonic into an extremely dry collect-a-thon that is every bit as mechanically confused as it is buggy, and which despite its many callbacks has completely divorced itself from the series' soul. It is the worst major release I've played in 2022 (Although I just started Gungrave G.O.R.E. so... we'll see about that!), and I think it is sad that Sonic fans have been so mistreated they see mediocrity as greatness.

For those still seated in the operating theater, my tools are sterilized and the patient is on the table. Lets get into them guts.

THE LONG VERSION

Act 1 - The Gameplay Loop is a Mobius Strip from Which There is No Escape

Sonic Frontiers all but abandons the more focused level-based structure of past games for a new "open zone" design, which you could deconstruct to mean "open world," though I would liken it closer to a collect-a-thon. There's no shotage of crap for Sonic to collect, from Chaos Emeralds to memory tokens, defense and power seeds, keys, fishing coins, Koco, gears and egg memos... When you're first dropped onto the Starfall Islands and introduced to these various collectables and their functions, it almost starts to get ridiculous. Those opening hours suffer from a sort of "forest through the trees" problem where the basic rhythm of progression is made unclear by the sheer amount of items you're being asked to manage. This problem sorts itself out in time and you begin to understand what you need to do to push the story forward and what is superfluous, but none of it ever comes together in a way that provides a satisfying sense of flow.

I think this is reflected most prominently in the amount of disparate level elements littering each island. I want to emphasize the word "litter" because they're often strewn about like discarded trash, rarely connecting with one another in a way that feels intentional. Much of your time exploring Starfall will be spent jumping into and out of these short platforming challenges to collect memory tokens, necessary for freeing your friends and progressing the story. They're composed of the same core elements: grey platforms, springs, rails, speed pads, boost rings, balloons... Each one is just another reconfiguration of the same fifteen-or-so pieces, almost like it was assembled in a consumer-friendly level editor. You can see the seams. This sort of cookie cutter design caused them to wear thin for me after the second island, and though I've not run the math to back up this figure, I'd say something like 70% of them just sort of play themselves.

Once you've collected a token, you're (usually) sent flying back onto land. That's it, you got one, time to move on to the next. There are no bespoke gimmicks per island, no quicksand on Ares or snowboarding on Chaos to make use of the unique qualities of the biomes you visit in the way that every other platforming game would. It's just the same combinations of prefab geometry every single time for 20-30 hours.

Breaking up the monotony are Cyberspace levels, which each island has a small number of. These short independent zones play similar to the "boost" style of levels found in previous 3D Sonic games and are probably the best part of Sonic Frontiers as a whole. This starts to make sense though when you realize the level layouts are ripped from other, better Sonic games. "Wait a minute... this is White Jungle! Hold on, this is just City Escape!" Oh Sonic Adventure 2, how I've misjudged you. Sonic Team could not be bothered to come up with more than a pinch of unique layouts for these levels, which are themselves 75% asset flips from Sonic Generation. Enough of this, please. I am so sick of seeing Green Hill. Chemical Plant as lost all of its power, I am no longer nostalgic for Sky Sanctuary. Great investment, that Generations. They've been picking its bones since 2011.

And yet, borne from a lack of effort and a dearth of originality, Cyberspace is Sonic Frontier's greatest strength. "Sonic had a rough transition to 3D," bitch I'm playing good 3D Sonic levels from the last 20+ years in the new 3D Sonic, which otherwise completely fails to be fun. These levels come from games that may have been uneven experiences, but which held tight something Frontiers has let go: the tenet that Sonic games excel when platforming works rhythmically with speed.

Launched back out of Cyberspace and into the dire landscapes of Sonic Frontier's open zones, there's a few more things you can do, like collecting Koco and red and blue seeds to upgrade Sonic's stats, a feature I'm convinced exists to pad out the experience and trick players into thinking they're making meaningful progress.

Rings and speed can only be upgraded by visiting the Elder Koco, the currency for which are young Koco you find throughout the island or in Big's finishing minigame. The formula for how much Koco equates to one skill point is unclear, and when you're turning them over you don't actually see how many are leaving your possession or how many points you're gaining in turn. You then bank these points into your desired stat, one... at a time. Very slowly. In this clip, I am mashing the buttons to get through this as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, you can visit the Hermit Koco to upgrade your defense and strength, except this Koco will just consume all the red and blue seeds you've collected and automatically upgrade the corresponding stats accordingly. So, what the hell? There's one guy over here who lets me upgrade my stats instantly, but he only lets me upgrade two of my four stats, and then I got this bozo over here who makes me slog through his menus for the other two? Why isn't there just one NPC who handles my stats? Why are there three upgrade currencies instead of four? Or better yet, why isn't there one currency that I can allocate however I wish? These characters are not voiced and when you talk to them it doesn't denote who is speaking so there was multiple times where I didn't know if the Koco was talking or Sonic. Who designed this! Give me a name!!

in sonci fromtiers you can fight ginormous bosses and its just like shadow of the collosos and its so cool it's like vrooom i'm running up his arm, oh whoops okay byeee

Ask me about the unquenchable thirst I have to put a gun in my mouth.

