Author’s note I — I am considering the possibility of opening a YouTube channel and using this script as the basis for a video on Tsui no Sora. If that becomes a reality, I intend to leave this original essay up as long as my Backloggd account is active. Should this interest you as a possibility, please feel free to let me know in the comments. This is my longest work on this site by far, and I sincerely appreciate anyone who reads any length of my work. Thank you so much.

Author’s note II — During the process of writing this piece on Tsui no Sora, which took me over a month of drafting, rewrites, and rearrangement, it has come to pass that mangaka and artist Akira Toriyama has passed away. You will see immediately that Toriyama-sensei’s work has had a profound impact on my art to this day within this very piece as Dragon Quest IV, my favorite video game that he was involved with, is a major talking point within this essay. I simply wish to express my grief and sorrow for the loss of such an incredible force of good and artistic passion in the world, and to thank him for contributing what he did to the greater tapestry of artistry during his active years. Thank you for everything, sensei, and may you rest in paradise.

Author's note III — Of course, a day after releasing this piece I come to notice some errors and additions I wish to make. Thanks to my friends in the small but tight-knit Tsui no Sora community in the West for their feedback and insight. Changes made within will be inserted seamlessly, so no worries to new readers about inaccuracies or loose ends.

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Die Geburt der Tragödie.
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Of course, in order to start talking about Tsui no Sora, I need to talk about a completely different game. Last month, one of my favorite role-playing games celebrated its thirty-fourth anniversary. Released for the Famicom on February 11, 1990, Enix’s Dragon Quest IV is deservedly considered one of the most influential and tide-turning games of the 8-bit era. While Dragon Quest III no doubt defined the shape of turn-based role-playing games to come, I would argue that the narrative influences that its sequel planted within not just its genre sphere, but the medium of video games as a whole, is equally as important.

For those unfamiliar with the structure of Dragon Quest IV, the game is told across five chapters, and each of the first four chapters follows the perspective of a different character inhabiting its world. Chapter One sees soldier Ragnar McRyan return abducted children to their parents by slaying a nearby monster, Chapter Three is an entirely removed story about the portly Torneko and his journey to become the world’s greatest merchant, so on and so forth. When the fifth and final chapter begins, the player is finally put in control of Solo, the protagonist featured on the game’s box art. While this chapter too starts off isolated as the others, an amazing development occurs partway through - each of the cast members the player followed in the preceding chapters resolves to join the hero’s party and with them their stories align, turning this fantasy anthology into a cohesively structured narrative, simply taken in across a handful of perspectives before culminating in the climax, in which the “main story” unfurls.

Now, I’m not going to claim that Dragon Quest IV is the first within the gaming medium to tell a story across multiple protagonists’ perspectives like it does - my knowledge of gaming history isn’t so strong - but it’s certainly one of the most important early adopters of the narrative device. Its influence can be felt all across the medium, both in role-playing games like LIVE A LIVE and MOTHER3 and beyond the genre’s confines. The idea of multiple protagonists experiencing their own stories in a revue-style suite of plot points before assimilating into the key narrative has, in the wake of Dragon Quest IV, become a well-trodden and beloved template with which to tell stories in video games… and that’s why I think it’s so interesting that a game like Tsui no Sora breaks that formula down and turns it on its head the way it does.

First, a little context.

Tsui no Sora, also known as Endsky, is the debut title by Japanese doujinsoft studio KeroQ. The entire story was written and directed by the enigmatic co-founder of the circle, SCA-Ji. To discuss any of SCA-Ji’s work properly necessitates two points of knowledge about the guy. The first is that he is incredibly well read - Tsui no Sora and his later work never shies away from directly referencing, analyzing, and arguably providing a narrative adaptation of high-octane writings on philosophy, psychology, mathematics, and meta-physics, as well as a plethora of international fictional literature ranging from children’s stories to thought-provoking and oft-debated works of literary high art. And we’re not talking simple name-drops - SCA-Ji clearly displays an academic understanding and digestion of the topics he chooses to reference in his writing, and one of his greatest gifts as an author lies in his ability to weave these stories, essays, theories and ideologies into his work - not by turning his characters into walking vessels for these concepts, but allowing the themes to embolden his characters, giving further depth to the lives they lead, the feelings they go through, and the ideals they arrive at and clutch onto. The second point of necessary understanding is, as fans and detractors alike will be happy to inform you, that SCA-Ji is unabashedly insane. I don’t mean in the same sort of quirky, “oh, you!” way that people look at Hideo Kojima or Kotaro Uchikoshi - the guy is a true looney. Following SCA-Ji on social media is a game of Russian roulette; sometimes, you get analytical posts about the things he’s reading, thinking about, and playing, sometimes he’s sharing fan art of his characters with huge dicks, sometimes he’s talking about how it’s perfectly normal to do the deed with raw chicken in Japanese supermarkets and vouching for the legitimacy of incest. He’s a gem, and I wouldn’t have the guy any other way. No, like seriously - I think the most compelling thing about SCA-Ji’s presence is the fact that even in the current era of the eroge landscape, he’s still acting like the same perverted weirdo he no doubt was when it was normal to be that type of person in the amateur scene around the time of Tsui no Sora’s release. No matter how one feels about SCA-Ji’s viewpoints and opinions, it’s undeniable that his work is endlessly earnest and entirely his. You can’t fake that, and plenty in the wake of his debut on the scene have tried and failed.

So, back to KeroQ themselves - if you’re looking for a more detailed look at their history, I can’t overlook this awesome video by BaseSk8er about their early days. Highly recommend this channel to anyone interested in eroge history in general, in fact. At the expense of lifting BaseSk8er’s work for my own, I’ll leave further influences on Tsui no Sora to largely be explained elsewhere. That said, it’s undeniable how strong of an influence both the fictional and academic literature SCA-Ji had been taking in at the time, as well as contemporary otaku artwork, particularly GAINAX’s Neon Genesis Evangelion, held on the story, themes, character designs, and imagery. One of the main characters, Takuji Mamiya, even has his design and some personal traits heavily lifted directly from Eva protagonist Shinji Ikari. However, if we’re going to talk about dominant influences and themes within Tsui no Sora, we need to discuss my favorite genre in Japanese media, one essentially dominated by eroge works in representation and although not necessarily birthed within eroge, it certainly found its home within the medium: the urban horror of denpa.

Denpa, which literally translates as “electromagnetic wave”, refers to either a narrative genre or character archetype revolving around those on the fringe of society. Denpa characters operate on a different wavelength than “normal” society; delusional street-wanderers who find fear, paranoia, and a loosening grip on “objective reality”, often finding themselves wrapped up in urban legends, conspiracies, and the modern occult. These stories tend to also revolve around themes of trauma, lack of a sense of self, and spiraling into insanity. Arguably the first truly denpa work within video games was Leaf’s 1996 debut eroge Shizuku, which is where the term “visual novel”, the name of the trilogy that Shizuku started, was adopted from when describing ADV games and eroge in the West. While Shizuku certainly has a reputation of being the grandfather of denpa eroge, generally there are three names brought up as the “holy trinity” of the genre in terms of cultural impact, innovation, and influence on eroge to come. Tsui no Sora was the first release to be considered part of this trinity, followed in 2001 by Duke’s Jisatsu no Tame no 101 no Hoho and CRAFTWORK’s iconic Sayonara o Oshiete. Plenty of the most iconic eroge and ADV titles ever made, whether or not they’re entirely denpa works or not, owe a great deal to the influence of these titles and the denpa genre as a whole - just to list off some names, you wouldn’t have Saya no Uta, Tsukihime, Fate/stay night, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, the Science;Adventure series, or Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi. without these games.

But, if there’s one title that clearly defines all that denpa is as a grounds for storytelling and has reached unprecedented acclaim on an international level, it’s the legendary 2010 title Subarashiki Hibi ~Furenzoku Sonzai~, a game that shares a rather… enigmatic and bizarre relationship with Tsui no Sora. Initially, there were plans within KeroQ dating back to the early 2000s to remake Tsui no Sora in a modern engine - likely after the completion of the next major work SCA-Ji had on his mind, Sakura no Uta (which, ironically, would not see proper completion until 2015). During this nebulous talk of a Tsui no Sora remake, ideas for two other titles were brewing in SCA-Ji’s mind, “Subarashiki Hibi” and “Diskontinuierliches Dasein”. Eventually, these two titles likely worked their way into this initial Tsui no Sora remake attempt, blossoming into a strange re-imagining and interpretation of the original game - the Subahibi we would receive in 2010 - in a fashion not unlike Jonze/Kaufman’s Adaptation. in relation to its source material, The Orchid Thief. I, like many other fans of KeroQ’s output, first found them through Subahibi, and so my basis for the cast, story, and themes of Tsui no Sora comes first and foremost through their 2010 reimagined selves. Tsui no Sora is largely retold through three of Subahibi’s chapters, “Down the Rabbit-Hole II”, “It’s My Own Invention”, and “Looking-Glass Insects”. Without diving into spoilers for an entirely different game, it’s hard not to be absolutely curious about what the original Tsui no Sora is like once the final lines of Subahibi come and go. For the 10th anniversary of Subarashiki Hibi, KeroQ would release a limited edition box-set, including not only the original 1999 Tsui no Sora, but a new Tsui no Sora remake proper - intended to be read after Subarashiki Hibi, which I have yet to do. With two reworks of varying loyalty to the source material with over twenty years of hindsight, it would be an understandable assumption that the original Tsui no Sora now serves largely as a historical footnote, a blueprint for two works with decades of polish and hindsight from which to usurp its long-held title. With that said, I disagree. Not only do I feel that Tsui no Sora and Subarashiki Hibi inform readings and interpretations of one another greatly, but I absolutely loved my time with this classic of the eroge scene and found it compelling entirely on its own merits, some of which are completely different in approach and execution than its legendary successor.

I think with a little over 1,700 words under our belts in this piece on KeroQ’s 1999 debut work, Tsui no Sora, I can now begin talking about KeroQ’s 1999 debut work, Tsui no Sora.

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Through the looking-glass.
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The focal point of the entire plot of Tsui no Sora essentially revolves around two major events: the sudden suicide of loner Zakuro Takashima, and the subsequent rise and fall of a death cult convinced of the oncoming apocalypse on July 20, 1999, under the leadership of the once meek self-assessed teenage messiah, Takuji Mamiya. One could frame the entire plot of the game under these terms, stating that these events are more or less the entirety of “what happens” in Tsui no Sora. However, what makes this interesting is the fact that we examine the roughly two week period in which these two events take place under four different lenses. Rather than the Dragon Quest IV approach of telling a revue of separate short stories, Tsui no Sora essentially tells fragments of the same story four times with the narrative perspective of four very different students of the school where most of the story occurs. The first chapter or “First View” is told through the well-read but ambivalent eyes of Yukito Minakami, “Second View” follows his childhood friend and patented genki girl Kotomi Wakatsuki, “Third View” revolves around the days leading up to the death of Zakuro Takashima in her own account, and “Fourth View” finally lands on the denpa wonderland and ascent to urban godhood of Takuji Mamiya. It is established early on that Yukito and Takuji essentially sit on opposite sides of the same philosophical scale, but it should be noted that much of the pathos and emotional tug of Tsui no Sora is found in the girls’ stories, which are both arguably the most gut-wrenching and painful stories within. I believe it’s best that we take this chapter by chapter, to properly assess the viewpoints and thematic purpose of each protagonist’s story.

