In my book, there are only very few “perfect” games, and Shovel Knight (aka, Shovel Knight: Shovel of Hope) is one of them. It just gets… everything right.
At its core, Shovel Knight is a tribute to retro gaming, and takes a lot of inspiration from Mega Man. And, unlike Mighty Number 9, Shovel Knight is a very good tribute to that game. Like the 80s and 90s run-and-guns that inspired it, Shovel Knight is simple yet effective: you select a level, press a button to hit the enemy, and press a button to jump. Sometimes, if you’re feeling fancy, you might attack while jumping, or use the now-iconic Shovel Bounce reminiscent of DuckTales to bounce off of enemies to victory. You beat the boss, and move on, picking up money and power-ups along the way. You have a limited special meter and a health bar. That’s all you really need to be a fun retro game, and yet Shovel Knight goes above and beyond, kicking this formula into maximum overdrive, to the point that it’s a better megaman game than megaman 11. It doesn't waste your time with filler bullshit, boring cutscenes, or unfair difficulty spikes: Shovel Knight is just good, clean, simple fun.
Despite being a loving retro tribute, the boys over at Yacht Club also put a little bit of a modern flair on the game, with boss encounters and challenges that roam across the world map, little villages where you can buy new spells, abilities, and armor sets, and having excellently designed characters, well-written dialogue, and colorful pixelated environments that elevate this game into a masterpiece that holds its own merit outside of being an indie throwback. It’s rare nowadays to find a game that is so consistent with its overall game design.
Like Okami, Shovel Knight’s goofy characters and fun level design take center stage: each boss, enemy, and NPC has their own little quirks and personalities just through gameplay and the boss level they inhabit. One of the biggest surprises I’ve had going through the game was how good the story and writing is: it’s not some groundbreaking narrative or some deep, complex story: it’s a fun and simple fantasy romp with a good sense of humor and charming little character interactions. It’s just defeat a bunch of knights, defeat the big bad, save the girl. Despite the simple plot, somehow the game makes you invested in the story and make you care about the characters. Even the bosses are incredibly likable and aren’t as bad as they seem, rather misguided by greed or duty or valor. Each member of the Order of No Quarter is a valiant, flamboyant knight that spouts their ideologies to the player, and each have their own brand of charm and wit. Mole Knight is a happy-go-lucky, prideful fellow. Propeller Knight is a dashing, egotistical, rapier-wielding foe. Black Knight is the edgy rival character with multiple encounters, yet appears to not be as evil as he seems, rather tainted by jealousy and desires to protect his loved one. The character design of the player character alone is geniusly silly: he’s a Knight, with a Shovel. What more do you need? There’s a deep-sea diver knight as the boss of the water level, a Grim Reaper knight in the graveyard level, a viking with a snow shovel for the snow level: the game hits you with one inventive and creative enemy design after another, to the point where I could envision what each character would sound like if they were given a voice. Each character, each boss has such expressive personalities through design, dialogue, and diction alone, helped by the game’s fantastic art direction.
As I said before, the retro world of Shovel Knight is beautiful, and Yacht Club took what little design options they had and went completely fucking nuts, pushing the limits on how pretty an 8-bit game could look without making it too messy to look at. The game is so colorful, and each area and level tells a little story through lighting, mood and color. The dark, muted tones of red and brown in a graveyard is in direct contrast to the bright blues and greens of the starting level. The mysterious dark green palate of the Plague Knight’s laboratory, or the deep cold blues and purples of a snowy field. Much like the bosses, enemies pop out of the environment yet also fit each level’s palate and design philosophy and are fun and zany as well: you’ve got slimes, rats with lil propellers on them, wizard dudes, samurai guys, bubble dragons, goldarmors (which are actually pretty tough) and so much more, and it all adds to the fun of the game.
