Woodaba
842 Reviews liked by Woodaba
"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?
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.
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.
Let's Catch
2008
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.
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 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.
Final Fantasy XVI
2023
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.
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.
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
1994
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.
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.
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.
Final Fantasy XV
2016
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.
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.
Yakuza: Dead Souls
2011
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.
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.
The Far Cry Elden Ring-ification of Breath of the Wild with a smattering of end-of-chapter Fortnite and New Funky Mode.
While BotW was content to let players roam free in a sprawling world, Tears of the Kingdom reins in this freedom considerably and hides the guardrails from the player with horse blinders. Link is still welcome to run around Hyrule at will, but the primary storyline holds the keys which allow actual exploratory liberation. My first dozen hours completely ignored Lookout Landing, leaving me without critical tools like the paraglider and towers. That was the most challenging TotK ever got, and the most it (unintentionally) forced me to think outside the box. I dragged gliders to the tops of hills labouriously, I used a horse and cart, I made elaborate vehicles simply to get around. I scrounged for rockets, fans, batteries, and air balloons to ascend to sky islands, making it to a few of the lower ones with great accomplishment. I committed to putting off the towers as long as I could, not realising they were an outright necessity. Seeing how this additional layer of the map functioned demystified it severely, rendering a challenge into a stepping stone for parcels of content.
The depths, like the skies above, are filled with potential. Many of its spaces are similarly wide open to encourage blind exploration with vehicles. Only there is nearly no purpose to any of it. Lightroots are a checkbox which dismantle the most compelling part of the depths -- their darkness. The depths are a place you visit to grab zonaite or amiibo armour and leave. As the Fire Temple is within the depths, and it being the first I tackled, I falsely believed there would be more dungeons strewn about below, simply a part of the world rather than instanced away from it. Sadly, it is the exception.
The other temples are obfuscated and inaccessible without their related storylines, which is itself fine (the temples are impossible to progress through without their associated power anyways) but this leaves the world feeling more boxed in, a selection of rooms in an overly-long hallway. A spare few rooms complement each other, most of them do not. The walls of the rooms must be thick. Whether it is shrines, side quests, or temples, the developers yet again seemingly have no way of knowing what abilities the player might have, what puzzles they have encountered, what skills they remember. All that they know is that in the Fire Temple, you have a Goron. In the Water Temple, you have Zora armour. The positive is, of course, that these things can thus be tackled in any order without a fear of missing out on anything. The downside is that there is never anything more to a shrine, a temple, or anything than what the player encounters the first go around. There is no impetus to return to a location when you have a better tool, or a wider knowledge of how the game's mechanics work. You show up, experience the room, and leave. With 300 map pins at your disposal, and similar issues arising in BotW, there's a sense that the developers chickened out near the end, too afraid to let the player (gasp) backtrack or (gasp) miss out.
Ironically enough, the lack of FOMO is what I miss most. When I was towerlessly exploring with a hodgepodge of trash scavenged from around the world, I felt free. I felt clever! When I discovered the intended mode of play, however, I felt I was putting a square peg in a square hole. There's a crystal that needs to be moved to a far away island? Before, I might have made a horror of Octoballoons and Korok Fronds with Fans and Springs to get it where it needed to go. When the Fruit of Knowledge was consumed, I saw the parts for the prebuilt Fanplane were right next to the Crystal. There's a breakable wall in a dungeon? Bomb Flowers or a hammer are right there. It is incredibly safe. It is a pair of horse blinders that you can decorate as you please. Go ahead and make your mech, you are still on the straight and narrow path.
TotK tries to bring back the linearity of Zeldas past within the BotW framework, but it ignores that the linearity was speckled with a weave of areas which expanded alongside your arsenal, rather than shrinking. Everything here is incongruous, a smörgåsbord of cool set pieces that simply don't go together. There is too much content (Elden Ring) that is too self-contained (end of chapter Fortnite) and too afraid that you will not experience it (New Funky Mode).
Did I have fun? Yes. But I had to make it myself.
While BotW was content to let players roam free in a sprawling world, Tears of the Kingdom reins in this freedom considerably and hides the guardrails from the player with horse blinders. Link is still welcome to run around Hyrule at will, but the primary storyline holds the keys which allow actual exploratory liberation. My first dozen hours completely ignored Lookout Landing, leaving me without critical tools like the paraglider and towers. That was the most challenging TotK ever got, and the most it (unintentionally) forced me to think outside the box. I dragged gliders to the tops of hills labouriously, I used a horse and cart, I made elaborate vehicles simply to get around. I scrounged for rockets, fans, batteries, and air balloons to ascend to sky islands, making it to a few of the lower ones with great accomplishment. I committed to putting off the towers as long as I could, not realising they were an outright necessity. Seeing how this additional layer of the map functioned demystified it severely, rendering a challenge into a stepping stone for parcels of content.
The depths, like the skies above, are filled with potential. Many of its spaces are similarly wide open to encourage blind exploration with vehicles. Only there is nearly no purpose to any of it. Lightroots are a checkbox which dismantle the most compelling part of the depths -- their darkness. The depths are a place you visit to grab zonaite or amiibo armour and leave. As the Fire Temple is within the depths, and it being the first I tackled, I falsely believed there would be more dungeons strewn about below, simply a part of the world rather than instanced away from it. Sadly, it is the exception.
The other temples are obfuscated and inaccessible without their related storylines, which is itself fine (the temples are impossible to progress through without their associated power anyways) but this leaves the world feeling more boxed in, a selection of rooms in an overly-long hallway. A spare few rooms complement each other, most of them do not. The walls of the rooms must be thick. Whether it is shrines, side quests, or temples, the developers yet again seemingly have no way of knowing what abilities the player might have, what puzzles they have encountered, what skills they remember. All that they know is that in the Fire Temple, you have a Goron. In the Water Temple, you have Zora armour. The positive is, of course, that these things can thus be tackled in any order without a fear of missing out on anything. The downside is that there is never anything more to a shrine, a temple, or anything than what the player encounters the first go around. There is no impetus to return to a location when you have a better tool, or a wider knowledge of how the game's mechanics work. You show up, experience the room, and leave. With 300 map pins at your disposal, and similar issues arising in BotW, there's a sense that the developers chickened out near the end, too afraid to let the player (gasp) backtrack or (gasp) miss out.
Ironically enough, the lack of FOMO is what I miss most. When I was towerlessly exploring with a hodgepodge of trash scavenged from around the world, I felt free. I felt clever! When I discovered the intended mode of play, however, I felt I was putting a square peg in a square hole. There's a crystal that needs to be moved to a far away island? Before, I might have made a horror of Octoballoons and Korok Fronds with Fans and Springs to get it where it needed to go. When the Fruit of Knowledge was consumed, I saw the parts for the prebuilt Fanplane were right next to the Crystal. There's a breakable wall in a dungeon? Bomb Flowers or a hammer are right there. It is incredibly safe. It is a pair of horse blinders that you can decorate as you please. Go ahead and make your mech, you are still on the straight and narrow path.
TotK tries to bring back the linearity of Zeldas past within the BotW framework, but it ignores that the linearity was speckled with a weave of areas which expanded alongside your arsenal, rather than shrinking. Everything here is incongruous, a smörgåsbord of cool set pieces that simply don't go together. There is too much content (Elden Ring) that is too self-contained (end of chapter Fortnite) and too afraid that you will not experience it (New Funky Mode).
Did I have fun? Yes. But I had to make it myself.
Final Fantasy VIII
1999
I’m gonna start this off by getting right to the heart. What Final Fantasy VIII is all about, is the reconciliation between the self and its relationship with time. This relationship and its characteristics refer specifically to the changes in the self’s relation to time as historical advances are made to the interconnectivity of physical places, communication, and people as byproducts of the increasing demands of world-wide capitalist economy and its impacts on culture.
The concept of the annihilation of space by time, or time-space compression, is an idea posited by Karl Marx in 1857 that continued to be applied, articulated, and changed by writers and theorists as a global economy continued to form through modern history, which created the incentive to overcome both the spatial and communication barriers by which space between people, places, and thought had been previously manifest. These advances include things like transportation (railroads, cars, jets), communication channels (fax, radio, phone), and most recently online communication, or construction of non-physical spaces based on information transfer and delivery.
Keep in mind the fundamental striking changes to the world design of VIII from past games includes all these things that are shown to the player right from the start—trains running automatically between locations, rental cars available to the player, as well as the narrative’s emphasis on satellite, radio, and cable-based communications, and most importantly, the online forums and pages running on the school’s closed network servers.
Final Fantasy VIII’s fundamental design was actually heavily inspired by internet forums, as scenario writer Nojima recently discussed his experience with using a personal computer to search for online discussions about previous games he’d worked on for the first time, and how impacted he was to see all kinds of criticisms on his use of character death and tragedy and the “overuse of flashbacks” as a narrative device, all of which directly affected the decisions made during the narrative development of VIII. It doesn’t just stop there either, as VIII is really the first game to begin a trend in the series where the narrative is made of hints and clues at hidden information, context, and details to serve the main storyline, something directly designed to bolster online and forum discussions among players. Do you remember the datalog of FFXIII? Did you ever realize that whole thing began with VIII? The ‘tutorial’ section of the menu has sections among sections detailing not just the various unexplained aspects of the game systems, but information about characters, locations, plot events, and the history of the world that go mostly unspoken during the game, key terms with which to read the several intended playthroughs of the game and to put pieces together with others.
I wholly believe that the direct exposure to other people and places via the internet as an extension of previous historical accelerations and compressions of time and their subsequent erasure of borders and discreet identities in time and space directly informs the themes, message, and the narrative and mechanical design of Final Fantasy VIII.
“We are entering a space which is speed-space…[a] time of electronic transmission…and therefore, man is present not via his physical presence, but via programming.”
NARRATIVE 1 - VHS
I think a lot of people will agree that the narrative and plot of FFVIII has a unique flair to it. It took me some time to realize how to describe it, but I think I’ve reached something I’m satisfied with. The plot of FFVIII, from the beginning, feels compressed, with events happening of wildly ranging content, tones, fictional genres, compiled together in tight bouts of non-sequitur editing. What it really feels like, is an old, worn-out inherited VHS tape that’s seen years of use and rewriting between various films and programs, to the extent that you can no longer tell where one film ends and the next begins. Storylines and cinema modes blend together, events unpredictable in nature only loosely related to the ones immediately surrounding them dissolve with the seams between so worn out that the lack of cuts itself is jarring (note the cinematics’ consistent, heavy use of dissolves) and characters appear to change fundamental roles based not on character or plot developments but on the tape’s runtime itself, dictated by the speed of the dream, as if resembling a worn-out existential footprint of a person’s interests and entertainment dispositions over a long period of time. The plot of FFVIII grabs from ranges of Hollywood films between Star Wars to minutes of Jurassic Park to Saving Private Ryan, Aliens to hints of Harry Potter (unreleased as of ff8’s release), Titanic, etc. Each section feels iconic, but they all feel like different, unrelated works stitched together, bound by culture and speed.
What effect does living in that kind of existence have on a person? Final Fantasy VIII has large swaths of time the player can experience, if they so choose, between important plot events, where nothing important happens and time seems to feel like a paranoid stand-still, as if frozen between actions but never at rest, where players are pulled along mainly by interest in the trading card game system. But when plot events happen, they happen fast, in intense succession, one after another. Final Fantasy VIII is a story about young people, especially Squall, being consistently overwhelmed by events they have no control over, by a world that deems all the elements of discrete eras of history as totally equivalent, permitted to happen simultaneously.
Unlike a typical narrative’s sense of time where at any moment that the present takes place the threat of the unknown would come from the future, the characters of VIII are attacked from all sides, so little is their grasp on both the grand scope of time and the minuteness of its intervals. VIII is a story where enemies become mothers (your own), and not in the Luke Skywalker sense. Relationships are given unknown meanings, and then immediately dropped, recontextualized, and then decontextualized. No form of understanding about the nature of this world is stable. It is a dream where your own personal reality rewrites itself so fast and frequently as everything changes and morphs all around you.
“When we think of speed, we say it’s the means of getting from here to there fast…But I say no to this. It’s a milieu, a milieu in which we participate only indirectly through the videotape machine after recording, through information science and [programmed] systems.”