"First View"

To anyone who’s played Subarashiki Hibi, Yukito’s story should feel right at home. A large amount of the story would be lifted as the basis for “Down the Rabbit-Hole II”, but there are certainly still differences between the two. Being that Yukito is a young man, his manzai-like banter with Kotomi should feel right at home with many ecchi works of the era. If he weren’t so well-read, it would be easy to pass Yukito off as your typical stand-in ecchi protagonist - but it’s in his more intimate moments of reflection, as well as his rooftop conversations over bento with the denpa epicenter of Tsui no Sora’s cast, Ayana Otanashi, where his depth is made clear. Spending his remaining high-school days with intent laziness, most of Yukito’s deeper thoughts revolve around the “big questions”, considering the writings of Kant and Wittgenstein as he begins to form his own philosophies about the world and humanity. To me, Yukito reads like he has a lot of faith in humanity, but not a lot of faith in people. He’ll postulate over the crocodile tears and lack of genuine interest his classmates take in the wake of Zakuro’s death, claiming that none of them (himself included) have any right to grieve a girl they so clearly ignored. Yet, he’ll also go on internal tangents about that spark within humanity that simply cannot be explained through logic: our issues with God, our emotional dilemmas, and the purpose we find in being around other people.

The irony in this dichotomy is that Yukito ends up being the character that perhaps spends the least time considering others as well as their own place within the world, despite all of this internal hem-haw; again, Yukito and Takuji stand on opposite sides of a spectrum, and that’s also clear in how much initiative is taken in their actions through the lead-up to the 20th. I’ll talk about Takuji later, but really it’s funny that for a “protagonist” if there is one proper in Tsui no Sora, Yukito doesn’t really do so much as he considers, with the exception of the final act of his route in which he rescues Kotomi from the clutches of Takuji’s cult. I find Yukito compelling as a lead because he’s simply enjoyable to witness talking to others, thinking about the world, and ultimately find his conviction when dropping the philosophical pretenses and acting out of pure care for Kotomi when push comes to shove. I wouldn’t go as far to say that he “grows” over the course of his route, really, but he does show a softer side in the back half that contradicts his initial aloof coolness. He might be the member of the Tsui no Sora leading crew that ponders the big questions the most, but he’s also arguably its most put together and adjusted member.

"Second View"

While Kotomi Wakatsuki's route certainly informed the development of cast members and plot beats within Subahibi’s “Down the Rabbit-Hole” duology, I’m happy to say that this story is one that remained a virginal and surprisingly fresh perspective for someone who first experienced that later rendition of this story. While the more identifiable aspects of Kotomi’s character were split into Subahibi’s Wakatsuki twins (along with some blatant borrowing from CLANNAD’s Fujibayashi sisters, who both SCA-Ji and myself love dearly) she is a character that remains, in her original state, unique to Tsui no Sora. As the captain of the kendo team, Kotomi is a valued member of the social structure of the school, generally liked by her underclassmen, and unafraid to speak her mind and challenge others to put their money where their mouth is when the time comes. As I said when discussing Yukito’s route, the banter those two share is genuinely charming - but perhaps more interestingly, their lifelong friendship is also an area where Kotomi struggles internally. The future is approaching her faster and faster each day, and as things progress through her route, she gets real with herself and accepts that a time in her life in which Yukito isn’t close by, or in the arms of another, is one that would absolutely crush her. These are feelings understandable of any teenager dealing with a serious crush, but no doubt the death of Zakuro Takashima sends Kotomi’s insecurities and inability to get open, to get over the idea that she would be burdening Yukito with her vulnerability, down a dangerous and self-destructive path. The first time that Tsui no Sora resonated with me on a deep level was Kotomi’s initial response to the news of her death. SCA-Ji weaponizes sentence structure wonderfully in this section, with Kotomi initially sputtering off into internal tangents, recollecting her final meeting with the late Zakuro, trying to pick up the pieces and recall why she had thanked her for being so kind to her despite the two sharing a surface-level relationship at best, before she breaks down into repetitions of Zakuro’s name, apologies, and unfinished starts to trying to offer up some sort of explanation or amends to the deceased.

It wouldn’t be fair to call Kotomi’s route headier and more contemplative than Yukito’s per se, but the way it plays out feels much more reliant on her thoughts leading her actions and responses than his more philosophical ponderings. Kotomi continues to be plagued by two trains of thought through the majority of her route - the first, a direct guilt for what she believes in her fault in the ultimately death of Zakuro, which she hopes to manifest as some sort of emulation of the late girl’s pain, reaching out beyond the grave to try to understand what she was going through to lead her to the place she ended her life. This feels like projection of her own insecurities about the future, because the other main plot thread in her story revolves around her inability to express her desire to be with Yukito, or really even understand what her feelings towards him are. She understands him to be strong and unwavering, and also wishes to emulate that about him as well. On a larger scale, I think Kotomi is looking to better understand her place in the world, more specifically, where she belongs. This is a theme I believe to be consistent with the third and fourth routes of the game as well, and I’ll be looping back to this point later.

By the time that these plot points settled in, I began to realize just how good Tsui no Sora is at creating an alien and off putting atmosphere. I’m a big fan of the sketchy and clearly doujin art here, with a very vibrant and saturated color scheme that feels distinct from the lighter and more polished colors and linework of Subarashiki Hibi’s take on this cast and setting. Backgrounds are largely empty which works to great effect when alienating the cast members from the extra characters - it certainly feels like the spirited characters are almost the only “real people” in the world at each respective time. I would liken the soundtrack to that of the original Tsukihime, very brief, minimalist passages lasting around ten to thirty seconds on average, looping ad nauseam to wash over the player in a trance-like presence. There is no voice acting and hardly any sound effects to speak of, so most of your time is spent on either the sprites, the text, or the music - and it all blends together to birth a product that feels just off-center, just amateur enough to have a real sense of tension come crawling on the regular. We’ve yet to see Tsui no Sora firing on all cylinders in this department, but again, more on that later.

Whether or not Kotomi comes to the answers of these plaguing questions is left vague. Ironically, the torture she ends up enduring once the class turns towards Takuji - and thus against her and Yukito - is not unlike the pain and suffering Zakuro went through on a daily basis. Of course, even as she’s reminding herself to be strong like Yukito, considering Zakuro’s situation, she couldn’t know that they shared so much experience when she goes through it. She’s probably left wondering if she’s somehow done enough to atone for something that was never her fault to begin with. Of course, as we see in “First View”, Yukito does end up coming for her - but this is another place where Tsui no Sora plays with perspective so meaningfully. In fact, so much of Kotomi’s route plays with perspective directly in argument with Yukito’s. When he went off at her and Kimika in his route for even discussing Zakuro’s death, mumbling to himself about how none of them had any right to grieve her, we understand in Kotomi’s route that this moment absolutely broke her spirit and she already internalized the feeling that because she didn’t save her, because she felt she didn’t do enough, that she specifically had no right to grieve her death. Yukito does not understand the lengths which Takuji goes to try to win him over, including the fact that Kotomi doesn’t make it out of her kidnapping unscathed, having been subjected to physical and sexual torture in abundance. Yukito has no understanding of the personal betrayal Kotomi goes through in this process, having been sold over to Takuji by her close friend and underclassman Yasuko out of what are likely unrequited feelings of love soured in part by delusion into hate and jealousy. Of course Yukito saves her, but is it really a happy ending for Kotomi? Is what he does for her too little too late? Can she learn to heal from this experience? Thankfully, these things are left up to interpretation - because again, Kotomi is just one of the viewpoints of this story. And if she’s so concerned with emulating the pain of someone she knew so little about in passing, it only makes sense that the experiences of Zakuro Takashima herself come under discretion next.

"Third View"

While the perspective of Zakuro Takashima offers the vague plot points and themes that would go on to serve as the basis of Subarashiki Hibi’s “Looking-Glass Insects”, the intent of each of these renditions is different enough - and the execution so largely different - that it’s fair to think of “Insects” as a heavy, heavy revision and reinterpretation rather than a direct adaptation of “Third View”. Perhaps the most crucial change made in how “Insects” tells this story is the complete rework of background character Kimika Ishihara (renamed Kimika Tachibana in Subahibi) into a major player in several of the game’s chapters. In “Insects”, Zakuro has a home base in Kimika most of the time. She has someone to confide in even in spite of how many awful things she’s put through. There are people in her cruel and unfair world that still see her. In Tsui no Sora, this really isn’t the case for most of her chapter. The only person in the world that seems to regularly acknowledge her existence is Ozawa, her sexual abuser to whom she is essentially bound through no fault of her own. There is no build-up to how Zakuro truly feels about the world in Tsui no Sora, because there doesn’t have to be - there is an immediate, obvious understanding that the world Zakuro inhabits offers her nothing but anger, pain, and fear. There is simply no hope in her life, there is nowhere she belongs and nothing she believes in. There isn’t a Kimika in her life, and so every day is spent with the inconsolable fear of the next. Her life is hell, and a hell with seemingly no way out.

I spoke previously about Kotomi’s unique perspective and the theme of belonging that ran throughout her chapter. As I began to notice this theme seep into Zakuro’s route in its second act, in which she comes into contact with Usami and Ayumi, two girls who claim to have known her in a previous life as the magical soldier Angel Advise in their battle against an awful cataclysm, I truly began to appreciate the seeds that were being planted that Subarashiki Hibi would capitalize on down the line. One could argue, and they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, that the path that Zakuro takes in the back half of “Third View” is ultimately one of destruction - taking her own life and ultimately those of these newfound friends in the process. But, at the same time, the Zakuro presented in Tsui no Sora is far more outwardly hopeless and spiteful prior to meeting them. Something I feel that Tsui no Sora arguably offers with an even more potent emotional affect is just how much Zakuro’s life is changed by making her first friends, and as a result having a place where she feels understood and, again, that she belongs to. This may be a result of the fact that Usami and Ayumi simply play a larger part in the Zakuro story than their Subahibi equivalents do, but I found the sisterhood shared between the three even more intense and heartfelt in the original rendition of this story. When Zakuro begins to take a leadership position and treads over the second-guessing of her fellow former “Angels”, the two thoughts that come to mind are of the catharsis that Zakuro must feel in having some level of control and agency for the first time in her life, and the conviction with which she clings on, desperately, to having a purpose and a place she understands that she is needed. Subarashiki Hibi expands on this world and its characters on an ultimately greater and more intricate level, I agree, but I think the Zakuro storyline sits at the very heart of the original Tsui no Sora and as a result is given even greater chance to shine as the emotional “purpose” of the story. More than anything, Tsui no Sora is a story that belongs to Takashima Zakuro - a dramatic irony lies in the fact that it takes her death for that to become apparent.