Another great aspect of the game is that it’s silly, and it knows it’s silly. The game is called Shovel Knight. You are a knight. With a shovel. There's so much humor and charm packed in every part of this game. Everything feels like you’re passing through a Renaissance Fair, as if each person you meet is trying their best to immerse you in this world. The most expensive armor set, the Ornate Set, is “Flashy! Acrobatic! Useless!” Which only effects you by having Shovel Knight do a fancy somersault while jumping. The bureaucrats in the Hat Shop that ask for your money despite being filthy rich, only to run off with it. The way that bosses will fall flat on their face when defeated is hilariously satisfying. The Troupple King is a giant funny fish who does a silly dance so you get a power buff, and then there’s the Bard, who I like a lot. I just like him, he’s genuinely funny. There’s a cheat code you can put in before you start a new save file that changes random nouns in the game with “butt.” It’s all great stuff.
In terms of gameplay, none of the enemies in the level feel out of place, level design and platforming is tight and leaves enough margin of error for players to experiment, checkpoints are spread across the levels just enough to be fair but not over-saturated to be too easy. Controls are fluid and simple, bosses and minibosses are fun and challenging, and it all lends to that sense of fun. Each area has its own mechanic or gimmick that keeps it fresh, or makes you utilize a move or technique in your limited movepool so that you get used to them. For example , the graveyard zone has these little bush things that go higher when you hit them, so it teaches you that shovel bouncing off of these things will get you to higher places, naturally allowing the play to get used to the Shovel Drop, which becomes an integral platforming tool. Bosses are great visually and excellent mechanically: each one is unique and fun in their own right, with just the right movepool or a fun gimmick or stage hazard. One of my favorites is TInker Knight, where he starts out as kinda a little bitch. Then he brings out this gigantic mech where you have to dodge missiles and punches, and climb up missiles to hit the head. Then there’s Plague Knight, which is the most hectic and chaotic boss in the game with explosions going off everywhere and the Knight teleporting everywhere. In the xbox/pc version of the game there is a secret, difficult, 5-stage bossfight against Rare’s Battletoads which is so good that I recommend you pick up the PC port of the game just to access that fight. The death mechanic is also interesting: When you die, you drop money, and flying moneybags pop up where you died last. You have one chance to get them back, leading to some tense situations where you’re almost back to where you died, only to lose it all. The moment-to moment gameplay is so strong and yet another thing that Yacht Club just knocks out of the park.
The music is also an excellent throwback: it’s 8-bit chiptunes are pushed to the limit with how complicated it can get without becoming too complex, resulting in these endlessly catchy themes and tracks, some highlights being the triumphant main theme, Plague Knight’s hectic theme, and the Specter Knight theme. The sound design is also excellent: the swooshes, the satisfying PINGs or metal clinks. Despite the compression it all sounds great, which is something that is so mind-bogglingly good that it’s near magic.
Shovel Knight doesn’t have to be just a single-player experience either: the co-op mode adds a ton of replayability. It adds to the humor of the game because it actually kinda makes the game harder: nothing is adjusted to co-op, everything is the same except for the fact that you have an additional green Shovel Knight accompanying you, and you can shovel bounce off of their head, not only to screw with them, but for the occasional advantage. It’s also a sort of competition, to see who can gather the most gold at the end of each stage, with a brilliantly dramatic podium after exiting the campsite. While I haven’t gotten through the entire game co-op with my brother yet, we had a blast whenever we turned it on, and I would love to revisit it with him someday.
Shovel Knight proves to be an excellent tribute to retro gaming (and gaming in general) not only through gameplay, visuals, and sound design, but through the little extra touches and side collectables. There's little music sheets that you can collect in each level and you can give to a Bard, and he'll play those songs in the villages. There are dozens of classic cheat codes you can enter before starting the game, which enable modifiers, challenges, Palette swaps, and a mode called “Jar Jar Binks.” You can swap the genders to specific characters, and there’s so much more under the surface. Shovel Knight not only holds a lot of love for retro gaming, but for the community that allowed it to be made: the kickstarter backers and developers are listed off in this neat little mansion with a bunch of custom portraits, a couple of characters were designed by backers, and the end credits feature the speedrun world record. The free content added to the game, such as extra campaigns featuring other Knights with their own levels and storylines, a strategy card game, and a Smash Bros-esque fighting game (a few of which I still have yet to play through) also breath fresh air into the game.

