Woodaba
2023
I considered strongly putting together a long-form critique of this game, but the most damning statement I could possibly make about Final Fantasy XVI is that I truly don't think it's worth it. The ways in which I think this game is bad are not unique or interesting: it is bad in the same way the vast majority of these prestige Sony single-player exclusives are. Its failures are common, predictable, and depressingly endemic. It is bad because it hates women, it is bad because it treats it's subject matter with an aggressive lack of care or interest, it is bad because it's imagination is as narrow and constrained as it's level design. But more than anything else, it is bad because it only wants to be Good.
Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.
From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.
In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.
In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.
The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.
In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.
Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.
It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.
Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.
Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.
Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.
From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.
In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.
In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.
The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.
In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.
Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.
It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.
Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.
Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.
2011
This review contains spoilers
Class Zero has died a thousand thousand times. They're going to die, and die, and die again. They're going to keep dying, forever. And no one will remember them, because the Crystals won't let them.
Type-0 begins, after a characteristically bombastic intro CG cutscene displaying all the visual panache and particle effects one would expect from a Squeenix production, in a decidedly much less characteristic manner, in which we see, over the course of a long cutscene, a character slowly bleed out and die waiting for the "heroes", Class Zero, who will not arrive in time to save him, watching as he goes through periods of calm, resignation, acceptance, and then, most cuttingly and affecting at all, last minute panic as he spends his final moments screaming about how he doesn't want to die, before he finally, inevitably, does.
In the world of Type-0, the dead are erased from the minds of the living, an act framed as a kindness on behalf of the benevolent crystals, but in reality is only a measure to ensure the grand experiment of Orience continues in the most efficient manner possible. So, when members of Class Zero find Izana Kunagiri's body, they don't see him. They see a shape, an empty vacuous hole in the shape of a human being, everything he was and could have been having been violently stripped from him as he passed, with only Ace (who for reasons the game is largely uninterested in explaining, is one of only a few people in the world who can remember the dead) actually being able to see this for what this is: a young man, with thoughts and feelings and dreams, a loved one, taken from the world before any of those things could be fulfilled. Ace looks on at Izana, tears welling up as he strains to maintain his composure, before his companions demand he continue the mission, the social violence of this system the crystals perpetuate consuming even those who are able to sidestep its immediate effects. Not even given the space to process what this loss means for him - because his allies are literally incapable of understanding it - Ace turns away, and back into the battle...to die, and die again.
This is what it means to exist in Orience, the world of Final Fantasy Type-0. It's not simply that it is a hostile world to exist in (though, it definitely is that, as the preponderance of level 99 behemoths that can wipe your entire party effortlessly wandering even the low-level areas makes navigating it's world a constantly tense affair), but that the modes and rhythms of play constantly emphasize the ever-present threat of death, not just death, but callous, uncaring death that comes quickly, nastily, and brutishly.
When you first start Type-0, 14 party members right from the start feels like a lot. But you're going to need them, because on any given mission, most if not almost all of them will die, either at the hands of the astonishingly quick TTK given how high the Numbers are for your health, or for being summarily executed by your own side in the middle of a battle for failing to execute an optional order, or from the insta-kill Killsight mechanic that exists for both the enemy and you, or simply because you yourself sacrifice them to bring out the game's magical WMDs de jour, the Eidolons. The constancy of death in play, combined with the fact that revival items are absurdly rare and expensive, means you can't just keep throwing Phoenix Downs at your fave to keep them up and in the action. You can easily exhaust the entire game's quantity of Phoenix Downs on a single mission by doing that. So, instead, you have to roll with the punches, and soon, you learn to take part in the grim moral calculus of which party members are expendable, which ones you want to throw into the fire of almost certain death, and which ones you value enough to protect and keep for later.
It's a sickening realization to come to, to realize that Type-0 demands you play it in such a way that you hold the lives of these children in your hands and decide which life holds value to you.
It's also revelatory of who the player character of Type-0 actually is. It's not Ace, who is prominently fronted in the opening cutscene and is the go-to rep for Type-0 in crossover media, because despite that (and being my favorite character) he's not that important. It's not Machina or Rem, who are both taken out of the action in the final chapter and are best described as the Witnesses of the story rather than it's protagonists.
No, the person you are playing as is actually Arecia al-Rashia, the abusive mother of Class Zero who kidnapped, brainwashed, and made these children into weapons as part of a nebulous goal she has thus far failed to achieve 600,142,971 times, and will likely fail to achieve 600,142,971 times more.
Experiencing the playing of an RPG - the levelling, the equipping, the customization - through this frame is a confronting experience that is difficult to sit with. When you're playing Dragon Quest III, for example, there is a level of assumed abstraction, that when you de-equip a sword from one character to give to another, that there is not a godlike entity watching over the cast that makes these decisions for them, we take as given that our mechanical movements here represent an interaction between these characters. Type-0 removes this comforting abstraction, and ties the acts of JRPG mechanical play with parental abuse in a way that, once you realize what is happening here, tints even the most mundane of mechanical interactions in the game in upsetting hues.
I want to stress, because I think there's a bad, almost solipsistic tendency on behalf of players to associate criticism and condemnation of a player character with criticism and condemnation of the player themself, that I do not think Type-0 thinks that RPG mechanics are abusive. Rather, I think this lens of abuse exists because of what Type-0 is actually interested in, which is the deeply cruel and dehumanizing effect of the way we raise young people in schools.
It's easy to assume that the school setting of Type-0 is barely meant to be thought about, used as shorthand for a relatable shared social space in the way that many anime and anime-adjacent media do, and I think that is exactly what we are supposed to think at the beginning, before the unique cruelties of this school environment begin to properly reveal themselves.
What the Akademia of Rubrum exists to teach these kids is not the things that will actually meaningfully enrich their lives. It is not the things that will help them become happier, brighter people. They are taught how to be better killers, how to increase their stats and get better equipment to more efficiently kill others, all for the sake of the adults in charge of the school, blissfully comfortable far behind the frontlines, churning through these children in order to achieve a nebulous, undefined goal that, owing to said undefinability, can never and will never be achieved. In play, this creates a dynamic where unlike, say, Persona, socializing with others represents time that would be better spent, in the eyes of the faculty, on training missions, classes to raise stats, and other strict mechanical bonuses that will allow you to succeed in upcoming "exams" in the form of mandatory story missions.
School in Type-0 is not, as in Persona, a kind of fantastical place to live out an idyllic, largely frictionless school life. It is the infliction of a cold, brutal calculus of choosing between academic/mechanical success and developing relationships and more positive memories, a kind of calculus that you don't really have much choice but to acquiesce to, because it's not like you can challenge the school system as a school student, can you?
I'd like to use the character of Ace as my case study for this. As mentioned above, Ace is my favorite character in this game. We're introduced to him, after the dramatic entrance of Class Zero, crying over the passing of Izana Kunagiri, the boy who slowly dies in the game's opening suquence. This established that unlike his comrades, Ace can remember Izana, but it's only in flashbacks as the game goes on (flashbacks that take up valuable time the faculty would rather you use on training) that their relationship is revealed, and it only enhances the tragedy of the opening moments by making clear that the tears Ace shed over Izana's passing were the only time he was able to be fully emotionally honest with him in a way he could understand, because Ace, as a sheltered child soldier raised from birth within this system doesn't have the framework to ask Izana to hang out sometime or play Tekken with him after school or whatever. His opening up to Izana comes in the form of asking him to go on a mission with him, the same mission that will lead to his death. It's tragic, and thorny, and difficult to turn over in my head without it cutting against me. Ace in general empathizes greatly with a lot of the interactions and distances my autism created for me in school, but I don't want to center this reading on myself when I think the game is so good at reflecting the meaningful lived experience of far more people than just myself.
(Though, I do gotta say: the scene where Ace sings the opening bars of the game's theme song to try to communicate his feelings to the rest of the class because he doesn't feel like he can manage it with his own words? Broooooooooooooooooo 😭😭😭😭😭😭)
Far be it from me to speculate on the tastes of an entire nation, but if there is a reason I can point to for why Type-0 was a surprise hit in Japan when it was originally released on PSP, despite the deeply frictional and hostile nature of many of it's design decisions, I think this might be why. I do not want to suggest that anime as a medium is entirely uninterested in interrogating the violence of education because that is clearly untrue, but I do think there is a ubiquity to the school setting in anime that belies what a troubling and traumatic experience it can be for many people, myself very much included. Type-0 is far truer to experience of School as I experienced it than most any other game depicting that environment I have ever played, first and foremost by acknowledging the uniquely upsetting experience of spending years inside a system where you are taught in such a manner as to mold you into a nebulous concept rather than to meaningfully broaden your horizons.
Indeed, if you just go through the main story of Type-0 and don't take time out to talk to NPCs in the World Map or read the Rubicus lore book, you might completely miss out on certain details, and have certain late-game plot turns completely blindside you with their apparent abruptness. Even past this, certain key characters are introduced after the final cutscene and first ending, and require a second playthrough - with new scenes and plot elements - to fully grasp the significance of. This is the element of the game I most struggled with on my past abortive attempts to get into Type-0, but when I finally did break past the loop and find myself in Type-0, it was one of the elements I appreciate the most. Much like this team's next work, Final Fantasy XV, Type-0 is very intentional with the elements it presents to you and the elements it leaves out, and the elements it wants you to seek out for yourself. The game's major cutscenes are presented like wartime propaganda, and that's because they are: selectively informative newsreels that tell you what the Dominion of Rubrum wants you to know. Very rarely does a game withhold so much information so intentionally, to let you miss out on so many things if you are unwilling to seek out that information for yourself, and broaden your knowledge beyond what the Powers That Be want you to know.
The more you learn, the bleaker and more desperate the world of Orience seems, with a similar effect reading the news and histories of our own world can have. If you are familiar with the Fabula Nova Crystallis lore that Type-0 draws from you might realize what exactly is going on reasonably quickly, but even without that, the game does an excellent job of giving you information that rarely gives simple answers to simple questions. Instead, everything it tells you makes everything thornier, more complicated, less the simple "we are being invaded by fascists" premise the story fronts as. It's a kind of complexity that reaches fever pitch in time for the game's final act where Rubrum, your nation, manages to hold back a two-pronged attack by enacting - out of desperation, for whatever that is worth - what can only be described as a wartime atrocity, annihilating the Evil Army you've spent the entire game fighting against and setting the stage for a penultimate chapter wherein you are obviously - if you have been paying attention - becoming the villains, moving beyond simply reclaiming your own territory and outright conquering the entire world with your overwhelming military strength. I've not really touched on the game's RTS elements but I do want to note them here because this is another example where Type-0 takes it's mechanics to their uncomfortable conclusions: what does Painting A Map Your Colour practically mean in a world full of real, living people?
There's interesting stuff in this lore - particularly with regards to the world's relationship with Agito and Finis, and the motivations of Grand Marshal Cid Aulstyne, who initially appears to be a laughably unsympathetic fascist analogue but who eventually reveals himself to be a troubled idealist who is taking whatever methods necessary to free the people of Orience from the hell they are blissfully unaware of being trapped in (yes, I am aware that once again I have found a Problematic Char Aznable to Stan) - but the importance of it is in how it is placed, this act of you going to seek out this information on your own, to push against the boundaries of the system you are trapped in even if breaking through entirely might be impossible. When Tempus Finis comes - the final exam both for you and all humanity - you can learn all you want about why it's occurring and what it's purpose is, but no matter what, the game will still end with a final dungeon that consists almost entirely of arbitrary challenges you must follow to the letter or face death. No one in the world of Orience can escape examination, and because of the nature of that world, none can ever truly meet the standards of their deific examiners.
VERDICT: FINIS.
I love how this game ends. It's the strangest final dungeon I've ever experienced in an RPG, one that lays bear the question-answer-response loop of almost every video game remotely like this bare in a strangely upsetting and beautifully alienating way. It's oft been described that bosses and final levels should act as examinations for everything the player has been taught so far, and Type-0 literalizes that in such a charismatic way. And the glimmer of hope at the end, where you persist even after the Arbiter fails you, where you fight and die and fight and die again to finally defeat him and end the apocalypse is so beautiful...and only made more so when it is eventually snatched from you again. The true end of the game is not when you defeat the final boss, but when the party, in a position to be ressurected once again by Arecia, begs to be allowed to finally die and for the world to escape from it's cycle, to which Arecia, seemingly, acquiesces. As a beat, this didn't sit right with me, but, in the one true act of brilliance the HD port offers, I was surprised to find the game agreeing with that read, choosing instead to truly close out Type-0 on one final secret ending that reveals that, eventually, Arecia ignored the pleas of her children, changes her mind, and resets everything for one more turn of the wheel.
The world won't change by begging for it to. Because, fundamentally, the Powers That Be don't actually care. And so, Class Zero and the rest of Orience remain trapped. Forever.
Class Zero has died a thousand thousand times. They're going to die, and die, and die again. They're going to keep dying, forever. And no one will remember them.
"This makes it 600,142,972 times."
VERDICT: ZERO
In 2016, I was starting to fall out with video games a little. Increasingly, it felt like there weren't really any video games coming out that were For Me. Between a few high-profile disappointments in the form of Fire Emblem Fates, launch-era Civilization VI, and SMTIV: Apocalypse, and cases where games I did like, like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Dishonored 2, were commercial flops that killed their franchises, it felt like it just wasn't possible to make games anymore that hit me like the ones that made me fall in love with this medium in the first place. And then Final Fantasy XV came out, a game I approached with cautious optimism at best, but which absolutely blew me away, for being this deeply idiosyncratic game that did things I simply thought were impossible to do in the contemporary big-budget video game space, a game that removed it's own open world at the halfway point, when continuing to have it would be detrimental to the narrative, a game that was willing to be absolutely miserable to play for multiple chapters in order to underscore the collapsing relationships it was depicting, a game that enthralled me because it knew exactly what it wanted to do and what it wanted to be about, focusing it's entirety on that goal and leaving areas of traditional narrative or game design wisdom to languish where they weren't necessary.
I adored that game. It reignited my passion for video games, and set ablaze my fandom for Final Fantasy once again after the XIII series (at the time) left me feeling mixed, at best. But it was deeply divisive, outright loathed in many circles, and Square, for better or worse, released a series of updates and DLC content that sought to address those criticisms. Some of these additions were fine, others less so, but for someone who already loved the game exactly the way it was, it felt...strange and upsetting to watch a game I loved try to contort itself into new shapes to try to appeal to people who just weren't interested in it in the first place, and by the end of this process, with the absolutely execrable Episode Ardyn and Dawn of the Future novel that sought to effectively rewrite the story of Final Fantasy XV into a more traditional epic fantasy narrative that run roughshod over everything that made it exceptional in the first place, brought me back to the same place I was before XV, feeling that a game like this just wasn't possible to make in this environment.
Type-0 brought back those feelings, and served to solidify further that the team's decisions on XV were not the result of incompetence or a rushed development, but from genuine consideration for what would be the most effective way to tell this story. Hajime Tabata and his team at what would become Luminous Productions fucking had it, man, and it's a crying shame that Tabata left and Luminous was shifted onto a project steered into the dirt by Gary Fucking Whitta.
Type-0 is a difficult game to enjoy. It's not for nothing that it took me three or four attempts to get into it: it is frictional, off-putting, and alienating, and doesn't even have a beloved auteur's name attached like Suda51 or Yoko Taro that would give people a reason to push further in. But I've also never played a game quite like it. It's been about 3 months since I finished it and it's never quite left my head in that time. I don't think everyone is going to love this, which is why I've been a bit more laissez-faire with spoilers here (though i'm still not giving everything away) than normal, but I think if you want to love it, if this sounds like your thing...you owe it to yourself to play Type-0.
I am under no illusion that most people will not fall into that category. This game is even more alienating than launch-era FFXV, a game that to this day inspires some of the most venomous tracts I have ever heard towards any video game. And it's really not helped by the fact that the complete picture of the game is difficult to see, with the fan-translated PSP port's multiplayer features functionally inaccessible at this point, and the officially-translated HD port being, to be blunt, rubbish in many ways but also the most practically convenient way to play. Even Square has not seen fit to remember and honor Class Zero the way my heart cries out for them to be.
So, let this be my own personal epitaph for them. Not a recommendation, because I know most people won't like this game. Not an excoriation, because I still believe this game has immense worth. These are just words to mark it in one place, in one time.
History has left Final Fantasy Type-0 behind. But I remember it. And I am still here.
Type-0 begins, after a characteristically bombastic intro CG cutscene displaying all the visual panache and particle effects one would expect from a Squeenix production, in a decidedly much less characteristic manner, in which we see, over the course of a long cutscene, a character slowly bleed out and die waiting for the "heroes", Class Zero, who will not arrive in time to save him, watching as he goes through periods of calm, resignation, acceptance, and then, most cuttingly and affecting at all, last minute panic as he spends his final moments screaming about how he doesn't want to die, before he finally, inevitably, does.
In the world of Type-0, the dead are erased from the minds of the living, an act framed as a kindness on behalf of the benevolent crystals, but in reality is only a measure to ensure the grand experiment of Orience continues in the most efficient manner possible. So, when members of Class Zero find Izana Kunagiri's body, they don't see him. They see a shape, an empty vacuous hole in the shape of a human being, everything he was and could have been having been violently stripped from him as he passed, with only Ace (who for reasons the game is largely uninterested in explaining, is one of only a few people in the world who can remember the dead) actually being able to see this for what this is: a young man, with thoughts and feelings and dreams, a loved one, taken from the world before any of those things could be fulfilled. Ace looks on at Izana, tears welling up as he strains to maintain his composure, before his companions demand he continue the mission, the social violence of this system the crystals perpetuate consuming even those who are able to sidestep its immediate effects. Not even given the space to process what this loss means for him - because his allies are literally incapable of understanding it - Ace turns away, and back into the battle...to die, and die again.
This is what it means to exist in Orience, the world of Final Fantasy Type-0. It's not simply that it is a hostile world to exist in (though, it definitely is that, as the preponderance of level 99 behemoths that can wipe your entire party effortlessly wandering even the low-level areas makes navigating it's world a constantly tense affair), but that the modes and rhythms of play constantly emphasize the ever-present threat of death, not just death, but callous, uncaring death that comes quickly, nastily, and brutishly.
When you first start Type-0, 14 party members right from the start feels like a lot. But you're going to need them, because on any given mission, most if not almost all of them will die, either at the hands of the astonishingly quick TTK given how high the Numbers are for your health, or for being summarily executed by your own side in the middle of a battle for failing to execute an optional order, or from the insta-kill Killsight mechanic that exists for both the enemy and you, or simply because you yourself sacrifice them to bring out the game's magical WMDs de jour, the Eidolons. The constancy of death in play, combined with the fact that revival items are absurdly rare and expensive, means you can't just keep throwing Phoenix Downs at your fave to keep them up and in the action. You can easily exhaust the entire game's quantity of Phoenix Downs on a single mission by doing that. So, instead, you have to roll with the punches, and soon, you learn to take part in the grim moral calculus of which party members are expendable, which ones you want to throw into the fire of almost certain death, and which ones you value enough to protect and keep for later.
It's a sickening realization to come to, to realize that Type-0 demands you play it in such a way that you hold the lives of these children in your hands and decide which life holds value to you.
It's also revelatory of who the player character of Type-0 actually is. It's not Ace, who is prominently fronted in the opening cutscene and is the go-to rep for Type-0 in crossover media, because despite that (and being my favorite character) he's not that important. It's not Machina or Rem, who are both taken out of the action in the final chapter and are best described as the Witnesses of the story rather than it's protagonists.
No, the person you are playing as is actually Arecia al-Rashia, the abusive mother of Class Zero who kidnapped, brainwashed, and made these children into weapons as part of a nebulous goal she has thus far failed to achieve 600,142,971 times, and will likely fail to achieve 600,142,971 times more.
Experiencing the playing of an RPG - the levelling, the equipping, the customization - through this frame is a confronting experience that is difficult to sit with. When you're playing Dragon Quest III, for example, there is a level of assumed abstraction, that when you de-equip a sword from one character to give to another, that there is not a godlike entity watching over the cast that makes these decisions for them, we take as given that our mechanical movements here represent an interaction between these characters. Type-0 removes this comforting abstraction, and ties the acts of JRPG mechanical play with parental abuse in a way that, once you realize what is happening here, tints even the most mundane of mechanical interactions in the game in upsetting hues.
I want to stress, because I think there's a bad, almost solipsistic tendency on behalf of players to associate criticism and condemnation of a player character with criticism and condemnation of the player themself, that I do not think Type-0 thinks that RPG mechanics are abusive. Rather, I think this lens of abuse exists because of what Type-0 is actually interested in, which is the deeply cruel and dehumanizing effect of the way we raise young people in schools.
It's easy to assume that the school setting of Type-0 is barely meant to be thought about, used as shorthand for a relatable shared social space in the way that many anime and anime-adjacent media do, and I think that is exactly what we are supposed to think at the beginning, before the unique cruelties of this school environment begin to properly reveal themselves.
What the Akademia of Rubrum exists to teach these kids is not the things that will actually meaningfully enrich their lives. It is not the things that will help them become happier, brighter people. They are taught how to be better killers, how to increase their stats and get better equipment to more efficiently kill others, all for the sake of the adults in charge of the school, blissfully comfortable far behind the frontlines, churning through these children in order to achieve a nebulous, undefined goal that, owing to said undefinability, can never and will never be achieved. In play, this creates a dynamic where unlike, say, Persona, socializing with others represents time that would be better spent, in the eyes of the faculty, on training missions, classes to raise stats, and other strict mechanical bonuses that will allow you to succeed in upcoming "exams" in the form of mandatory story missions.
School in Type-0 is not, as in Persona, a kind of fantastical place to live out an idyllic, largely frictionless school life. It is the infliction of a cold, brutal calculus of choosing between academic/mechanical success and developing relationships and more positive memories, a kind of calculus that you don't really have much choice but to acquiesce to, because it's not like you can challenge the school system as a school student, can you?
