Woodaba
the xeno series has always struck a precarious balance between it's twin influences: contemporary anime tropes, and heady paperback golden-age science fiction. xeno has always been an incredibly derivative series that - when it is good - makes up for it's complete lack of originality with it's overwhelming enthusiasm for it's influences, and I think part of my continuing disappointment with The Direction xenoblade went after X was that it stopped pulling from 2010: The Year We Make Contact with the same fervor with which it pulled from Mobile Fighter G Gundam and instead went all in on aping the sensibilities and attitudes of repulsive but incredibly successful anime like Sword Art Online and Fate: Grand Order.
Xenoblade Chronicles X then, makes one last desperate stand for the paperback sci-fi side of the equation, leaning far harder into that side of the pendulum on every level of it's design and narrative intentions than any other game in the series. The common problem running through all three currently existing Xenoblade games - besides their choice of outfits for the girls, I mean - is that they are very bad at teaching the player how to play them, and I think X might be the most egregious example. It's this, more than any other element of the game, that I think kept people from accessing what is - for my money - the most narratively and mechanically accomplished game in the entire series.
Because, like I said, XCX isn't an anime. The main plot is leisurely and slight, not much happens except at the very end, and is mostly a vehicle for allowing the player to access the real narrative meat of the game - the myriad side quests that explore the game's sci-fi ideas, the world of Mira, and it's eclectic inhabitants. If that structure sounds familiar, it's probably because you've read a few of the golden-age sci-fi novels that director Tetsuya Takahashi is clearly so fond of. Looking at the audience the series has today, and even the one built up by the original game (or LPs of said game, XC1 standing alongside Earthbound and Persona 5 as JRPGs that developed a huge fandom through the lens of one or two big streamers/youtubers rather than solely the game itself) I don't think it's unreasonable to make the claim that many fans who derided XCX for "not having a story" didn't exactly have the framework to engage with this approach, and it's a shame the game didn't do enough to ease them into it.
In terms of writing, X is the best Xenoblade game. I don't even think it's close. It's certainly the most thematically ambitious, with the weirdest, thorniest ideas, and least reliant on characters constructed wholesale from clichés. I like quite a few characters in Xenoblade 1, but do I find any of them interesting? Not really. They're broadly-drawn cartoon people, and they work in that context, but XCX has characters that I thought quite deeply about, characters whose inner lives were compelling to me. it's themes are unique and compelling, exploring what "humanity" as a concept could mean divorced from our past lives, our home planet, and even our very bodies. The Mimeosome is the entire Xenoseries' best idea, a frighteningly rich concept that pairs beautifully with the questions mecha so often raises about the relationship between the self, the body, and the society in which it inhabits. But almost all of this is in the side-quests and heart-to-hearts, or doled out in piecemeal over an absurdly long game, and I can't exactly blame people for not getting to that stuff. XCX makes it difficult to access the parts of itself that are truly remarkable, and that's such a shame.
The combat system is the same: it has truly cavernous depth and options and customization, but by the end of my original over 150 Hour-long playthrough, I felt like I had only just got a handle on the tangled web of systems and mechanics and stats. It doesn't so much as throw you into the deep end but throw you into the mariana trench. But once you do crack it? Once you have an armory of Skells tooled out with well-thought out builds, each named and given color-schemes after your favorite mechs? It feels incredible. XCX is a majestic mechanical mountain to climb, and while the view from the top is incredible, I could have done with a few ski-lifts on the way up here.
I completely understand why people dislike this game, why it was almost uniformly seen as a steep downgrade from it's predecessor, and why, with a sense of palpable resignation, the influence pendulum was swung completely back to Full Anime for future instalments. But I can't help but love this game. It's ideas are so genuinely thought-provoking that, half a decade after I wrapped up my playthrough, I still find myself turning it over in my head, thinking about what it tried to say and what it tried to do. The post-credits scene is maybe my favorite one in any video game or film, and completely set my mind on fire with it's implications both for a phantom Xenoblade Chronicles Double X and the adventure that just lay behind me. It's a deeply flawed game, one that could be improved immensely, but it will always have my heart, over it's more straightforwardly numbered siblings. It represents best the wild, wrongheaded, idiotic ambition that defines why I still, on some level, care about Xenogames, even if I think they have about a 50/50 track record at this point of Good to Total Shit, even if they will never, ever be normal about women, because I can't help but look at X and think "shine on, you crazy motherfucker".
I love it. I love being a BLADE!
Oh and the soundtrack rips so fucking hard you have no idea. Easily the best of the three, as long as you aren't someone who's phone is full of "EPIC ANIME BATTLE MUSIC" mp3s!! All those who think the NLA themes are bad are weak and will not survive the winter
Xenoblade Chronicles X then, makes one last desperate stand for the paperback sci-fi side of the equation, leaning far harder into that side of the pendulum on every level of it's design and narrative intentions than any other game in the series. The common problem running through all three currently existing Xenoblade games - besides their choice of outfits for the girls, I mean - is that they are very bad at teaching the player how to play them, and I think X might be the most egregious example. It's this, more than any other element of the game, that I think kept people from accessing what is - for my money - the most narratively and mechanically accomplished game in the entire series.
Because, like I said, XCX isn't an anime. The main plot is leisurely and slight, not much happens except at the very end, and is mostly a vehicle for allowing the player to access the real narrative meat of the game - the myriad side quests that explore the game's sci-fi ideas, the world of Mira, and it's eclectic inhabitants. If that structure sounds familiar, it's probably because you've read a few of the golden-age sci-fi novels that director Tetsuya Takahashi is clearly so fond of. Looking at the audience the series has today, and even the one built up by the original game (or LPs of said game, XC1 standing alongside Earthbound and Persona 5 as JRPGs that developed a huge fandom through the lens of one or two big streamers/youtubers rather than solely the game itself) I don't think it's unreasonable to make the claim that many fans who derided XCX for "not having a story" didn't exactly have the framework to engage with this approach, and it's a shame the game didn't do enough to ease them into it.
In terms of writing, X is the best Xenoblade game. I don't even think it's close. It's certainly the most thematically ambitious, with the weirdest, thorniest ideas, and least reliant on characters constructed wholesale from clichés. I like quite a few characters in Xenoblade 1, but do I find any of them interesting? Not really. They're broadly-drawn cartoon people, and they work in that context, but XCX has characters that I thought quite deeply about, characters whose inner lives were compelling to me. it's themes are unique and compelling, exploring what "humanity" as a concept could mean divorced from our past lives, our home planet, and even our very bodies. The Mimeosome is the entire Xenoseries' best idea, a frighteningly rich concept that pairs beautifully with the questions mecha so often raises about the relationship between the self, the body, and the society in which it inhabits. But almost all of this is in the side-quests and heart-to-hearts, or doled out in piecemeal over an absurdly long game, and I can't exactly blame people for not getting to that stuff. XCX makes it difficult to access the parts of itself that are truly remarkable, and that's such a shame.
The combat system is the same: it has truly cavernous depth and options and customization, but by the end of my original over 150 Hour-long playthrough, I felt like I had only just got a handle on the tangled web of systems and mechanics and stats. It doesn't so much as throw you into the deep end but throw you into the mariana trench. But once you do crack it? Once you have an armory of Skells tooled out with well-thought out builds, each named and given color-schemes after your favorite mechs? It feels incredible. XCX is a majestic mechanical mountain to climb, and while the view from the top is incredible, I could have done with a few ski-lifts on the way up here.
I completely understand why people dislike this game, why it was almost uniformly seen as a steep downgrade from it's predecessor, and why, with a sense of palpable resignation, the influence pendulum was swung completely back to Full Anime for future instalments. But I can't help but love this game. It's ideas are so genuinely thought-provoking that, half a decade after I wrapped up my playthrough, I still find myself turning it over in my head, thinking about what it tried to say and what it tried to do. The post-credits scene is maybe my favorite one in any video game or film, and completely set my mind on fire with it's implications both for a phantom Xenoblade Chronicles Double X and the adventure that just lay behind me. It's a deeply flawed game, one that could be improved immensely, but it will always have my heart, over it's more straightforwardly numbered siblings. It represents best the wild, wrongheaded, idiotic ambition that defines why I still, on some level, care about Xenogames, even if I think they have about a 50/50 track record at this point of Good to Total Shit, even if they will never, ever be normal about women, because I can't help but look at X and think "shine on, you crazy motherfucker".
I love it. I love being a BLADE!
Oh and the soundtrack rips so fucking hard you have no idea. Easily the best of the three, as long as you aren't someone who's phone is full of "EPIC ANIME BATTLE MUSIC" mp3s!! All those who think the NLA themes are bad are weak and will not survive the winter
2021
a short and sweet little adventure game with enough cleverness and thoughtful design to outshine the ways in which it is almost breathtakingly stupid. i'm sure everyone feels the same about the completely unnecessary lengthy combat section so I won't relitigate that point here, my bigger disappointment was in how i was enthralled by the prospect of engaging with the archaic morality of an ancient society from a modern perspective but you almost never have to do that: there's one character who you have to engage that line of dialogue with and it's thrilling, but he's soon revealed to be a cartoon supervillain and the rest of the conversations in the game are shockingly frictionless. that's not to say there weren't very enjoyable conversations here, like having an honest-to-gods socratic dialogue with a disciple of the big man himself, but i found myself disappointed by just how...normal everyone in the titular city was. which is, I suppose, the ultimate point the game is going for by the end, but frankly I hate that point.
the forgotten city is a very novelistic game, and I love many aspects of it for that, but it also indulges in something i scarcely see to the same degree outside of novels, where the author just goes all-in on a completely unhinged worldview that a bigger team may have been able to rein in. i'm fine with a game having a perspective i disagree with, such as this game's argument that civilisation really hasn't changed that much and maybe we're not so different after all, you and I etc etc, but it's when this argument runs right up to a flagrantly racist conspiracy theory the game wholeheartedly indulges in at the end that I find my patience waning.
i've complained a lot but I enjoyed my time with this game a great deal, I would adore for short, janky little games like this to come out on Game Pass every month. it's strongest moments shine bright, and it's easier to forgive the flaws when there's such a low barrier to entry. maybe i wouldn't hate God of War 2018 so much if it was 4 hours long and came free with the subscription that lets me play Halo Infinite.
as a Fallout: New Vegas DLC, I'd put it above Honest Hearts and Lonesome Road but below Dead Money and Old World Blues. please, someone Normal make One of These.
the forgotten city is a very novelistic game, and I love many aspects of it for that, but it also indulges in something i scarcely see to the same degree outside of novels, where the author just goes all-in on a completely unhinged worldview that a bigger team may have been able to rein in. i'm fine with a game having a perspective i disagree with, such as this game's argument that civilisation really hasn't changed that much and maybe we're not so different after all, you and I etc etc, but it's when this argument runs right up to a flagrantly racist conspiracy theory the game wholeheartedly indulges in at the end that I find my patience waning.
i've complained a lot but I enjoyed my time with this game a great deal, I would adore for short, janky little games like this to come out on Game Pass every month. it's strongest moments shine bright, and it's easier to forgive the flaws when there's such a low barrier to entry. maybe i wouldn't hate God of War 2018 so much if it was 4 hours long and came free with the subscription that lets me play Halo Infinite.
as a Fallout: New Vegas DLC, I'd put it above Honest Hearts and Lonesome Road but below Dead Money and Old World Blues. please, someone Normal make One of These.
2008
i was talking with people today about my profound lack of interest in the upcoming "Dark Souls is now OPEN WORLD" game Elden Ring and it led me to think about Burnout: Paradise. this game was made before it became a trend, an expectation, to move your previously linear, level-based series into the open-world and it shows, because in stark contrast to games like Halo: Infinite or Grand Theft Auto V, Paradise's open world is actually purposeful in a sense that suggests that the open world was part of a wider design goal, rather than an existing series trying to cram itself into an open-world format because that is The Done Thing.
because Paradise doesn't really play like other burnout games. sure, the core tenets of driving dangerously to build up boost to hit ludicrous speeds is still there, but the game is utterly transformed by how races are built. there aren't circuits in this game, not in the sense we traditionally think of it, anyway: instead, each race begins at a specific intersection and ends at one of eight end points, and you can take whatever route you want across the vast complex supercircuit that is Paradise City to reach it. burnout paradise is essentially an enormous tesseract of a racing game, one gigantic race that you are constantly learning and improving on, where each event has you creating your own paths and routes to victory, filling out an ever more complete understanding of Paradise City until you know it's streets better than you know your hometown's. paradise embraces openness in every part of it's design, and you'd think that wouldn't be notable in the open-world space, but it is.
in Red Dead Redemption 2, the open-world essentially ceases to exist the moment you talk to someone and enter one of the game's interminable missions. in Halo: Infinite and Far Cry, the vast map of the game essentially acts as a glorified level select for a set of activities, large and small, that comprise the existing gameplay loop of those franchises. the open-world is an illusion, a marketing point, a buzzword. it exists so someone on an E3 presentation can press a button and phwoar! wow! look how far we can zoom out on this map! but you're doing all the same things in the same ways as you did in all the other games, usually less interestingly because the designs of these linear systems and the concept of a vast, freely explorable worlds cannot collide and leave both intact.
to be an open-world game, Burnout Paradise had to change. it had to be fundamentally different from prior Burnouts to such an extent that there exist many fans of the earlier Burnout games who do not like Paradise at all, and vice versa. i happen to think paradise is great, but it is great in a way largely divorced from why Burnout 3: Takedown was great. and I think that's a good thing. it demonstrates that the team at criterion used the open-world to create a genuinely transformative experience. if Elden Ring or Sonic Frontiers or however many upcoming games in which your favorite franchises decide haphazardly graft themselves onto a Breath of the Wild map end up great, they will be great because they allow themselves to transform, and race out into a brand new world, rather than trying to inflict the old one onto it.
because Paradise doesn't really play like other burnout games. sure, the core tenets of driving dangerously to build up boost to hit ludicrous speeds is still there, but the game is utterly transformed by how races are built. there aren't circuits in this game, not in the sense we traditionally think of it, anyway: instead, each race begins at a specific intersection and ends at one of eight end points, and you can take whatever route you want across the vast complex supercircuit that is Paradise City to reach it. burnout paradise is essentially an enormous tesseract of a racing game, one gigantic race that you are constantly learning and improving on, where each event has you creating your own paths and routes to victory, filling out an ever more complete understanding of Paradise City until you know it's streets better than you know your hometown's. paradise embraces openness in every part of it's design, and you'd think that wouldn't be notable in the open-world space, but it is.
in Red Dead Redemption 2, the open-world essentially ceases to exist the moment you talk to someone and enter one of the game's interminable missions. in Halo: Infinite and Far Cry, the vast map of the game essentially acts as a glorified level select for a set of activities, large and small, that comprise the existing gameplay loop of those franchises. the open-world is an illusion, a marketing point, a buzzword. it exists so someone on an E3 presentation can press a button and phwoar! wow! look how far we can zoom out on this map! but you're doing all the same things in the same ways as you did in all the other games, usually less interestingly because the designs of these linear systems and the concept of a vast, freely explorable worlds cannot collide and leave both intact.
to be an open-world game, Burnout Paradise had to change. it had to be fundamentally different from prior Burnouts to such an extent that there exist many fans of the earlier Burnout games who do not like Paradise at all, and vice versa. i happen to think paradise is great, but it is great in a way largely divorced from why Burnout 3: Takedown was great. and I think that's a good thing. it demonstrates that the team at criterion used the open-world to create a genuinely transformative experience. if Elden Ring or Sonic Frontiers or however many upcoming games in which your favorite franchises decide haphazardly graft themselves onto a Breath of the Wild map end up great, they will be great because they allow themselves to transform, and race out into a brand new world, rather than trying to inflict the old one onto it.
what does it mean to "feel like Spider-Man"? after all, that's the refrain we heard time and time again upon the release of Spider-Man for the PS4, and it's the question that I couldn't get out of my head every time I thought about this game.
looking at the mechanics of the game doesn't really answer that question for me, mostly because a shocking amount of the experience of this game is simply lifted wholesale from the Batman Arkham games with precious little alteration. the combat, the surprisingly present stealth sections that involve isolating a group of enemies with a chronic neck injury that prevents them from looking even slightly Up, "detective" segments that entirely involve looking for a yellow line to follow, even an omnipresent voice in your ear feeding you constant info, it's all as it was all the way back in 2009's Arkham Asylum, mostly unaltered. indeed, these games themselves were lauded at the time for "making you feel like Batman" but not nearly to the same hyperbolic memetic extent as marvel's sony's kevin feige's ike perlmutter's spider-man does for the ultimate arachnid-boy. generally speaking I would not consider Spider-Man and Batman to be characters that share an enormous deal in common outside of the very basic concept of fighting criminals in an urban environment, and in many ways there is an argument to be made that spider-man is batman's antithesis. and yet, somehow, essentially the same mechanics that created an experience that made you Feel Like Batman has made a great many people Feel Like Spider-Man.
the one meaningful mechanic which differentiates this from Arkham (though, maybe not as much as it perhaps should given the zip-to-point mechanic is again lifted completely wholesale from Arkham City) is the web-swinging, and it's a useful point in elucidating what the mechanical experience of this game does. web-swinging in this game is pleasing, stunningly well-animated, highly responsive, and also completely effortless. it's a struggle to even call it a mechanic: it is almost completely on auto-pilot, with nothing more involved than successive presses of R2 seeing Miles swing, leap, run on walls, the navigational experience of Spider-Man swinging through a painfully detailed recreation of Manhattan reduced to a single button. much like Assassin's Creed's automated free-running that clearly inspired the rhythms of play here, web swinging in this game looks fantastic - especially on a twitter clip captured with the patented SonyTM PlayStationTM ShareTM ButtonTM - but mechanically vacuous to the point of non-existence.
comparisons to Spider-Man 2's (the 2004 game, not this, the second instalment of the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise, nor the upcoming Marvel's Spider-Man 2, the third game in the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise) much lauded web swinging are passé, I know, but indulge me for just a moment: web-swinging in that game was beloved because it was a system. It had depth, it had a skill ceiling, it had moves that were difficult to pull off and a learning curve that required familiarity with the mechanic. it was enough to make a game in and of itself, and indeed it largely did because the rest of Spider-Man 2 ranges from unremarkable to poor. i don't know if i would go as far to say that this system "made me feel like spider-man" but it was, at the very least, a systemisation of this aspect of the character in such a way that it made for a compelling gameplay experience.
spider-man PS4 has none of this. it's mechanics are intentionally stripped down to the point that essentially the entire game is about pressing buttons at the right time in response to on-screen stimuli, and I know all video games can be boiled down to that, but Marvel's Spider-Man comes pre-boiled: the illusion it creates is so wafer thin that even a minute of thought reveals the 4K smoke and mirrors for what they really are. contrary to the appeals to the fraught concept of immersion the phrase "makes you feel like spider-man" evokes, I've scarcely felt more painfully aware that I am a person sitting on a sofa, holding a controller, than when playing this. when your entire game is frictionless, there's nothing to hang onto, either.
there is one sense in which the gameplay experience of Marvel's Miles Morales succeeds in capturing the spirit of the character, and that's in how his new powers frequently dissolve tension in the gameplay, with his invisibility offering you a fast charging get-out-of-jail-free card if you mess up the stealth (if being the operative word here) and the way almost every fight will end with an overpowered Venom Blast.
indeed, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales often does feel like a Spider-Man comic, but rarely in ways I enjoy. After tremendous backlash from vocal fans at the time to "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" issue of Spider-Man, Stan Lee (who at this point was increasingly disconnected from the actual goings-on of the universe he helped create to the point that he only knew Gwen was dead when someone at a con asked if she would come back to life) decreed that Marvel Comics should avoid meaningful change, change that might alienate longtime fans or, more importantly, those who wished to turn marvel characters into lunchboxes and action figures and cartoons and movies, and instead only offer the illusion of change. while the obvious response to this is that Peter Parker could only be replaced by his clone, Ben Reily, for a short period of time before the gravity of the status quo would pull Peter Parker back into the starring role, it also had something of a side-effect, which is that as a universe where meaningful change is resisted and avoided, Marvel Comics as a whole has a reactionary and conservative worldview that gravitates towards it's baked-in assumptions and the presumed goodness of those assumptions.
in 2004's Civil War, Marvel Comics sided with the PATRIOT act. In 2008's Secret Invasion, Marvel Comics used evil religious extremist shapeshifting Skrulls who hide among us and could be friends, co-workers, countrymen plotting the destruction of earth as an analogy for islamic terrorism. In 2012's Avengers VS X-Men, five heroes empowered by a cosmic force change the world for the better, curing diseases, ending world hunger, only to have those changes be rejected as unnatural, and eventually are consumed by said cosmic power. In 2019's House of X/Powers of X, the X-Men founded a nationalistic ethnostate for mutants that is an explicit parallel for the apartheid state of Israel and sees this as a good thing.