And all of it was added for free.

So much love, care, and respect was put into this game, and for that I just have to applaud Yacht Club for all the work they have done.
There is nothing bad I have to say about Shovel Knight. It’s not the most groundbreaking game, and it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it’s not trying to: what it IS trying to do is deliver a fun experience that anyone can enjoy, and Yacht Club has executed that flawlessly. Everything this game does is perfect.

Do yourself a favor and play this damn game.

I haven’t played enough of the multiplayer or Forge to make a final statement, but it is very fun. You've got iconic maps like Valhala, which is Blood Gulch but better, the claustrophobic Rat’s Nest with it’s branching halls and corridors, Last Resort with it’s verticality and variety of tight corridors and open shooting ranges, and, of course, Sandtrap, where there are 2 gigantic tanks that each team must drive around the map where the flags are kept, because this is a good FPS. Each of the modes, from Big Team Battle to Capture the Flag to SWAT, are incredibly fun in their own unique way, and I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface with all the custom Forge maps and gamemodes and vehicle and weapon sandbox.
However, Halo 3’s campaign is enough to put this game here. Halo 3 has an air of finality, and to exemplify this, Bungie pulled out all of the stops to create an excellent single-player shooter. The weapon sandbox is the strongest it ever has been in the series: each weapon has a place in the combat puzzle, and all of the guns are incredibly fun to use and (on Heroic) are viable, some of my favorites being the Bruteshot, Gravity Hammer, and the Fuelrod Cannon, not to mention the various powerups and grenades that make the game all the more interesting.
Halo 3 takes the fantastic level design of Halo CE and cranks it up into overdrive, with these huge arenas that require strategy and careful planning to overcome. One minute you’re sneaking through the jungle to make contact with your allies, the next you’re fighting your way out of a base being invaded by overwhelming forces, or cruising down an open highway; then the next moment you’re zooming around this large open space, swapping between zooming around in a Brute motorcycle, or hopping into a tank to obliterate the competition, or taking down 2 giant enemy walkers. Each mission feels fresh and unique, and a single shootout can play out completely differently between playthroughs, especially due to the enemy AI.
Although there are no Elites, the Brutes are an excellent stand-in: they behave differently than elites, being tankier and more brutish, and that helps breath fresh life into the trilogy after the constant shooting galleries full of elites. They also have excellent visual clarity: when you shoot a brute his armor actually slowly gets blown off of him, until you can see his exposed head, giving the player more power as to how you can approach shootouts, and gives a player a sense of progress. Another great quality about the brutes is that they can also use the same power ups and grenades that you have access to such as shields and tomahawk grenades, and combined with the mainstay enemies like the Grunts and Jackals, you got yourself a great combat flow that cause a player to think creatively and keep them engaged.
Not only is Halo 3 a blast to play, it’s also really pretty to look at. The graphical fidelity of Halo 3 is top-notch, and still holds up even 14 years later. Yeah. It’s old as fuck. The arenas are beautiful and varied, whether it’s a lush green forest, or the cold, brutalist Forerunner architecture, or the purple, otherworldly hues of Covenant ships all fits into place. The character and enemy designs put most current games to shame, to the point that brutes in Halo 3 look scarier and more lifelike than Halo Infinite’s brutes. Enemies are colorful and pop out of the environment, but also look realistic enough to be part of this world and ecosystem. Character and facial animations can be stiff, and Lord Hood is just… ew, but in all Halo 3 aged very well visually.

Halo 3 Rat.

The story of Halo 3, like the gameplay, is all about finality: the loose ends come together, and, for lack of a better term, it just feels epic, as if everything has been building up to this point. You get these incredible scenes of unity between the Sangheili and the humans, former enemies allying to join the cause. You get tense moments of sacrifice and betrayal, as well as some excellent character finales, such as Sgt. Johnson’s death and the Arbiter finishing off the Prophet of Truth. There are also quieter moments that let us breath, such as Master Chief and Cortana finding each other again. And then there's the final cutscene, which is just the perfect way to end Halo. It all just comes to a head in the end and is an excellent finisher to an excellent franchise, and the music by the legendary Marty O’Donell really helps sell it. Each amazing, piano-infused track adds to that sense of ending and finality, between the uplifting Finish the Fight, the tense and exciting One Final Effort, and the charged yet Somber atmosphere of Follow Our Brothers. The gameplay and the story come together to create this incredible game that sends the series out with a bang.
However, there are some flaws with the game: story-wise, the writing is considerably weaker in this entry of the series (especially compared to Halo 2’s god-teir story and writing). Some of the story bits and set pieces are rehashed from Halo 1, and there are some really, really bad lines and character choices, especially for Miranda Keyes and the Gravemind. The Gravemind’s motives are just unintelligible? He’s just all over the place, and while he feels like a threat it’s so unclear as to what his plan is or what his goals are, and muddles up the Flood and what made them imposing in the first place. It’s also never really explained well as to why they need humans to activate the Halo Array, or what was going on between Cortana and the Gravemind.
The gameplay and level design would be perfect if it wasn’t for…. Cortana. Not the character, the mission. Remember all of the things that I praised about Halo 3? Through that shit out the fucking window. Infiltrating a flood-infested High Charity sounds fun on paper, but the flood has always been one of the weakest points of Halo campaigns, and all the problems that the Flood have come to a head in this mission. All of the enemies you come across are bullet sponges, but you always feel like you don’t have enough ammo and guns are sparse. There are this dipshit “turrets” that block all attacks, these freaky, weird spider-things that have basically no attack pattern and giant flood brutes that are incredibly tanky and also one shot you because fuck you. Unlike the rest of the game where environments are distinct and pretty to look at, everything in High Charity is just ugly, and puke-colored, and all look the same, and the enemies just blend right into it. It’s so easy to get lost in the sprawling corridors and areas that just look the same and you have to go through doors that look like gaping assholes, and it’s all gross and to top it all off you’re constantly slowed down by the Gravemind and Cortana just randomly speaking to you and I wish they would just SHUT THE FUcK UP. This mission picks up very late with you getting back Cortana and blowing high Charity to hell, but it was too little, too late.
Despite this one hiccup, Halo 3 is a complete package and an excellent send-off to the trilogy, and I’m in the mood to get back into multiplayer and have some fun.