Act 2 - You Make Your Own Fun (No Fun Allowed)

It takes a very boring man to admit he doesn't like Breath of the Wild. Similar to Frontiers, it's a series reinvention that cares more about the scope of its world than filling that space with anything meaningful, which hinges too much of its gameplay on frequently reused elements that overstay their welcome. However, the real appeal of Breath of the Wild is not lost on me. You really can go anywhere, you can do anything. The tools Link is given not only become necessary for exploring Hyrule, but let you break the game in fun and interesting ways. If you want, you can go straight for Hyrule Castle, or totally break out of the more restrictive tutorial area from the start to begin exploring the overworld proper. Breath of the Wild can be what you want it to be, it gives you toys and a box to play with them in and sets you loose.

Ideally, an open world Sonic game would give you an unparalleled sense of freedom, allowing you to unleash Sonic's speed and explore his world on your terms. Unfortunately, the way Sonic Frontiers is structured comes with it the expectation that the player will experience its platforming challenges from their point of origin to completion. To ensure a curated experience, Sonic's controls are made more restrictive. I'd describe the overall feel of Sonic as being a hybrid of Lost World and Sonic the Hedgehog 4.

Sonic's speed is downright sluggish coming off the heels of the "boost formula" games. Though this can be upgraded, it (along with all your other stats) have such incremental gains that they're imperceptible. Suffice it to say, you're probably going to be holding down the boost button to go anywhere, as it effectively becomes Sonic's sprint. If you stop holding the directional stick during a run or boosted jump, he'll come to a halt, meaning you have to always be directing Sonic where you want him to go rather than letting momentum take control. This makes speed feel especially artificial, there's no real weight to Sonic, no physicality to exploit. It's also a bit inconsistent too. Jump from one platform to another and use a boost to gain forward momentum, then try the same jump but instead boost off the edge of the platform and jump mid-descent. You'll gain exponentially more forward and vertical momentum than taking the more calculated jump. This doesn't feel like a feature, more like a quirk. That above clip of me flying off of the boss? I was hitting buttons to try to recover from that, the game just decided I couldn't make anymore inputs despite the fact that it doesn't really make sense that I couldn't. This happens regularly, as launching yourself high into the air off of platforms or through boost rings causes Sonic to seize up, as if to prevent him from using his newly gained verticality to get to places he's not supposed to be.

This gets especially bad when you reach Chaos Island, the third island in the game. Most of the platforming challenges in that map are locked to a 2D perspective, which about ten hours in already flies in the face of what the game has conditioned you to expect. However, it also means you're trapped. If you accidentally ran onto a boost pad that sent you careening into one of these 2D segments, you now either have to jump around while rolling the right analog stick hoping you can wrest yourself free and carry on, or complete the platforming sequence as designed. This is really annoying when you're trying to go to a specific location, or when you've already collected the associated memory token, but is also emblematic of a greater problem with Sonic Frontiers. It provides a space to play in, but you can only play on its terms.

Act 3 - Windows Login Screen Zone

Sonic's adventure on the Starfall islands takes place over three different biomes spread across five islands (yes, one biome is reused three times) and falls into the same aesthetic problem I have with the Sonic movies, in that you're sacrificing too much of the series unique visual design by plopping Sonic and his friends down in like, Nebraska. Placing Sonic into a "real" space is anathema to what I want from the series, but I also respect that this is very subjective. I'm sure someone looks at these biomes and thinks "oh yes, no more psychedelic levels for me please!"

Setting aside my preference and being critical of the presentation of Sonic Frontiers for what it is, I still think it's pretty bad. The design of the main cast of characters has not changed to suitably fit this world, with the various Titans and robots Sonic battles feeling as if they belong from a different game entirely. This visual inconsistency is made even more apparent when you jump out of a Cyberspace level. Vibrant colors transition to dull greys, washed out blues, muddy browns... Textures are soupy and low-res when they're not flickering or glitching out.