MECHANICS 1 – Deconsolidation and Assembly
The act of dealing with that world, where everything is connected to the point where nothing is any more relevant than anything else, is to acknowledge its implicit existential anxiety and death anxiety.
More than anything else, I think, the makeup of Final Fantasy VIII’s world and mechanics design is that of a consolidated, disassembled world, where everything remains clumped together in chunks, but nothing is really pre-built for the player. The content, from quests to acquirable resources are concentrated in select points along the map. Rather than spread across the map so the player is led to find the Necessary Keys ala Dragon Quest, as it were, they are in distinct points the player is meant to remember and return to should they seek those properties. Even the system of magic itself implies that magic, the most important resource of this world, is located along concentrated areas that spurt out from physical locations, or from the monsters who originate from the moon. Item drops only come from specific monsters and have very specific uses, and monsters themselves are often limited to specific continents or areas. But it isn’t just content that’s consolidated, the rules of the game themselves are. Each new Guardian Force (summon) acquisition and new type of magic has the power to fundamentally change how the game works for the player and the psychology of the battles and exploration, exactly the same as how Triple Triad’s (card game side mode) rulesets change as you travel.
You might have heard the complaint that Final Fantasy VIII is easy to break, but in truth, you cannot break Final Fantasy VIII because you cannot break something that is not yet assembled. The assembly of its elements is entirely up to the player, with what you do in the game, what you find, what you explore, how you allocate things, and what affordances you define each element with. And none of these decisions are permanent; the game can be rewritten any time and as many times as you choose.
CONTEXTUALIZATION – Putting VIII into Perspective of the Series
Put simply, the identity of Final Fantasy is that it attempts to encapsulate everything that can be said regarding a theme using both fantasy and role-playing mechanics within a single game. They are a lot like the Star Wars films in how those films cover an extremely broad and encompassing range of visual, cinematographic, and mythological elements taken from various sources and put together to form a narrative that explores narrative. Final Fantasy games are all encompassing works of the same kind; each game is both the first work and the last work in a series that explores the art of game-driven narrative.
I would like now to break down each game in the series until VIII and paint them as a specific type of Final Fantasy with regards to how each approaches its interpretation and style of roleplaying to demonstrate the path taken to get to VIII's approach.
1 Final Dungeon Fantasy
A game mainly driven by individual dungeons that require the player to explore and plan routes through several times until coming away with the most important treasure, a narrative key, that applies itself in some way to the overworld, itself a large dungeon. This form of dungeon diving heavily tests resource management and planning as well as managing encounter based risk and reward.
2 Final Campaign Fantasy
A game that serves a narrative campaign about rebellion first and foremost, and requires the player to consistently return to a specific location as they seek the resources and keys necessary to develop a resistance strong enough against an empire. Rather than resource management, the behavior of the player is heavily tracked and used to shape the growth of the characters nonlinearly which requires appropriate use of spells and weaponry to modify characters temporarily and permanently to approach the challenges.
3 Final Exploration Fantasy
A story centered around a freewheeling party exploring both a shifting world and their own shifting selves. Tasks are found on volition and approached through an economy of mechanical roles.
4 Final Theater Fantasy
A game that defines all mechanics and roles of its participants by and for narrative, and allows the player to be the discoverer and actor of their interplay.
5 Final Television Fantasy
A game about approaching challenges by not just trying different classes and mechanical roles but by combining their aspects and seeing their effects. An episodic costume narrative directed by the player with a party as cast members in on-going production.
6 Final Opera Fantasy
An extension of the fourth game's theater, developed into a full multi-character parallel storied narrative where each character is less defined by role and more by personal quirks and distance from the former games' magic, never being able to take ownership of it.
7 Final Everything Fantasy
7 is like a culmination and convergence of so many things and ideas. It feels like it contains so many settings, story genres, and pieces as an urban fantasy. From sidewalks and ceos, mythical creatures, crazed scientists and test subjects, caves of natural wonder, haunted mansions, a “princess”-like and a “knight”-like, lost magic cities, amusement parks, giant robots, kaiju, space, special soldiers, secret agents, aliens, I mean the list just goes on, and it all works because none of these things take up too much of the time and the pace is fast enough to be riveting but with deep enough character writing and psychology between the turnarounds to keep consistent interest on a main through-line.
Final fantasy VII is the fantasy of everything, contextualized by the concept of the lifestream, where all life and concepts flow through the planet in a physical, manifested way. Anything can happen because it’s part of the same stream of planetary existence, like a wave that comes and goes.
8 Final RPG Fantasy
How do you go past “everything”? What do you look toward once you’ve created a story about the concept of “everything”? The answer VIII arrives at, is to look at the container itself, the RPG wrapper that houses the content of the game. Whereas VII asked what are all the things we can put and keep in an RPG, VIII asks what is an RPG? How does an RPG present and deliver its ideas?
To play Final Fantasy VIII is to create questions and follow lines of thought. The game itself houses multiple choice tests (as the main characters are students) that help determine the salary level the player receives. Each of these tests is not only designed to test the player’s understanding of the game, but to give them ideas for things to experiment with, questions to follow up on and experiment within the game’s almost carelessly open and flexible system.
Each character is a momentary collection of spells that determine what they’re good at. Each spell a question of how to make a character either stronger or more resistant. And each potential of each spell is determined by what god-creatures you’ve pacted with or spotted and fished in each battle. But, the decisions you can make for what you want to be good at are also determined by what GFs you have found and what abilities you've invested in. For example, you might prioritize HP and junction cures to HP, but then you find that you're rarely doing limit breaks because limits are tied to low HP, and have their own kind of system for chaining limits by manipulating windows. You would be ignoring a system of the combat and never hitting your characters' true potential, not to mention having slow battles. But, then you get the spell Aura, which lets you do limits at higher HP. But you find that with that high HP, you don't really ever heal high enough to take advantage of it because your magic stat is low. And when you do heal, your max hp diminishes anyway. You have a specific idea about how HP and healing works, until you get an ability that instantly heals an ally to full without any resource limit, and suddenly you have a completely different understanding of opportunity costs, statistical uses, and how spells can be used. There's many abilities in the game that offer (or threaten) to change the way the game can or should be played, and each stat has its own little functions worth discovering.
Even the difficulty of the game is entirely dependent on how much time one spends digging into the game, with enemies leveling up with the player’s party and the speed of level-ups being on a linear scale, rather than exponential (1000 exp to level up at all times, regardless of current level), which puts a pressure on the player to keep their builds up against the speed of the game's power scale. You might think to avoid killing creatures and gaining experience and focus entirely on getting spells, which many do to "break" the game, but this prevents you from being able to draw higher level magic as your level (and magic ability) determine your capabilities with that. Without high enough levels, enemy monsters won't even have high level magic on them to take from at all, and without killing monsters and only ending battles in other ways, you'll never get the monster parts and drops to turn into either magic or new weapons, and neither will your GFs learn new abilities and stat relationships or develop summon compatibilities. Although you can bypass some of that by delving into the card game, another system of intricate and shifting rulesets, which leads me to my next point.
MECHANICS 2 - Neuroplasticity
All the (consolidated) parts of Final Fantasy VIII, although scattered and very missable, are not any of them necessary toward completing the game because the system is designed to work around missing components.
You can ignore triple triad and focus on drawing magic and making builds from monster drop items. You can make your GFs focus on summon damage and boosts over junctioned stats and play the game carefully using summons and summon items, or you might never use those items at all. You might prioritize disposable high damage items over high level magic and build characters around that.
You might have one character build defensive and manipulate them to stay in low health to get limit breaks off of them. Doing that implies that you have access to a defense boosting GF, which are missable. You can plan a party around anything given what stat junctions you have available. You might have a party that's weak or strong against various elements at random times depending on what the auto junction system chooses for you, or you might be in complete control of the elemental and status properties of everyone around you.
Even the pocket playstation peripheral, something I thought was a downside of the game as without it certain items and summons can't be obtained. But having a better understanding of the game let me realize that it's entirely in the spirit of the game since everything in the game is an optional, circumventable thing that helps you define what kind of rpg you're playing. It's not a complete, self-contained "final fantasy", I thought, if it has these things outside the game. But, it doesn't need to have it, and besides, what ambition to have a separate monocolor tiny game screen with the potential to bring game altering items into the game that you can acquire by adventuring while outside.
To add onto the chocobo pocketstation game point, what it is is a tiny little random dungeon navigator and battler with small events that can help you level up a small chocobo in the real game and grow a summon in real time, while it nets you items from all over the game, even when you wouldn't be able to get them normally. Sometimes these items can help you get lategame GFs early. But this doesn't break the difficulty curve as it would in a normal rpg, because the game is balanced not around standard difficulty but on a risk/reward system where danger is beneficial, all boons are expendable and disposable, and everything around you is on the same growth curve as you.
All this to say that, while I think Final Fantasy had been leaning toward this direction for some time with V's class change system, VI's magic learning system and VII's materia system, but VIII is the first to fully embrace a difficulty designed around broadness. Instead of a series of challenges that test you on your ability to use available resources, growth choices made, or special items and weapons found via exploration, VIII is all about improvisation and just seeing what you can do and how you can play with it. This is reinforced by both a growth structure based on impermanence and redefinability and a world and system structure of circumventable machinery, where the pleasure is in the rewiring. It's the emphasis on how, not on performing optimally but on enjoying the act and actually paying attention and recognizing the struts, rails, and artifice of the play. In that sense, the game might be the first and only truly mechanically Brechtian RPG.
NARRATIVE 2 - Characters Who Exist Between the Frames
Given the state of impermanence and redefinability of the game’s mechanical construction, in a world where everything is permitted to exist at once in one concentrated mass dilated over a stretch of bending time, characters live and breathe in the spaces between time. If timecode dictates the law of this world the way it does relationships, events, and reality, then it is between units of time that characters find their existence.
The key visual motif of this game is the fade. Locations, characters, and places in time are introduced by fading, cascading shots. It is a visual dilation between disparate moments, a morphing of person to place, the inner to outer and back again, and it is constant across this game’s narrative framing.
Yet the characters when introduced are always given these very specific, quiet moments. Beautifully rendered short, intimate cg, completely voiceless, pointmark each new character’s introduction to the story. It’s such a unique feeling watching these, like learning about somebody without hearing them say anything, an interview of gestures, small movements, and diegetic environmental sound. It’s these moments that stand out throughout the game as in the heat of narrative choice, climax, and expositions where characters are put through the wringer and make mistakes, change, remember things, forget things; characters have developments in this game so quickly sometimes or have stunning redefining moments and reevaluations that it sometimes does feel absurd, surreal, and many have criticized this style of narrative development, but it's entirely appropriate for this game’s theme and story, a story where young adult development is characterized by the existential speed of the present, the claustrophobia of the past and the future closing on you at both sides, the baggage of the parent, the realization of your own eminent death, the reconciliation or lackthereof of a society and history that feels alien and unmalleable, of time itself that seems hostile and alive. To live here is to have surrendered yourself to it, to be a participant of the self-annihilation of its very existence, so there is no self, really, to separate from the out-of-control plot spiraling across the drama of all ages, except for only those that can be captured by these tiny, seemingly trivial moments, these small things that carry so much meaning about a person. And isn’t that ultimately the way you’ll be remembered? When a person is gone and all their life is part of the lives of all the other people’s lives, we remember those small bits, right? The way they move their hair or gaze into the sky or stumble on some rocks. It’s the moments between that can breathe.
MECHANICS 3 - Bargaining with Time
Much has been said about the drawing system of Final Fantasy VIII. I stand by that it is one of the most misunderstood mechanics in all RPG history. The regurgitated complaint is that it's slow, it's a waste of time, it's repetitive, and lastly that it's a required exercise in tedium as a replacement for traditional experience based stat growth. Such complaints or that the idea that the game was unplayable before the option to speed up time in the remaster (or that it improves the game) are untrue, and can be dispelled easily with an idea that might explain the mechanic better.