Ah, Dark Souls. The game that broke gaming journalism forever.

In 2011, the Wii was at its strongest: family-friendly and “easy” games were pumped out by the dozen, and mobile games became more popular. Xbox started heavily marketing the Kinect, and more and more games would include extra difficulties and excessive hand-holding through tutorials, non-punishing death mechanics and extra lives. Now, I'm not on of those neckbeard gatekeepers against making gaming as a medium more accessible and inclusive, but the market at the time was over-saturated with easy, more forgiving games and the concept of the truly "hard" game was beginning to die out. What I'm saying is that there's gotta be a balance so everyone has something to appeal to them.

Dark Souls began the painstaking work of restoring that balance. It took what worked about Demon’s Souls and began improving on it tenfold, bringing a brutally difficult experience that was so refreshing in an environment that had become increasingly more casual, that it created an entire “Souls-like” genre where apparently every hard game is “like Dark Souls.”

Each entry in the Souls series has its strong points and weak points, but there are 4 aspects of Dark Souls that really make it stand out against other games in the franchise: it’s nonlinear interconnected map and excellent level design, the atmospheric storytelling, it’s difficulty through lack of information, and subtle combat mechanics.

Dark’s Souls drab medieval kingdom of Lordran is one of the best and most immersive game worlds that I have ever played through. There are so many branching pathways, shortcuts and alternate routes you can take, especially if you picked the Master Key as your starting gift. (Do yourself a favor and pick it as your starting gift, don't make the same mistake as me.) The map is truly expansive, and the game rewards an intuitive player for exploring every nook and cranny for better items, ways to skip boss fights, shortcuts, and even entire hidden areas. The moment I fell in love with the game was when I finally fought my way to the church in the Undead Parish. I was panicking, with no estus and low on health, and I ran into the church with about 15 guys swarming me. I paid no attention to them, blindly scrambling to an elevator that took me down, to my amazement, all the way back to Firelink Shrine. Lordran is filled with these shortcuts that you slowly unlock to make travel between areas easier, and as you figure out the branching pathways backtracking becomes a sinch. There are shortcuts that take you to a bonfire you'd never expect to be back at, there's a ladder that takes you all the way around to the beginning of a level. There's a tower in the first part of the game with a powerful knight and a locked door at the bottom which connects to a late-game area where you get DLC. There is a moment where after unlocking the elevator from the cathedral, you can hop off it early onto the ceiling of a temple, platform across the ruins of the Shrine, curl up into a ball at a nest and return to the fucking tutorial area. No other game does this kind of interconnected level design like Dark Souls, and I wish the entire game was like this as some late-game areas are comparatively linear.

Dark Souls is always lauded as a difficult game. And sure, even basic enemies can kill you fairly easily, there are some very tricky platforming and combat encounters, and the bosses are challenging walls. Some would say Dark Souls is “bullshit,” but I don’t really think so. What I think makes Dark Souls difficult, and why some players might think the game is being a bastard, is the lack of initial player knowledge. Dark Souls gives you nothing in terms of help, except the basic controls. No tutorial screens, no characters explaining what to do, no explanation of the level-up system, mechanics, enemies, or where you had to go: the player had to figure that out by themselves. All you are given in terms of a goal was to “Ring the Bell of Awakening,” and even that is unclear because it turns out there are 2 bells. Rather than using tutorial screens, Dark Souls guides the player through death and trial and error. For the first section of the game, Dark Souls just kicked my ass over and over. It’s unrelenting in it’s enemy placements and maze-like areas such as the Depths and Blighttown. Aside from some late-game jank, enemy placement is excellent and level design feels natural, whether you’re snakeing (pun entirely intended) your way through Sen’s Fortress, dodging archers in Anor Londo, exploring the verticality of the Undead Burg, or fighting your way through the Painted World: there aren't as many points where you go “that’s completely bullshit” as you’d expect (though there are a few), and each new place, each unique enemy connects to the lore of the game.

What I like about the story of Dark Souls is how the handle it. They set up the basics for you with a short opening cutscene, showing off the Four Great Lords and how they defeated the Ancient Dragons to begin an Age of Light, and how the Darksign has plagued humanity. Through the environment, sparse dialogue, and flavor text, the player had to piece together the story themselves.