Speaking of glitches, when not busy falling through the world, you get to put up with all sorts of fun technical and performance problems. The framerate is inconsistent, sometimes fixed cameras totally fail to activate, sometimes Sonic just dies while still holding rings, and every single piece of geometry pops in about twenty feet in front of your face. In fact, the pop in is so bad that it's practically a baked-in part of the gameplay loop. I spent hours staring at the sky looking for an objective, then walking along trying to get the rest of the level to pop in so I could figure out how to get up there. On more than one occasion I was unable to actually figure out how to get a stray memory token, only to stumble hours later on the route to it a mile away. I don't know who needs to hear this, but the sense of reward a player experiences for completing a goal should not be punctuated by them saying "oh that's how I get it." Frontiers has the same shitty draw distance as a Pokemon game but is even more problematic given how much more crucial speed and exploration is to Sonic.

Act 4 - I Miss My Wife, Sonic

The one thing that I remained hopeful for with Sonic Frontiers was the promise of Ian Flynn's writing. Without getting too into the weeds on this, Flynn is the head writer for IDW's Sonic the Hedgehog comic, and previously took over for Ken Penders on the Archie series following his tumultuous departure. While I haven't kept up with the Sonic comic since the license changed hands, I've enjoyed what I've read of Ian's work. It's clear he understands the characters and has a fondness for the property, and everyone seems to be in agreement that he's Good and we like what he does here.

Still, out of the loop as I may be, I think Frontiers is his weakest work. I suspect a lot of people may like it if only for its sharp tonal shift, which pushes the series away from the more comedic nature of Colors and Lost World towards something that takes itself more seriously. However, Flynn's attempt at telling a more heartfelt and introspective story comes with quite a few stumbles, resulting in a game that is often sullen, and a bit dull. I'm going to get into spoilers here, so this is your warning to bail or skip ahead.

A lot of the game's story plays out in these little heart-to-hearts with your friends, who all have their own self-doubts and fears that they've kept bottled up. They start to express these as they help the remaining Koco on Starfall island, who themselves are vessels for the memories (perhaps souls) of the island's former inhabitants. The game enters into this very predictable formula wherein each of your friends meets a Koco who very conveniently shares character traits with them, allowing them to better understand themselves and their own motivations. It's touching at first, but quickly becomes rote, ultimately muddling its sincerity. While all of this is going on, Sonic also has to deal with Sage, an AI construct created by Robotnik who is initially antagonistic towards Sonic but begins to learn about herself by observing his actions.

This is where things kinda tipped from genuine and sweet to unintentionally funny to me. The concept of Eggman developing a fatherly affection for his computer daughter is pretty silly conceptually, but in practice is meant to make you feel sympathy for this egg-shaped goober who likes putting tiny animals into robots. It doesn't really work. It's been three decades of this Teddy Roosevelt looking freak slapping "EGG" onto all his inventions and I've just kinda hit the point where I think it's impossible for me to feel like he's relatable. Maybe someone less inundated with Sonic could get into this in a way I can't, but every time Eggman is like "oh my dear sweet daughter, please don't leave me" I just think "this motherfucker went to Bean Town and put all the beans in his machine to make them mean."

There's a point where Sonic and Tails are having a bro talk. You know, like a talk between bros? And she realizes that Sonic and Tails have a connection that is distinctly human, one that she wants to experience with Dr. Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik, and this hits her so hard she starts to cry and hum a sorrowful song while a montage of scenes between her and Robotnik plays in sepia tone. Except this game didn't have much of a budget for things like character animation, so all these flashbacks are just them like, standing around and flapping their mouths, and all of this is happening while she continues to hum out of key and it broke me. I laughed hysterically. Until my body hurt.

The weakest part of the whole narrative is probably its main villain. The story itself is very predictable, from the outset you'll likely come to the conclusion that the disembodied voice urging Sonic to destroy the titans is actually the bad guy, and obviously you'd be right. However, despite the fact that Sonic is clearly sharing some kind of psychic link with the big bad, you never really hear much from them. In fact, their motivation is unclear through much of the game, kept just as vague as its final form, which is perceived differently by all those who see it. What form it takes for Sonic and Sage is unknown to us, but for the player it appears as a purple moon, chosen for its symbolic connection to death. Another way of looking at it is that a sphere is very easy to render, and any asshole can slap a moon texture on one and turn that craterous bitch purple. During the final confrontation with this entity, The End, it laments how it's eternal, how it's a god unlike anything you've faced before. At least I think so, I'm not 100% sure because the reverb they put on the voice makes it a real pain to understand what it's saying. In any case, it's a really flaccid way to end the game. I don't know what exactly The End wants besides destruction, and I don't know why it wants it. It's like Necron, except - and I must stress I am not being hyperbolic about this - it feels less earned.