"Fourth View"

Sitting deep in the heart of Tsui no Sora is the final major chapter, the longest and most infamous of the perspectives. “Fourth View” is perhaps what Tsui no Sora is best known for - its most influential section, which puts the player behind the eyes of Takuji Mamiya - and so the grand denpa carnival begins. Previous chapters have seen Takuji as less of a proper character and more of an abstract force of chaos. The two modes we’ve seen him in - the sheepish, flitting coward, and the terrible, commanding preacher of the apocalypse - are so radically different from each other that it innately begs the question: what drove Takuji from Point A to Point B? While previous perspectives had brief stints with denpa, it’s no doubt the lunacy and almost eldritch horror of Takuji Mamiya’s perspective that not only influenced its Subarashiki Hibi equivalent episode, “It’s My Own Invention”, but also serves as the mark it most strongly made on the entire eroge scene in its wake. And what a ride it is.

It’s in “Fourth View” that the player gains an understanding of who Takuji is as a person - and in reality, he’s not all that different from Yukito in a few areas. He’s clearly bright, clearly passionate, but where Yukito stifles that with his own projected disinterest and apathy, Takuji’s flame is put out due to the harassment and abuse of his peers. For all the brilliance that clearly lies dormant in Takuji, his life has essentially been stripped of that glow to the chagrin of his predators - he is bullied, put into financial corners, and laid bare of all that makes him an individual. Based on the previous chapters, one might assume that Yukito is the strongest emotional presence in Takuji’s life, the attack on Kotomi something of a personal gambit done for the sake of provoking him into confrontation. “Fourth View” brings this idea into question, however, because it’s here we learn that the entire plot seems to be spurred on by the death of Zakuro Takashima.

Suddenly, these two plot points become connected on a level beyond Takuji simply using her death as additional reasoning in his proclamations of the end times. He grieves for Zakuro. He never concerns himself with whether or not it’s right for him or others to do so, her death has a profound effect on his outlook. Like Kotomi, he sees the purity in her presence and feels the weight of her loss on a personal level, regardless of how well he knew her, and it’s at this point where I started to consider the possibility that, under better circumstances, maybe the three living leads of Tsui no Sora could have been friends in a better, more communicative world. The audience comes to understand the bullied, battered-down life that Takuji leads of course, but it’s arguably through the death of Zakuro that he comes to accept life as unfair and broken on the level he does, which spurs his descent into madness and awakens a deep belief within that he is the Messiah of the world, advised by his beloved Magical Girl Riruru, leading a conquest within his school into the titular Endsky, accepting the death and rebirth of the world into absolute nil.

And what a descent into madness it is - it’s here where the game holds no more punches and we get to see KeroQ working their magic in creating some of the most unnerving, creative, and grotesque imagery in this era of the eroge scene. Real-life faces are warped and mutilated into eldritch horrors, the Magical Girl Riruru babbles on and on, crossing from spoken words into quadratic formulas and back again, bullies are revived from the dead with their fatal injuries still well intact, and KeroQ saves an exponential amount of cash by not hiring a seiyuu to accompany Takuji screaming bloody murder through the better half of this. It’s an absolutely glorious roller coaster ride into surrealism and the decay of someone whose conviction lies in the absolute dedication to nothingness that Takuji finds. If all Takuji ever wanted was a place to belong, he finds it here, a self-proclaimed Christ figure among the rabble of serfs who heed his every word. No teacher, no classmate, no sibling is safe from the depravity - and in all its hedonistic glory Takuji finds himself ironically more alienated from the people who would serve his word than ever before. He wants nothingness, and as they jump from the rooftop one by one, it’s fair to say he finds it.

… This is one conclusion to draw, of course.

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Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen.
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The following section will feature spoilers for both the original Tsui no Sora and Subarashiki Hibi, in their entirety. Please be advised before moving forward.

There is a single conversation in the original Tsui no Sora that I feel stands as the strongest case for reading it as a companion piece to Subarashiki Hibi. I have not read the remake as of writing this essay, so I am not sure if this is retained there, so I don’t want to call this section “forgotten” - just the opposite. The final conversation in “Fourth View” between Takuji and Yukito on the rooftop plants a seed that SCA-Ji would only allow to blossom eleven years later, and it’s the moment of the game that has stuck with me the hardest in reflection.

In direct reference to a story from the Rigveda, Takuji offers a monologue to the dumbfounded Yukito about two eagles resting within the same tree. To summarize the purpose and the quandary presented within this conversation, Takuji likens himself to the second eagle, who watches the first eagle roost, enjoying his harvest and leading his nest. The second eagle only watches on as a lone observer on the tree, occupying the same space, but never actually enjoying what life has to offer. As Takuji leaps from the roof, admitting his admiration and adoration for Yukito, the empty sky hangs above, and I’m left wondering… was his assessment of which boy represents each eagle correct?

The onlooking eagle - a figure standing watch, never reaching out and simply existing unchanged and unmotivated to branch out and change no matter how much the victorious eagle harvests. Such uncertainty and lack of action doesn’t really represent Takuji Mamiya within Tsui no Sora to me. In fact, if there’s any character we’ve seen take the most action, engage with the most truly life-changing, exciting, and dynamic-shifting experiences in this game… it’s got to be him. From pushed around coward to the commanding shepherd of a flock of sycophants, ordering lives to be sullied, stripped, and cast away in the holy name of the Endsky. It’s a life cut off early but one lived ultimately with conviction, intent, and execution.

In one of the epilogue sequences, we follow the ascertained dominant eagle, Yukito, into a surreal and desolate version of his school. All that waits for him there is Ayana Otanashi - a character I’ve chosen to talk so little about to this point with intent - and all the time he could ever wish for. In this reality, which the two deem is likely some form of mirror image of the one they’ve known, the quiet is only broken by meaningless and copious sexual gratification and a plastic happiness with which to wait out limitless time. Interestingly, this idea of infinite space and time is a concept that Ayana has run by other members of the cast before, namely Takuji, as a hypothetical. Adding more and more “things” to an endless existence simply means more time for those things to sour, and while at first the erotic scenes with Ayana here mark some of the most “happy” and “feel-good” instances in an otherwise bleak and explicitly violent story, I couldn’t help but think back on these conversations. In a sense, it was almost as if Ayana was presenting this life without change to Yukito, the most stubborn and unchanging member of the cast. His inaction and disinterest granted him a quiet life without change, but without much else to hold onto beyond that. Is that reality so unlike the abyssal world which Takuji claimed he and his disciples would leave behind? Is his mulish demeanor and emotional blockage really the coveted have-all life Takuji likened to the victorious eagle in his parable?

Which “viewer” sought change the hardest, who pushed the hardest to find the place they belonged, and who was the happiest for it? Who got it right? In my opinion, this lingering question, above all else, not only explains the purpose for Subarashiki Hibi’s very existence, but also leads to a discussion of my own theory regarding its final chapter, the fittingly titled "Tsui no Sora II". There are many popular “lore”-based theories regarding this chapter, and to be perfectly clear I think the entire point of the ending is to be open to any and all interpretation, so please don’t think that I’m inserting my opinion as any more correct than anyone else’s. With that in mind, one of the other most important themes in both games is the layering of multiple perspectives over the same set of events or ideas in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of a multifaceted “truth”, and I do believe you’re missing a substantial piece of the puzzle without having played Tsui no Sora yourself.

Arguably the most important and famous line in Subarashiki Hibi is, of course, “live happily!”, a quote that gains prominence during the “Jabberwocky” chapter duology late into the game. The purpose of the title of the game itself, translating to “Wonderful Everyday”, is just that - the ability that anyone and everyone has to find tranquility, peace, belonging and above all else happiness in the mundanity of everyday life. Tsui no Sora provides the basis for the events - again, this story largely revolves around the death of Zakuro Takashima and the subsequent spiral into despair and proclaimed holiness of Takuji Mamiya. It is a world of little hope, little light and little answer to the above questions. How fitting, then, that Subahibi immediately adds its own layer to the perspectives - its opening chapter, “Down the Rabbit-Hole I”, ends up giving the answers to new readers well before they know the question. It marks the change in philosophy SCA-Ji went through as a philosophical mind and as a storyteller in the decade separating these two major iterations of the story. The paths of “Rabbit-Hole I” may lead protagonist Yuki to one of three possible endings - two of which, a hasty, needy rendezvous with either Kagami or Tsukasa, dropping the pretenses and hesitancy towards same-sex relationships masked as childhood friendship, embracing the reality of their feelings, allowing the wonderful everyday to take hold. Should the player choose to fall for the very well alive, very well expressive and happy Zakuro Takashima, though, the wonderful everyday comes from both the heartfelt expressions of blossoming love… and the tenderness with which Zakuro is able to express her thanks in an interpolation of Night of the Galactic Railroad, and join the infinite cosmos in much-deserved finality, peace, and rest. This level of hope, radiance, joy, recklessness, and adoration of love in spite of, living in spite of, daring to dream and to go out and do in spite of, it all permeates the dark world Tsui no Sora set the foundation for, the foundation which asked the question: “who really lived a fulfilling life of happiness?” And no matter the circumstances, no matter the context, this is the importance of the stories as retold through the lens of Subarashiki Hibi - the answer: “all of us”.

In “Tsui no Sora II”, we are led to believe that all of the events of the preceding game are the inventions or stitched-together memories and personalities which combine into the girl known as Ayana Otanashi - dismembering her full conscious into characters, settings, and reruns familiar to Tsui no Sora prior but with this newfound philosophy and conclusory response applied. This is also true of the second epilogue in Tsui no Sora, in which the line is blurred for Yukito between Kotomi and Ayana, perpetually floating in a sea of ambiguity and infinite time. In reference to this reoccurring theme as it appears in Subarashiki Hibi, though — what is the purpose of this? Why is she suddenly called back by a random student who prior to her appearance in the last minute of the game must have had a dozen lines maximum in the script? Why place this secret at the end of the rabbit-hole to begin with?

Ayana’s discussion of perspective and theorizing about the “reality” of Subarashiki Hibi with the game’s central protagonist, Yuki, rings the same bell that Takuji and Yukito’s conversation did at the end of Tsui no Sora. In our eyes as readers, Ayana may hold all the cards and the specific knowledge about the state of all things that we, proxy Yuki, lack… but all the same, what difference does that really make? SCA-Ji debunks his own former conclusion here. It could very well be that Tsui no Sora serves only as a blueprint to its far more beloved and discussed reimagining, it could be that theories of Ayana comatose in a hospital in the “Rabbit-Hole I” ghost house concocting dreams of sunflower fields hold some truth, it could be that the Tsui no Sora remake which I’ve yet to play will layer yet another perspective atop this forgery I lay before you now, adding context I couldn’t imagine and could very well shift my perspective on this game entirely. That’s the secret of the Endsky - the Tsui no Sora. Endsky is the collective, it is all conscious understanding and expression. The more people who read, believe these characters, and find themselves thinking about the “big questions”... the more we discuss this work, the more we overlay our perspective atop each others’, the greater the tapestry of understanding we create, indeed, the closer we climb up the endless ladder to the Endsky. If we just keep thinking, maybe we could reach the “truth” at the end of the rabbit-hole…

But, at the end of the day, just like that final scene in Subahibi shows the ever-present Ayana, we’ve all got class to go to and a life to live in. The game closes, the tab gets X’d out, and the discussion threads need to be put on pause eventually. Thinking and expressing the internal is wonderful and expression is how we come to define our world and existence to each other, but we have everyday life to attend to, after over 7,000 words together. Live happily, and seek your wonderful everyday a thought, a dream, a conversation, a laugh, a cry, and a wish at a time.