I'd like to use the character of Ace as my case study for this. As mentioned above, Ace is my favorite character in this game. We're introduced to him, after the dramatic entrance of Class Zero, crying over the passing of Izana Kunagiri, the boy who slowly dies in the game's opening suquence. This established that unlike his comrades, Ace can remember Izana, but it's only in flashbacks as the game goes on (flashbacks that take up valuable time the faculty would rather you use on training) that their relationship is revealed, and it only enhances the tragedy of the opening moments by making clear that the tears Ace shed over Izana's passing were the only time he was able to be fully emotionally honest with him in a way he could understand, because Ace, as a sheltered child soldier raised from birth within this system doesn't have the framework to ask Izana to hang out sometime or play Tekken with him after school or whatever. His opening up to Izana comes in the form of asking him to go on a mission with him, the same mission that will lead to his death. It's tragic, and thorny, and difficult to turn over in my head without it cutting against me. Ace in general empathizes greatly with a lot of the interactions and distances my autism created for me in school, but I don't want to center this reading on myself when I think the game is so good at reflecting the meaningful lived experience of far more people than just myself.
(Though, I do gotta say: the scene where Ace sings the opening bars of the game's theme song to try to communicate his feelings to the rest of the class because he doesn't feel like he can manage it with his own words? Broooooooooooooooooo 😭😭😭😭😭😭)
Far be it from me to speculate on the tastes of an entire nation, but if there is a reason I can point to for why Type-0 was a surprise hit in Japan when it was originally released on PSP, despite the deeply frictional and hostile nature of many of it's design decisions, I think this might be why. I do not want to suggest that anime as a medium is entirely uninterested in interrogating the violence of education because that is clearly untrue, but I do think there is a ubiquity to the school setting in anime that belies what a troubling and traumatic experience it can be for many people, myself very much included. Type-0 is far truer to experience of School as I experienced it than most any other game depicting that environment I have ever played, first and foremost by acknowledging the uniquely upsetting experience of spending years inside a system where you are taught in such a manner as to mold you into a nebulous concept rather than to meaningfully broaden your horizons.
Indeed, if you just go through the main story of Type-0 and don't take time out to talk to NPCs in the World Map or read the Rubicus lore book, you might completely miss out on certain details, and have certain late-game plot turns completely blindside you with their apparent abruptness. Even past this, certain key characters are introduced after the final cutscene and first ending, and require a second playthrough - with new scenes and plot elements - to fully grasp the significance of. This is the element of the game I most struggled with on my past abortive attempts to get into Type-0, but when I finally did break past the loop and find myself in Type-0, it was one of the elements I appreciate the most. Much like this team's next work, Final Fantasy XV, Type-0 is very intentional with the elements it presents to you and the elements it leaves out, and the elements it wants you to seek out for yourself. The game's major cutscenes are presented like wartime propaganda, and that's because they are: selectively informative newsreels that tell you what the Dominion of Rubrum wants you to know. Very rarely does a game withhold so much information so intentionally, to let you miss out on so many things if you are unwilling to seek out that information for yourself, and broaden your knowledge beyond what the Powers That Be want you to know.
The more you learn, the bleaker and more desperate the world of Orience seems, with a similar effect reading the news and histories of our own world can have. If you are familiar with the Fabula Nova Crystallis lore that Type-0 draws from you might realize what exactly is going on reasonably quickly, but even without that, the game does an excellent job of giving you information that rarely gives simple answers to simple questions. Instead, everything it tells you makes everything thornier, more complicated, less the simple "we are being invaded by fascists" premise the story fronts as. It's a kind of complexity that reaches fever pitch in time for the game's final act where Rubrum, your nation, manages to hold back a two-pronged attack by enacting - out of desperation, for whatever that is worth - what can only be described as a wartime atrocity, annihilating the Evil Army you've spent the entire game fighting against and setting the stage for a penultimate chapter wherein you are obviously - if you have been paying attention - becoming the villains, moving beyond simply reclaiming your own territory and outright conquering the entire world with your overwhelming military strength. I've not really touched on the game's RTS elements but I do want to note them here because this is another example where Type-0 takes it's mechanics to their uncomfortable conclusions: what does Painting A Map Your Colour practically mean in a world full of real, living people?
There's interesting stuff in this lore - particularly with regards to the world's relationship with Agito and Finis, and the motivations of Grand Marshal Cid Aulstyne, who initially appears to be a laughably unsympathetic fascist analogue but who eventually reveals himself to be a troubled idealist who is taking whatever methods necessary to free the people of Orience from the hell they are blissfully unaware of being trapped in (yes, I am aware that once again I have found a Problematic Char Aznable to Stan) - but the importance of it is in how it is placed, this act of you going to seek out this information on your own, to push against the boundaries of the system you are trapped in even if breaking through entirely might be impossible. When Tempus Finis comes - the final exam both for you and all humanity - you can learn all you want about why it's occurring and what it's purpose is, but no matter what, the game will still end with a final dungeon that consists almost entirely of arbitrary challenges you must follow to the letter or face death. No one in the world of Orience can escape examination, and because of the nature of that world, none can ever truly meet the standards of their deific examiners.
VERDICT: FINIS.
I love how this game ends. It's the strangest final dungeon I've ever experienced in an RPG, one that lays bear the question-answer-response loop of almost every video game remotely like this bare in a strangely upsetting and beautifully alienating way. It's oft been described that bosses and final levels should act as examinations for everything the player has been taught so far, and Type-0 literalizes that in such a charismatic way. And the glimmer of hope at the end, where you persist even after the Arbiter fails you, where you fight and die and fight and die again to finally defeat him and end the apocalypse is so beautiful...and only made more so when it is eventually snatched from you again. The true end of the game is not when you defeat the final boss, but when the party, in a position to be ressurected once again by Arecia, begs to be allowed to finally die and for the world to escape from it's cycle, to which Arecia, seemingly, acquiesces. As a beat, this didn't sit right with me, but, in the one true act of brilliance the HD port offers, I was surprised to find the game agreeing with that read, choosing instead to truly close out Type-0 on one final secret ending that reveals that, eventually, Arecia ignored the pleas of her children, changes her mind, and resets everything for one more turn of the wheel.
The world won't change by begging for it to. Because, fundamentally, the Powers That Be don't actually care. And so, Class Zero and the rest of Orience remain trapped. Forever.
Class Zero has died a thousand thousand times. They're going to die, and die, and die again. They're going to keep dying, forever. And no one will remember them.
"This makes it 600,142,972 times."
VERDICT: ZERO
In 2016, I was starting to fall out with video games a little. Increasingly, it felt like there weren't really any video games coming out that were For Me. Between a few high-profile disappointments in the form of Fire Emblem Fates, launch-era Civilization VI, and SMTIV: Apocalypse, and cases where games I did like, like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Dishonored 2, were commercial flops that killed their franchises, it felt like it just wasn't possible to make games anymore that hit me like the ones that made me fall in love with this medium in the first place. And then Final Fantasy XV came out, a game I approached with cautious optimism at best, but which absolutely blew me away, for being this deeply idiosyncratic game that did things I simply thought were impossible to do in the contemporary big-budget video game space, a game that removed it's own open world at the halfway point, when continuing to have it would be detrimental to the narrative, a game that was willing to be absolutely miserable to play for multiple chapters in order to underscore the collapsing relationships it was depicting, a game that enthralled me because it knew exactly what it wanted to do and what it wanted to be about, focusing it's entirety on that goal and leaving areas of traditional narrative or game design wisdom to languish where they weren't necessary.
I adored that game. It reignited my passion for video games, and set ablaze my fandom for Final Fantasy once again after the XIII series (at the time) left me feeling mixed, at best. But it was deeply divisive, outright loathed in many circles, and Square, for better or worse, released a series of updates and DLC content that sought to address those criticisms. Some of these additions were fine, others less so, but for someone who already loved the game exactly the way it was, it felt...strange and upsetting to watch a game I loved try to contort itself into new shapes to try to appeal to people who just weren't interested in it in the first place, and by the end of this process, with the absolutely execrable Episode Ardyn and Dawn of the Future novel that sought to effectively rewrite the story of Final Fantasy XV into a more traditional epic fantasy narrative that run roughshod over everything that made it exceptional in the first place, brought me back to the same place I was before XV, feeling that a game like this just wasn't possible to make in this environment.
Type-0 brought back those feelings, and served to solidify further that the team's decisions on XV were not the result of incompetence or a rushed development, but from genuine consideration for what would be the most effective way to tell this story. Hajime Tabata and his team at what would become Luminous Productions fucking had it, man, and it's a crying shame that Tabata left and Luminous was shifted onto a project steered into the dirt by Gary Fucking Whitta.
Type-0 is a difficult game to enjoy. It's not for nothing that it took me three or four attempts to get into it: it is frictional, off-putting, and alienating, and doesn't even have a beloved auteur's name attached like Suda51 or Yoko Taro that would give people a reason to push further in. But I've also never played a game quite like it. It's been about 3 months since I finished it and it's never quite left my head in that time. I don't think everyone is going to love this, which is why I've been a bit more laissez-faire with spoilers here (though i'm still not giving everything away) than normal, but I think if you want to love it, if this sounds like your thing...you owe it to yourself to play Type-0.
I am under no illusion that most people will not fall into that category. This game is even more alienating than launch-era FFXV, a game that to this day inspires some of the most venomous tracts I have ever heard towards any video game. And it's really not helped by the fact that the complete picture of the game is difficult to see, with the fan-translated PSP port's multiplayer features functionally inaccessible at this point, and the officially-translated HD port being, to be blunt, rubbish in many ways but also the most practically convenient way to play. Even Square has not seen fit to remember and honor Class Zero the way my heart cries out for them to be.
So, let this be my own personal epitaph for them. Not a recommendation, because I know most people won't like this game. Not an excoriation, because I still believe this game has immense worth. These are just words to mark it in one place, in one time.
History has left Final Fantasy Type-0 behind. But I remember it. And I am still here.
2022
This review contains spoilers
In the closing moments of 2022, a ping on discord alerts me that the game I spent most of my Christmas break from work finishing up has been added to IGDB, just in time for me to mark it as my GOTY for 2022. It is of course, not actually that, but something about the misplaced arrogance of doing that, ironically or otherwise, really tickles me. I giggle about it to myself for the rest of a party in a far nicer house than I have scarcely been in for my entire life that puts me on edge about it the entire time I am there.
But, of course, in order to mark it as GOTY, I have to mark it as played. And the easiest way to do that is to give it a star rating, which, of course, was 5 stars, on the urging of a voice in my head telling me that if I'm not going to give the game 5 stars, who will?
In a turn that feels immensely humbling, others have in fact rate it 5 stars. Which I am grateful and mortified about, but also thankful because it lifts from me the burden of having to mark this as 5 stars.
I don't know if other people feel the same about this, but I find it extremely difficult to look at something I've made holistically. I was there for every step of the sausage being made, after all, so maybe it's just natural that I all I see are a thousand tiny pieces, a jigsaw that has no clear overall shape. What this means is that when I look at Holy Ghost Story, I can see lines, scenes, moments and beats, but the whole picture is unclear to me. I think it's a real weakness of my writing, getting lost in the weeds and losing sight of the larger whole. Which is probably why this is twice as long as I planned it to be and has some scenes that an editor probably would have cut, but which I retained because I liked the way the light caught them, irrespective of their place in the wider thing.
Unlike some of the other entries in this mini genre, which comprises some of my favorite pieces on this site, I don't know if I have anything enormously interesting or cool to say about holy ghost story. As something that was originally planned to be a short and sweet project I could cobble together for Halloween, it ending up two months late and maybe twice as long as I intended does feel like something of a failure. Truthfully, I don't know how I feel about this and it's likely that I won't for a while, and if my track record with this sort of thing is any indication I'll probably come down pretty hard against it.
But right now, all I have are the pieces, and I can still pick them up and turn them over in my hands. I know I like reading about game development and the way these things come into life, so in lieu of any actual insightful thoughts or analyses, here are just some little tidbits from the time I spent making this game.
(spoilers, obvs)
- The whole thing was inspired by a riff I had with two of my friends about ghosts whose Unfinished Businesses were incredibly mundane. The ideas I had ballooned out during a visit to the Tate Modern the next day, and then contracted in again while I tried to siphon out the actual core of the story.
- The original title, inspired by one of the pieces in the Tate I saw, was "...almost religious awe..." but ultimately I could not resist the gag of evoking The Holy Ghost. Sorry, big man.
- I wanted to avoid any explicit queer/trans themes for this. A lot of my creative and critical work exists in this space, and I kind of wanted to avoid it for this. Not because I have anything against such works - far from it - but just because I wanted to go out of my comfort zone a little, into the moderately different comfort zone that is Catholic Guilt.
- Embarrassingly, the logo/cover art was partially inspired by the HD Remaster OPs for Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, specifically the bits naming the various Gundams. I'm so sorry.
- This was originally going to be made in Visual Novel Maker, something which appealed to me because of my past work in RPGMaker. However, while RPGMaker as a toolset has it's ups and downs, I think VNM is something of a disaster, with an incredibly clunky interface that is catastrophically less intuitive than the python-based Ren'Py, which is where this ended up.
- Following on from above, the entire script was written in a word document before Ren'Py was opened even once. I future, I think I will play around much more with visuals and music as I am writing rather than writing everything and then making visuals and sounds around that, but I do think inputting the final script manually was good, because it allowed me to do some final last-minute editing and drafting that ended up with some of my favorite lines.
- Originally, the POV character, or "genius", was a much more passive person, who spoke in the present tense, and had almost no internal monologue or interiority. However, through successive drafts, more of a character started to creep in as I started to move the didactic qualities of the script into Genius as a character. I have mixed feelings about how Siobhan is presented but I do feel good about where Genius ended up, this kind of unpleasant, unempathetic, well-meaning but patronizing figure. Despite them being almost completely absent in the original outline, I think the story ended up being as much about them as it did about Siobhan, which I do like, even if it did take perhaps too many drafts to reach that point.
- Accordingly, the scene with Genius by themselves was a late addition that didn't get as much redrafting as the rest of it. I think it's better with than without, but I also side-eye it even more than I do the rest of it.
- My actual favorite thing in the game is Siobhan's name turning pink during the "flashback".
- Do you know how difficult it is to find public domain visual novel schoolgirl sprites that aren't very horny? Let me tell you: pretty fucking difficult!!
- ? speaking in a more formal tone was something inspired by Squigglydot's Post-Disclosure Devil's Night, and it's use of purple prose, to suggest my interpretation that ? was in some way separate from Genius without saying it outright.
- Let me tell you - it has been pretty nerve-wracking working on this while an emerging trend of people in my activity feed crept up of taking random itch.io games, writing a scathing dunk of them, and then others who, clearly, would not have liked said game, downloading and playing it anyway to get their own hilarious dunk in. Which is not to say that I don't think there aren't going to be people who find this to be nails on a chalkboard and will write a funny dunk review of this, but I do think the one thing that would make me regret having made this would be if it became something people crowded around to get the boot in.
- Kevin MacLeod is such a real one dude
- If I had to sum up the lessons I learned from this project, I would say that researching and testing out software with miniscule practice runs is essential even for a "small" project you undertake to "learn the basics" of software, and also that I think I need to divorce myself entirely from the prospect of "true" "solo" development. Anxiety prevented me from reaching out to talented artists and musicians I know about commissioning stuff that would have helped give the game an actual visual identity to call it's own, and I don't want that to happen next time. When I write that Siobhan scowled and yelled, I wish I could have properly conveyed how I wanted that to look.
I hope this has been interesting at all! My nerves and anxiousness around this title have yet to dissipate, so I likely won't be reading anything about it for at least a few days, but knowing that people took the time to check this out means more than I can say, both for the people who enjoyed it and the people it didn't. I'm really looking forward to reading people's thoughts once I feel able to do so without my nerves exploding at first brush.
Hopefully I'll see you again sometime in 2023, hopefully with a less played-out theme!
But, of course, in order to mark it as GOTY, I have to mark it as played. And the easiest way to do that is to give it a star rating, which, of course, was 5 stars, on the urging of a voice in my head telling me that if I'm not going to give the game 5 stars, who will?
In a turn that feels immensely humbling, others have in fact rate it 5 stars. Which I am grateful and mortified about, but also thankful because it lifts from me the burden of having to mark this as 5 stars.
I don't know if other people feel the same about this, but I find it extremely difficult to look at something I've made holistically. I was there for every step of the sausage being made, after all, so maybe it's just natural that I all I see are a thousand tiny pieces, a jigsaw that has no clear overall shape. What this means is that when I look at Holy Ghost Story, I can see lines, scenes, moments and beats, but the whole picture is unclear to me. I think it's a real weakness of my writing, getting lost in the weeds and losing sight of the larger whole. Which is probably why this is twice as long as I planned it to be and has some scenes that an editor probably would have cut, but which I retained because I liked the way the light caught them, irrespective of their place in the wider thing.
Unlike some of the other entries in this mini genre, which comprises some of my favorite pieces on this site, I don't know if I have anything enormously interesting or cool to say about holy ghost story. As something that was originally planned to be a short and sweet project I could cobble together for Halloween, it ending up two months late and maybe twice as long as I intended does feel like something of a failure. Truthfully, I don't know how I feel about this and it's likely that I won't for a while, and if my track record with this sort of thing is any indication I'll probably come down pretty hard against it.
But right now, all I have are the pieces, and I can still pick them up and turn them over in my hands. I know I like reading about game development and the way these things come into life, so in lieu of any actual insightful thoughts or analyses, here are just some little tidbits from the time I spent making this game.
(spoilers, obvs)
- The whole thing was inspired by a riff I had with two of my friends about ghosts whose Unfinished Businesses were incredibly mundane. The ideas I had ballooned out during a visit to the Tate Modern the next day, and then contracted in again while I tried to siphon out the actual core of the story.
- The original title, inspired by one of the pieces in the Tate I saw, was "...almost religious awe..." but ultimately I could not resist the gag of evoking The Holy Ghost. Sorry, big man.
- I wanted to avoid any explicit queer/trans themes for this. A lot of my creative and critical work exists in this space, and I kind of wanted to avoid it for this. Not because I have anything against such works - far from it - but just because I wanted to go out of my comfort zone a little, into the moderately different comfort zone that is Catholic Guilt.
- Embarrassingly, the logo/cover art was partially inspired by the HD Remaster OPs for Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, specifically the bits naming the various Gundams. I'm so sorry.
- This was originally going to be made in Visual Novel Maker, something which appealed to me because of my past work in RPGMaker. However, while RPGMaker as a toolset has it's ups and downs, I think VNM is something of a disaster, with an incredibly clunky interface that is catastrophically less intuitive than the python-based Ren'Py, which is where this ended up.
- Following on from above, the entire script was written in a word document before Ren'Py was opened even once. I future, I think I will play around much more with visuals and music as I am writing rather than writing everything and then making visuals and sounds around that, but I do think inputting the final script manually was good, because it allowed me to do some final last-minute editing and drafting that ended up with some of my favorite lines.
- Originally, the POV character, or "genius", was a much more passive person, who spoke in the present tense, and had almost no internal monologue or interiority. However, through successive drafts, more of a character started to creep in as I started to move the didactic qualities of the script into Genius as a character. I have mixed feelings about how Siobhan is presented but I do feel good about where Genius ended up, this kind of unpleasant, unempathetic, well-meaning but patronizing figure. Despite them being almost completely absent in the original outline, I think the story ended up being as much about them as it did about Siobhan, which I do like, even if it did take perhaps too many drafts to reach that point.
- Accordingly, the scene with Genius by themselves was a late addition that didn't get as much redrafting as the rest of it. I think it's better with than without, but I also side-eye it even more than I do the rest of it.
- My actual favorite thing in the game is Siobhan's name turning pink during the "flashback".
- Do you know how difficult it is to find public domain visual novel schoolgirl sprites that aren't very horny? Let me tell you: pretty fucking difficult!!
- ? speaking in a more formal tone was something inspired by Squigglydot's Post-Disclosure Devil's Night, and it's use of purple prose, to suggest my interpretation that ? was in some way separate from Genius without saying it outright.
- Let me tell you - it has been pretty nerve-wracking working on this while an emerging trend of people in my activity feed crept up of taking random itch.io games, writing a scathing dunk of them, and then others who, clearly, would not have liked said game, downloading and playing it anyway to get their own hilarious dunk in. Which is not to say that I don't think there aren't going to be people who find this to be nails on a chalkboard and will write a funny dunk review of this, but I do think the one thing that would make me regret having made this would be if it became something people crowded around to get the boot in.
- Kevin MacLeod is such a real one dude
- If I had to sum up the lessons I learned from this project, I would say that researching and testing out software with miniscule practice runs is essential even for a "small" project you undertake to "learn the basics" of software, and also that I think I need to divorce myself entirely from the prospect of "true" "solo" development. Anxiety prevented me from reaching out to talented artists and musicians I know about commissioning stuff that would have helped give the game an actual visual identity to call it's own, and I don't want that to happen next time. When I write that Siobhan scowled and yelled, I wish I could have properly conveyed how I wanted that to look.
I hope this has been interesting at all! My nerves and anxiousness around this title have yet to dissipate, so I likely won't be reading anything about it for at least a few days, but knowing that people took the time to check this out means more than I can say, both for the people who enjoyed it and the people it didn't. I'm really looking forward to reading people's thoughts once I feel able to do so without my nerves exploding at first brush.
Hopefully I'll see you again sometime in 2023, hopefully with a less played-out theme!