The stuff I did like were the bits that tried to establish some sense of narrative continuity with the rest of the series. They do just enough to make it clear that all the games (including Team Sonic Racing and Sonic Riders) have canonically taken place, though they don't try to untangle all the inconsistencies this brings. It's clear Flynn is taking the stance that everything happened, but also you probably shouldn't think about it and try to just relax (la la la.) There will maybe be some changes to Sonic lore that people as mentally stunted as I might take exception to, like Chaos being a space alien and the chaos emeralds coming from his home planet. I don't mind that they've given the emeralds a little more context without over-explaining them, and the Master Emerald is established to be of terrestrial origin, which almost feels like a bit of an out. Like maybe the Chaos Emeralds aren't from space but just ended up there for a bit through like, a warp zone or something. I don't know. They're doing that kinda shit all the time.

I don't have any friends because I talk at great length about Sonic the Hedgehog lore. Playing Sonic 2 is the single worst thing to happen to the development of my brain.

Act 5 - The Future's Gonna be Great (Because I'll Be Dead!)

Takashi Iizuka made a pretty bold statement about Frontiers back in June of this year, making it clear that this game would chart the course Sonic would take for the next decade. I suppose I'll be playing Sonic again when I'm 45.

The common consensus appears to be that Frontiers is an imperfect game that lays a promising foundation, one that is perhaps setting Sonic up for true greatness. I mean, imagine what they could do in the next game! I really wonder where that level of trust is coming from. Every time Sonic Team puts out a 3D Sonic that's well-received, they do a marginally better job in the sequel and then almost immediately thereafter blow the whole thing up. "Well, Sega has finally learned that they need to let them take their time developing a Sonic game!" My brother in Christ, for as long as this game was in development it's still riddled with problems, and if there's one group I trust less than Sonic Team, it's Sega. I'm like 35 or 38? I've been doing this my whole life, I know what they're capable of.

Look, I'll hedge my bets, maybe Frontiers 2 will be incredible; but even if it is relative to this game, it's not for me. I don't like open zone Sonic, I think it's conceptually rotten. Say what you will about Lost World, but at least it had unique levels with their own gimmicks to keep gameplay fresh. Talk all the crap you want about Forces, I'll be right there with you, but at least you could bust that game open in ways that makes even the most amateur speedrunner feel like a pro.

Sonic has been a lot of things over the years. It was never in the series DNA to remain static, and long running franchises are often expected to evolve or die, so I certainly accept that experimentation is not only good, but necessary. Frontiers is not the first time Sonic has been reinvented. It's not even the second or the third. But this time Sonic has lost something important, that ethos that has always beat at the heart of every game, helping the series endure through good times and bad. Early in the game, Amy Rose makes an observation about the Starfall Islands that really puts it best:

"The land feels sad and empty."

I'd like to say "this hasn't aged well" and be done with it, but that is NOT ALLOWED! If I said that, they'd put me in the stockades again, and I'm not going back there!!

I never got into the Ultimate Spider-Man comics back in the day. I don't like to dog on anyone's art, but Mark Bagley's interpretation of these characters was always a barrier, and it turns out they look pretty bad when rendered through a Nintendo Gamecube, too. However, if you asked me what my favorite pre-Marvel's Spider-Man game was at any point prior to this last weekend, I'd say Ultimate Spider-Man. Probably talk about how good the web-slinging was, or how neat the stylized comic book panel cutscenes were.

It's easy to assign a high level of quality to something you haven't touched for about twenty years.

Everything in this game feels weightless, Peter most of all as any punch to the nose will send him flying several miles away, rag-dolling at maximum velocity into the cold depths of the Hudson. Combat, traversal, even the level of mission variety just feels so flat, so bodyless that at several points I started to question if I accidentally downloaded a beta. I remember it being better than this, but apparently I just got way into a budget mid-2000s action game. I remember booting this up just to swing around for hours, not really doing anything. Real "playing with rocks" behavior.

Turns out me not actually doing anything when revisiting the game is partly a consequence of the game providing nothing to do. Side missions are divided between races and "tours" of combat that send you between points to beat up a few bad guys. Occasionally you'll be called upon to stop a crime in progress or swing someone with a tummy ache to the hospital (Spider-Man is a friend to those with IBD), but there's just not much going on in New York. Unfortunately, the game forces you to complete a pre-requisite amount of these missions before continuing with the story, and despite never being a tall task, it is incredibly mind numbing.

The main story missions are lacking in variety, too. Almost all of them follow the same pattern of chasing a villain from Spider-Man's rogues gallery and then doing battle with them. The chase sequences are lengthy and lacking in any sense of flow, and battles largely boil down to dodging attacks while waiting for the enemy to become vulnerable, then doing a hit-and-run for a small amount of damage. My favorite. There's like, five things to do in this game and they're all unengaging.