Whatever form it may take, whatever illusions of change may, however briefly, be affected, Marvel Comics are bound to a reflection of our status quo that is essentially desirable, and a huge amount of Superhero comics are about reinforcing their own status quos as well as our own, with high-profile stories such as DC's Doomsday Clock ultimately being nothing more than desperate appeals to the supposed self-evident relevance and importance of the unchanging status of these characters. All of this does not even mention the aggressive copaganda of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, to the point where Captain Marvel was reproduced unaltered as propaganda for the US Air Force. Mainstream superheroes are always enforcers of the status quo, for good or for ill, but it's when the enforcement of that status quo comes up against depictions and discussions of the injustices of the real world that this becomes most uncomfortable.
There's a bit in this game, once you finish a side quest, where the camera pans up to a Black Lives Matter mural painted on the side of a building, and lingers there for just long enough to feel awkward. I don't object to the presence of this mural at all, but the direction decision here smacks as performative. It's not enough that the building is placed very prominently to ensure you can't miss it, but the game cranes itself to show you the image again, and the feeling of this can only really be described as the cinematography equivalent of "You know, I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could." It's desperate to demonstrate that it knows, it supports Black Lives Matter, but the functional reality of the rest of the game is aggressively at odds with what that movement is materially about.
I knew that the original 2018 Marvel's Spider-Man was in love with The Police but I can't describe how unprepared I still was for how aggressively conservative this game is. The story revolves around Miles Morales, while Peter Parker is on holiday to Generic Eastern Europeaistan, fighting against The Tinkerer and their evil plot to...destroy a product of an Evil Corporation that is giving people cancer. While at the eleventh hour they do contrive a reason why The Tinkerer's plan is #GoingTooFar, for most of the game there's actually no material reason for her to be in the wrong, and Miles Morales - and by extension, the game - is completely incapable of coming up with a single argument against her plan, simply resorting to "it's wrong! blowing things up is against the law!" or the classic "it's too risky! if even one person gets hurt that is too much!" said while Miles gives a Goon a severe concussion.
When I think of what Spider-Man means to me, what it is About, I think I'd describe it as the struggle to live up to an ideal of being our best selves, of always doing the right thing, in a world that makes that incredibly difficult to actually achieve, with our own personal failings and our endless conflicting responsibilities. In that sense, the Tinkerer, instrumentalized into meaningful action against an evil corporation by the death of a loved one, and struggling with how that affects her personal life and the relationships she has, is far more of a Spider-Man than Miles Morales in this game could ever be, given that his job is one of endless praise and assumed goodness facilitated by a hilarious uncritical depiction of the gig economy that sees the responsibility of Spider-Man morphed into a Deliveroo hustle grindset that always makes sure to respect Our Boys In Blue. How can something that loves the Police and hates direct action this much possibly claim to believe that Black Lives Matter?
In attempting to provide an "All-New, All-Different" up-to-date Spider-Man without making any effort to change the underlying assumptions it has about the world in which it lives, all this game does is expose how out of touch and outdated this whole concept is when the illusion of change fades away. Everything about this game is completely surface-level, all a well-presented illusion of Being Spider-Man that breaks the instant you think about it in any way, and you find yourself sitting your sofa, with your expensive toy for privileged people, pressing buttons to make the copaganda continue to play out in front of you.
I finished Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I had a perfectly ok time. I was rarely frustrated and occasionally found it charming and visually enthralling. I liked stuff with Miles' uncle. It also made me feel like everything about this style of game and this type of story had hit an evolutionary dead-end and had nowhere to go but running on the same treadmill, forever.
So, yes. It made me feel like Spider-ManTM.
looking at the mechanics of the game doesn't really answer that question for me, mostly because a shocking amount of the experience of this game is simply lifted wholesale from the Batman Arkham games with precious little alteration. the combat, the surprisingly present stealth sections that involve isolating a group of enemies with a chronic neck injury that prevents them from looking even slightly Up, "detective" segments that entirely involve looking for a yellow line to follow, even an omnipresent voice in your ear feeding you constant info, it's all as it was all the way back in 2009's Arkham Asylum, mostly unaltered. indeed, these games themselves were lauded at the time for "making you feel like Batman" but not nearly to the same hyperbolic memetic extent as marvel's sony's kevin feige's ike perlmutter's spider-man does for the ultimate arachnid-boy. generally speaking I would not consider Spider-Man and Batman to be characters that share an enormous deal in common outside of the very basic concept of fighting criminals in an urban environment, and in many ways there is an argument to be made that spider-man is batman's antithesis. and yet, somehow, essentially the same mechanics that created an experience that made you Feel Like Batman has made a great many people Feel Like Spider-Man.
the one meaningful mechanic which differentiates this from Arkham (though, maybe not as much as it perhaps should given the zip-to-point mechanic is again lifted completely wholesale from Arkham City) is the web-swinging, and it's a useful point in elucidating what the mechanical experience of this game does. web-swinging in this game is pleasing, stunningly well-animated, highly responsive, and also completely effortless. it's a struggle to even call it a mechanic: it is almost completely on auto-pilot, with nothing more involved than successive presses of R2 seeing Miles swing, leap, run on walls, the navigational experience of Spider-Man swinging through a painfully detailed recreation of Manhattan reduced to a single button. much like Assassin's Creed's automated free-running that clearly inspired the rhythms of play here, web swinging in this game looks fantastic - especially on a twitter clip captured with the patented SonyTM PlayStationTM ShareTM ButtonTM - but mechanically vacuous to the point of non-existence.
comparisons to Spider-Man 2's (the 2004 game, not this, the second instalment of the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise, nor the upcoming Marvel's Spider-Man 2, the third game in the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise) much lauded web swinging are passé, I know, but indulge me for just a moment: web-swinging in that game was beloved because it was a system. It had depth, it had a skill ceiling, it had moves that were difficult to pull off and a learning curve that required familiarity with the mechanic. it was enough to make a game in and of itself, and indeed it largely did because the rest of Spider-Man 2 ranges from unremarkable to poor. i don't know if i would go as far to say that this system "made me feel like spider-man" but it was, at the very least, a systemisation of this aspect of the character in such a way that it made for a compelling gameplay experience.
spider-man PS4 has none of this. it's mechanics are intentionally stripped down to the point that essentially the entire game is about pressing buttons at the right time in response to on-screen stimuli, and I know all video games can be boiled down to that, but Marvel's Spider-Man comes pre-boiled: the illusion it creates is so wafer thin that even a minute of thought reveals the 4K smoke and mirrors for what they really are. contrary to the appeals to the fraught concept of immersion the phrase "makes you feel like spider-man" evokes, I've scarcely felt more painfully aware that I am a person sitting on a sofa, holding a controller, than when playing this. when your entire game is frictionless, there's nothing to hang onto, either.
there is one sense in which the gameplay experience of Marvel's Miles Morales succeeds in capturing the spirit of the character, and that's in how his new powers frequently dissolve tension in the gameplay, with his invisibility offering you a fast charging get-out-of-jail-free card if you mess up the stealth (if being the operative word here) and the way almost every fight will end with an overpowered Venom Blast.
indeed, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales often does feel like a Spider-Man comic, but rarely in ways I enjoy. After tremendous backlash from vocal fans at the time to "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" issue of Spider-Man, Stan Lee (who at this point was increasingly disconnected from the actual goings-on of the universe he helped create to the point that he only knew Gwen was dead when someone at a con asked if she would come back to life) decreed that Marvel Comics should avoid meaningful change, change that might alienate longtime fans or, more importantly, those who wished to turn marvel characters into lunchboxes and action figures and cartoons and movies, and instead only offer the illusion of change. while the obvious response to this is that Peter Parker could only be replaced by his clone, Ben Reily, for a short period of time before the gravity of the status quo would pull Peter Parker back into the starring role, it also had something of a side-effect, which is that as a universe where meaningful change is resisted and avoided, Marvel Comics as a whole has a reactionary and conservative worldview that gravitates towards it's baked-in assumptions and the presumed goodness of those assumptions.
in 2004's Civil War, Marvel Comics sided with the PATRIOT act. In 2008's Secret Invasion, Marvel Comics used evil religious extremist shapeshifting Skrulls who hide among us and could be friends, co-workers, countrymen plotting the destruction of earth as an analogy for islamic terrorism. In 2012's Avengers VS X-Men, five heroes empowered by a cosmic force change the world for the better, curing diseases, ending world hunger, only to have those changes be rejected as unnatural, and eventually are consumed by said cosmic power. In 2019's House of X/Powers of X, the X-Men founded a nationalistic ethnostate for mutants that is an explicit parallel for the apartheid state of Israel and sees this as a good thing.
Whatever form it may take, whatever illusions of change may, however briefly, be affected, Marvel Comics are bound to a reflection of our status quo that is essentially desirable, and a huge amount of Superhero comics are about reinforcing their own status quos as well as our own, with high-profile stories such as DC's Doomsday Clock ultimately being nothing more than desperate appeals to the supposed self-evident relevance and importance of the unchanging status of these characters. All of this does not even mention the aggressive copaganda of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, to the point where Captain Marvel was reproduced unaltered as propaganda for the US Air Force. Mainstream superheroes are always enforcers of the status quo, for good or for ill, but it's when the enforcement of that status quo comes up against depictions and discussions of the injustices of the real world that this becomes most uncomfortable.
There's a bit in this game, once you finish a side quest, where the camera pans up to a Black Lives Matter mural painted on the side of a building, and lingers there for just long enough to feel awkward. I don't object to the presence of this mural at all, but the direction decision here smacks as performative. It's not enough that the building is placed very prominently to ensure you can't miss it, but the game cranes itself to show you the image again, and the feeling of this can only really be described as the cinematography equivalent of "You know, I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could." It's desperate to demonstrate that it knows, it supports Black Lives Matter, but the functional reality of the rest of the game is aggressively at odds with what that movement is materially about.
I knew that the original 2018 Marvel's Spider-Man was in love with The Police but I can't describe how unprepared I still was for how aggressively conservative this game is. The story revolves around Miles Morales, while Peter Parker is on holiday to Generic Eastern Europeaistan, fighting against The Tinkerer and their evil plot to...destroy a product of an Evil Corporation that is giving people cancer. While at the eleventh hour they do contrive a reason why The Tinkerer's plan is #GoingTooFar, for most of the game there's actually no material reason for her to be in the wrong, and Miles Morales - and by extension, the game - is completely incapable of coming up with a single argument against her plan, simply resorting to "it's wrong! blowing things up is against the law!" or the classic "it's too risky! if even one person gets hurt that is too much!" said while Miles gives a Goon a severe concussion.
When I think of what Spider-Man means to me, what it is About, I think I'd describe it as the struggle to live up to an ideal of being our best selves, of always doing the right thing, in a world that makes that incredibly difficult to actually achieve, with our own personal failings and our endless conflicting responsibilities. In that sense, the Tinkerer, instrumentalized into meaningful action against an evil corporation by the death of a loved one, and struggling with how that affects her personal life and the relationships she has, is far more of a Spider-Man than Miles Morales in this game could ever be, given that his job is one of endless praise and assumed goodness facilitated by a hilarious uncritical depiction of the gig economy that sees the responsibility of Spider-Man morphed into a Deliveroo hustle grindset that always makes sure to respect Our Boys In Blue. How can something that loves the Police and hates direct action this much possibly claim to believe that Black Lives Matter?
In attempting to provide an "All-New, All-Different" up-to-date Spider-Man without making any effort to change the underlying assumptions it has about the world in which it lives, all this game does is expose how out of touch and outdated this whole concept is when the illusion of change fades away. Everything about this game is completely surface-level, all a well-presented illusion of Being Spider-Man that breaks the instant you think about it in any way, and you find yourself sitting your sofa, with your expensive toy for privileged people, pressing buttons to make the copaganda continue to play out in front of you.
I finished Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I had a perfectly ok time. I was rarely frustrated and occasionally found it charming and visually enthralling. I liked stuff with Miles' uncle. It also made me feel like everything about this style of game and this type of story had hit an evolutionary dead-end and had nowhere to go but running on the same treadmill, forever.
So, yes. It made me feel like Spider-ManTM.
1998
racing games' The Bouncer, and i mean that as the highest praise possible. cannot really bring anything more to the table that the excellent reviews by squigglydot, kingbancho, and letshugbro have not already discussed but god damn i completely adored this game. aesthetics, vibes...all of it is off the god damn charts and hits my aesthetic sensibilities dead-on.
this simple but deceptively taxing game of knowing when to push your machine and when to let go to handle unforgiving corners on your way to the front of the pack has a mood and vibe that leaves modern multi-million dollar productions hopelessly in the dust. y2k optimism in it's purest form, trusting the machine to take you where you need to go but never letting it control you.
few games have better endings than this. on a track where the assumptions you have built up will fail you time and time again, in the closing minutes of the 20th century, how do you survive? by slamming your foot down on the accelerator and never letting go, never looking back, until the years become blurred around you, until 1999 is nothing but a distant speck in the rear view mirror, and you reach the future before it arrives.
a masterpiece.
this simple but deceptively taxing game of knowing when to push your machine and when to let go to handle unforgiving corners on your way to the front of the pack has a mood and vibe that leaves modern multi-million dollar productions hopelessly in the dust. y2k optimism in it's purest form, trusting the machine to take you where you need to go but never letting it control you.
few games have better endings than this. on a track where the assumptions you have built up will fail you time and time again, in the closing minutes of the 20th century, how do you survive? by slamming your foot down on the accelerator and never letting go, never looking back, until the years become blurred around you, until 1999 is nothing but a distant speck in the rear view mirror, and you reach the future before it arrives.
a masterpiece.
This review contains spoilers
"But when the celebrations finally died down, our hero was nowhere to be seen...She left only a sword, a suit of armor, a shield, and an amulet behind, and these became great treasures of the kingdom."
TO BE CONTINUED IN DRAGON QUEST I + II
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Both times I've played Dragon Quest III, it's the ending that hits the hardest. The first time, all the way back in 2013 on a Snes9x emulator running on a battered old laptop in my parents' house, it struck me, mostly, because it was supposed to strike me: this was The Thing I had been told about this game, the really cool finale where you travel to the world of the original Dragon Quest for the final showdown, and to become the legendary hero Erdrick from the prior two games. That was a twist when the game was coming out, but I knew it going in. I expect most people do at this point. So I wasn't surprised when it happened. I was dutifully Impressed, like I was supposed to be, and then finished the game, and liked it like I was supposed to, and then moved on to Dragon Quest IV.
I wasn't exactly in a state of mind to have many particularly developed critical thoughts at that stage, in many ways. I was just feverishly devouring RPGs, one after another, and ultimately all I needed from Dragon Quest III at that point was something to fill time and it did that quite dutifully.
Dragon Quest is something that comes with an assumed quality. Aside from maybe 2, the conversation around any one of these games never really floats the idea that any one of them might be bad. The cultural conception of Dragon Quest is that you know what you're going to get from them, and that thing will be good, and it will not be revolutionary. This perspective was even absorbed by the series itself at some point, with every entry since 7 feeling like - for better or worse - a conscious nostalgic throwback that resists change and evolution pridefully. And when I was younger, I think I just sort of absorbed that assumption into my own perspective uncritically, without ever really trying to work out how *I felt about this game, and why, if these games were so consistently great, did none of them - bar one - really capture my imagination the way FF8 - a Bad Game by assumed understanding, especially back then - did?
Because here's the thing: all of that stuff? It's bullshit. Not just because there are indeed bad Dragon Quests - 2, 6, 7, and (if I'm feeling mean) 11 all make that quite clear - but because once upon a time, these games were absolutely revolutionary.
Years before Final Fantasy III's Job System, Dragon Quest III's class system is surprisingly in-depth and meaty for the time and makes leveling characters delightfully moreish and rewarding in a way that no RPG really managed prior to this point. It doesn't seem that way at first: while you can create whatever party you like from the available classes at the start, you're probably going to stick to that party, but, once you get to a certain point in the game - around a third of the way in, maybe a quarter depending on how much you do - you unlock the ability to reset any character bar the hero to level 1 in another class - except they keep all the spells they've learned and the stats they had were halved.
Suddenly, the possibility space explodes. That fighter who's been too slow to be useful outside of bosses? What if you let them gain a few dozen levels as a Thief or a Martial Artist, and then switch them back to Fighter? What if your healer takes up the Fighter role for a while to become a jury-rigged Paladin, healing and smiting with equal fervor? It's such an exciting sandbox to play around in, and the fact that the EXP curve becomes wonkier around this point - and you have a nearby source of Metal Slime spawns - means that resetting a character back to Level 1 isn't too big an ask, because they're likely to be back up to your level within a couple of hours. This system is wonderful and I can absolutely see why this game became an absolute sensation on its original Famicom release: I can imagine endless playground discussions about cool things you can do with this system, with maybe even one kid mentioning how you can turn a useless Gadabout into a (sorta) all-powerful Sage if you stick with them for 20 levels before they're laughed away by their friends.
While I do now think that Dragon Quest III is not as good a game as the original, owing mostly to a meandering structure it shares with II that just doesn't sing like the tight, lean original, this revolutionary leveling system was something I found really engaging once it opened up, and twinned with some genuinely tough bosses that made the most out of DQ's minimalist combat system (that is, frankly, not terribly fun in and of itself most of the time) and got me genuinely sweating, I still think this game is can stand tall as a very good game, even if I think the design philosophy of the original classic works less and less well the bigger the game is.
Dragon Quest III does allow you to play as female characters for the first time, which is cool, but it does also open up the series to another part of the Assumed Myth around it that I increasingly struggle to stomach, which is that Dragon Quest's shockingly frequent filtrations with outrageous Horn is part-and-parcel with the series' charm rather than being just straightforward sexism that feels particularly gross in a series that is meant to be enjoyed by all ages. And I'm sure there are people leaping to their keyboards to inform me that, actually, female characters in this game are better than males because they get exclusive powerful equipment and personalities with better stats than their male counterparts, whilst conveniently forgetting to mention that this superiority takes the form of battle bikinis and "sexy" personalities. Yes, you totally can gaslight gatekeep girlboss into the ultimate female warrior in Dragon Quest III, but you're going to have to objectify yourself in order to do so.
Having said that, I am glad that I played this game with an all-girl party, not only because it was just pretty fun to save the world with 16-bit renditions of the Gullwings by my side, but also because it allowed the ending to unexpectedly hit me in a way it hadn't before.
