i wonder what the first rationalization was, for the finding of a young corpse inside a closet, killed at hands puppeteered by the violence of parents, family, church, school, science. what story did they tell themselves, to explain what they found in there? were they saved, or damned? were they a tragedy, or a warning, or - depressingly common in stories throughout history - was the murder of this young life, so full of potential stories to enrich all of our visions - a comedy?

these stories - these parables - are tools used to build our children - don't do this or ██████, do this and you'll ██████. they are stories wielded in violent ways towards violent ends: to cut us into shapes that they deem good, that they deem right. don't paint your nails, say your prayers, stay out of the woods, and you won't be a ██████, you'll be good little boys and girls and you'll be Saved.

tomorrow won't come for those without ██████ communicates this strongly. and if that was all it did, it would be a fine experience. but it does more than that. it cuts deeper than that. this knife has two edges. it doesn't offer simply the familiar story of people sanded down and lost to religious violence. it also shows us the other side of the coin.

because to simply say that religious parables and thoughts are tools of violence and social control is also a story we tell ourselves, with a specific purpose. it is a truth, yes, but not the only truth, and not the whole truth.

religion and faith have brought immense joy to many. i am not one of those people, but it would be churlish and insensitive for me to deny the immensity of my grandfather's faith and the strength he derives from it, from the faith of so many good people who follow religions that I am not a part of. are those thoughts evil? are these bad people, because the words they hold so dear are used as violent weapons against people? these stories have inspired people to kindness and warmth that means something, and that comes from a framework that, for some, left them unable to think of pokemon cards as anything other than categorizations of demonic entities.

here's another truth: humans tell stories about everything. we can't help it. while I am loath to say that any part of a human being is fundamentally true it is an often agreed-upon scientific assertion that human beings survival instincts in the early days of our existence operated like miniature storytelling: the recognition of a berry that made us sick, so we should not eat that, is a kind of story. our entire world is one enormous meta-narrative, everything given a name, categorized, introduced, developed, and concluded. the scientific process is telling ourselves a story of what we believe the world to be.

but that's another edge to all this, isn't it? reason, science, the thing we often put opposite faith, is a religion in itself, no more infallible than the Bible or the Quran. terrible violence has indeed been done to queer people in the name of religion, but has science been any better? for how long were gay people considered mentally ill or broken? how long are trans people still going to be considered as such? science called us ██████ for years, how is that any better than what religion has done for us?

religion and reason and everything else is all an ouroboros: each one feeding into another, each one determining how we see the world. christianity has shaped the world, and the world has shaped us. science has changed us, and many of us have changed science. neither of those things are good or evil inherently, but they are stories can be wielded or told in ways that have done good and done evil. they are the stories we have created, and the stories that created us. which is not to say we all turn out exactly the same. we've all come from our own choirs, ran off into our own woods, and come back changed...but never entirely.

i was raised catholic, and found a deeply catholic resonance in much that was in this game. but to say that I was raised to be catholic is not as revelatory as it may seem, because what it means to be raised catholic where I live, in Northern ██████, is very different from what it means to be raised catholic in the united states, or even different from what it means to be raised catholic in the republic of ██████. just like Rem and Ori, we can stand in the same place - the same religion, and see different things.

catholic families here are, predominately, working-class, poorer than protestant families, and (at least in my own admittedly limited experience of only having been raised once) operating within a strange kind of puritanical socially conservative leftism. that uniquely northern ██████ catholic upbringing is undoubtedly a key part of why i'm a communist today: my parents and grandparents were some of the first people to talk to me seriously about capital in terms that I could understand - but they were also homophobic, transphobic, sometimes casually racist and sometimes outright racist, and those stories affected me just as deeply as ones about what Thatcher did to them. that manifested in my past as me being a little shit uncritically regurgitating homophobia and transphobia, and manifests now as sheer terror at the day my family discovers my transness.

some of the things my upbringing - my faith - have offered me are valuable. some of them are not. but all of them form the framework with which i view the world. all of it is entangled together, cutting into each other, an enormous frankensteined mass of viewpoints, ideologies - stories. these frameworks are inherently a part of us, and we are a part of them, constructing and reconstructing and deconstructing stories for ourselves and those around us every time we speak.