I don't even care for the story, which treads a bit too close to "it's all fate" for my liking. Peter and Eddie Brock's dads were both working on the Venom symbiote prior to their deaths, and apparently some of Richard Parker's DNA made it into the suit (he came a little), which creates a unique bond between it and Peter. I think part of what makes Spider-Man so appealing is that anybody could be him, Peter was just the right guy in the right place at the right time. Ultimate's story takes away from that and is worse for it.

Peter is also written to be an insufferable jerkass with no redeeming qualities, something Sean Marquette does an admirable job at capturing with his line delivery. Don't get me wrong, while half of Sean's acting credits in games are cited as "reused grunts," I'm sure he's a perfectly good actor who was turning in the performance expected of him. I pin the blame on bad writing and poor direction.

anyway, i'm giving this game an extra star because it never at any point made me play as Mary Jane

Metroid's Sonic 2006.

Other M has been on my radar for a while. The indisputable black sheep of the Metroid series, so known for the hate it gets that you'd be forgiven for not knowing it was positively received by critics upon release. I don't think I would've been able to appreciate what this game meant to Metroid fans circa 2010 as I would not have classified myself as one. In fact, my familiarity with the series was limited to Metroid Prime, a game I did not really care for, and which kept me from playing other Metroid games until only a few years ago. Being more familiar with the franchise now than I was, Other M has become a festering curiosity, always existing in the periphery while I play good Metroid games. It is not enough to be told it's bad, I need to know. I even began to gaslight myself into thinking the game is likely just mediocre, that all the derision and vitriol it gets is a classic case of people globbing onto a popular narrative and continuing to blow it all out of proportion.

Yeah, I'm an idiot. So what?

I don't even know where to begin with this game. Everything Other M sets out to accomplish - even on levels that are very fundamental to gaming as a whole - ends in spectacular failure. Its problems are so great, reviewing this game feels like walking into the home of a hoarder and being asked to sort everything out. I can't do that. You have to call in a professional, and apparently if you brought in any critic from 2010 they'd think it's just fine. GameSpot's Tom McShea looking at the wall-to-wall junk, shrugging, and going "I don't see any problem with this."

Like, do I start with the controls? That's a pretty important part of any game! There is only one controller setup for Other M: holding the Wiimote horizontally. I find this orientation to be inherently uncomfortable, and navigating Samus around in 3D using the Wiimote's gag D-Pad caused my hand to cramp horribly if I played for longer than an hour. Favoring uniqueness over ergonomics is an immutable element of Nintendo's greater design ethos, so... Whatever.

You can switch from third to first person perspectives by pointing the Wiimote at the TV, which you'll need to do frequently as it's the only way to fire your missiles. This locks Samus in place, making it very easy for her to eat shit while you're trying to line a shot up, but even more frustrating is how often the game drops you back out to third person. I started to worry something was wrong with my Wiimote or sensor bar, or that perhaps I was sitting too close to the TV, but everything seems to work fine in other games. It's just Other M that I'm having this problem with and given the overall poor quality of the rest of the game, I'm going to just go with it being either poorly implemented or outright bugged. Even if it was more reliable, I think this is a lousy way to play the game and would have vastly preferred they picked one perspective and just stuck with it. At one point in time, Other M was being designed as a purely 2D game, and I will lament to my dying days the fact that some bozo decided it ought to be this monstrosity instead.

Right, so, we've got a whole lot of garbage boxed up and taken out to the curb now, but oh no a whole fucking god damn muscle rack of SHIT has just fallen on me, and apparently it broke under the strain of Metroid's genre defining elements. All this crap about open-ended design and backtracking with new powers is all over the floor and I hate it here!!

Haha just kidding, because none of that stuff is in this game. Other M is less search-action and more action-platformer. All of your major suit upgrades are given to you at various points in the story, making them no longer feel earned, and most of the backtracking you'll be doing simply comes in the form of your objective marker arbitrarily moving around the Bottle Ship and it's three sectors. There's no satisfying sense of exploration here, and though E-Tanks and missile upgrades can still be collected, their presence is only to satisfy some sense of obligation to Metroid's identifiable pieces. You can just recharge your health or missiles when you're low by tilting the Wiimote vertically and holding down the A button, and because ammo is infinitely recoverable, enemies no longer drop health or missiles, giving you little reason to actually engage in skirmishes. In tacit recognition of the fact that nothing is worth interacting with, Other M frequently locks you into forced combat encounters and god do they drag. Most of them are spongy and have brief windows where they can actually be damaged. There's a handful against multiple enemies that like to zip around and collide with Samus, which causes her to bounce around like Brad Pitt in Meet Joe Black. I swear this game was either designed from a place of contempt for its players or Metroid. Maybe both.