Like I said at the top, the ending is what hit the hardest, this time as last time. But not because of the shock of nostalgia and the presented Big Twist. But because I found this ending to be, quite unexpectedly, crushingly sad. From finally reuniting with your father after hearing about him your whole adventure, only for him to die in your arms never recognizing or realizing that you are his daughter, the hollow end of Zoma as he says, correctly, that all of this will Happen Again before you are forever locked away from returning to the world you fought to save, and are trapped forever in this strange land where people speak as from a different age gone by. A land whose king rewards you by stripping you of your name, and claiming that now you will be recognized and venerated as Erdrick, the greatest hero the world of Alefgard has ever known.
It's horrible. To lose everything, your family, your world, even your name, was bad enough, but knowing from the prior two games that this woman would instead be remembered as a Man?* Fuck, dude. It hit me like a truck. I don't think the narrative of Dragon Quest III is particularly compelling as a whole, but this specific beat, this ending? Genuinely tied my chest into knots. This isn't anything anyone talks about when they talk about Dragon Quest III. Nothing of the assumed myth around this game records this heartbreak, most people don't even see this ending as particularly sad.
The hero, whoever they were before, is dead. Long live Edrick, the great man who vanquished the darkness, his legend persisting through history, an assumption of What Happened In Dragon Quest III that colors the history - and woman - that really happened, in this telling of the tale, at least. Erdrick and Dragon Quest are as one, casts made in the something that never was, but something it was assumed to be.
Is this a happy ending? It doesn't feel like it.
TO BE CONTINUED IN DRAGON QUEST I + II
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Both times I've played Dragon Quest III, it's the ending that hits the hardest. The first time, all the way back in 2013 on a Snes9x emulator running on a battered old laptop in my parents' house, it struck me, mostly, because it was supposed to strike me: this was The Thing I had been told about this game, the really cool finale where you travel to the world of the original Dragon Quest for the final showdown, and to become the legendary hero Erdrick from the prior two games. That was a twist when the game was coming out, but I knew it going in. I expect most people do at this point. So I wasn't surprised when it happened. I was dutifully Impressed, like I was supposed to be, and then finished the game, and liked it like I was supposed to, and then moved on to Dragon Quest IV.
I wasn't exactly in a state of mind to have many particularly developed critical thoughts at that stage, in many ways. I was just feverishly devouring RPGs, one after another, and ultimately all I needed from Dragon Quest III at that point was something to fill time and it did that quite dutifully.
Dragon Quest is something that comes with an assumed quality. Aside from maybe 2, the conversation around any one of these games never really floats the idea that any one of them might be bad. The cultural conception of Dragon Quest is that you know what you're going to get from them, and that thing will be good, and it will not be revolutionary. This perspective was even absorbed by the series itself at some point, with every entry since 7 feeling like - for better or worse - a conscious nostalgic throwback that resists change and evolution pridefully. And when I was younger, I think I just sort of absorbed that assumption into my own perspective uncritically, without ever really trying to work out how *I felt about this game, and why, if these games were so consistently great, did none of them - bar one - really capture my imagination the way FF8 - a Bad Game by assumed understanding, especially back then - did?
Because here's the thing: all of that stuff? It's bullshit. Not just because there are indeed bad Dragon Quests - 2, 6, 7, and (if I'm feeling mean) 11 all make that quite clear - but because once upon a time, these games were absolutely revolutionary.
Years before Final Fantasy III's Job System, Dragon Quest III's class system is surprisingly in-depth and meaty for the time and makes leveling characters delightfully moreish and rewarding in a way that no RPG really managed prior to this point. It doesn't seem that way at first: while you can create whatever party you like from the available classes at the start, you're probably going to stick to that party, but, once you get to a certain point in the game - around a third of the way in, maybe a quarter depending on how much you do - you unlock the ability to reset any character bar the hero to level 1 in another class - except they keep all the spells they've learned and the stats they had were halved.
Suddenly, the possibility space explodes. That fighter who's been too slow to be useful outside of bosses? What if you let them gain a few dozen levels as a Thief or a Martial Artist, and then switch them back to Fighter? What if your healer takes up the Fighter role for a while to become a jury-rigged Paladin, healing and smiting with equal fervor? It's such an exciting sandbox to play around in, and the fact that the EXP curve becomes wonkier around this point - and you have a nearby source of Metal Slime spawns - means that resetting a character back to Level 1 isn't too big an ask, because they're likely to be back up to your level within a couple of hours. This system is wonderful and I can absolutely see why this game became an absolute sensation on its original Famicom release: I can imagine endless playground discussions about cool things you can do with this system, with maybe even one kid mentioning how you can turn a useless Gadabout into a (sorta) all-powerful Sage if you stick with them for 20 levels before they're laughed away by their friends.
While I do now think that Dragon Quest III is not as good a game as the original, owing mostly to a meandering structure it shares with II that just doesn't sing like the tight, lean original, this revolutionary leveling system was something I found really engaging once it opened up, and twinned with some genuinely tough bosses that made the most out of DQ's minimalist combat system (that is, frankly, not terribly fun in and of itself most of the time) and got me genuinely sweating, I still think this game is can stand tall as a very good game, even if I think the design philosophy of the original classic works less and less well the bigger the game is.
Dragon Quest III does allow you to play as female characters for the first time, which is cool, but it does also open up the series to another part of the Assumed Myth around it that I increasingly struggle to stomach, which is that Dragon Quest's shockingly frequent filtrations with outrageous Horn is part-and-parcel with the series' charm rather than being just straightforward sexism that feels particularly gross in a series that is meant to be enjoyed by all ages. And I'm sure there are people leaping to their keyboards to inform me that, actually, female characters in this game are better than males because they get exclusive powerful equipment and personalities with better stats than their male counterparts, whilst conveniently forgetting to mention that this superiority takes the form of battle bikinis and "sexy" personalities. Yes, you totally can gaslight gatekeep girlboss into the ultimate female warrior in Dragon Quest III, but you're going to have to objectify yourself in order to do so.
Having said that, I am glad that I played this game with an all-girl party, not only because it was just pretty fun to save the world with 16-bit renditions of the Gullwings by my side, but also because it allowed the ending to unexpectedly hit me in a way it hadn't before.
Like I said at the top, the ending is what hit the hardest, this time as last time. But not because of the shock of nostalgia and the presented Big Twist. But because I found this ending to be, quite unexpectedly, crushingly sad. From finally reuniting with your father after hearing about him your whole adventure, only for him to die in your arms never recognizing or realizing that you are his daughter, the hollow end of Zoma as he says, correctly, that all of this will Happen Again before you are forever locked away from returning to the world you fought to save, and are trapped forever in this strange land where people speak as from a different age gone by. A land whose king rewards you by stripping you of your name, and claiming that now you will be recognized and venerated as Erdrick, the greatest hero the world of Alefgard has ever known.
It's horrible. To lose everything, your family, your world, even your name, was bad enough, but knowing from the prior two games that this woman would instead be remembered as a Man?* Fuck, dude. It hit me like a truck. I don't think the narrative of Dragon Quest III is particularly compelling as a whole, but this specific beat, this ending? Genuinely tied my chest into knots. This isn't anything anyone talks about when they talk about Dragon Quest III. Nothing of the assumed myth around this game records this heartbreak, most people don't even see this ending as particularly sad.
The hero, whoever they were before, is dead. Long live Edrick, the great man who vanquished the darkness, his legend persisting through history, an assumption of What Happened In Dragon Quest III that colors the history - and woman - that really happened, in this telling of the tale, at least. Erdrick and Dragon Quest are as one, casts made in the something that never was, but something it was assumed to be.
Is this a happy ending? It doesn't feel like it.
CW: Mentions of systemic racism.
wowgoodname recommended this one on my list here: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Woodaba/list/recommend-me-a-game-and-ill-review-it/ and while I didn't pick this one originally, I simply HAD to play this one once I realized there was an Ireland One. And boy, was I not disappointed.
Something that is depressingly common among older Irish people - though it still crops up among younger generations from time to time - is a sentiment of Irishness being an identity with similar generational trauma and associated systemic violence as that experienced by people of color in America and other places. Inevitably, they'll bring up the "no cats, no dogs, no blacks, no irish" signs and point to that as evidence of the "fact" that Irish people "were just as hard done by" as the people kidnapped from their homes and enslaved, and some of these people will even go so far as to say that the Irish actually had it worse than black people in America for certain periods of time.
Obviously, this is horseshit of the highest volume. This is not to downplay the very real marginalization that many Irish people throughout history did encounter or the equally real violence perpetrated to the Irish at the hands of Britain but it's so cringeworthy to hear people who really should know better try to claim a similar level of violence was visited upon them because it just is not the same by any stretch of the imagination and yet people like My Dad will continue spouting this cheerfully racist delusion, crawling forward through history unchallenged and uninterrogated.
I say all this to make clear a certain awareness of the context surrounding what I'm about to say and the image I am invoking: Nancy Drew: The Haunting of Castle Malloy is eire-sploitation of the highest caliber. I cannot tell you how much fun I had experiencing the most bone-headedly cartoonish depiction of the emerald isle I have encountered in recent memory. Right from the beginning, the suggestion that the titular castle was simultaneously a couple hours drive away from Dublin and just down the road from Donegal got me giggling, and from there, things just got better and better. The phone booth run by the "Lepre-con" telecom company, bumper stickers advertising a radio station boasting "All Bodhran, All the Time", and of course, the man that stole the show and my heart, Donal.
The sole Irish character Nancy Drew interacts with (aside from a bartender who is only heard, never seen) in her quest to exorcise the uh "haunting" of Castle Malloy, Donal the Caretaker, whose name is pronounced in a manner hilariously divorced from anyone with that name I have ever known, who wears a cap, spends all his time drinking in the local pub (The Screaming Banshee) has the most "jaysus begorrah" accent you could possibly imagine, and will rant to anyone who can hear about the faeries and their ineffable ways is a man that has stepped right out of John Wayne's The Quiet Man, and he rules. A king. A legend, even if he made me spend the majority of this game's runtime on meaningless bullshit chores.
The sheer absurdity of The Haunting of Castle Malloy is easily the highlight. I won't go over ground wowgoodname has already covered in her excellent review (https://www.backloggd.com/u/wowgoodname/review/281822/) but it's the sheer ridiculousness of the premise and the amount of absurd curveballs thrown in your way, like enormous cybernetic doomsday device which...sheared sheep, the underground nazi(?) missile silo and the MULTIPLE JETPACKS in a plot that is ultimately ABOUT JETPACKS, that carried me through a series of puzzles that are, generously, a bit of a mixed bag. A couple are genuinely fiendish brainteasers, but too many just test your ability to take notes, or your patience with minigames that don't require skill or quick thinking as much as they do memorization of instructions. I think someone once said that a good puzzle should never take longer to input the solution than working out the solution, and this game consistently breaks that rule to intensely frustrating levels.
It's not a bad little game, all things considered. I have a nostalgia for this kind of "CD-ROM" game that we don't really get anymore, as games like this picked up from the bargain bin at TK Maxx and Woolworths made up the majority of my PC gaming as a child, but I also think this is a perfectly good adventure game in it's better moments. Like I say, I got a huge amount of enjoyment from the perverse thrill of this ridiculous depiction of my home country and the ludicrous directions the story goes. But also I think there's genuine skill and artistic craft on display in this game that unfortunately doesn't really get the place in the spotlight it maybe deserves when the game is such a directionless mess. There's some really well-crafted pre-rendered backgrounds in this game, particularly in the haunted playroom of the titular castle, which is genuinely creepy and never quite feels wholly comfortable to be in, despite how many times you return there over the course of the adventure. Parts of this game are funny, parts are well-written, parts are fun to solve and parts are unnerving. But all the good is lost in the endless tedium of bad minigames and sheep-herding.
Still. While I do think it may have been a better game if it wasn't ultimately about an old woman flying around a castle in a jetpack while an offensive irish caricature yells about faeries, I don't think I'd take that hypothetical better game over this beautiful, hilarious, mess.
wowgoodname recommended this one on my list here: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Woodaba/list/recommend-me-a-game-and-ill-review-it/ and while I didn't pick this one originally, I simply HAD to play this one once I realized there was an Ireland One. And boy, was I not disappointed.
Something that is depressingly common among older Irish people - though it still crops up among younger generations from time to time - is a sentiment of Irishness being an identity with similar generational trauma and associated systemic violence as that experienced by people of color in America and other places. Inevitably, they'll bring up the "no cats, no dogs, no blacks, no irish" signs and point to that as evidence of the "fact" that Irish people "were just as hard done by" as the people kidnapped from their homes and enslaved, and some of these people will even go so far as to say that the Irish actually had it worse than black people in America for certain periods of time.
Obviously, this is horseshit of the highest volume. This is not to downplay the very real marginalization that many Irish people throughout history did encounter or the equally real violence perpetrated to the Irish at the hands of Britain but it's so cringeworthy to hear people who really should know better try to claim a similar level of violence was visited upon them because it just is not the same by any stretch of the imagination and yet people like My Dad will continue spouting this cheerfully racist delusion, crawling forward through history unchallenged and uninterrogated.
I say all this to make clear a certain awareness of the context surrounding what I'm about to say and the image I am invoking: Nancy Drew: The Haunting of Castle Malloy is eire-sploitation of the highest caliber. I cannot tell you how much fun I had experiencing the most bone-headedly cartoonish depiction of the emerald isle I have encountered in recent memory. Right from the beginning, the suggestion that the titular castle was simultaneously a couple hours drive away from Dublin and just down the road from Donegal got me giggling, and from there, things just got better and better. The phone booth run by the "Lepre-con" telecom company, bumper stickers advertising a radio station boasting "All Bodhran, All the Time", and of course, the man that stole the show and my heart, Donal.
The sole Irish character Nancy Drew interacts with (aside from a bartender who is only heard, never seen) in her quest to exorcise the uh "haunting" of Castle Malloy, Donal the Caretaker, whose name is pronounced in a manner hilariously divorced from anyone with that name I have ever known, who wears a cap, spends all his time drinking in the local pub (The Screaming Banshee) has the most "jaysus begorrah" accent you could possibly imagine, and will rant to anyone who can hear about the faeries and their ineffable ways is a man that has stepped right out of John Wayne's The Quiet Man, and he rules. A king. A legend, even if he made me spend the majority of this game's runtime on meaningless bullshit chores.
The sheer absurdity of The Haunting of Castle Malloy is easily the highlight. I won't go over ground wowgoodname has already covered in her excellent review (https://www.backloggd.com/u/wowgoodname/review/281822/) but it's the sheer ridiculousness of the premise and the amount of absurd curveballs thrown in your way, like enormous cybernetic doomsday device which...sheared sheep, the underground nazi(?) missile silo and the MULTIPLE JETPACKS in a plot that is ultimately ABOUT JETPACKS, that carried me through a series of puzzles that are, generously, a bit of a mixed bag. A couple are genuinely fiendish brainteasers, but too many just test your ability to take notes, or your patience with minigames that don't require skill or quick thinking as much as they do memorization of instructions. I think someone once said that a good puzzle should never take longer to input the solution than working out the solution, and this game consistently breaks that rule to intensely frustrating levels.
It's not a bad little game, all things considered. I have a nostalgia for this kind of "CD-ROM" game that we don't really get anymore, as games like this picked up from the bargain bin at TK Maxx and Woolworths made up the majority of my PC gaming as a child, but I also think this is a perfectly good adventure game in it's better moments. Like I say, I got a huge amount of enjoyment from the perverse thrill of this ridiculous depiction of my home country and the ludicrous directions the story goes. But also I think there's genuine skill and artistic craft on display in this game that unfortunately doesn't really get the place in the spotlight it maybe deserves when the game is such a directionless mess. There's some really well-crafted pre-rendered backgrounds in this game, particularly in the haunted playroom of the titular castle, which is genuinely creepy and never quite feels wholly comfortable to be in, despite how many times you return there over the course of the adventure. Parts of this game are funny, parts are well-written, parts are fun to solve and parts are unnerving. But all the good is lost in the endless tedium of bad minigames and sheep-herding.
Still. While I do think it may have been a better game if it wasn't ultimately about an old woman flying around a castle in a jetpack while an offensive irish caricature yells about faeries, I don't think I'd take that hypothetical better game over this beautiful, hilarious, mess.
This review contains spoilers
Tell Us Why
Given Life
Are we meant to die
Helpless in our cries
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It’s early 2014, I’m pretty sure. Maybe around March, or April? It’s been a bad year. It’s going to get worse. I’m falling back into bad habits. Not leaving the house as much. Not going to classes. I’m trawling through Steam one day when I see a marginal discount on Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn. Wasn’t this good now, I heard? I hadn’t thought much of this game since I laughed at footage of the 1.0 version at launch. It’s cheap and comes with a month free trial. I like Final Fantasy. Why not?
I make my first character, a male miqo’te gladiator, a classic new player mistake to accidentally opt in to Tanking because Gladiators are the only class that starts with a sword. I name them Woodaba Vacaum, a surname that is borrowed from a character in a game I will never finish making. “Vacaum” doesn’t mean what I think it means and apparently isn’t even a latin word like I thought it was. I play for a few hours, and have a pretty good time, but, y’know…exams are coming up, there are other games to play, and this “Ifrit” boss seems pretty scary. I log out, let the free month lapse, and let the game languish in my steam library for years.
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It would be an incredible understatement to say that Endwalker had a lot on it’s shoulders. Not only was it following up on the near-universally beloved Shadowbringers, not only was it the first piece of content released after the game unexpectedly skyrocketed in popularity in 2021 and became the nigh-mythical “WoW Killer” almost out of nowhere, but it also had the unenviable task of wrapping up a story that has been in the making, in some shape or form, since 2010, a story that had some whispering in hushed tones about being “the best Final Fantasy, now”, whilst not resolving it too conclusively to encourage people to stop playing Square Enix’s most profitable venture. Given all that, it’s maybe a little churlish of me to point out that, under the weight of all this, Endwalker stumbles, falls, and ultimately chooses to lighten that load to ensure it can reach the finish line intact.
I’ll just be upfront with this: I don’t think this as good as Shadowbringers. I’m not even sure it’s as good as Heavensward. Even Stormblood, increasingly the punching bag of the XIV community, for all it’s messiness, feels like it’s aiming for more ambitious and thematically interesting things than Endwalker. I think as the afterglow fades, we’re going to see less and less people somewhat embarrassingly referring to this as “peak fiction”. There was genuinely a point in the main quest where I felt crushingly disappointed that this was the direction they had decided to take things for the grand finale, that the game had, in some ways, become the least interesting version of itself, went for a storyline that I would sooner expect from, say, Star Ocean, than Final Fantasy. But at the same time, there were moments that had my heart soaring for how much they affected me, left me feeling awed at just how tight a hold this story had on my heart. For everything that irks me, there are things I dearly love.
Thinking about Endwalker is difficult, and I think that might be why we’ve yet to see many substantive pieces of criticism on it that isn’t just effervescent praise. It’s taken me a long time to write this piece. I’m still unsure how I feel about many things in it. I don’t know if I’m ready to write this review.
Let's try anyway.
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It’s summer 2016. I’m at the end of my final year of university. I’m leaving with a decent grade in a subject that is kind of worthless, especially since the uncertainty following the Brexit vote is about to obliterate the few job opportunities there are in this field. If I’m honest with myself, I never quite thought about what I would do after university. I was so fixated on the dream of the rose coloured campus life that I never thought about what I’d do after that. So instead of answering that question, I’m playing MMOs again. I’ve been revisiting my childhood fascination of Azeroth, but it’s slowly losing its luster. But then, I remember. Didn’t I have Final Fantasy XIV on steam? I keep hearing that it’s really good now. Maybe I should try it again…
Suddenly, I’m Woodaba Vacaum once more, picking up just where I’d left off over two years ago. The necessity of having to do group content to continue the story gets me over a hurdle that I’ve never quite managed to get over for an MMO, and suddenly, I’m hooked. Over the coming months, I play through the entirety of the A Realm Reborn storyline as well as the Crystal Tower raid series, the very first raids I’ve done for any MMORPG “properly”, and finally reach Ishgard and the Heavensward expansion, forgoing the Paladin job in favour of Dark Knight because events of the main quest suddenly make me feel uncomfortable playing Paladin and in that moment, realise that I’m invested in this world quite unlike any other before. The incredible Dark Knight quests only solidify that for me. In late November, having started somewhere around June, I’m officially, for the very first time “caught up” with the main story of an MMORPG, finishing the 3.3 Dragonsong War quests with a final confrontation with Nidhogg.