2022
got to the 2nd island before i decided to pack it in. delighted that this is resonating for so many people but feel pretty confident in saying that i sadly won't be joining you. everything that i enjoy about sonic is absent here, individual ingredients of sonic play scattered haphazardly through an almost disarmingly ugly default unreal engine map, without context or pace or anything to give them life, a series of endlessly repeated chores that offer various flavors of coins that you feed into various flavors of vending machine that dispense cutscenes that, while a step above the standard of the past few games are still lightyears behind the heights of SA2 and Shadow. ian flynn evidently has an earnest fannish enthusiasm for these characters, which is refreshing, but from what i saw of the story (which is not much in fairness) his script very much struggles to keep it's head above water in terms of actual entertainment.
i feel this way not out of mean-spirited hate for sonic and his fandom, but out of love. i'm not the biggest sonic fan in the world but i do genuinely adore the series in the moments i fully resonate with it, and spent a big portion of my last youtube video waxing lyrical about one of the most derided sonic games. that's why the closing of my time on the first island, of following a map marker and feeding coins into amy rose so she could dispense another anonymous cutscene, over and over again, until it felt less like rolling around at the speed of sound and more like clocking into work, felt so genuinely heartbreaking. the sonic i love, his energy, his attitude, his world...none of that is here. all that remains is a hollow facsimile, dispensing flavorless sonic-brand protein paste. playing this genuinely made me feel sad. there's a moment, climbing the big floating tower on the first island, that the game actually felt like a sonic game, chaining together homing attacks and rail grinds and keeping momentum and speed against rapid challenges...and it was all underscored by the same completely utilitarian sad piano track that perpetually haunts the experience. if this was A Level in a sonic game, there would be one of the franchise's signature sick tunes punctuating my ascent, but the open world has taken even this from me...what are we doing here, when we lose even The Tunes to the open world zeitgeist? why should i keep playing when the only moments with any life are those that briefly come close to recapturing the normal experience of playing a level in the adventure-era games? why don't I just boot up an old SA2 level?
i'm just bummed. i really wanted to like this, but it honestly feels like a companion piece in desperation to the last game I reviewed, a final plea to the zeitgeist that the blue blur can still keep up, one that by most accounts is a success, but one that, for me, discards everything i find loveable about the series and replaces it with a frankenstein quilt of contemporary influences that never work together, one that will almost certainly define the direction of the franchise going forward. ultimately, detchibe is right: I love sonic for being new, bold, and weird. and this game is none of those things. it's stale, safe, and depressingly in line with every other game latching onto The Open World as if it is a universal panacea for franchise stagnation.
i should play spark the electric jester.
i feel this way not out of mean-spirited hate for sonic and his fandom, but out of love. i'm not the biggest sonic fan in the world but i do genuinely adore the series in the moments i fully resonate with it, and spent a big portion of my last youtube video waxing lyrical about one of the most derided sonic games. that's why the closing of my time on the first island, of following a map marker and feeding coins into amy rose so she could dispense another anonymous cutscene, over and over again, until it felt less like rolling around at the speed of sound and more like clocking into work, felt so genuinely heartbreaking. the sonic i love, his energy, his attitude, his world...none of that is here. all that remains is a hollow facsimile, dispensing flavorless sonic-brand protein paste. playing this genuinely made me feel sad. there's a moment, climbing the big floating tower on the first island, that the game actually felt like a sonic game, chaining together homing attacks and rail grinds and keeping momentum and speed against rapid challenges...and it was all underscored by the same completely utilitarian sad piano track that perpetually haunts the experience. if this was A Level in a sonic game, there would be one of the franchise's signature sick tunes punctuating my ascent, but the open world has taken even this from me...what are we doing here, when we lose even The Tunes to the open world zeitgeist? why should i keep playing when the only moments with any life are those that briefly come close to recapturing the normal experience of playing a level in the adventure-era games? why don't I just boot up an old SA2 level?
i'm just bummed. i really wanted to like this, but it honestly feels like a companion piece in desperation to the last game I reviewed, a final plea to the zeitgeist that the blue blur can still keep up, one that by most accounts is a success, but one that, for me, discards everything i find loveable about the series and replaces it with a frankenstein quilt of contemporary influences that never work together, one that will almost certainly define the direction of the franchise going forward. ultimately, detchibe is right: I love sonic for being new, bold, and weird. and this game is none of those things. it's stale, safe, and depressingly in line with every other game latching onto The Open World as if it is a universal panacea for franchise stagnation.
i should play spark the electric jester.
some delightfully goopy visuals and sets aside, i am honestly stunned by how completely this failed to work for me. i am by no means one of the resi 6 faithful but i found myself constantly wishing i was playing that while trudging my way through this turgid exercise in insecurity. this to me far more aptly demonstrates the air of extreme desperation many people accused resi 6 of, a supremely unconfident attempt to play catchup to an entire history of the horror zeitgeist. texas chainsaw massacre, evil dead, the shining, the ring, blair witch, the hills have eyes, escape rooms, even america's most haunted and ghostwatch...it's all been thrown in and blended together until all that remains is a tasteless textureless black sludge.
the found footage angle is one i found particularly shockingly poor, as someone who counts the blair witch project a personal favorite, and who jumped back into resi 7 because of letshugbro's reflections on this point. aside from the reality show pastiche at the start (easily the highlight of the game for me) there is absolutely zero consideration at any point given to the camera or it's presence or physicality: we simply plainly see through the eyes of the character with a generic vhs filter put over it. it's brazenly pillaging the most basic imagery signifiers of this form possible without a single iota of consideration for the intent or form, purely cynical exploitation in the meanest sense of the word, a reference to it's influences as shallow as a MCU quip.
this is the entire game, a rickety haunted house built on the thinnest veneer imaginable, where every element is never deeper than the skin. the stiff and robotic movements of the bakers, with their glitchy animations, clinically transactional relationship with the player, and scripted sequences based almost entirely on simply waiting around running in circles for the switch to flip in their head that makes them do something that lets you progress, annihilates any sense of organic living atmosphere the game strains to affect, revealing these walking pathfinding algorithms for what they really are. the overtures towards being a return to classic resident evil is similarly merely an illusion that falls apart under moderately close inspection: the inventory management and shared stash is here but the considered map and encounter design that necessitates careful planning and macro-tension across the experience is wholly absent, a build of resources towards a payoff that never arrives, a series of engagements against a single enemy type that never meaningfully intimidates or frightens. a fractured facsimile of classic resident evil is here, but none of the effects it produced is, and what remains is a tedious series of empty frictionless jogs between item transactions to unlock the next area of this vacuous escape room.
if all this wasn't enough, biohazard might honestly be in contention for the narrative low point of the series as i have experienced it. at least resident evil 5 has wesker. the game sure mentions the word "family" a lot but anything it might have to say about that is rendered so completely incoherent by this dangerous combination of shockingly underwritten narrative and tedious "the writer has just had a bad breakup" misogynistic energy that it can scarcely be believed. i was wondering whether or not this was a 1-star or 2-star affair but learning that not being unflinchingly loyal to your cartoonishly evil wife (whose evil is basically never so much as remarked upon by a game that instead chooses to heap infinite mean-spirited scorn upon a child turned by her and her compatriots into a bioweapon) gives you an unexpected Wrong Ending an hour after you make that one choice is what made me decide on the score i did. i am by no means going to defend the travails of prior entries like resident evil 5, but at least that game has been deservedly dragged through the mud for it's perspective. the fact that, five years on, the nightmarishly terrible gender politics of this title have gone almost completely unremarked upon speaks volumes to the degree to which mainstream critics in this medium are completely willing to turn the blinkers on for anything that affects even the thinnest veneer of Western Prestige.
like i say, the word of the day is desperate. frantically pillaging from every horror movie it can find without any care for intent or meaning or context, desperately floundering for relevancy in a world that rejected the apex of what it was pushing towards post resi 4. and yet, ironically, despite my total failure to invest in it, resident evil 7 can only be called a success in terms of reinvigorating the series and giving it a new direction: theme park horror, a series of shallow pastiches, a linear sequence of homage, that has laid the groundwork for the tremendous critical and financial success of resident evil village. and for those who are loving this direction i say, go with god, but there is no way in hell i am getting on board a rollercoaster with foundations as completely rotten as this.
the found footage angle is one i found particularly shockingly poor, as someone who counts the blair witch project a personal favorite, and who jumped back into resi 7 because of letshugbro's reflections on this point. aside from the reality show pastiche at the start (easily the highlight of the game for me) there is absolutely zero consideration at any point given to the camera or it's presence or physicality: we simply plainly see through the eyes of the character with a generic vhs filter put over it. it's brazenly pillaging the most basic imagery signifiers of this form possible without a single iota of consideration for the intent or form, purely cynical exploitation in the meanest sense of the word, a reference to it's influences as shallow as a MCU quip.
this is the entire game, a rickety haunted house built on the thinnest veneer imaginable, where every element is never deeper than the skin. the stiff and robotic movements of the bakers, with their glitchy animations, clinically transactional relationship with the player, and scripted sequences based almost entirely on simply waiting around running in circles for the switch to flip in their head that makes them do something that lets you progress, annihilates any sense of organic living atmosphere the game strains to affect, revealing these walking pathfinding algorithms for what they really are. the overtures towards being a return to classic resident evil is similarly merely an illusion that falls apart under moderately close inspection: the inventory management and shared stash is here but the considered map and encounter design that necessitates careful planning and macro-tension across the experience is wholly absent, a build of resources towards a payoff that never arrives, a series of engagements against a single enemy type that never meaningfully intimidates or frightens. a fractured facsimile of classic resident evil is here, but none of the effects it produced is, and what remains is a tedious series of empty frictionless jogs between item transactions to unlock the next area of this vacuous escape room.
if all this wasn't enough, biohazard might honestly be in contention for the narrative low point of the series as i have experienced it. at least resident evil 5 has wesker. the game sure mentions the word "family" a lot but anything it might have to say about that is rendered so completely incoherent by this dangerous combination of shockingly underwritten narrative and tedious "the writer has just had a bad breakup" misogynistic energy that it can scarcely be believed. i was wondering whether or not this was a 1-star or 2-star affair but learning that not being unflinchingly loyal to your cartoonishly evil wife (whose evil is basically never so much as remarked upon by a game that instead chooses to heap infinite mean-spirited scorn upon a child turned by her and her compatriots into a bioweapon) gives you an unexpected Wrong Ending an hour after you make that one choice is what made me decide on the score i did. i am by no means going to defend the travails of prior entries like resident evil 5, but at least that game has been deservedly dragged through the mud for it's perspective. the fact that, five years on, the nightmarishly terrible gender politics of this title have gone almost completely unremarked upon speaks volumes to the degree to which mainstream critics in this medium are completely willing to turn the blinkers on for anything that affects even the thinnest veneer of Western Prestige.
like i say, the word of the day is desperate. frantically pillaging from every horror movie it can find without any care for intent or meaning or context, desperately floundering for relevancy in a world that rejected the apex of what it was pushing towards post resi 4. and yet, ironically, despite my total failure to invest in it, resident evil 7 can only be called a success in terms of reinvigorating the series and giving it a new direction: theme park horror, a series of shallow pastiches, a linear sequence of homage, that has laid the groundwork for the tremendous critical and financial success of resident evil village. and for those who are loving this direction i say, go with god, but there is no way in hell i am getting on board a rollercoaster with foundations as completely rotten as this.
an entrancing moonlight dance between post-modern naturalism and mushy sentimental romanticism, this is unexpectedly great! for a free-to-play game with very modestly priced DLC that more than doubles the game's length, the depth and quality of writing and interaction here is seriously impressive; on multiple occasions i was genuinely struck by the little things the game picked up on and developed in interesting ways for both the player character and cove. when a character in step 3 commented on how i normally behaved one way but shifted that behavior in certain contexts, or how i would have the pc express outward disinterest in formal engagements but would have them throw themselves into them when they were presented, i was surprised and suddenly introspective in a way that felt extremely complicatedly real in a way i've scarcely seen from a game like this.
it's also a bit more thorny and dramatic than initial impressions might seem: while the game maintains a positive tone (in particular the adults around you are always supportive of whatever developing gender or sexual identity your character might have in a way that is nice but also feels like the part of the game most in tune with the wholesomecore aesthetic it sometimes toys with) and it's never going to spring something truly shocking or upsetting on this pleasant boat ride, you can choose to steer various scenes into rougher waters, if you so desire. some of my favorite scenes were a result of me choosing to do this, playing into the image i had built up of the player character being insecure and socially awkward in often kind of mean and selfish ways.
it's for this willingness to get real and dive into the friction it's scenarios present that the childhood segment ended up as the highlight: overall Our Life is a game about maturity and how people change, and starting off with a bunch of kids who are in turns deeply immature in very real ways and honestly bratty unpleasant is maybe the most unique and singularly well-realized part of the game. the rest of it is good too, with the teenager segment sagging a little bit maybe compared to the others, but for reasons i've talked about elsewhere I think it's the best part of the game and is instrumental to what makes it work. later scenes and conversations only work as well as they do because of the important groundwork laid down earlier, building to quiet, naturalistic crescendos of personal reflection and emotional development. the developing physical intimacy between the player character and cove on the romance route is something i found particularly powerful, as it's one of the few areas where the game puts it's foot down and had my character be realistically too emotionally immature to really get it, and when the two do eventually find a place that works for them, it really got me! our life understands i think that total comfort is ultimately suffocating: to truly appreciate how warm it is under the covers, you have to spend time away from them.
it's not going to be for everyone: i find myself wishing it asserted itself to the player a little more than it did: being able to manually customize cove's personality and appearance somewhat between steps feels like a step too far in player agency, and i'm glad that you can just choose to ignore that because it doesn't feel like the right way to engage with the game. in general, the game isn't particularly interested in challenging the player, which is fine, but it does mean that i can see it totally washing over some.
for me though, it was a surprising delight. there's a sequel in the works that seems to be aiming for less of a specifically romantic frame with more than one central character of interaction, and that has me seriously excited. cove is a really well-rounded character but i was surprisingly enamored by the entire cast, and a game that felt more able to explore that wider cast might have landed even better. very excited to see what comes next from this team!
it's also a bit more thorny and dramatic than initial impressions might seem: while the game maintains a positive tone (in particular the adults around you are always supportive of whatever developing gender or sexual identity your character might have in a way that is nice but also feels like the part of the game most in tune with the wholesomecore aesthetic it sometimes toys with) and it's never going to spring something truly shocking or upsetting on this pleasant boat ride, you can choose to steer various scenes into rougher waters, if you so desire. some of my favorite scenes were a result of me choosing to do this, playing into the image i had built up of the player character being insecure and socially awkward in often kind of mean and selfish ways.
it's for this willingness to get real and dive into the friction it's scenarios present that the childhood segment ended up as the highlight: overall Our Life is a game about maturity and how people change, and starting off with a bunch of kids who are in turns deeply immature in very real ways and honestly bratty unpleasant is maybe the most unique and singularly well-realized part of the game. the rest of it is good too, with the teenager segment sagging a little bit maybe compared to the others, but for reasons i've talked about elsewhere I think it's the best part of the game and is instrumental to what makes it work. later scenes and conversations only work as well as they do because of the important groundwork laid down earlier, building to quiet, naturalistic crescendos of personal reflection and emotional development. the developing physical intimacy between the player character and cove on the romance route is something i found particularly powerful, as it's one of the few areas where the game puts it's foot down and had my character be realistically too emotionally immature to really get it, and when the two do eventually find a place that works for them, it really got me! our life understands i think that total comfort is ultimately suffocating: to truly appreciate how warm it is under the covers, you have to spend time away from them.
it's not going to be for everyone: i find myself wishing it asserted itself to the player a little more than it did: being able to manually customize cove's personality and appearance somewhat between steps feels like a step too far in player agency, and i'm glad that you can just choose to ignore that because it doesn't feel like the right way to engage with the game. in general, the game isn't particularly interested in challenging the player, which is fine, but it does mean that i can see it totally washing over some.
for me though, it was a surprising delight. there's a sequel in the works that seems to be aiming for less of a specifically romantic frame with more than one central character of interaction, and that has me seriously excited. cove is a really well-rounded character but i was surprisingly enamored by the entire cast, and a game that felt more able to explore that wider cast might have landed even better. very excited to see what comes next from this team!
This review contains spoilers
Finally, after all these years, all this waiting...a sequel to Metal Gear Solid 4.
Less of an elegant melding of the design philosophies of Xenoblade 1 and 2 and more a Burnout-Esque car crash of systems, careening discordant mechanics at each other again and again, piling mechanic upon mechanic upon mechanic, leaving each one shattered by impact, until finally, just when it would be funniest to...another system comes screaming in and collides with the pile-up. On paper, Xenoblade 3 seems like it might really be the best of both worlds, but paper is famously two-dimensional. Practice reveals that Xenoblade 3's complete incoherence, its inability to make any single element of its design work fully with any other results in a game that was, for me, actively unpleasant and frustrating to play through.
So many things about Xenoblade 3 reward you with experience points, be they sidequests, chain attacks, or exploration, and certainly the most fun I had in Xenoblade 3 was the initial thrill of abusing the chain attack to get 1000% extra EXP and go up like 4 levels at once. But because the ability to level down to keep apace with the level curve of the main quest is bafflingly locked behind New Game+, and because fighting enemies below your level substantially slows down the unlocking of your Jobs, which the game encourages you to switch near constantly but also encourages you to remain on a single job so that others can use it too, what gaining that EXP practically means is a short burst of endorphins at seeing Number Go Up in exchange for an hour or two of staid misery as your progression grinds to a halt and you languish in a party composition you aren't enjoying so that you can unlock one you do like later. A game where you are punished for progression, and punished for not progressing by potentially missing out on the first game in the trilogy where there is more than a handful of sidequests with actual stories and meaningful gameplay unlocks in them. Xenoblade 3 represents the point where the memetic maximalism of the series, something I have always enjoyed about it, finally buckles and collapses under it's own weight, the cumulative effect of all this is being that you are left with a game built on systems of rewards that actively work against things the rest of it is doing, that make the game frustrating and unpleasant to play, the RPG design equivalent of being pulled in 4 separate directions by each of your limbs.
The story produces a similar effect. While the pretty great core cast provides a solid foundation for the game, thematically or stylistically there's not a single theme or idea that Xenoblade 3 brings up that it will not at some point contradict or muddy, not a single thing it ever fully commits to. Sometimes this is borderline parody, like the scene where the party rages with righteous fury at members of Mobius for having the temerity to treat killing people as a game, only to then in the very next screen meet a hero character who treats killing people as a game that every single character is completely on board with except for Eunie, who is chided for the crime of consistency and is asked to undergo a sidequest character arc in order to stop committing it. It often has the feel of a first draft, especially in how characters significant to the histories of our crew are introduced in flashback seconds before they reappear in the present to have a dramatic and tearful finale. Down to the very basics, the broad theme that comprises so much of the story and the gameplay, of two disparate peoples doing good by coming together, is shattered by an ending that sees their separation as a tragic necessity. By any conventional standards of narrative or mechanical coherence, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is an unmitigated disaster.
This isn't a unique failing of this game, however. Some of this is not unique to Xenoblade 3, but rather represents a degree of exhaustion I have with elements of Xenoblade that have remained unchanging. Xenoblade has always taken influence from MMORPGs, but it's influences have never really extended beyond the experience of the player character. Playing through raid or even dungeon bosses in an MMO, with their own discrete mechanics and designs that throw wrenches into your rotations you must react to, alongside Xenoblade 3 thoroughly demonstrates that if Xenoblade is a single-player MMO, it is a single-player MMO where every single enemy is a mob, where every single fight plays out almost the exact same way. Whether you are fighting a lowly bunnit or the God of Genesis, you're going to be just trying to execute your rotation all the same. And the rotations themselves are incredibly simple, the actual challenge is navigating around the uniformly terrible AI of your squadmates. The chain attack has always felt like a concession to this, and never more so than here, where at almost any time the + button lets you opt into a mode of play that tosses out basically the entire rest of the battle system to play a minigame that also happens to be a completely dominant strategy that is more powerful than anything else in the game, at the cost of being incredibly drawn-out and boring. Similarly, the world design, which is basically the same as the prior games but much wider, exposes just how uninteresting these spaces are to explore when the visuals and atmosphere aren't doing the heavy lifting. But Aionios is a particularly bland and staid world, with precious little interesting visual scenery and barely buoyed by a soundtrack that, Mobius themes aside, I found almost totally unmemorable. Both in the things it takes away from prior games that may have distracted from it, and the things it does itself, Xenoblade 3 does an admirable job at demonstrating the rot at the core of this entire series, the flaws and failings that have always been there, brought into the light more completely for the first time.
And it almost works. It genuinely, sincerely, almost works.
The world of Xenoblade 3 is a literal mash-up of the worlds of Xenoblade 1 and 2, a staid, in-between world maintained in eternal stasis and backward-looking by a group of (awfully-dressed) manchildren who treat all of this as consequence-less entertainment for themselves, who hang out in a theater watching clips from the world outside as if they are little more than episodes of a weekly seasonal anime. This lack of coherence, the way the writing never takes more than a step without stumbling, the way the ungodly chimera of systems and mechanics makes simply existing in Aionios feel genuinely stressful for me, against all odds does manage to feel resonant with the parts of the story that are about how existing in this singular moment is awful, how we need to forcefully draw a line under all this and move on. When characters talk about how much they hate this world, I sincerely agree with them. I hate it because the time I have spent here, because I have hiked across its vast empty wastes, seeing off dead bodies in a spiritual ritual reduced to a Crackdown Orb, because I have fought the battles of this endless war between Keves and Agnus and found them to be unpleasant and unsatisfying, because I have found the carrots of progression it offers to be hollow and tasteless. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 earnestly and sincerely represents a formal boldness that I genuinely did not think Monolith Soft was capable of, a willingness to produce a game where the act of playing feels terrible in order to underscore its point about how the world it presents must be ended. Even if it's lack of materialism and eagerness to abstract it's themes means it's never going to hit me like games that name their enemy (I've seen people talk about XB3 as an anti-capitalist game and while I can see how it's talk about destroying the Endless Now would be resonant with feelings like that, I'd like to direct your attention towards the early scene where a nopon explains the Free Market to the party and they all go "that's so poggers" and also the unbridled Shinzo Abe-ness of certain scenes, you know the ones) it nonetheless represents Xenoblade going further and reaching higher than, frankly, I ever thought it capable of. When a late-game boss starting randomly spouting contextless lines from Xenogears' theme song, I knew that some part of this game knew what was up.
I wish the rest of it did.