Imagine if each enemy in the game had only a limited amount of spell stocks, for example, if the bats at the start of the game had just a limit of 15 fires, and perhaps the triwing miniboss had 50 fires, blizzards, and thunders each. The expectation of “grinding by drawing” would be dead, and by explicitly disallowing players the opportunity to ruin their own enjoyment of the game by abusing a mechanic for “optimal growth and spell stocking” the game would have a much better sense of natural pace. And I mean, when you think about, even with that limitation you STILL could grind endlessly and pick up as many spells as you want, because the enemies are still random encounters you can grind. So what’s the difference, why does allowing a player to get ~infinite spells from a single encounter make it any worse than allowing a player to get a limited amount of spells from an infinitely repeatable encounter? The difference is player psychology, and how players perceive the game is to be played based on pre-established conditions of the genre. I’ve never seen a player of an rpg complain that a game demands that they grind by allowing infinite enemy encounters to occur in a designated area, because it’s understood unless the player explicitly desires a statistical advantage through repetitive actions, they are not meant to walk around and battle endlessly for optimal growth and item/resource availability.
But that still leaves the question, why design the game that way, why design it so that each enemy is an endless dispenser of spells and that spell stock is the foremost determiner of character statistic ability?
To answer this, first, what is drawing spells? Why have a magic system set up like this at all? I think the main benefits of this mechanic in terms of player emotion are that:
1- It gives each individual battle the ability to permanently change, for better or worse, your character’s potential capabilities, weaknesses and strengths. In other terms, their invisible, implied ambiguous class. Of course, there are no character classes in Final Fantasy VIII, and they haven’t been in the series at this point since V, but there are still minute decisions to tool and retool every character in the game based on available resources that can instantly completely change how your characters act, fight, and interact in terms of battles. Every single battle in the game has the potential to change this, either by having the player spend lots of magic spell stocks during the fight for casting and thus losing their junctioned stat strengths, or by acquiring an unknown amount of new spells, or even discovering an unknown spell altogether that gives new potential both as an ability to cast during battle and as an ability that might redefine or change your strategies completely. One of my biggest problems with many JRPGs is there is too much inconsequential time spent in battle, and that time actually feels inconsequential. Sure, technically experience points are consequential since they can permanently change your characters for the better once you get enough, but gaining experience is always the same reward (the only variable being amount), and always in the upward direction, and is always applied the same way by the game system. Spell stocks all have different stat relationships based on the spell, which itself is a form of discovery that’s pretty fun.
2- It creates a decision-making point. In each battle, you have the option to spend a character turn being useless for the sake of acquiring resources, and doing this consecutively leaves you open for more attacks by the enemy. You cannot predict the exact quantity you’ll receive each turn, so there’s a bit of a gamble involved, and it creates a risk/reward system of staying longer or choosing not to end battles to get more out of them. Drawing is also a skill. It’s not an option available at all times; it costs a full menu slot of which there are only four available and this never changes during the game (a big change from VII’s everything-window resizing itself), and the game makes this point from the beginning by starting you off with 4 available command skills in addition to Draw.
Additionally, the outcome of a successful Draw is dependent on magic stats/junctions, so there is incentive to do things like specialize characters for drawing, have mages geared toward drawing, or even make your characters physical stats weaker so as not to end battles too quickly. There is also the fact that your character level determines Drawing success/failure, and a lot of spells have a minimum level to acquire, which also actually means if you want to take advantage of battle spell drawing you cannot keep yourself intentionally underlevel (though you don’t have to take advantage of it; there are other ways of playing the game), and that if you have a specialized draw character, you still want to keep their level up, and in this game experience is primarily determined by who gets the last hit in battle, which means you still want them to attack every once in a while…
At the same time though, Draw is still useful as a command for characters with weak magic stats. You could always cast a Drawn spell instead of stocking it, kind of excitingly using the enemy spell against themselves right away in the heat of battle, and the power of that spell isn’t determined by character magic stats since it’s not really being casted from that character. Instead spells casted this way are given random strength, which could be useful in fights where physical fighters can’t use their attacks, need to get an elemental weakness out, or do anything spur-of-the-moment.
At the same time though, there is a huge flaw with the implementation of this mechanic, and I think it’s responsible for the reason this mechanic is misunderstood as something expected to be abused to the point of “making the game boring”. And that’s that, for about half of the game, the enemies simply don’t do enough damage per turn to create a legitimate threat to the player’s risk of standing around, drawing. Because players don’t feel a risk or danger, the only real risk until enemies become stronger is the passage of time, which is where the concept of perceived intended grind comes from. The game is not difficult enough in general to necessitate wasting your time with excessive drawing anyway, yet players cannot know that when starting the game or anticipating the next challenge. To be frank, the root of this issue stems from the ATB system and Final Fantasy’s approach to enemy design at this stage in general: from VI on, FF games had battles that were more about performance, expression and a horizontal power system where you could defeat enemies in multiple ways, which would actually help define the characters and their journeys, as well as create the cinematic character-driven narrative layer to the moment-to-moment gameplay. Making the enemies too hard would limit player incentive to experiment, and would lower the potential ways to solve encounters, so lowering the minimum requirement for defeating enemies makes sense. When the ATB system gets involved, though, you get the situation where if the player doesn’t truly go for ending the fight quickly and just does the minimum physical attack, the battles can very easily stall, where nobody does much damage, and the thrill of engagement is all but gone. This unfortunate result, combined with Final Fantasy’s popularization of prioritizing lengthy/showy battle animations over quicker alternatives or text, and the fact that all battles open in completely separate scenes from the exploration scene, disorienting the player if the battle takes too long (upon which re-orientating yourself by moving around to get your bearings will likely create another battle with step-based encounters), ALL are kind of the reason 70% of post FFVII JRPGs can feel like a slog to play. But that digression aside, adding the Draw system onto that low-risk and time-(in)sensitive battle foundation makes the first half of the game not live up to the risk in the risk/reward system the game is setting up.
Later games do have this element in them actually, FFIX basically has the Draw command in the form of a Steal system. It used to be that enemies had only one item players could steal, but in IX enemies have a whole table of items with harder and rarer to steal things at the top, which are really enticing since items and equipment have lots of functions in that game, similar to the magic system of VIII. Although in both games you can forgo a turn for the risk of getting hit more for the chance of scoring something good that can permanently change or increase your abilities in the game, the difference is that in IX the things enemies hold are actually limited! Look at that!
Then, in XII, you have a somewhat different thing but still a battle risk/reward subsystem where you can fight consecutive enemies by aggroing them and increase your chances of getting items and equipments and drops the higher your enemy chain is, and the more you fight and get more enemies involved the higher the risk gets for aggroing a strong enemy or overwhelming yourself in numbers. Continuing to reason 3…
3-It’s sick as hell. I don’t know what it is, and normally I don’t even care much for battle animations and particle effects, but the Draw animation is just super cool to me, and just conceptually, the idea of extracting magic essence from enemies and using it yourself in myriad ways is dope.
And if we go back to my previous point of the lack of pressure in damage turning the main motivater of risk to time, as much as I dislike it, in a game about dealing with time, with a sense of time that’s simultaneously instantly fast and endlessly frozen, isn’t it kind of apt? The anxiety of the draw state, the gambler’s addiction of staying in place just to get more, the fact that moving forward with the game and finishing encounters is something the player has to decide and actively cause, not just passively wait for things to end, well it all kind of fits thematically, I think.
One last addendum I'm gonna add here is that the way money is made in the game is also based on time, since you get a salary based on the time spent moving around in the game. Since the salary amount is determined only partially, minimally by battling, and mostly on quizzes taken that test and encourage experimentation with the game systems, it creates another horizontally structured optional progression path.
NARRATIVE 3 - Space as Final Respite, or: The Scarcity of Quiet
With my view of this story being explicitly about teenagers coming to terms with a hostile world defined by the simultaneity of time, the climax of the story is its calmest point.
I don’t want to give away too much about it in case there are readers who haven’t experienced it. But I will say that it’s a sequence that seems to come out of nowhere, has several twists, and barely explains itself. Yet it absolutely works.
Everywhere on the surface of the world of this game, there is the feeling of restlessness. Like I said before, the story sequences are accelerations of what feel like events occurring miles apart in time, the moments between them, to me at least, feel like environments defined by a freeze-frame energy. Everything is either a calm-before-the-storm, or the fallout right after a catastrophe, and in most cases, both. At rest, there is no rest, except for in space.
That being said, the scene in space technically is neither peaceful nor calm in its context. It’s very tense. BUT, it’s the one chapter in the game where the two main characters can just exist, and live by their own volition, separate from the propellants of time. The motivating factors behind Squall and Rinoa are very pure, and in that sense, it’s a rebellion against the forms of logic that construct the space the narrative defines itself in. It’s a hug in the void, interrupted only by a dragon.
MECHANICS 4 - You Are Still Playing the Game When It’s Shut Off
Final Fantasy VIII is built for external discussions. The storytelling style being based around events and relationships hinted at, the proto FFXIII datalog, the way junctioning allows for different players to have completely different play styles and setups, the fact that the card game rules scatter around and spread in unique, random ways along the towns and areas you play it at, leading to completely different rules ecosystems across the world in each save file. But I think the most interesting parts to this fact are two things.
First, the sidequest design in this game, specifically the ones you find on the overworld, and the way they’re populated along the map feel way more “you read this on a forum or heard it from a friend” than anything in the series prior, like with the invisible monkey stuff or the lake (if you know, you know), but it has a certain flavor all its own. There’s surprisingly very few of them and they’re all sort of funky in the sense that they feel abruptly distinct and don’t make sense until you ‘get’ them. It feels very protogenic to the kinds of things that would spread in early 2000s game design and sensibilities (in my opinion).
Second, with the inclusion of money being determined by something distinctly outside of the gameplay loop (optional exams), to the point that they’re in a section of the menu labeled ‘Tutorial’, I think is the game kind of encouraging the player to engage the game outside of the game and to think on their own by burying sorts of layers within the game’s construction. I think this is the first Final Fantasy where I felt the systems of combat, exploration, and character growth were distinct among themselves within the game, and could feel where each one ended and started. It’s the first Final Fantasy where I went out of my way to hunt down specific type of enemies based on their habitats to find a specific item. It’s also the first Final Fantasy where I went out of my way to construct a specific type of weapon I read about in a magazine and where going to a store meant more than just spending the gold I had for what they had on offer.
NARRATIVE 4 - The End on Tape
Potential spoilers for this section if you have not seen the ending.
“Reflect on your...childhood…your sensation...your words...your emotions.......Time...it will not wait...no matter...how hard you hold on...it escapes you...and......."-Ultimecia’s final words
What place does mortality have in a world where everything exists at the same time; if in the Vonnegut sense, you only need to look in a certain direction to see someone gone still standing, still doing what they’ve always been doing?
I read the ending in a particular way that I’ll try to explain. Squall finds himself transmitted by some signal into a cracked endless desert. In the Baudrillardian sense, this is the desert of the real. The crossing of all time, the eradication of distance between discreteness, and the overbombardment of information and signal—the noise of their reality of life—has created in its diametric the frayed husk of an opposite reality. No sound can be heard, and no signal perceived; no truth distinguishable from a soup of signs, signifiers, and contexts, there is no context found here at all, it is the Desert.
The hero wanders alone, unable to hold on to what mattered to him most. Unable to hold on to himself. Without context, without other things to compare itself to, the self disintegrates. The land shrinks until there is nowhere left to wander, because the act of wandering itself loses context, loses meaning, loses discreteness in relation to other things.
The signal/noise dichotomy is best represented by the violent montage sequence, the meshing, cutting, liquifying, re-editing as the picture itself fails to hold on to memory, fails to filter memory, fails to understand memory. And with neither memory, context, or structured/discernable reality, death comes without life beginning, and life arrives without death completing it, intermittently and together.
And the only solution to the hero’s purgatory of time, mortality, and context, is, as completely corny and as silly as it sounds, it’s just love. It’s just what matters to people, to be held and accepted. That’s the signal. It’s a beautiful image, with the clouds parting and the flowers coming back, when the two find each other again despite all odds. Because even if this whole loop will start again, Edea will begin SeeD, will become the sorceress, time draws in on itself, the characters are divided without knowing each other, and everybody is lost and alone in a sea of anxiety and noise, and the war comes from every side of time again, this one moment will still be there, and the game is asking the player to recognize the importance of that feeling. It ends with acceptance of that feeling across time, even for Seifer, who finally feels at ease with himself without actually changing, and especially Laguna, who finally gets to express what he’s always wanted to. A lost kind of love that’s continued across generations connected by a song and unspoken feelings.