But it’s something I did alone. The duty finder is a godsend and encountering genuinely unpleasant people almost never happens, but I’m too shy to join a free company, or join in on any PF content for high-difficulty content. Bereft of MSQ, I log out for a while. Final Fantasy XV is coming out soon, after all. The book on the Dragonsong War closes in silence.
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Endwalker starts pretty slow, with Labyrinthos probably ranking as one of the lamer zones in the game and Thavnair taking a bit too long to go anywhere cool, but once you arrive in Garlemald, things pick up significantly, and the game dives headfirst into some of its most fascinating and thorny content in its history, and then, after a hugely surprising bodyswap sequence, the game slams down hard on the accelerator and leaves whatever expectations you might have for where the story is going to go far, far behind it. To leave me completely in suspense at where the story is going to go after this many expansions is a genuine feat that I appreciate, but it also means that sheer adrenaline and excitement does a lot to carry you through stuff that is maybe, in hindsight, more than a little thematically suspect. Still, my eyebrows went through the roof when I killed Zodiark in the first trial, and I spent the next couple dozen hours absolutely dumbfounded as to where the story could possibly go next, and completely enjoying that feeling of this game still being able to surprise me after all this time.
What’s also surprising is the quality of the battle content in the game thus far. The first two trials, in particular, are tuned to a notably higher difficulty than prior story trials, finally recognizing that if someone has three expansions under their belt they might be able to tackle some heftier mechanics than a stack or two. The dungeon bosses too are notably more demanding mechanically than even Shadowbringers’ bosses, continuing the style of that expansion of very simple layouts twinned with boss mechanics that would give a Heavensward boss a heart attack. The game in general seems more keen to prepare players for the jump in difficulty that comes with EX-level content, which is something I really appreciate, as someone who spent over a year of playing this game too terrified to even consider checking out some of the most mechanically engaging and satisfying multiplayer gameplay one can find. While I think The Seat of Sacrifice remains my favorite fight in the entire game, the fact that The Mothercrystal in particular is able to put in a decent fight for the top spot is incredibly high praise.
The new jobs are also two real winners, particularly Sage, which is positively electrifying to play, even in old content, thanks partially to the stat squish that has given a lot of old raids back some bite that they lost after Shadowbringers beefed up numbers so considerably. Getting O11 in Raid Roulette and finding it to be once again a tense white-knuckle drag race of a fight put an enormous smile on my face. Even stuff that seems rough at first glance, like Dark Knight and New Summoner, will continually evolve in both perception and tweaks as time passes, and already we’re seeing a re-evaulation of the initial backlash against Dark Knight after it unexpectedly found itself sitting atop the tanking DPS charts. Although I’m reviewing Endwalker now, as a period in the game’s life it is only just beginning, over the next couple years it will continue to evolve and change, and will succeed and fail in different respects, just like how Shadowbringers ended up as a mediocre expansion in the eyes of many who are strictly interested in high-level raid content despite being so beloved among those like myself who place a high value on narrative.
Ultimately, it’s that value that has my feelings on Endwalker so mixed. There’s so much to enjoy in this expansion, so much to appreciate, that the areas where it fumbles and falters are drawn into sharp relief, and ultimately it’s the areas of this story and this world that I value the most that Endwalker fumbles the hardest.
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It’s 2017. It’s a bad year. It will continue to be a bad year. Aside from a miserable fast food job I hold down for a couple months at the start of the year until one of the other workers there threatens to kill me, I am unemployed for the entirety of the year. I try a lot of things, and I fail at all of them. I am increasingly ill at ease with the person I am pretending to be. The details aren’t relevant. I am unhappy. But I still play Final Fantasy XIV, and, in fact, I find myself incredibly excited to take part in my first “live” expansion launch for an MMO, in the form of Stormblood. It’s certainly a rough one, and leads into something of a rough MSQ, but it’s one that I still treasure dearly as a light in a time where I had few.
I’m keeping up to date more regularly, I start doing content without guides, I level other jobs, and I find myself becoming a part of the community of the game in a way I simply haven’t before. As 2017 changes to 2018, FFXIV becomes more and more a part of my life, as starting a masters in a last ditch attempt to give my life a form of direction leaves me with far less time to play games than ever before, and FFXIV’s structure allows me to dive into content and experience the myriad stories within piecemeal in between work and classes. Whether it’s the Omega raids, the slowly unfolding MSQ, or getting into fishing while listening to revision notes, I have quite unexpectedly gone from someone who Plays XIV to a XIV Person. It gets me excited, helps me destress, helps me socialize, and is helping me in ways that I only begin to understand.
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When Shadowbringers discussed the Final Days as experienced by the Ancients, I thought what was happening was fairly conclusive: they encountered something that did not fit within their framework of understanding, and that lack of understanding led to a horrified revelation at their own limits and mortality, a fear of death that manifested via their creation magicks into demonic entities shaped like their own death. It was, I thought, quite clear and extremely resonant with the wider themes of the expansion vis a vis allowing old things to die and fade away and be replaced with better things, both the sadness and necessity of that. I genuinely wasn’t expecting further elaboration on The Final Days in Endwalker, but further elaboration is what we get, and the explanation only serves to narrow the scope of interpretation and resonance to such an extent that it arguably harms Shadowbringers in hindsight, which is maybe the most damning thing I can say about a story beat.
To put it simply, Meteion sucks. I know some people really like the birb but for me, she just blows, I’m sorry. This jokerfied Junko Enoshima wannabe is one of the lamer villains in the entire final fantasy pantheon, like if Seymour Guado was actually the villain of FFX instead of a distraction from the real problem. An evil bird-girl in space who is radiating Bad Vibes because she thinks life is meaningless and therefore everyone should die is something I would expect from an AI-generated parody of Bad JRPG plots, and yet, here it is, sitting as the culmination of this decade-long narrative. After the thoughtful theming of Shadowbringers I could not have imagined that its sequel would boil everything down to generalized Hopepunk but that is kind of what happened. No longer is the demise of the Ancients a result of the flaws of their own societal perspective that is resonant with real things, instead it is because a big ball of evil at the end of the universe turns you into a monster when you feel despair.
And yeah, I get that big loud themes of Hope facing Despair at the end of the universe is kind of a JRPG staple, but boiling things down to such primal themes causes a lot of friction with the kind of game Final Fantasy XIV, and, indeed, the series as a whole, has been up to this point. In Shadowbringers, you were fighting a near godlike entity at the end of their universe, but that godlike entity represented material things. They were an aging boomer who refused to accept or acknowledge the validity of the world that was coming in favor of their uncritical adoration of their idealized prelapsarian idea of the world as it was. In contrast to many lesser Hopepunk stories, Final Fantasy XIV has previously acknowledged that people feel despair for real, material reasons. The people of Ishgard and Dravania in Heavensward felt despair because they were trapped in a war built on lies and deception, a Foundation constructed to justify the unjustifiable. The people of Doma and Ala Mhigo in Stormblood felt despair because they were trapped under the boot of imperial tyranny and violence, of their cultures being taken from them and twisted beyond recognizability, of their lives being treated as sport by a spoiled brat born into immense power, an expansion who’s materialist concerns hit me particularly hard as someone living in a land occupied by a colonial power. And, of course, the people of The First in Shadowbringers despair because the ideology they were taught from birth was good and right and just turned against them and choked them to the edge of their life, and they overcame the despair by uniting to overthrow the (admittedly fatphobic caricature) eikon of greed and complacency at the top of it all. In Endwalker, people feel despair, ultimately, because an evil space bird with primary-school nihilist motivations makes them feel despair.
In the real world, people feel “despair” for many reasons, and more often than not, those reasons are directly related to the material circumstances that affect their daily lives. Not being able to pay rent, being unemployed, suffering heartbreak and depression, witnessing the callousness and greed of the people who hold positions of power in our world. Reducing Despair to an ontological narrative force completely divorced from the lived experiences of our everyday lives also divorces it from resonance with said lived experiences, and is what ultimately leaves Endwalker feeling intellectually hollow. Shadowbringers electrified my mind for months after I finished it and I am fairly confident the same will not happen here. When this reveal happened, Endwalker transformed from a story that had me literally trembling with excitement the more I played to something that, even if for just a moment, made me question whether investing in this world and these characters for as long as I have had been worth it after all.
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It’s 2019. I’m coming to the end of my masters, working on a dissertation project that is, hilariously, a “letterboxd for games” called…Backloggr. The release of Shadowbringers is imminent, and I am excited. Not like I was excited for Stormblood, no. Now I’m in and Shadowbringers is my most anticipated game of the year, and I’m planning how I can voraciously consume it whilst not letting my dissertation project suffer. What’s more, 2019 is the year I am finally honest with myself and others that I am trans, and my relationship with my FFXIV character finally makes sense. They are the medium in which I experiment with gender and gender presentation in a way that does not have the pressure and anxieties of experimentation in the real world, a way to experiment with an audience that won’t judge me in the way that I fear the most. This subject - and Final Fantasy XIV in general - becomes the subject of my first paid piece of games writing, and although I have mixed feelings on that article, the fact that I managed it at all is something that I hold dearly to heart. The article even goes up during my first clear of The Seat of Sacrifice [Extreme], my favorite fight in the entire game and one of my favorite moments in all of video games. It is the culmination of a story that has evolved from “pretty good, for an MMO” to a genuine contender for Best Final Fantasy Story, which I can only really express as the highest praise possible given that FF is probably my favorite series of games that contains multiple all-time contenders.
Final Fantasy XIV is a part of my life. I’m not going to credit it for the way I’ve grown as a person or a writer or say that it saved me or anything like that, I find the way people often give the media they enjoy the credit for accomplishing things like that disappointing because it deprives them of enormous credit. But during Shadowbringers especially, it helped me. It helped me work things out about myself, it helped me get work, it helped me develop my critical and creative writing faculties, it helped me make friends and it helped me get closer to old ones. And it helped make me happy when I wasn’t.
How do you even begin to review something like that?
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As a story, Endwalker is frequently and fairly consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but attempting to think more deeply about what it is trying to say causes a lot of friction, particularly when attempting to reconcile it with past expansions, and the Meteion stuff is maybe No.1 with a bullet as to why this is. I keep thinking about the scene where Jullus, one of the expansion’s most compelling new characters, rages with righteous anger against Zenos viator Galvus for destroying his home and people in his quest to fightfuck the player character, only for Alphinaud to tell him that he has to remain calm or else he’ll turn into a big evil monster the heroes will have no choice but to take down. Or how the fandom’s overly sympathetic lens of Emet-Selch and the Ancients in general has been absorbed wholeheartedly, leading to a shockingly uncritical depiction of a society that has a fundamental callous disregard for the sanctity of life, and particularly falls a little too much in love with Venat/Hydaelyn, sanding down many of the most interesting wrinkles of her character to make her a fairly unambiguous good guy at the end (which is not to say that her character is without depth - far from it - but the game does almost repel from the idea of really digging into that depth in favor of idolizing her), especially given things like the bodyswap and the conscious uselessness of the characters on the moon highlighting the fallibility of Hydaelyn and her plans, and casting a critical eye on the Scions’ uncritical adoration of her (you can even say “hey what was with Hydaelyn straight up lying to me in Heavensward ” to which an NPC says “huh dunno, probably nothing to worry about” which I thought for sure was Going Somewhere but no I was simply Not Supposed To Worry About it). And, frankly, only doom lays down the path of trying to parse any kind of statement out of the Final Days itself, what with it turning people feeling depression, righteous anger against injustice, and other true, human emotions unhelpfully grouped together and labeled “despair” into evil creatures who cannot be saved and must be put down lest they harm others.
Endwalker is a mess, both when it comes to reconciling what it’s trying to say with itself, and when it comes to how it interacts with prior expansions. But if it must be a mess? If it has to have this difficult and frictional relationship with the parts of the story I value the most? If it must end this way? Then let it be a beautiful mess. Let it be dumb and questionable with impeccable style, let it burn it’s bridges with impeccably dancing flames. Endwalker is many things at many times, but it is almost always doing what it is doing amazingly, with a confidence fully owned by a creative team burning with a confidence and passion found almost nowhere else in the big-budget space. Any time Endwalker goes somewhere, it does so in the most brash, confident manner possible, with some truly incredible visuals and direction that is genuinely staggering coming from a game that’s still kinda running on 13 year old FF13 tech. The music team once again does incredible work here, and if this soundtrack isn’t spoken of in the same hushed tones as all the expansion soundtracks before it, it’s only because Square Enix has become ever more draconian about allowing people to share this wonderful music. I said in a kind of cutting way earlier that Endwalker is consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but I want to stress that being continually entertaining throughout is something that many games utterly fail to manage, and the day I turn my nose up at a story that delights in its movements as much as Endwalker does is the day you can officially write me off as a lost cause.
And, hell, it’s not like the story isn’t worthwhile. I’ve been highly critical of the decisions made thematically, and I stand by those criticisms, but not only are the decisions not as disastrous as they could have been (in the incredible Answers scene the status of the Ascians as pining for a prelapsarian utopia that did not exist is upheld despite much of Elpis’ attempts to undermine that, which I felt was very important) but also there is still a great deal of resonance here to be found here. I truly think Garlemald, in particular, is a strong contender for best arc in the entire MSQ, and the character writing as a whole remains excellent. Thavnair is a cultural appropriation playground to be certain, but it’s also got one of the sickest characters in the whole game making his nest there, and I hope to see it developed further in future patches. The fact that I’m not as condemnatory of the Elpis arc as I think perhaps part of me wants to be is a testament to just how well rounded Hythlodaeus, Emet-Selch, Venat and Hermes manage to be. The Zenos duel at the end is obviously hysterical as a big dumb shonen finale but it also I think acknowledges a truth about this game and the people that play it that a lot of games (including this one, in the past) try to dance around. I may fundamentally disgree and find facile the game's argument that suffering is what gives life meaning, but it's in how that idea interacts with characters like the Ancients and Zenos, that this theme finds some purchase in my heart, an exploration of how people who have lived blessed, privileged lives of plenty are deaf and cold-hearted to the suffering of those less fortunate around them, and how that eventually twists into genuine malice as they become ever more desperate to maintain their comfortable status quo. Even if I find the root of why she has to do it fairly vacuous, Venat choosing to destroy her world for the sake of a potential better one is incredibly powerful. And above all, this story of people at the end of days finding something to hold onto, something worth living for, is something that I did find affecting and meaningful, even if I kind of have to avoid thinking about the details in order for it to have the biggest impact. Every day, I feel the crushing weight of the end of the world all around me, and I struggle greatly with just trying to live in a world where all around me are reminders trying to convince me that there is no hope to save our planet in the face of the people and systems killing it. And while I would caution against becoming addicted to Hope as a placebo against genuine change, there is still something to be said for making me feel like there is hope.
The answer that Endwalker ultimately arrives at, is that in the darkest of times, we find the strength to go on in each other, and in standing/working together, we can overcome anything. It’s a cliche, perhaps boring answer, but in many ways it is also the right one. The Warrior of Light has never walked alone, after all, they’ve always had a party of 3/7/23 others to journey alongside, to help carry them through their trials. Whether they saved others from death, took the fire for their friends, or slain the beasts that threatened them, we’ve always done this together. I know I have. I wouldn’t be here without those who have walked beside me, who healed me when I was at the end of my rope, who stood alongside me against my problems and granted me the strength to see them through. Whatever else I may think about what Endwalker has to say about living at the end of the world, I think it is right about that, at least.
Do I wish Endwalker handled things differently? Yeah, kinda. Do I think there are things about it that suck? For sure. Is this a fitting conclusion to a story over a decade in the making? Honestly, I still don’t know.
But did I have fun? Was it meaningful? Am I happy I made these friends, fought these battles? Am I glad I heard what I heard, felt what I felt, and thought what I thought?
Has my journey been good? Has it been worthwhile?
...That, I can’t deny.
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Whispers
Falling silently drifts on the wind
But I hear you
Our Journey
Now a memory fading from sight
But I see you
You're not alone.
Given Life
Are we meant to die
Helpless in our cries
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It’s early 2014, I’m pretty sure. Maybe around March, or April? It’s been a bad year. It’s going to get worse. I’m falling back into bad habits. Not leaving the house as much. Not going to classes. I’m trawling through Steam one day when I see a marginal discount on Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn. Wasn’t this good now, I heard? I hadn’t thought much of this game since I laughed at footage of the 1.0 version at launch. It’s cheap and comes with a month free trial. I like Final Fantasy. Why not?
I make my first character, a male miqo’te gladiator, a classic new player mistake to accidentally opt in to Tanking because Gladiators are the only class that starts with a sword. I name them Woodaba Vacaum, a surname that is borrowed from a character in a game I will never finish making. “Vacaum” doesn’t mean what I think it means and apparently isn’t even a latin word like I thought it was. I play for a few hours, and have a pretty good time, but, y’know…exams are coming up, there are other games to play, and this “Ifrit” boss seems pretty scary. I log out, let the free month lapse, and let the game languish in my steam library for years.
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It would be an incredible understatement to say that Endwalker had a lot on it’s shoulders. Not only was it following up on the near-universally beloved Shadowbringers, not only was it the first piece of content released after the game unexpectedly skyrocketed in popularity in 2021 and became the nigh-mythical “WoW Killer” almost out of nowhere, but it also had the unenviable task of wrapping up a story that has been in the making, in some shape or form, since 2010, a story that had some whispering in hushed tones about being “the best Final Fantasy, now”, whilst not resolving it too conclusively to encourage people to stop playing Square Enix’s most profitable venture. Given all that, it’s maybe a little churlish of me to point out that, under the weight of all this, Endwalker stumbles, falls, and ultimately chooses to lighten that load to ensure it can reach the finish line intact.
I’ll just be upfront with this: I don’t think this as good as Shadowbringers. I’m not even sure it’s as good as Heavensward. Even Stormblood, increasingly the punching bag of the XIV community, for all it’s messiness, feels like it’s aiming for more ambitious and thematically interesting things than Endwalker. I think as the afterglow fades, we’re going to see less and less people somewhat embarrassingly referring to this as “peak fiction”. There was genuinely a point in the main quest where I felt crushingly disappointed that this was the direction they had decided to take things for the grand finale, that the game had, in some ways, become the least interesting version of itself, went for a storyline that I would sooner expect from, say, Star Ocean, than Final Fantasy. But at the same time, there were moments that had my heart soaring for how much they affected me, left me feeling awed at just how tight a hold this story had on my heart. For everything that irks me, there are things I dearly love.
Thinking about Endwalker is difficult, and I think that might be why we’ve yet to see many substantive pieces of criticism on it that isn’t just effervescent praise. It’s taken me a long time to write this piece. I’m still unsure how I feel about many things in it. I don’t know if I’m ready to write this review.
Let's try anyway.