Perhaps Xenoblade 3 would be dishonest with itself if it did not also muddy and fumble the one part of it tying all the disparate strands together, but by indulging in earnest and straightforward nostalgia to an almost comical extent. One of the earliest things that intrigued me about Xenoblade 3 was how each of the two nations is ruled by a figurehead representation of a prominent waifu character from a prior game, where the uncritical worship of these characters is manufactured and exploited in order to maintain the endless war machine. It was cutting, it was incisive, and seemed self-aware, however briefly, of just how wretched the fandoms of these games are. Of course, it couldn't last. By the end, these figureheads are replaced with the Real Versions of these characters, who actually are uncritically good and brilliant and worthy of worship, whose immense power is absolutely necessary to destroy "The Endless Now", and also my willingness to find something that means anything in this mess. The one thing you absolutely cannot do when making a story about clinging to the past being wrong and bad is to parade around that same past as if it's the second coming, to indulge so completely in uncritical fanservice that buries anything interesting beneath tuneless self-indulgence that sounds like a thousand teenage boys yelling "BRO PEAK FICTION". If Xenoblade 3 isn't willing to commit to what it's doing, why should I? Why did I spend 100 hours of my life that I will never get back on a game that's just going to throw away everything interesting it's doing a the final hurdle? What was the point of any of this?
The angry tone of the prior passage is not how I feel now, given time to relax and reflect on the parts of the game that do genuinely work for me, like the main party (Eunie and Taion prove that Monolith Soft is in fact capable of writing a good romance, they have thus far simply chosen not to) and, of course, the parts that Really Don't Work, which are the things that worked most of all. But I'm not really able to get over that the one thing I found was truly interesting and exceptional about this game was something it just couldn't resist the allure of Servicing Fans enough to bring home. With Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Monolith Soft set out to prove that Xenoblade cannot continue the way it is, and the worst part is that they succeeded...just in a way that convinced me that the problem might lie deeper within Monolith Soft, not simply with Xenoblade itself.
Ultimately, I just think these games aren't for me anymore. I really gave it the best try I could, but I'm content to let the people who do still love them enjoy it themselves, whilst I let time turn it into a faded memory. The best Xenoblade, on paper? Definitely. But then, cardboard cut-outs don't make for great company, do they?
Less of an elegant melding of the design philosophies of Xenoblade 1 and 2 and more a Burnout-Esque car crash of systems, careening discordant mechanics at each other again and again, piling mechanic upon mechanic upon mechanic, leaving each one shattered by impact, until finally, just when it would be funniest to...another system comes screaming in and collides with the pile-up. On paper, Xenoblade 3 seems like it might really be the best of both worlds, but paper is famously two-dimensional. Practice reveals that Xenoblade 3's complete incoherence, its inability to make any single element of its design work fully with any other results in a game that was, for me, actively unpleasant and frustrating to play through.
So many things about Xenoblade 3 reward you with experience points, be they sidequests, chain attacks, or exploration, and certainly the most fun I had in Xenoblade 3 was the initial thrill of abusing the chain attack to get 1000% extra EXP and go up like 4 levels at once. But because the ability to level down to keep apace with the level curve of the main quest is bafflingly locked behind New Game+, and because fighting enemies below your level substantially slows down the unlocking of your Jobs, which the game encourages you to switch near constantly but also encourages you to remain on a single job so that others can use it too, what gaining that EXP practically means is a short burst of endorphins at seeing Number Go Up in exchange for an hour or two of staid misery as your progression grinds to a halt and you languish in a party composition you aren't enjoying so that you can unlock one you do like later. A game where you are punished for progression, and punished for not progressing by potentially missing out on the first game in the trilogy where there is more than a handful of sidequests with actual stories and meaningful gameplay unlocks in them. Xenoblade 3 represents the point where the memetic maximalism of the series, something I have always enjoyed about it, finally buckles and collapses under it's own weight, the cumulative effect of all this is being that you are left with a game built on systems of rewards that actively work against things the rest of it is doing, that make the game frustrating and unpleasant to play, the RPG design equivalent of being pulled in 4 separate directions by each of your limbs.
The story produces a similar effect. While the pretty great core cast provides a solid foundation for the game, thematically or stylistically there's not a single theme or idea that Xenoblade 3 brings up that it will not at some point contradict or muddy, not a single thing it ever fully commits to. Sometimes this is borderline parody, like the scene where the party rages with righteous fury at members of Mobius for having the temerity to treat killing people as a game, only to then in the very next screen meet a hero character who treats killing people as a game that every single character is completely on board with except for Eunie, who is chided for the crime of consistency and is asked to undergo a sidequest character arc in order to stop committing it. It often has the feel of a first draft, especially in how characters significant to the histories of our crew are introduced in flashback seconds before they reappear in the present to have a dramatic and tearful finale. Down to the very basics, the broad theme that comprises so much of the story and the gameplay, of two disparate peoples doing good by coming together, is shattered by an ending that sees their separation as a tragic necessity. By any conventional standards of narrative or mechanical coherence, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is an unmitigated disaster.
This isn't a unique failing of this game, however. Some of this is not unique to Xenoblade 3, but rather represents a degree of exhaustion I have with elements of Xenoblade that have remained unchanging. Xenoblade has always taken influence from MMORPGs, but it's influences have never really extended beyond the experience of the player character. Playing through raid or even dungeon bosses in an MMO, with their own discrete mechanics and designs that throw wrenches into your rotations you must react to, alongside Xenoblade 3 thoroughly demonstrates that if Xenoblade is a single-player MMO, it is a single-player MMO where every single enemy is a mob, where every single fight plays out almost the exact same way. Whether you are fighting a lowly bunnit or the God of Genesis, you're going to be just trying to execute your rotation all the same. And the rotations themselves are incredibly simple, the actual challenge is navigating around the uniformly terrible AI of your squadmates. The chain attack has always felt like a concession to this, and never more so than here, where at almost any time the + button lets you opt into a mode of play that tosses out basically the entire rest of the battle system to play a minigame that also happens to be a completely dominant strategy that is more powerful than anything else in the game, at the cost of being incredibly drawn-out and boring. Similarly, the world design, which is basically the same as the prior games but much wider, exposes just how uninteresting these spaces are to explore when the visuals and atmosphere aren't doing the heavy lifting. But Aionios is a particularly bland and staid world, with precious little interesting visual scenery and barely buoyed by a soundtrack that, Mobius themes aside, I found almost totally unmemorable. Both in the things it takes away from prior games that may have distracted from it, and the things it does itself, Xenoblade 3 does an admirable job at demonstrating the rot at the core of this entire series, the flaws and failings that have always been there, brought into the light more completely for the first time.
And it almost works. It genuinely, sincerely, almost works.
The world of Xenoblade 3 is a literal mash-up of the worlds of Xenoblade 1 and 2, a staid, in-between world maintained in eternal stasis and backward-looking by a group of (awfully-dressed) manchildren who treat all of this as consequence-less entertainment for themselves, who hang out in a theater watching clips from the world outside as if they are little more than episodes of a weekly seasonal anime. This lack of coherence, the way the writing never takes more than a step without stumbling, the way the ungodly chimera of systems and mechanics makes simply existing in Aionios feel genuinely stressful for me, against all odds does manage to feel resonant with the parts of the story that are about how existing in this singular moment is awful, how we need to forcefully draw a line under all this and move on. When characters talk about how much they hate this world, I sincerely agree with them. I hate it because the time I have spent here, because I have hiked across its vast empty wastes, seeing off dead bodies in a spiritual ritual reduced to a Crackdown Orb, because I have fought the battles of this endless war between Keves and Agnus and found them to be unpleasant and unsatisfying, because I have found the carrots of progression it offers to be hollow and tasteless. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 earnestly and sincerely represents a formal boldness that I genuinely did not think Monolith Soft was capable of, a willingness to produce a game where the act of playing feels terrible in order to underscore its point about how the world it presents must be ended. Even if it's lack of materialism and eagerness to abstract it's themes means it's never going to hit me like games that name their enemy (I've seen people talk about XB3 as an anti-capitalist game and while I can see how it's talk about destroying the Endless Now would be resonant with feelings like that, I'd like to direct your attention towards the early scene where a nopon explains the Free Market to the party and they all go "that's so poggers" and also the unbridled Shinzo Abe-ness of certain scenes, you know the ones) it nonetheless represents Xenoblade going further and reaching higher than, frankly, I ever thought it capable of. When a late-game boss starting randomly spouting contextless lines from Xenogears' theme song, I knew that some part of this game knew what was up.
I wish the rest of it did.
Perhaps Xenoblade 3 would be dishonest with itself if it did not also muddy and fumble the one part of it tying all the disparate strands together, but by indulging in earnest and straightforward nostalgia to an almost comical extent. One of the earliest things that intrigued me about Xenoblade 3 was how each of the two nations is ruled by a figurehead representation of a prominent waifu character from a prior game, where the uncritical worship of these characters is manufactured and exploited in order to maintain the endless war machine. It was cutting, it was incisive, and seemed self-aware, however briefly, of just how wretched the fandoms of these games are. Of course, it couldn't last. By the end, these figureheads are replaced with the Real Versions of these characters, who actually are uncritically good and brilliant and worthy of worship, whose immense power is absolutely necessary to destroy "The Endless Now", and also my willingness to find something that means anything in this mess. The one thing you absolutely cannot do when making a story about clinging to the past being wrong and bad is to parade around that same past as if it's the second coming, to indulge so completely in uncritical fanservice that buries anything interesting beneath tuneless self-indulgence that sounds like a thousand teenage boys yelling "BRO PEAK FICTION". If Xenoblade 3 isn't willing to commit to what it's doing, why should I? Why did I spend 100 hours of my life that I will never get back on a game that's just going to throw away everything interesting it's doing a the final hurdle? What was the point of any of this?
The angry tone of the prior passage is not how I feel now, given time to relax and reflect on the parts of the game that do genuinely work for me, like the main party (Eunie and Taion prove that Monolith Soft is in fact capable of writing a good romance, they have thus far simply chosen not to) and, of course, the parts that Really Don't Work, which are the things that worked most of all. But I'm not really able to get over that the one thing I found was truly interesting and exceptional about this game was something it just couldn't resist the allure of Servicing Fans enough to bring home. With Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Monolith Soft set out to prove that Xenoblade cannot continue the way it is, and the worst part is that they succeeded...just in a way that convinced me that the problem might lie deeper within Monolith Soft, not simply with Xenoblade itself.
Ultimately, I just think these games aren't for me anymore. I really gave it the best try I could, but I'm content to let the people who do still love them enjoy it themselves, whilst I let time turn it into a faded memory. The best Xenoblade, on paper? Definitely. But then, cardboard cut-outs don't make for great company, do they?
2021
"My slumber was disturbed by a mighty roar heard across worlds. On every world, a CRISIS. On every alternative, a new apocalypse. A doomsday. A last judgement. A conclusion that never comes but continues to arrive. An endless EVENT."
-----------------------------------------
When I first wrote about Halo Infinite, I described it as where you need to go to find an avatar of the Modern AAA game experience. Having now finished the campaign, I would like to expand that further to include the modern media landscape as a whole in 2022.
Halo Infinite begins without beginning, and ends without ending. It is an eternal middle, starting after everything is established and stopping before anything is concluded, a promise of content to come, an eternal conflict Master Chief wages to stop Halo from being fully reborn, that in it's waging produces a thousand tiny moments of HaloTM content to enjoy. Or, perhaps, not even to enjoy; to simply consume, one after another, turning blue icons grey until there are no blue icons that remain, until the next feast of Blue Icons arises, until the wheel turns again.
In a world where each day, we are presented with news headlines demonstrating time and time again that the pillars that make up our modern world are in fact the very same thing choking the life out of it, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Shared Universe, previously the niche domain of geek franchise fodder that produced such delightful ephemera as the Yuuzhan Vong or Faction Paradox, has emerged as the definitive modern storytelling mode. How else do we justify the obscene contradictions of the world in which we live than by performing necromantic rituals on dead worlds and stories, ensuring they stretch on forever and ever, insisting upon their own existences far beyond memory and relevancy or even their own endings. A world where marvel superheroes can face their Endgame and keep going, a world where The Dead Speak, and, of course, a world where Master Chief continues to fight the good fight forevermore, clearing outposts on the infinite sprawl of Zeta Halo.
Do you remember Halo 5: Guardians? Halo Infinite, hopes you do and do not, at the exact same time. That game happened, to be sure - the illusion of the Shared World cannot allow something like a game with a number attached to simply Not Occur without shattering the shared delusion of meaning and import that continuity represents - but it was followed by a phantom Halo 6 that never came out, a game that resolved the conflict with The Created that Halo 5 set up, a game where Master Chief had his tearful final confrontation with Cortana, a game that properly introduced The Banished and established them as an equal threat to the UNSC, a game that conveniently resets everything to it's most comfortably anthromorphic and predictable states. The green guy and the aliens on the ringworld, the rebel alliance and the empire. On and on it goes. Halo 6 exists now only as a wound that Infinite spends the entirety of it's runtime picking at, a gap in space and time that exists only to be filled in by content, audio logs and and lore podcasts and theory videos, Content upon Content, nothing but Content in this blasted land. Master Chief emerges from this black hole of a Game That Never Was to find Halo in the process of rebooting itself, and wearily sets himself to prevent that goal. Bereft of advancement, regressing to the Iconic Version of himself, and aided always by a false simulacra made by the image Cortana represented in prior games, against a nameless, faceless enemy, literally called The Endless, always out of sight and out of firing range, dangled forever in front of the Chief as he runs along on the hamster wheel of Halo's corpse forevermore, listening to the voices of ghosts explaining what happened in games that never were, all the while, a Final, True and Ultimate Threat hangs just out of reach, an Empty Hand holding an Energy Sword of Damocles that will never, ever fall.
This is Halo: Infinite. The promise of ephemera, imagery, and writing that once Meant Something, that had cultural and artistic significance emerging from the time it was created, placed into a vacuum-sealed Platform to sustain itself in perpetuity, without beginning or end, a mobius loop greedily devouring it's own tail because there remains nothing else. An existential nightmare existence without progress or retreat, where Master Chief fights forever against an enemy he cannot ever defeat, yet cannot ever defeat him in turn. Where the only victory to be found is the perpetuity of the world that Is, stretching on forever and ever. The Covenant can become The Banished, the Empire can become The First Order, Dark Souls can become Elden Ring, Overwatch can become Overwatch 2, but nothing can ever actually change. Nothing can actually evolve, not even combat. The world can never be allowed to end, to die, to allow new flowers to sprout from it's corpse as it becomes a part of the earth that spawns it. No matter what happens, Master Chief must always be on a Halo, shooting a grunt with a battle rifle.
And it's still fun to shoot a grunt with a battle rifle. But it's been over 20 years since Combat was said to Evolve. When will the war end? Will it ever, or are we trapped in a perpetual conflict with an enemy that is both tremendously weak and cowardly and infinitely powerful and terrifying? When will the galaxy be at peace? When will the covenant finally be defeated? When will Durandal look back on the world that was, and wonder who we were? How many more Ancient Evils remain to be defeated? How many more Banished/Covenants exist to be broken? How many more Grunts are there to be shot with my Battle Rifle? When will the credits roll, when will the screen fade to black, when will anything come to an actual, true end?
I don't know. But I know I'll probably play the DLC. Because I don't know the way out of this world any more than you do. And at the end of the day, bereft of anything better, I'll keep shooting grunts in the face with a battle rifle.
Three stars.
-----------------------------------------
"'In the End'? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends."
-----------------------------------------
When I first wrote about Halo Infinite, I described it as where you need to go to find an avatar of the Modern AAA game experience. Having now finished the campaign, I would like to expand that further to include the modern media landscape as a whole in 2022.
Halo Infinite begins without beginning, and ends without ending. It is an eternal middle, starting after everything is established and stopping before anything is concluded, a promise of content to come, an eternal conflict Master Chief wages to stop Halo from being fully reborn, that in it's waging produces a thousand tiny moments of HaloTM content to enjoy. Or, perhaps, not even to enjoy; to simply consume, one after another, turning blue icons grey until there are no blue icons that remain, until the next feast of Blue Icons arises, until the wheel turns again.
In a world where each day, we are presented with news headlines demonstrating time and time again that the pillars that make up our modern world are in fact the very same thing choking the life out of it, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Shared Universe, previously the niche domain of geek franchise fodder that produced such delightful ephemera as the Yuuzhan Vong or Faction Paradox, has emerged as the definitive modern storytelling mode. How else do we justify the obscene contradictions of the world in which we live than by performing necromantic rituals on dead worlds and stories, ensuring they stretch on forever and ever, insisting upon their own existences far beyond memory and relevancy or even their own endings. A world where marvel superheroes can face their Endgame and keep going, a world where The Dead Speak, and, of course, a world where Master Chief continues to fight the good fight forevermore, clearing outposts on the infinite sprawl of Zeta Halo.
Do you remember Halo 5: Guardians? Halo Infinite, hopes you do and do not, at the exact same time. That game happened, to be sure - the illusion of the Shared World cannot allow something like a game with a number attached to simply Not Occur without shattering the shared delusion of meaning and import that continuity represents - but it was followed by a phantom Halo 6 that never came out, a game that resolved the conflict with The Created that Halo 5 set up, a game where Master Chief had his tearful final confrontation with Cortana, a game that properly introduced The Banished and established them as an equal threat to the UNSC, a game that conveniently resets everything to it's most comfortably anthromorphic and predictable states. The green guy and the aliens on the ringworld, the rebel alliance and the empire. On and on it goes. Halo 6 exists now only as a wound that Infinite spends the entirety of it's runtime picking at, a gap in space and time that exists only to be filled in by content, audio logs and and lore podcasts and theory videos, Content upon Content, nothing but Content in this blasted land. Master Chief emerges from this black hole of a Game That Never Was to find Halo in the process of rebooting itself, and wearily sets himself to prevent that goal. Bereft of advancement, regressing to the Iconic Version of himself, and aided always by a false simulacra made by the image Cortana represented in prior games, against a nameless, faceless enemy, literally called The Endless, always out of sight and out of firing range, dangled forever in front of the Chief as he runs along on the hamster wheel of Halo's corpse forevermore, listening to the voices of ghosts explaining what happened in games that never were, all the while, a Final, True and Ultimate Threat hangs just out of reach, an Empty Hand holding an Energy Sword of Damocles that will never, ever fall.
This is Halo: Infinite. The promise of ephemera, imagery, and writing that once Meant Something, that had cultural and artistic significance emerging from the time it was created, placed into a vacuum-sealed Platform to sustain itself in perpetuity, without beginning or end, a mobius loop greedily devouring it's own tail because there remains nothing else. An existential nightmare existence without progress or retreat, where Master Chief fights forever against an enemy he cannot ever defeat, yet cannot ever defeat him in turn. Where the only victory to be found is the perpetuity of the world that Is, stretching on forever and ever. The Covenant can become The Banished, the Empire can become The First Order, Dark Souls can become Elden Ring, Overwatch can become Overwatch 2, but nothing can ever actually change. Nothing can actually evolve, not even combat. The world can never be allowed to end, to die, to allow new flowers to sprout from it's corpse as it becomes a part of the earth that spawns it. No matter what happens, Master Chief must always be on a Halo, shooting a grunt with a battle rifle.
And it's still fun to shoot a grunt with a battle rifle. But it's been over 20 years since Combat was said to Evolve. When will the war end? Will it ever, or are we trapped in a perpetual conflict with an enemy that is both tremendously weak and cowardly and infinitely powerful and terrifying? When will the galaxy be at peace? When will the covenant finally be defeated? When will Durandal look back on the world that was, and wonder who we were? How many more Ancient Evils remain to be defeated? How many more Banished/Covenants exist to be broken? How many more Grunts are there to be shot with my Battle Rifle? When will the credits roll, when will the screen fade to black, when will anything come to an actual, true end?
I don't know. But I know I'll probably play the DLC. Because I don't know the way out of this world any more than you do. And at the end of the day, bereft of anything better, I'll keep shooting grunts in the face with a battle rifle.
Three stars.
-----------------------------------------
"'In the End'? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends."
This review contains spoilers
cw: allusions to suicide, self-harm, and bodily harm. discussions of mental health and social phobia included.
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All around my house, there is a garden made of glass. It looks so beautiful outside my window. During the day, the light from the sun shining down on it refracts through the trees made of twisting and flowers made of tiny perfect shards, a dazzling kalidescope of colours dancing through the garden. And at night, the light from the stars shines down on each one of the mirrorleaves that make up the bushes and trees, each one twinkling and dazzling with the light of an entire sea of stars.
I want nothing more to get closer, to see the forest with my own eyes, feel it with my own hands, hear it with my own ears. But every time I get close, every time i try to venture outside and into the world beyond my window, it hurts. I try to walk through it, as carefully as I can, but thorns that others can see but I can't cut into me. I shatter fragile flowers into a thousand tiny jagged shards with a single clumsy footstep. And sometimes I catch my face in reflections in the glass, reflecting a twisted, malformed image of the self that exists in the mind's eye, all the imperfections and flaws cutting all the deeper for their concreteness. Each time I try to walk through the garden, each time I try to exist in that space, in that moment, I shatter beautiful things around me at every turn, without intending, without meaning, and hurt myself in turn.
And so, I flinch. I retreat. I walk away, back behind closed doors. Where I can't break anything else. Where I can't hurt anymore.
And I stay there.
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I've always been fascinated by the relationship visual novels have with space and time. Almost all of the ones I've played - from serious personal reflective pieces to light-hearted romances - contain within them multiple parallel worlds, different realities of the same story spiraling off in their own directions. Romance stories that contain within them a dozen universes where the main character dates each member of the cast, stories with countless detours and Bad Ends on the way to a True Conclusion...it's not unheard of in literature, but it's ubiquity within the VN space is striking. Even Umineko, the most notable VN I have played (some of) that does not have branching routes or choices, plays extensively in a field of alternate possibilities and routes in a way that assumes familiarity with forms and rhythms that simply isn't given outside the Visual Novel. Even setting aside my lingering university Grant Morrison Phase giving me Multiverse Brain Worms that only the media environment of 2022 could entirely rid me of, there's something entrancing about a work that contains multitudes of itself within it, rivers that break off and flow in altogether separate directions from a source they all draw from, answering the same questions in different ways.
And yet, even in games like Zero Time Dilemma that are absolutely lascivious in their interest in parallel worlds, rarely has this aspect of a visual novel truly affected me. The ways in which the different branches and routes do, certainly, but the act of choosing itself rarely strikes me in such a way. It's connective tissue, not a beating heart in and of itself.
This cannot be said for one night, hot springs, a game I played last year, and have attempted to write about multiple times, only to fail each and every time. A game where the use of these choices, the use of these other realities, and other possibilities, existing side-by-side, affected me more than I could have ever imagined.
