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"Listen up, Phones! The world ends with you. If you want to enjoy life, expand your world. You gotta push your horizons out as far as they'll go."

To truly understand another person is a fundamentally impossible task. No matter how much we can claim to know about other people, we will never be able to truly know everything about a person. And yet, despite the apparent Sisyphean nature of reaching out to people, to remain alone is to deny yourself the true scope of the human experience. To give up on others is to give up on yourself, and consequently, the world as a whole. Despite how much it can hurt to lay your heart bare to other people, we're in this shit together, ain't we? It's only through taking the risk to open up that we can expand our world beyond the boundaries of ourselves, and what better way to represent the difficulty of learning to open up to and understand people than with the most action-per-minute ADHD-ass battle system to grace RPGs?

The World Ends With You is a master-class of the mostly now-extinct maximalist game design philosophy that pervaded the 7th generation of gaming, being a game that makes full use of every single aspect of the DS' unique hardware. Control two characters at once in combat, one with the d-pad/face buttons, another with the touch screen. Match cards, do arithmetic & deal poker hands on the top screen while you tap, touch, swipe, scratch, even scream to attack and cast spells on the bottom screen. It's so gripping and unique that it's virtually impossible to emulate the sheer frenetic energy of the gameplay (which is why, to my knowledge, future ports don't even try to replicate it); a true dedication to hardware & design that makes the unfortunate stranding of this game on the DS almost impressive in it's sheer audacity & commitment to putting every single bit of hardware to use. In picking up TWEWY to idly pass the time during my 40 minute bus commutes to my college campus, I had unknowingly gotten myself sucked into one of the most innovative action RPGs to grace the system.

This frenetic & captivating gameplay is complimented perfectly by TWEWY's period-perfect commitment to the late 2000's urban youth's sense of charm & style. Fighting to a playlist of dozens of unique J-Pop/J-Rock/J-Rap battle themes; hitting the town to buy high-rise skinny jeans, browsing goth fashion boutiques for Scene Kid arm-warmers and knee-high boots to craft a fashion-disaster of a character build; keeping a pulse on the modern trends of the youth culture epicenter that is the Shibuya scramble crossing to maximize your damage output. The under & over-current of youth culture, fashion trends & artistry runs strong through TWEWY's veins, in every aspect of its UI & gameplay systems.

In fitting with this focus on youth culture, the story tackles the most pressing personal issue of every generation before, during and after ours: opening up to others. TWEWY's protagonist Neku is a thorny individual who is initially down-right unlikable, uncooperative & borderline malicious in his actions towards his partner & those just trying to help him survive. Put as on-the-nose as possible, his world starts & ends with him, and no one else. But by being forced into the Reaper's life-or-death game, attached by the hip to a wide variety of party members & crazy characters, he's forced to rehabilitate his misanthropic worldview & opinions of other people, and by the end of his adventure, he's dedicated himself to his friends & mankind as a whole. Understanding other people is a difficult & terrifying prospect, but it's only by clashing with others and their values & beliefs, and by making an attempt to help & know those around us that we truly live. The world doesn't just end with you, it begins with you, and it's horizons stretch as far as you are willing to push them. TWEWY is a game that leaves you with a single thought after it's all over:

It's a wonderful world, isn't it?

This review contains spoilers

Under hail of gunfire and at the edge of the blade, you bob and weave through the vicious streets of Hong Kong in pursuit of an envelope of concealed truth. Today, the old man claiming ownership of the letter sends you after it with a silent nob. Tomorrow, he’ll lie dead, a sniper’s sight piercing him with a tracer of boiling lead vengeance. Truthfully, the elder matters not in this grand game we play; yes, his death puts his ruthless second in charge, and yes, your revenge leads to a new hierarchy of power across the triad. But your retaliation carries nil significance to He, the vainglorious and vicious one-with-all. Surely you remember him, for he remembers you, tearing through the kitchen he called a domain tracking a pointless errand.

Between the seared flesh of the fallen and the waterlogged corpses of those who crossed your path, he took an interest in you, petty as it may be. His skin, a baked golden-brown, glistening under the high-beams of the lights overhead; his beak, cracked and blackened from the lethal heat – The bird remembers you all too well.

As you tore through the back-alley kitchen, you grabbed the bird by the throat, striking the soon-to-be-dead with a brother of morbid kin. Just as quickly, you escape Hong Kong, finding travel to San Francisco… but your attempts to care for your dead leader, your childhood friends, the men who live and die by your hands, are all for naught. You can only remember one thing as you grab the twin pistols and gun down countless opposition:


“What about that duck?”

Past the nameless, featureless courtyards, through construction sites and shantytowns, the question still follows you, as enemies pill up for a ceaseless funeral pyre. Staring at the deceased, watching the meat bake and cook under roaring flame, you’re reminded of him once more:

“Oh, just like that duck!”

Even at the end of your travels, with friends dead, and millions cleaved in bloodless carnage, as you yourself fall countless times to the cut of automatic arms or the brutal battery of Muay Thai kicks, your memories fade of all but a singular purpose. Not revenge, clearly not the girl dangling off the building, nor the second-in-command you forgot existed: only he.

“Man. I miss that duck.”

When it all comes tumbling down, and the pointless conspiracy draws to a close, you sigh. For how pointless the journey was, it's hard to not feel defeated. You turn to your tomes, seeking some solace among countless pages, when the great beyond begs heed. In arcane tongues, it whispers in your ear:

“Hold L1 + R1 and press Circle, Square, Down, Left at the main menu.”

You bolt from your bed, drenched in cold sweat. A quick search of your room alleves your fears: You had never left Hong Kong, San Francisco might as well not even exist. Your friends, as you know them, are alive and well. You breathe a sigh of relief… realizing all too late your fate. By speaking his command, the all-powerful accepted you into his fold – and in term, accepted you as a vessel. You can barely cry from your cracked beak before you hear a divine voice booming, one of three. The first is almost familiar as it reads back the code as you’ve read it, sealing your curse.

The second laughs uproariously: “Oh shit, it’s a chicken!”

The third replies, unsure: “No, I think it’s That Duck.”

Your eternity in this form was bound from the moment you rose. Now, as ever, you are truly cooked. You should have never left Hong Kong.

Hi, I'm Joey.

Sorry, it's been a while since I played catch.

So you'll have to forgive me if my aim is off.

Nice throw!

You want to know how I've been?

I haven't been great lately.

I know we only started playing, but I can't pretend things are fine.

I should be honest, I haven't been great for a while.

Watching that ball pierce the air, I thought I should break the silence.

Maybe that was inappropriate, I'm sorry.

Good one!

What's that?

You don't mind?

I appreciate that, thank you.