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It’s summer 2016. I’m at the end of my final year of university. I’m leaving with a decent grade in a subject that is kind of worthless, especially since the uncertainty following the Brexit vote is about to obliterate the few job opportunities there are in this field. If I’m honest with myself, I never quite thought about what I would do after university. I was so fixated on the dream of the rose coloured campus life that I never thought about what I’d do after that. So instead of answering that question, I’m playing MMOs again. I’ve been revisiting my childhood fascination of Azeroth, but it’s slowly losing its luster. But then, I remember. Didn’t I have Final Fantasy XIV on steam? I keep hearing that it’s really good now. Maybe I should try it again…
Suddenly, I’m Woodaba Vacaum once more, picking up just where I’d left off over two years ago. The necessity of having to do group content to continue the story gets me over a hurdle that I’ve never quite managed to get over for an MMO, and suddenly, I’m hooked. Over the coming months, I play through the entirety of the A Realm Reborn storyline as well as the Crystal Tower raid series, the very first raids I’ve done for any MMORPG “properly”, and finally reach Ishgard and the Heavensward expansion, forgoing the Paladin job in favour of Dark Knight because events of the main quest suddenly make me feel uncomfortable playing Paladin and in that moment, realise that I’m invested in this world quite unlike any other before. The incredible Dark Knight quests only solidify that for me. In late November, having started somewhere around June, I’m officially, for the very first time “caught up” with the main story of an MMORPG, finishing the 3.3 Dragonsong War quests with a final confrontation with Nidhogg.
But it’s something I did alone. The duty finder is a godsend and encountering genuinely unpleasant people almost never happens, but I’m too shy to join a free company, or join in on any PF content for high-difficulty content. Bereft of MSQ, I log out for a while. Final Fantasy XV is coming out soon, after all. The book on the Dragonsong War closes in silence.
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Endwalker starts pretty slow, with Labyrinthos probably ranking as one of the lamer zones in the game and Thavnair taking a bit too long to go anywhere cool, but once you arrive in Garlemald, things pick up significantly, and the game dives headfirst into some of its most fascinating and thorny content in its history, and then, after a hugely surprising bodyswap sequence, the game slams down hard on the accelerator and leaves whatever expectations you might have for where the story is going to go far, far behind it. To leave me completely in suspense at where the story is going to go after this many expansions is a genuine feat that I appreciate, but it also means that sheer adrenaline and excitement does a lot to carry you through stuff that is maybe, in hindsight, more than a little thematically suspect. Still, my eyebrows went through the roof when I killed Zodiark in the first trial, and I spent the next couple dozen hours absolutely dumbfounded as to where the story could possibly go next, and completely enjoying that feeling of this game still being able to surprise me after all this time.
What’s also surprising is the quality of the battle content in the game thus far. The first two trials, in particular, are tuned to a notably higher difficulty than prior story trials, finally recognizing that if someone has three expansions under their belt they might be able to tackle some heftier mechanics than a stack or two. The dungeon bosses too are notably more demanding mechanically than even Shadowbringers’ bosses, continuing the style of that expansion of very simple layouts twinned with boss mechanics that would give a Heavensward boss a heart attack. The game in general seems more keen to prepare players for the jump in difficulty that comes with EX-level content, which is something I really appreciate, as someone who spent over a year of playing this game too terrified to even consider checking out some of the most mechanically engaging and satisfying multiplayer gameplay one can find. While I think The Seat of Sacrifice remains my favorite fight in the entire game, the fact that The Mothercrystal in particular is able to put in a decent fight for the top spot is incredibly high praise.
The new jobs are also two real winners, particularly Sage, which is positively electrifying to play, even in old content, thanks partially to the stat squish that has given a lot of old raids back some bite that they lost after Shadowbringers beefed up numbers so considerably. Getting O11 in Raid Roulette and finding it to be once again a tense white-knuckle drag race of a fight put an enormous smile on my face. Even stuff that seems rough at first glance, like Dark Knight and New Summoner, will continually evolve in both perception and tweaks as time passes, and already we’re seeing a re-evaulation of the initial backlash against Dark Knight after it unexpectedly found itself sitting atop the tanking DPS charts. Although I’m reviewing Endwalker now, as a period in the game’s life it is only just beginning, over the next couple years it will continue to evolve and change, and will succeed and fail in different respects, just like how Shadowbringers ended up as a mediocre expansion in the eyes of many who are strictly interested in high-level raid content despite being so beloved among those like myself who place a high value on narrative.
Ultimately, it’s that value that has my feelings on Endwalker so mixed. There’s so much to enjoy in this expansion, so much to appreciate, that the areas where it fumbles and falters are drawn into sharp relief, and ultimately it’s the areas of this story and this world that I value the most that Endwalker fumbles the hardest.
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It’s 2017. It’s a bad year. It will continue to be a bad year. Aside from a miserable fast food job I hold down for a couple months at the start of the year until one of the other workers there threatens to kill me, I am unemployed for the entirety of the year. I try a lot of things, and I fail at all of them. I am increasingly ill at ease with the person I am pretending to be. The details aren’t relevant. I am unhappy. But I still play Final Fantasy XIV, and, in fact, I find myself incredibly excited to take part in my first “live” expansion launch for an MMO, in the form of Stormblood. It’s certainly a rough one, and leads into something of a rough MSQ, but it’s one that I still treasure dearly as a light in a time where I had few.
I’m keeping up to date more regularly, I start doing content without guides, I level other jobs, and I find myself becoming a part of the community of the game in a way I simply haven’t before. As 2017 changes to 2018, FFXIV becomes more and more a part of my life, as starting a masters in a last ditch attempt to give my life a form of direction leaves me with far less time to play games than ever before, and FFXIV’s structure allows me to dive into content and experience the myriad stories within piecemeal in between work and classes. Whether it’s the Omega raids, the slowly unfolding MSQ, or getting into fishing while listening to revision notes, I have quite unexpectedly gone from someone who Plays XIV to a XIV Person. It gets me excited, helps me destress, helps me socialize, and is helping me in ways that I only begin to understand.
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When Shadowbringers discussed the Final Days as experienced by the Ancients, I thought what was happening was fairly conclusive: they encountered something that did not fit within their framework of understanding, and that lack of understanding led to a horrified revelation at their own limits and mortality, a fear of death that manifested via their creation magicks into demonic entities shaped like their own death. It was, I thought, quite clear and extremely resonant with the wider themes of the expansion vis a vis allowing old things to die and fade away and be replaced with better things, both the sadness and necessity of that. I genuinely wasn’t expecting further elaboration on The Final Days in Endwalker, but further elaboration is what we get, and the explanation only serves to narrow the scope of interpretation and resonance to such an extent that it arguably harms Shadowbringers in hindsight, which is maybe the most damning thing I can say about a story beat.
To put it simply, Meteion sucks. I know some people really like the birb but for me, she just blows, I’m sorry. This jokerfied Junko Enoshima wannabe is one of the lamer villains in the entire final fantasy pantheon, like if Seymour Guado was actually the villain of FFX instead of a distraction from the real problem. An evil bird-girl in space who is radiating Bad Vibes because she thinks life is meaningless and therefore everyone should die is something I would expect from an AI-generated parody of Bad JRPG plots, and yet, here it is, sitting as the culmination of this decade-long narrative. After the thoughtful theming of Shadowbringers I could not have imagined that its sequel would boil everything down to generalized Hopepunk but that is kind of what happened. No longer is the demise of the Ancients a result of the flaws of their own societal perspective that is resonant with real things, instead it is because a big ball of evil at the end of the universe turns you into a monster when you feel despair.
And yeah, I get that big loud themes of Hope facing Despair at the end of the universe is kind of a JRPG staple, but boiling things down to such primal themes causes a lot of friction with the kind of game Final Fantasy XIV, and, indeed, the series as a whole, has been up to this point. In Shadowbringers, you were fighting a near godlike entity at the end of their universe, but that godlike entity represented material things. They were an aging boomer who refused to accept or acknowledge the validity of the world that was coming in favor of their uncritical adoration of their idealized prelapsarian idea of the world as it was. In contrast to many lesser Hopepunk stories, Final Fantasy XIV has previously acknowledged that people feel despair for real, material reasons. The people of Ishgard and Dravania in Heavensward felt despair because they were trapped in a war built on lies and deception, a Foundation constructed to justify the unjustifiable. The people of Doma and Ala Mhigo in Stormblood felt despair because they were trapped under the boot of imperial tyranny and violence, of their cultures being taken from them and twisted beyond recognizability, of their lives being treated as sport by a spoiled brat born into immense power, an expansion who’s materialist concerns hit me particularly hard as someone living in a land occupied by a colonial power. And, of course, the people of The First in Shadowbringers despair because the ideology they were taught from birth was good and right and just turned against them and choked them to the edge of their life, and they overcame the despair by uniting to overthrow the (admittedly fatphobic caricature) eikon of greed and complacency at the top of it all. In Endwalker, people feel despair, ultimately, because an evil space bird with primary-school nihilist motivations makes them feel despair.
In the real world, people feel “despair” for many reasons, and more often than not, those reasons are directly related to the material circumstances that affect their daily lives. Not being able to pay rent, being unemployed, suffering heartbreak and depression, witnessing the callousness and greed of the people who hold positions of power in our world. Reducing Despair to an ontological narrative force completely divorced from the lived experiences of our everyday lives also divorces it from resonance with said lived experiences, and is what ultimately leaves Endwalker feeling intellectually hollow. Shadowbringers electrified my mind for months after I finished it and I am fairly confident the same will not happen here. When this reveal happened, Endwalker transformed from a story that had me literally trembling with excitement the more I played to something that, even if for just a moment, made me question whether investing in this world and these characters for as long as I have had been worth it after all.
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It’s 2019. I’m coming to the end of my masters, working on a dissertation project that is, hilariously, a “letterboxd for games” called…Backloggr. The release of Shadowbringers is imminent, and I am excited. Not like I was excited for Stormblood, no. Now I’m in and Shadowbringers is my most anticipated game of the year, and I’m planning how I can voraciously consume it whilst not letting my dissertation project suffer. What’s more, 2019 is the year I am finally honest with myself and others that I am trans, and my relationship with my FFXIV character finally makes sense. They are the medium in which I experiment with gender and gender presentation in a way that does not have the pressure and anxieties of experimentation in the real world, a way to experiment with an audience that won’t judge me in the way that I fear the most. This subject - and Final Fantasy XIV in general - becomes the subject of my first paid piece of games writing, and although I have mixed feelings on that article, the fact that I managed it at all is something that I hold dearly to heart. The article even goes up during my first clear of The Seat of Sacrifice [Extreme], my favorite fight in the entire game and one of my favorite moments in all of video games. It is the culmination of a story that has evolved from “pretty good, for an MMO” to a genuine contender for Best Final Fantasy Story, which I can only really express as the highest praise possible given that FF is probably my favorite series of games that contains multiple all-time contenders.
Final Fantasy XIV is a part of my life. I’m not going to credit it for the way I’ve grown as a person or a writer or say that it saved me or anything like that, I find the way people often give the media they enjoy the credit for accomplishing things like that disappointing because it deprives them of enormous credit. But during Shadowbringers especially, it helped me. It helped me work things out about myself, it helped me get work, it helped me develop my critical and creative writing faculties, it helped me make friends and it helped me get closer to old ones. And it helped make me happy when I wasn’t.
How do you even begin to review something like that?
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As a story, Endwalker is frequently and fairly consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but attempting to think more deeply about what it is trying to say causes a lot of friction, particularly when attempting to reconcile it with past expansions, and the Meteion stuff is maybe No.1 with a bullet as to why this is. I keep thinking about the scene where Jullus, one of the expansion’s most compelling new characters, rages with righteous anger against Zenos viator Galvus for destroying his home and people in his quest to fightfuck the player character, only for Alphinaud to tell him that he has to remain calm or else he’ll turn into a big evil monster the heroes will have no choice but to take down. Or how the fandom’s overly sympathetic lens of Emet-Selch and the Ancients in general has been absorbed wholeheartedly, leading to a shockingly uncritical depiction of a society that has a fundamental callous disregard for the sanctity of life, and particularly falls a little too much in love with Venat/Hydaelyn, sanding down many of the most interesting wrinkles of her character to make her a fairly unambiguous good guy at the end (which is not to say that her character is without depth - far from it - but the game does almost repel from the idea of really digging into that depth in favor of idolizing her), especially given things like the bodyswap and the conscious uselessness of the characters on the moon highlighting the fallibility of Hydaelyn and her plans, and casting a critical eye on the Scions’ uncritical adoration of her (you can even say “hey what was with Hydaelyn straight up lying to me in Heavensward ” to which an NPC says “huh dunno, probably nothing to worry about” which I thought for sure was Going Somewhere but no I was simply Not Supposed To Worry About it). And, frankly, only doom lays down the path of trying to parse any kind of statement out of the Final Days itself, what with it turning people feeling depression, righteous anger against injustice, and other true, human emotions unhelpfully grouped together and labeled “despair” into evil creatures who cannot be saved and must be put down lest they harm others.
Endwalker is a mess, both when it comes to reconciling what it’s trying to say with itself, and when it comes to how it interacts with prior expansions. But if it must be a mess? If it has to have this difficult and frictional relationship with the parts of the story I value the most? If it must end this way? Then let it be a beautiful mess. Let it be dumb and questionable with impeccable style, let it burn it’s bridges with impeccably dancing flames. Endwalker is many things at many times, but it is almost always doing what it is doing amazingly, with a confidence fully owned by a creative team burning with a confidence and passion found almost nowhere else in the big-budget space. Any time Endwalker goes somewhere, it does so in the most brash, confident manner possible, with some truly incredible visuals and direction that is genuinely staggering coming from a game that’s still kinda running on 13 year old FF13 tech. The music team once again does incredible work here, and if this soundtrack isn’t spoken of in the same hushed tones as all the expansion soundtracks before it, it’s only because Square Enix has become ever more draconian about allowing people to share this wonderful music. I said in a kind of cutting way earlier that Endwalker is consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but I want to stress that being continually entertaining throughout is something that many games utterly fail to manage, and the day I turn my nose up at a story that delights in its movements as much as Endwalker does is the day you can officially write me off as a lost cause.
And, hell, it’s not like the story isn’t worthwhile. I’ve been highly critical of the decisions made thematically, and I stand by those criticisms, but not only are the decisions not as disastrous as they could have been (in the incredible Answers scene the status of the Ascians as pining for a prelapsarian utopia that did not exist is upheld despite much of Elpis’ attempts to undermine that, which I felt was very important) but also there is still a great deal of resonance here to be found here. I truly think Garlemald, in particular, is a strong contender for best arc in the entire MSQ, and the character writing as a whole remains excellent. Thavnair is a cultural appropriation playground to be certain, but it’s also got one of the sickest characters in the whole game making his nest there, and I hope to see it developed further in future patches. The fact that I’m not as condemnatory of the Elpis arc as I think perhaps part of me wants to be is a testament to just how well rounded Hythlodaeus, Emet-Selch, Venat and Hermes manage to be. The Zenos duel at the end is obviously hysterical as a big dumb shonen finale but it also I think acknowledges a truth about this game and the people that play it that a lot of games (including this one, in the past) try to dance around. I may fundamentally disgree and find facile the game's argument that suffering is what gives life meaning, but it's in how that idea interacts with characters like the Ancients and Zenos, that this theme finds some purchase in my heart, an exploration of how people who have lived blessed, privileged lives of plenty are deaf and cold-hearted to the suffering of those less fortunate around them, and how that eventually twists into genuine malice as they become ever more desperate to maintain their comfortable status quo. Even if I find the root of why she has to do it fairly vacuous, Venat choosing to destroy her world for the sake of a potential better one is incredibly powerful. And above all, this story of people at the end of days finding something to hold onto, something worth living for, is something that I did find affecting and meaningful, even if I kind of have to avoid thinking about the details in order for it to have the biggest impact. Every day, I feel the crushing weight of the end of the world all around me, and I struggle greatly with just trying to live in a world where all around me are reminders trying to convince me that there is no hope to save our planet in the face of the people and systems killing it. And while I would caution against becoming addicted to Hope as a placebo against genuine change, there is still something to be said for making me feel like there is hope.
The answer that Endwalker ultimately arrives at, is that in the darkest of times, we find the strength to go on in each other, and in standing/working together, we can overcome anything. It’s a cliche, perhaps boring answer, but in many ways it is also the right one. The Warrior of Light has never walked alone, after all, they’ve always had a party of 3/7/23 others to journey alongside, to help carry them through their trials. Whether they saved others from death, took the fire for their friends, or slain the beasts that threatened them, we’ve always done this together. I know I have. I wouldn’t be here without those who have walked beside me, who healed me when I was at the end of my rope, who stood alongside me against my problems and granted me the strength to see them through. Whatever else I may think about what Endwalker has to say about living at the end of the world, I think it is right about that, at least.
Do I wish Endwalker handled things differently? Yeah, kinda. Do I think there are things about it that suck? For sure. Is this a fitting conclusion to a story over a decade in the making? Honestly, I still don’t know.
But did I have fun? Was it meaningful? Am I happy I made these friends, fought these battles? Am I glad I heard what I heard, felt what I felt, and thought what I thought?
Has my journey been good? Has it been worthwhile?
...That, I can’t deny.
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Whispers
Falling silently drifts on the wind
But I hear you
Our Journey
Now a memory fading from sight
But I see you
You're not alone.
<0zym4ndias> i am 0zym4ndias
<0zym4ndias> king of kings
<0zym4ndias> look upon my gear, ye mighty, and despair
(0zym4ndias last seen online 5475 days ago)
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Both Final Fantasy XI Online and Final Fantasy XIV Online have an early quest involving the player character being assigned the role of a diplomat by your home city-state, and traveling to the other two city-states to see what's going on there. In XIV, this is an easy task that you can accomplish in under half an hour, as cutscene-based airship rides bridge the vast gaps in seconds. Despite the calamity it suffered 5 years before A Realm Reborn begins, the city-states of Eorzea recovered with a zeal befitting their colonial natures, rebuilding their fortunes atop the well-worn foundations of civilizations past - Allag, Ampador, and Vana'diel.
Vana'diel, XI's setting, has no such luck. Its world is comprised almost entirely of large desolate wastelands, still feeling utterly devastated by the war that occurred 20 years prior in its backstory. And there aren't any convenient airships waiting to take you across that vast distance to the other city-states. You can't even get a mount until you reach Jueno, the farthest and most dangerous of the initial city-states to reach. If you want to complete your mission, you're just gonna have to walk.
And walk.
And walk.
And walk.
Vana'diel is a hostile land, but only partially because of the monsters. Yes, those critters can and will ruin you if you venture far outside the cities alone, so you'll need some helping hands to survive out there, but more hostile than that are the obscenely vast distances that, even if you know exactly where you're going (there are almost no directions to anywhere) can lead to multi-hour treks just to get from one town to another. But your most dangerous foe, especially in 2021, is the user interface.
The thing is, in some ways, I kind of love it. The bleeps and bloops and lo-fi menus are so evocative of a particular time and place online, a vibe only surpassed by the immaculate PlayOnline launcher, a pre-Web 2.0 vision of online community that is sometimes what I genuinely wish the entire internet looked and sounded like.
But it's also a nightmare. Maps are uniformly terrible, with barely anything marked on it and no indication of how to reach far-off places. If you ask the person who tells you to serve as an emissary to the other nations how to actually get to them, he will tell you to fuck off and go work it out yourself. This is what the game is like to play after nearly two decades of patches to make it slightly more convenient and accessible. And it's still as frictional as a porcupine.
The thing is though, there is a method to this madness. Or, at least, there was.