However, I suspect the focus of people's dislike for Other M is its story, or more specifically its bizarre, borderline fetishistic portrayal of Samus Aran. Even if you get past the "male gaze" camera shots she's often framed in, her character is totally butchered. The story starts when Samus is called to the Bottle Ship after responding to a "baby's cry" distress signal... Baby's cry...? You mean, like the baby? Wait a minute, if I move the M in Other M it spells... Othmer!! Ah, it's all coming together now.

She's not the only one on the ship, however. The Galactic Federation has sent their own unit to investigate the disturbance, and it happens to be Samus' old squad, still led by her former CO, Adam. Samus has complicated feelings for Adam, which she articulates in very overwrought narration delivered by actor Jessica Erin Martin, whose delivery sounds like she's being stirred periodically from a medically induced coma. The way these feelings manifest in Samus is through utter submission to his authority. Like I said, you don't earn your upgrades, they're given to you through the story, and I mean they are literally given through Adam's permission. Oh, Samus is authorized to use her Varia suit now that she's been forced to run through several extremely hot areas that caused her physical damage? Well, I guess it's a good thing she acquiesced her autonomy to some asshole at the expense of her well-being.

It's all so out of character, to the point where I just assumed this was written by someone at Team Ninja who didn't care for the source material at best and at worst had some very problematic views on women, but uh nope, this is all on Sakamoto. This is a character who has always been portrayed stoically, hardened by her experiences as a bounty hunter and being orphaned. I never got the sense she'd have a panic attack seeing Ridley, someone she's canonically murdered four times prior to Other M, but she starts hyperventilating at the sight of him and it nearly gets someone else killed. Someone who, by the way, has a habit of calling Samus "princess," which should get both his arms broken. She's cool with it, though, and within the context of the game's narrative she finds it exhilarating to take orders from someone.

It is such a rancid depiction, and at several points it feels like she's just being written by a creep. It is also very heavy-handed in its themes about maternity, and it never has anything interesting to say about it. It's all surface level, superficial crap that's no more deep than the title of the game abbreviating to MOM. Even the more emotional beats feel hollow, partly due to how wooden everyone is, and partly because nothing feels earned within the story. Adam sacrifices himself to eliminate the sector the Metroids are propagating in, but like whatever. Get fucked, loser, you wouldn't let me power bomb.

Other M is legitimately one of the worst major franchise releases I have ever played. When I started this review a hundred years ago, I made a comparison to Sonic 2006 that might just seem snide, but I honestly don't think it's that off-base. It may not be broken in the same way as Sonic, but I think it's equally poor in terms of gameplay and how it feels in-hand. They're also responsible for nearly killing their respective franchises on the spot. There really isn't much else I can say about it, Other M fails to get even one thing right and that's astonishing.

Panzer Dragoon Orta is another one of those games I mostly remember hearing about in magazines. It received a lot of praise at the time, but being as it was an Xbox exclusive, it was forever out of reach like other well-regarded classics of that generation, like Jet Set Radio Future and Blinx the Time Sweeper. You have no idea how much I longed to play Azurik: Rise of Perathia, there was a whole universe of games just beyond my grasp!

Unlike JSRF and its own predecessors, Orta is actually fairly accessible today thanks to the Xbox marketplace, and used copies are still reasonably priced. I've been thinking of grabbing one as recent delistings has inverted my prior (psychotic) belief that I need digital backups of all my physical games. Gotta cover all my bases, I need to be able to play this grungy-ass port of the PC version of Panzer Dragoon whenever I'd like, that's important.

In any case, it's nice that I finally got to check this game off my list after 20+ years of thinking "I really should play Panzer Dragoon Orta," and I'm happy that it lived up to years of continued hype. Orta feels like a culmination of Panzer Dragoon's narrative and mechanical ideas, borrowing from all three previous games in one way or another to create what I think is the most fully realized entry in the series.

Obviously, Orta models itself after the on-rails entries rather than continuing down the turn-based RPG path laid out by Saga. That's not to say it jettisons all of that game's identity, of course. Orta is similarly narrative heavy and makes good on Saga's world building and storyline by focusing on Azel and (presumably) Edge's daughter. Look, it's a little hard to say, Azel just downloaded some DNA and I'm not about to check the file properties on that. Orta also borrows from Saga's positional combat in a way that feels very naturalistic, so much so that I had to question if it was present in Zwei.

Speaking of Zwei, the dragon yet again has the ability to grow over time, but no longer does so based on end-of-level scores. Rather, it changes shape in real-time when enough power-ups are collected in a given form to advance it to the next stage of its evolution. This feels like a natural progression from Zwei, and though the effect might seem quaint today, that level of skeletal deformation and changes to texture mapping is one of Orta's most impressive features. Being able to swap between different attack types also adds a layer of depth, and the deeper into the game you progress, the more rapidly you'll find yourself flicking between forms in order to manage different enemy types. Though I found this a bit overwhelming initially, once you find the right flow and develop an eye for what enemy types you need to counter, it feels pretty good.