this is not to say that bad ideas and bad stories should not be argued against or denied or rejected - there is a fundamental need to interrogate assumed truths, imo - but that any critique we make, every idea we raise, it all comes from within that framework, and is fundamentally shaped by it's opportunities and limitations. everything we believe to be true or false, it all comes the human perspective, not a celestial one: even fundamental maths and other "pure science" concepts are constructed from the stories that we tell: it's entirely possible - almost certain in fact - that a hypothetical alien would not comprehend this framework, and have a different one that is so outside of our perspective that we cannot even imagine it. a ██████.

we need a story in order to survive. just like our ancestors needed to know which berries were safe to eat and which ones were not, to interact with anything, to have meaning in anything, we need to tell stories about them, otherwise, we're just floundering in the dark, blind and deaf and dead.

so, if all we can do is trapped by this perspective, these stories, are we doomed to just perpetuate them over and over? i don't think so. i think we have some creativity, some possibility space, afforded by ██████ perspectives, to make games like this one. games that offer no easy answers or simple resolutions, games that force us to push against it's and our own sharp edges and can cause violent reactions, but things that can change or expand our stories. we can make beautiful things out of rough stones.

one of the things I found most affecting about this game personally - as someone who has made awful rpgmaker games before - is how this game wears the limitations of rpgmaker core toolset through it's "puzzles" and user interface. to say such thoughtful things so beautifully out of the same fundamental building blocks i used to make my shitty vagrant story knockoff affected me more than I dared expect. others in the backloggd discord game club were not enthused by these puzzles but for this reason they were one of the most affecting parts of the experience for me. i guess that's my story bleeding through.

tommorow won't come for those without ██████ is a difficult game, abrasive and unwelcoming. i found it to be an emotionally upsetting and violent experience. but that's why I loved it. because just like religion or science or anything else, violence means different things depending on where you stand. a knife can hurt us, cut into our flesh, make us bleed and kill us...but it can also cut at the net that surrounds us.

it can cut us ████.

I think this installment invites us to reconsider how we examine this series.

The fact is, Annoying Mouse Room 3 is not the most remarkable room put together by the mice, and perhaps it's focus on dazzling us with new things and all-too-clever subversions of the classic Annoying Mouse Room formula is somewhat misguided, but it is consistently entertaining in an almost effortless way, demonstrating that these mice have an almost singular grasp of the medium of rooms. Each block rotation is a delightful experience, and the mice themselves have never looked better.

The vocal parts of the fandom who uncritically champion the original Annoying Mouse Room, still looking for the complete thematic experience that wowed them so completely in that room will undoubtedly be disappointed, but after Annoying Mouse Room 2 disappointed me (look, don't @ me, the politics of that one are dire and basically inexcusable even if the elaborations of the core rotation loop are good. Don't know what the mice were thinking there), I found this a spectacular return to form.

My only major criticism is that while Annoying Mouse Room 3 delights in the moment to moment experience, it fails to really electrify intellectually, and if you asked me what it was saying, I'd probably just shrug. There's certainly elements that are potentially fascinating but I don't think there's enough to here to make a conclusive reading, so anything I might bring up is sheer speculation for Annoying Mouse Room 4. But I imagine the themes of the series will become far clearer with future intallments of Annoying Mouse Room, and honestly, the day we turn our noses up at a room that consistently delights and entertains as well as Annoying Mouse Room 3 is the day we officially lose our SOUL.

I don't really know where to begin. It's hard to think of a bigger letdown for me in recent memory. Almost every aspect of this game feels underbaked, undeveloped, and unfinished. None of it congeals together. It's a trainwreck of the likes I haven't seen since - well, since the kind of games Grasshopper Manufacture were making in the early 2010s. The more things change.

So, let's tackle these in order.

RANK #10: DIABOLICAL PITCH

The combat's fine. It's alright. I know there are people who super dig it. It's probably the most fun combat that's ever been in a NMH game, but I find that it pales in comparison to a lot of the fantastic action games on the market today. Even compared to indie efforts like Assault Spy, Travis' limited moveset sticks out like a sore thumb, and means that despite there being some genuinely creative and cool enemy designs in the bunch, I still found myself tackling encounters almost the exact same way every single time.