Finally the whole thing culminates in a video recording of a celebration where everyone is present. It’s almost as if this one piece of footage, this is all that is allowed to exist outside of the loop that the timeline of the game is predicated on. Unlike the other forms of information transmission and transportation the game is fixed on, I think this one final tape shows a reality where everybody is at ease, being themselves, in the moment (and the headmaster’s Robin Williams face has suddenly fully transformed into a Phillip Seymour Hoffman). It’s an immortalization of the many lives that were there, granting them separation from the other many signals, noises, contexts, and realities of present, past, and future times. It ends only when the machine does, as the battery dies, the viewpoint is switched to Rinoa’s, and Squall is allowed to exist once more, present in the moment seen to Rinoa, flying toward a Lunar exit.
A send-off to 1999 and the entire millennium before it, as RPGs, rendering technology, and fiction storytelling on the digital medium won’t ever be quite the same.
My Own Timeline
I wanna take this part and talk a bit about my relationship with this game, and with games in general, over time.
I grew up at a time when PS1 games had just fully phased out and were unavailable in stores. I never had much money as a kid so getting games was a very infrequent thing, until the next gen consoles would come out and make the previous generations games discount and I could play catch-up.
Most of my relationship with games at that time was over the internet, watching videos of others older than I explaining about games and their relationships with them. Much can and has been said about the early years of YouTube and video game discussion, the immature humor, the overstretched personas, the ridiculous rants, embarrassing skits, and how generally mean spirited a lot of it was. But when I was a kid, that's all I had to go to to learn more and engage in what was absolutely the most fascinating topic out there, video games I cannot play.
Playstation 1 games, especially, felt like they were mystic artifacts, there was always an air of magic to them. I think my very first exposure to final fantasy was the FF8 intro cutscene. I thought the quick shots in that trailer-style intro were scenes from an actual movie, I remember googling for a place to watch the full thing. Then I remember finding Midgar and images depicting FF7's industrial black city and wondering how the hell it all fit together. The boxarts were always so intriguing and cinematic, but the resolution on my screen and old images and maybe just my dumb baby head would read into them the completely wrong way. I thought FF7s box was depicting a hero with a giant sword approaching a dark castle. I thought it was amazing. I could barely see or understand gameplay screenshots and just went off of text descriptions of it, and it always sounded more interesting and out there than the limited worlds being rendered in real time on my PS2. Besides 2000's Wikipedia and fan wikis I only had YouTubers to go off of for any context about these strange things that seemed so much better than the games I was playing then.
And who else to convince me of the superiority of the past than the growing number of men on the internet reminiscing about the games of their youth? And I fell for it, I just believed older games were better than anything next gen. I like to think of this now as a kind of big brother effect I experienced. I didn't have any older siblings and was an only child for a long time, so I sometimes feel jealous when I hear of others' experiences with older siblings passing down or sharing in video game experiences. Since I had no guide in the world of games, looking back now it kind of felt like I was relying on online video creators for a kind of parasocial game-themed relationship.
By allowing those kinds of people to be my guides in childhood escapist experiences, I had unknowingly allowed myself to swallow whole-sale all kinds of things, things that were not so good, and I just believed in the opinions others had for experiences I didn't have myself, for games I never played or movies I'd never watched. Most of my experience with Final Fantasy VIII for the longest time was with The Spoony One's review series on the game. It's funny to me now looking back and seeing how completely wrong most of his points about the game are, how he misreads its design choices and intentions, and kind of just complains.
Yet I can't really bring myself to hate it. I guess part of me just grew up in that culture, much as I disapprove of it now, and when I sit down and watch something like it from that time period I still find it kind of relaxing. Just to sit down, settle in, and listen to someone take me on a personal comedic journey that edits between gameplay footage, historical context, criticisms and anecdotes, and anything else that could happen on a screen. It's crazy, even if literally all of the content within that structure is horrible, it still feels comfortable somehow just through its format, its structure. I can't come to hate the things that taught me about all the games I wouldn't have been able to wonder and dream about, learn about, and eventually bring myself to try to experience on my own, even if I reject its message and outdated grossness.
That's the internet though, isn't it? The place where the past and future exist simultaneously, all directions to be experienced all at once. The turn of the millennium, the birth of the forum, the voices turning, all things must pass and all things must come, now at the same time.
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“We program a computer or a videotape machine to record a telecast in our absence, to be able to watch it the next day. Here we have a discovery: the olden space-time was an extensive space, a space where duration of time was valued. Whatever was short-lived was considered an evil-something pejorative. To last a short time was to not be present; it was negative. Today…new technologies lead us to discover the equivalent of the infinitely small in time. In previous times, we were conscious, with telescopes, of the infinite large, and with microscopes, of the infinitely small. Today, high speed machines, electronic machines, allow us to comprehend the same thing in regard to time. There is an infinitely long time which is that of history, of carbon-14, which enables us to date extremely ancient artifacts. Then, we have an infinitely short time, which is that of technology’s billionths of seconds. I think the present finds us squarely between these two times. We are living in both the extensive time of the cities of stories, of memories, or archives, or writing, and the intensive time of the new technologies. That’s the ‘program of absence’, that’s how we program our definitive absence, because we’ll never be present in that billionth of a second.”
All quotations about speed/time by Paul Virilio.
The concept of the annihilation of space by time, or time-space compression, is an idea posited by Karl Marx in 1857 that continued to be applied, articulated, and changed by writers and theorists as a global economy continued to form through modern history, which created the incentive to overcome both the spatial and communication barriers by which space between people, places, and thought had been previously manifest. These advances include things like transportation (railroads, cars, jets), communication channels (fax, radio, phone), and most recently online communication, or construction of non-physical spaces based on information transfer and delivery.
Keep in mind the fundamental striking changes to the world design of VIII from past games includes all these things that are shown to the player right from the start—trains running automatically between locations, rental cars available to the player, as well as the narrative’s emphasis on satellite, radio, and cable-based communications, and most importantly, the online forums and pages running on the school’s closed network servers.
Final Fantasy VIII’s fundamental design was actually heavily inspired by internet forums, as scenario writer Nojima recently discussed his experience with using a personal computer to search for online discussions about previous games he’d worked on for the first time, and how impacted he was to see all kinds of criticisms on his use of character death and tragedy and the “overuse of flashbacks” as a narrative device, all of which directly affected the decisions made during the narrative development of VIII. It doesn’t just stop there either, as VIII is really the first game to begin a trend in the series where the narrative is made of hints and clues at hidden information, context, and details to serve the main storyline, something directly designed to bolster online and forum discussions among players. Do you remember the datalog of FFXIII? Did you ever realize that whole thing began with VIII? The ‘tutorial’ section of the menu has sections among sections detailing not just the various unexplained aspects of the game systems, but information about characters, locations, plot events, and the history of the world that go mostly unspoken during the game, key terms with which to read the several intended playthroughs of the game and to put pieces together with others.
I wholly believe that the direct exposure to other people and places via the internet as an extension of previous historical accelerations and compressions of time and their subsequent erasure of borders and discreet identities in time and space directly informs the themes, message, and the narrative and mechanical design of Final Fantasy VIII.
“We are entering a space which is speed-space…[a] time of electronic transmission…and therefore, man is present not via his physical presence, but via programming.”
NARRATIVE 1 - VHS
I think a lot of people will agree that the narrative and plot of FFVIII has a unique flair to it. It took me some time to realize how to describe it, but I think I’ve reached something I’m satisfied with. The plot of FFVIII, from the beginning, feels compressed, with events happening of wildly ranging content, tones, fictional genres, compiled together in tight bouts of non-sequitur editing. What it really feels like, is an old, worn-out inherited VHS tape that’s seen years of use and rewriting between various films and programs, to the extent that you can no longer tell where one film ends and the next begins. Storylines and cinema modes blend together, events unpredictable in nature only loosely related to the ones immediately surrounding them dissolve with the seams between so worn out that the lack of cuts itself is jarring (note the cinematics’ consistent, heavy use of dissolves) and characters appear to change fundamental roles based not on character or plot developments but on the tape’s runtime itself, dictated by the speed of the dream, as if resembling a worn-out existential footprint of a person’s interests and entertainment dispositions over a long period of time. The plot of FFVIII grabs from ranges of Hollywood films between Star Wars to minutes of Jurassic Park to Saving Private Ryan, Aliens to hints of Harry Potter (unreleased as of ff8’s release), Titanic, etc. Each section feels iconic, but they all feel like different, unrelated works stitched together, bound by culture and speed.
What effect does living in that kind of existence have on a person? Final Fantasy VIII has large swaths of time the player can experience, if they so choose, between important plot events, where nothing important happens and time seems to feel like a paranoid stand-still, as if frozen between actions but never at rest, where players are pulled along mainly by interest in the trading card game system. But when plot events happen, they happen fast, in intense succession, one after another. Final Fantasy VIII is a story about young people, especially Squall, being consistently overwhelmed by events they have no control over, by a world that deems all the elements of discrete eras of history as totally equivalent, permitted to happen simultaneously.
Unlike a typical narrative’s sense of time where at any moment that the present takes place the threat of the unknown would come from the future, the characters of VIII are attacked from all sides, so little is their grasp on both the grand scope of time and the minuteness of its intervals. VIII is a story where enemies become mothers (your own), and not in the Luke Skywalker sense. Relationships are given unknown meanings, and then immediately dropped, recontextualized, and then decontextualized. No form of understanding about the nature of this world is stable. It is a dream where your own personal reality rewrites itself so fast and frequently as everything changes and morphs all around you.
“When we think of speed, we say it’s the means of getting from here to there fast…But I say no to this. It’s a milieu, a milieu in which we participate only indirectly through the videotape machine after recording, through information science and [programmed] systems.”
MECHANICS 1 – Deconsolidation and Assembly
The act of dealing with that world, where everything is connected to the point where nothing is any more relevant than anything else, is to acknowledge its implicit existential anxiety and death anxiety.
More than anything else, I think, the makeup of Final Fantasy VIII’s world and mechanics design is that of a consolidated, disassembled world, where everything remains clumped together in chunks, but nothing is really pre-built for the player. The content, from quests to acquirable resources are concentrated in select points along the map. Rather than spread across the map so the player is led to find the Necessary Keys ala Dragon Quest, as it were, they are in distinct points the player is meant to remember and return to should they seek those properties. Even the system of magic itself implies that magic, the most important resource of this world, is located along concentrated areas that spurt out from physical locations, or from the monsters who originate from the moon. Item drops only come from specific monsters and have very specific uses, and monsters themselves are often limited to specific continents or areas. But it isn’t just content that’s consolidated, the rules of the game themselves are. Each new Guardian Force (summon) acquisition and new type of magic has the power to fundamentally change how the game works for the player and the psychology of the battles and exploration, exactly the same as how Triple Triad’s (card game side mode) rulesets change as you travel.
You might have heard the complaint that Final Fantasy VIII is easy to break, but in truth, you cannot break Final Fantasy VIII because you cannot break something that is not yet assembled. The assembly of its elements is entirely up to the player, with what you do in the game, what you find, what you explore, how you allocate things, and what affordances you define each element with. And none of these decisions are permanent; the game can be rewritten any time and as many times as you choose.
CONTEXTUALIZATION – Putting VIII into Perspective of the Series
Put simply, the identity of Final Fantasy is that it attempts to encapsulate everything that can be said regarding a theme using both fantasy and role-playing mechanics within a single game. They are a lot like the Star Wars films in how those films cover an extremely broad and encompassing range of visual, cinematographic, and mythological elements taken from various sources and put together to form a narrative that explores narrative. Final Fantasy games are all encompassing works of the same kind; each game is both the first work and the last work in a series that explores the art of game-driven narrative.
I would like now to break down each game in the series until VIII and paint them as a specific type of Final Fantasy with regards to how each approaches its interpretation and style of roleplaying to demonstrate the path taken to get to VIII's approach.
1 Final Dungeon Fantasy
A game mainly driven by individual dungeons that require the player to explore and plan routes through several times until coming away with the most important treasure, a narrative key, that applies itself in some way to the overworld, itself a large dungeon. This form of dungeon diving heavily tests resource management and planning as well as managing encounter based risk and reward.