Mechanically, one night is simple. You simply read the story of Haru, a trans woman, and her friends visiting the hot springs for a birthday party, dealing with the frictions and relationships that Haru confronts along the way. Through that story, you make little decisions that branch the narrative in different ways. Some choices will simply move the narrative along in a different direction, while other choices will make you lose one of three hearts on the top of your screen, and if you lose all three, you get a "bad" ending. Classic visual novel stuff. But how one night presents these choices, how it presents the consequences of getting a game over, and how I responded to both...it was...
it was more than i could take.
i thought i knew. i thought i knew what i was getting into. i had played another of npckc's games, tomato clinic, before this one, and it was mostly just, well, cute. that's not to say there was nothing there, it felt very true to the awkward role of educator average queer people are often forced to play for well-meaning but uninformed cishet people, but overwhelmingly what it did was make me smile and not much else. and y'know i was expecting the same thing here. i was expecting to smile, to have a nice time on my lunch break.
that didn't happen.
what happened instead was that this game hit me with incalculable force, all the stronger for how completely unexpected it was, it's deliberately small presentation cutting deep into in ways that left me genuinely shaken and deep in thought about who i am and why i act the way that i do.
that's a hyperbolic statement. and i expect, for many people, it won't ring true. but it did for me. and articulating why requires articulating...myself, somewhat.
full disclosure, i first played this about a year ago. and i've tried to write this review multiple times before. but I just found no way of doing so without talking explicitly about why it made me feel the ways that it did, what about it that caused it to hit so hard. excessive auto-biography is a bad habit i fell into far often when i was writing more regularly on letterboxd and i have tried to avoid that here, to not treat a work's relation to me as the beginning and end of its critique. i am simply not a very interesting person, and saying "i personally related to this work" for a piece of criticism doesn't make for compelling writing by default. i don't think i've always succeeded, but it is something i have tried to aspire beyond on backloggd. i just found that impossible for one night hot springs. and i still do. and yet, i still want to talk about this game, what i think it does and has to say, and if i have to talk about myself to do so, then that is what will have to happen.
so, apologies. this is One of Those.
i am a non-binary trans person. i am also autistic, described to me then as "asperger's syndrome", and was diagnosed at a young age because I was a particularly...noticeable case of it. in addition, i was also diagnosed at a relatively young age with social anxiety disorder, then described to me as "social phobia". autism manifests in myriad different ways for myriad different people, and what is true for one person will not ring true for others. one autistic person i knew in university was one of the most socially capable people i have ever known, effortlessly charming and quick-witted in a way i am not or never have been. i struggle immensely with tone, expressions, and conversational flow, of knowing when to say the right thing, or how to say it. i speak without full confidence that my meaning will be expressed, only having hope that it will land how i intend to, without hurting anyone around me, and if i do, i hope only that i can recognise it and make amends for it immediately. whether this creates or simply feeds into my social anxiety disorder i can't say for certain, but the way others will speak in ways in ways i don't entirely understand i will respond in ways that i less comprehend and more simply Hope are the way one is Supposed To Respond certainly does not help the fact that i approach most conversations with almost everyone in the world with a certain degree of nervousness, if not outright fear, whether it's hoping to make a good impression on someone new, or hoping i don't accidentally hurt the feelings of someone i care about, there's always a reason to feel nervous about the very simple act of interacting with another human being in the world. being non-binary doesn't help much either, as in the majority of situations that take place in areas where i am not able to make my pronouns clear up front, misgendering and misrecognition isn't so much a possibility as it is a certainty.
if you've interacted with me personally at all you almost certainly think of me as oblivious or distant, speaking clumsily, awkwardly, stand-offishly, or any combination of these or any other, for which I apologize, because even reaching this level of capability requires a level of effort on my behalf that often leaves me completely exhausted from even basic interactions. none of this means i don't enjoy being with others, for me, no interaction is natural or free-flowing, it's a panicked and practiced effort to keep my head above water with immense effort.
so, often? i will flinch. i will shudder. i will apologize - for any unintended slight, for my existence as a whole. out of fear, out of resignation, out of the crawling voice in the back of my skull that tells me that no one - no one - wants to be around me, ever - i will find ways to extricate myself or excuse myself from situations, sometimes from all things altogether. faced with friction, it is easier to simply relent, to stand aside, rather than to speak up, because my voice is coarse and harsh and i cannot stand the noise it makes as it crawls out of my throat.
time and time again, i have taken the path of least resistance, so, when i played one night hot springs...i did the same. when haru suffered the routine emotionless deadnaming that is the common result of interactions in the world, i instinctively picked the options that made her flinch, shudder, to take the path of least resistance, to allow herself to be walked over rather than assert herself. as i do each time i play through a vn like this for the first time, i picked the options that struck as natural, and each and every time, it led me down paths that ranged from self-humiliating to outwardly self-destructive, to erode away at Haru's confidence because i had none, until eventually she can't take any more, and retreats into herself mid-party, until she vanishes, leaving the concern of her friends in her wake.
this is my world. this is the world i have made for myself. this closed-off, tiny thing, where i slam shut every door i have to knock on out of fear of what i might find on the other side. playing this game forced me to confront things about myself that part of me might have thought were natural, or even noble, boldly self-sacrificing myself, excusing myself from the company of others for their own good. but really, it was just cowardice, in the face of a world that is difficult, that is challenging, that hurts and where, yes, you can cause hurt in turn. but there's nothing noble about hiding yourself away in a dark corner of a distant room, afraid to even speak. one night, hot springs, despite it's incredibly warm, soft visuals and gentle music, is absolutely uncompromising in what it revealed about the way i so often choose to live my life.
it's a depiction made all the more heartbreaking by the results of resisting my natural instincts, peering into the alternate worlds in this story, and seeing for myself the words i have left unsaid, the friends left unmade, the closed-off hearts that could have been opened, but remained sealed out of fear. there are some really warm, beautifully written scenes in one night, hot springs, and it's only by seeing every path, by walking down every door, by availing yourself of the power visual novels grant you to see every possibility in this single night at the hot springs in a way you never could in real life, can you see the full shape of these people and the feelings they have for one another. something is always left unsaid, unheard.
each time i leave my house, each time i meet with friends, each time i poke my head around to my roommates, each time i log on to this website or any other, i am haru, and her choices become my choices. to risk walking barefoot through a garden of glass for what i know to lie on the other side, or to remain behind it, and make of it an insurmountable wall that grows smaller and smaller as my world contracts more and more into that darkened corner in my room. but there is a wider world out there, full of people i want to see, full of potential great memories and warm moments. not every night at the hot springs will be good. there will always be opportunities i cannot take, things left unsaid, and things left unheard. but if i flinch and retreat every time i face difficulties, every time it seems like this might be a bad night at the hot springs, then i'll never have a good one. i'll never have that night where i make a new friend, reconnect with an old one, or tell someone how i really feel about them.
the cringey, melodramatic thing i wrote at the top of this review? that's the best picture i can paint about what it feels like to live behind my eyes, of trying as best as i can to communicate fully and completely with the people i love because i want to be with them and enjoy their company more than anything else in the world, but knowing that it will always be difficult, knowing that it requires constant, agonising effort. it's not the same as feeling that, every day. i do not think writing, or video games, are true empathy machines, despite assertions to the contrary rising in both gaming journalism and academic spaces in the past couple years. i don't think video games can make you feel what it is like to be trans, or autistic, or socially anxious. neither this review, nor one night, hot springs will make you feel like what it feels like to be me.
but do they have to? i don't think they do. i think all they have to do, in the sounds they make chiming with another, in how they look matching an image etched into your heart, in the words they speak, and how they feel to play, to produce some kind of image that resonates, some kind of emotion that resounds...to reach someone, anyone, and maybe even be reached in turn.
and it isn't easy. believe me, i know.
but when it works? when you reach out a metaphorical hand, and meet another? it is so, so worth it in the end.
there is no reason to believe npckc will ever read this. but, i'll knock on that door anyway, speak up anyway, just in case my words reach theirs.
Thank you for your game!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All around my house, there is a garden made of glass. It looks so beautiful outside my window. During the day, the light from the sun shining down on it refracts through the trees made of twisting and flowers made of tiny perfect shards, a dazzling kalidescope of colours dancing through the garden. And at night, the light from the stars shines down on each one of the mirrorleaves that make up the bushes and trees, each one twinkling and dazzling with the light of an entire sea of stars.
I want nothing more to get closer, to see the forest with my own eyes, feel it with my own hands, hear it with my own ears. But every time I get close, every time i try to venture outside and into the world beyond my window, it hurts. I try to walk through it, as carefully as I can, but thorns that others can see but I can't cut into me. I shatter fragile flowers into a thousand tiny jagged shards with a single clumsy footstep. And sometimes I catch my face in reflections in the glass, reflecting a twisted, malformed image of the self that exists in the mind's eye, all the imperfections and flaws cutting all the deeper for their concreteness. Each time I try to walk through the garden, each time I try to exist in that space, in that moment, I shatter beautiful things around me at every turn, without intending, without meaning, and hurt myself in turn.
And so, I flinch. I retreat. I walk away, back behind closed doors. Where I can't break anything else. Where I can't hurt anymore.
And I stay there.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've always been fascinated by the relationship visual novels have with space and time. Almost all of the ones I've played - from serious personal reflective pieces to light-hearted romances - contain within them multiple parallel worlds, different realities of the same story spiraling off in their own directions. Romance stories that contain within them a dozen universes where the main character dates each member of the cast, stories with countless detours and Bad Ends on the way to a True Conclusion...it's not unheard of in literature, but it's ubiquity within the VN space is striking. Even Umineko, the most notable VN I have played (some of) that does not have branching routes or choices, plays extensively in a field of alternate possibilities and routes in a way that assumes familiarity with forms and rhythms that simply isn't given outside the Visual Novel. Even setting aside my lingering university Grant Morrison Phase giving me Multiverse Brain Worms that only the media environment of 2022 could entirely rid me of, there's something entrancing about a work that contains multitudes of itself within it, rivers that break off and flow in altogether separate directions from a source they all draw from, answering the same questions in different ways.
And yet, even in games like Zero Time Dilemma that are absolutely lascivious in their interest in parallel worlds, rarely has this aspect of a visual novel truly affected me. The ways in which the different branches and routes do, certainly, but the act of choosing itself rarely strikes me in such a way. It's connective tissue, not a beating heart in and of itself.
This cannot be said for one night, hot springs, a game I played last year, and have attempted to write about multiple times, only to fail each and every time. A game where the use of these choices, the use of these other realities, and other possibilities, existing side-by-side, affected me more than I could have ever imagined.
Mechanically, one night is simple. You simply read the story of Haru, a trans woman, and her friends visiting the hot springs for a birthday party, dealing with the frictions and relationships that Haru confronts along the way. Through that story, you make little decisions that branch the narrative in different ways. Some choices will simply move the narrative along in a different direction, while other choices will make you lose one of three hearts on the top of your screen, and if you lose all three, you get a "bad" ending. Classic visual novel stuff. But how one night presents these choices, how it presents the consequences of getting a game over, and how I responded to both...it was...
it was more than i could take.
i thought i knew. i thought i knew what i was getting into. i had played another of npckc's games, tomato clinic, before this one, and it was mostly just, well, cute. that's not to say there was nothing there, it felt very true to the awkward role of educator average queer people are often forced to play for well-meaning but uninformed cishet people, but overwhelmingly what it did was make me smile and not much else. and y'know i was expecting the same thing here. i was expecting to smile, to have a nice time on my lunch break.
that didn't happen.
what happened instead was that this game hit me with incalculable force, all the stronger for how completely unexpected it was, it's deliberately small presentation cutting deep into in ways that left me genuinely shaken and deep in thought about who i am and why i act the way that i do.
that's a hyperbolic statement. and i expect, for many people, it won't ring true. but it did for me. and articulating why requires articulating...myself, somewhat.
full disclosure, i first played this about a year ago. and i've tried to write this review multiple times before. but I just found no way of doing so without talking explicitly about why it made me feel the ways that it did, what about it that caused it to hit so hard. excessive auto-biography is a bad habit i fell into far often when i was writing more regularly on letterboxd and i have tried to avoid that here, to not treat a work's relation to me as the beginning and end of its critique. i am simply not a very interesting person, and saying "i personally related to this work" for a piece of criticism doesn't make for compelling writing by default. i don't think i've always succeeded, but it is something i have tried to aspire beyond on backloggd. i just found that impossible for one night hot springs. and i still do. and yet, i still want to talk about this game, what i think it does and has to say, and if i have to talk about myself to do so, then that is what will have to happen.
so, apologies. this is One of Those.
i am a non-binary trans person. i am also autistic, described to me then as "asperger's syndrome", and was diagnosed at a young age because I was a particularly...noticeable case of it. in addition, i was also diagnosed at a relatively young age with social anxiety disorder, then described to me as "social phobia". autism manifests in myriad different ways for myriad different people, and what is true for one person will not ring true for others. one autistic person i knew in university was one of the most socially capable people i have ever known, effortlessly charming and quick-witted in a way i am not or never have been. i struggle immensely with tone, expressions, and conversational flow, of knowing when to say the right thing, or how to say it. i speak without full confidence that my meaning will be expressed, only having hope that it will land how i intend to, without hurting anyone around me, and if i do, i hope only that i can recognise it and make amends for it immediately. whether this creates or simply feeds into my social anxiety disorder i can't say for certain, but the way others will speak in ways in ways i don't entirely understand i will respond in ways that i less comprehend and more simply Hope are the way one is Supposed To Respond certainly does not help the fact that i approach most conversations with almost everyone in the world with a certain degree of nervousness, if not outright fear, whether it's hoping to make a good impression on someone new, or hoping i don't accidentally hurt the feelings of someone i care about, there's always a reason to feel nervous about the very simple act of interacting with another human being in the world. being non-binary doesn't help much either, as in the majority of situations that take place in areas where i am not able to make my pronouns clear up front, misgendering and misrecognition isn't so much a possibility as it is a certainty.
if you've interacted with me personally at all you almost certainly think of me as oblivious or distant, speaking clumsily, awkwardly, stand-offishly, or any combination of these or any other, for which I apologize, because even reaching this level of capability requires a level of effort on my behalf that often leaves me completely exhausted from even basic interactions. none of this means i don't enjoy being with others, for me, no interaction is natural or free-flowing, it's a panicked and practiced effort to keep my head above water with immense effort.
so, often? i will flinch. i will shudder. i will apologize - for any unintended slight, for my existence as a whole. out of fear, out of resignation, out of the crawling voice in the back of my skull that tells me that no one - no one - wants to be around me, ever - i will find ways to extricate myself or excuse myself from situations, sometimes from all things altogether. faced with friction, it is easier to simply relent, to stand aside, rather than to speak up, because my voice is coarse and harsh and i cannot stand the noise it makes as it crawls out of my throat.
time and time again, i have taken the path of least resistance, so, when i played one night hot springs...i did the same. when haru suffered the routine emotionless deadnaming that is the common result of interactions in the world, i instinctively picked the options that made her flinch, shudder, to take the path of least resistance, to allow herself to be walked over rather than assert herself. as i do each time i play through a vn like this for the first time, i picked the options that struck as natural, and each and every time, it led me down paths that ranged from self-humiliating to outwardly self-destructive, to erode away at Haru's confidence because i had none, until eventually she can't take any more, and retreats into herself mid-party, until she vanishes, leaving the concern of her friends in her wake.
this is my world. this is the world i have made for myself. this closed-off, tiny thing, where i slam shut every door i have to knock on out of fear of what i might find on the other side. playing this game forced me to confront things about myself that part of me might have thought were natural, or even noble, boldly self-sacrificing myself, excusing myself from the company of others for their own good. but really, it was just cowardice, in the face of a world that is difficult, that is challenging, that hurts and where, yes, you can cause hurt in turn. but there's nothing noble about hiding yourself away in a dark corner of a distant room, afraid to even speak. one night, hot springs, despite it's incredibly warm, soft visuals and gentle music, is absolutely uncompromising in what it revealed about the way i so often choose to live my life.
it's a depiction made all the more heartbreaking by the results of resisting my natural instincts, peering into the alternate worlds in this story, and seeing for myself the words i have left unsaid, the friends left unmade, the closed-off hearts that could have been opened, but remained sealed out of fear. there are some really warm, beautifully written scenes in one night, hot springs, and it's only by seeing every path, by walking down every door, by availing yourself of the power visual novels grant you to see every possibility in this single night at the hot springs in a way you never could in real life, can you see the full shape of these people and the feelings they have for one another. something is always left unsaid, unheard.
each time i leave my house, each time i meet with friends, each time i poke my head around to my roommates, each time i log on to this website or any other, i am haru, and her choices become my choices. to risk walking barefoot through a garden of glass for what i know to lie on the other side, or to remain behind it, and make of it an insurmountable wall that grows smaller and smaller as my world contracts more and more into that darkened corner in my room. but there is a wider world out there, full of people i want to see, full of potential great memories and warm moments. not every night at the hot springs will be good. there will always be opportunities i cannot take, things left unsaid, and things left unheard. but if i flinch and retreat every time i face difficulties, every time it seems like this might be a bad night at the hot springs, then i'll never have a good one. i'll never have that night where i make a new friend, reconnect with an old one, or tell someone how i really feel about them.
the cringey, melodramatic thing i wrote at the top of this review? that's the best picture i can paint about what it feels like to live behind my eyes, of trying as best as i can to communicate fully and completely with the people i love because i want to be with them and enjoy their company more than anything else in the world, but knowing that it will always be difficult, knowing that it requires constant, agonising effort. it's not the same as feeling that, every day. i do not think writing, or video games, are true empathy machines, despite assertions to the contrary rising in both gaming journalism and academic spaces in the past couple years. i don't think video games can make you feel what it is like to be trans, or autistic, or socially anxious. neither this review, nor one night, hot springs will make you feel like what it feels like to be me.
but do they have to? i don't think they do. i think all they have to do, in the sounds they make chiming with another, in how they look matching an image etched into your heart, in the words they speak, and how they feel to play, to produce some kind of image that resonates, some kind of emotion that resounds...to reach someone, anyone, and maybe even be reached in turn.
and it isn't easy. believe me, i know.
but when it works? when you reach out a metaphorical hand, and meet another? it is so, so worth it in the end.
there is no reason to believe npckc will ever read this. but, i'll knock on that door anyway, speak up anyway, just in case my words reach theirs.
Thank you for your game!
2018
Excellent work, 47. Using Liz Truss as a medium was a particularly inspired touch. The client will be most pleased that the target died before she had to give herself a letter for her 100th birthday. Head for an exit, and we'll speak again soon.
2022
This review contains spoilers
A SLIME draws near!
Command?
> FIGHT
OERSTED attacks!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
there's nothing new under the sun.
it's a pithy statement to the point of reductiveness, as such things usually are, but there is a truth to it, not one that condemns, but one that liberates. forgive me for drinking deep of the well of ideology here, but even though all of us may indeed be the products of the words and systems that surround us, no one is quite the same combination of influences as any other, which gives us a wholly unique perspective. but this is also why ensuring our horizons are broad is important, because although we can never widen our scope enough to take in everything, narrowing it in turn only presses the walls in around us, and leaves us with only one path forward.
dragon quest, then, is not a wholly unique game that sprung fully-formed out onto the famicom, but was once that represented a conscious effort to translate a specific mode of game - the popular pc rpgs of the time like wizardry and ultima - and many of the decisions it made clearly have immense thought and care put into them as a result of this, and the result was a game that changed the landscape of the entire industry. but in doing so, it provided a template, a set story for how these things go. defeat monsters. gather experience. explore dungeons. destroy T̵̲̼͆̅͘ͅȟ̸̲̇e̷̡̬̪͛ ̶͙̰͇̍̓̏L̵̪̽̒͌o̷͍͛r̴͖̙͋̾̕d̸̘̜͔̅̋̽ ̷̳͌́̑o̸̪͌̚f̶̗̹͓̆͂ ̶̗̗͊Ḍ̴̪̽͠a̸̙͌̍r̸̜͎̾k̶̻̽.
games that came in dragon quest's wake drew from this story, telling it over and over again. i do not wish to claim here that dragon quest is the only truly original work in the entire jrpg form because that's clearly a completely unhinged and wrong thing to say, but i do wish to argue that the things dragon quest put thought and care into creating were adopted wholesale, without the same level of purposefulness, by many other games, creating an intrinsic language of expectation and reference that in turn provides a bedrock of norms through which audiences and creators can process the form. this is useful, both artistically and financially for both the audience and the artist, but by it's nature it narrows the scope of the form arround it, and allows ideas that were never challenged or interrogated, even ones as simple as defeating enemies to gain experience points, to crystalise around the work, creating something that may indeed be beautiful, but is unmoving, unchanging.
while there are heavier consequences to this - the widespread homogenisation of monetization and progression systems in games undoubtedly is self-served by their uncritical ubiquity, and many stories continue to carry forth regressive ideas built into their hearts because the creators are unaware of them or unwilling to divest themselves from them - one that should also be considered is that the more and more complex the language of norms around a form becomes, the more insular and closed-off it is at risk of becoming.
one need only look at the third most-important JRPG to release in july 2022 to see what this results in: a complete mess of a game, only barely held together by self-justifying tropes and glue that the prospective player - intimately familiar with the construction of and tropes of these games - will simply accept and enjoy singularly. ask a single question about it's world or it's characters or it's plot and it's illusion of cohesiveness will shatter instantly. why does the party react with such horror to someone killing for sport in this cutscene, but will happily recruit the sexy warrior woman who also kills for sport in the very next cutscene? because each one is a trope that carries a set of norms that is implicitly understood and accepted by it's core audience, and proves to be completely baffling to anyone who does not speak this language - or, indeed, Thinks for One Minute.