Oh gosh, this one really hit me.

Sort of a soft-isekai type story where you (yes, you, the player) are invited into a magical world by a wizard to help him fix his sentient house, but it quickly becomes apparent that your stay in this world will involve quite a bit of legwork, fetch quests, and inventory object puzzles. Standard adventure game stuff but on the way... I don't know, I just fell in love with this world.

The Fortunate Isles were such a beautiful setting full of a diverse array of colorful characters, and it was such a treat to explore it all. It helps that detail is poured into every corner of the screen- there's so much to click on with volumes of text as a reward, and I wasted so much time just clicking on every single flower and mushroom in the game just to get their little stories.
In addition, all of the characters have a lot to say and will even be updated with new dialogue as the story progresses so you have a reason to keep coming back to them even after their quests have been fulfilled, which made me feel connected with even the humblest of NPCs. Many of the stories that they tell are quite touching.

But as you get to know the Isles it quickly becomes very obvious what their real problem is, and the game gets rather "political" in a cool way. There's no ambiguity to what the creators are trying to say here about the importance of community and collective action but... well, number one I agree with them, but number two, I think that they should be commended for how well their themes arise organically from the storyline. You aren't explicitly handed an "overthrow the capitalist oligarchy" quest, but as you follow the threads of what you need and see how everything connects together it just kind of makes sense.

Even when the characters were almost literally preaching to me about politics, philosophy, economics, revolution, even gender identity, it didn't /feel/ like they were preaching because it just felt like the people I had gotten to know were offering their takes on "current events" and sharing a bit of wisdom with me. Genuinely left this game feeling inspired and a bit more enlightened!

The brilliant thing about it is that, despite the epic quest you go on to uncover ancient secrets and overthrow tyrannical governments, ultimately it's all in service of fixing that house, which feels just as important as the other stuff. You can't fix the Underhome without saving the Isles because the problems with the Isles ARE the problem with the Underhome, just like all of the people of the isles are one with each other, just like the sea connects them. Just like it connects us :)

(The only negative thing that I have to say is that the songs on the soundtrack, while pretty, are very short, and since I spent a lot of time sitting in the same locations reading text I heard them loop a LOT and it got kind of annoying. It was easy to mute them via a clever little interface, but still.)

Why do we play videogames?

There’s no right or wrong answer to this question. For a lot of us, videogames exist as a form of entertainment. We seek to exploit and bend game mechanics to our will to have fun, competing both against the game and against others in this push and pull of winning versus losing. For me, I see fun as part of the spectrum of emotions that interactive media can bring out of us; while I’m always down to play video games for enjoyment, I’ve also been a bit of a believer that videogames can coexist alongside this tried-and-true definition as a medium that’s just as capable of bringing out an entire range of emotions like sorrow, anxiety, and tension, alongside the joy of playing games. And so, it was in that kind of mood that one day, I was browsing the Steam store for indie games, scouring for the newest exploratory story-rich game present as a particular species of “art game,” “games for change,” “social impact games,” or whatever term you want to use for that strain of indie games that tries to tell a story via integration of game mechanics and narrative that focuses less on big budget production and more on the construction and deconstruction of everything else going into it.

Enter That Dragon, Cancer. I’ve known about this title for at least five, maybe six years now, but never got around to it; perhaps I felt as if I wasn’t in the right mood, the right setting, hadn’t done the proper amount of preparation to really get everything out of the game. And honestly, nothing could have ever prepared me for it. No amount of playing What Remains of Edith Finch or Spiritfarer or even Rakuen alongside anything marked as a “tearjerker” or under the “Emotional” tag on Steam could have left me ready to tackle the heavy subjects presented in That Dragon, Cancer, an experience which the Steam Store page sums up as “An immersive, narrative videogame that retells Joel Green’s 4-year fight against cancer through about two hours of poetic, imaginative gameplay that explores themes of faith, hope and love.” It is the most undisguised game I have perhaps ever experienced, a game that is so unapologetically personal and close to the heart in memorializing a lost family member that I felt guilty at times intruding upon the scenes and memories written into the engine. And it did so in a way that I honestly cannot say many other games have attempted, much less done well.

Most games in this genre utilize a variety of (often thinly) veiled narrative metaphors to portray morals and tragedy alongside gameplay, embedded character backgrounds and world-building to provoke thoughts and emotions among the players; they don’t necessarily market themselves as games that are meant to spin yarns of melancholy and despair, but they have that sort of “feel” to them where you can tell that in many cases, a once joyous and brightly colored tale is headed in that general direction. I don’t think That Dragon, Cancer is anything like that; it is extremely upfront about its content and its intentions. Reading the description on the store page, it states, "This is where we go to remember our son Joel, up through here along this path. We want to show you who he was, and how his life changed us. Can we walk here together for a while?" There are no illusions of what lies at the end of the tunnel; you know how the game ends. Quite literally, what you see is what you get; this all actually happened, and the game becomes that much more emotionally raw because of that. It presents itself as a point and click adventure game with sporadic videogame gameplay elements and references scattered throughout (controlled very simply as there’s only one instance that actually requires use of the keyboard), serving to highlight the seemingly mundane in Joel Green’s five-year life as the valuable memories that construct his story. And make no mistake; this is a “video game,” just stripped down to its bare essentials. The medium’s elements are there to both emphasize the metaphors that convey the Green family’s struggle and at the same time, cleverly impart and evoke emotions by twisting your perception of what the game mechanics mean to the player regarding agency and perspective.

I’ll address one of the elephants in the room at this time; there are a lot of complaints scattered across the internet about how the gameplay is unfulfilling, or “unfun,” or how it’s a “bad video game” and shouldn’t be classified as a video game. Well… yeah, that is the point. Ryan Green has stated that it would defeat the purpose of the game if the tale of his family tending to Joel’s cancer treatment was considered fun. The closest comparison that I could make here would be to Phil Elverum’s album A Crow Looked At Me, written in the wake of his wife’s passing and focusing on brutally honest and unflinching diary-like lyricism with more muted musicality, and even this is an oversimplification. What Ryan Green sought to bring out of the medium was, rather, evoking a variety of emotions as you closely follow Joel’s journey. His answer to the “game” aspect is this: "I would say, 'No, it's not a game, but there are games in it… [a]nd it's not about fun. But there are moments when you have fun. And life is a mixture of the sorrowful and the joyful and weeping and playing and praying, and so I hope that it's a reflection of our life, you know, in the form of a videogame." The authors never intended for the game to exist simply as “a vault of sadness”; there are moments of pristine joy, when you spin Joel in the roundabout in the playground at the start of the game, or when you’re celebrating his end of treatment day in a kart racing minigame in the hospital corridors. And there are moments of tenderness, when Joel’s playing with the dog and you move the stethoscope around to revisit his sounds of laughter, or when Joel lies in his father’s arms feeding off the IV, and moments of anger, trepidation, and exhaustion when Ryan and Amy Green learn that the tumors have been spotted again and become overwhelmed in their tidal waves of grief. To try and label That Dragon, Cancer as another “tearjerker” would be wrong; the whole package is much more than just an outpouring of grief, and the game mechanics themselves serve as devices to impart the wide range of emotions.

You may have heard of the controversy surrounding That Dragon, Cancer’s address towards full Let’s Plays of the game, where some YouTube playthroughs of the game were copyright claimed due to audio (from Jon Hillman’s soundtrack) and the Numinous Games team lamented that some full playthroughs had hit millions of views with some not even linking to the original authors/source material, even though the game at that time had only sold a modest 16,000 copies. While the topic of the relationship between game developers and Let’s Players is beyond the scope of this review, I do want to state this; I don’t believe that a Let’s Play is a genuine substitute for actually experiencing That Dragon, Cancer. It is nevertheless valuable as a snapshot of how another person views the game through their own lens, but it will never replace Ryan Green’s vision of putting the player into the family’s shoes, experiencing every moment of their journey of hope in the shadow of death. He came to the idea of translating his experiences into video game form from reflecting upon one miserable night, where Joel kept howling from dehydration and nothing Ryan did could ease his pain; he had been thinking about how mechanics dictated how players in a video game interact with elements on the screen, and thought “This is like a game where the mechanics are subverted and don’t work.” Several notable instances registered during my own playthrough that confounded my own expectations. The structure of the overall game itself is an interesting example; most games of this form utilize a pseudo-open world environment within the levels, where players walk around with WASD and look around with the mouse. But as mentioned previously, That Dragon, Cancer simplifies this approach and works as a point and click to move to highlightable nodes; by doing so, it has the appearance of a game that suggests freedom within its environments, but in reality restricts you to only a few locations with certain viewpoints embedded for the characters’ experiences, as such takes full advantage of maximizing detail within certain viewpoints while subverting this expectation of free movement and focusing the player on reliving the experiences of those represented in the game while quite literally standing in their place. Another good example happens during a certain dream sequence where Joel is floating in the stars hanging onto heart balloons, while you as the player must control him, dodging spiky black balls of thorns that represent the antagonist of this narrative, cancer, omnipresent and always just lurking around the corner in its pernicious, pervasive malice. Here, the game subverts the idea of a win condition; you can keep dodging the spiky balls for as long as you’d like (or rather, as long as you’re able to), but there’s no end or reward to “doing well;” at some point, cancer will pop all of Joel’s heart balloons, at which the nightmare ends. Finally, the aforementioned story segment titled “Dehydration” puts you in the role of Ryan looking over Joel during that fateful night where an inconsolable Joel, wailing in anguish and banging his head against the hospital bed crib right beside you, simply cannot be stopped. You, as Ryan, can attempt to ease Joel by giving him juice boxes as a remedy for the dehydration, but Joel just vomits it back up. As Joel continues coughing and crying, the illusion of player control disappears and Ryan is left feeling empty, his head face down on his hands as he prays for relief, that a miracle will happen and bring his son a moment of peace. Only by playing the video game can you experience the shock when first offered the expectation of a certain degree of player agency, and then having the curtains torn away when it’s revealed that nothing you do will lend any semblance of changing the final outcome.