RANK 9: DESPERATE STRUGGLE

Now, I said most fun combat in a NMH game. I didn't say best. Because for me, NMH1 still has that crown. Yes, it's grindy and repetitive. Yes, it feels like a chore. But in a game about stripping away the romanticisation of the life of a video game hero and revealing it to be labour-intensive contract work performed by someone's who's adolescent fantasies are exploited for profit, that works. It enhances the experience tremendously. What does the combat here do? What does it say? Nothing, really. It's just quite fun. But why should I turn this game on just for quite fun combat when I have DMC5 also on my shelf, a game who's combat I enjoy much more? The combat fails to be interesting or thematically resonant, and fails to compete as a surface-level thrillride. Just like the rest of the game!

RANK 8: HEROES' PARADISE

This affliction of total purposeless afflicts the open world as well. No More Heroes 1 caught a lot of flack for its buggy and barren open world, and while I won't defend the performance issues, I will defend its inclusion. In a game about labour and work, the commute is an important part of contextualising that. What does the open world of No More Heroes III serve? What point does it make? What does it say? Nothing really. There are suggestions, things you could read into what they might have said if the game was interested in actually exploring its world, but that's all it is, a veneer of purpose papered over an empty world that exists only because fans wanted it to exist.

RANK 7: SERIOUS MOONLIGHT

Every element of this game has the same feel: shallow, insubstantial, underused, underdeveloped. You can feel the shadow of "this was developed during COVID" looming over the entire world of this game, but even setting that aside, no idea, motif, or theme this game haphazardly throws out has any nuance whatsoever. GHM have finally made a game that truly feels true to the ancient criticism of them: they have made a game that genuinely feels like they threw a million things at a wall and none of them stick. Superheroes? Streaming? Retro gaming? Call of Duty? Fortnite? Mad Max? Rocky? All of it is thrown out there, and none of it amounts to anything. That's why when I say this game feels unfinished, I don't mean that's buggy or missing content or anything like that: I mean that every single element of this game feels like a first draft that goes nowhere (including combat, what other explanation can there be for the game making you use SCREW CRUSHER DEATH KICK exclusively for multiple hours only to unceremoniously throw you every single other death skill at you at once?), a digital version of a planning whiteboard full of everyone's vague ideas.

RANK 6: STRIKES AGAIN

There's a faint air of desperation about it all, leaping from scene to scene hoping that at least some of it will sink in and resonate. And, fair dos: I thought the Midori Midorikawa bit was cute and Death Chair Girl's section, involving murdering a sobbing alien mourning its friend while it quoted the end Rocky over and over while Travis says "I'm finally a hero!", was genuinely gnarly in an interesting way and was the only time I felt the spirit of NMH1 shine through. But as the game goes on it only gets more and more desperate to be liked, culminating in a last couple hours that are genuinely embarrassing and cringeworthy to behold, from simply recycling the ending of TSA with zero of the original impact, to begging Takashi Miike to make a No More Heroes movie after the entire game has been spent singing his praises (admittedly these scenes are fun in isolation but my god do they grate repeated ad nauseam) before the train finally meets its wreck as the game ends in what can only be described as a digital adolescent temper tantrum, as Grasshopper copes hard about not getting Travis in Smash Bros. while Suda once again makes a simulacrum of John Riccitello to make fun of and digitally take his revenge on for not getting to make Kurayami the way he wanted. I cannot describe how utterly embarrassing and pathetic this spectacle is: I think Riccitello is a shitbag too (for other reasons than Kurayami, admittedly) but all of you are way too old to be engaging in "oh yeah!!! i'll show u!!! i'll make you into my game and have you be a big ugly loser who gets killed by my OC while piloting an advertisement for another game!!!!" petulant childish nonsense.

RANK 5: LOLLIPOP CHAINSAW

This isn't the thing I found most upsetting about the game, though. That would be the way in which this game continues an upsetting trend from No More Heroes 2: that of extremely upsetting purposeless psychosexual hyperviolence against women for no good reason. Shinobu is brutally fridged at the start of the game and ends up doing basically fuck-all for the whole experience, whatever wrinkles TSA introduced to Bad Girl's character that made her return an intriguing prospect are completely dropped here, but most upsetting of all is the return of Kimmy from NMH2, already a pretty suspect idea in that game, which is turned up to eleven when she is murdered in a flagrantly pornographic way that is deeply uncomfortable, but not in any way that feels purposeful in any way shape or form. I'm not gonna describe the scene other than saying it's the most violently sexual thing I've seen in a game in some time and seems to be played largely for titillation because there's zero discussion on anything that occurs here. Whatever nuance that has to be entered into a scene to have it be more than a straightforwardly exploitative misogynistic scene is absent here.