Wild though it may be to think about now, looking at this game where you can't even jump, but XI was a forward-thinking game for the time. It was the last FF game series original director Hironobu Sakaguchi worked on in any meaningful capacity, and while the man has been known to puff up his own myth a bit, there does seem to be an agreement that many of the most unique elements of the game's design come from Sakaguchi and game director Koichi Ishii's desire to make players feel individually small and powerless, but powerful and meaningful when together, to organically forge from the players the kinds of bonds and parties of the offline Final Fantasies. The game even had multinational servers, unlike the region-based systems of modern MMOs, where players could play together no matter where in the world they came from, enabled by a to-this-day genuinely innovative auto-translation system that allows players to type key phrase that will be automatically translated into another player's client language, bridging the gap between languages just like Final Fantasy XIV's cutscenes bridge the gaps between it's locations. Much of the game's design was designed to force players into meaningful interaction and cooperation, because without others, you could not survive Vana'diel.
Don't know where to go? Ask someone for directions, or better yet, pay for a higher-level player to escort you to where you need to go! How do you unlock the Dragoon job? Ask a Dragoon! Need to get to the bottom of a mine filled with monsters that you have no hope of defeating alone? Find like-minded allies who also need a boar ass from the bottom of said mine, and venture forth!
Vana'diel is a hostile world because the design of the game is hostile, acting as a dark shadow looming around you and the other players, pushing you together to fight against it. The Shadow Lord may be the ostensible villain of the plot but the antagonist is the game itself, pushing back at you to push you together.
It's an engine for frustration more than anything else. By many accounts, this hostility engendered genuine camaraderie back in the day but it also alienated as many as it enthralled, and in the contemporary iteration of the game, it has been drained of its purpose. Painstakingly detailed guides on multiple wikis telling you exactly where to go and when and exactly how to optimally navigate the obtuse web of systems that had players thinking that hugging walls could aggro every enemy in an instance in 2002 remove the need to actually interact with players meaningfully in the game world, which is just as well because almost everyone you encounter is a level 99 demigod that shall not deign to engage a lowly mortal like you lest they interrupt the busy AFKing schedule they've been committed to for the past 19 years. The thing that makes the game playable in 2021, the Trust system, is also the thing that obliterates much of the design of the game, as in an instant you can summon a party of highly competent NPCs who will effectively allow you to solo all but the most difficult of encounters. In a game where almost every facet of its design is built around getting you to interact with others, Trusts and Wiki guides allow you to sidestep vast swathes of the game design, leaving only a strangely lonely and austere game experience whilst also keeping its places and people accessible to a modern audience who never experienced the game's prime.
If you aren't here for the (genuinely immaculate) vibes, then you're probably here for the story, and while I can only account for the base game story, it isn't much to write home about. It's steeped in an even more intense strain of the Fantasy Racism tropes that accounts for the least palatable sections of XIV's story, to the point that it would almost be avant-garde, the way the Bastok nation storyline has you working unquestioningly for a cartoonishly evil state that openly uses slave labor, to defeat the embodiment of rage and anger felt by those exploited by them: a being called, uh, the Shadow Lord. But it doesn't really put the work in to make it interesting. By many accounts Rise of the Zilart, the first expansion, picks up immediately where the base game left off and recontextualizes events to make things much less uncomfortably racist, but due to the games frankly bizarre attitude towards difficulty scaling, Zilart is so difficult that most guides encourage you to complete almost all the expansions that came after Zilart before you tackle the thing that resolves most of the threads hanging from the story that propelled - well, gently nudged - me through the first 50 levels, and I'm a long way off from all of that. Despite the systems of Final Fantasy XI being neutered to allow players to access the story, the base story lacks almost all bite without them. I'm sure defeating The Shadow Lord was an immense mechanical accomplishment given meaning by accomplishing it with your friends in 2002. But now? It barely registers.
Still, there are moments of true beauty where the magic of this game somehow manages to shine through. Once you have your wiki open on the other screen, and a band of unwaveringly faithful NPC trusts, you can set forth on your quest. Going from Bastok to Windhurst as I did, the first leg of your journey will end in the seaside town of Selbina in the Valkurum Wastes, from which you must take a ship across the sea to the town of Mhaura. Maybe here, the game will use a cutscene like XIV? No, of course not. Buying a ticket, you are brought to a little gated area to wait for the ship (a potentially 10-15 minute wait) just like real public transport. Then you get on the boat, wait for it to set off, and then you can climb up onto the deck to enjoy a low-res version of the world and it's landmarks roll past you, while a beautiful track plays that belies this game's history as a product of the remarkable Chrono Cross team (https://youtu.be/jaKmkoy1r7o). This whole process takes a long time, and it can take over half an hour to reach Mhaura from Selbina. And there isn't really anything to do on the way but talk to your fellow passengers. And before you think I'm about to launch into a boomer rant about how we all used to talk to each other before our headphones and ipods and playstation ps and zunes, the beautiful trick of all this is in what happens halfway through the voyage.
On my trip from Selbina to Mhaura, another ship, without warning, pulled up alongside ours, and a band of undead pirates lept aboard. Barely managing to fight off one, I couldn't hope to face the entire band on my own, and retreated below decks, waiting for them to give up and move on. But instantly, in my head, I saw a story unfold. Of a whole group of players, each of whom came to the boat on their own, suddenly having to band together to beat back the pirates. This whole boat ride, all it's length and waiting, is an engine designed to organically facilitate a genuine fantasy story beat, of individual adventurers on their own banding together - maybe even becoming friends - to defeat a foe they did not expect. It was honestly kind of beautiful to imagine.
But it was just imagination. I can see how the design of this area could facilitate that story, for sure. I'm sure it happened, in the past. Maybe it forged genuine friendships that transcended the world of Vana'diel, or maybe the impromptu alliance disbanded as they disembarked, and went their separate ways, never to see each other again. But there isn't room for either now. There's just me, watched over by my silent NPC allies, enjoying the wonderful music and beautiful vibes as I imagine what may, once upon a time, have been.
Is Final Fantasy XI a good game? I don't know. I can't know. It's not here. I'll play to see the stories, sure - Rise of the Zilart, in particular, has my attention for seeming to share a lot of ideas with Shadowbringers - but the actual play experience that the systems of this game were designed to create has not been preserved. Final Fantasy XI, as it exists now, is a museum. A (lightly) guided tour through its impossibly vast, crushingly empty world, everything within a memorial to the experiences its systems were designed to facilitate, now gone and beyond our ability to revive, no matter how powerful our healing magic is. There's something kind of beautiful and wonderful about what Final Fantasy XI tried to do. But that game is gone. All that's left is its headstone, and those that left in its wake, some continuing to visit and remember, and most leaving it far, far behind them.
<0zym4ndias> king of kings
<0zym4ndias> look upon my gear, ye mighty, and despair
(0zym4ndias last seen online 5475 days ago)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Both Final Fantasy XI Online and Final Fantasy XIV Online have an early quest involving the player character being assigned the role of a diplomat by your home city-state, and traveling to the other two city-states to see what's going on there. In XIV, this is an easy task that you can accomplish in under half an hour, as cutscene-based airship rides bridge the vast gaps in seconds. Despite the calamity it suffered 5 years before A Realm Reborn begins, the city-states of Eorzea recovered with a zeal befitting their colonial natures, rebuilding their fortunes atop the well-worn foundations of civilizations past - Allag, Ampador, and Vana'diel.
Vana'diel, XI's setting, has no such luck. Its world is comprised almost entirely of large desolate wastelands, still feeling utterly devastated by the war that occurred 20 years prior in its backstory. And there aren't any convenient airships waiting to take you across that vast distance to the other city-states. You can't even get a mount until you reach Jueno, the farthest and most dangerous of the initial city-states to reach. If you want to complete your mission, you're just gonna have to walk.
And walk.
And walk.
And walk.
Vana'diel is a hostile land, but only partially because of the monsters. Yes, those critters can and will ruin you if you venture far outside the cities alone, so you'll need some helping hands to survive out there, but more hostile than that are the obscenely vast distances that, even if you know exactly where you're going (there are almost no directions to anywhere) can lead to multi-hour treks just to get from one town to another. But your most dangerous foe, especially in 2021, is the user interface.
The thing is, in some ways, I kind of love it. The bleeps and bloops and lo-fi menus are so evocative of a particular time and place online, a vibe only surpassed by the immaculate PlayOnline launcher, a pre-Web 2.0 vision of online community that is sometimes what I genuinely wish the entire internet looked and sounded like.
But it's also a nightmare. Maps are uniformly terrible, with barely anything marked on it and no indication of how to reach far-off places. If you ask the person who tells you to serve as an emissary to the other nations how to actually get to them, he will tell you to fuck off and go work it out yourself. This is what the game is like to play after nearly two decades of patches to make it slightly more convenient and accessible. And it's still as frictional as a porcupine.
The thing is though, there is a method to this madness. Or, at least, there was.
Wild though it may be to think about now, looking at this game where you can't even jump, but XI was a forward-thinking game for the time. It was the last FF game series original director Hironobu Sakaguchi worked on in any meaningful capacity, and while the man has been known to puff up his own myth a bit, there does seem to be an agreement that many of the most unique elements of the game's design come from Sakaguchi and game director Koichi Ishii's desire to make players feel individually small and powerless, but powerful and meaningful when together, to organically forge from the players the kinds of bonds and parties of the offline Final Fantasies. The game even had multinational servers, unlike the region-based systems of modern MMOs, where players could play together no matter where in the world they came from, enabled by a to-this-day genuinely innovative auto-translation system that allows players to type key phrase that will be automatically translated into another player's client language, bridging the gap between languages just like Final Fantasy XIV's cutscenes bridge the gaps between it's locations. Much of the game's design was designed to force players into meaningful interaction and cooperation, because without others, you could not survive Vana'diel.
Don't know where to go? Ask someone for directions, or better yet, pay for a higher-level player to escort you to where you need to go! How do you unlock the Dragoon job? Ask a Dragoon! Need to get to the bottom of a mine filled with monsters that you have no hope of defeating alone? Find like-minded allies who also need a boar ass from the bottom of said mine, and venture forth!
Vana'diel is a hostile world because the design of the game is hostile, acting as a dark shadow looming around you and the other players, pushing you together to fight against it. The Shadow Lord may be the ostensible villain of the plot but the antagonist is the game itself, pushing back at you to push you together.
It's an engine for frustration more than anything else. By many accounts, this hostility engendered genuine camaraderie back in the day but it also alienated as many as it enthralled, and in the contemporary iteration of the game, it has been drained of its purpose. Painstakingly detailed guides on multiple wikis telling you exactly where to go and when and exactly how to optimally navigate the obtuse web of systems that had players thinking that hugging walls could aggro every enemy in an instance in 2002 remove the need to actually interact with players meaningfully in the game world, which is just as well because almost everyone you encounter is a level 99 demigod that shall not deign to engage a lowly mortal like you lest they interrupt the busy AFKing schedule they've been committed to for the past 19 years. The thing that makes the game playable in 2021, the Trust system, is also the thing that obliterates much of the design of the game, as in an instant you can summon a party of highly competent NPCs who will effectively allow you to solo all but the most difficult of encounters. In a game where almost every facet of its design is built around getting you to interact with others, Trusts and Wiki guides allow you to sidestep vast swathes of the game design, leaving only a strangely lonely and austere game experience whilst also keeping its places and people accessible to a modern audience who never experienced the game's prime.
If you aren't here for the (genuinely immaculate) vibes, then you're probably here for the story, and while I can only account for the base game story, it isn't much to write home about. It's steeped in an even more intense strain of the Fantasy Racism tropes that accounts for the least palatable sections of XIV's story, to the point that it would almost be avant-garde, the way the Bastok nation storyline has you working unquestioningly for a cartoonishly evil state that openly uses slave labor, to defeat the embodiment of rage and anger felt by those exploited by them: a being called, uh, the Shadow Lord. But it doesn't really put the work in to make it interesting. By many accounts Rise of the Zilart, the first expansion, picks up immediately where the base game left off and recontextualizes events to make things much less uncomfortably racist, but due to the games frankly bizarre attitude towards difficulty scaling, Zilart is so difficult that most guides encourage you to complete almost all the expansions that came after Zilart before you tackle the thing that resolves most of the threads hanging from the story that propelled - well, gently nudged - me through the first 50 levels, and I'm a long way off from all of that. Despite the systems of Final Fantasy XI being neutered to allow players to access the story, the base story lacks almost all bite without them. I'm sure defeating The Shadow Lord was an immense mechanical accomplishment given meaning by accomplishing it with your friends in 2002. But now? It barely registers.
Still, there are moments of true beauty where the magic of this game somehow manages to shine through. Once you have your wiki open on the other screen, and a band of unwaveringly faithful NPC trusts, you can set forth on your quest. Going from Bastok to Windhurst as I did, the first leg of your journey will end in the seaside town of Selbina in the Valkurum Wastes, from which you must take a ship across the sea to the town of Mhaura. Maybe here, the game will use a cutscene like XIV? No, of course not. Buying a ticket, you are brought to a little gated area to wait for the ship (a potentially 10-15 minute wait) just like real public transport. Then you get on the boat, wait for it to set off, and then you can climb up onto the deck to enjoy a low-res version of the world and it's landmarks roll past you, while a beautiful track plays that belies this game's history as a product of the remarkable Chrono Cross team (https://youtu.be/jaKmkoy1r7o). This whole process takes a long time, and it can take over half an hour to reach Mhaura from Selbina. And there isn't really anything to do on the way but talk to your fellow passengers. And before you think I'm about to launch into a boomer rant about how we all used to talk to each other before our headphones and ipods and playstation ps and zunes, the beautiful trick of all this is in what happens halfway through the voyage.
On my trip from Selbina to Mhaura, another ship, without warning, pulled up alongside ours, and a band of undead pirates lept aboard. Barely managing to fight off one, I couldn't hope to face the entire band on my own, and retreated below decks, waiting for them to give up and move on. But instantly, in my head, I saw a story unfold. Of a whole group of players, each of whom came to the boat on their own, suddenly having to band together to beat back the pirates. This whole boat ride, all it's length and waiting, is an engine designed to organically facilitate a genuine fantasy story beat, of individual adventurers on their own banding together - maybe even becoming friends - to defeat a foe they did not expect. It was honestly kind of beautiful to imagine.
But it was just imagination. I can see how the design of this area could facilitate that story, for sure. I'm sure it happened, in the past. Maybe it forged genuine friendships that transcended the world of Vana'diel, or maybe the impromptu alliance disbanded as they disembarked, and went their separate ways, never to see each other again. But there isn't room for either now. There's just me, watched over by my silent NPC allies, enjoying the wonderful music and beautiful vibes as I imagine what may, once upon a time, have been.
Is Final Fantasy XI a good game? I don't know. I can't know. It's not here. I'll play to see the stories, sure - Rise of the Zilart, in particular, has my attention for seeming to share a lot of ideas with Shadowbringers - but the actual play experience that the systems of this game were designed to create has not been preserved. Final Fantasy XI, as it exists now, is a museum. A (lightly) guided tour through its impossibly vast, crushingly empty world, everything within a memorial to the experiences its systems were designed to facilitate, now gone and beyond our ability to revive, no matter how powerful our healing magic is. There's something kind of beautiful and wonderful about what Final Fantasy XI tried to do. But that game is gone. All that's left is its headstone, and those that left in its wake, some continuing to visit and remember, and most leaving it far, far behind them.
2025
This review was written before the game released
surely there are fighting games you could get excited for that aren't made by companies currently in the midst of sexual harrasment lawsuits and has a "Allegations over gender discrimination and sexual harassment" section of their wikipedia page longer than any other section on there
1988
8-bit games often feel strangely lonely and alienating to me. Do you feel like this? I can't really put my finger on why, exactly. Maybe it's because so many of them are such well-trodden ground by now, that it feels like everyone else has been and gone, leaving me alone, crawling amongst the wreckage the words of others have left behind.
Few games tap into that feeling more than the much-maligned Final Fantasy II. There's really no way to say this without sounding hyperbolic/unhinged/pretentious, but it's a game that I am absolutely convinced has a true Soul, one that exists beyond the cartridge, and in the heart and imagination. In the same way that many people develop emotional attachments to their cars and end up attaching human characteristics to their errors and singularities, evolving them into quirks and endearing character flaws, Final Fantasy II's straining ambition gives it an utterly human character to me, a mess of quirks and ideas and wholly distinctive character traits that are entirely its own. Even when the game has serious issues that can impact my enjoyment - namely, the dungeon designs, the one part of the game I find largely indefensible - I find myself endeared to it completely. "Oh, you, FF2!"
There is no other game quite like Final Fantasy II, and there probably never will be again, simply because we now have so much ingrained knowledge of how systems like these are supposed to work, how stories like this are supposed to be told. The lessons learned from games like Final Fantasy II have taken root in the future, but in so doing, the games themselves have been left to languish in retrospect's austere halls.
If I had to sum up the soul of this game, I'd say that it's character can be drawn out through one of my favorite anecdotes in video game history (https://twitter.com/woodaba2/status/1331685180285874176?s=20), the story of how Ultima, the spell sought after by the heroes that Minwu, the most stalwart and useful of the guest party members, gives his life to unseal, only to find it ultimately useless. Although "fixed" in subsequent releases, the emotions this bug inspires live on in the "correct" implementation of Ultima, that being it growing in power the more spells you have mastered, and it takes quite some mastery to push it beyond the bounds of Flare. Even if you do unleash it's full power, that power comes from the user, not the spell: in the hands of a party member without spells, Ultima is powerless.
Unintentional though it may have been, this moment is core to the heart of Final Fantasy II and why it remains incredibly impactful to this day. Common storytelling logic - and, indeed, the original intention of the script - holds that Minwu's death would allow the heroes to find the weapon they need to overthrow the evil Emperor once and for all, but the programming of Final Fantasy II, astonishingly present thanks to the myriad bugs and systemic quirks the game is infamous for, rebels against this idea. "No," it says. "Ultima is but the loudest cry of a far bygone age, echoing almost silently into the future. Minwu died for nothing."
When Aerith dies in Final Fantasy VII, the party is struck by the suddenness of it, but eventually come to understand that she died casting a spell that may save the planet. They can find meaning in what she died doing, even as they mourn the death itself. But in Final Fantasy II, people die and often, their deaths are senseless and without meaning. Perhaps characters like Gordon, who dies from his wounds in his bed, marking your first real mission for the Rebel Army a failure, may have inspired tragic cutscenes in a SNES or PS1 RPG (though I should stress that this game does have the integral addition of choreographed cutscenes punctuating critical moments, but I'll let New Frame Plus discuss it better in their excellent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xapVOKEMk6A), but here, a death like this brings with it only the hole they leave in your party, a wound on the very battle screen that no one can entirely replace.
Not to say that characters are entirely mechanical, like they are in the original, but certainly the game leverages the mechanical boosts the guest characters offer you to make you truly feel their absence. Despite his sparse dialogue, Minwu, the ass-kicking white mage sporting one of early FF's best designs is beloved by fans because he is a crucial asset in battle, and his loss is deeply felt by a party that has no doubt by this stage come to depend on him. Your permanent party members, the vectors through which you'll explore the game's revolutionary levelling system - now thoroughly jacked by The Elder Scrolls, becoming the foundation for the most popular RPG in the world - wherein your characters grow organically through play from orphans who are destroyed in the first battle of the game to distinct archetypes of your own choosing. In my last playthrough, Firion became a master of bows and magics, while Maria took up Leon's fallen sword and became a dual-wielding powerhouse. You can become incredibly powerful in your chosen niches quite quickly in the remakes of this game...not that it will help you against the might of Palamecia.
Victories against the Empire are hard-won, difficult to come by, and often, negligible or even fruitless. Even slaying the Emperor in his palace only allows him to rise again, more powerful than ever before, as the Emperor of Hell itself. By the time you begin the final assault on Pandaemonium, there's a very real sense that there's not much of the world left to save, so devastated has it been by the conflict, leaving you wandering alone in the wreckage of the world listening to the crucially melancholy overworld theme (https://youtu.be/SaCLoLBdxTU). A later Squaresoft title on the PS1 leaves its world in a similar state going into the final dungeon, but it never hit me there quite like it does here because that game is filled with so much exposition and character moments that there's so much else to think about and consider. Final Fantasy II drowns you in the sensory silence of it's empty world, and it is deafening.