And yet, the developers went further; Numinous Games further experimented with their ideas of player perspective and player agency that could only be utilized in the video game format. One emblematic example occurs during chapter seven, aptly titled “I’m Sorry Guys, It’s Not Good.” You’re first introduced to the See n’ Say that Joel is playing around with as a brief moment of levity, the calm before the storm. Once the doctors enter the room, the animal slots on the See n’ Say become the faces of the Green family and the doctors; you can then use the See n’ Say to progress the conversation and shift the perspective to one of the doctors or the family members and essentially, listen to their inner thoughts. As the conversation continues, the sea level begins to rise; you as the player can rewind time using the See n’ Say to revisit the adults’ perspectives in the room, allowing you to take the necessary time to process the heavy topic of Joel’s final prognosis before the ocean swallows everyone. But at some point, you have to move on and accept that your actions cannot prevent the inevitable, just as Joel and the adults cannot fight the ocean; the lack of control becomes even more evident. It’s in this moment that I as the player began to reflect upon the time spent in the scenes prior; the game never rushed me as I spent time playing with Joel in the playground, or rocking in a chair holding Joel as he was fed with his IV, but did I, as the player, spend enough time with Joel to decompartmentalize everything that was going on around me, or was I just letting time slip by me in these fleeting moments when the end was nigh? This idea of using a video game space to capture and remain transfixed in moments in time was reflected in the documentary Thank You For Playing, where Amy Green commented that the family was so eager to document so much regarding Joel’s life and the everyday moments spent with him, because they were afraid of what would happen if they weren’t recording and if so, “wouldn’t ever be able to go back.” The final scene of the game, titled “Picnic at the edge of the world,” serves as a final reminder of this idea. Here, after taking a rowboat with just you and Joel, you meet Joel in the clearing of the woods on an isolated island, where he is surrounded by pancakes and finally able to speak coherently (not present prior because the cancer had caused significant development issues). He offers you a pancake and a seat at the picnic as he scratches his dog “Manju,” and your response is to blow bubbles as Joel stares in awe and attempts to catch them. There’s no strict time limit on this scene, as you can theoretically blow bubbles forever with Joel here, though the camera will begin to pan away after a few moments of non-interaction. But, you still the chance to go back if you change your mind for a little bit, as an icon appears to signify that it’s still possible to click back to the picnic to blow more bubbles. The player agency here is all that's necessary to signify the importance of this final moment; you can still go back and blow bubbles to your own leisure, but at some point, you have to let go, just like the Green family did. As such, no other medium can offer this idea of player agency and control to highlight just how important these seemingly mundane moments with Joel are in the overall scope of his life, giving you as the player as much time as you need to process the details while giving you the option to move forward when you’re ready. Nevertheless, it’s unafraid to suddenly take away that agency when it feels the need to make a point, as “That's what fighting cancer is like... no agency, no control”.

There’s one other significant example that I think emphasizes That Dragon, Cancer’s understanding of subverting video game mechanics and player agency/control to impart a wide range of emotions, in the form of Scene 9, “Joel the Baby Knight.” Here, the player controls Joel in a set of cardboard armor as Amy and Ryan Green convey Joel’s treatment as his battle versus a dragon named Cancer in the form of a bedtime story to their other children. Reminding me as an almost throwback to the early, crude 2D platformers I played as flash games on Newgrounds, this section is almost fun; you duck underneath Cancer’s fireballs as you traverse the DIY videogame landscape, throwing spears at MS Paint red serpents in your way. Eventually, Joel enters a cave, where he is chased down and trapped by the dragon. And here, the developers do something simple yet effective; you can’t actually slay the dragon. No matter how well you play with the rough controls, dodging the fireballs and throwing spears to increase your score as the dragon’s health bar slowly decreases, it will never decrease past half a heart. Because after all, as one of the other kids mentions, Joel’s just a little kid, and “babies can’t defeat dragons.” Nor can their neighbor Tim, from church; both eventually fall to the dragon. It seems like such an easy design choice in retrospect, but this metaphor, and my personal moment in finding out that my efforts ultimately would never beat the “boss,” spoke volumes in conveying how cancer is this beast that can be dulled, but never truly defeated. And it’s in this moment that Amy and Ryan Green begin to work in their faith, telling their kids that “God is right there fighting the dragon with Joel” and that while many brave knights have valiantly fought cancer, and that it may appear that they have lost because they died, “maybe getting to be done fighting was grace.”

Perhaps this is the most contentious aspect of That Dragon, Cancer. Ryan and Amy Green are very devout Christians, and their faith in God and those around them is one of the main themes of the overall game. For what it’s worth, I never saw this as a negative, because despite not being a religious person myself, Ryan and Amy never felt preachy to me; their struggle with maintaining faith in the depths of despair while their child battled terminal cancer is integral to them ultimately accepting Joel’s fate. Ryan’s struggle in particular feels very human; he has many glimpses of doubt and is portrayed as someone who wants to be “drowning” in his doubt, just to feel what it’s like even when Amy attempts to pull him out. Everyone deals with death in different ways, and I appreciate that something this personal is not only shown at all, but portrayed with thoughtful nuance; the Greens come across as far too earnest and caring of Joel for me to broach this topic with any sense of cynicism. Ryan has stated that “Loving Joel was not safe,” but they didn’t even see detachment as an option. Amy herself admitted, “We pushed past that self-preservation because Joel was worth loving, even if that love could crush us.” Ultimately, I will admit that I also don’t know how important my interpretation of their faith is; this is a love-letter to their deceased child that feels like I am infringing upon their personal space at times when viewing through their window, and while I and the Green family admit that the game is a tough sell, it is ultimately something so personal and so sincerely told that I’m not sure if outside interpretations matter in the overall scope of the Greens’ experiences. But there lies the bigger question; if the game is so niche, so “unfun” to play and perhaps polarizing to many who are not devoutly religious, and may even hit “too close to home” for some who have been there, then why take a chance and play this game at all?

Two particular stories come to mind. The first takes place during PAX Prime, 2013, in a small booth dedicated to showing curious attendees an early demo of the game. Responses to the game ranged from some hastily walking away, to some more becoming teary-eyed and needing some time to recompose before leaving, to the developer who began to sob and said “I don’t want to be here at PAX; I want to be home with my kids.” The depth of emotional responses evoked by the demo that Ryan Green witnessed that day brought something out of him that he had previously forgotten, and a little while later, as captured in the documentary Thank You For Playing, he too is beside himself with tears; according to him, his experiences of taking care of Joel and being alongside Joel during every step of his treatment had become so normalized to him, that he hadn’t completely realized the enormity of many of the memories that had been present in the demo. The second story comes as an extension of this launching point: during the Kickstarter campaign used to further fund the game’s development, Numinous Games gave their backers an opportunity to include messages addressed to their own family members and loved ones, many of whom had also battled cancer and were no longer in this world. These messages are scattered throughout the rooms and hallways of the scene titled “Waking Up,” in the form of hundreds of cards lying about the environment. This particular interaction is something that cannot ever be captured 1:1 by a video recording of the game; it is up to the player to choose how ever many cards and messages they want to read before moving on. Personally, I tried to get to as many cards as I could, but the sheer number of messages and tributes left me overwhelmed at times. It was in that moment that I realized my initial interpretation of That Dragon, Cancer’s scope was wrong; it wasn’t just a memorial for Joel, because at the end of the day, “…while this is a story about Joel, everybody has a Joel.”

I will be frank; while I may have experienced some degree of loss in my life, nothing I have experienced even comes close to the loss that the Greens have encountered in their recollection of Joel’s story. To even suggest that I could try and use my own experiences to relate my own struggles to their struggle of being right beside Joel Green during every step of his treatment and eventual passing would be disrespectful to his memory and everything that the family has gone through. That is why I believe that the least I can do, is hear them out. To gain a window into a snapshot of their lives as a complete outsider to try and better understand their experiences while looking through their lens with the video game medium in a tale that is so painfully intimate is something so powerful, that I’m not sure words are strong enough to describe the experience. Empathy is what can be gleaned here. Moreover, in another article, O’Hern et al. claims that the game may be conducive in the training of health care workers, stating that “[e]vidence suggests… empathy decreases during medical training,” and that emotional experiences like That Dragon, Cancer may serve as a powerful preservative of empathy. It’s why despite being a game that “is not fun to play,” That Dragon, Cancer is valuable in utilizing the video game medium and all its various tools and mechanics to more effectively convey its tale of Joel Green while providing an outlet, both for those who have experienced similar loss to share and for those who have not experienced similar loss to step into different shoes to better understand the perspectives of those who have.

I can’t help but hold the Green family in high regards for the decisions made during the production of this game, or how it was even conceived in the first place, or how its bold, intense, vulnerability alongside carefully examined and thought-out use of the video game medium manages to evoke a wide range of emotions. It’s unfathomable to me that “[i]t was the story that began as a miracle and ended as a memorial” and it still manages to remain more than just an outpouring of grief, because Joel Green’s death was more than just a tragedy. At the end of the day, it wasn’t even the story that they wanted to tell. Regardless, they’re choosing to forge their own path forward, and share their experiences with others in hopes that we can become more open about discussing death, or that personal experiences can be more expressively shared through the video game medium and we’re often “all in this together,” or even implementing death as more than just a video game mechanic that serves as a fail state or a trivial means to an end, instead taking a more “death positive” approach that examines death in video games in dealing with its meaning and its consequences. Ryan Green himself asks, “What if videogames are the inception of a medium that will allow us to encode the voices of people who have changed the world... or in my case, a small voice, that changed my whole world?”

In another sense, I was wrong again. I thought That Dragon, Cancer was far too personal, starkly penetrating, and profound for me at first; I originally saw it more or less as a documentary painted with adversity, an unspeakably hard tale captured in a video game space that I would play once, shed my tears, and move on having listened to their story with little to no catharsis. After all, how could one find catharsis in something that is so tragically true? But it was much more than that; the journey of being in someone else’s shoes, living a little of their life through video games capturing an emotional landscape that would otherwise be lost in time and having my expectations played with thoughtfully to impart an array of feelings that otherwise may not have been evoked from a more passive experience... that was the catharsis itself. I will not “score” That Dragon, Cancer or mark this with spoilers in the hopes of talking about this experience more openly and out of respect for the Greens’ story, but let this be known; I could not help but be moved by the earnestness of what was presented to me over the course of two hours. This experience has once again reminded me that emotionally compelling pieces of media have the power to change lives, and while still in their relative infancy in video games, games like That Dragon, Cancer continue to reaffirm my belief that this medium has value and still has so much more to offer. I suppose that’s why I play video games at the end of the day; to feel a range of emotions just like this, and to share my experiences with others in hopes that they will get similar reactions or experiences just like me. Thank you for sharing your story, Ryan & Amy Green, and may Joel Green rest in peace.