The player figures out the story through playing the game and reading flavor text. In an environment where games deliver their stories through extensive use of cutscenes, Dark Souls is refreshing by allowing the player to decide whether or not they want to care about the story. Many games like God of War and Spider-Man have a core story where if you dislike it, you dislike about a third of that game. Fro an example done poorly, as much as I love Monster hunter World, you have this really, really bad story told through unstoppable cutscenes that bog the pacing of an otherwise excellent game. If you don't like the story, you're gonna be sitting there bored as fuck waiting for characters to finish vomiting exposition for at least a few hours of your experience with the game. With Dark Souls, if you don't like the lore, it doesn't impact the gameplay at all! There are skippable cutscenes that only occur during extremely important events or before some bosses, the aforementioned opening cutscene and endings, and that's about it. The game focuses more on environmental storytelling, introducing settings and enemies and item flavor text that begin to clue you in on Dark Souls’ larger story.

The atmosphere of Dark Souls is-well-Dark. It's usage of drab grayish color gradient and a general lack of brightness lend to the image of this Age of Fire collapsing in on itself in an attempt to prevent and Age of Dark, so when you find those brief moments of light and warmth and color with the bonfires you breathe a sight of relief.

Another excellent worldbuilding technique that Dark souls uses is by actually connecting the standard gameplay mechanics, such as healing, checkpoints, and respawning into the overall story. Where some games are content to just keep “respawning” as a game mechanic, Dark Souls goes as far as giving a canonical reason as to why the player respawns when they die. It's not “respawning at a checkpoint” in this game: it’s a curse of undying, where the souls of the curse-bearers are drawn to Gywn’s fire only to repeat this cycle until they go insane from Hollowing. This is one of the many, many examples of how Dark souls allowed me to get lost in the world of Lordran and attempt to piece together the fragments of lore supplied by flavor text and dialogue.

Another aspect that really helps set the mood of the game is the music, which the game uses very sparingly: Aside from boss fights most areas are silent, so when you do come across an area with music it’s usually to set the overall tone. The only two areas that have background music utilizing Motoi Sakuraba’s excellently epic and melancholy music are Firelink Shrine and Ash Lake. The former’s music is that iconic, soothing, string-heavy, sorrowful track, insinuating that this is the one safe place left in this broken world. The latter uses the intense chanting vocals of the Everlasting Dragon in order to emphasize that the Ash Lake is a truly majestic and ancient place, a forgotten memory of a bygone era. Despite these two outliers, music only ever kicks in during boss fights. This restraint in how Dark Souls uses music allows bosses to feel more important and grandiose, especially with how intense they are. The boss themes of this game also perfectly encapsulate boss personality or how the fight plays out. Ornstein and Smough have this regality to their theme, as well as a sense of pride and power. The Four King’s theme is intense and filled with dread, further escalating the dread the player feels as they’re overwhelmed by more than Four Kings. Seath’s theme is a strange, zany piece with ear-peircing violins and an off-beat xylophone, highlighting the bizarre and grotesque nature of the Scaleless dragon. Knight Artorias has a very subtle and sad theme, contrasting the intense, face-paced battle while emphasizing the “fallen warrior” feel of the lost knight. The final boss of the game rather unexpectedly has this somber, beautifully depressing piano piece, which has become the iconic Plin Plin Plon of Gwyn’s theme. Even the first boss in the game has this intense, bombastic soundtrack, perfectly setting the tone and pretext for this game as the dread seeps as you realize that you have this hulking demon in order to progress.

This brings me into my next point: the unrelenting difficulty (or rather challenge) of the game. Right off the bat, right after giving you a starter weapon and some basic tips, you’re thrown up against the Asylum Demon, which you need to fight in order to continue. No buffs, stats or equipment: fight this fat-ass demon with what you’re given. Almost every encounter is designed to test your skill and deepen your understanding of the game, and due to the sheer amount of tools at your disposal and the variety of enemies, the same encounter can play out completely differently between each player. The stamina bar and equip load are also a genius way to introduce difficulty: every action consumes stamina, so the player must think carefully about their next action in order to manage stamina effectively. A limited equip load means that you must think about what you’re wearing: a light armor set or weapon gives you more mobility but sacrifices defense or damage, while heavy armor sets or more powerful weapons will sacrifice mobility and iframes. Two-handing, blocking, backstabbing, kicking, and parrying also bring more depth and nuance into the combat puzzle, as you slowly master these mechanics. Two-handing does more damage and makes swings faster, but at the cost of shielding and more stamina usage per attack. Kicking can break a guard against defensive opponents but has a long startup and insignificant damage. Parrying is a high-risk, high-reward mechanic that encourages a player to learn their opponent’s moveset and punishes over-offensive players. Backstabbing, in my opinion, doesn’t really fit into this puzzle: with such a low-risk, high-reward mechanic it undermines the point of parrying or kicking opponents in favor of running around them, fishing for backstabs. Despite this, the combat is very nuanced and rewards intelligent players, and the sheer amount of equipment and stat allocation possibilities really adds to build variety and player preference.