It can be hard to get others to lend you an ear when you need it.

Why am I down?

Good question, I don't fully know.

For a while I thought it was missed medications.

Something tangible and real I could blame it on.

But I'm starting to think that's not the case.

You really don't mind talking about this?

If you'd rather just play catch that's okay too...

Okay, if you're sure...

I suppose it's fitting to have a heart to heart while we play catch.

We're taking turns.

Allowing each other space and time until we're called upon.

Sorry, just a silly thought.

I don't think it's the medication though.

At least, not anymore.

It feels more and more like a part of me is missing.

Maybe it always was, maybe I was just made aware of it...

★☆☆☆☆

Maybe what I'm missing is people.

It feels like people come and go a lot in my life these past few years.

I don't blame them, of course, things don't last forever.

But I still miss them.

Some were in real life. People move. People change.

I guess that's true online, too.

I'm guilty of coming and going myself.

It feels harsh in retrospect, but sometimes I feel so afraid and trapped and I have to run.

I'm sure it's that way for others, too.

I wonder if they know I miss them?

I wonder if they miss me, too.

★★☆☆☆

Maybe what I'm missing is time.

Since graduating university and the whole COVID thing, time doesn't seem the same.

I always have too much, but too little.

But when I feel like I have too much, it's nice to while it away.

Like we're doing now.

Thanks for playing with me, by the way.

I know you could be spending your own time in other ways.

With other people.

It's nice to be able to just talk.

When I feel I have too little time, I again become scared.

I fear I've spread myself too thin, made too many promises.

Like I'm trying to do too much.

And so much of it feels fruitless. Like the only one who cares is me.

Or worse, that not even I care.

Maybe that's a sign I shouldn't do the things I don't care about.

But that abandonment hurts as much as the slipping of time does.

★★★☆☆

Maybe what I'm missing is myself.

It feels all the time like I'm living a lie.

Like I'll break kayfabe at some point, and the old me will show itself.

But I know the old me is the same me as the me I am now.

Sorry, that was a marble-mouthed way to put it.

Still, it's as if I've given parts of myself to others.

And to the things I make and do.

Without giving myself time to regenerate those parts.

It's as if I'm letting genies out of bottles and hurriedly trying to shove them back in.

Like I'm scared of the consequences of my own actions.

I think I'm scared that I am who I am.

That my relationships, my life, simply are the way they are.

And sometimes things go great, we get to go a little longer.

Just like when one of us catches or throws perfectly.

We get to keep things going a tiny bit longer.

Just like when we reach a new level.

We get a deeper bond, a sense of fulfillment, and get to keep going.

Only I've been missing too many throws, fumbling more catches than I make.

And I know that one of these times, I'll turn to grab the ball.

Pleading that things can continue a bit longer.

Only to turn around, and see another person I'm playing catch with leave.

See another piece of myself leave.

★★★★☆

I'm sorry, I don't mean to cry.

This is supposed to be a nice game of catch.

And you were so nice to let me talk about myself.

And I've gone and ruined it.

Things always end up like this.

Maybe that's why I try not to get close to others.

I end up hurting them just as I hurt myself.

I end up needing more and more affirmation and validation.

I take and I take without giving back.

I'm making things worse, aren't I?

I just know when this is over, I'll have to go back to pretending things are fine.

And they just aren't.

★★★★★

If it's alright with you, I'd like to stop playing catch for now.

Thanks for letting me talk your ear off.

Despite the tears, I really enjoyed this.

And I really hope you'll play with me again.

Maybe next time I won't be so sad.

But maybe I will.

And maybe it won't matter.

Uhmm... I know this might be silly.

And that we don't really know each other that well.

But I hope I get to see you again.

Get to hear your voice again.

And until the next time, I hope with all my heart that things go well for you.

Or get better for you.

And until the next time, I will miss you tremendously.

Not because I'm sad you're gone.

But because I was so happy you were here.

Far and away the most egregiously misguided attempt at myth-making in games history. This isn't the worst game ever. It's not the weirdest game ever. It is not the 'first American produced visual novel.' Limited Run Games seems content to simply upend truth and provenance to push a valueless narrative. The 'so bad it's good' shtick serves only to lessen the importance of early multimedia CD-ROM software, and drenching it in WordArt and clip art imparts the notion that this digital heritage was low class, low brow, low effort, and altogether primitive.

This repackaging of an overlong workplace sexual harassment/rape joke is altogether uncomfortable at best. Further problematising this, accompanying merch is resplendent with Edward J. Fasulo's bare chest despite him seemingly wanting nothing to do with the project. We've got industry veterans and games historians talking up the importance of digital detritus alongside YouTubers and LRG employees, the latter making the former less credible. We've got a novelisation by Twitter 'comedian' Mike Drucker. We've got skate decks and body pillows and more heaps of plastic garbage for video game 'collectors' to shove on a dusty shelf next to their four colour variants of Jay and Silent Bob Mall Brawl on NES, cum-encrusted Shantae statue, and countless other bits of mass-produced waste that belongs in a landfill. Utterly shameful how we engage with the past.

This review contains spoilers

HE A LITTLE CONFUSED, BUT HE GOT THE SPIRIT:

Much and more has been said about all of the things Final Fantasy XVI gets wrong (including on this very site by writers who I respect, who I consider friends and who can probably voice their thoughts and make points in a more captivating and eloquent way than I can): the unfair-at-absolute-best treatment of its female characters, the missteps with its political storytelling that indicate anything and everything from a well-intentioned carelessness to an active othering of refugees and oppressed peoples, the conscious and gleeful lack of diversity in characters’ ethnicities and races… you get the picture.

I’m not gonna talk about any of that stuff in-depth though, partially because I feel as if I don’t have anything meaningful to add to the already-existing discussions and partially because I think that a lot of this stuff isn’t really unique to XVI within the context of Final Fantasy. XVI’s sexism didn't get under my skin the way Final Fantasy VII’s infamous slap fight or Final Fantasy XV’s nigh-hostile treatment of any and all female characters did… and honestly, the laundry list of XVI’s issues are pretty much equally present in the current-day darling of the franchise, Final Fantasy XIV, which is also developed and maintained by Creative Business Unit 3. I’m not bringing up XIV specifically as a “gotcha!” (I’ve been playing it since 2018 and been a regular since 2021, and I have two different FFXIV tattoos on my wrist), but because a lot of the way I look at XVI is rooted in the way I look at XIV.