Sources used:

That Dragon, Cancer Steam Store Page
Thank You For Playing
That Dragon, Cancer 2016 Game Awards Acceptance Speech
That Dragon, Cancer wins Game Innovation | BAFTA Games Awards 2017
A video game to cope with grief | Amy Green
Curing ideological cancers with video games
Experimental Gameplay Workshop 2015: That Dragon Cancer
That Dragon, Cancer & Purpose
Errant Signal - That Dragon, Cancer
That Dragon, Let’s Play
On Let’s Plays
Turning tragedy into a videogame memorial
"That Dragon, Cancer" Feature Film - "Thank You For Playing" Documentary
E3 13: That Dragon, Cancer Interview
That Dragon, Cancer - A journey with a family dealing with cancer - PAX 2013
Interview With Ryan & Amy Green: Creators Of 'That Dragon, Cancer'
Meet Joel, taking it one day at a time | My Last Days
That Dragon, Cancer: A game for Joel
Tribeca ’15: “That Dragon, Cancer” Q&A with Ryan Green
Interview with Ryan & Amy Green and the Development Team of That Dragon, Cancer
A Father, a Dying Son, and the Quest to Make the Most Profound Videogame Ever
Representation of Death in Independent Videogames: Providing a Space for Meaningful Death Reflection
That Dragon, Cancer—Exploring End of Life Through an Unwinnable Video Game

The great strength of Disco Elysium is this critical distance between the character and the player. In particular, it's the innovative mechanics of the inner monologues that force you to react according to the skills you have chosen. This is particularly subtle, but special mention must be made of the discussions with Klaasje, during which we know that our 'sensors' are being manipulated and giving incorrect information, if not for Volition managing to keep us on track. With this preliminary mention, it appears that Disco Elysium is a title that allows for almost infinite narrative creativity, since – as with the ideal role-playing game – the perception of the world is modified by our mental inclinations. The sense of detail is exceptional, so that the world reacts to our posture: eradicating The Expression and shaving will have effects on dialogue and how people view us, as will the use (or not) of illicit substances and the persona we choose to assume. While the title shines in its moments of absurdity, allowing for some particularly hillarious humour, it also has some very charming moments with a very pleasing metaphysical depth. Whether it's Pale's existential angst or Dora's acceptance of her choices, questions are posed across the screen about how one should live their life. As such, it is the whole political purpose of the game that attempts to answer this question. Disco Elysium doesn't hold back its blows against centrism, but the left-wing tones are greyed out. The Revolution failed, creating human wrecks, but yet the ideal was noble. More than ever, the title conjures up the unpleasant impression of an invisible hand – the Capital – coldly slaughtering individuals, without realising it. The rough and sublime prose is truly at the heart of this experience, a mark of the great CRPGs. Some would regret the ending, which contradicts the game's efforts to be a Golden Age whodunit, but this coincides with the metaphysical point it seeks to make. Disco Elysium comes across as an extraordinary experience, following in the footsteps of its illustrious predecessor, Planescape: Torment, with the twist of modernity and a political emphasis. It is, without doubt, a success.

"I often think about that old metaphor, the one that says we are all islands on a wide sea. Especially these days, now that things are more difficult than before and the world appears to be harsher than we once imagined it to be. We are all like islands, the philosopher said. Perhaps it's true. Yet I cannot help but remember an older saying, scratched on a cave wall somewhere by a long-forgotten prophet: in the end, the sea will claim everything."

If you've read any of my recent reviews lately, you might be able to tell that I've sort of been in a pickle. I've felt a bit restless yet exhausted trying out different things only for nothing to seemingly stick; Deus Ex is always just a bit too much for my tired mind after a long day at work (and I suck at stealth), Skies of Arcadia looks and sounds so cool but right now it feels a bit too drawn-out for my fickle being, Muv-Luv is filled with these loud characters that seem to just act at their own whim, the older Ys games I've tried have been pretty fun but haven't lived up to Origin or Lacrimosa of Dana, and party game weekend was lightning in a bottle that quite frankly, I'm not sure I really ever want to go through or attempt to capture again. And it makes me wonder, where I went wrong to make gaming feel less like a hobby and more like a chore. But playing through Root Film recently got me thinking that maybe, I should just go back to the classics for a bit.

I don't usually take the time to replay older games I've enjoyed. My backlog is bursting with titles (and only gets larger when my friends dig up yet another dusty title that they played back in the day), and I'd like to think I'm past those days of mindlessly comboing CPUs in Rivals of Aether to instrumental music. And even if I were to revisit some favorites, point and clicks don't tend to fall on that list; they're great for a quick fix of adventure and simple puzzle solving, and you move on with your day, never to play it again because you've seen it all. That said, The Sea Will Claim Everything continues to stand out in my memory, so... why not revisit it to find out why?

This is probably one of the harder reviews that I have had to write; I can usually pin down exactly why I like or dislike certain games due to specific gameplay elements and features, and as such most of my reviews tend to be more mechanically focused. But how do you even begin describing a game like The Sea Will Claim Everything? It is about as barebones as a point and click adventure game can get. There's no dragging items to and from an inventory for interaction; the usual motley of "verbs" for interacting with objects have been replaced with 4 buttons describing the human senses. Most of the game involves clicking and reading text with no voice acting or animations, and many of the "puzzles" could be simplified as straight fetch quests. And finally, there really aren't any forced "gameplay" execution tests to be found here; what you see is what you get.

And yet, I am confident that this is still the most distinct point and click adventure game I've ever played. The game will outright start by telling you that time behaves differently in the Land of Dream; it warns you that if you try to interact with things at a similar pace to our world, you might find the whole experience outright unpleasant. So take your time and just soak in the moment, observing all you see and can click on. And it's absolutely worthwhile to do so; embedded in the game are tons of silly references, jokes, narratives, flights of fancy, and much more. The game walks this tightrope between being too other-worldly versus being too rooted in reality, but it just understands how to capture its wistfulness well without feeling too heavy. It's not afraid to break the fourth wall every now and then alongside its philosophical tangents, but it's also subtly daring in how it tightly constructs its surrealist world with so many varied and colorful locations and individuals. There's a lot to unpack from speaking with everyone in this evocative and unfamiliar world, and plenty of bright and whimsical moments to be found alongside the pangs of yesterday. And despite this world feeling so unknown, it's deeply humanizing in how it emphasizes connection and reminds us all that there is so much we share despite our differences. It's such a mood that I've never quite experienced to this extent in any point and click adventure game I've ever played, and maybe any video game I've played to this day.

Fun fact by the way, did you know that this is written by Jonas Kyratzes, one of the writers of the Talos Principle? Or that Chris Christodoulou, the composer of the Risk of Rain soundtracks, handled the music for this game? I only just found out about this now, but it's such an interesting collaboration between two greats that have handled such different works in video games. (Go check out Jonas Kyratzes' other works by the way, they're all just as strange and as fascinating as this one!)

So I'm left with not enough words and not enough time to really decipher exactly how to put it all down. The fanciful hand drawn graphics, the contemplative tinkering background tunes, the flurry of silly jokes and references scattered across the dreamy landscapes, and the messages sent and felt through the window; it all comes together almost seamlessly and I can't imagine how it would play out any other way. You just have to experience this for yourself to really capture an understanding for what makes this seemingly innocent title so powerful. It's fantastical yet familiar, simple yet layered, and nostalgic yet unafraid of the future. I think we could all learn something from The Sea Will Claim Everything, in that it never forgets to emphasize how important it is to enjoy the now and then; I sure know I won't be forgetting about this anytime soon.

The student becomes the master overnight.

Lies of P is a game that came completely out of nowhere, left no impression on me beyond "why would someone make a dark, moody game about Pinocchio", and then managed to completely eclipse every expectation I had. I got back on Game Pass for Starfield and PAYDAY 3, and decided to give this a crack solely as a might-as-well-try-it; not only is this the better of those, it's one of the finest games I've ever played. I mean this honestly and heretically: it is better than all three mainline entries of the Dark Souls series.

Yes, Lies of P is derivative. No, this does not detract from its quality. The obsession with "newness", both as an inherent virtue and as something all creators ought to strive for, is an ideal forced to take root almost exclusively at the behest of European bourgeois Romantics all looking to (ironically enough) copy what Rousseau was telling them to do in the 1700s. Art as a whole has spent centuries upon centuries cribbing from other pieces to put itself together, and it's a fairly recent development that doing shit that someone else did but in your own way is seen as a failure of the artist. I, personally, do not care about this in the slightest. If you do, I would ask only that you examine why you believe this to be so; do you have a legitimate grievance against derivative works for any reason other than because others have told you that they're some synonym for "bad"?

Round8 Studio has come almost completely out of nowhere to deliver something that's immensely fun to play, narratively engaging, and utterly gorgeous in just about every area you can find yourself in. Any developer that can come out swinging this hard and connect with just about every blow deserves to be celebrated. There's a lot to talk about, and certainly a lot of it is in regards to the way that people are talking about it. I'll get my core thesis out of the way, first:

If you like Dark Souls, you'll probably like this game.

If you've made liking Dark Souls into a defining personality trait of yours, you're going to fucking hate this game.

Lies of P rides a fine line of being distinct, but not different. The overlap between FromSoft's PS3-and-onward output is broad, borrowing bits and pieces and rearranging them around; something similar to Sekiro parries, something similar to a Bloodborne dodge, something similar to the Dark Souls 3 enemy ambushes. But Lies of P is distinct enough in its execution of these elements that long-time Souls players will unilaterally be chin-checked when they try bringing over their muscle memory from these other titles.

Perfect guards are a guard, not a parry, and tapping the block button Sekiro-style will make you eat a hit. The dodge offers fast, generous invincibility, but it's never as safe as the one in Bloodborne is; enemies using their big red attacks will cut through your i-frames by design, encouraging you to either parry or move well out of the way. Enemies will usually come in ones and be very obvious, but many will hide just out of sight in the hopes of clipping players who haven't yet been trained to look around before charging past a blind corner. The game is uncompromising in demanding the player to meet it on its terms, rather than copying wholesale from the games that obviously inspired it and allowing the skills you learned there to completely carry over.

If you try playing this exactly like every other FromSoft Souls game you've played up to this point, you will lose, and hard. If you can not (or will not) adapt, you will probably get filtered out by the Archbishop and start publicly wondering why anyone likes this game.

There's a very strange — and frankly, it feels borderline dishonest — set of complaints I've seen where people are just outright wrong about the way the game functions, and they then use their incorrect assumptions as a base from which to knock on the game. I've seen complaints that large weapons aren't viable because you don't get poise/super armor on heavy attacks; this is blatantly untrue, and charge attacks with heavy weapons will regularly blow straight through an enemy hit. People say the dodge is unreliable, but it really isn't; if you're getting caught, you're either messing up a (fairly generous) timing or you're getting hit by red fury attacks, which the game clearly tells you cannot be rolled through. People say it's an aesthetic rip-off of Bloodborne, and this really only applies to a couple of the eldritch enemies; Parisian streets, circus theming, and fantastical automatons lend to a pretty distinct visual identity from any of the other heavy-hitters in the genre.