As a player, you’re not shoehorned into just “attack with sword.” Sorceries , Miracles, and Pyromancy are high-damaging ranged attacks, but usually because of the extra stats you have to invest in such as attunement, intelligence or faith you have to sacrifice equipment load, health, and strength just to use these powerful spells, resulting in many “glass cannon” builds. There are a ton of options for melee as well: Most weapons have certain stat requirements, scale better with certain stat, or give you a buff, so if you find a couple that you like, upgrade stats accordingly. Maybe go in on equip load and midroll your way to victory with even the heaviest armor sets. Between starting classes, rings, weapons, armor, and spells, there are so many ways you can approach the game, which brings me to my next point. I like when games allow me to express myself and play the way I want to, but also restricts me from being too crazy with builds. In Dark Souls, if I want to invest in one stat, because of the genius way leveling up works I'm sacrificing what I could've spent in another, so it' sa constant management of which stats I want to prioritize, or which stat is the best tor most "fun" option for me.

I feel like most of the difficulty of Dark Souls isn't from “bullshit” or “unfair” mechanics: it’s that you know nothing and are told nothing. It’s up to the player to find out what to do or where to go, and the game guides you on the right track rather than outright helping you by... well, killing you. For example, the Firelink Shrine has multiple different areas to go to, a few of which are late-game areas that you could explore early if you want to. But if you enter the graveyard by the shrine early, seemingly unbeatable skeletons will swarm you. If you go down the lift at the base of the shrine, a bunch of unkillable ghosts will swarm you. This is the game’s way of telling you, "bro. You’re not ready for this yet. Try another place." And eventually, you’ll find yourself at the Undead Burg. But, if you persevere, and you do go through these areas, you’re rewarded with some neat stuff: go far enough into the graveyard and you can find a VERY good sword that can be used very early if you two-hand. Go even farther into the Catacombs, you’re rewarded with a Pinwheel fight that’s actually challenging due to low-level gear, and have access to Rite of Kindling early.

Dark Souls encourages you to experiment, explore, and learn the game. Having a tough time with a certain area? Look around: maybe you can find a shortcut somewhere. Is a boss killing you over and over? Explore the area for better armor or a ring, find a route back to a blacksmith to upgrade your regular gear. Maybe the boss has a weakness to magic or fire or lightning, find some resin to coat your weapon with. Maybe find an NPC summon. Or, just leave. Come back when you’ve fought some other bosses and gotten better equipment.

Sen’s Fortress is one of my favorite places in the game for this reason: for some fucking reason snakes are everywhere and they use lighting, as the sounds of clanking machinery and the grinding of boulders rolling through the castle. Why are there a bunch of lightning snakes? Fuck if I know! If I wanted to I could look into it, but what matters is that it's FUN! It tested my limits as a player, testing me if I had remembered the lessons the game has taught me, and whether I was ready for the next half of the game. Dark souls is a difficult game if you're not paying attention, but rewards players for figuring out it’s obtuse mechanics and puzzles.

Another good example of Dark souls subtly teaching you these mechanics are with boss fights. Ornstien and Smough was my first wall, as it was with many players. So I decided to look for better gear, and I found the Ring of Favor and Protection and Havel’s Armor, which with Havel’s Ring allowed me to mid roll with the armor equipped, allowing me to secure a victory after multiple failures and breeze through the rest of the game with a tanky Strength build and a +15 Zweihander, to the point where I deleted the Sanctuary Guardian and beat Artorias first try.

Boss fights are a highlight in Dark souls: so many memorable and intense fights, like the Four Kings, Ornstien and Smough, and Gwyn. These fights act as a rite of passage for the player: overcome this wall, and you can overcome the challenges ahead. By having these well-designed bosses kick your ass over and over again, the game encourages experimentation: maybe try a new set of armor, use an elemental buff or spell, learn boss patterns to know when to dodge. Most of them are fun fights, are excellently designed in gameplay and visuals, and serve as challenging yet mostly fair battles. The DLC bosses especially are brutally challenging and excellently designed. Kalameet and Manus in particular destroyed me over and over with how ridiculously large their movepool was.

Although Dark Souls harbors some mediocre fights (such as the Moonlight Butterfly and the Firesage Demon and… well, I’ll get to that soon), and a handful of endgame fights are a bit boring or too easy, Dark Souls also boasts some of the most memorable and incredible bosses of any game.