XIV routinely treats its women like shit (hell, Jill Warrick isn’t even the first Shiva penned by Maehiro to get fucked out of a place in the story while acting as a crutch for her love interest’s character development). XIV has a serious problem with xenophobia and portraying brown people as thinly-veiled caricatures or regarding them with a thinly-veiled hostility. XIV shames victims of imperialism for wanting to give their oppressors their comeuppance, dehumanizes refugees from said imperialized countries, and unironically uses gimmick characters to act as spokespersons for trickle-down economics. Hell, it does most of this shit within the span of a single patch story.

But like, honestly, none of that is particularly relevant to why XVI manages to speak to me in spite of itself. I’m gonna talk about XIV again, are you ready?

Final Fantasy XIV is a game I love, it’s a game that’s important to me, and in many ways it’s a game that has impacted my life in a way few other games have. It also frequently leaves me feeling frustrated, unseen, or actively disregarded. While the Dark Knight questline is probably the single piece of written word that’s resonated with me the most and certain characters such as the aforementioned Estinien give a voice to aspects of my worldview and morality I often feel are understood, more often than not I feel like Final Fantasy XIV wants me to feel ashamed for being who and how I am. The again-aforementioned questline where an angry mob is compared to their oppressors for ganging up on a member of an occupying military force, the almost exclusive emphasis on empathy and understanding of those who have wronged you no matter their crimes (again, with Estinien and the recently-added Zero being notable exceptions), the fucking ending to Endwalker framing the founder of a fascist state as a noble hero after spending a long time earlier in the expansion demonstrating the horrors of the well-oiled machine he designed…

I don’t know, dude, I’m just not wired like that. Some people are and I’m glad they find meaning in it, but time and time again Final Fantasy XIV feels like it doesn’t really welcome anybody who doesn’t have a boundless fount of empathy and compassion towards evildoers.

And then there’s the fact that as an MMO Final Fantasy XIV must maintain a status quo and cannot ever meaningfully change its world without uprooting the foundations upon which it’s built (which - credit where credit is due - it did in fact pull off once). The Warrior of Light fights to maintain a neoliberal utopia in which the corpses of the poor are left to rot outside the walls of Ul’dah and Ishgard remains defined by its horrific class disparity between the Brume and the Pillars. Final Fantasy XIV is about hope for the future, but that future can never and will never come. Pat yourselves on the back, kids, you’ve just contracted Ala Mhigan refugees to work in the salt mines which will be fantastic for the economy.

Okay! I’m gonna talk about Final Fantasy XVI now. You know Hugo Kupka, the guy that looks like he’s walked out of the Apple store with an iPhone 12 in his mouth? I fucking love Kupka; he’s a really fascinating character to me and I think he’s the most strongly-written as an individual character of all of XVI’s villains. Kupka has a pretty typical Man-Pain motivation (unfortunately earned by the unearned death of Benedikta Harman, one of the earliest examples of XVI’s latent misogyny) of wanting to avenge his dead lover, with his definition of vengeance being a reign of terror over the Hideaway (a commune of runaway slaves run by his archnemesis Cid Telamon, who he believes responsible for Benedikta’s death).

What makes Kupka interesting to me though is that Benedikta probably never actually cared about him and appeared to value him exclusively as a political pawn, using intimacy to get him wrapped around her finger while her true affections ironically lay with Cid. There’s a unique sort of tragedy to Kupka with that in mind: all of his pain, anger and all of the blood spilled in the name of his vengeance was all in the name of a woman who in all likelihood never loved him and only used him as a means to an end while her heart lay with another man. It’s interesting! He’s fascinating and a well-executed if not unconventional example of a tragic, sympathetic villain.

Our protagonist Clive though? Clive doesn’t give a shit about any of that. When confronting Kupka as not only his own form of revenge but to stop Kupka’s attacks against Clive’s current and former homes, the two share plenty of verbal blows and monologue at each other, pretty typical JRPG stuff… until Clive highlights the hypocrisy in Kupka’s logic and makes painfully clear that Kupka didn’t give a damn about any of the pain he caused as compensation for his own pain, considering the majority of the people he killed were entirely innocent and that Clive killed Benedikta only to keep her from killing innocent people too.

He’s a hypocrite who will not offer even a smidgen of the respect to his own victims that he demands, and Clive makes it agonizingly clear that Kupka will get “no pity from me - no pity and no mercy.”

Clive is full of righteous anger, a fury fueled by the souls of the friends he’s lost to Kupka’s actions. He has nothing but spite and hostility towards Kupka, he has no intentions of understanding or sparing a single thought towards Kupka’s own pain, and he’s framed as wholly and entirely right for doing so. There are a lot of examples of this in XVI, from Jill brutally murdering the abusive father figure who forced her to act as a weapon of war, all the way to Charon gouging out the eye of a fellow trader in compensation for the eye he took from her years and years ago. None of it is ever framed as anything but a justified and cathartic experience for the one who seeks revenge, nor are we ever expected to really sympathize with any of the people who had caused harm to the characters XVI follows. Whenever news of Kupka’s death reaches the Hideaway, they rejoice not only for justice served but for the threat that no longer lingers over their heads.

After years and years of feeling misunderstood and othered by XIV, XVI feels like a breath of fresh air and some indirect form of acceptance from FF’s writing - especially since XVI’s story is pretty specifically about revolutionary violence as a means to deconstruct oppressive power structures, another topic that is really near and dear to my heart. Ultima and the Mothercrystals can act as a metaphor for capitalism, for colonialism, for religious oppression, or all three depending on the angle from which you view them and the scene at hand, and the game never really meaningfully questions or doubts the righteousness of revolt in the face of being held underfoot. I think XVI lives and dies by its politics, and considering Tactics and XII don’t really do that much for me I’m pleasantly surprised by the fact that I find XVI’s politics engaging and resonant enough to make up for the shoddy writing elsewhere.

Which… yeah, dude, towards the end the game starts trying to work in a bunch of shounen tropes about the power of wills and friends and loved ones giving you strength and that shit sucks dude, God, earlier in the game lower-class people coming together to bring about societal change seemed like a pretty opaque portrayal of working-class organization (again, the Hideaway is pretty blatantly supposed to be a commune even if some sidequests expose that it’s funded by external benefactors) but when you try and make it The Power Of Friendship it sucks. Why does Clive have it harped on constantly that he’s not alone but he ends up doing most shit alone anyways? None of it goes anywhere. It sucks. In the mid-game I was fully ready to call FFXVI one of the best FFs because of how strong its narrative was but once they shoved the obligatory JRPG theme tropes in there it starts to drag its feet hard.