But still, you press on.
For those you have lost. For those you can yet save.
Because the deaths of Minwu and the others, they can't have been for nothing.
You can't let them be for nothing.
Most people don't get out of this game what I do. Heck, even I often don't get out of this game what I do in my moments of highest appreciation for it, as it exists in experiential aggregate, forgetting the miserable dungeons and the way the game is almost completely broken in it's original form. But there's no doubt in my mind that this is a special game, that does very special things. You may argue that those things are unintentional, sure, but does that matter? Games like Metroid II: The Return of Samus have come to be seen in bold and incisive ways that grow beyond their original intentions, so allow me to plant my flag and say that Final Fantasy II deserves to be acknowledged and appreciated much the same, as a defiant Wild Rose, rather than be left to wither and dry up on a sad, lonely outpost on the road to a future that left it behind.
Few games tap into that feeling more than the much-maligned Final Fantasy II. There's really no way to say this without sounding hyperbolic/unhinged/pretentious, but it's a game that I am absolutely convinced has a true Soul, one that exists beyond the cartridge, and in the heart and imagination. In the same way that many people develop emotional attachments to their cars and end up attaching human characteristics to their errors and singularities, evolving them into quirks and endearing character flaws, Final Fantasy II's straining ambition gives it an utterly human character to me, a mess of quirks and ideas and wholly distinctive character traits that are entirely its own. Even when the game has serious issues that can impact my enjoyment - namely, the dungeon designs, the one part of the game I find largely indefensible - I find myself endeared to it completely. "Oh, you, FF2!"
There is no other game quite like Final Fantasy II, and there probably never will be again, simply because we now have so much ingrained knowledge of how systems like these are supposed to work, how stories like this are supposed to be told. The lessons learned from games like Final Fantasy II have taken root in the future, but in so doing, the games themselves have been left to languish in retrospect's austere halls.
If I had to sum up the soul of this game, I'd say that it's character can be drawn out through one of my favorite anecdotes in video game history (https://twitter.com/woodaba2/status/1331685180285874176?s=20), the story of how Ultima, the spell sought after by the heroes that Minwu, the most stalwart and useful of the guest party members, gives his life to unseal, only to find it ultimately useless. Although "fixed" in subsequent releases, the emotions this bug inspires live on in the "correct" implementation of Ultima, that being it growing in power the more spells you have mastered, and it takes quite some mastery to push it beyond the bounds of Flare. Even if you do unleash it's full power, that power comes from the user, not the spell: in the hands of a party member without spells, Ultima is powerless.
Unintentional though it may have been, this moment is core to the heart of Final Fantasy II and why it remains incredibly impactful to this day. Common storytelling logic - and, indeed, the original intention of the script - holds that Minwu's death would allow the heroes to find the weapon they need to overthrow the evil Emperor once and for all, but the programming of Final Fantasy II, astonishingly present thanks to the myriad bugs and systemic quirks the game is infamous for, rebels against this idea. "No," it says. "Ultima is but the loudest cry of a far bygone age, echoing almost silently into the future. Minwu died for nothing."
When Aerith dies in Final Fantasy VII, the party is struck by the suddenness of it, but eventually come to understand that she died casting a spell that may save the planet. They can find meaning in what she died doing, even as they mourn the death itself. But in Final Fantasy II, people die and often, their deaths are senseless and without meaning. Perhaps characters like Gordon, who dies from his wounds in his bed, marking your first real mission for the Rebel Army a failure, may have inspired tragic cutscenes in a SNES or PS1 RPG (though I should stress that this game does have the integral addition of choreographed cutscenes punctuating critical moments, but I'll let New Frame Plus discuss it better in their excellent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xapVOKEMk6A), but here, a death like this brings with it only the hole they leave in your party, a wound on the very battle screen that no one can entirely replace.
Not to say that characters are entirely mechanical, like they are in the original, but certainly the game leverages the mechanical boosts the guest characters offer you to make you truly feel their absence. Despite his sparse dialogue, Minwu, the ass-kicking white mage sporting one of early FF's best designs is beloved by fans because he is a crucial asset in battle, and his loss is deeply felt by a party that has no doubt by this stage come to depend on him. Your permanent party members, the vectors through which you'll explore the game's revolutionary levelling system - now thoroughly jacked by The Elder Scrolls, becoming the foundation for the most popular RPG in the world - wherein your characters grow organically through play from orphans who are destroyed in the first battle of the game to distinct archetypes of your own choosing. In my last playthrough, Firion became a master of bows and magics, while Maria took up Leon's fallen sword and became a dual-wielding powerhouse. You can become incredibly powerful in your chosen niches quite quickly in the remakes of this game...not that it will help you against the might of Palamecia.
Victories against the Empire are hard-won, difficult to come by, and often, negligible or even fruitless. Even slaying the Emperor in his palace only allows him to rise again, more powerful than ever before, as the Emperor of Hell itself. By the time you begin the final assault on Pandaemonium, there's a very real sense that there's not much of the world left to save, so devastated has it been by the conflict, leaving you wandering alone in the wreckage of the world listening to the crucially melancholy overworld theme (https://youtu.be/SaCLoLBdxTU). A later Squaresoft title on the PS1 leaves its world in a similar state going into the final dungeon, but it never hit me there quite like it does here because that game is filled with so much exposition and character moments that there's so much else to think about and consider. Final Fantasy II drowns you in the sensory silence of it's empty world, and it is deafening.
But still, you press on.
For those you have lost. For those you can yet save.
Because the deaths of Minwu and the others, they can't have been for nothing.
You can't let them be for nothing.
Most people don't get out of this game what I do. Heck, even I often don't get out of this game what I do in my moments of highest appreciation for it, as it exists in experiential aggregate, forgetting the miserable dungeons and the way the game is almost completely broken in it's original form. But there's no doubt in my mind that this is a special game, that does very special things. You may argue that those things are unintentional, sure, but does that matter? Games like Metroid II: The Return of Samus have come to be seen in bold and incisive ways that grow beyond their original intentions, so allow me to plant my flag and say that Final Fantasy II deserves to be acknowledged and appreciated much the same, as a defiant Wild Rose, rather than be left to wither and dry up on a sad, lonely outpost on the road to a future that left it behind.
2021
if you want to have a perfect encapsulation of the modern state of triple-A video games, then the free-to-play multiplayer mode of Halo Infinite is where you need to find it.
loading up this game is kind of an upsetting experience. the UI is absolutely terrible, just like Halo 5 the game is missing series-staple features like Forge, game modes like Infection, Assault, Juggernaut (this isn't even all of it, the game will release without a campaign co-op mode for the first time in series history, which to me would be like a fighting game being released without a training mode), locking basic customization features behind an obscenely miserly battlepass grind that doles out a drip feed of additions to a customization suite that no longer deigns to let you change the color of your character freely, made more insidious by the game itself placing more emphasis on individual player expression than any game in the series before it, what with each player using their own colors even in team game modes and a roll call at the beginning of every match to show off your cosmetics and give shitty little kids an opportunity to call you a Default.
however. once you're in the game? once you're haloing? oh man. oh buddy. it's fucking halo!!! halo just rules, the place it sits between more classic boomer shooters and more modern "boots on the ground" fare has always given it a distinct niche, one that rewards strategy and knowledge of its systems in ways that it's contemporaries simply don't, whilst offering a vast enough sandbox of intersecting weapons, vehicles, and ephemera that the game becomes an engine for creating hilarious stories to share with your friends. why else do you think the theater mode exists? (well, existed lol) just on a visceral game feel level this is by far 343's most successful iteration of the sandbox to date, excising much of the bizarre decisions that inflicted their Halo 4 efforts while still carving out it's own niche within a series that still maintains it's older efforts to play at your leisure through the master chief collection. it's very early days yet so we don't know exactly how balancing, map design, and things like that are gonna shake out in the long run, but just on a base level? this game is such a blast. two decades of iteration and tweaking of this formula have created a game that is like kinesthetic ambrosia, and it's refreshing to play a western modern-AAA game with visibly absurd money behind it that feels consciously designed, y'know?
i love the master chief collection for offering so much halo so readily, but the fact that it offers so much is kind of why it always feels depopulated and muted despite having a healthy player base. everything is so decentralized that there isn't really A Halo that everyone is playing, y'know? and that's what excites me about Infinite. a free-to-play halo game that everyone can play together and enjoy...once they get through the actively depressing menus lmao. even takes up a very normal and sensible amount of space on your hard drive!! i don't have to plan my life around having halo installed!! it's a miracle!!!
halo night with the squad...it's been a long time without you, my friend...
loading up this game is kind of an upsetting experience. the UI is absolutely terrible, just like Halo 5 the game is missing series-staple features like Forge, game modes like Infection, Assault, Juggernaut (this isn't even all of it, the game will release without a campaign co-op mode for the first time in series history, which to me would be like a fighting game being released without a training mode), locking basic customization features behind an obscenely miserly battlepass grind that doles out a drip feed of additions to a customization suite that no longer deigns to let you change the color of your character freely, made more insidious by the game itself placing more emphasis on individual player expression than any game in the series before it, what with each player using their own colors even in team game modes and a roll call at the beginning of every match to show off your cosmetics and give shitty little kids an opportunity to call you a Default.
however. once you're in the game? once you're haloing? oh man. oh buddy. it's fucking halo!!! halo just rules, the place it sits between more classic boomer shooters and more modern "boots on the ground" fare has always given it a distinct niche, one that rewards strategy and knowledge of its systems in ways that it's contemporaries simply don't, whilst offering a vast enough sandbox of intersecting weapons, vehicles, and ephemera that the game becomes an engine for creating hilarious stories to share with your friends. why else do you think the theater mode exists? (well, existed lol) just on a visceral game feel level this is by far 343's most successful iteration of the sandbox to date, excising much of the bizarre decisions that inflicted their Halo 4 efforts while still carving out it's own niche within a series that still maintains it's older efforts to play at your leisure through the master chief collection. it's very early days yet so we don't know exactly how balancing, map design, and things like that are gonna shake out in the long run, but just on a base level? this game is such a blast. two decades of iteration and tweaking of this formula have created a game that is like kinesthetic ambrosia, and it's refreshing to play a western modern-AAA game with visibly absurd money behind it that feels consciously designed, y'know?
i love the master chief collection for offering so much halo so readily, but the fact that it offers so much is kind of why it always feels depopulated and muted despite having a healthy player base. everything is so decentralized that there isn't really A Halo that everyone is playing, y'know? and that's what excites me about Infinite. a free-to-play halo game that everyone can play together and enjoy...once they get through the actively depressing menus lmao. even takes up a very normal and sensible amount of space on your hard drive!! i don't have to plan my life around having halo installed!! it's a miracle!!!
halo night with the squad...it's been a long time without you, my friend...
2021
This review contains spoilers
PREVIOUSLY ON METROID: Samus Aran, bonded with Metroid DNA in order to save her life from the X, a world-eating parasite she unwittingly allowed to flourish by genociding the Metroids of SR388, becomes a new type of life-form, a hybrid of Humanity, Chozo, Metroid and X with no name other than "Samus Aran", and destroys a plot by The Federation to manufacture copies of the most dangerous predators in the galaxy: first Metroids, then Samus Aran.
So, how does Metroid: Dread progress this story, after nearly two decades between installments? What are the big ideas and concepts that Sakamoto claimed simply could not have been accomplished until the power of the Nintendo Switch arrived? And how will Dread re-restablish Metroid's position as the queen of this genre in a world full of games like Hollow Knight?
The answer to all of these questions is more or less a shrug. Metroid Dread is a fine game, one that is extremely engaging and compelling in the moment to moment, with smooth movement, pitch-perfect feedback, and some wonderfully exhilarating moments, but it isn't so much an evolution of the Metroid framework as it is a Greatest Hits collection of some of the series most compelling ideas, but if there's anything on here that was simply impossible to create on, say, the Wii U I can't find it, and the story mostly serves to repeat Fusion's ideas far less subtly and far less competently, a narrative that fails to convince me that Nintendo has any ideas of how to follow on from the knockout ideas presented in Fusion and, to a lesser extent, Dread.
The most baffling thing about this game is The Twist. Namely, that it's presented as one at all. Why is Samus "being a Metroid" (great writing on that one by the way, gang. What, was "no samus, you are the metroids AND THEN SAMUS WAS A METROID" too good for you?) supposed to be a shock? We knew this. We knew this from the start of Fusion. Its implications were fully crystallized when you escaped the secret lab near the end of that game through a shaft full of Metroids who regarded you as one of their own. Don't get me wrong, I like this story idea and I liked it when it was in Fusion, but it's bizarre to reach the reveal the story has been building towards and have it be something I fundamentally already know, like if Return of the Jedi decided to reveal that Darth Vader was Luke's father...again.
Speaking of which, Raven Beak is a cartoonishly uninteresting antagonist, but the scene where Samus does embrace the Metroid part of her to destroy the origin of the Chozo part of her is a genuinely sick as hell beat that would have really hit if this game was about the Chozo or bothered to interrogate them in any way, but instead Raven Beak is just an Evil Guy who Must Be Stopped, functionally interchangeable with the faceless arm of the Federation Military that served as Fusion's unseen true antagonist. And it ultimately just leads into another sequence referencing a past Metroid game.
There's cool stuff here, but it's all stuff I liked better when it was in the other games, routinely done better in those games. I'm very surprised that this game has received little to none of Fusion's criticism of extended dialogue sequences because they feel much more frictional here, particularly a 5-minute long exposition dump around the midpoint where some guy just drones the entire plot at you, rather than having it unfold and develop over the course of the game. The twist regarding who's on the intercom is basically the same as the twist with the computer in Fusion except less interesting, the X being released from containment lacks the weight of the same beat from Fusion...Dread feels like a holding pattern, Metroid spinning its wheels as it aimlessly wanders in search of a direction.
Speaking of aimlessness, one of the feelings that really struck me playing Dread was how aimless progression in it feeling despite being extremely linear in practice. I won't go over again how purposeful and effective Fusion's linearity was narratively, but I will mention that despite the linearity, Fusion was still able to establish the station as a meaningfully interconnected and intersecting space in a way that Dread is painfully unable to. There's no sense of cohesion or distinctiveness to the myriad environs of ZDR, they all look so similar (barring the forest level) and you zip and back forth between them with such reckless abandon that I never got any sense of them as meaningful distinct spaces, never mind a full cohesive world that I could understand in my head. When I got to the end of the game and could start the scavenger hunt, I didn't. How could I? I remembered rooms with stuff that I could explore and collect now, but I had no idea where it all actually was because I had no sense of what ZDR actually looked like. It's clear that this kind of progression is just MercurySteam's style: it's present in both the absolutely abysmal Mirror of Fate and the mediocre Samus Returns, and I just don't like it. Even if it's just a Generic Desert Level, a Generic Fire Level, I want my environments in a Metroidvania to feel meaningfully distinct, rather than an identikit techbase smear.
What makes this especially egregious is the EMMI areas, which are literally identical visually no matter what area of the game you're in. I have no idea why this decision was made: there are already so many indicators of when an EMMI is nearby, why do we need to make the environment conform to them as well? I never felt hunted by the EMMI, never (ahem) dreaded them, because very quickly I understood them to be essentially a minigame, divorced from the wider gameplay and narrative experience.
It's a fun minigame, at least. Chases are genuinely exhilirating and tense thanks to how genuinely difficult it is to nail the precise timing for the QTE, thought the incredibly generous checkpointing does rob them of their bite eventually. Narratively they're a total dud and they don't really work within the macrostructure of the game, but they are at least quite a bit of fun in isolation.
That's kinda Dread in a nutshell, honestly. I've been very negative thus far but it's still getting three stars for a reason, and that reason is that moment to moment this is just an incredibly playable game, and I mean that as a compliment. Samus controls great, the stiffness that made free-aiming and counters awkward fits in Samus Returns have been smoothed over to create an experience that excels in forward momentum, constantly moving and shooting and sliding in a way that tickles my neurons in the way that pulling off a string of Prince of Persia platforming does, a natural flow of movement and combat that just feels great in the moment. I may strongly dislike the way MercurySteam constructs their worlds, but by this point their designers have become incredibly adept at individual encounters and rooms. A particular highlight is just how puzzle-y much of the item collection is: requiring genuinely tricky and thoughtful application of your moves above and beyond any other game in the series bar sequence-breaks in Super Metroid. Dread has the absolute least "shoot every wall to try to find the one box that has an item" of any Metroid game, and this, along with the routinely excellent bosses (obscene reuse of the X-infected Chozo Warrior in the final stretch aside, I swear you fight this guy like four times in the space of an hour) mean that this game has some of the best individual bits in the entire series, even if it never coheres into a knockout whole.
Which makes me wonder if this game would not have been better off if it wasn't a Metroid game. Would this combat and movement have been more fun in a more linear game, where the environments could be sculpted to provide constant specific challenges perfectly attuned to the moveset you have right now? Would this game be able to be bolder with its storytelling if it wasn't tied to this specific franchise? I don't know. What I do know is that Metroid Dread, as it is now, does not feel like a franchise comeback as much as it does an overly cautious, conservative game that ultimately functions as an argument for the series' irrelevance, its inability to move forward and compete with its contemporaries. Neither MercurySteam nor Sakamoto seem to have any ideas on how to move this series forward, and given MercurySteam's well-documented unethical working practices I'm not particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of them being given yet another turn at the bat. Even Samus' Metroid Metamorphosis, the most evocative, exciting, and cool thing in the game, even if it is largely an element from Fusion's story writ louder, is walked back at the end with another recycled plot point from Fusion, the X reuniting with Samus. The game ends on business-as-usual, Samus blowing up a planet and flying away in her Iconic Purple Gravity suit, an echo of past glories growing more and more faded and distant as the years go on.
She doesn't even save anyone this time.
So, how does Metroid: Dread progress this story, after nearly two decades between installments? What are the big ideas and concepts that Sakamoto claimed simply could not have been accomplished until the power of the Nintendo Switch arrived? And how will Dread re-restablish Metroid's position as the queen of this genre in a world full of games like Hollow Knight?
The answer to all of these questions is more or less a shrug. Metroid Dread is a fine game, one that is extremely engaging and compelling in the moment to moment, with smooth movement, pitch-perfect feedback, and some wonderfully exhilarating moments, but it isn't so much an evolution of the Metroid framework as it is a Greatest Hits collection of some of the series most compelling ideas, but if there's anything on here that was simply impossible to create on, say, the Wii U I can't find it, and the story mostly serves to repeat Fusion's ideas far less subtly and far less competently, a narrative that fails to convince me that Nintendo has any ideas of how to follow on from the knockout ideas presented in Fusion and, to a lesser extent, Dread.
The most baffling thing about this game is The Twist. Namely, that it's presented as one at all. Why is Samus "being a Metroid" (great writing on that one by the way, gang. What, was "no samus, you are the metroids AND THEN SAMUS WAS A METROID" too good for you?) supposed to be a shock? We knew this. We knew this from the start of Fusion. Its implications were fully crystallized when you escaped the secret lab near the end of that game through a shaft full of Metroids who regarded you as one of their own. Don't get me wrong, I like this story idea and I liked it when it was in Fusion, but it's bizarre to reach the reveal the story has been building towards and have it be something I fundamentally already know, like if Return of the Jedi decided to reveal that Darth Vader was Luke's father...again.