Despite its interconnected and vertical world map, despite the great bosses and level design, Dark Souls also harbors some of the lowest lows the series has to offer. For one, there are a lot of weird jank moments and, for some reason, a lot of platforming for a game with fall damage and no dedicated jump button. There are annoying enemies such as the Basilisks and the Wheel Skeletons, and occasionally the game can be bs. Crossbows are also laughably weak and bows are a niece tool rather than a viable weapon to use. There are also a few rings that are so good that it’d be stupid to not use them. Finally, some of the late-game content ranges from mediocre to dogshit. Later areas are very linear without any shortcuts or branching pathways unlike the amazing early game, because at that point the player would already have the Lordvessel. Some of these areas are still great, like the Tomb of the Giants and the Duke’s Archives, but others are just…. Meh. First off, the Crystal Caves. It’s fine. It's a linear walk with annoying invisible pathways. There are like 4 clams and 2 golems to fight and that’s it. Then there’s Chaos Ruins. Ugh. It’s a huge area that hurts to look at and is annoying to traverse due to the sheer amount of copy/pasted enemies, bad pacing, and 3 mediocre bosses, one of which is literally the third Asylum Demon. There are like 14 Taurus Demons and Capra Demons, 2 enemies that were early-game bosses, that are a chore to take out because you need to take them out one by one. The only other enemies are these ugly, fat fire demons and these really annoying worm things that break your weapons. (Also, weapon durability really isn’t a huge deal in the game and more of an annoyance unless you're using a crystal weapon.) Chaos ruins is definitely a low point in the game.

Then there’s Lost Izalith.

Hoo boy.

The entire place just screams “We ran out of money.” So, the moment you enter this place, you have to deal with this annoying mechanic where you have to use a ring to walk on lava, except there’s still a huge danger of dying despite “protection,” and the sound it makes when you walk on lava is really annoying. As you walk across this lava, there are about 2 dozen of these giant, ugly… things that are just chilling there that look incredibly out of place and just copy/pasted there. They’re like, the bottom half of a dragon, have insane amounts of health, and can one-shot you. Once you get to the temple, all there are are these weak, uninspired fat fire demons once again, and the Chaos Eaters… are actually pretty neat, but there’s not alot of them.

And what do you get for getting through this boring slogfest? Oh, only the worst fucking boss in the series. Seriously, Bed of Chaos is the jankiest, most unfair, uninspired boss I have ever had the displeasure of fighting, to the point where even FromSoftware realized it was bullshit and threw the player a homeward bone, so that the boss has “checkpoints” and you don’t have to slog through it longer than you need to. In all, Lost Izalith is just an ugly, boring experience, and represents the worst of the Souls franchise.

Souls is a special game, one with an extreme amount of jank and some really low lows, but the highs of this game are some astronomically high that no other games in the series has quite recaptured yet, and set a precedent that changed the face of gaming forever, with the help of it’s older brother Demon’s Souls. I for one am glad that I got to be a part of this community, with so many incredible content creators, animators, artists, and modders, and I hope that this convinced others to pick up this game and experience the magic for themselves, because I feel like I haven’t done this game justice with words alone.