Unfortunately, I live in an imperfect, shitty, fucked up world where a sequel to Saga and the overall health of the franchise was solely dependent on how well Orta performed. Since then, we've gotten a remake of the first game that released 18 years after Sega put the series on ice, and people tore it apart for reasons I still can't quite wrap my head around. I think it's safe to say the book is closed on Panzer Dragoon, and that's a shame, but I do think Orta is a good note to go out on. There's no cliffhanger ending here to weigh down on me, though Orta's story is left open, and the gameplay is so tight and refined that I'm not left with a sense that they needed one more game to get things right.

Sometimes you just gotta be grateful for the Panzer Dragoons you got.

Now that the dust has settled, what do we all think of Sneak King?

Before this last playthrough, I would've said Sneak King was the best of the trilogy with Big Bumpin' being the worst, but nearly twenty years removed, I'm afraid to say the BK hierarchy has changed.

It's tragic, because Sneak King's opening sets you up for something special. A still shot of a darkened driveway... The King appears from the shadows, stalking about like a predator, his visage a cruel mockery of the human form intended to disarm and draw in his prey. But this beast is no man, and his attempt mimicry is all wrong, glassy-eyed and without life. And then you boot up the game proper and find that it's just a crusty stealth title that asks you to do the same exact thing over and over and over again.

If Pocket Bike Racer's problem was too little content, then Sneak King's is that there's too much. Twenty missions spread out over four levels, but every mission tasks you with essentially the same objective: deliver delicious Burger King meals to hungry masses. The most variety you'll get in how you go about that is in what order you'll need to hit up the various NPCs sulking around the map or how often you're allowed to make a mistake. Sometimes you'll need to deliver [X] amount of meals without getting caught or by climbing into trash cans (coincidentally where I found my copy of this game, I think someone threw it out by mistake) or popping out of houses, but the amount of repetition here really sucks all the fun out. The King doesn't even need to take pentazemin to stop his hands from shaking when delivering Original Chicken Sandwiches™, this game's got no meat on its bones!

The controls are also horrible, which is something I actually wouldn't accuse the other two games of. Say what you will about Big Bumpin' and Pocket Bike Racer, but movement at least feels serviceable. Sneak King inverts the Y-axis and makes climbing into cover so laborious that your mark will likely move away or collapse from hunger before you're able to get into position. The King shrugging his shoulders and shaking his damn head because I botched the timing on his sandwich delivery while the camera was juttering behind a tree branch, what the fuck do you want from me, man? When we get to the sawmill I'm throwing your ass in a woodchipper [Warning: do not do this. The King cannot be killed by conventional means, he will come back and he will be stronger.]

Despite how bad it is, Sneak King is often the entry in the BK Trilogy that people talk about, because it is the most conceptually interesting of the bunch and the one to lean the hardest into the marketing that gave life to this iteration of The King. Tactical Burger Delivery Action is such a good-dumb idea that at least one man has dedicated his time and income to collecting any copy of the game he can find, and by a magnitude of cents it is the most consistently expensive title in the series on the aftermarket. Curiously, graded copies of the game are actually worth less than open CIBs. I understand the economics of this and why that's the case, but it's very funny to think Sneak King inherently has more value when played.

Ohhhh, wait a minute... Sneak King sounds like sneaking. Shit, I just got it.

This has got to have the weirdest story mode in any Mario Party I've ever played.

It's been several days now since I finished Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I've been decompressing, letting my experience sit in the hopes that my thoughts might coalesce into something clear and concise. But this is a game that took me 139 hours to complete, easily the most time I've sunk into a single run of a video game, and naturally there's a lot of highs and lows in there. In some ways, Rebirth is everything I was hoping it would be, especially after embracing the more contentious changes Square made to Final Fantasy VII's continuity. In a lot of other ways, it's doing crunches for three hours straight so the number of collectables in Johnny's Seaside Inn goes up by [1].

In my review of Remake, I heaped a lot of praise on Square's audaciousness in regard to how they treated the source material, especially towards the end of the game. The promise that the "unknown journey will continue" removed some of the expectation for where the plot was headed, so much so that something as well-known as Aerith's death could once again be considered a genuine spoiler insofar that it was no longer a certainty. Rebirth certainly takes what Remake set up and goes places with it, though it backloads much of this and rushes through at a pace that makes some of the payoff a bit too vague and convoluted. It's got a lot more Zack though, and as a Zack fan, we're feastin'.