RANK 4: REPORT FROM HELL

In this way, the shape of this scene is the shape of the game itself: there's no nuance anywhere, nothing substantive to justify any of this. In the early hours of my playthrough, I latched onto the one cohesive element of the game: the fact that every single element feels hollow, undeveloped, like a total facade, was surely deliberate, surely leading to something. But as time passed, as image after unremarked upon image is vaguely gestured at by the game only to be dropped with zero development or nuance, that reading became more and more strained. I could galaxy brain this, I could say that Santa Destroy is a wasteland full of no real people purposefully, I could say that every single fight taking place in the same warehouse with different set-dressing is deliberately drawing attention to the hollowness of it all, but at what point do I have to admit that the game isn't engaging with any of this in a meaningful way? At what point is this game not commenting on facile, undeveloped, perfunctory sequels, and is it just...one of those?

RANK 3: KILLER IS DEAD

I have no doubt that there are people for whom this resonates. I recognise that I'm coming in with quite a strong take: not for nothing is the game sitting pretty with a very high average score on this website. But I have to be honest with myself and say that any attempts to be generous with my reading of this game are based solely in the pedigree of those behind it, and that I have been harsher to better games in the past. I could be extremely generous, I suppose. But it would just be because I want to be, not because I think the game actually deserves it. At some point, I simply have to admit that this cloying, overly-referential, late-era punk band album desperately screaming about how much it wants to be liked...is just kinda sad.

RANK 1: LET IT DIE

No one can like a band forever. Sometimes you grow apart. And at this point, there are talented creators I would have a much better time exploring, rather than chasing the shadow of games that came out around 15 years ago.

I guess that's me killing my past.

"There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex. - IGN Staff, 2001

I may have ruined this one for myself, and that's the worst thing.

I bought Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes shortly after it came out. Not immediately after, as I was still knee-deep in exams, but a couple of months after. Just enough time for consensus to percolate on the game. And when I posted about beginning to play the game, that consensus was clear:

"You really should play The Silver Case, Flower Sun and Rain, and The 25th Ward if you want to get the most out of this."

And, somehow, I believed this completely ludicrous statement. And Travis Strikes Again sat on my shelf, waiting to be played, as I went through those three games one by one, as the expectations in my head for this game were built by the effusive words of those around me, until finally, just about a month ago, I finished The 25th Ward and sat down to play Travis Strikes Again. It's possible that the letdown was inevitable.

(incidentally, if you're anything like me in 2019, first of all, good luck, second of all, don't make my mistake, and just play this game. The Silver Cases and FSR are fabulous games well worth playing, far more so than this one for my money, but all you're really missing out on is references on par with that you'd find in a typical MCU film, and since I personally find that kind of indulgent key-jangling reference kind of annoying, I think knowing who Kurumizawa is, for example, actually made me like this game a bit less, because I understood how shallow the reference really was.)

Sorry. I got distracted. Where was I?

I have two fundamental issues with TSA. The first is how insubstantial it is. It's not like there aren't great things in this game: there are. But they take up so little of the experience in terms of sheer volume. Dialogue is sparse, and dialogue that actually hits is even sparser among that, and it really feels like so much of the game is trudging through treacle to reach those nuggets of gold. This game is far, far too long, easily twice the length it needed to be. If this was a 2-3 hour game, like so many of the referenced indie games that Grasshopper holds an obvious amount of affection for, I think I might love it. But as it stands, as a game that can last anywhere from 8-12 hours, it's hard to shake the feeling that so little of that time is spent experiencing things that are valuable and actually say anything that hits.