(i kinda like it though. i am a student of this language, after all.)
the games that result from this aren't necessarily bad, but i think truly exceptional works will strive to be more than the perpetuations of their genre, want to create an experience that aspires to more than simply playing the hits and playing them adequately. because when your path is narrow, there's really only one way forward.
which brings us, at last, to live a live, and to what makes it truly special. while I think this game is clever and inventive constantly, i don't want to let that be mistaken for a game that is unlike anything you've seen or played before. indeed, in many ways, live a live revels in cliche, with each of its scenarios merrily indulging in the rote tropes of its genre. the difference is not merely in the choice to tackle stories that are - still! - rarely glimpsed within the JRPG form, but in how these stories are told. these are not 7 different miniature jrpgs in one - these are 7 stories that, like the original dragon quest before it, think so carefully about each aspect of themselves, and use jrpg mechanics in unique and surprising ways to tell those stories. and because it earnestly and completely invests in these stories, they are brought to new and wonderful life.
i have seen the story of a master training a prospective student to succeed them, but until live a live, i have never so completely been that master, thinking carefully about what techniques most benefit each of the students under my care, and trying to teach what I can in the time I have left. when i see my student finally surpass me, i feel genuine pride, because them reaching Level 9 means so much when I have been stuck in my Level 8 ways for all this time. i've seen heroes scramble to put together traps and tricks in a time limit to defeat an overwhelming enemy, but by utilizing a creative conception of the RPG loop of rifling through chests and cabinets for loot, it becomes realized kinaesthetically in a way i've scarcely seen before. not every chapter is wholly successful - for me, akira's near future anime ova riff does the least work to make the beats it's playing sing with new life by relying on a conception of the cliches themselves as self-evidently worthwhile, in a way that is shockingly prescient of the direction increasingly anime-influenced jrpgs like tales and xeno end up taking - but in almost all cases, live a live's creative use of its mechanics, presentation, and design makes what could potentially be rote stories play in beautiful harmony, a harmony that resounds through the commonalities that exist through the stories. there's nothing new under the sun, after all, and so each of these stories, these ideas, feed into one another across history, ultimately fighting the same enemy - hatred - across all time, as a straight club banger plays over the same fight being fought across the millennia.
live a live's unwillingness to accept for granted the norms of the RPG extends to all facets of it's construction, and the battle system is the clearest case for this. random encounters do exist, but they are confined behind the bars of the kingdom of lucrece, rpg conventions being a malady that haunts that land as a sickness more virulent than any the lord of dark could spread. but even here, you are subtly encouraged to flee from battle much more often than you would in other games of its type, due to both the game's EXP system making rewards for fighting weaker enemies to be so utterly negligible as to be practically nonexistent, and the way it offers rewards for escaping from battles with a certain character. In comparison to earthbound simply skipping encounters when you hit them, whilst still giving you all the rewards for combat, such as they are, live a live instead invites you to exercise your own restraint, to consciously choose to sheathe your sword, which is an interesting wrinkle that adds a layer of intentionality to it's violence once you realize that this isn't one of the long list of other jrpgs where you should never really use the flee button.
the chapters that come closest to being purely normative in their play are prehistoric and near future, but even here, the former invites you to become a hunter by having your nose track encounters in the world, and the latter has enemies patrolling the city streets of neo-japan in such a way that you can avoid confrontation but can also get cornered and blocked off. both are thematic and evocative, as are wild west's maneuver of a long buildup to a single gunfight and edo japan's invocation of the idea that a sword drawn is a conscious decision that invites violence (slightly hampered by certain traps putting you in a position where you have no choice but to draw it), but it's the far future that has the most thoughtful approach to combat in the game: because it mostly doesn't have it.
well, that's not true. you can actually play an arcade game using the game's combat system at almost any time, but it is consciously a distraction, separate from the ongoing concerns of the ship. your role in this chapter is that of a witness: a silent observer to the sci-fi horror film playing out around you. here, live a live demonstrates a remarkable awareness of the limits of it's own form - combat is how you interact with this world and combat won't help you here: all you can do is watch, and make coffee, as personal tragedies play out in front of you time and time again. fittingly for a chapter that takes place at the farthest reaches of time and humanity, far future explores the furthest edge of it's systems by depicting a story somewhat beyond the reach of the framework it finds itself in. like a beacon of hope shot in the night, pleading for a more nuanced world than this one. it's not surprising that the final moments of the chapter have you explicitly use the medium of a video game to kill a nascent life form, nor is it shocking that there is a twinge of regret that this is the only way this could have gone. isn't it a little sad that this is the way games currently are?
each element of the game is so well-considered, so carefully constructed to resonate and cohere with the wider piece and with itself. never is something there simply because it is expected to be there, never is a trope invoked without care or consideration into how it can be made to work with the greater whole. and when assumptions are found to be lacking, where the gaps of implication they leave behind are too big to ignore, they are challenged.
the oersted chapter is something of a flashpoint both for the game's critical legacy - such as it is - and the narrative around it. after a series of adventures that use rpg mechanics in creative and exciting ways to bring these pulp adventures to life, ending with a rote dragon quest riff could only be a bizarre self-defeating maneuver. is it any wonder then, that oersted was doomed? it's easy to look at the final moments of the hero declaring himself odio, lord of the dark, near-exclusively, but it's the moments beforehand - elevated by the remake's tastefully extended script, producing that exceedingly rare remake that i prefer to the original, whilst still having things the original does better - that make it work. the princess' agonised cries over the man she actually loved being murdered by the uncaring mute she was betrothed to because he happened to defeat the man she loved in combat at a tourney followed by her suicide is the real shock of this chapter, one where the care and attention live a live shows to all the cliches it invokes is turned on the dominant form of it's genre, exposing the sexist ideology that persists through dragon quest's vision of the heroic narrative. oersted's blind adherence to the script of his genre might lead to him falling to the darkness, but i will point out that the game doesn't use this to say that dragon quest is evil - this isn't spec ops: the line for jrpgs. the story of a band of heroes setting out to defeat the evil is not the issue: it is doing so unthinkingly, accepting rewards and events blindly, of assuming a love belongs to you simply because you are the hero that is entitled to it. oersted is not evil because jrpgs are evil: he's evil because he didn't think for a single second about the narrative handed to him.
it's why the final chapter itself still plays out like a traditional JRPG: assembling a party and travelling to the final dungeon to defeat the final boss with the power of friendship. but because it earns it, because it does the work to make every single step on that journey, because it refuses to simply take for granted the baked-in assumptions of it's genre and it's form...it works. it feels natural, it feels right. there's a strong argument to be made that live a live is something of a naive idealist in how it argues that the broad arcs of these stories are never irredeemable but are corruptible through thoughtlessness, but when it makes it's arguments with this much care and confidence it's very difficult to quibble with it. i never have to feel like I have to stop thinking, or just embrace that this is the way this story has to go in order to enjoy it, like I might have to do for so many other modern jrpgs, that are so wrapped up in their own convulution that they forget to do the work to actually make you care. as jackson tyler touches on in their own piece on the game, live a live is arguably even better in 2022 than it was in 1994, because of the way the genre has changed and, maybe more importantly, the ways that it hasn't, becoming more and more wrapped up in the snake eating its own tail without bothering to ask why we have the snake eat the tail in the first place, what might be gained by doing something new.
there is nothing completely new under the sun. live a live knows this, and accepts it, but remains inventive, remains questioning, remains determined to push up against the boundaries of what rpgs - what video games - can do, to find new ways to tell old stories, and old ways to tell new stories, playing the old hits with a purpose and style that makes them sing like they never quite have before, and hitting out with some new singles that won't ever leave you. Inspired, and inspiring in turn: live a live is a game to make you love games, a creation to make you want to create, and a memory I don't think I'll ever forget.
Command?
> FIGHT
OERSTED attacks!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
there's nothing new under the sun.
it's a pithy statement to the point of reductiveness, as such things usually are, but there is a truth to it, not one that condemns, but one that liberates. forgive me for drinking deep of the well of ideology here, but even though all of us may indeed be the products of the words and systems that surround us, no one is quite the same combination of influences as any other, which gives us a wholly unique perspective. but this is also why ensuring our horizons are broad is important, because although we can never widen our scope enough to take in everything, narrowing it in turn only presses the walls in around us, and leaves us with only one path forward.
dragon quest, then, is not a wholly unique game that sprung fully-formed out onto the famicom, but was once that represented a conscious effort to translate a specific mode of game - the popular pc rpgs of the time like wizardry and ultima - and many of the decisions it made clearly have immense thought and care put into them as a result of this, and the result was a game that changed the landscape of the entire industry. but in doing so, it provided a template, a set story for how these things go. defeat monsters. gather experience. explore dungeons. destroy T̵̲̼͆̅͘ͅȟ̸̲̇e̷̡̬̪͛ ̶͙̰͇̍̓̏L̵̪̽̒͌o̷͍͛r̴͖̙͋̾̕d̸̘̜͔̅̋̽ ̷̳͌́̑o̸̪͌̚f̶̗̹͓̆͂ ̶̗̗͊Ḍ̴̪̽͠a̸̙͌̍r̸̜͎̾k̶̻̽.
games that came in dragon quest's wake drew from this story, telling it over and over again. i do not wish to claim here that dragon quest is the only truly original work in the entire jrpg form because that's clearly a completely unhinged and wrong thing to say, but i do wish to argue that the things dragon quest put thought and care into creating were adopted wholesale, without the same level of purposefulness, by many other games, creating an intrinsic language of expectation and reference that in turn provides a bedrock of norms through which audiences and creators can process the form. this is useful, both artistically and financially for both the audience and the artist, but by it's nature it narrows the scope of the form arround it, and allows ideas that were never challenged or interrogated, even ones as simple as defeating enemies to gain experience points, to crystalise around the work, creating something that may indeed be beautiful, but is unmoving, unchanging.
while there are heavier consequences to this - the widespread homogenisation of monetization and progression systems in games undoubtedly is self-served by their uncritical ubiquity, and many stories continue to carry forth regressive ideas built into their hearts because the creators are unaware of them or unwilling to divest themselves from them - one that should also be considered is that the more and more complex the language of norms around a form becomes, the more insular and closed-off it is at risk of becoming.
one need only look at the third most-important JRPG to release in july 2022 to see what this results in: a complete mess of a game, only barely held together by self-justifying tropes and glue that the prospective player - intimately familiar with the construction of and tropes of these games - will simply accept and enjoy singularly. ask a single question about it's world or it's characters or it's plot and it's illusion of cohesiveness will shatter instantly. why does the party react with such horror to someone killing for sport in this cutscene, but will happily recruit the sexy warrior woman who also kills for sport in the very next cutscene? because each one is a trope that carries a set of norms that is implicitly understood and accepted by it's core audience, and proves to be completely baffling to anyone who does not speak this language - or, indeed, Thinks for One Minute.
(i kinda like it though. i am a student of this language, after all.)
the games that result from this aren't necessarily bad, but i think truly exceptional works will strive to be more than the perpetuations of their genre, want to create an experience that aspires to more than simply playing the hits and playing them adequately. because when your path is narrow, there's really only one way forward.
which brings us, at last, to live a live, and to what makes it truly special. while I think this game is clever and inventive constantly, i don't want to let that be mistaken for a game that is unlike anything you've seen or played before. indeed, in many ways, live a live revels in cliche, with each of its scenarios merrily indulging in the rote tropes of its genre. the difference is not merely in the choice to tackle stories that are - still! - rarely glimpsed within the JRPG form, but in how these stories are told. these are not 7 different miniature jrpgs in one - these are 7 stories that, like the original dragon quest before it, think so carefully about each aspect of themselves, and use jrpg mechanics in unique and surprising ways to tell those stories. and because it earnestly and completely invests in these stories, they are brought to new and wonderful life.
i have seen the story of a master training a prospective student to succeed them, but until live a live, i have never so completely been that master, thinking carefully about what techniques most benefit each of the students under my care, and trying to teach what I can in the time I have left. when i see my student finally surpass me, i feel genuine pride, because them reaching Level 9 means so much when I have been stuck in my Level 8 ways for all this time. i've seen heroes scramble to put together traps and tricks in a time limit to defeat an overwhelming enemy, but by utilizing a creative conception of the RPG loop of rifling through chests and cabinets for loot, it becomes realized kinaesthetically in a way i've scarcely seen before. not every chapter is wholly successful - for me, akira's near future anime ova riff does the least work to make the beats it's playing sing with new life by relying on a conception of the cliches themselves as self-evidently worthwhile, in a way that is shockingly prescient of the direction increasingly anime-influenced jrpgs like tales and xeno end up taking - but in almost all cases, live a live's creative use of its mechanics, presentation, and design makes what could potentially be rote stories play in beautiful harmony, a harmony that resounds through the commonalities that exist through the stories. there's nothing new under the sun, after all, and so each of these stories, these ideas, feed into one another across history, ultimately fighting the same enemy - hatred - across all time, as a straight club banger plays over the same fight being fought across the millennia.
live a live's unwillingness to accept for granted the norms of the RPG extends to all facets of it's construction, and the battle system is the clearest case for this. random encounters do exist, but they are confined behind the bars of the kingdom of lucrece, rpg conventions being a malady that haunts that land as a sickness more virulent than any the lord of dark could spread. but even here, you are subtly encouraged to flee from battle much more often than you would in other games of its type, due to both the game's EXP system making rewards for fighting weaker enemies to be so utterly negligible as to be practically nonexistent, and the way it offers rewards for escaping from battles with a certain character. In comparison to earthbound simply skipping encounters when you hit them, whilst still giving you all the rewards for combat, such as they are, live a live instead invites you to exercise your own restraint, to consciously choose to sheathe your sword, which is an interesting wrinkle that adds a layer of intentionality to it's violence once you realize that this isn't one of the long list of other jrpgs where you should never really use the flee button.
the chapters that come closest to being purely normative in their play are prehistoric and near future, but even here, the former invites you to become a hunter by having your nose track encounters in the world, and the latter has enemies patrolling the city streets of neo-japan in such a way that you can avoid confrontation but can also get cornered and blocked off. both are thematic and evocative, as are wild west's maneuver of a long buildup to a single gunfight and edo japan's invocation of the idea that a sword drawn is a conscious decision that invites violence (slightly hampered by certain traps putting you in a position where you have no choice but to draw it), but it's the far future that has the most thoughtful approach to combat in the game: because it mostly doesn't have it.
well, that's not true. you can actually play an arcade game using the game's combat system at almost any time, but it is consciously a distraction, separate from the ongoing concerns of the ship. your role in this chapter is that of a witness: a silent observer to the sci-fi horror film playing out around you. here, live a live demonstrates a remarkable awareness of the limits of it's own form - combat is how you interact with this world and combat won't help you here: all you can do is watch, and make coffee, as personal tragedies play out in front of you time and time again. fittingly for a chapter that takes place at the farthest reaches of time and humanity, far future explores the furthest edge of it's systems by depicting a story somewhat beyond the reach of the framework it finds itself in. like a beacon of hope shot in the night, pleading for a more nuanced world than this one. it's not surprising that the final moments of the chapter have you explicitly use the medium of a video game to kill a nascent life form, nor is it shocking that there is a twinge of regret that this is the only way this could have gone. isn't it a little sad that this is the way games currently are?
each element of the game is so well-considered, so carefully constructed to resonate and cohere with the wider piece and with itself. never is something there simply because it is expected to be there, never is a trope invoked without care or consideration into how it can be made to work with the greater whole. and when assumptions are found to be lacking, where the gaps of implication they leave behind are too big to ignore, they are challenged.
the oersted chapter is something of a flashpoint both for the game's critical legacy - such as it is - and the narrative around it. after a series of adventures that use rpg mechanics in creative and exciting ways to bring these pulp adventures to life, ending with a rote dragon quest riff could only be a bizarre self-defeating maneuver. is it any wonder then, that oersted was doomed? it's easy to look at the final moments of the hero declaring himself odio, lord of the dark, near-exclusively, but it's the moments beforehand - elevated by the remake's tastefully extended script, producing that exceedingly rare remake that i prefer to the original, whilst still having things the original does better - that make it work. the princess' agonised cries over the man she actually loved being murdered by the uncaring mute she was betrothed to because he happened to defeat the man she loved in combat at a tourney followed by her suicide is the real shock of this chapter, one where the care and attention live a live shows to all the cliches it invokes is turned on the dominant form of it's genre, exposing the sexist ideology that persists through dragon quest's vision of the heroic narrative. oersted's blind adherence to the script of his genre might lead to him falling to the darkness, but i will point out that the game doesn't use this to say that dragon quest is evil - this isn't spec ops: the line for jrpgs. the story of a band of heroes setting out to defeat the evil is not the issue: it is doing so unthinkingly, accepting rewards and events blindly, of assuming a love belongs to you simply because you are the hero that is entitled to it. oersted is not evil because jrpgs are evil: he's evil because he didn't think for a single second about the narrative handed to him.
it's why the final chapter itself still plays out like a traditional JRPG: assembling a party and travelling to the final dungeon to defeat the final boss with the power of friendship. but because it earns it, because it does the work to make every single step on that journey, because it refuses to simply take for granted the baked-in assumptions of it's genre and it's form...it works. it feels natural, it feels right. there's a strong argument to be made that live a live is something of a naive idealist in how it argues that the broad arcs of these stories are never irredeemable but are corruptible through thoughtlessness, but when it makes it's arguments with this much care and confidence it's very difficult to quibble with it. i never have to feel like I have to stop thinking, or just embrace that this is the way this story has to go in order to enjoy it, like I might have to do for so many other modern jrpgs, that are so wrapped up in their own convulution that they forget to do the work to actually make you care. as jackson tyler touches on in their own piece on the game, live a live is arguably even better in 2022 than it was in 1994, because of the way the genre has changed and, maybe more importantly, the ways that it hasn't, becoming more and more wrapped up in the snake eating its own tail without bothering to ask why we have the snake eat the tail in the first place, what might be gained by doing something new.
there is nothing completely new under the sun. live a live knows this, and accepts it, but remains inventive, remains questioning, remains determined to push up against the boundaries of what rpgs - what video games - can do, to find new ways to tell old stories, and old ways to tell new stories, playing the old hits with a purpose and style that makes them sing like they never quite have before, and hitting out with some new singles that won't ever leave you. Inspired, and inspiring in turn: live a live is a game to make you love games, a creation to make you want to create, and a memory I don't think I'll ever forget.
2009
This review contains spoilers
CW: this one is...it's maybe NSFW in the same way that you wouldn't play some Bayonetta in the same room as your parents, if you catch my drift.
ben esposito, director of neon white, has claimed that that game was made "by freaks, for freaks", which got me thinking. what does such a game look like? what does a true game that flies it's freak flag high wear before it begins to peel it off, teasing all around it just enough to excite them before baring it's full naked form for an audience it knows will bark and howl for it? bayonetta. obviously.
such blood has been spilt over one question, rephrased and relitigated countless times: is bayonetta exploitative or empowering? feminist or objectivist? I'm here to tell you that the answer to these questions is Yes. bayonetta is a character designed by a woman under the direction of a man who wanted his dream woman brought to life. bayonetta is an all-powerful dominant force rarely not in complete control of the situation, that dances and parades herself for the male gaze as well as her own amusement. spank material for straight cis teenage boys and the most delightfully camp For The Gays drag show energy in the world, and earnest transition goals for transfems. bayonetta is all these things at once. the perceptions of bayonetta and what she is and does tangle up in themselves in a mess under the covers: sex, and by extension erotica, is inherently messy and you aren't going to get the clear-cut answers you want by demanding obsequious deference: you're in mommy's house now. be good, and maybe she'll give you what you want.
kinesthetic erotica to boil your blood and make the hairs on your neck stand on end like almost nothing else in the world. the thousand tiny moments of ever-building tension until it explodes into relief that the wicked weave system creates will never fail to make me shiver with delight, a bed of deep satisfaction that makes it so easy to excuse all the awkward fumbling when it reaches out of its comfort zone. it's an intoxicating (s)witch, one that's open to anything you can imagine and more besides. turn the difficulty down and you can effortlessly style on heaven's soldiers as the dominatrix supervillain of your wildest fantasies, or turn the difficulty up and have the game break you over its knee and make you beg for more, whilst still consenting to your learning how to turn the tables and show paradiso what a real witch can do.
many games are very bad at being convincingly erotic for a wide variety of reasons, whether out of the depressing commercialism of it all, the narrow audience of straight cis teenage boys most big games are aiming for, or just for taking themselves far too seriously. bayonetta succeeds because it puts such immense effort and care into fooling around, into not only its ludicrous high camp world and story, but also in the act of playing it, and enticing you to engage with it on terms both you and it consent to. dom or sub, any, all, or none of the toys of it's bedside table, in cutscenes and in play, bayonetta has one goal that overrides all others: to bring you to it's infinite climaxes, over and over again.there are many many tiny irrations and dissatisfactions with bayonetta that crawl into my mind once i'm hit with the clarity of the afterglow, but once i'm in there, it's hard to think about them, it's hard to think about anything else, other the game's intoxicating invitations push harder and faster against your limits and its, until either you or it or both of you can't take anymore, until...
...until we are all satisfied.
ben esposito, director of neon white, has claimed that that game was made "by freaks, for freaks", which got me thinking. what does such a game look like? what does a true game that flies it's freak flag high wear before it begins to peel it off, teasing all around it just enough to excite them before baring it's full naked form for an audience it knows will bark and howl for it? bayonetta. obviously.
such blood has been spilt over one question, rephrased and relitigated countless times: is bayonetta exploitative or empowering? feminist or objectivist? I'm here to tell you that the answer to these questions is Yes. bayonetta is a character designed by a woman under the direction of a man who wanted his dream woman brought to life. bayonetta is an all-powerful dominant force rarely not in complete control of the situation, that dances and parades herself for the male gaze as well as her own amusement. spank material for straight cis teenage boys and the most delightfully camp For The Gays drag show energy in the world, and earnest transition goals for transfems. bayonetta is all these things at once. the perceptions of bayonetta and what she is and does tangle up in themselves in a mess under the covers: sex, and by extension erotica, is inherently messy and you aren't going to get the clear-cut answers you want by demanding obsequious deference: you're in mommy's house now. be good, and maybe she'll give you what you want.
kinesthetic erotica to boil your blood and make the hairs on your neck stand on end like almost nothing else in the world. the thousand tiny moments of ever-building tension until it explodes into relief that the wicked weave system creates will never fail to make me shiver with delight, a bed of deep satisfaction that makes it so easy to excuse all the awkward fumbling when it reaches out of its comfort zone. it's an intoxicating (s)witch, one that's open to anything you can imagine and more besides. turn the difficulty down and you can effortlessly style on heaven's soldiers as the dominatrix supervillain of your wildest fantasies, or turn the difficulty up and have the game break you over its knee and make you beg for more, whilst still consenting to your learning how to turn the tables and show paradiso what a real witch can do.
many games are very bad at being convincingly erotic for a wide variety of reasons, whether out of the depressing commercialism of it all, the narrow audience of straight cis teenage boys most big games are aiming for, or just for taking themselves far too seriously. bayonetta succeeds because it puts such immense effort and care into fooling around, into not only its ludicrous high camp world and story, but also in the act of playing it, and enticing you to engage with it on terms both you and it consent to. dom or sub, any, all, or none of the toys of it's bedside table, in cutscenes and in play, bayonetta has one goal that overrides all others: to bring you to it's infinite climaxes, over and over again.there are many many tiny irrations and dissatisfactions with bayonetta that crawl into my mind once i'm hit with the clarity of the afterglow, but once i'm in there, it's hard to think about them, it's hard to think about anything else, other the game's intoxicating invitations push harder and faster against your limits and its, until either you or it or both of you can't take anymore, until...