I still think it sticks the landing though; FFXVI is pretty uncompromising about the fact that destroying oppressive power structures won’t immediately unfuck the world and that things will get worse before they get better. Clive has a monologue towards the end where he talks about how people will suffer, die, try, and fail before billions of people manage to work in tandem to build a better world, but a post-credits sequence shows the fruits of mankinds’ labor within a distant future where the societal norms that caused the strife at the root of the game’s narrative are such a thing of the past they’re considered simply fantasy. It’s a much-needed spot of hope after a fairly bleak and grim ending that veers hard into the “things will get worse before they get better” train of thought, but it reminds you of what all that effort and pain will be in service of. It actually got a pretty strong emotional reaction out of me if only for again the vindication of affirmation.

And like, full disclosure, even if character writing isn’t nominally its strong suit (Clive’s initial character arc is a 50-hour ordeal stuffed into 10 hours of screentime) the game still made me cry once. Not to get too personal on my silly game review but the past year hasn’t been great to me: family members and pets passing away, acrimoniously losing contact with people I considered to be closer than the people I actually do share blood with, facing the reality of my roommate and best friend having to move away for over a year… and the scene of Clive and Joshua finally being reunited after eighteen years just got me, dude. That strong sense of yearning to be reunited with one’s family hit me really hard in a game that otherwise didn’t get me super invested in the individual characters as hard as other Final Fantasy games did.

So like… yeah, it’s got more issues than you can count, most of those issues are entirely valid and ones I agree wholeheartedly with, the character writing is hit-or-miss and it’s awful at the typical JRPG tropes it forces into the narrative, the combat is repetitive and exhausting, the pacing is godawful, it drags on for way too long… and yet there’s still so much here that means something to me it feels like a disservice to write it all off on account of all the things that any reasonable person wouldn’t care for.

XVI is an enormous mess, but it’s a mess with a lot things I find beautiful caught up in the disharmony of it all, and that’s Final Fucking Fantasy Baby.

"Your highness, if our kingdom is to prosper, it needs more heroes."

In the infancy of my PC gaming experience, I was naturally drawn to the then-booming genre of Real-Time Strategy. Little me was a tyrant who wanted nothing more than to command little guys around and build bases forever and ever. Perhaps it was my way of going on a personal power trip. Do my bidding my make-believe armies of death! Do what I say, or it's off to the dungeon for yee! Bwahahahah.

However, this one in particular would give a bit of a shock to my system. What if? The units...did stuff on their own? Units....have feelings and their own agendas? Impossible, it's my kingdom and they do my bidding! Alas, in Majesty I could not command my heroes directly, instead I had to...ugh....offer a bounty or some sort to convince them to do what I wanted. The only control you have over these heroes is where their home is located. You could be nice and put it next to a pretty pond on the map, or have a nice morbid chuckle to yourself by throwing those Gnome Hovels next to the graveyard. As with every kind of hero unit, came a specialty or a likelihood to do whatever. Need the map explored? Build a Ranger's Guild. Need a crack squad of hitmen who always risk their necks for cheap? Get a ton of Rogues. Getting mauled by wild animals a lot? Get yourself some Cultists, and start exchanging hugs and kisses with their god Fervus.

There's a nice setup for everything.

Majesty itself found it's way into my heart very quickly with more of it's focus on kingdom management. No longer do I need to worry about rounding up troops with Starcraft's 12-unit limit per selection, I can just trust and hope my heroes will make the right decisions and serve my kingdom well. Sure, the Rogues will be assholes and loot some poor guy's gravestone as soon as it appeared after said person got split in two by a minotaur, and sometimes you'll just have friendly skeletons wandering all over town since you decided to ally with the Krypta worshipers, but hey, things will never be dull.

If there is absolutely one thing that made sure Majesty would make a lasting impression on me until the end of my days, it's the sheer force of character and presentation. Everything said by every hero, NPC and enemy unit is entrenched deep within my memory. Your trusted Royal Advisor Sean Connery who speaks to you at all times and in every mission introduction, and the absolutely wonderful music that ratchets from ever-so peaceful to epic and booming to go along with the growth of my kingdom.

"Your majesty, a new building is complete!!"
"A new hero has arrived at the Embassy my liege!"
"Majesty! A building has been upgraded!!"
"A new hero has arrived at the Embassy my liege!"

"Keep it comin'." ~ Rogue badass after hitting level ten

I love it. Things are constantly happening, especially once I put the game at Super Hard mode speed.

It feels like once every month I find myself coming back to Majesty. As if I must come back to my kingdom and set forth to adventure once more with my heroes. After all, what is a queen without a queendom? It's a comforting return home. Whether it's to pass thirty minutes of time or to put my mind at ease after a bad day at work, I'll always be up to build up another happy and prosperous city along the mountainside...next to some dragon nests with....wandering vampires....It's gonna be one of those days.

A perfect re-release was given to this by Paradox many moons ago, and was no joke probably one of the first games I ever purchased on my Steam account. The only way you should re-release your old PC games is just upping the resolution, optimizing it for modern operating systems, and make it mod friendly. That's all ya gotta do, thank you so much Paradox for keeping my childhood accessible for a low sale cost of 1.99.

Forevermore, the ruler of my heart.

Hammers the shift and comma/quote keys to make the cartoon banana peel sound effect go off on the graveyard

Never gets old.

Marathon! When Bungie announced a new Marathon that is going to be some normal-ass extraction shooter following current trends, my social media feeds were abuzz with so many people reacting in real time, first with joy and then with horror. Such is the way of things. Anyway, I thought it was time to check this out via Aleph One, but I did have some trepidation after absolutely hating Dark Forces. Was there really room for me in the FPS genre?

Turns out the answer was yes! You can make an FPS good after all!

In addition to being a Mac game, Marathon came out before most of the post-Doom canon and outstrips all of them in terms of narrative ambitions. This was mostly accomplished just by having you read a lot of words on computer screens (affectionate) and by having them be character dialogue from a small cast of AIs with only a minimum number of logs from randos. The setup isn't anything groundbreaking: you're just a Man With Gun on a Big Spaceship that's been attacked by aliens. Of the three AIs onboard, only one is available to help you Die Hard your way around trying to fight back. That's Leela, the most boring one, which is great for starting off. She'll show you maps of the levels when you enter and give you tips on where to find save points and health recharging stations, which the game has kinda like Half Life would eventually do. There's a sense that she's balancing a hundred different priorities in trying to send you around to put out fires, gathering intel, and doing whatever computer shit she can to slow the invasion. You get told about enemies you won't encounter for some time just because survivors of the initial attacks remember them. You get sent to send a message to warn earth but it's probably not going to get there in time because it'll take decades to arrive and the aliens have FTL capability. Everything is falling apart it rules!