2 Final Campaign Fantasy
A game that serves a narrative campaign about rebellion first and foremost, and requires the player to consistently return to a specific location as they seek the resources and keys necessary to develop a resistance strong enough against an empire. Rather than resource management, the behavior of the player is heavily tracked and used to shape the growth of the characters nonlinearly which requires appropriate use of spells and weaponry to modify characters temporarily and permanently to approach the challenges.
3 Final Exploration Fantasy
A story centered around a freewheeling party exploring both a shifting world and their own shifting selves. Tasks are found on volition and approached through an economy of mechanical roles.
4 Final Theater Fantasy
A game that defines all mechanics and roles of its participants by and for narrative, and allows the player to be the discoverer and actor of their interplay.
5 Final Television Fantasy
A game about approaching challenges by not just trying different classes and mechanical roles but by combining their aspects and seeing their effects. An episodic costume narrative directed by the player with a party as cast members in on-going production.
6 Final Opera Fantasy
An extension of the fourth game's theater, developed into a full multi-character parallel storied narrative where each character is less defined by role and more by personal quirks and distance from the former games' magic, never being able to take ownership of it.
7 Final Everything Fantasy
7 is like a culmination and convergence of so many things and ideas. It feels like it contains so many settings, story genres, and pieces as an urban fantasy. From sidewalks and ceos, mythical creatures, crazed scientists and test subjects, caves of natural wonder, haunted mansions, a “princess”-like and a “knight”-like, lost magic cities, amusement parks, giant robots, kaiju, space, special soldiers, secret agents, aliens, I mean the list just goes on, and it all works because none of these things take up too much of the time and the pace is fast enough to be riveting but with deep enough character writing and psychology between the turnarounds to keep consistent interest on a main through-line.
Final fantasy VII is the fantasy of everything, contextualized by the concept of the lifestream, where all life and concepts flow through the planet in a physical, manifested way. Anything can happen because it’s part of the same stream of planetary existence, like a wave that comes and goes.
8 Final RPG Fantasy
How do you go past “everything”? What do you look toward once you’ve created a story about the concept of “everything”? The answer VIII arrives at, is to look at the container itself, the RPG wrapper that houses the content of the game. Whereas VII asked what are all the things we can put and keep in an RPG, VIII asks what is an RPG? How does an RPG present and deliver its ideas?
To play Final Fantasy VIII is to create questions and follow lines of thought. The game itself houses multiple choice tests (as the main characters are students) that help determine the salary level the player receives. Each of these tests is not only designed to test the player’s understanding of the game, but to give them ideas for things to experiment with, questions to follow up on and experiment within the game’s almost carelessly open and flexible system.
Each character is a momentary collection of spells that determine what they’re good at. Each spell a question of how to make a character either stronger or more resistant. And each potential of each spell is determined by what god-creatures you’ve pacted with or spotted and fished in each battle. But, the decisions you can make for what you want to be good at are also determined by what GFs you have found and what abilities you've invested in. For example, you might prioritize HP and junction cures to HP, but then you find that you're rarely doing limit breaks because limits are tied to low HP, and have their own kind of system for chaining limits by manipulating windows. You would be ignoring a system of the combat and never hitting your characters' true potential, not to mention having slow battles. But, then you get the spell Aura, which lets you do limits at higher HP. But you find that with that high HP, you don't really ever heal high enough to take advantage of it because your magic stat is low. And when you do heal, your max hp diminishes anyway. You have a specific idea about how HP and healing works, until you get an ability that instantly heals an ally to full without any resource limit, and suddenly you have a completely different understanding of opportunity costs, statistical uses, and how spells can be used. There's many abilities in the game that offer (or threaten) to change the way the game can or should be played, and each stat has its own little functions worth discovering.
Even the difficulty of the game is entirely dependent on how much time one spends digging into the game, with enemies leveling up with the player’s party and the speed of level-ups being on a linear scale, rather than exponential (1000 exp to level up at all times, regardless of current level), which puts a pressure on the player to keep their builds up against the speed of the game's power scale. You might think to avoid killing creatures and gaining experience and focus entirely on getting spells, which many do to "break" the game, but this prevents you from being able to draw higher level magic as your level (and magic ability) determine your capabilities with that. Without high enough levels, enemy monsters won't even have high level magic on them to take from at all, and without killing monsters and only ending battles in other ways, you'll never get the monster parts and drops to turn into either magic or new weapons, and neither will your GFs learn new abilities and stat relationships or develop summon compatibilities. Although you can bypass some of that by delving into the card game, another system of intricate and shifting rulesets, which leads me to my next point.
MECHANICS 2 - Neuroplasticity
All the (consolidated) parts of Final Fantasy VIII, although scattered and very missable, are not any of them necessary toward completing the game because the system is designed to work around missing components.
You can ignore triple triad and focus on drawing magic and making builds from monster drop items. You can make your GFs focus on summon damage and boosts over junctioned stats and play the game carefully using summons and summon items, or you might never use those items at all. You might prioritize disposable high damage items over high level magic and build characters around that.
You might have one character build defensive and manipulate them to stay in low health to get limit breaks off of them. Doing that implies that you have access to a defense boosting GF, which are missable. You can plan a party around anything given what stat junctions you have available. You might have a party that's weak or strong against various elements at random times depending on what the auto junction system chooses for you, or you might be in complete control of the elemental and status properties of everyone around you.
Even the pocket playstation peripheral, something I thought was a downside of the game as without it certain items and summons can't be obtained. But having a better understanding of the game let me realize that it's entirely in the spirit of the game since everything in the game is an optional, circumventable thing that helps you define what kind of rpg you're playing. It's not a complete, self-contained "final fantasy", I thought, if it has these things outside the game. But, it doesn't need to have it, and besides, what ambition to have a separate monocolor tiny game screen with the potential to bring game altering items into the game that you can acquire by adventuring while outside.
To add onto the chocobo pocketstation game point, what it is is a tiny little random dungeon navigator and battler with small events that can help you level up a small chocobo in the real game and grow a summon in real time, while it nets you items from all over the game, even when you wouldn't be able to get them normally. Sometimes these items can help you get lategame GFs early. But this doesn't break the difficulty curve as it would in a normal rpg, because the game is balanced not around standard difficulty but on a risk/reward system where danger is beneficial, all boons are expendable and disposable, and everything around you is on the same growth curve as you.
All this to say that, while I think Final Fantasy had been leaning toward this direction for some time with V's class change system, VI's magic learning system and VII's materia system, but VIII is the first to fully embrace a difficulty designed around broadness. Instead of a series of challenges that test you on your ability to use available resources, growth choices made, or special items and weapons found via exploration, VIII is all about improvisation and just seeing what you can do and how you can play with it. This is reinforced by both a growth structure based on impermanence and redefinability and a world and system structure of circumventable machinery, where the pleasure is in the rewiring. It's the emphasis on how, not on performing optimally but on enjoying the act and actually paying attention and recognizing the struts, rails, and artifice of the play. In that sense, the game might be the first and only truly mechanically Brechtian RPG.
NARRATIVE 2 - Characters Who Exist Between the Frames
Given the state of impermanence and redefinability of the game’s mechanical construction, in a world where everything is permitted to exist at once in one concentrated mass dilated over a stretch of bending time, characters live and breathe in the spaces between time. If timecode dictates the law of this world the way it does relationships, events, and reality, then it is between units of time that characters find their existence.
The key visual motif of this game is the fade. Locations, characters, and places in time are introduced by fading, cascading shots. It is a visual dilation between disparate moments, a morphing of person to place, the inner to outer and back again, and it is constant across this game’s narrative framing.
Yet the characters when introduced are always given these very specific, quiet moments. Beautifully rendered short, intimate cg, completely voiceless, pointmark each new character’s introduction to the story. It’s such a unique feeling watching these, like learning about somebody without hearing them say anything, an interview of gestures, small movements, and diegetic environmental sound. It’s these moments that stand out throughout the game as in the heat of narrative choice, climax, and expositions where characters are put through the wringer and make mistakes, change, remember things, forget things; characters have developments in this game so quickly sometimes or have stunning redefining moments and reevaluations that it sometimes does feel absurd, surreal, and many have criticized this style of narrative development, but it's entirely appropriate for this game’s theme and story, a story where young adult development is characterized by the existential speed of the present, the claustrophobia of the past and the future closing on you at both sides, the baggage of the parent, the realization of your own eminent death, the reconciliation or lackthereof of a society and history that feels alien and unmalleable, of time itself that seems hostile and alive. To live here is to have surrendered yourself to it, to be a participant of the self-annihilation of its very existence, so there is no self, really, to separate from the out-of-control plot spiraling across the drama of all ages, except for only those that can be captured by these tiny, seemingly trivial moments, these small things that carry so much meaning about a person. And isn’t that ultimately the way you’ll be remembered? When a person is gone and all their life is part of the lives of all the other people’s lives, we remember those small bits, right? The way they move their hair or gaze into the sky or stumble on some rocks. It’s the moments between that can breathe.
MECHANICS 3 - Bargaining with Time
Much has been said about the drawing system of Final Fantasy VIII. I stand by that it is one of the most misunderstood mechanics in all RPG history. The regurgitated complaint is that it's slow, it's a waste of time, it's repetitive, and lastly that it's a required exercise in tedium as a replacement for traditional experience based stat growth. Such complaints or that the idea that the game was unplayable before the option to speed up time in the remaster (or that it improves the game) are untrue, and can be dispelled easily with an idea that might explain the mechanic better.
Imagine if each enemy in the game had only a limited amount of spell stocks, for example, if the bats at the start of the game had just a limit of 15 fires, and perhaps the triwing miniboss had 50 fires, blizzards, and thunders each. The expectation of “grinding by drawing” would be dead, and by explicitly disallowing players the opportunity to ruin their own enjoyment of the game by abusing a mechanic for “optimal growth and spell stocking” the game would have a much better sense of natural pace. And I mean, when you think about, even with that limitation you STILL could grind endlessly and pick up as many spells as you want, because the enemies are still random encounters you can grind. So what’s the difference, why does allowing a player to get ~infinite spells from a single encounter make it any worse than allowing a player to get a limited amount of spells from an infinitely repeatable encounter? The difference is player psychology, and how players perceive the game is to be played based on pre-established conditions of the genre. I’ve never seen a player of an rpg complain that a game demands that they grind by allowing infinite enemy encounters to occur in a designated area, because it’s understood unless the player explicitly desires a statistical advantage through repetitive actions, they are not meant to walk around and battle endlessly for optimal growth and item/resource availability.
But that still leaves the question, why design the game that way, why design it so that each enemy is an endless dispenser of spells and that spell stock is the foremost determiner of character statistic ability?
To answer this, first, what is drawing spells? Why have a magic system set up like this at all? I think the main benefits of this mechanic in terms of player emotion are that:
1- It gives each individual battle the ability to permanently change, for better or worse, your character’s potential capabilities, weaknesses and strengths. In other terms, their invisible, implied ambiguous class. Of course, there are no character classes in Final Fantasy VIII, and they haven’t been in the series at this point since V, but there are still minute decisions to tool and retool every character in the game based on available resources that can instantly completely change how your characters act, fight, and interact in terms of battles. Every single battle in the game has the potential to change this, either by having the player spend lots of magic spell stocks during the fight for casting and thus losing their junctioned stat strengths, or by acquiring an unknown amount of new spells, or even discovering an unknown spell altogether that gives new potential both as an ability to cast during battle and as an ability that might redefine or change your strategies completely. One of my biggest problems with many JRPGs is there is too much inconsequential time spent in battle, and that time actually feels inconsequential. Sure, technically experience points are consequential since they can permanently change your characters for the better once you get enough, but gaining experience is always the same reward (the only variable being amount), and always in the upward direction, and is always applied the same way by the game system. Spell stocks all have different stat relationships based on the spell, which itself is a form of discovery that’s pretty fun.