People say the voice acting is bad, but most of the cast is made up of established, talented stage and screen actors returning from other games like Elden Ring and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, where their performances were lauded; they sound borderline identical to what they've done since just last year, so what makes it acceptable there, and laughable here? People say the translation is bad, but I only noticed a single grammar mistake and typo in my entire playthrough, and they were both buried in the flavor text of a gesture; the rest of the writing offered some evocative lines that managed to bounce between introspective, beautiful, and the coolest fucking thing I've ever read in my life. Where are these complaints coming from? Did we play the same game? It makes no sense. I'm losing my mind trying to figure out how anyone even came to most of these conclusions. It really feels like the most vocal naysayers only played enough of Lies of P to come up with a few surface observations and then made up the rest wholesale.

None of this is to imply that the game is without fault, because it isn't. Boss runs are still present in all of their vestigial glory, consistently adding a mandatory and boring twenty seconds before you can retry a failed boss attempt. Elite enemies — especially in the late game — are often such massive damage sponges that it's a complete waste of time and resources to actually bother fighting the ones that respawn. The breakpoint at which an enemy gets staggered is a hidden value, so you're always just hoping that the next perfect guard will be enough to trip it; we've already got visible enemy health bars here, so I can't see why we don't get enemy stamina bars, too. (Stranger of Paradise continues to be the most mechanically-complete game in this sub-genre.)

For these faults, though, there are at least as many quality-of-life changes that I'm astounded haven't been adopted elsewhere already. Emptying your pulse cells (your refillable healing item) allows you the opportunity to get one back for free if you can dish out enough damage. Theoretically, as long as you can keep up both your offense and defense, you have access to unlimited healing. It's such a natural extension of the Rally system, where you can heal chip damage by hitting foes; Bloodborne's implementation of blood vials looks completely misguided next to this. If you have enough Ergo to level up, the number in the top right corner of the screen will turn blue, no longer requiring you to manually check if you've got enough at a save point. When a side quest updates, the warp screen will let you know that something has happened, and where to start looking for the NPC that it happened to.

It's a challenging game, but it really isn't that hard. I do agree with the general consensus that it would be nice if the perfect guards could be granted a few extra frames of leniency. I managed to start hitting them fairly consistently around halfway through the game, but it's going to be a large hurdle that'll shoo off a lot of players who don't like such tight timings. Tuning it just a little bit would help to make it feel a bit more fair without completely compromising on the difficulty. Everything else, I feel, is pretty strongly balanced in the player's favor; I got through just about every boss in the game without summoning specters and without spending consumables, but they were all there for me if I really needed them. I'd like to go back and play through it again, knowing what I know now, and really lean into the item usage. It's not like you won't wind up with a surplus, considering how easy everything is to farm.

I understand that Bloodborne is something of a sacred cow, especially on this website — it's currently two of the top five highest-ranked games — so anything that seems like it's trying to encroach on its territory is going to be met with hostility before all else. I understand. It's a special game for a lot of people. That said, I'd suggest going into Lies of P with an open mind and a willingness to engage with the game on its own terms; you might manage to find it as impressive of a work as I do.

Quartz is stored in the P-Organ.

It’s okay when FromSoft does it.

Sekiro is guilty of everything that its staunchest defenders attack other games for. An unforgivably bad camera, bosses with surprise second phases, dreadfully simple and overpowered parrying, a near-complete lack of depth both artistically and mechanically, and a thematic retread of what the studio has been doing for fifteen years now all culminates to create something that can peak at the heights of interesting but mostly just lingers in the trenches of bland.

I knew that I wasn’t going to like Sekiro about an hour into it, but I also knew that it would be incredibly easy for someone to point out that I'm a quitter and say that I just didn’t like it because I was bad at the game. You get that a lot, with FromSoft’s titles: the implication being that the difficulty is the sole reason why anyone could ever dislike it. Set aside the red-headed stepchildren that are titles like Dark Souls II and Dark Souls III, where the premier Soulsheads are often pretty harsh on them, and look instead to the darlings like Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, and Sekiro. There are a certain amount of criticisms that you’re allowed to make — farming for blood vials or spirit emblems is boring, certain builds or weapons are imbalanced compared to others — but start pointing out flaws in the underlying systems themselves, and watch the wagons get circled as you’re told that you just need to git gud to appreciate them. I’ll outline what I disliked about the game itself in a bit, but all of this preamble is required to explain why I felt so compelled to finish Sekiro, in the hopes that it’d allow me to speak with some degree of authority.

I have to wonder if Hidetaka Miyazaki ever feels like Victor Frankenstein looking at the monster he's created. The ethos of the earliest Souls games were largely about strangers coming together to overcome the challenges imposed by the brutal and uncaring world they inhabited. Miyazaki famously said that he was inspired by an icy road on a hill that he needed a stranger's help to get over, and that he himself also helped a stranger get over; it was "a connection of mutual assistance between transient people", he said, because he couldn't stick around to thank them or else he'd get stuck again. This laid the foundations not just for the jolly co-operation summons of the original Dark Souls, but certainly reflected players on a more meta level, as well. We're all transient people to one another online, and we'll talk about these games for tips and guides and then dip out to take on the challenges with new information, often to never hear from the other players again. We get what we can and give what we're able.

Yet there's been an inarguable change, I feel, in the way that fans of the newest games talk about them. The seeds were certainly first sown with the whole "PREPARE TO DIE" garbage from the western Dark Souls marketing campaign, but there's been a marked shift in the way that people discuss these games. Complain that it's too hard, and you'll now immediately be met with derision instead of advice: well, you're just bad, you need to git gud, you just don't get it. God help you if you decide to drop the game because you're not having fun. There's no faster way to prove that you're a casual who hasn't earned the right to talk about it. Sekiro discussion in particular is especially noxious, with the community that exists today largely believing that anyone who has any complaints whatsoever is just mad because bad. Even if you beat the game, complaining about it is unjustified because you're actually still bad. If you were good, you would have liked it. Your complaints are because you're bad, thus they're invalid; any praise must then be because you're good, and thus valid. I complained about the shitty camera to a friend and he immediately shot back that it was my fault for being near a wall, and that it's actually intended behavior for it to fuck up near terrain because it'll push clever players to the middle of rooms where they'll be safer. This is the level of discourse we're operating at here. A decade and a half of making these third-person action-adventure games and they still can't fix the fucking cameras, but it's actually because they're playing 4D chess against the player. Can you imagine anything else getting this much leniency?

The camera is really the thing I want to hammer home as the worst element here, because it alone has killed me more than any other enemy in the game. I don’t know how FromSoft still haven’t figured this out. I intentionally sped through most of the game, skipping a lot of the optional content primarily just because I wanted to roll credits, and even most of the mandatory bosses introduced new problems with the camera. Guardian Ape would throw me into a wall that the camera couldn’t phase through, which meant that it tried to go for a birds-eye view and got me killed because I couldn’t see what was happening in time to block the follow-up; Summoner Monk similarly backed me into a wall and brought us both so close to the camera that our models turned invisible and I had to guess what the pattern was, effectively with my eyes closed; Sword Saint Isshin’s Phase 2 jumping attack would break the lock-on whenever I dodged under it, because the camera couldn’t keep up with where he was going. Mini-bosses like the Lone Shadow Longswordsman and the Lone Shadow Vilehand would similarly eat the camera with some of their dashing moves, and bounding off the head of the latter after dodging his sweep caused the camera to get stuck in the ceiling so hard that it started flashing Electric Soldier Porygon at me for a few seconds until it freed itself. It’s so blatantly wrong that I’m astonished both that it made it to production in the state that it’s in and that it isn’t a complete dealbreaker for significantly more people than it is.

I mentioned to another friend that I was having some trouble with Owl and that I was going to call it quits for the night there, and he excitedly mentioned that Owl had his favorite boss theme in the game. It was at this exact moment that I realized that I couldn’t actually recall a single track from the entire ten or so hours I had played up to that point. Even after rolling credits, I still don’t remember anything aside from the fact that I thought Divine Dragon had a cool theme. Music is constantly playing over every sequence of the game, ambient tracks and combat tracks alike; if you aggro an enemy, kill them, and then immediately aggro another, the combat track will start, fade out, and then start from the beginning again. Moving through an area to quickly cut down enemies who don’t alert the others when they aggro can make the combat track start itself over what I managed to get about five times in a row. It’s kind of funny in how sloppy it is.

The narrative is dreck, of course, and I doubt anyone was expecting much different. It’s the same story FromSoft has been telling for years now — unnatural life and resurrection, it’s all cyclical, you can choose to either break the cycle or keep it going, blah blah blah — with the added twist of “honor culture is actually dishonorable”, which has been massively oversaturated for longer than anyone reading this has been alive, and Sekiro has absolutely nothing interesting to add to the conversation. It’s certainly present. Owl shows up after seemingly dying, decides to be evil, actually dies unceremoniously, and the game just kind of moves along without really being interested in how or why any of that happened. I’ve seen praise for the story, and I can’t honestly believe that anyone is cheering this on. This is the fourth time FromSoft has shown that time is a flat circle in class, and the irony of how they keep doing it over and over again is really kind of giving me a kick as I type it out. You certainly can’t say they don’t believe in it.

Souls combat was never mechanically deep, but made up for it predominately just by giving you a lot of options. Sekiro throws this out in favor of exclusively allowing the player to play as a squishy, dex-based katana-wielder who dies in two hits on a good day and has to perfect parry the world or be crushed beneath it. I respect, in a way, the sheer commitment to this singular playstyle, but I also don’t think there’s any depth here to actually make me want to play this over any other similar action game. You get a parry and you get some basic sword swings, and if you’re a really good boy, you get to do Ichimonji Double. The actual parrying itself is ridiculously forgiving, and you’ll just end up psyching yourself out if you read online that spamming it will reduce your parry window to about seven frames; it’s active for so long and you’re actionable again so quickly after you use it that you’re in no real danger so long as you just keep hammering away at L1 fast enough. The fact that this got a port for the Stadia — with its inherent input lag that you can count in geologic time — should indicate how core these so-called “strict reaction times” actually are. What you’re left with once you get past that mental barrier is a game where you hit R1 until orange sparks fly, hit L1 until orange sparks stop flying, and then repeat the process from the start. When the kanji for danger occasionally appears, you get to hit either the jump button or the dash button. It is fucking boring. I managed to no-hit all three phases of Isshin not because I had downloaded him and completely figured out a perfect counter for every single one of his combos, but because his AI broke and he kept spamming the thrust attack in Phase 2 and the lightning sweep in Phase 3. I was getting rolled before that, because he was actually using his entire arsenal. I didn’t outskill him, I just got lucky that he kept picking the exact same attack over and over again. It’s like I got double-perfected by a world-class Zangief player and then in game two he just sat in neutral and spammed SPD. Sure, I’ll take the win, but it’s not because I earned it. I didn’t win, he just lost. Sekiro occupies an incredibly awkward middle ground between something slow and simple like Dark Souls and something fast and complex like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. The game is instead fast and simple, and I can’t think of anything that is less for me.