Of course, Durandal is the real main character here, and eventually Leela gets taken out and has to turn you over to him. I knew the whole rampant AI thing was something 343 put into Halo so it was funny to discover they lifted it from here and made it dumber. Durandal has gone bad in a pretty normal way, and hates humanity for pretty normal reasons. He doesn't really hate you though, and he's basically on the same side so you just end up bonding over the fact that some of the humans are actually secretly bombs now so you've just started shooting all of them (this also rules). Like yeah he's evil but that's fine. He's funny. Love that guy. The third AI, Tycho, appears like twice and is probably underutilized but he seems fine. Hates Durandal for normal reasons too. I get it. I get everyone's concerns. Eventually Durandal concocts a way to deal with the invasion, you get a prett good idea of what the aliens' whole deal is, and he steals the alien ship to set up a sequel while leaving you to run out of maps with no particular climax.

All of this would not work if it was painful to play, and luckily it's instead: nice to play. This isn't Doom. The pace is much slower and more methodical, as suits the story and setting. However you still have a bunch of weapons that feel different and work well on different enemies, who also all feel distinct. Not a ton of hitscan bullshit and the monster closet BS is mostly used sparingly as well. I liked that you have an Alien-ish motion sensor, which gives you some of the benefits of a radar without being all powerful. At no point do these maps actually feel like real places, which only becomes more true as you get further and solve more puzzles involving shooting grenades at wall switches. There's more platforming than I expected, but you fall hilariously slow in low G and it mostly feels good! My biggest problem is that the puzzles, when they arrive, all revolve around pressing switches, and the actual effects of switches are completely arbitrary. Do I have to turn this one on and off? Does it change something on the other side of the level? Does it have a delayed effect? Who the fuck knows you're just going to have to figure it out. In one of the late maps I actually managed to get myself softlocked because I didn't fiddle with the switches properly before advancing, and the pacing of save points is sometimes dicey. I had to repeat literally three maps out of the game's 27 in a row because in the alien ship levels the trigger for leaving is "looking out a window" and the saves are hidden.

None of this stopped me for long! The game is mostly prett breezy! I think the remaining two games will probably step things up even more on all fronts, and I look forward to confirming this. I don't know anything about Mac games but this is a classic Mac game.

Around the beginning of the year, I looked back at my rating for Outer Wilds with a bit of hesitation. I may be more generous than many other reviewers with my 5/5's, but I still genuinely consider everything I give the perfect score to, a league above the rest, and as I looked at Outer Wilds, I couldn't conjure up as many concrete reasons, as I could with any of the others, to the point where I retroactively changed the rating to a 4. So I began to tackle the DLC, in hopes of remembering what blew me away about this game, in a previous life.
Outer Wilds is a game that I played alongside over 50 other's in the oft unfondly remembered year of 2020. During those months of quarantine, fewer and fewer hours at work, and dwindling social interaction, I took to clearing out my backlog at a rabid pace. It got to the point where I was playing multiple story heavy games in the same day. I begin to get addicted to watching the credits roll after beating a game, and so I just kept going, realistically past the point of burnout, but this was Covid era, I was experiencing burnout with everything. And then in October, after my declaration of a 52 game/One game a week pace for 2020, I played Outer Wilds. I was charmed by the world, the atmosphere, but I genuinely wasn't viewing the game for what it actually is. While I was playing Outer Wilds like an open world adventure game with cool sci fi flare, I was missing out on the layered puzzle at the core of it all. For whatever reason, I viewed the obtuse logic and note rewarding puzzles as obstructions to seeing the credits roll, so I willfully looked up walkthroughs, almost immediately when I'd hit an impasse. By the time I made it to the remarkable finale, I tried my best to feel proud of what I'd accomplished, but over time the victory began to feel hollow, and I desperately wished to wipe my memory of the game and start fresh.
Fast forward to 2023; Life went on, my game completion rate dwindled, but everything else began to improve. It wasn't until I sat down with a newly acquired PS Plus (Extra) subscription, and noticed a familiar space-traveling game, that I decided to give Outer Wilds another shot. It was genuinely like I was playing a new game, despite my previous knowledge undercutting some puzzles, I was still having a blast reading the history of the Nomai, figuring out their technologies and cities, and using immensely satisfying A->B->C logic chains to get a full picture of what I had seen 3 years ago. It was then that I remembered that I had purchased the games' acclaimed DLC soon after beating it, but I had simply never played it.
I had a miniature revelation moment, knowing that this was my chance to experience a chunk of the organic discovery process the base game offered, with completely fresh eyes. I made it my goal to avoid walkthroughs, unless I had tried out everything to the extent of my knowledge, I focused on deductions and exploration, and I ended up being genuinely blown away by what Echoes of the Eye has to offer.
This may be one of the best-in-class complete packages that I've ever seen for DLC of a game, it offers something completely fresh, while keeping the same satisfying design principles that the base game did.
As I type this review, I am about one hour removed from the completion of Echoes of the Eye, the tears have dried a while ago, but the impression that I'm getting, is that I finally understand not only what I felt in 2020, but what I missed, playing this game back then with guides. I hope everyone can find some sense of satisfaction with this weird, messy entertainment medium, because Echoes of the Eye definitely reminded me of what that feels like.

Wholly uncompromising in its grandiose, buckling vision. Crumbling under the weight of its world of ideas. Breakneck and glacial, confused and confusing. To call it a flawed masterpiece is an admission that it is a masterpiece all the same.

The plot is frequently limp, characters incensed by seemingly random motivations. The world folds out into eternity while railroading the Regalia to a two lane highway. The ache for reprieve from ballooning stakes goes eternally unanswered. What starts as a granting of ever more freedoms becomes a collapse of everything being taken away from the player bit by bit. An unceasing tide of fetch quests forgotten in a shift to eternal linearity. Yet none of this takes away from the experience, it only reinforces a consistent theme of loss and trade-offs.

The first playable moments bring this into laser focus. The iconic Regalia, a literal symbol of freedom carries nothing but unfulfilled promises as it is laboriously pushed across the desert. When it is repaired, Noctis receives a single opportunity to drive his steed, only to discover he is no more in control of it behind the wheel than he is as a passenger. It is often a hindrance, barely moving at night, unable to ever meaningfully approach points of interest, as manoeuvrable as a train on the tracks. Yet each time it is taken away, the notion of freedom dissipates, eventually passing forever into history. Similarly, the temporary departure of party members makes what were once mechanical nothings into tangible absence; Gladio, Prompto and Ignis all bringing something crucial yet invisible to the dynamics of the party and combat.