The problem with the gameplay is not necessarily that it is tedious. Tedious gameplay is not new to the No More Heroes series. The problem is that the gameplay here is not purposeful. Even if it was incredibly fun - I didn't find it to be so, personally - it would still have the same issue: the gameplay doesn't work with the story so much as just feel in the way of it: the almost never-changing gameplay loop sands down the supposed unique character between the games Travis is playing and makes me wonder what exactly he sees in them. I didn't learn much of anything about these games or about Travis through massacring hordes of identical bugmen, and the way the gameplay has almost no verbs apart from that leaves every game world feeling hollow and empty, without the capability to engage with these spaces as spaces, none of them feel appreciably different from each other, or, indeed, from the abstract maze that lies at the end of the game. It just felt perfunctory, obligatory, lacking any weight or purpose, or meaning.

And I could maybe tolerate this if the dialogue we were fighting through all this to reach was solid gold but most of the time it just isn't. The most demonstrative level for this issue is the much-discussed Serious Moonlight - which - as you already know, of course - is actually an extended reference to Shadows of the Damned. I say "reference to" rather than "sequel to" or "meditation on" because it's very hard for me to take seriously that this level says anything of major substance about that game or the development process behind it. The only thing even slightly aiming at that is the intro sequence where - according to someone on discord - Garcia Fucking Hotspur is killed by a prototype version of his character, from back when the game was called Kurayami. If I hadn't known that tidbit, I don't know if I would have intimated even slightly that this was a game Suda51 and Grasshopper Manufacture feel divided about, or, indeed, one that has been remembered pretty poorly. Because the rest of the level is just a love-in for the three or four Shadows of the Damned fans that exist. White Sheepman's musing's on the game are just factoids of things that happen in the game without any commentary that isn't just basic praise, and Travis won't stop talking about how cool Garcia is, and the premise of the entire level is that the genius auteur (we'll get back to this) Dr.Juvenile saw it in a dream and loved it so much she made a sequel to it before it even came out.

None of this is reacting to or engaging with the legacy of Shadows of the Damned as it actually existed: a financial disaster that got good reviews at the time but is remembered poorly if at all today, instead it mythologizes Shadows of the Damned as a misunderstood masterpiece with a cult following. There is no reflection on the game's outrageous misogyny, bad jokes, and disastrous development that resulted in a game that seemingly no one (except, apparently, Akira Yamaoka) involved wanted to make. I can see why, for people who have invested a huge amount into Suda, that know the history of Grasshopper Manufacture inside and out, that the mere presence of this level in this game can invite reflections on the ghost of Kurayami and what might have been, but the game doesn't inspire those thoughts on its own. It doesn't let me in.

There's no room for me here. There's only room for Grasshopper, and those so invested in them that they can fill in the myriad gaps TSA leaves behind.

Travis Strikes Again does not feel like a coherent, unified thesis on much of anything. It feels like a sketchbook, a collection of ideas, often evocative, enthralling ideas (god I cannot express how much I wish the game explored more deeply its brief flirtations with the intersection of US state violence and the videogame industry), that never congeal together into something that completely resonates. This is Grasshopper Manufacture's Unfinished Tales, or The Salmon of Doubt, posthumous writings from a period in their history they are drawing a line under here. And in the abstract, y'know, I like that. I like the sound of that.

I just wish I played this game sooner. I wish I played it in 2019, and not in 2021. Because times have changed, and I have too. And I can no longer simply take this game's musings with the earnest spirit with which they were so clearly intended.

If Travis Strikes Again has any coherent overriding theme, it is the concept of the Auteur. The real story we're experiencing here is Travis Touchdown exploring the work of legendary game developer Dr.Juvenile and beginning to feel like he can understand her through her games, until he comes face to face with her digital ghost, living on in the games, at the end. He is, essentially, doing an auteur reading on Juvenile and her games, bordering on psychoanalysis. ​

This is one of the most popular ways to read art, and is certainly the most popular way to read the games with Suda51's involvement. Nonetheless, it's something I try to avoid doing. The majority of games are a collaborative medium, with anywhere from a dozen to a hundred developers working on a game, each talented and creative people in their own right, and while I won't say that directors don't have an appreciable style that can't be gleaned from their work, the tendency to attribute a game to a single creative voice is something that I have always been cynical about and have completely turned against over the past two years.

How many Michel Ancels, how many Neil Druckmanns, how many John Carmacks, how many Chris Avellones or Jesse McCrees, how many David Cages do we have to see revealed to be toxic individuals who use the cult of personality around them to abuse their staff and wield their myth like a knife to harm those around them before we rid ourselves of the image of the genius auteur whose flaws only serve to highlight their impossible genius? How many more people in this industry have to be hurt before we rid ourselves of the specter of Dr.Juvenile?