...until we are all satisfied.
-- Gorgeously rendered open world with clear thought put into it's design that is still actually pretty boring to traverse
-- Great music
-- A guitar riff plays in the cutscenes when the main characters start doing naruto shit and it's sick
-- Mostly boring sidequests with one or two bizarrely hidden really good ones
-- Too long
-- Some truly loaded language that it is not interested in or capable of discussing in any meaningful way
yep, it sure is xenoblade!!
if xenoblade chronicles is a mostly pretty brainless but highly entertaining shonen anime, then future connected is the non-canon movie spin-off where nothing really happens but it gives you a bit more time to spend with some characters you like, and it's an ok one of those. unless melia is your wife you're really not gonna get much out of this, and in true Takahashi fashion the character of Gael'Gar evokes some really heavy stuff that the game doesn't really have the capability or interest to handle accordingly. but, y'know, if you're deep enough into the xenoblade well to be playing the epilogue OVA, you're probably used to monolithsoft taking wild careless swings.
i think i'm mostly disappointed by how conservative it is. not in the weird kind of "reclaim-the-empire" honor and duty of the nobility thing, that's conservative in a different way, one that i already kind of expect from these games. i mean conservative in the sense that that future connected is wholly uninterested in doing anything remotely interesting, even as it charges past the point where the story really should have Ended. monolithsoft seem determined to dull whatever thematic impact the original ending of xenoblade 1 has, first with stuff in xenoblade 2, and now with this, showing that whatever infinite horizons and new futures await us, they're going to be the same people doing mostly the same things in the same places. and if future connected was about that, it would be interesting! but it isn't. in fact, it seems keen to insist that this is, in fact, a New World despite the fact that basically nothing has changed. if we had to return to this world, I would have liked for them to get creative or ambitious with it, to do something to justify it's existence, because as it stands, all future connected really does is hang limply off the body of a game that was already perfectly fine.
if this really is the Definitive Edition of xenoblade chronicles, when what does that say for what shape it will take place in history? an awkward appendix clinging on to a game that never needed it and arguably suffers from it's attachment? it doesn't even succeed at being more xenoblade gameplay, because you're working with a constrained and hampered toolset that's much less interesting to play around in. it's just a worse, miniature version of xenoblade chronicles. what's Definitive about that? have we learned nothing from Persona 3's The Answer? i doubt future connected will have much impact on history at all, except as a slightly unsightly asterisk on xenoblade chronicles' place in it.
however, it gets an extra star for two reasons. first: it was nice to enjoy a new bit of xenoblade content after my relationship with xenoblade 2 ended up so deeply fraught. i used to consider myself a xenoblade fan and 2, in not just being (imo) a really bad game but also something that held a perspective i found really triggering, kind of killed that part of me. so it was nice to just Enjoy this! two: they made nopons good again. oh my god. it's taken them two games and two expansions but they are finally great little guys we all love again. it's a fucking miracle!! kino forever!!!!
-- Great music
-- A guitar riff plays in the cutscenes when the main characters start doing naruto shit and it's sick
-- Mostly boring sidequests with one or two bizarrely hidden really good ones
-- Too long
-- Some truly loaded language that it is not interested in or capable of discussing in any meaningful way
yep, it sure is xenoblade!!
if xenoblade chronicles is a mostly pretty brainless but highly entertaining shonen anime, then future connected is the non-canon movie spin-off where nothing really happens but it gives you a bit more time to spend with some characters you like, and it's an ok one of those. unless melia is your wife you're really not gonna get much out of this, and in true Takahashi fashion the character of Gael'Gar evokes some really heavy stuff that the game doesn't really have the capability or interest to handle accordingly. but, y'know, if you're deep enough into the xenoblade well to be playing the epilogue OVA, you're probably used to monolithsoft taking wild careless swings.
i think i'm mostly disappointed by how conservative it is. not in the weird kind of "reclaim-the-empire" honor and duty of the nobility thing, that's conservative in a different way, one that i already kind of expect from these games. i mean conservative in the sense that that future connected is wholly uninterested in doing anything remotely interesting, even as it charges past the point where the story really should have Ended. monolithsoft seem determined to dull whatever thematic impact the original ending of xenoblade 1 has, first with stuff in xenoblade 2, and now with this, showing that whatever infinite horizons and new futures await us, they're going to be the same people doing mostly the same things in the same places. and if future connected was about that, it would be interesting! but it isn't. in fact, it seems keen to insist that this is, in fact, a New World despite the fact that basically nothing has changed. if we had to return to this world, I would have liked for them to get creative or ambitious with it, to do something to justify it's existence, because as it stands, all future connected really does is hang limply off the body of a game that was already perfectly fine.
if this really is the Definitive Edition of xenoblade chronicles, when what does that say for what shape it will take place in history? an awkward appendix clinging on to a game that never needed it and arguably suffers from it's attachment? it doesn't even succeed at being more xenoblade gameplay, because you're working with a constrained and hampered toolset that's much less interesting to play around in. it's just a worse, miniature version of xenoblade chronicles. what's Definitive about that? have we learned nothing from Persona 3's The Answer? i doubt future connected will have much impact on history at all, except as a slightly unsightly asterisk on xenoblade chronicles' place in it.
however, it gets an extra star for two reasons. first: it was nice to enjoy a new bit of xenoblade content after my relationship with xenoblade 2 ended up so deeply fraught. i used to consider myself a xenoblade fan and 2, in not just being (imo) a really bad game but also something that held a perspective i found really triggering, kind of killed that part of me. so it was nice to just Enjoy this! two: they made nopons good again. oh my god. it's taken them two games and two expansions but they are finally great little guys we all love again. it's a fucking miracle!! kino forever!!!!
2022
"When you're pushed, killing's as easy as breathing."
Video games are violent.
Shocker, I know. Stunned silence across the board, I'm sure. The conversation around violence in games is one that is as old as the medium itself, and is maybe the most misguided and exhausting of the conversations around the medium, in the mainstream at least. Largely, I think this is because the counter-response to the, indeed, worthy-of-critique ubiquity of games were you hurt and kill others, is so routinely embarrassing.
If you google "non-violent video games", one of the first games that crops up is Cities: Skylines. While it is true that you do not personally murder anyone with a sword in Cities: Skylines, and setting aside the fact that you can use disasters to commit absolute genocide of your largely invisible population, to describe Cities: Skylines as a non-violent game is mind-bogglingly ridiculous to me. The ideology that drives this game - indeed, one that drives the entire genre - is that of growth - growth upon growth, nothing but growth in this blasted land, the incarnation of Reaganomics, the management of the human mind through the construction of the space around them to ensure efficiency.
Sure, Cities: Skylines is slightly less toxic than it's overbearing predecessor SimCity, the breakout title from Will Wright, who's game development portfolio consists almost entirely of adaptations of neo-conservative texts he consumed completely uncritically. It has a huge emphasis on public transport, and the gameplay loop of that title is defined by your attempt to stem the tide of traffic clogging the arteries of your city with the kind of Smart, Walkable, Mixed-Use Urbanism that is Illegal To Build In Most American Cities...as long as it still fits within the image of the American megalopolis super-city. Everything about Cities: Skylines pushes you to grow, small cosy towns at one with nature are not considered a valid end goal but an implicit failure to follow the path of perpetual growth, of endless explosive population and income increase, to make a city of towering skyscrapers, booming industry, bustling streets, to the point that the game will constrain your creative powers until you meet certain thresholds of population and size.
One need only look at London, New York, Los Angeles, Dublin, hell, even my own home city of Belfast, tiny as it is in comparison to these others, to see the consequences of this ideology. Their impact on the world ecologically, their impact on how we live our lives, their impact on our mental state...this is all violence, real violence, but violence that is abstracted, violence where you can't see the knife and the throat it cuts into, until you really look, until you see all those curved benches around town that hurt to lie on, that no longer have backrests or are dotted with little "armrests" for what they really are.
By any reasonable metric that understands how the world works and how systems and laws can cause harm to others, Cities: Skylines is a violent video game. Even a player that is conscious of the environment, that takes the time to produce robust public transport solutions, you're almost certainly going to commit more violence to the little abstract people of Spunkburg or whatever than Solid Snake could manage over the course of his mission to Shadow Moses. But it doesn't feel that way, because the violence is abstracted, hidden behind spreadsheets and charts and corporate focus-tested interface design, all rounded edges and pastel colors. The violence is abstract, over there.
Now, I'm far from the first person to say this, and there is plenty of conversation about violent video games that takes an actual understanding of what material violence actually is into account. But most of that conversation is relegated to either actual academic spaces or occasionally, in alternative academic works on YouTube or, indeed, Backloggd. Rarely does it percolate into the mainstream discourse enough to change the conception of what a violent video game actually is. The kind of mainstream critique of violent video games - one that can be seen most strongly in the Wholesome Games movement - does not seem to me an actual objection to Violence, but a discomfort with it's presentation, with the fact that the violence of tearing open an Imp's head in Doom Eternal is impossible to ignore as anything other than the violent act that it is. It is not an actual concern about the depiction or normalization of violence in video games, it is principally, an objection to the viscera of it's presentation. It is, if you will pardon my French, a bourgeois indulgence.
I don't think it's impossible to make truly non-violent video games, nor do I think that the ubiquity of games where the primary/sole modes of interaction it facilitates is killing is unworthy of critique. But I do think that the nature of what violence actually is makes that far more difficult than one might initially think.
Let me explain by talking about something that I think Backloggd would do well to consider more often: Board Games. If one was so inclined, one could categorize most any board game into one of two camps: abstract games, and thematic games. A thematic board game is one that would use an aesthetic, narrative, or other kind of theming in order to place the mechanics of the game into a context in order to facilitate the intentions of the game. For example, Monopoly is a game where each player plays the role of a real-estate/business mogul who is travelling around London/New York/The Fortnite Island buying up properties in order to eventually win the game by being the player with the most money at the end. As a game where the explicit goal is to bankrupt every other player, Monopoly is plainly a Violent Board Game, even if at no point does your little top hat take out a gun and shoot the thimble in the head. But what about Abstract games? Chess is probably the most famous abstract game in the world, it's mechanics and rules are offered no real justification or contextualization by a theme - castles, in real life, contrary to Chess' bizarre worldview, can actually move diagonally. And yet, despite this, the violence of the real world creeps into Chess. It's pieces are named according to the hierarchy of the feudal system, with higher pieces being ever more powerful and capable, up to the King, who is functionally invincible in a way the other pieces aren't.
What about Go? This Chinese abstract game that is at least 2500 years old, predating most of the concepts that have been mentioned in this review, doesn't even have named spaces or concepts - players simply take turns placing colored pieces and whoever has the most points at the end wins. But even though Go doesn't have anything resembling a traditional theme, it remains a game of violence - most obviously through the way an opponents pieces can be captured, but also through how scores are tallied, through how big the territory you control is. Even though there are no soldiers, even though there is none of the formal mechanisms of violence, conversations about Go refer to it's movements and situations as battles in a war because the mechanics are derived from violent social constructions about the capture and ownership of territory and individuals.
The dichotomy between theme and abstract is not as present in video games, but there does remain a sliding scale between games that attempt some form of verisimilitude in it's visuals and play, and those that preference kinesthetic interaction far more than caring to contextualize that. Which brings me, at last, to Libble Rabble.
Libble Rabble is the game that I thought about the most while playing Quantum Bummer Blues. This arcade classic from the designer of Pac-Man is far from the traditional image of "violent video game" that that phrase conjures. It is a (mostly) abstract game where the player controls two cursors at once, drawling lines around pegs in the game space to capture space inside them. There is no real context for who the player is or why they are doing this, and yet, much like Chess or Go, the violence of our society is inherent in these mechanics. Encircling land on the map changes it's hue, marking your territory like an explorer planting a flag of plain colors, and if you happen to capture objects or creatures in that territory, they vanish, and in their place, offer points. The encirclement and capture of living creatures is core to the loop of Libble Rabble.
I don't say this to condemn Libble Rabble - I have no actual ethical concerns about it whatsoever - nor to make a statement along the lines of "Pac-Man is actually a guy taking a load of drugs at a rave". Instead, I hope all of this has convincingly demonstrated that violence, as a concept, exists on so many levels beyond the act of hurting virtual dolls (incidentally, please read Vehmently's incredible piece on that particular aesthetic subject ) and that "non-violent games" are instead merely games that successfully abstract out their violence so that we can be comforted by the illusion of it's non-presence, and that the fetishization of that illusion leads us to uncomfortable places.
Violence is not inescapable in play, but games are violent, and they are violent because we are violent, because they are made, produced, and played by a culture where violence is ubiquitous. Not because human beings are a kind of hobbesian construct of pure violence and that Link slashing a bokoblin in some way taps into a fundamental human instinct towards harming others, but because we live in a violent and flammable world that snaps and twists and folds our limbs into origami shapes that fold our mind into thoughts and places where violence is normal. We probably aren't going to juggle-combo an opponent in the King of Iron First Tournament in our everyday lives, but violence is all around us, it is inherent to the structures and systems that entomb us, it's only hidden from view, abstracted and blurred by those same systems, and it is only when the abstraction is removed and the image is in focus do we acknowledge it for what it is.
It is this that is so remarkable about Quantum Bummer Blues. In play, it bears remarkable similarity to abstract games, and Libble Rabble in particular, feels to me like a clear ancestor of this game's design. But unlike all these other games, QBB marks it's body deep with the violence of our world, never allowing anything you do to be comfortably abstracted. Any potential implication of the premise of it's play is fully incorporated - what could be a simple contextless line is a trail of blood leaning away from a murdered corpse, and each action is contextualized by the game's compelling stream-of-consciousness writing. Self-harm is a mechanic in this game, a delicate balance that was the only way I got as far as I did, and the game faces this head-on. And the abstract maze that you bleed through is a prison tucked far out of earth's sight, where human minds and bodies are bent and broken and twisted into shapes that are comforting to our bourgeois bounds of acceptability and comfort. More than a game that deconstructs assumptions of video game mechanics, more than one that exposes a dark truth about the world narratively, QBB, by violently jamming traditionally abstract arcade-style mechanics into an aesthetic and narrative framework that absolutely refuses to fade into the background and let itself be blurred out, articulates with astonishing clarity just how violent our society and the things it creates is.
In a space that so often dodges the full implications of it's mechanics, where the more serious the themes, the more abstractions are removed, Quantum Bummer Blues is a blast of summer wind, a game that is brutally, angrily honest, about itself, about games, and how these things fit into a burning world. An act not of condemnation, but excoriation.
This is the world. How do you stand it?
It's as easy as breathing.
Video games are violent.
Shocker, I know. Stunned silence across the board, I'm sure. The conversation around violence in games is one that is as old as the medium itself, and is maybe the most misguided and exhausting of the conversations around the medium, in the mainstream at least. Largely, I think this is because the counter-response to the, indeed, worthy-of-critique ubiquity of games were you hurt and kill others, is so routinely embarrassing.
If you google "non-violent video games", one of the first games that crops up is Cities: Skylines. While it is true that you do not personally murder anyone with a sword in Cities: Skylines, and setting aside the fact that you can use disasters to commit absolute genocide of your largely invisible population, to describe Cities: Skylines as a non-violent game is mind-bogglingly ridiculous to me. The ideology that drives this game - indeed, one that drives the entire genre - is that of growth - growth upon growth, nothing but growth in this blasted land, the incarnation of Reaganomics, the management of the human mind through the construction of the space around them to ensure efficiency.
Sure, Cities: Skylines is slightly less toxic than it's overbearing predecessor SimCity, the breakout title from Will Wright, who's game development portfolio consists almost entirely of adaptations of neo-conservative texts he consumed completely uncritically. It has a huge emphasis on public transport, and the gameplay loop of that title is defined by your attempt to stem the tide of traffic clogging the arteries of your city with the kind of Smart, Walkable, Mixed-Use Urbanism that is Illegal To Build In Most American Cities...as long as it still fits within the image of the American megalopolis super-city. Everything about Cities: Skylines pushes you to grow, small cosy towns at one with nature are not considered a valid end goal but an implicit failure to follow the path of perpetual growth, of endless explosive population and income increase, to make a city of towering skyscrapers, booming industry, bustling streets, to the point that the game will constrain your creative powers until you meet certain thresholds of population and size.
One need only look at London, New York, Los Angeles, Dublin, hell, even my own home city of Belfast, tiny as it is in comparison to these others, to see the consequences of this ideology. Their impact on the world ecologically, their impact on how we live our lives, their impact on our mental state...this is all violence, real violence, but violence that is abstracted, violence where you can't see the knife and the throat it cuts into, until you really look, until you see all those curved benches around town that hurt to lie on, that no longer have backrests or are dotted with little "armrests" for what they really are.
By any reasonable metric that understands how the world works and how systems and laws can cause harm to others, Cities: Skylines is a violent video game. Even a player that is conscious of the environment, that takes the time to produce robust public transport solutions, you're almost certainly going to commit more violence to the little abstract people of Spunkburg or whatever than Solid Snake could manage over the course of his mission to Shadow Moses. But it doesn't feel that way, because the violence is abstracted, hidden behind spreadsheets and charts and corporate focus-tested interface design, all rounded edges and pastel colors. The violence is abstract, over there.
Now, I'm far from the first person to say this, and there is plenty of conversation about violent video games that takes an actual understanding of what material violence actually is into account. But most of that conversation is relegated to either actual academic spaces or occasionally, in alternative academic works on YouTube or, indeed, Backloggd. Rarely does it percolate into the mainstream discourse enough to change the conception of what a violent video game actually is. The kind of mainstream critique of violent video games - one that can be seen most strongly in the Wholesome Games movement - does not seem to me an actual objection to Violence, but a discomfort with it's presentation, with the fact that the violence of tearing open an Imp's head in Doom Eternal is impossible to ignore as anything other than the violent act that it is. It is not an actual concern about the depiction or normalization of violence in video games, it is principally, an objection to the viscera of it's presentation. It is, if you will pardon my French, a bourgeois indulgence.
I don't think it's impossible to make truly non-violent video games, nor do I think that the ubiquity of games where the primary/sole modes of interaction it facilitates is killing is unworthy of critique. But I do think that the nature of what violence actually is makes that far more difficult than one might initially think.
Let me explain by talking about something that I think Backloggd would do well to consider more often: Board Games. If one was so inclined, one could categorize most any board game into one of two camps: abstract games, and thematic games. A thematic board game is one that would use an aesthetic, narrative, or other kind of theming in order to place the mechanics of the game into a context in order to facilitate the intentions of the game. For example, Monopoly is a game where each player plays the role of a real-estate/business mogul who is travelling around London/New York/The Fortnite Island buying up properties in order to eventually win the game by being the player with the most money at the end. As a game where the explicit goal is to bankrupt every other player, Monopoly is plainly a Violent Board Game, even if at no point does your little top hat take out a gun and shoot the thimble in the head. But what about Abstract games? Chess is probably the most famous abstract game in the world, it's mechanics and rules are offered no real justification or contextualization by a theme - castles, in real life, contrary to Chess' bizarre worldview, can actually move diagonally. And yet, despite this, the violence of the real world creeps into Chess. It's pieces are named according to the hierarchy of the feudal system, with higher pieces being ever more powerful and capable, up to the King, who is functionally invincible in a way the other pieces aren't.
What about Go? This Chinese abstract game that is at least 2500 years old, predating most of the concepts that have been mentioned in this review, doesn't even have named spaces or concepts - players simply take turns placing colored pieces and whoever has the most points at the end wins. But even though Go doesn't have anything resembling a traditional theme, it remains a game of violence - most obviously through the way an opponents pieces can be captured, but also through how scores are tallied, through how big the territory you control is. Even though there are no soldiers, even though there is none of the formal mechanisms of violence, conversations about Go refer to it's movements and situations as battles in a war because the mechanics are derived from violent social constructions about the capture and ownership of territory and individuals.
The dichotomy between theme and abstract is not as present in video games, but there does remain a sliding scale between games that attempt some form of verisimilitude in it's visuals and play, and those that preference kinesthetic interaction far more than caring to contextualize that. Which brings me, at last, to Libble Rabble.
Libble Rabble is the game that I thought about the most while playing Quantum Bummer Blues. This arcade classic from the designer of Pac-Man is far from the traditional image of "violent video game" that that phrase conjures. It is a (mostly) abstract game where the player controls two cursors at once, drawling lines around pegs in the game space to capture space inside them. There is no real context for who the player is or why they are doing this, and yet, much like Chess or Go, the violence of our society is inherent in these mechanics. Encircling land on the map changes it's hue, marking your territory like an explorer planting a flag of plain colors, and if you happen to capture objects or creatures in that territory, they vanish, and in their place, offer points. The encirclement and capture of living creatures is core to the loop of Libble Rabble.
I don't say this to condemn Libble Rabble - I have no actual ethical concerns about it whatsoever - nor to make a statement along the lines of "Pac-Man is actually a guy taking a load of drugs at a rave". Instead, I hope all of this has convincingly demonstrated that violence, as a concept, exists on so many levels beyond the act of hurting virtual dolls (incidentally, please read Vehmently's incredible piece on that particular aesthetic subject ) and that "non-violent games" are instead merely games that successfully abstract out their violence so that we can be comforted by the illusion of it's non-presence, and that the fetishization of that illusion leads us to uncomfortable places.