Speaking of which, Raven Beak is a cartoonishly uninteresting antagonist, but the scene where Samus does embrace the Metroid part of her to destroy the origin of the Chozo part of her is a genuinely sick as hell beat that would have really hit if this game was about the Chozo or bothered to interrogate them in any way, but instead Raven Beak is just an Evil Guy who Must Be Stopped, functionally interchangeable with the faceless arm of the Federation Military that served as Fusion's unseen true antagonist. And it ultimately just leads into another sequence referencing a past Metroid game.
There's cool stuff here, but it's all stuff I liked better when it was in the other games, routinely done better in those games. I'm very surprised that this game has received little to none of Fusion's criticism of extended dialogue sequences because they feel much more frictional here, particularly a 5-minute long exposition dump around the midpoint where some guy just drones the entire plot at you, rather than having it unfold and develop over the course of the game. The twist regarding who's on the intercom is basically the same as the twist with the computer in Fusion except less interesting, the X being released from containment lacks the weight of the same beat from Fusion...Dread feels like a holding pattern, Metroid spinning its wheels as it aimlessly wanders in search of a direction.
Speaking of aimlessness, one of the feelings that really struck me playing Dread was how aimless progression in it feeling despite being extremely linear in practice. I won't go over again how purposeful and effective Fusion's linearity was narratively, but I will mention that despite the linearity, Fusion was still able to establish the station as a meaningfully interconnected and intersecting space in a way that Dread is painfully unable to. There's no sense of cohesion or distinctiveness to the myriad environs of ZDR, they all look so similar (barring the forest level) and you zip and back forth between them with such reckless abandon that I never got any sense of them as meaningful distinct spaces, never mind a full cohesive world that I could understand in my head. When I got to the end of the game and could start the scavenger hunt, I didn't. How could I? I remembered rooms with stuff that I could explore and collect now, but I had no idea where it all actually was because I had no sense of what ZDR actually looked like. It's clear that this kind of progression is just MercurySteam's style: it's present in both the absolutely abysmal Mirror of Fate and the mediocre Samus Returns, and I just don't like it. Even if it's just a Generic Desert Level, a Generic Fire Level, I want my environments in a Metroidvania to feel meaningfully distinct, rather than an identikit techbase smear.
What makes this especially egregious is the EMMI areas, which are literally identical visually no matter what area of the game you're in. I have no idea why this decision was made: there are already so many indicators of when an EMMI is nearby, why do we need to make the environment conform to them as well? I never felt hunted by the EMMI, never (ahem) dreaded them, because very quickly I understood them to be essentially a minigame, divorced from the wider gameplay and narrative experience.
It's a fun minigame, at least. Chases are genuinely exhilirating and tense thanks to how genuinely difficult it is to nail the precise timing for the QTE, thought the incredibly generous checkpointing does rob them of their bite eventually. Narratively they're a total dud and they don't really work within the macrostructure of the game, but they are at least quite a bit of fun in isolation.
That's kinda Dread in a nutshell, honestly. I've been very negative thus far but it's still getting three stars for a reason, and that reason is that moment to moment this is just an incredibly playable game, and I mean that as a compliment. Samus controls great, the stiffness that made free-aiming and counters awkward fits in Samus Returns have been smoothed over to create an experience that excels in forward momentum, constantly moving and shooting and sliding in a way that tickles my neurons in the way that pulling off a string of Prince of Persia platforming does, a natural flow of movement and combat that just feels great in the moment. I may strongly dislike the way MercurySteam constructs their worlds, but by this point their designers have become incredibly adept at individual encounters and rooms. A particular highlight is just how puzzle-y much of the item collection is: requiring genuinely tricky and thoughtful application of your moves above and beyond any other game in the series bar sequence-breaks in Super Metroid. Dread has the absolute least "shoot every wall to try to find the one box that has an item" of any Metroid game, and this, along with the routinely excellent bosses (obscene reuse of the X-infected Chozo Warrior in the final stretch aside, I swear you fight this guy like four times in the space of an hour) mean that this game has some of the best individual bits in the entire series, even if it never coheres into a knockout whole.
Which makes me wonder if this game would not have been better off if it wasn't a Metroid game. Would this combat and movement have been more fun in a more linear game, where the environments could be sculpted to provide constant specific challenges perfectly attuned to the moveset you have right now? Would this game be able to be bolder with its storytelling if it wasn't tied to this specific franchise? I don't know. What I do know is that Metroid Dread, as it is now, does not feel like a franchise comeback as much as it does an overly cautious, conservative game that ultimately functions as an argument for the series' irrelevance, its inability to move forward and compete with its contemporaries. Neither MercurySteam nor Sakamoto seem to have any ideas on how to move this series forward, and given MercurySteam's well-documented unethical working practices I'm not particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of them being given yet another turn at the bat. Even Samus' Metroid Metamorphosis, the most evocative, exciting, and cool thing in the game, even if it is largely an element from Fusion's story writ louder, is walked back at the end with another recycled plot point from Fusion, the X reuniting with Samus. The game ends on business-as-usual, Samus blowing up a planet and flying away in her Iconic Purple Gravity suit, an echo of past glories growing more and more faded and distant as the years go on.
She doesn't even save anyone this time.
2000
an adaptation of the fevered sugar-fueled scribblings in the margins of your maths textbook, impossible battles and astonishing reveals and incredible images streamed directly from the imagination of a bored 11-year old. zero restraint, zero conception of what is and is not "enough", pulling from all the things they love with reckless abandon, rendered with all the technical mastery of one of the most legendary studios in the industry at the height of their powers.
sin and punishment reeks of a dense inner mythology that it almost never lets the viewer peer into, not so much beginning in media res but existing almost entirely in the head of it's creator, assuming an understanding that could only be found inside there. i mean this as the highest possible praise, sin and punishment channels an effortlessly positive adolescent enthusiasm that other games could only dream of replicating. pairing this with an understanding of cinematic technique in gameplay years ahead of the curve, turn-of-the-millennium eco-warrior themes screamed loud enough to be heard above the glorious cacophony, a beautiful tapestry of rail shooting that entices perfection like few other games manage and what else could Sin and Punishment possibly do? what more could we possibly ask for?
well, one of the best final bosses that video games have ever seen certainly helps.
A warning from Beyond The Time, from futures wrapped in themselves: Kill the future they say Must Be. Preferably with a gunblade.
sin and punishment reeks of a dense inner mythology that it almost never lets the viewer peer into, not so much beginning in media res but existing almost entirely in the head of it's creator, assuming an understanding that could only be found inside there. i mean this as the highest possible praise, sin and punishment channels an effortlessly positive adolescent enthusiasm that other games could only dream of replicating. pairing this with an understanding of cinematic technique in gameplay years ahead of the curve, turn-of-the-millennium eco-warrior themes screamed loud enough to be heard above the glorious cacophony, a beautiful tapestry of rail shooting that entices perfection like few other games manage and what else could Sin and Punishment possibly do? what more could we possibly ask for?
well, one of the best final bosses that video games have ever seen certainly helps.
A warning from Beyond The Time, from futures wrapped in themselves: Kill the future they say Must Be. Preferably with a gunblade.
2002
PREVIOUSLY ON METROID: Samus Aran, galactic hero, nemesis of the evil space pirates, and bounty hunter who to my knowledge has never actually Hunted a Bounty, commits genocide.
this isn't a game theory or another example of a leftist unwilling to read a game in a way that isn't materialistic (i mean. not entirely, anyway...), this is just textually what occurs in Metroid 2. Samus touches down on SR388 and doesn't leave its surface until she's exterminated every single Metroid, except one, a final act of mercy that's immediately dropped off for invasive scientific study.
difficult to approach and often really quite tedious, Metroid 2 is nonetheless a truly remarkable game accurately described by FMTownsParty (https://www.backloggd.com/u/FMTownsParty/review/1831/) as an "art game for the Game Boy", and something of a black sheep in Nintendo's vast catalogue. it's a game I respect immensely even if I will probably never play it again, and its uniqueness stands out all the more for the abject failure of its twin remakes to replicate it, even if they are accomplished works in their own right, and one of my sticking points with Super Metroid, a game I like but cannot bring myself to love, is that it largely excises these more narratively complex elements in favor of something far more traditional. super metroid is an exceedingly fine game, but it doesn't really go for it, y'know?
thankfully, Metroid: Fusion makes up for it's predecessor by going for it harder than few games could ever hope to match.
becoming a new kind of life-form made out of the DNA of the single act of mercy you offered to a species you exterminated only to find yourself hunted by the physical embodiment of that past extermination wearing your face and using your powers is enough of a killer hook to hang an entire game out of but somehow Fusion just keeps going, adding layer upon layer of incisive thematic work interrogating it's central character relentlessly, until it cements itself as (with the possible exception of Majora's Mask) the single most thematically rich, narratively accomplished nintendo game with no input from Shigesato Itoi. every pixel of this game is bursting with resonance and detail and purpose that is near un-rivalled. fusion isn't just the best metroid game, it's one of the best games, period.
i think we've mostly chilled out on decrying Fusion for its linearity, but i wanna highlight what the game's structure does to serve it. the game's loop is simple: you arrive in a sector, adam tells you roughly what you need to do and why, and then you go do that thing, usually with some little hidey-holes you can poke in along the way to get an upgrade. but within this loop, the information you are given and the information that is withheld is pointed. even before the big reveals it's clear just how much the federation is manipulating and lying to you, and as you question your orders more and more, the game widens the scope it offers you, going from your first run in sector 1 being practically on-rails to the sections where the game lets go of the reins entirely, inviting you to find the path forward on your own, which are inevitably the moments where you push up against and bomb your way through the walls of the conspiracy around you. portal wishes it could do this as well.
everything about the storytelling in this game is so incisive, so pointed. the way the game emphasizes the destructive/predatory nature of Samus by making clear that you are not only the reason for the X's existence, by wiping out its natural predators, the Metroids, from the ecosystem, but also for it's spread throughout the station, as the AI reminds you that by opening up other areas, you are letting the X spread into them. the federation and samus' intertwined culpability in this incident is never left in doubt, the very act of playing a Metroid game, of increasing your ability to navigate this space, is toxic and bringing about it's destruction.
this culminates in one of the most remarkable sequences in the game and, indeed, the series, when you trick your way into the restricted zone and discover, inevitably, that the federation is breeding metroids. for "peaceful purposes", they claim. contrary to the game's reputation as constantly talking (Samus has some internal narration but it's genuinely quite sparse, and her actually talking back to the AI at the end is a big moment) this entire sequence, from the reveal to the knife-twisting that is the SA-X showing up to do as Samus does: butcher Metroids, to the final escape, where you drift upwards through an elevator shaft filled with other metroids - your kin, now - it's all done wordlessly, and communicates far more complicated feelings than anything in Super Metroid.
more than Other M could ever conceive, Fusion is about Samus. her destructive and violent past in the prior metroids, and her current status, a tool of the federation that they are preparing to discard once they find multiple, mass-produced SA-Xs they believe they can control. after all, why not? they controlled Samus, at least up to a certain point. the way the game pulls back its tight linear pacing ever so slightly as the story reaches its climax communicates Samus' push for personal autonomy beautifully, which is why I wish the ending was just a little tighter.
don't get me wrong, it's a knockout in many respects. facing the SA-X, the embodiment of what Samus once was, and triumphing over it with the new(ish) powers you've obtained from interfacing and embracing the life forms you destroy is a fantastic final battle, as is the last-minute reprise of being saved by the baby metroid. much-mocked as it is, I actually like the Fusion one far better, because rather than being a straightforwardly paternalistic relationship, the SA-Xs motives are far more obscured. is this the Samus part of it? or is it the X, protecting what could be the last remnant of its existence inside Samus? or is it a bittersweet reclamation and restating of Samus Aran as the one who kills the Metroids? it could be all of them, and that's why I like it. i like metroid when it's not doing gender, frankly. i like it, even more, when Samus Aran is ultimately saved by the funny little animals she saves innocuously around halfway through the game. i think that's why i like samus, ultimately, despite her genocidal tendencies, despite the fact that she is absolutely someone who would take away one of her hands, one of the ways she is able to reach out and embrace the world around her, with a gun. here, at the end, she still has enough good in her to save people.
which brings me to the actual sore point with the ending: Adam. there's a generous read to be made on the game's depiction of Adam for much of it, and I maintain that the game is genuinely critical of him as a person, as the twin reveals of him actively deceiving Samus throughout the adventure and also being the actual mind of Adam Malkovich do much to paint the picture of a kind of shitty military guy that Samus is all too willing to absolve him due to her own guilt. the problem is, of course, the Gender. the "any objections, lady?" shit and Samus' frankly embarrassing "no wait hold on it's fine actually his misogyny is secretly woke come on" is hard to swallow and impossible to muster the enthusiasm to do so after Sakamoto went on to write and direct Metroid: Other M, a fucking dumpster fire with the biggest gender essentialist TERF energy imaginable. Other M's very existence makes it a bit harder to be generous to Fusion in the way that I would like to.
there's so much to like about the end of this game, but there's just a twinge of (ahem) Dread it envokes. from the (genuinely forgotten by me until this most recent playthrough) backpedaling of Samus' revolutionary act against the government by Adam insisting that "someone (in government) will understand" to the aforementioned gender, there are things about it that could be taken in a bad direction. nevertheless, it's hard to hold the mistakes of the future, be they in Other M or, potentially, in Dread, against Fusion too hard. it remains an absolutely singular work that I love dearly, a thematic embarrassment of riches that deserves to stand up and be counted as a true classic.
i didn't even mention how much fun it is to shoot da guys! it's very fun. five stars.
this isn't a game theory or another example of a leftist unwilling to read a game in a way that isn't materialistic (i mean. not entirely, anyway...), this is just textually what occurs in Metroid 2. Samus touches down on SR388 and doesn't leave its surface until she's exterminated every single Metroid, except one, a final act of mercy that's immediately dropped off for invasive scientific study.
difficult to approach and often really quite tedious, Metroid 2 is nonetheless a truly remarkable game accurately described by FMTownsParty (https://www.backloggd.com/u/FMTownsParty/review/1831/) as an "art game for the Game Boy", and something of a black sheep in Nintendo's vast catalogue. it's a game I respect immensely even if I will probably never play it again, and its uniqueness stands out all the more for the abject failure of its twin remakes to replicate it, even if they are accomplished works in their own right, and one of my sticking points with Super Metroid, a game I like but cannot bring myself to love, is that it largely excises these more narratively complex elements in favor of something far more traditional. super metroid is an exceedingly fine game, but it doesn't really go for it, y'know?
thankfully, Metroid: Fusion makes up for it's predecessor by going for it harder than few games could ever hope to match.
becoming a new kind of life-form made out of the DNA of the single act of mercy you offered to a species you exterminated only to find yourself hunted by the physical embodiment of that past extermination wearing your face and using your powers is enough of a killer hook to hang an entire game out of but somehow Fusion just keeps going, adding layer upon layer of incisive thematic work interrogating it's central character relentlessly, until it cements itself as (with the possible exception of Majora's Mask) the single most thematically rich, narratively accomplished nintendo game with no input from Shigesato Itoi. every pixel of this game is bursting with resonance and detail and purpose that is near un-rivalled. fusion isn't just the best metroid game, it's one of the best games, period.
i think we've mostly chilled out on decrying Fusion for its linearity, but i wanna highlight what the game's structure does to serve it. the game's loop is simple: you arrive in a sector, adam tells you roughly what you need to do and why, and then you go do that thing, usually with some little hidey-holes you can poke in along the way to get an upgrade. but within this loop, the information you are given and the information that is withheld is pointed. even before the big reveals it's clear just how much the federation is manipulating and lying to you, and as you question your orders more and more, the game widens the scope it offers you, going from your first run in sector 1 being practically on-rails to the sections where the game lets go of the reins entirely, inviting you to find the path forward on your own, which are inevitably the moments where you push up against and bomb your way through the walls of the conspiracy around you. portal wishes it could do this as well.
everything about the storytelling in this game is so incisive, so pointed. the way the game emphasizes the destructive/predatory nature of Samus by making clear that you are not only the reason for the X's existence, by wiping out its natural predators, the Metroids, from the ecosystem, but also for it's spread throughout the station, as the AI reminds you that by opening up other areas, you are letting the X spread into them. the federation and samus' intertwined culpability in this incident is never left in doubt, the very act of playing a Metroid game, of increasing your ability to navigate this space, is toxic and bringing about it's destruction.
this culminates in one of the most remarkable sequences in the game and, indeed, the series, when you trick your way into the restricted zone and discover, inevitably, that the federation is breeding metroids. for "peaceful purposes", they claim. contrary to the game's reputation as constantly talking (Samus has some internal narration but it's genuinely quite sparse, and her actually talking back to the AI at the end is a big moment) this entire sequence, from the reveal to the knife-twisting that is the SA-X showing up to do as Samus does: butcher Metroids, to the final escape, where you drift upwards through an elevator shaft filled with other metroids - your kin, now - it's all done wordlessly, and communicates far more complicated feelings than anything in Super Metroid.
more than Other M could ever conceive, Fusion is about Samus. her destructive and violent past in the prior metroids, and her current status, a tool of the federation that they are preparing to discard once they find multiple, mass-produced SA-Xs they believe they can control. after all, why not? they controlled Samus, at least up to a certain point. the way the game pulls back its tight linear pacing ever so slightly as the story reaches its climax communicates Samus' push for personal autonomy beautifully, which is why I wish the ending was just a little tighter.
don't get me wrong, it's a knockout in many respects. facing the SA-X, the embodiment of what Samus once was, and triumphing over it with the new(ish) powers you've obtained from interfacing and embracing the life forms you destroy is a fantastic final battle, as is the last-minute reprise of being saved by the baby metroid. much-mocked as it is, I actually like the Fusion one far better, because rather than being a straightforwardly paternalistic relationship, the SA-Xs motives are far more obscured. is this the Samus part of it? or is it the X, protecting what could be the last remnant of its existence inside Samus? or is it a bittersweet reclamation and restating of Samus Aran as the one who kills the Metroids? it could be all of them, and that's why I like it. i like metroid when it's not doing gender, frankly. i like it, even more, when Samus Aran is ultimately saved by the funny little animals she saves innocuously around halfway through the game. i think that's why i like samus, ultimately, despite her genocidal tendencies, despite the fact that she is absolutely someone who would take away one of her hands, one of the ways she is able to reach out and embrace the world around her, with a gun. here, at the end, she still has enough good in her to save people.
which brings me to the actual sore point with the ending: Adam. there's a generous read to be made on the game's depiction of Adam for much of it, and I maintain that the game is genuinely critical of him as a person, as the twin reveals of him actively deceiving Samus throughout the adventure and also being the actual mind of Adam Malkovich do much to paint the picture of a kind of shitty military guy that Samus is all too willing to absolve him due to her own guilt. the problem is, of course, the Gender. the "any objections, lady?" shit and Samus' frankly embarrassing "no wait hold on it's fine actually his misogyny is secretly woke come on" is hard to swallow and impossible to muster the enthusiasm to do so after Sakamoto went on to write and direct Metroid: Other M, a fucking dumpster fire with the biggest gender essentialist TERF energy imaginable. Other M's very existence makes it a bit harder to be generous to Fusion in the way that I would like to.
there's so much to like about the end of this game, but there's just a twinge of (ahem) Dread it envokes. from the (genuinely forgotten by me until this most recent playthrough) backpedaling of Samus' revolutionary act against the government by Adam insisting that "someone (in government) will understand" to the aforementioned gender, there are things about it that could be taken in a bad direction. nevertheless, it's hard to hold the mistakes of the future, be they in Other M or, potentially, in Dread, against Fusion too hard. it remains an absolutely singular work that I love dearly, a thematic embarrassment of riches that deserves to stand up and be counted as a true classic.
i didn't even mention how much fun it is to shoot da guys! it's very fun. five stars.