When the games of the Death Drive Mk II are discussed, they are always discussed as Juvenile's games. The games are her vision, and anything that is not her vision was a compromise placed upon it by the restrictions of technology or moneymen or other outside forces impeding on her art. She wasn't a solo developer, for whom this claim might hold some water: we are explicitly told she had a team working with her, one that wanted to fulfill her vision. But what about their vision? Where are the Jun Fukadas, whose superb sound design is about all that makes the gameplay loop of TSA tolerable? The Ren Yamazakis, who is credited as co-director alongside Goichi Suda, yet I don't see anyone effusing about his return? The Hajime Kishiis, the Takashi Kasaharas? They aren't here. They exist, but their vision is not allowed to intrude upon these games. There is no space for anything else in them, no space for anyone else. They simply exist to attempt to fulfill Juvenile's creative vision, even when such creative vision is obscured in such a way we are encouraged to read as being emblematic of her ahead-of-the-curve genius, but reads less romantically as someone who was hopeless at managing projects and a nightmare to work under.

(there is one concrete person who worked with Juvenile on the games themselves that we encounter, and it's an, uh, interesting choice of TSA to use that character to characterize the degree to which EA meddled with the development of Shadows of the Damned as a man beating a woman to within an inch of her life. Real fucking classy, man. And, no, I don't think I'm being ungenerous with that read, given how close the game aligns itself with Juvenile and the fact that the character in question has the exact same name as John Riccitello, CEO of EA during Shadows' development, with a couple of letters changed in the first name, who has actually been accused of sexual harassment by a co-worker at Unity, which just compounds the grossness of this. I'm sorry Kurayami didn't turn out how you wanted. But that isn't the same as being physically abused by John Riccitello.)

I cannot buy into the narrative of Dr.Juvenile as an effusive genius ahead of her time because all I see when I look at her story is the uncritical recitation of a myth that has caused genuine, real harm to people. A myth that you would think that Grasshopper Manufacture would know better than to buy into, given how games with relatively little involvement from Suda51 have used his name to market games that would ultimately contribute to tanking the company's reputation in the eyes of all but the most dedicated fans. This doesn't mean my sympathy lies with the corporate moneymen either: what I want is a recognition of games (again, solo projects aside) as a team effort made my diverse voices performing genuine labour to will these impossible things, all the more special and characterful for their flaws, into life. And TSA just...doesn't.

I don't think this game is presenting this viewpoint maliciously, or deliberately, to be clear. But I think it is the result of this self-indulgent, uncritically reflective game that truly lacks the bite it really needs. It's not a terrible game. I'm glad it exists, despite all the shit I've talked about it here. And I admire and respect it greatly, in a certain way, and I completely understand the people for whom this game truly was a deeply meaningful experience. This would be a lesser medium if not for Travis Strikes Again. It's a masturbatory game, but I don't mean that entirely as negatively as the connotations of that word would imply. We all need to let off some steam every once in a while.

But you can't expect me to get much out of it.

once, we all lived inside the bottle. but without us noticing, without us hearing, little by little, crack by crack, the bottle broke. and all worlds became one world. the inside became the outside.

--#006: PLASTIC --

playing this game and reminding myself that it came out in 2005 and not in 2018 is wildly difficult because this feels like a game so perfectly aligned with the current Moment that it's absolutely surreal that it was originally beamed to Japanese flip phones a decade before we heard the word "hypernormalisation".

if the original Silver Case explored the anxieties and changing face of a world slowly becoming digitized, then The 25th Ward is a true sequel, exploring a world where there is no difference, no boundary, between the digital world and the physical world, between the person we present and the person we are, and whether it even matters enough to make a distinction. tokio plugging his eye into a computer through an enormous analog cable is one of the most evocative images of the game, but it goes so far beyond that.

in the 25th ward, people have become pieces of data moving through a system filtered out by antivirus software made of the opinions and thoughts the system breeds them to have. the cast of the 25th Ward are far less distinct than the original's more eclectic cast, a deliberate contrast made clear by the points at which the original cast show up, and that more muted palette for these people is the result of the planning of this city turning each person within it into a piece of a wider machine, circuits in a system, receivers for the Word of Kamui.