This typifies what the Final Fantasy XV experience is; one of dashed expectation. Chase down your MacGuffin of a betrothed only for her to fade away. Collect a litany of ingredients, lures, paint jobs, CDs, quests, hunts, medals all for it to become meaningless in an instant, no indication that the time for a relaxed approach has drawn to a close. The only fragment of a 'road trip with the boys' being memories made concrete through Prompto's photographic documentation of the journey. Much as one might scoff at an overabundance of filters, selfies, extreme angles, and inadvertent captures of Gladio's ass, these joyful glimmers of what was and could have been resonate with nostalgic depression. When our story draws to a close, all we have to remember it by are our memories. Wishes that it had gone better, not just for ourselves, but for those who would walk a doomed path.

DEAD SOULS DEAD SOULS DEAD SOULS DEAD SOULS

LIKE A DRAGON OF THE END

What a name, right? Fuck, dude.

Usually I think of myself as someone who is on the other side of being a Like A Dragon enjoyer than, like, The Fans. Obviously on the whole I like these games a lot and I have written extensively about them on this website. I do find though that I’m a lot more critical of the writing in the series than almost anyone I’ve seen doing any written or video content about them, so a lot of the time when I talk about Like A Dragon, a series that I on the whole quite enjoy, I often sound like a huge grouch who doesn’t want anyone to have any fun.

Not this time though. This time I find myself in a bizarro upside down world where I have to look around and be like what the fuck are you guys all talking about. This game rocks. I feel like I’ve played a different game than everyone else who’s ever talked about it. I am getting the vibe that this is one of those times where a game that’s relatively annoying to access nowadays has developed a memetic reputation that’s just been repeated over and over and over online enough that everyone just accepts its shittiness as obvious fact even though only like nine people in the world ever actually played it. And those people simply have bad taste dude.

The story of Dead Souls is the simplest and shortest of any Like A Dragon game I’ve played; someone has engineered a zombie virus and unleashed it upon Kamurocho in a strategic manner that is clearly targeting offices of yakuza families associated with the eternally losing Tojo Clan, and eventually the guy behind it kidnaps Haruka because of course this entire thing was set up to fuck with specifically Kazuma Kiryu as revenge for the events of Yakuza 2 at the hands of some no name Omi Alliance guy who has gone rogue to do zombie stuff. The game is structured in the same way as Yakuza 4, split into four chapters where you control a different guy who each have a different perspective and access to different parts of the events going on and who each have some particular gameplay or story quirk that makes them unique, capping off with a climatic finale chapter to wrap everything up. Despite this sort of repeat in structure, everything you expect to be here is here. You have substories, you have all the minigames, you have hostess stuff, they even have made a third version of boxcelios just for this. It is, in every way that you would expect, a fully featured Like A Dragon.

Which does make the ways that it’s extremely not that feel more impactful. This is everyone’s big sticking point right: the game is not a brawler, but we have twisted the LAD3 engine into something that enables us to use all our existing assets to make a third person shooter that everyone hates. But like, it’s good! I Like It. It’s fine. The big thing that seems to really stick in everyone’s craw is the controls, and it’s true that Deal Souls doesn’t remotely resemble what had even in 2011 become basically standardized third person shooter controls. There’s no cover system and your guys are not particularly maneuverable. You have to unlock a lot of basic moves with level up points, stuff like melee attacks to clear rooms from often impressively large groups of zombies, dodge rolls, snap-aiming when you look down your sights. The flip side of this, to me, is that the RPG mechanics are impressively meaningful. There aren’t THAT many things to actually upgrade and unlocking two more inventory slots or the ability to pick up heavier shit or lock onto a head for a second just by pressing L2, these are huge, meaningful upgrades, and I’m happy to have them.

And the basic controls themselves, they cover basically every situation you need! Normally you’re walking around with the typical LAD range of movement, your guy just points in the direction you point the left stick, and you control the camera with the right stick. This doesn’t offer a great degree of precision to aim with but you rarely NEED precision – as long as you’re pointing roughly in the direction of a zombie, you’ll hit them. The range you need varies based on your weapon type of course but it holds true generally speaking. You can, however, hold the L1 button to lock your guy in a forward facing position which allows you to strafe horizontally or in a circle if you need to clear a crowd or slowly track a guy, or you want to shoot with some degree of measured care or in closer quarters but you need some maneuverability. Finally holding L2 locks you in place and you enter a first person aiming down your sights or scope, and yeah, you move that cursor with the left stick and that sucks, but y’know, in my 27 hours with this game, I did get used to it in the first, like, thirty minutes. Between these three degrees of movement vs precision, I never felt ill-equipped for any situation the game threw at me, and the game does give you a lot to work around.

There are a couple of strains of regular cannon-fodder zombies (some of them are Sort Of Large, you see, and knock you over instead of grabbing you, and some of them throw molotov cocktails), but much like in a musou game, which Dead Souls does resemble in a lot of ways, you know shit’s mostly worth your time when you see a guy with a health bar. There are ten-ish Mutant zombie types, and while the majority of them are stolen UNASHAMEDLY from other games like Left 4 Dead and Resident Evil, this kind of outright stealing is wise, imo. It ain’t broke, y’know? These guys are introduced at a steady clip throughout basically the entirety of the game, and for the most part they are all basically fun to deal with and add just enough complication to any given fight to be a good surprise to see rather than an annoyance. Particularly in Kiryu’s chapter where they start popping up in novel combinations and groups of two or three among hordes of normal zombies who are affected by some of the mutants’ behaviors, juggling the specific requirements for handling each of them all at once is some of the best stuff in this game from a play perspective. They also drop a good portion of the upgrade materials for your weapons and PERSONALLY I prefer fighting these guys to doing gambling minigames which is the other source of high level materials (thankfully money flows enough that you can buy your way out of engaging with any of that shit by the time you really need those upgrades).

Where Dead Souls does have drop the ball PRETTY HARD is in the way the game structures itself. Because there’s an ongoing zombie apocalypse, the map is separated between regular Kamurocho as we’re familiar with it and the quarantine zone, which is where you’ll be making your runs any time you have to do story stuff or for basically all side content. This makes sense, of course; the problem is that the process of accessing parts of the town is hugely restrictive now. Substories still have you running back and forth all over the neighborhood, the same way they ever have, but now all of their steps are formally broken up into three or for chapters of substory. So now rather than a substory called Brother And Sister that has multiple steps, you have four substories called Brother and Sister 1, 2, 3, and 4. Additionally, at any given time there are at most only two designated points where your character can be smuggled into the quarantine zone, but usually it’s only one. Which means you start in the same part of town every time and have to walk to wherever you need to be. ON TOP OF THIS, many of Kamurocho’s normal streets are clogged with debris or crashed cars within the quarantine zone, meaning travel is much more restricted and linear than usual in these games. So every time you want to advance the story you are talking to the quest giver, then walking to the quarantine zone entrance (walking around regular Kamurocho is also more difficult because you have to walk around the walls of the QZ), loading into the QZ, walking from the spawn point to the location of the substory, usually just doing One Fight that takes Thirty Seconds, then almost always you have to walk your way out of the QZ as well and back to the quest giver on the outside, rather than just warping you out when you’re done. Because hey, you might have other shit you wanna do in here!