Rebirth does otherwise follow the plot of Final Fantasy VII's first disc with about as much faithfulness as Remake does, which is to say you'll still be visiting the Gold Saucer, experience an extended flashback to Nibelheim, and battle a fucked up looking wall in the Temple of the Ancients. Just like the last game, a lot of these familiar locations and moments are expanded upon and fleshed out using material introduced in the Complication of Final Fantasy VII and various spin-offs.

This was at times detrimental to Remake given its focus on Midgar, ballooning what was a three-to-four-hour chunk of gameplay into a full 40+ hour experience. Though Rebirth is packed to the point of bursting with superfluous content, it suffers fewer pacing issues thanks to the portion of the original game it covers, which already provided the player more moments to breathe between visits to dungeons and towns.

That's not to say all that side content is worthwhile. In fact, a lot of it is pretty tedious, excessive, and at times frustrating, and while it's optional on paper, some amount of it will be required either by force or by need. Lighting watch towers, collecting lifestream and summon intel, completing hunts, taking on special hunts, capturing chocobo, digging up valuable loot with said chocobo, completing air-courses with chocobo, jumping around in two different frog minigames, WHEELIES, getting the high score in shooting galleries, playing Not Rocket League, taking on VR battles, destroying your tendons in god damn Cactuar Crush, taking pictures of Cactuars, taking pictures for the photography club, finishing multiple tiers of 3D Brawler, playing Star Fox, riding the G-bike, performing in two different rhythm games, MORE WHEELIES, taking on brutal VR battles, redoing the pull-ups game from Remake but somehow worse, breaking boxes in Desert Rush, catching a bunch of ffffucking Moogles, playing a more truncated version of Intermission's otherwise excellent Fort Condor tower defense game, finding PlayArts figures in well-hidden rabbit holes, setting up automated attack patterns in Gears and Gambits, playing the piano very poorly, I FUCKING LOVE WHEELIES

This isn't even getting into Chocobo Races or Rebirth's persistent card game, Queen's Blood, which both feel like full games grafted on at the hip. Sure, you could do as I did and fall into the trap of trying to 100% a game and come to hate parts of it as a result, but I also think it's fair to say these games are designed in a way that try to pull the player into its side content. Indeed, the story will have you dip your toes into most minigames, and the promise of valuable gear, folios, and even a super-boss might be temptation enough to suck you into some truly dreadful stretches of gameplay. I stomached about 3/4's of what Rebirth had to offer and started to get burnt out, but by that point am I really not going to finish the rest of it?

Well, no, because the final side quest is currently bugged and cannot be completed. Very nice thing to run into after doing literally everything else.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth feels like a minigame compilation that is occasionally interested in being an action-RPG, but when it is, it's pretty damn good. I was already a fan of Remake's take on the familiar "active time battle" system that served as the series bedrock during much of its turn-based days. New to Rebirth are synergy skills, which both deal significant amounts of damage while conferring positive buffs to participating party members. And y-yeah, you know, like... you gotta beat a lot of side quests and stuff to get folios to buy new synergy skills, but if you're playing the game like a freak-ass maniac, you'll have a lot of fun messing around with different party combinations. Aerith can put on Barret's sunglasses and pose with him. She's so cool, I hope she doesn't get stabbed later.

The materia system is intact and has been expanded with new materia that allow for some pretty inventive builds, my personal favorite being Exploding Yuffie. Character playstyles carry over from the last game, though I found newcomers Cait Sith and Red XIII to be the least interesting of the bunch, and as far as I'm concerned, Cloud, Yuffie and Barret are the best combination and suitable for basically any combat encounter you'll find yourself in outside of sections where your party has been pre-determined.

A lot has been said about Rebirth's presentation and performance, and I think most complaints about it are extremely valid. Performance mode is one of the muddiest looking things I've seen and I play Nintendo 64 games on a CRT routinely. Remake's infamous door texture is carried spiritually into the wind-ranging vistas of Gaia, though the inconsistent texture work is better hidden when roaming around the open world. However, plenty of cutscenes are blocked in such a way that draws attention to low-res textures and objects, and I don't know, I think they could've swapped out Midgar's horrible looking skybox if they were going to focus on it this much.

Look, it's hopeless for me. I'm all in on Final Fantasy VII. I see Cid Highwind raise a hand to a woman and my brain goes as smooth as a marble. Palmer wanted butter for his tea, I stood up and clapped and said "yes, thank you, I will spend one HUNDRED hours of my life playing Leap Frog." I have the deluxe edition with two steelbooks, one for each disc, and worse than all of that... I tried to platinum the game. I'm already dead, man. Dump my ass in the Forgotten Capital.

I could say "Square ought to learn some restraint and reign it in with the final chapter," but even if they don't, I'll be on my hands and knees in front of the dog bowl ready for more wet slop. Mmm, diced Zack Fair for me, please!