2- It creates a decision-making point. In each battle, you have the option to spend a character turn being useless for the sake of acquiring resources, and doing this consecutively leaves you open for more attacks by the enemy. You cannot predict the exact quantity you’ll receive each turn, so there’s a bit of a gamble involved, and it creates a risk/reward system of staying longer or choosing not to end battles to get more out of them. Drawing is also a skill. It’s not an option available at all times; it costs a full menu slot of which there are only four available and this never changes during the game (a big change from VII’s everything-window resizing itself), and the game makes this point from the beginning by starting you off with 4 available command skills in addition to Draw.
Additionally, the outcome of a successful Draw is dependent on magic stats/junctions, so there is incentive to do things like specialize characters for drawing, have mages geared toward drawing, or even make your characters physical stats weaker so as not to end battles too quickly. There is also the fact that your character level determines Drawing success/failure, and a lot of spells have a minimum level to acquire, which also actually means if you want to take advantage of battle spell drawing you cannot keep yourself intentionally underlevel (though you don’t have to take advantage of it; there are other ways of playing the game), and that if you have a specialized draw character, you still want to keep their level up, and in this game experience is primarily determined by who gets the last hit in battle, which means you still want them to attack every once in a while…
At the same time though, Draw is still useful as a command for characters with weak magic stats. You could always cast a Drawn spell instead of stocking it, kind of excitingly using the enemy spell against themselves right away in the heat of battle, and the power of that spell isn’t determined by character magic stats since it’s not really being casted from that character. Instead spells casted this way are given random strength, which could be useful in fights where physical fighters can’t use their attacks, need to get an elemental weakness out, or do anything spur-of-the-moment.
At the same time though, there is a huge flaw with the implementation of this mechanic, and I think it’s responsible for the reason this mechanic is misunderstood as something expected to be abused to the point of “making the game boring”. And that’s that, for about half of the game, the enemies simply don’t do enough damage per turn to create a legitimate threat to the player’s risk of standing around, drawing. Because players don’t feel a risk or danger, the only real risk until enemies become stronger is the passage of time, which is where the concept of perceived intended grind comes from. The game is not difficult enough in general to necessitate wasting your time with excessive drawing anyway, yet players cannot know that when starting the game or anticipating the next challenge. To be frank, the root of this issue stems from the ATB system and Final Fantasy’s approach to enemy design at this stage in general: from VI on, FF games had battles that were more about performance, expression and a horizontal power system where you could defeat enemies in multiple ways, which would actually help define the characters and their journeys, as well as create the cinematic character-driven narrative layer to the moment-to-moment gameplay. Making the enemies too hard would limit player incentive to experiment, and would lower the potential ways to solve encounters, so lowering the minimum requirement for defeating enemies makes sense. When the ATB system gets involved, though, you get the situation where if the player doesn’t truly go for ending the fight quickly and just does the minimum physical attack, the battles can very easily stall, where nobody does much damage, and the thrill of engagement is all but gone. This unfortunate result, combined with Final Fantasy’s popularization of prioritizing lengthy/showy battle animations over quicker alternatives or text, and the fact that all battles open in completely separate scenes from the exploration scene, disorienting the player if the battle takes too long (upon which re-orientating yourself by moving around to get your bearings will likely create another battle with step-based encounters), ALL are kind of the reason 70% of post FFVII JRPGs can feel like a slog to play. But that digression aside, adding the Draw system onto that low-risk and time-(in)sensitive battle foundation makes the first half of the game not live up to the risk in the risk/reward system the game is setting up.
Later games do have this element in them actually, FFIX basically has the Draw command in the form of a Steal system. It used to be that enemies had only one item players could steal, but in IX enemies have a whole table of items with harder and rarer to steal things at the top, which are really enticing since items and equipment have lots of functions in that game, similar to the magic system of VIII. Although in both games you can forgo a turn for the risk of getting hit more for the chance of scoring something good that can permanently change or increase your abilities in the game, the difference is that in IX the things enemies hold are actually limited! Look at that!
Then, in XII, you have a somewhat different thing but still a battle risk/reward subsystem where you can fight consecutive enemies by aggroing them and increase your chances of getting items and equipments and drops the higher your enemy chain is, and the more you fight and get more enemies involved the higher the risk gets for aggroing a strong enemy or overwhelming yourself in numbers. Continuing to reason 3…
3-It’s sick as hell. I don’t know what it is, and normally I don’t even care much for battle animations and particle effects, but the Draw animation is just super cool to me, and just conceptually, the idea of extracting magic essence from enemies and using it yourself in myriad ways is dope.
And if we go back to my previous point of the lack of pressure in damage turning the main motivater of risk to time, as much as I dislike it, in a game about dealing with time, with a sense of time that’s simultaneously instantly fast and endlessly frozen, isn’t it kind of apt? The anxiety of the draw state, the gambler’s addiction of staying in place just to get more, the fact that moving forward with the game and finishing encounters is something the player has to decide and actively cause, not just passively wait for things to end, well it all kind of fits thematically, I think.
One last addendum I'm gonna add here is that the way money is made in the game is also based on time, since you get a salary based on the time spent moving around in the game. Since the salary amount is determined only partially, minimally by battling, and mostly on quizzes taken that test and encourage experimentation with the game systems, it creates another horizontally structured optional progression path.
NARRATIVE 3 - Space as Final Respite, or: The Scarcity of Quiet
With my view of this story being explicitly about teenagers coming to terms with a hostile world defined by the simultaneity of time, the climax of the story is its calmest point.
I don’t want to give away too much about it in case there are readers who haven’t experienced it. But I will say that it’s a sequence that seems to come out of nowhere, has several twists, and barely explains itself. Yet it absolutely works.
Everywhere on the surface of the world of this game, there is the feeling of restlessness. Like I said before, the story sequences are accelerations of what feel like events occurring miles apart in time, the moments between them, to me at least, feel like environments defined by a freeze-frame energy. Everything is either a calm-before-the-storm, or the fallout right after a catastrophe, and in most cases, both. At rest, there is no rest, except for in space.
That being said, the scene in space technically is neither peaceful nor calm in its context. It’s very tense. BUT, it’s the one chapter in the game where the two main characters can just exist, and live by their own volition, separate from the propellants of time. The motivating factors behind Squall and Rinoa are very pure, and in that sense, it’s a rebellion against the forms of logic that construct the space the narrative defines itself in. It’s a hug in the void, interrupted only by a dragon.
MECHANICS 4 - You Are Still Playing the Game When It’s Shut Off
Final Fantasy VIII is built for external discussions. The storytelling style being based around events and relationships hinted at, the proto FFXIII datalog, the way junctioning allows for different players to have completely different play styles and setups, the fact that the card game rules scatter around and spread in unique, random ways along the towns and areas you play it at, leading to completely different rules ecosystems across the world in each save file. But I think the most interesting parts to this fact are two things.
First, the sidequest design in this game, specifically the ones you find on the overworld, and the way they’re populated along the map feel way more “you read this on a forum or heard it from a friend” than anything in the series prior, like with the invisible monkey stuff or the lake (if you know, you know), but it has a certain flavor all its own. There’s surprisingly very few of them and they’re all sort of funky in the sense that they feel abruptly distinct and don’t make sense until you ‘get’ them. It feels very protogenic to the kinds of things that would spread in early 2000s game design and sensibilities (in my opinion).
Second, with the inclusion of money being determined by something distinctly outside of the gameplay loop (optional exams), to the point that they’re in a section of the menu labeled ‘Tutorial’, I think is the game kind of encouraging the player to engage the game outside of the game and to think on their own by burying sorts of layers within the game’s construction. I think this is the first Final Fantasy where I felt the systems of combat, exploration, and character growth were distinct among themselves within the game, and could feel where each one ended and started. It’s the first Final Fantasy where I went out of my way to hunt down specific type of enemies based on their habitats to find a specific item. It’s also the first Final Fantasy where I went out of my way to construct a specific type of weapon I read about in a magazine and where going to a store meant more than just spending the gold I had for what they had on offer.
NARRATIVE 4 - The End on Tape
Potential spoilers for this section if you have not seen the ending.
“Reflect on your...childhood…your sensation...your words...your emotions.......Time...it will not wait...no matter...how hard you hold on...it escapes you...and......."-Ultimecia’s final words
What place does mortality have in a world where everything exists at the same time; if in the Vonnegut sense, you only need to look in a certain direction to see someone gone still standing, still doing what they’ve always been doing?
I read the ending in a particular way that I’ll try to explain. Squall finds himself transmitted by some signal into a cracked endless desert. In the Baudrillardian sense, this is the desert of the real. The crossing of all time, the eradication of distance between discreteness, and the overbombardment of information and signal—the noise of their reality of life—has created in its diametric the frayed husk of an opposite reality. No sound can be heard, and no signal perceived; no truth distinguishable from a soup of signs, signifiers, and contexts, there is no context found here at all, it is the Desert.
The hero wanders alone, unable to hold on to what mattered to him most. Unable to hold on to himself. Without context, without other things to compare itself to, the self disintegrates. The land shrinks until there is nowhere left to wander, because the act of wandering itself loses context, loses meaning, loses discreteness in relation to other things.
The signal/noise dichotomy is best represented by the violent montage sequence, the meshing, cutting, liquifying, re-editing as the picture itself fails to hold on to memory, fails to filter memory, fails to understand memory. And with neither memory, context, or structured/discernable reality, death comes without life beginning, and life arrives without death completing it, intermittently and together.
And the only solution to the hero’s purgatory of time, mortality, and context, is, as completely corny and as silly as it sounds, it’s just love. It’s just what matters to people, to be held and accepted. That’s the signal. It’s a beautiful image, with the clouds parting and the flowers coming back, when the two find each other again despite all odds. Because even if this whole loop will start again, Edea will begin SeeD, will become the sorceress, time draws in on itself, the characters are divided without knowing each other, and everybody is lost and alone in a sea of anxiety and noise, and the war comes from every side of time again, this one moment will still be there, and the game is asking the player to recognize the importance of that feeling. It ends with acceptance of that feeling across time, even for Seifer, who finally feels at ease with himself without actually changing, and especially Laguna, who finally gets to express what he’s always wanted to. A lost kind of love that’s continued across generations connected by a song and unspoken feelings.
Finally the whole thing culminates in a video recording of a celebration where everyone is present. It’s almost as if this one piece of footage, this is all that is allowed to exist outside of the loop that the timeline of the game is predicated on. Unlike the other forms of information transmission and transportation the game is fixed on, I think this one final tape shows a reality where everybody is at ease, being themselves, in the moment (and the headmaster’s Robin Williams face has suddenly fully transformed into a Phillip Seymour Hoffman). It’s an immortalization of the many lives that were there, granting them separation from the other many signals, noises, contexts, and realities of present, past, and future times. It ends only when the machine does, as the battery dies, the viewpoint is switched to Rinoa’s, and Squall is allowed to exist once more, present in the moment seen to Rinoa, flying toward a Lunar exit.
A send-off to 1999 and the entire millennium before it, as RPGs, rendering technology, and fiction storytelling on the digital medium won’t ever be quite the same.
My Own Timeline
I wanna take this part and talk a bit about my relationship with this game, and with games in general, over time.
I grew up at a time when PS1 games had just fully phased out and were unavailable in stores. I never had much money as a kid so getting games was a very infrequent thing, until the next gen consoles would come out and make the previous generations games discount and I could play catch-up.
Most of my relationship with games at that time was over the internet, watching videos of others older than I explaining about games and their relationships with them. Much can and has been said about the early years of YouTube and video game discussion, the immature humor, the overstretched personas, the ridiculous rants, embarrassing skits, and how generally mean spirited a lot of it was. But when I was a kid, that's all I had to go to to learn more and engage in what was absolutely the most fascinating topic out there, video games I cannot play.
Playstation 1 games, especially, felt like they were mystic artifacts, there was always an air of magic to them. I think my very first exposure to final fantasy was the FF8 intro cutscene. I thought the quick shots in that trailer-style intro were scenes from an actual movie, I remember googling for a place to watch the full thing. Then I remember finding Midgar and images depicting FF7's industrial black city and wondering how the hell it all fit together. The boxarts were always so intriguing and cinematic, but the resolution on my screen and old images and maybe just my dumb baby head would read into them the completely wrong way. I thought FF7s box was depicting a hero with a giant sword approaching a dark castle. I thought it was amazing. I could barely see or understand gameplay screenshots and just went off of text descriptions of it, and it always sounded more interesting and out there than the limited worlds being rendered in real time on my PS2. Besides 2000's Wikipedia and fan wikis I only had YouTubers to go off of for any context about these strange things that seemed so much better than the games I was playing then.