Violence is not inescapable in play, but games are violent, and they are violent because we are violent, because they are made, produced, and played by a culture where violence is ubiquitous. Not because human beings are a kind of hobbesian construct of pure violence and that Link slashing a bokoblin in some way taps into a fundamental human instinct towards harming others, but because we live in a violent and flammable world that snaps and twists and folds our limbs into origami shapes that fold our mind into thoughts and places where violence is normal. We probably aren't going to juggle-combo an opponent in the King of Iron First Tournament in our everyday lives, but violence is all around us, it is inherent to the structures and systems that entomb us, it's only hidden from view, abstracted and blurred by those same systems, and it is only when the abstraction is removed and the image is in focus do we acknowledge it for what it is.
It is this that is so remarkable about Quantum Bummer Blues. In play, it bears remarkable similarity to abstract games, and Libble Rabble in particular, feels to me like a clear ancestor of this game's design. But unlike all these other games, QBB marks it's body deep with the violence of our world, never allowing anything you do to be comfortably abstracted. Any potential implication of the premise of it's play is fully incorporated - what could be a simple contextless line is a trail of blood leaning away from a murdered corpse, and each action is contextualized by the game's compelling stream-of-consciousness writing. Self-harm is a mechanic in this game, a delicate balance that was the only way I got as far as I did, and the game faces this head-on. And the abstract maze that you bleed through is a prison tucked far out of earth's sight, where human minds and bodies are bent and broken and twisted into shapes that are comforting to our bourgeois bounds of acceptability and comfort. More than a game that deconstructs assumptions of video game mechanics, more than one that exposes a dark truth about the world narratively, QBB, by violently jamming traditionally abstract arcade-style mechanics into an aesthetic and narrative framework that absolutely refuses to fade into the background and let itself be blurred out, articulates with astonishing clarity just how violent our society and the things it creates is.
In a space that so often dodges the full implications of it's mechanics, where the more serious the themes, the more abstractions are removed, Quantum Bummer Blues is a blast of summer wind, a game that is brutally, angrily honest, about itself, about games, and how these things fit into a burning world. An act not of condemnation, but excoriation.
This is the world. How do you stand it?
It's as easy as breathing.
2006
"A story is a series of memories. Memories are remembered with other memories, and in turn become memories themselves. If you don't take care to preserve your memories, you'll forget them. So, please tell us frogs your memories of everything so far... That is what people refer to as 'saving'."
This isn't really a review, more of just some...thoughts on this game and my relationship to it. Fair warning, it's pretty navel-gazey and self-indulgent. You may not really get on with this one.
One of the all-time best Hard Drive headlines remains "Huge Earthbound Fan Excited To Play It For The First Time". It's a good gag, an playfully teasing dig that is funny because it's true, and could only come from a place of understanding of the EarthBound/Mother fandom. I know, because once upon a time, I was a Huge Mother 3 Fan Excited To Play It For The First Time.
It's hard to emphasize how much of a fetish object Mother 3 was for the western EarthBound fandom, even for the wider JRPG fandom. I became aware of EarthBound through Smash Bros, as I am sure most people my age did, and was immediately taken in by how out-of-a-piece it was with the rest of Nintendo's stable, and my interest only skyrocketed when I searched the internet and found out that EarthBound was super fucked up and weird and scary in a way only slightly off-beat Nintendo games hyped up by 14-year olds who don't really know anything else could be.
(See also: Majora's Mask, and endless features in Official Nintendo Magazine UK swearing that the ReDeads in Ocarina of Time were the scariest shit in the fucking world man you'd fuckin shit and piss your pants)
And then, of course, there was the sequel on the Game Boy Advance, that never left Japan and never would, implicitly because it would emotionally scar anyone who played it and was even more messed up than it's fuckin twisted predecessor. EarthBound has a habit of being slightly spoken over by many of its most ardent fans, certainly, those I was privy to in my days lurking on noted Haven for Absolute Unhinged Freaks Starmen.net, but Mother 3 was on a whole other level. Everything about this game was spoken of in terms of absurd religiosity, which was only heightened by its relative inaccessibility. Speaking about the game in hyperbolic terms practically became a core tenant of the EarthBound fandom, as if an official translation could be physically evoked out of the ether if enough people were enthusiastic enough for it. Entire swathes of the game were freely discussed, both before and after the (also given a kind of quasi-religious status by the fandom) fan translation were released, spoiling every single conceivable thing in the game in order to entice someone, anyone to give it a go and join the chorus, never quite seeming to realize that, mostly, they were was just talking to each other, and to impressionable 13-year-olds like me.
I swallowed all of this. It was hard not to. I remember one day, on what was probably at the time the most exciting website ever devised, the Smash Bros. Dojo, which contained daily updates for the sure-to-be greatest Smash Bros. ever made when Lucas and New Pork City were announced. To say I lost my shit was an understatement. I freaked out to just about any of my friends who would care to listen, performing the same role of Eulogist that all the people I saw online do for Mother 3, giving away every possible twist and reveal and plot point to people who, maybe might have actually played EarthBound on their own one day and liked it well enough. To say that I was a fan of Mother 3 at this point would be incorrect: I was a religious convert, a cultist, a Happy-Happyist passing down the teachings that I had taken in from sermons of the mount like "Blues Brothers Symbolism in EarthBound". Blue, blue.
I did play EarthBound, and really loved it, mostly because like 80% of the conversation around the game, when I was getting into it, was about how totally fucked up the final boss battle with Giygas is, and the remaining 20% was endless relitigating about why a game so impossibly magical and amazing didn't sell well enough, which carried the implicit conversation with the unreleased status of Mother 3. Because of this, I found so many surprises and things I found personally resonant, things that I had nothing to bring to other than myself. I didn't even have this feeling with the even-more over-discussed Final Fantasy VII because the things culture remembers of that game are bafflingly at odds with what it actually is and what I took away from it when I came to it.
But with Mother 3? I can't say the same thing. It's partly because it's a much shorter, more focused game than it's predecessor, it's partially because it stands alongside Far Cry 2 and Dark Souls as one of the most over-analyzed games in existence. But mostly, I think it's because the fandom conversation around this game warped my perception of it and turned every step on the Nowhere Islands into charted territory, where everyone had left their mark, and I had no space to make mine, no space to find myself beneath everyone else.
There are a huge amount of things that I love about Mother 3, so many things that I appreciate, and so many things that make me smile. But I've never been able to feel like my experiences of it were entirely mine. I've never been able to find the unique resonances with my own life or experiences that characterize all of my favorite games. Everywhere I look, every corner I turn on the Nowhere Islands, I see the words of others, the perspectives of others. I look at little elements like the doorknob, and instead of being able to turn it over in my head, and place it within the wider whole, all I can hear is a cacophony of voices echoing throughout the years, the interpretations of posters on Starmen.net, Itoi and Brownie Brown's own comments on the subject, drowning out any thoughts I might have.
Yes, I could definitely discuss my thoughts on the fact that the village of Tazmily was in some way doomed to it's fate from the very beginning because of it's pursuit of an idealized vision of a specifically American past draped in western imagery that conveniently ignores the great darkness of that time in material history...but even this thought echoes with perspectives I've read countless times before. Wess' abuse, the Magypsies as a deeply clumsy but earnest attempt to explore gender non-conformity as it relates to the social and "nature", the way forgetting haunts the entire game world, as if everyone else on the Islands knows what a terrible mistake has been made by choosing to move backwards rather than forwards and desperately wishes to avoid it by enshrining themselves in your memory...it's possible you've read stuff here and thought "oh, that's interesting!" But every time I go to speak, every time I open my mouth on these things the words of others spill out, so ingrained and intertwined that I don't know which thoughts are mine and which thoughts are creeping in from forum threads long, long ago. Playing this game is like playing with a director's commentary track inside my head that I cannot switch off, commenting on the meaning or intent behind every single pixel on the screen, and it's heartbreaking because I truly believe this kind of voracious all-consuming analysis is completely antithetical to why these games are good.
Mother/Earthbound games are free-wheeling, lackadaisical, and rarely concerned with all-consuming arcs and statements. Those things are there, but the real pleasure of playing one of these games is just meeting the weird and wonderful people of this odd and beautiful world. You can see it in the battle system, in how it is playfully carefree with it's rules and rhythms, with many boss battles being beaten after you have technically been dealt lethal damage, but the game is kinda taking it easy until it gets to you. You can see it in the, frankly, absolutely astonishing soundtrack that freely mixes and matches genres and tones and instruments all processed through the woeful GBA speakers. You can see it in how the MacGuffin that dominates the first half of the game's plot is basically forgotten about and never mentioned again afterwards, in the lack of interest in connecting the dots between EarthBound and this game, in how the same reverence that the fandom spaces I hung out in hold this game and EarthBound are viewed with huge scepticism via Porky's Museum of EarthBound ephemera.
Mother 3 is not a religious object of absurd fervour, it's not a mythical Dark Dragon waiting to be unleashed. It's a video game, one that is laid back, at ease and confident in itself. And I wish I could be the same with it, but I can't help but play this game with the same awkward, nervous, stammering energy that comes with meeting an internet acquaintance in person. I wish I could be normal here, I really could! But my brain is too filled with EarthBound fansite trivia, I'm so sorry. Did you know there's an unused sprite that depicts the creation of the Masked Man, but that it was never used because it's probably just too fucked up and scary f-
Boney attacks!
...yeah, ok, I deserved that.
I've read a lot on games I love, and games I don't, but never do I really feel like those perspectives take me over, leave me unable to see the game beneath them. Certainly, my perspective has been altered by the perspectives of others, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill but with no other game do I feel so wholly unable to find myself in, no other game has this opaque wall around it made of What Other People Thought About It. Not even EarthBound has this for me. And it makes me really sad. Mother 3 is a special game. A really great one. And I think I do love it but...it's a love with a lower-case L. Despite it's reputation as a merciless feels machine, my appreciation of Mother 3 is extremely emotionally detached in a way I find kind of upsetting. There are definitely things about it that I feel strongly about, things about it that provoke profound emotion in me, but I wish I had been able to find those things for myself, instead of my love for the game sold to me by overzealous fans.
No, that's wrong. It's not the fan's fault. Well, not entirely. I do think that a lot of the conversation with these games is kind of fundamentally opposed to what they actually are in a way that speaks to the relative immaturity of a lot (not all) of the people talking about them at the point in time where their critical reception was still cooling. But ultimately, It's not the fault of people just talking enthusiastically about a game they loved, or at least, wanted to love. Mother 3 is just...as a result of my interactions with it, how long its shadow is cast across my mind as a child...trying to find personal meaning in Mother 3 that relates personally to myself is like trying to find something new in Citizen Kane. When something is that storied, that discussed...what hope do I have?
When people who were there talk about their first interactions with EarthBound, it's so often framed as this unfolding flower of a work, that grew beyond whatever humble thoughts they may have derived from the game's legendarily misguided marketing campaign. They weren't expecting to find one of the best games of all time inside it, but they did. It's the same I feel about when I played my favourite game for the first time. I wasn't prepared for the things it would do and show me. This is not to say that novelty is an inherent facet of a game I love. But at the same time...I don't know how fully I can love something that falls into a dutiful checklist of the things I already expect to find there.
I think Mother 3 is a great game. But I think people should be allowed to find that for themselves, or not if that's how it goes. It is, ultimately, A Video Game, after all, a children's video game at that, the video equivalent of a Ghibli or Pixar film, and not a holy missive from on high. Because I don't know if I feel, in my heart, that Mother 3 is a great game, and I think that's terrible. I think fandom and conversation can be really special, and I hope this doesn't come off as a condemnation of the western Mother/EarthBound fandom. But I think sometimes, Fandom can do terrible things to work, warp it to fit their enthusiasm. I see it in games like Persona 5, Xenoblade, Dark Souls, games that become disseminated by voices that come to dictate the scope of their meaning.
Maybe you would find Mother 3 weird, funny, or heartrending. Maybe you would think of it as super fucked up and nasty and scary. Maybe it will be the saddest thing in the world for you. But I think, as with any game, you owe it to yourself to find out for yourself, rather than have some ageing boomer online tell you what it should be.
It's like the frog. You can dissect it forever, but nothing you learn or examine or analyse will change the fundamental fact that the frog is dead. Wouldn't you much rather meet it for the first time when it's still alive, while it can still save your game?
This isn't really a review, more of just some...thoughts on this game and my relationship to it. Fair warning, it's pretty navel-gazey and self-indulgent. You may not really get on with this one.
One of the all-time best Hard Drive headlines remains "Huge Earthbound Fan Excited To Play It For The First Time". It's a good gag, an playfully teasing dig that is funny because it's true, and could only come from a place of understanding of the EarthBound/Mother fandom. I know, because once upon a time, I was a Huge Mother 3 Fan Excited To Play It For The First Time.
It's hard to emphasize how much of a fetish object Mother 3 was for the western EarthBound fandom, even for the wider JRPG fandom. I became aware of EarthBound through Smash Bros, as I am sure most people my age did, and was immediately taken in by how out-of-a-piece it was with the rest of Nintendo's stable, and my interest only skyrocketed when I searched the internet and found out that EarthBound was super fucked up and weird and scary in a way only slightly off-beat Nintendo games hyped up by 14-year olds who don't really know anything else could be.
(See also: Majora's Mask, and endless features in Official Nintendo Magazine UK swearing that the ReDeads in Ocarina of Time were the scariest shit in the fucking world man you'd fuckin shit and piss your pants)
And then, of course, there was the sequel on the Game Boy Advance, that never left Japan and never would, implicitly because it would emotionally scar anyone who played it and was even more messed up than it's fuckin twisted predecessor. EarthBound has a habit of being slightly spoken over by many of its most ardent fans, certainly, those I was privy to in my days lurking on noted Haven for Absolute Unhinged Freaks Starmen.net, but Mother 3 was on a whole other level. Everything about this game was spoken of in terms of absurd religiosity, which was only heightened by its relative inaccessibility. Speaking about the game in hyperbolic terms practically became a core tenant of the EarthBound fandom, as if an official translation could be physically evoked out of the ether if enough people were enthusiastic enough for it. Entire swathes of the game were freely discussed, both before and after the (also given a kind of quasi-religious status by the fandom) fan translation were released, spoiling every single conceivable thing in the game in order to entice someone, anyone to give it a go and join the chorus, never quite seeming to realize that, mostly, they were was just talking to each other, and to impressionable 13-year-olds like me.
I swallowed all of this. It was hard not to. I remember one day, on what was probably at the time the most exciting website ever devised, the Smash Bros. Dojo, which contained daily updates for the sure-to-be greatest Smash Bros. ever made when Lucas and New Pork City were announced. To say I lost my shit was an understatement. I freaked out to just about any of my friends who would care to listen, performing the same role of Eulogist that all the people I saw online do for Mother 3, giving away every possible twist and reveal and plot point to people who, maybe might have actually played EarthBound on their own one day and liked it well enough. To say that I was a fan of Mother 3 at this point would be incorrect: I was a religious convert, a cultist, a Happy-Happyist passing down the teachings that I had taken in from sermons of the mount like "Blues Brothers Symbolism in EarthBound". Blue, blue.
I did play EarthBound, and really loved it, mostly because like 80% of the conversation around the game, when I was getting into it, was about how totally fucked up the final boss battle with Giygas is, and the remaining 20% was endless relitigating about why a game so impossibly magical and amazing didn't sell well enough, which carried the implicit conversation with the unreleased status of Mother 3. Because of this, I found so many surprises and things I found personally resonant, things that I had nothing to bring to other than myself. I didn't even have this feeling with the even-more over-discussed Final Fantasy VII because the things culture remembers of that game are bafflingly at odds with what it actually is and what I took away from it when I came to it.
But with Mother 3? I can't say the same thing. It's partly because it's a much shorter, more focused game than it's predecessor, it's partially because it stands alongside Far Cry 2 and Dark Souls as one of the most over-analyzed games in existence. But mostly, I think it's because the fandom conversation around this game warped my perception of it and turned every step on the Nowhere Islands into charted territory, where everyone had left their mark, and I had no space to make mine, no space to find myself beneath everyone else.
There are a huge amount of things that I love about Mother 3, so many things that I appreciate, and so many things that make me smile. But I've never been able to feel like my experiences of it were entirely mine. I've never been able to find the unique resonances with my own life or experiences that characterize all of my favorite games. Everywhere I look, every corner I turn on the Nowhere Islands, I see the words of others, the perspectives of others. I look at little elements like the doorknob, and instead of being able to turn it over in my head, and place it within the wider whole, all I can hear is a cacophony of voices echoing throughout the years, the interpretations of posters on Starmen.net, Itoi and Brownie Brown's own comments on the subject, drowning out any thoughts I might have.
Yes, I could definitely discuss my thoughts on the fact that the village of Tazmily was in some way doomed to it's fate from the very beginning because of it's pursuit of an idealized vision of a specifically American past draped in western imagery that conveniently ignores the great darkness of that time in material history...but even this thought echoes with perspectives I've read countless times before. Wess' abuse, the Magypsies as a deeply clumsy but earnest attempt to explore gender non-conformity as it relates to the social and "nature", the way forgetting haunts the entire game world, as if everyone else on the Islands knows what a terrible mistake has been made by choosing to move backwards rather than forwards and desperately wishes to avoid it by enshrining themselves in your memory...it's possible you've read stuff here and thought "oh, that's interesting!" But every time I go to speak, every time I open my mouth on these things the words of others spill out, so ingrained and intertwined that I don't know which thoughts are mine and which thoughts are creeping in from forum threads long, long ago. Playing this game is like playing with a director's commentary track inside my head that I cannot switch off, commenting on the meaning or intent behind every single pixel on the screen, and it's heartbreaking because I truly believe this kind of voracious all-consuming analysis is completely antithetical to why these games are good.
Mother/Earthbound games are free-wheeling, lackadaisical, and rarely concerned with all-consuming arcs and statements. Those things are there, but the real pleasure of playing one of these games is just meeting the weird and wonderful people of this odd and beautiful world. You can see it in the battle system, in how it is playfully carefree with it's rules and rhythms, with many boss battles being beaten after you have technically been dealt lethal damage, but the game is kinda taking it easy until it gets to you. You can see it in the, frankly, absolutely astonishing soundtrack that freely mixes and matches genres and tones and instruments all processed through the woeful GBA speakers. You can see it in how the MacGuffin that dominates the first half of the game's plot is basically forgotten about and never mentioned again afterwards, in the lack of interest in connecting the dots between EarthBound and this game, in how the same reverence that the fandom spaces I hung out in hold this game and EarthBound are viewed with huge scepticism via Porky's Museum of EarthBound ephemera.
Mother 3 is not a religious object of absurd fervour, it's not a mythical Dark Dragon waiting to be unleashed. It's a video game, one that is laid back, at ease and confident in itself. And I wish I could be the same with it, but I can't help but play this game with the same awkward, nervous, stammering energy that comes with meeting an internet acquaintance in person. I wish I could be normal here, I really could! But my brain is too filled with EarthBound fansite trivia, I'm so sorry. Did you know there's an unused sprite that depicts the creation of the Masked Man, but that it was never used because it's probably just too fucked up and scary f-
Boney attacks!
...yeah, ok, I deserved that.
I've read a lot on games I love, and games I don't, but never do I really feel like those perspectives take me over, leave me unable to see the game beneath them. Certainly, my perspective has been altered by the perspectives of others, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill but with no other game do I feel so wholly unable to find myself in, no other game has this opaque wall around it made of What Other People Thought About It. Not even EarthBound has this for me. And it makes me really sad. Mother 3 is a special game. A really great one. And I think I do love it but...it's a love with a lower-case L. Despite it's reputation as a merciless feels machine, my appreciation of Mother 3 is extremely emotionally detached in a way I find kind of upsetting. There are definitely things about it that I feel strongly about, things about it that provoke profound emotion in me, but I wish I had been able to find those things for myself, instead of my love for the game sold to me by overzealous fans.
No, that's wrong. It's not the fan's fault. Well, not entirely. I do think that a lot of the conversation with these games is kind of fundamentally opposed to what they actually are in a way that speaks to the relative immaturity of a lot (not all) of the people talking about them at the point in time where their critical reception was still cooling. But ultimately, It's not the fault of people just talking enthusiastically about a game they loved, or at least, wanted to love. Mother 3 is just...as a result of my interactions with it, how long its shadow is cast across my mind as a child...trying to find personal meaning in Mother 3 that relates personally to myself is like trying to find something new in Citizen Kane. When something is that storied, that discussed...what hope do I have?
When people who were there talk about their first interactions with EarthBound, it's so often framed as this unfolding flower of a work, that grew beyond whatever humble thoughts they may have derived from the game's legendarily misguided marketing campaign. They weren't expecting to find one of the best games of all time inside it, but they did. It's the same I feel about when I played my favourite game for the first time. I wasn't prepared for the things it would do and show me. This is not to say that novelty is an inherent facet of a game I love. But at the same time...I don't know how fully I can love something that falls into a dutiful checklist of the things I already expect to find there.
I think Mother 3 is a great game. But I think people should be allowed to find that for themselves, or not if that's how it goes. It is, ultimately, A Video Game, after all, a children's video game at that, the video equivalent of a Ghibli or Pixar film, and not a holy missive from on high. Because I don't know if I feel, in my heart, that Mother 3 is a great game, and I think that's terrible. I think fandom and conversation can be really special, and I hope this doesn't come off as a condemnation of the western Mother/EarthBound fandom. But I think sometimes, Fandom can do terrible things to work, warp it to fit their enthusiasm. I see it in games like Persona 5, Xenoblade, Dark Souls, games that become disseminated by voices that come to dictate the scope of their meaning.
Maybe you would find Mother 3 weird, funny, or heartrending. Maybe you would think of it as super fucked up and nasty and scary. Maybe it will be the saddest thing in the world for you. But I think, as with any game, you owe it to yourself to find out for yourself, rather than have some ageing boomer online tell you what it should be.
It's like the frog. You can dissect it forever, but nothing you learn or examine or analyse will change the fundamental fact that the frog is dead. Wouldn't you much rather meet it for the first time when it's still alive, while it can still save your game?