Out of all the games I've ever played, Okami is certainly the most unique. It’s kind of hard to explain what makes this game so darn appealing.
I’ve noticed for a while now that Capcom’s design pattern when making a game is to prioritize gameplay and immersion over story. Monster hunter, Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, Megaman, Street Fighter: These are all excellent and successful game franchises, but their stories and writing range from decent to actually dogshit, most of which are the latter. These games again instead give a player a more gameplay-oriented experience and focus on atmosphere or game mechanics to create engaging experiences. Okami, however, is the exception to that rule.
Okami’s worldbuilding is truly exceptional, a beautiful painted world of Japanese culture and mythology. Right off the bat, you get these beautiful brush paintings that introduce you to the beautiful world of Nippon.
I want to pause here for a moment to talk about the artstyle and visuals of Okami. The game has one of the most unique styles of any video game I’ve ever played, as if a traditional Japanese brush technique popped out of it’s canvas and was given bright, vibrant colors. The character and npc designs are doll-like and minimalistic but have so much life and expression due to how well they are designed. The enemy designs are weird and grotesque and pop out, and their animations have so much life and vigor behind them. As you defeat these enemies, you get rewarded with some incredible artwork as each of these characters fill out this large, beautifully hand-drawn mural, as well as some flavor text that teaches you about how they fit into the world of Nippon and their inspiration from Japanese mythology. In between major story beats, you’ll also be rewarded with cutscenes composed of brush paintings with so much life and color that it’s almost overwhelming. The environments are straight out of a storybook: with strokes of wind blowing through the open sky, drawn in the sky as if by an artist. Cherry blossom trees of lush pink and green hues, standing vigilant as their leaves fall and get caught in the breeze. Animals frolicking about in large open fields, and villages and cities with wonderful traditional architecture and bustling with charming characters going about their day. This is just the first few areas: It all just feels so alive, and every building, landscape, and character fits the game’s artistic theme, while also having various landscapes to explore: such as a beach connected to a vast ocean, or an imposing fortress filled with danger, or a cold and snowy mountaintop. The core of Okami is it’s excellent visual design that I can’t do justice with words alone, and with the exception of draw distance limitations, Okami’s beautifully realized world and art hasn’t aged a bit.
The music of Okami also helps realize the world of Okami: the beautiful and subtle ambiance of environmental music, the tense percussion and woodwind of combat encounters, and the incredible uplifting and tear-jerking scores that help convey the beauty of Okami and combined with it’s visuals and story, turn it into something truly special.
As I stated before, Okami’s writing and storytelling are truly incredible: the story fully immerses you into the artistically beautiful Nippon through well-written, believable, and charming characters. Amaterasu, the player character, does not utter a single word of dialogue, but is so expressive with facial emotions and body language that you can realize her emotions or desires in a scene. Issun, the young, fiery and hot-headed sidekick, is charming and great comic relief, and again, despite being a tiny speck of light is incredibly expressive through color and movement. The side characters, villains, and npcs are all expressive and emotive as well, despite having minimalistic faces. These characters, such as the foolish and egotistical Susano, the mysterious Waka, or the sinister Ninetails: all of these characters are given so much life and expression through solid writing and great character design. Rivals, friends, enemies, and threats: I recommend this game just to meet and face these wild characters alone.
The plot of Okami is also incredible: it brings you all across Nippon to various locations, and fully embraces the wackiness and mysticism of Japanese Mythology. The overarching plot keeps the player engaged and keeps them pushing forward until the very end. It’s a charming, funny, uplifting story about rising up to defeat evil and although nobody believes in you (literally), you can rise above and rely on faith and friends to carry you though. The game also pushes you though the story through it’s unique gameplay.
Once again, the 1st word that pops into my mind over and over again as I think about Okami is unique. There really isn’t a game as inventive or so wildly different as Okami. In this game you play as a god resurrected in the form of a wolf. What games let you play as a dog? Not many, and that’s just the beginning of how wildly inventive Okami can be. The base combat is simple but fun-it’s a basic hack-n-slash with different types of weapons and weapon combos that help expand your toolkit. Enemies are all unique and have various weaknesses that you can exploit. However, the centerpiece of Okami’s gameplay is, truly, the Celestial Brush. Being able to pause the action and draw new objects or attacks into the battlefield is just incredible and so inventive. When you get a new Brush Technique such as a time stop or Divine Slash, or encounter a new enemy, or obtain a new weapon, the combat and puzzles open up and Ammy realizes more possibilities in combat and interaction with the world. The bosses are also incredibly creative and impressive, making use of the brush techniques you’ve learned along the way to create fun battles, such as the first Orochi fight, Blight, Ninetails, and Kami.
Aside from combat, the moment-to moment puzzles and mini games in between on your quest to defeat the evil plaguing the earth don’t feel like filler, rather, they are fun enough to serve as engaging side quests that also further your immersion into the world, whether that is solving platforming puzzles, leaping between chasms, feeding animals, or racing npcs. The Celestial Brush and the interactivity it has with the rest of the world makes for engaging moment-to-moment gameplay in between combat encounters.
When I first played through the game, I was genuinely surprised as to the sheer amount of content in the game. In the beginning of the game, Ammy and Issun are given the goal of defeating the 8-headed dragon Orochi. However, I was surprised to find that once you beat Orochi, the adventure was far from over, in fact, it was only about 1/4th of the total game. It’s almost like you’re playing through an adventure anime with different sagas and arcs as you traverse the world. After beating Orochi the game opens up to just how massive and inter-connected Nippon truly is. I’ve barely even scratched the surface with weapons, unlockable brush techniques, and challenges that the game provides.
Now there are some negatives I have to discuss, one of the major ones being that this is a Playstation 2 game, and of course some aspects of the game are incredibly dated. The beginning of the game is incredibly slow to start, with walls of cutscenes and dialogue and text boxes thrown at you over and over again. The cutscenes, while they are engaging and further the story, are so high in volume, especially during the Orochi segment of the game, that they become overwhelming at some points and near fatal to the pacing of the game.
Okami is also occasionally obtuse, to the point where I had to look up guides on how to progress and what I was supposed to do, as the game was unclear as to where I was supposed to go. So I’d backtrack and find out I was supposed to go to this specific location that I missed because sometimes individual maps are so big, that I forgot I never checked there. And then there’s the fact that you have to fight Orochi 3 SEPARATE TIMES. The first fight was fun, but it was long and felt like a final bossfight. Fighting Orochi 2 more times was just exhausting, especially after gaining so many power ups. In terms of difficulty, the main game is honestly pretty easy. I didn’t get a game over screen a single time, and only “died” once but was saved due to the astral pouch mechanic. However I didn’t 1005 the game so I believe that there still is some challenge to be had.
In all, despite it’s PS2-era sensibilities, Okami is an incredibly unique game with charming characters, a beautifully weird world, simple yet fun combat, and engaging gameplay that services the plot to provide an artistic and inventive experience that Capcom has not matched since. I mean, you get to play as a dog for christ sake.