And who else to convince me of the superiority of the past than the growing number of men on the internet reminiscing about the games of their youth? And I fell for it, I just believed older games were better than anything next gen. I like to think of this now as a kind of big brother effect I experienced. I didn't have any older siblings and was an only child for a long time, so I sometimes feel jealous when I hear of others' experiences with older siblings passing down or sharing in video game experiences. Since I had no guide in the world of games, looking back now it kind of felt like I was relying on online video creators for a kind of parasocial game-themed relationship.
By allowing those kinds of people to be my guides in childhood escapist experiences, I had unknowingly allowed myself to swallow whole-sale all kinds of things, things that were not so good, and I just believed in the opinions others had for experiences I didn't have myself, for games I never played or movies I'd never watched. Most of my experience with Final Fantasy VIII for the longest time was with The Spoony One's review series on the game. It's funny to me now looking back and seeing how completely wrong most of his points about the game are, how he misreads its design choices and intentions, and kind of just complains.
Yet I can't really bring myself to hate it. I guess part of me just grew up in that culture, much as I disapprove of it now, and when I sit down and watch something like it from that time period I still find it kind of relaxing. Just to sit down, settle in, and listen to someone take me on a personal comedic journey that edits between gameplay footage, historical context, criticisms and anecdotes, and anything else that could happen on a screen. It's crazy, even if literally all of the content within that structure is horrible, it still feels comfortable somehow just through its format, its structure. I can't come to hate the things that taught me about all the games I wouldn't have been able to wonder and dream about, learn about, and eventually bring myself to try to experience on my own, even if I reject its message and outdated grossness.
That's the internet though, isn't it? The place where the past and future exist simultaneously, all directions to be experienced all at once. The turn of the millennium, the birth of the forum, the voices turning, all things must pass and all things must come, now at the same time.
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“We program a computer or a videotape machine to record a telecast in our absence, to be able to watch it the next day. Here we have a discovery: the olden space-time was an extensive space, a space where duration of time was valued. Whatever was short-lived was considered an evil-something pejorative. To last a short time was to not be present; it was negative. Today…new technologies lead us to discover the equivalent of the infinitely small in time. In previous times, we were conscious, with telescopes, of the infinite large, and with microscopes, of the infinitely small. Today, high speed machines, electronic machines, allow us to comprehend the same thing in regard to time. There is an infinitely long time which is that of history, of carbon-14, which enables us to date extremely ancient artifacts. Then, we have an infinitely short time, which is that of technology’s billionths of seconds. I think the present finds us squarely between these two times. We are living in both the extensive time of the cities of stories, of memories, or archives, or writing, and the intensive time of the new technologies. That’s the ‘program of absence’, that’s how we program our definitive absence, because we’ll never be present in that billionth of a second.”
All quotations about speed/time by Paul Virilio.
Phoenix: The witness claims that The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is, quote: "Just like Ace Attorney," but that claim clearly contradicts the evidence!
Edgeworth: What are you on about, Wright? The lack of courtroom scenes again? I'll remind you that you yourself just wasted fifteen minutes of the court's time proving that nobody in the West knows the legacy of Japanese detective visual novel.
Phoenix: What I'm "on about," Mr. Edgeworth, is this!
[Shitty Minigame]
A terrible mobile runner-ass minigame, played every few minutes. It's very boring.
> Present
Edgeworth: But that's...
Phoenix: The existence of this godawful minigame whenever the player character needs to 'think' can lead us to only one conclusion! The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog... is actually Dangan Ronpa!
Judge: This trial was supposed to be about insider trading.
Edgeworth: What are you on about, Wright? The lack of courtroom scenes again? I'll remind you that you yourself just wasted fifteen minutes of the court's time proving that nobody in the West knows the legacy of Japanese detective visual novel.
Phoenix: What I'm "on about," Mr. Edgeworth, is this!
[Shitty Minigame]
A terrible mobile runner-ass minigame, played every few minutes. It's very boring.
> Present
Edgeworth: But that's...
Phoenix: The existence of this godawful minigame whenever the player character needs to 'think' can lead us to only one conclusion! The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog... is actually Dangan Ronpa!
Judge: This trial was supposed to be about insider trading.
Sorcery!
2013
This isn’t going to shock anyone who knows me, but I’ve got a lot of affection for gamebooks as a gaming medium. I spent a lot of time as a kid going through the most basic Choose Your Own Adventure brand CYOA stuff, but elementary school libraries and book fairs made sure that I quickly gained access to shit that was aimed at kids older than me, with more complex choice branches, more grisly depictions of your self-insert characters’ many terrible fates, and, when I was lucky, full fledged RPG mechanics. I’ve always been fascinated with the space that gamebooks occupy in the RPG world, somewhere between the social and varyingly freeform experience of a tabletop game with friends and the more narrative driven and inherently linear RPG video games that would begin to emerge somewhat contemporaneously to gamebooks as a medium in the mid-1980s. Gamebooks invite an imaginative element, an insertion of oneself into the role of the protagonist and a degree of choice in determining a narrative’s outcome, sort of, that’s not common in video games and more focused than a group-based campaign of Dungeons & Dragons might be. I think you could make the case that a lot of modern solo tabletop games take a lot of design cues from classic gamebooks, and you see a lot more freedom from these a lot of the time to create narrative more openly than you could between the confines of a page. Similarly, people often like to call old Final Fantasies and similarly structured RPGs “open world” games but they’re not, they’re fully linear; just because you have a large map you can wander around and occasionally some side objectives you can distract yourself with doesn’t mean that you’re not making specific progress through the game in a particular order. A gamebook is like this too – no matter what freedom of choice you have to accomplish your goal, you’re ultimately being shunted along and between a few relatively narrow paths to an ending. The real amount of choice can vary from book to book. It’s a malleable form.
I never played the book version of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery!, but I do have some experience with its parent franchise, Fighting Fantasy, which is probably the biggest name in that space still today and definitely was when I was twelve. I’m sort of glad that I didn’t, though, because having perused the first book upon finishing Inkle’s adaptation of it earlier this week it kind of obviously blows most of the stuff I was reading out of the water? Its big claim to fame is introducing a second entire character build, a wizard who can cast magic instead of the kind of generic sword guy you automatically play as in most of these. There are literally dozens of spells that you can cast in any number of situations that could have many outcomes and while there are restrictions on how to cast them and the game only offers six options at a time, that so radically opens up the play space that the idea of playing the book as a normal guy who can’t do the thing the book is named for is like, genuinely impossible for me to fathom.
Inkle takes the choice out of your hands though, one of many very smart decisions they make in what surprised me by being actually an extremely faithful adaptation of the book to the video game format. Ya girl got a new phone so I’m fuckin GAMING now and I’ve had my eye on these for a while. I did NOT know they all got ported to the switch like a year ago sue me. But there’s something nice about having them on my phone, it’s definitely well-designed around that screenshape and a touch interface.
So some fuckin asshole magician stole The Crown Of Kings, which is an important magical artifact that a few countries pass around every once in a while and it’s a big deal. You’ve been chosen to go steal it back and it has to be kind of a stealth mission because the crown is so powerful that if they just sent armies then the now all powerful Archmage could supposedly just like bzzzzap everybody or whatever. In this first of four game adapting the first of the four Sorcery! books, your goal is to travel across a stretch of land known as the Shamuntanti hills, which is a generally blighted, mountainous region with lots of little caves and sad, inhospitable settlements between your starting point and the also shitty-sounding big city of Kharé.
The format of a gamebook translates perfectly to the mobile template, with bite-sized paragraphs leading into one another, occasionally embellished or with options to expand on detail if you want them, but by and large you’ve got all the information you need at most two clicks away at any time, and it’s very easy to put down between events and pick back up any time. The adventure is episodic to begin with as you encounter people on the road, get attacked by monsters or perhaps an assassin as you sleep in the woods, chat with the mysterious lady in her cabin (is she a witch or just kind of weird?). Things are punctuated at the most important moments with the original artwork by John Blanche, beautiful and occasionally grotesque, taken directly from the original gamebook. The general background aesthetic and UI has clearly been designed with an eye towards matching matching his art style in a modernized context and I appreciate that, it all looks good together, it doesn’t feel like they pasted a bunch of drawings from 1983 into an ugly phone game from 2013.
The big changeups are to combat and magic. Combat is done largely via narration, where you read the description of the clash you’ve had and decide based on your enemy’s poise whether they’re going to swing heavy, light, or guard. You choose how much energy to expend out of a possible 10, and if your number is higher, the enemy takes damage and vice versa. If one of you blocks and the other attacks, the blocker takes 1 damage no matter what. It’s a very smart way to handle combat, it’s snappy, it feels as narrative as the choices because of how tied it is to reading and enemy characterization, and it’s possible to really fuck yourself up if you commit to it and can’t learn your enemy’s patterns.
Magic may or may not be more freeform than the gamebook; I’m unsure if you’re offered more opportunities to cast, or if you ACTUALLY have more options once you do, but rather than just picking from a table of six spells you have to spell out words from a jumble of letters you’re presented with, which is both more simple and more complex than it sounds. Because your spellbook is within a different menu, 50 pages long, and digitized (and so must be thumbed through slowly and one page at a time on a touch screen), it’s much more difficult and tedious to refer to it than the spellbook that acts as a glossary in the gamebook, which encourages players to generally have an idea in mind of what they want to do when they go into a cast.
And this shit is all, like, it’s all good, but the game is, as far as I can tell, a 95% faithful transliteration of Steve Jackson’s original work, and so it’s very good that Steve Jackson’s original work is as good as it is at doing what it’s doing. This IS a pretty standard 1980s Western Fantasy Adventure and what you spend most of your time doing is walking up and down hills and maybe into a cave and into the odd village or not it’s your choice. But there’s an element of keeping track of your food intake, making sure you’re sleeping properly, staying not TOO hurt. Because it’s very easy to get caught with your proverbial pants down.
Sorcery! is, at its core, a game about judgment and trust. Not in a DEEP way, not that I’m trying to indicate that it wants to inspire pondering in you, only to say that this game is very very good at making you question whether the guy you just met is going to knife you in the ribs if you help him out of that tree, or if these guys in this tavern are gonna steal your sword if you disarm like their cultural custom says to, or if these elves are gonna be cool with a human walking by their land no matter how you plead their case, or if this witch you’ve talked your way into the good graces of will remain gracious if you make even one incorrect comment, or or or. Subversively, however, I found trust to almost always be worthwhile. After that initial and disastrous encounter with the elves (whose grievance with men at large is extremely well-founded), which did effectively put The Fear in me, it almost always paid to at least be kind or generous in spirit on the surface of most of my interactions. Trusting my defensive and antisocial fairy companion to do the right thing in a dire situation when it was clear from his comments that no one had done this before and he wasn’t used to being treated honestly, helping people out of binds despite warnings against their characters or returning stolen items that you’ve come into possession of when I met their owners didn’t always reward me and in fact once lost me what I think could have been a valuable resource in a future game, but the always led to a more enriching experience. And of course, it didn’t stop me from fleecing and stealing from people who could afford it. You can roleplay a decent range of behaviors and motivations for your character.
The prose, of course, is the real star, but combined with the decision-making it can really sing. The very last obstacle in the game for me was a trial where I found myself agreeing to help rescue the kidnapped daughter of an orc village’s mayor. I was lowered by basket into a pitch black tunnel system, made my way through the creeping maze, and used most of my stamina casting spells to kill the manticore that dwelled there before the kid safely led me back to the entrance. The orcs said hey you can both get in the basket at the same time we’ll pull you up, but I didn’t want anything to go wrong so I put the kid in alone and told them to pull. The basket didn’t come back down. I had the option to call up, or to wait. My character rationalized that they were probably celebrating, this kid had been missing for days after all. Wait again. Nothing, silence, too far up to hear them. Wait. I had to wait four times before the basket came back down. That’s a lot of faith. I don’t know what might have happened if I hadn’t had the trust and the respect for those guys to get me out of there, but there had been multiple moments before where there had been misunderstandings and miscommunications and every time I had chosen to work it out in good faith and every time things had been chill. Good dudes. And they were good dudes, and we went back to the village and partied hard and I moved on happily into Sorcery! book two.