So that is miserable. There’s some degree to which you can consolidate substories, but because you have to dip out to start the next phase of most of these quests, you’re always going in waves even if you’re operating at your absolute most efficient. Enemy layouts and aggression do change as you advance the story, and so do the points from which you enter the QZ and sometimes shortcuts open up within it, but not enough, and because the QZ grows to consume more and more of Kamurocho as the game advances, this problem actually gets worse over time. If there’s one noose around the game’s neck, that’s it. THAT’S where the feeling of unceasing repetition comes from, should one choose to engage with it, even after you realize there’s really no reason to be shooting like 90% of the enemies outside of the story missions.

I really do think the combat itself works perfectly well, though. You have a lot of weapon types that offer distinct use cases and the game makes a good argument for unlocking a lot of weapon slots and keeping a small variety on you as the difficulty ramps up in the late game. Each character carries a pistol with infinite ammo and their Signature Weapon (a shotgun for Majima, a gatling gun for Goda WE WILL TALK ABOUT HIM YES) but you get full freedom with the rest of their loadout and even though I always leaned into the main weapon of whoever I was playing as, a balanced kit gets you out of tight spots as the encounter design becomes more complex. This is probably best exemplified in the Subterraneas, a pseudo-roguelike mode that each character unlocks in a series of cartoonish tunnels underneath the city. The layouts and enemy configurations are randomized as you explore these depths and they can throw some really wacky and evil shit at you, rooms full of exploding guys or stacked with really fucked combinations of boss monsters. It’s good shit and an excellent showcase for the versatility that the systems in this game actually offer if you care to engage with them.

Meeting the game in good faith is kind of the theme of this experience for me. I am taking a pretty holier-than-thou tone here but I went into it expecting something a little more tongue-in-cheek than we get. And it’s not NOT that. The tone is lightER than you might see in a mainline LAD game. Majima gets a whole chapter to himself that doesn’t betray the fact that he’s actually a serious an competent leader within his organization who does his best to keep every situation in check from a supporting position, but it does ALSO indulge in the memey joke shit that Majima’s character is often reduced to when he doesn’t have a significant role in a given game’s story.

Ryuji Goda is perhaps the best example of what I’m talking about here because while he’s the third character you play as I think his chapter is the first time the game really digs its teeth into the possibility of what this kind of non-canon setting can do. Akiyama and Majima kind of just give you what you might expect those guys to do in this situation but Goda really breaks down the psychology of a guy whose psychology I’m distinctly uninterested in. I do like this character in the second game but a large part of why I like him is because he is uncomplicated to the point that his inability to Play The Game makes it clear that his path to power is enabled as much if not moreso by his prestigious name than his actual ability. Goda is interesting in Yakuza 2 because of the way the world warps around him, and when his personhood becomes the focus of the story is my least favorite shit in that plot.

Here, though, we don’t get very much of what we might expect to dig into about Goda. It’s not explained at all how he lived through the events of Yakuza 2, and an explanation for how he came to live the life he lives now, that of an apprentice to a takoyaki stand owner, happens in a completely offhand, undetailed way, after his own chapter even, to help explain why he knows how to get a big cool gun for Kiryu. The Goda we’re presented with in Dead Souls is an explicit, conscious mirror to Kiryu in almost every way. He’s a legendary guy with a huge reputation in his family, even years after he left the game, and he IS out, very firmly. He has a humble life that he earnestly loves and no one he associates with understands. He’s a gruff guy who isn’t portrayed as perfectly wise or anything but HAS realized that the violence and greed that dominated his life were childish and destructive drivers, and he tries to gently steer others away from paths he’s been down even if he still enjoys indulging himself under the right circumstances. And, also like Kiryu, The Life won’t let him be happy, and won’t let him be alone. The villain of the game is one of his former subordinates, hell-bent on getting revenge on the Tojo Clan, whom Goda doesn’t care about, and on Kiryu, whom Goda admires, partially on behalf of Goda himself, and refuses to hear Goda when he says this revenge is meaningless. The Tojo clan assumes Goda is in on this plot, even if they are decimated too quickly to really act on their suspicions. No one will just let him live his life. Even the man who saved his life and equipped him with his prosthetic arm made sure that arm can turn into a giant cartoonish gatling gun, one which he had never once used before the zombie shit started up. He makes takoyaki.

And this stuff is good but there’s more to him. Goda is much like Tanimura in Yakuza 4 where his character has depths to plumb but the game also realizes it forgot to put the plot in the first two chapters so most of his story is taken up by that stuff instead of shit that details the life of this new character, so all his most interesting shit is in his substories. In one of them he’s in the QZ and notices his master’s takoyaki pan with food being cooked badly in it, unattended. When he investigates a group of teenagers attempt to rob him. He doesn’t treat them compassionately but he doesn’t take them seriously as threats either, mostly just trying to get info about where his boss might be, but when zombies show up everyone scatters. When he runs into the group’s leader later the boy explains to him that they’d been stuck in the QZ since the beginning of the outbreak and he’d hidden himself in the ruins of the takoyaki stand. The food that was cooking wasn’t a trap, it was a poor attempt at making the first meal any of them would eat since the outbreak, and they only jumped him out of desperation. Goda offers to make them food because, after all, that’s his job, and you get a genuinely touching scene out of this where these teenaged boys start crying at being offered comfort and compassion and the space to not put up walls in an impossible situation, and Goda clearly takes enormous pleasure in being able to offer nourishment and comfort to people who need it. He’s a genuinely changed guy and this moment sells it better than anything else in the game, where he does still have to be a posturing badass a lot of the time, even if he’s a nice one now.

In another substory he meets a woman who looks startlingly like his sister Kaoru, a major character from Yakuza 2, one who is looking for her missing brother. Over the course of a long series of events in which they bond over their similar family situations growing up, Goda mostly unthinkingly shows this woman, and eventually also her brother, an enormous, life-changing amount of generosity and kindness. When everything is resolved and they part ways, the woman tells Goda that he acted like a brother to her in the brief time they knew each other. Goda actually doesn’t take this to heart - he barely knows his sister; they met briefly and in a horrible situation. He doesn’t think of himself in familial terms, and he thinks it’s strange and ridiculous for this woman to acknowledge compassion that he doesn’t realize he’s shown in remarkable quality. All he can do is hope his own sister is well. There’s a complex character to this guy that is honestly unnecessary and unexpected, but entirely welcome! I didn’t go into the funny zombie LAD game thinking I would come out a Ryuji Goda fan but they really went the extra mile to honor the fact that like, hey, we’re doing all the fanservice shit in this one, we might as well go balls out if this is the last we see of this guy. It’s an incredible send off for a fan favorite. And I mean like, he does also have a funny gatling gun arm. That’s here too.