work. consume. report suspicious activity. die. and when the experiment has run its course, they switch it all off. and the 25th ward crumbles into the sea. planned obsolescence. make sure to buy the Next Ward.

that machine takes the shape of the game itself. The 25th Ward is positioned as part of the "kill the past" universe, but I honestly believe that any attempt to view it as part of some wider universe where the characters exist in any way other than how we interact with them here will fail to derive anything meaningful from that read. when The Interface Itself is a character that the people inside these windows framed inside abstract void spaces can interact with and respond to, you have to abandon any attempt to apply verisimilitude as we traditionally understand it in order to survive. the style is the substance. everything is real. everything is virtual. everything is the same, all at once. is there a difference? does it matter?

as people become part of this machine, their selves become digital, and spread outwards, into and throughout the net. people become fictional characters. Kamui Uehara manifesting in the Matchmaker chapters in the form of Tsuki, a generic Ex-Yakuza man with a generic Dark And Troubled Past, navigating around his partner slolely being transformed into another Kamui by the Powers That Be.

people become other selves. Placebo has been cited as the highlight of the game by numerous people and while I don't know if I'd entirely agree, I can't deny the tremendous impact the story contained within had on me. Milu's existence hit hard for me, a fragmented individual spread across multiple real and unreal versions of herself each one shaped by the perceptions of others beyond the control of the original/format Milu, a wholly digital existence that is still tethered to a weak, dying, incorrect body that causes her pain on many levels.

even before The Unprecedented Times shifted even more of it onto digital spaces, I lived a life that I would have struggled to call my own outside of the internet. not just because I've never felt truly safe enough in the world outside my window to express myself fully within it, but also because the explorations of my self and my gender take up fragmented, distinct, and often contradictory forms that I try not to let intersect for fear of the friction that their ill-fitting will create. which of these forms is the real me? what makes the me that types these words with physical hands more real than the me created when the words are read? am i the name the structures of my 25th ward place on me, or am I the name I choose and have people online say? i don't feel like me outside. i don't feel like me when I look in the mirror. i feel like me when draping myself in images, when hiding myself behind makeup and voice training and cameras and filters. i feel more like me prancing around as a gay catboy in an online game than when I go out to buy milk. am I ignoring reality, or is this just another part of it?

i don't know. maybe there is a true me, out there, with a true name and a true face. maybe the real me is out there somewhere. or maybe this is all the real me, and every single contradiction and lie and false assumption is truth.

all i know for sure is that I believe these words I say, these things I feel, and these people i know are real.

i choose to believe in the net. what else is there to believe in?

this is an uneven work. despite being better paced than most VNs and certainly featuring less mandatory timewasting than its predecessor, the pacing still feels drawn out past the point of purposefulness. much like this review, it often feels...meandering.

i also feel compelled to bring up a part of the game that has gone largely unremarked upon on this site: Correctness 3, boys don't cry, which is where the game goes too far in my opinion and plays with the sensitive subject of rape in a way that feels extremely ill-advised, crass, and exploitative. when criticism of content in such a way is brought up in critical spaces like this there is a tendency by some to dismiss it out of hand as being unable to handle sensitive content and wishing everything to be sanitized of such frictions, so let me clarify that I do not think games should never discuss rape and I don't inherently want to avoid a game where it is discussed and to underline that point i want to stress that i think suda has been better about this subject in other works, but in this instance, he fucked up. this bit isn't bad because it's a rape scene, it's bad because it is a badly done scene. the vibes are rancid in that chapter, folks.

despite that, however, and other minor complaints, it's hard not to be blown away by the 25th ward. it's such a thematically dense and stylish work, with so much to say and so many ways to say it. if Umurangi is the macro experience of life today, then The 25th Ward is the micro, the day to day life of living inside and outside a screen at the same time, of being a different person to different people, of existing in a thousand spaces at once and not really knowing who I am in any of them.

sorry about this review. it's a bit of a mess. i'm a bit of a mess, after finishing this game. but it's ok. it's all right. I can fix it.

I just need 50,000 yen.

KAMUI UEHARA WILL
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KILL THE PAST
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KILL THE LIFE
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JOIN HOLOLIVE

TO BE CONTINUED -- ?