Most of the people in the Shamuntani Hills are good dudes, given the chance. It’s not a game without danger or treachery or mistrust and not all of that mistrust is unfounded, but the undeniable warmth that sits at the core of it is just pleasant, and it’s nice to see such a traditional work of fantasy playing with these ideas in a time I don’t really associate with generous depictions of fantasy cultures in lowbrow Western media.
After the decidedly mixed response to their first project, an IF adaptation of the Frankenstein novel, I think it makes sense that Inkle might have done something more directly akin to a conversion than an adaptation for their next project, but given the way their fortunes have turned over the past decade I’m glad they were brave enough to keep pushing out the edges of what their projects could look like. What I’m most interested to see is whether future installments of Sorcery! take on more of Inkle’s authorial voice. They made 80 Days in between the second and thirds installments of this four-part series so I would very much like to see them take more adaptation agency. Even if they don’t, though, Sorcery! Seems from this first impression like such a rich source material to begin with that it would be hard to come away wanting.
I never played the book version of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery!, but I do have some experience with its parent franchise, Fighting Fantasy, which is probably the biggest name in that space still today and definitely was when I was twelve. I’m sort of glad that I didn’t, though, because having perused the first book upon finishing Inkle’s adaptation of it earlier this week it kind of obviously blows most of the stuff I was reading out of the water? Its big claim to fame is introducing a second entire character build, a wizard who can cast magic instead of the kind of generic sword guy you automatically play as in most of these. There are literally dozens of spells that you can cast in any number of situations that could have many outcomes and while there are restrictions on how to cast them and the game only offers six options at a time, that so radically opens up the play space that the idea of playing the book as a normal guy who can’t do the thing the book is named for is like, genuinely impossible for me to fathom.
Inkle takes the choice out of your hands though, one of many very smart decisions they make in what surprised me by being actually an extremely faithful adaptation of the book to the video game format. Ya girl got a new phone so I’m fuckin GAMING now and I’ve had my eye on these for a while. I did NOT know they all got ported to the switch like a year ago sue me. But there’s something nice about having them on my phone, it’s definitely well-designed around that screenshape and a touch interface.
So some fuckin asshole magician stole The Crown Of Kings, which is an important magical artifact that a few countries pass around every once in a while and it’s a big deal. You’ve been chosen to go steal it back and it has to be kind of a stealth mission because the crown is so powerful that if they just sent armies then the now all powerful Archmage could supposedly just like bzzzzap everybody or whatever. In this first of four game adapting the first of the four Sorcery! books, your goal is to travel across a stretch of land known as the Shamuntanti hills, which is a generally blighted, mountainous region with lots of little caves and sad, inhospitable settlements between your starting point and the also shitty-sounding big city of Kharé.
The format of a gamebook translates perfectly to the mobile template, with bite-sized paragraphs leading into one another, occasionally embellished or with options to expand on detail if you want them, but by and large you’ve got all the information you need at most two clicks away at any time, and it’s very easy to put down between events and pick back up any time. The adventure is episodic to begin with as you encounter people on the road, get attacked by monsters or perhaps an assassin as you sleep in the woods, chat with the mysterious lady in her cabin (is she a witch or just kind of weird?). Things are punctuated at the most important moments with the original artwork by John Blanche, beautiful and occasionally grotesque, taken directly from the original gamebook. The general background aesthetic and UI has clearly been designed with an eye towards matching matching his art style in a modernized context and I appreciate that, it all looks good together, it doesn’t feel like they pasted a bunch of drawings from 1983 into an ugly phone game from 2013.
The big changeups are to combat and magic. Combat is done largely via narration, where you read the description of the clash you’ve had and decide based on your enemy’s poise whether they’re going to swing heavy, light, or guard. You choose how much energy to expend out of a possible 10, and if your number is higher, the enemy takes damage and vice versa. If one of you blocks and the other attacks, the blocker takes 1 damage no matter what. It’s a very smart way to handle combat, it’s snappy, it feels as narrative as the choices because of how tied it is to reading and enemy characterization, and it’s possible to really fuck yourself up if you commit to it and can’t learn your enemy’s patterns.
Magic may or may not be more freeform than the gamebook; I’m unsure if you’re offered more opportunities to cast, or if you ACTUALLY have more options once you do, but rather than just picking from a table of six spells you have to spell out words from a jumble of letters you’re presented with, which is both more simple and more complex than it sounds. Because your spellbook is within a different menu, 50 pages long, and digitized (and so must be thumbed through slowly and one page at a time on a touch screen), it’s much more difficult and tedious to refer to it than the spellbook that acts as a glossary in the gamebook, which encourages players to generally have an idea in mind of what they want to do when they go into a cast.
And this shit is all, like, it’s all good, but the game is, as far as I can tell, a 95% faithful transliteration of Steve Jackson’s original work, and so it’s very good that Steve Jackson’s original work is as good as it is at doing what it’s doing. This IS a pretty standard 1980s Western Fantasy Adventure and what you spend most of your time doing is walking up and down hills and maybe into a cave and into the odd village or not it’s your choice. But there’s an element of keeping track of your food intake, making sure you’re sleeping properly, staying not TOO hurt. Because it’s very easy to get caught with your proverbial pants down.
Sorcery! is, at its core, a game about judgment and trust. Not in a DEEP way, not that I’m trying to indicate that it wants to inspire pondering in you, only to say that this game is very very good at making you question whether the guy you just met is going to knife you in the ribs if you help him out of that tree, or if these guys in this tavern are gonna steal your sword if you disarm like their cultural custom says to, or if these elves are gonna be cool with a human walking by their land no matter how you plead their case, or if this witch you’ve talked your way into the good graces of will remain gracious if you make even one incorrect comment, or or or. Subversively, however, I found trust to almost always be worthwhile. After that initial and disastrous encounter with the elves (whose grievance with men at large is extremely well-founded), which did effectively put The Fear in me, it almost always paid to at least be kind or generous in spirit on the surface of most of my interactions. Trusting my defensive and antisocial fairy companion to do the right thing in a dire situation when it was clear from his comments that no one had done this before and he wasn’t used to being treated honestly, helping people out of binds despite warnings against their characters or returning stolen items that you’ve come into possession of when I met their owners didn’t always reward me and in fact once lost me what I think could have been a valuable resource in a future game, but the always led to a more enriching experience. And of course, it didn’t stop me from fleecing and stealing from people who could afford it. You can roleplay a decent range of behaviors and motivations for your character.
The prose, of course, is the real star, but combined with the decision-making it can really sing. The very last obstacle in the game for me was a trial where I found myself agreeing to help rescue the kidnapped daughter of an orc village’s mayor. I was lowered by basket into a pitch black tunnel system, made my way through the creeping maze, and used most of my stamina casting spells to kill the manticore that dwelled there before the kid safely led me back to the entrance. The orcs said hey you can both get in the basket at the same time we’ll pull you up, but I didn’t want anything to go wrong so I put the kid in alone and told them to pull. The basket didn’t come back down. I had the option to call up, or to wait. My character rationalized that they were probably celebrating, this kid had been missing for days after all. Wait again. Nothing, silence, too far up to hear them. Wait. I had to wait four times before the basket came back down. That’s a lot of faith. I don’t know what might have happened if I hadn’t had the trust and the respect for those guys to get me out of there, but there had been multiple moments before where there had been misunderstandings and miscommunications and every time I had chosen to work it out in good faith and every time things had been chill. Good dudes. And they were good dudes, and we went back to the village and partied hard and I moved on happily into Sorcery! book two.
Most of the people in the Shamuntani Hills are good dudes, given the chance. It’s not a game without danger or treachery or mistrust and not all of that mistrust is unfounded, but the undeniable warmth that sits at the core of it is just pleasant, and it’s nice to see such a traditional work of fantasy playing with these ideas in a time I don’t really associate with generous depictions of fantasy cultures in lowbrow Western media.
After the decidedly mixed response to their first project, an IF adaptation of the Frankenstein novel, I think it makes sense that Inkle might have done something more directly akin to a conversion than an adaptation for their next project, but given the way their fortunes have turned over the past decade I’m glad they were brave enough to keep pushing out the edges of what their projects could look like. What I’m most interested to see is whether future installments of Sorcery! take on more of Inkle’s authorial voice. They made 80 Days in between the second and thirds installments of this four-part series so I would very much like to see them take more adaptation agency. Even if they don’t, though, Sorcery! Seems from this first impression like such a rich source material to begin with that it would be hard to come away wanting.
Y'know, maybe I should have been more wary. RGG have now proven they have a serious track record of fucking up re-releases. Monkey ball 1+2 got borked physics. VF5 got racist netcode. Yakuza 1+2 got Kiwami'd. And now it really feels like Ishin has as well.
RGG will really add an unforgivably terrible gacha Card system on what already seems like a way too bloated game, but not address that you can just bait one attack and gun down from across the room every story boss.
RGG will really just change what seems like a pretty well thought out original cast considering the conceit in what is obviously a shortsighted fanservice move that will reek in like 3 years.
RGG will really just not address the game's blatant issues like a quarter of the runtime consisting of you running to and from work, attaching Kiryu's morality system onto thi main character requiring consant contrivance and the game's map clearly being hamstrung by loading times on the PS3.
Deep,, deep under Nu-Ishin is the best Yakuza game. And frankly, I get the impression that it's buried a fair bit under the original Ishin as well - I don't think the Yakuza stuff helps tell the story at play (not-Kiryu just sucks the life out of what seems like a truly fascinating real person imo) there's a pointless aount of RPG nonsense that only detracts from the combat that I can't blame entirely on the remake, and the map is probably the series' weakest if you arent a huge nerd for this shit like me.
But im a huge sucker for stories from this period (WATCH YOJIMBO) i love the aesthetic, the combat whilst having issues gainst greatly from swords and guns, and the general plot is really cool. Frankly, just experiencing thils state of japan from the viewpoint of an RGG game is satiation enough for me, huge nerd. But god it could be so much better.
And Nu-Ishin is just the worst kind of re-release. It reminds me a lot of Strange Journey Redux - making pointless changes that dont help and just alienate, whilst adding pointless new stuff that's both terrible and bloats out a game that if anything needs cutting down.
RGG are a very competent studio, but god they need to stop doing this shit.
PS: the translation/localisation here feels really rough. To the point i've spotted multiple spelling mistakes. Makes it particularly tempting to go back to the original once i've improved my Japanese... a lot.
RGG will really add an unforgivably terrible gacha Card system on what already seems like a way too bloated game, but not address that you can just bait one attack and gun down from across the room every story boss.
RGG will really just change what seems like a pretty well thought out original cast considering the conceit in what is obviously a shortsighted fanservice move that will reek in like 3 years.
RGG will really just not address the game's blatant issues like a quarter of the runtime consisting of you running to and from work, attaching Kiryu's morality system onto thi main character requiring consant contrivance and the game's map clearly being hamstrung by loading times on the PS3.
Deep,, deep under Nu-Ishin is the best Yakuza game. And frankly, I get the impression that it's buried a fair bit under the original Ishin as well - I don't think the Yakuza stuff helps tell the story at play (not-Kiryu just sucks the life out of what seems like a truly fascinating real person imo) there's a pointless aount of RPG nonsense that only detracts from the combat that I can't blame entirely on the remake, and the map is probably the series' weakest if you arent a huge nerd for this shit like me.
But im a huge sucker for stories from this period (WATCH YOJIMBO) i love the aesthetic, the combat whilst having issues gainst greatly from swords and guns, and the general plot is really cool. Frankly, just experiencing thils state of japan from the viewpoint of an RGG game is satiation enough for me, huge nerd. But god it could be so much better.
And Nu-Ishin is just the worst kind of re-release. It reminds me a lot of Strange Journey Redux - making pointless changes that dont help and just alienate, whilst adding pointless new stuff that's both terrible and bloats out a game that if anything needs cutting down.
RGG are a very competent studio, but god they need to stop doing this shit.
PS: the translation/localisation here feels really rough. To the point i've spotted multiple spelling mistakes. Makes it particularly tempting to go back to the original once i've improved my Japanese... a lot.