And that’s what I mean too when I say that this is a full-featured Like A Dragon, they didn’t half-ass anything about it. There’s all time good LAD shit in this game. Like, when Kiryu arrives at Kamurocho things are fully dire, the neighborhood is almost completely overrun, and he breaks into the quarantine zone and he’s super mad and he’s being swarmed by zombies...and the game suddenly, for the first time in 20 hours, is making you do regular ass Yakuza hand to hand combat. It even puts little button prompts on the screen to remind you how to do it. Because of course Kiryu didn’t bring a fuckin gun, he doesn’t own a gun, why would he even think to do that. And the game does make you just punch and kick like twenty zombies, in a sequence that made me really appreciate how impressive it is that they got all this going using the Yakuza 3 tech. Fighting more than like five guys at a time in classic yakuza fashion feels really cool. So eventually Kiryu is rescued by the game’s main original supporting character, played by and modeled after Chiaki Kuriyama who is WAY too famous to be Kiryu’s sexy JSDF sidekick for two hours in a Yakuza SPINOFF game but sure, and she explains zombies to him and that you gotta shoot them. But he STILL refuses a gun, he’s like NO these are the people of Kamurocho there must be another way. It’s sick. It’s not until he meets a guy and the guy turns into a zombie right in front of him and you get into a fight AGAIN and the game makes you deplete this zombie’s health bar like eight times before Kiryu’s new friend is like come on man this is inhuman and finally Kiryu does it. But afterwards he respectfully closes his eyes and is very solemn about it. Despite everything this is not a SUPER solemn game but it’s Kiryu at his most dour in the series, partially because Haruka is in direct danger and partially because Kamurocho means to much to him and it kills him to see it and its people so thoroughly destroyed.

And that’s the ACTUAL best part of Dead Souls. The atmosphere it strikes is uniquely harrowing. When the outbreak starts nobody on the outside knows what’s happening. The government doesn’t let any information through, they only erect these gigantic walls between buildings and post soldiers up at them to hem the plague in with absolutely no plan for real containment or treatment. If people on the outside are sick it’s implied they’re quietly executed. There are groups of people gathered around a lot of these walls in the early chapters of the game, demanding answers, wondering if their coworkers or loved ones are trapped, are safe, wondering if work and life are supposed to continue normally if their jobs or homes are on the inside and they’re out here. But just as much there are people being normal. Yakuza series npcs are spawning and walking around like always. The stores are all open. The anxious ambient chatter is matched by the usual shit you hear in these games, people talking about fads and food and life in the district. And after every major story event the quarantine zone grows. First it’s just Tenkaichi Street and the nearby alleyway but very quickly Theater Square is just gone. These massive walls move, or new ones are in place. And still people have to live their lives. It’s clear some people are able to smuggle themselves in and out. Information is spreading among the people of Kamurocho. And the stores are all open, and the people are walking around, talking about what bar they’re going to go to tonight. And tomorrow Millennium Tower is gone. And Shichifuku Street. At one point you enter a building outside of the QZ in the Champion District, watch a cutscene, and when you leave you’re in the QZ now. It expanded while you were inside. Your character is, of course, empowered to leave but the people who live there aren’t, and getting out in this instance takes you across the paths of the employees at Shellac and a lot of people who live in Little Asia who have no choice but to try to figure it out now that they’re trapped with the zombies. And as the normal spaces shrink and the QZ continues to grow the anxious chatter does begin to outweigh the normal stuff, and cops and soldiers do begin to post up in bigger numbers, and the vibe becomes more and more stressed. But life is still going until the very second the plague envelopes an area.

I think we’re a little past that time where we’re all writing shit about Stuff That’s Quaint Now That We’ve All Done Covid so forgive me but I read the Eurogamer review for this game and one of the reviewer’s huge sticking points about the game, which he liked more than most critics did, was that he found this disconnect between the apocalyptic quarantine zone and the completely functioning everyday life right outside the walls completely unbelievable, that even in a series with as much tonal flexibility as Like A Dragon, that was too much for his suspension of disbelief. And all I can think in 2023 is how this is one of the truest feeling depictions of pandemic life I’ve seen in fiction now. Life goes on, no matter how ill advised or illogical or stupid it seems. Are the people ignorant, is the government incompetent, is everyone willing this danger upon themselves when they could be preventing large portions of it? Yeah man I don’t know! This thing that feels like almost certainly a combination of tech limitations and excuses to have all the Yakuza Minigame stuff still be available all the time was really affecting to me twelve years later. It’s a shame this game is trapped on the PS3.

Four thousand words later I feel like I could probably tighten it up, maybe especially considering that Dead Souls isn’t really ABOUT anything? Like I didn’t even mention that the OTHER main villain, the evil scientist who actually invents the zombie plague is just like “hoo hoo hoo being alive sucks so I made a virus that makes you cum so much that you turn into a zombie and want to spread your ecstasy to everyone else” and kiryu is just like “no, living is hard but being a cum zombie is a coward’s way out and persevering is the cool thing to do” but this is not like really a theme this is just a thing two people say at the end of a game that is otherwise not really doing anything with these ideas. I didn’t mention the boss fights at all? There are a lot of them and they’re all massive mutant monster guys like you see in Resident Evil or House of the Dead and almost all of them are really cool! I didn’t mention that this game has the hot goth doctor lady from Persona 5 with a tragic backstory who has you do tests for her in exchange for rewards but like many years before P5 did that and they even have very similar designs.

But almost nobody is going to actually play this game right so I wanted to really soak in this stuff. There are so many unfairly maligned games out there that are completely easily accessible that nobody ever wants to touch. Dead Souls has SO much going for it that even when it took a long time to show me its best writing, or the gameplay was frustrating me, or I was frustrating myself by doing all the substories which I don’t really recommend they’re mostly just okay in this one, I never considered stopping. And it did eventually reward me with some of my favorite stuff in the series. If I had to rank all the Like I Dragons I’ve played right this second it wouldn’t be at the bottom, I’ll say that. I’ve absolutely spent twenty bucks on worse games.

At the end of the day, when you finish a mission you get a results screen of Kazuma Kiryu holding a giant anti-personnel rifle while you get ranked on an S to D or E scale (idk how low it goes I’m too good at video games) for your mission performance based on factors such as accuracy and how many heat moves you used and how many zombies you headshotted and TO ME, that is the essence of video games. It does not get more Video Games than that.