Speaking of, I think FromSoft has indicated with their last few releases that they’re no longer interested in catering to players like me. That’s fine. I say this with my teeth gritted and steam coming out of my ears, but, really, it is fine. They’ve clearly found a new audience who loves them dearly, and every new game they put out sells millions of copies and sweeps the Game of the Year awards from every publication giving them out. This beat Death Stranding and Resident Evil 2 at The Game Awards! It’s the fifth highest-rated game on Backloggd of all time! It’s sold over ten million copies as of September of this year! Clearly I’m the odd man out, here. What use is it even to complain? What reason would they have to listen?

I’ve been getting this sort-of old man doom sense lately — not just for game discussion, mind, but for a lot of things — about how saying what you feel about something doesn’t actually accomplish anything if you’re not in a position of power to change it. It’s got a purpose to just let others know how you feel about any given topic, but what does it actually do? If I find a group of like-minded individuals who think I nailed it with this review and agree that FromSoft ought to return to the good old days where they made shitty, clunky games that launched blatantly unfinished, what does that accomplish? If a group of Sekiro fans come in and dunk on me for just not understanding the game, what does that accomplish? I put myself through the ringer beating a twenty hour-long game that I hated, and for what? So that I’d be more credible when I said it was a pile of shit? What does that accomplish, then, when someone comes in and says that beating the game doesn’t mean anything and I’m still bad and that’s the only reason I hated it? Without anyone involved actually being in a position to change anything, what use is discussing it at all?

A large part of what bothers me is that I don't feel I've really gotten anything I value from my time with Sekiro. It's not just because of the difficulty; I do plenty of difficult things, play plenty of difficult games, and it's all given me something I value. Every piece I write makes me feel like I'm a little bit better at writing, and it helps me appreciate the writing of others more. Every fighting game I play tends to have wildly differing mechanics between them, but the fundamentals of squaring off against another player are transferable. Every song I compose makes me feel like I've got a deeper understanding of music. What I get from playing Sekiro is that I'm now better at Sekiro, which is a game I have no desire to ever touch again. There's hardly anything that plays quite like this — which is a massive point of support for those who love it — so I may as well have gotten nothing for all my time spent. There's nothing wrong with what I'll affectionately call "junk media", where there's no value to the piece besides what you feel in the exact moments where you're actively experiencing it, but you'd hope that what you feel is a sense of fun or reward. I felt neither from Sekiro. I thought it was boring, and it didn't give me anything I value. I could have gone to work and felt equally bored and unfulfilled, but at least work pays me.

It’s telling that the parts that I thought were most interesting — the Divine Dragon, the Armored Knight — are the parts that either go completely overlooked or disparaged by the broader fanbase. There’s a clear disconnect between me, this game, and everyone else. People all over the place online said to keep playing until the combat clicks, and that’s when you start having fun. I felt the combat click, and I felt bored. People said to play until Genichiro before you say you don’t like it, and I beat Genichiro and was still bored. People said you can’t call the game bad if you haven’t beaten it, and I have, and I still think it’s bad. Do I have the right to dislike it yet, or is there still something that I’ve missed?

Seeing a monkey in a conical hat firing a rifle was almost enough for me to justify giving this five stars.

Pivotal.

Funny that this has "pistol" in the title when it erupts with the force and bombast of a shotgun by your ear, explosive and unyielding, leaving you reeling as you try to reorient yourself. Constantly moving, never wasting a single breath, ensuring you can't look away. Tragedy as banality as comedy. Love is rainbow.

Heisei Pistol Show is a work that I have both no words and far too many words for. Rarely can anything — anything — strike a balance between sorrow and joy this effortlessly, bouncing the audience back and forth between having their hearts rended and making them double over with laughter. Slaughtering your way through Heart’s former assassin colleagues and then having your pistol say “I’m Pistol” in the Microsoft Sam voice every time it talks is the sort of thing that doesn’t sound like it works when it’s described to you, but flows perfectly when it’s actually experienced. I’m tempted to say that it’s all over the place tonally, but it really isn’t; nothing ever drifts too far from the through-line, with these shifts being core to the holistic affair.

Most notable about Heisei Pistol Show, however, is how it handles queer characters in a way that’s nothing short of masterful. Heart is a wonderful, awful character, both a victim of circumstance and someone who causes his own problems. Heart suffers because he is gay, but Heart also suffers and he is gay. Heart is abused by his father not because he is gay, but because he reminds his father of his mother. Heart is exiled by his family not because he is gay, but because he isn’t religious. Heart loses his friends not because he is gay, but because he refuses to accept their platonic love for him. Heart can’t find love because he is gay and thus limits himself exclusively to his clients that he serves as a rentboy, none of whom love him back. Heart can’t find love because he is gay and he’s lived his entire life in a society that hates him and his kind, and makes every attempt to hide what healthy gay relationships look like. Heart suffers because he is gay. Heart suffers and he is gay.

I’ll echo a common sentiment I see shared about this game and say that it makes so many pieces of queer media look toothless by comparison, especially in more recent years. Many of these works are made by and for queer creatives, but so many fail to strike balance. Either queer trauma is used, is weaponized, is swung like a baseball bat to cripple and wound any gays in the audience so the straights can feel like they did something by "experiencing something hard", or queer trauma is ignored wholesale in order to keep up the "comfy vibes". I played The Big Con earlier this year and dropped it because it was billed me to as a solid piece of queer media and instead existed as this soft, mealy blob-thing seemingly designed for people who say “be gay do crimes” and “FALGSC” online and then get sweaty palms when they think about shoplifting a pack of gum. Nobody in that world had ever had a single negative thought, ever, about queer people in 90’s North America. I don’t mean to turn this into a rant where I’m just shitting on a different work, but it really illustrates how many worlds of finesse apart a creator like Parun was long before it was even remotely popular to be tackling subject matter anywhere even approaching this in video games.

I wouldn't dare erase the experiences of these other creators by suggesting that these aren’t accurate to lived experiences — there are enough dipshits out there doing that already — but it always leaves me a little raw to never see me on the screen. Characters who aren't living their saccharine, gumdrop lives where everything in their world is completely fine and without conflict, but neither are they defined exclusively by external traumas and hatred, never possessing the agency to do anything besides be abused. Where are the characters who have lived complex lives? Who have suffered, but have found joy? Even if it ends in tragedy, where are those who have found catharsis in themselves and their loved ones in the quiet moments? Are they all locked away in Japanese RPG Maker games from 2008?

The messaging can be a bit clumsy in terms of what it's trying to get across, even after some scrutiny; Tokimeki's song calls out to "Indians" in feather hats who all look like T. Hawk, "Slums" made up entirely of dark-skinned characters, and Koreans, whose history of being discriminated against in Japan has been well-documented for decades. I'm still uncertain if this is simply a bit of off-color humor inserted into the bit or if it's a genuine and well-intentioned call of solidarity from one oppressed group to a few others; knowing what I know about Parun and his other work, I'm inclined to believe it's the latter. I'd like that to be the case, too.

After I beat the game, I saw Parun say that he liked reading fan theories of his work, and that he hoped the players of Heisei Pistol Show would come up with some for him to check out. I’m at least a decade and a half late to the party, but allow me to try, regardless.

The game is Heart's dying dream; a fantasy land conjured up in his final moments, flashing through vignettes of his life. Heart, in reality, is the rentboy Matsumoto tells his friend about, who contracted herpes, killed his friend, and committed suicide by cop. The dying dream itself is hyperreal, in the Baudrillardian sense. It's a simulacrum of reality that Heart escapes to — or perhaps is forced to escape to, his hallucinations resulting from his herpes meningoencephalitis — wherein he relives a version of his life as a musical, as kabuki theater. His friends are there, and he metaphorically guns them down, abandoning them in reality. His unrequited lover is there, and Heart actually guns him down, just as he does in reality. At the end of the dream, Heart is shot, told he's never known love because he was so desperate for it that he would latch onto anyone and everyone, and then he's out of memories. He imagines himself at the concert from his childhood once more, now the starring princess he always dreamt he would become, and he quietly passes away with a smile on his face.

At least, that’s the way I saw it all play out. I thought it was a remarkably straight-forward story once all of the ending reveals wrapped up, but then I got to a dev room where Parum’s authorial mouthpiece character told me that he thought I was dull if I believed that I had it all figured out after a single playthrough. He then gave me a list of Mulholland Drive-tier questions that I needed to answer if I wanted to have a real shot at deciphering everything that happened. It ruled. I wonder if I’m close to what he intended.

There's a bitter irony that the one person who might know all of this for certain is the one person that we can no longer ask.

BIOSHOCK 2: THE FIRST - AND BEST - SAD DAD GAME

I think about .hack//SIGN fairly frequently.

It’s one of my favorite anime and in my opinion the unmatched highlight of the series that it all but kickstarted, and could from a certain perspective be viewed as a witting deconstruction of the isekai genre that has come to dominate the landscape of modern anime (and light novels, from which most of said anime are spawned). Protagonist Tsukasa is an unlikeable loser like most Isekai main characters, only him being a gloomy, awkward and extremely callous person actively drives people away rather than them remaining glued to his side just for being there. The real-world problems that lead him to spend much of his time playing an MMO to begin with manifest in on-screen battles with mental illness and post-traumatic stress, often resulting in him breaking down or panicking on-screen with nobody around to help him. While Tsukasa’s character is extremely powerful, rather than being admired or fawned over he’s viewed as a cheater and all but exiled by the community around the game at large - which is just fine, as Tsukasa’s only power fantasy is being able to hurt the people who harass him just like he’s been hurt before. Beyond that he’s content to sit in isolation and be alone, completely rejecting the usual isekai wish-fulfillment standards such as power, valor and greatness. Hell, his eventual release from the game isn’t even won in some grand battle or accomplished of his own accord: a hacker forces the game to crash in a largely pragmatic act that just happens to release Tsukasa as a happily accidental side effect.

However, the problem with reading .hack//SIGN as a willing deconstruction is that it aired in 2002: roughly a decade before the isekai boom began in modern anime, when modern-day staples like Sword Art Online had only just begun being published and many modern classics of the genre were little more than fledgling ideas in their creators’ minds.

About a decade after .hack//SIGN’s original run the Western gaming sphere started to undergo a shift in and of itself, largely born from the heavier emphasis on cinematic storytelling introduced in the last few years of the 2000s in the West: in a phenomenon that was at the time colloquialized as the dadification of gaming, many of the at-the-time golden children of the yearly release cycles prominently featured a middle-aged man as its protagonist, who is then thrust into an unwitting or unwilling role as a father figure to a child or young teen. The Last Of Us, God of War (2018), Telltale’s The Walking Dead, LISA: The Painful, Heavy Rain, and even the directly-relevant-to-this-conversation BioShock Infinite are some of the most famous examples of the (often-pejoratively nicknamed) sad dad game, a microgenre treasured by some and loathed by increasingly more as the years go on.

You can see, then, why I thought about .hack//SIGN so often while I was replaying BioShock 2. BioShock 2 appears to willingly interrogate and analyze the very foundation of the “sad dad game,” or rather it would if not for the fact that it was released in February of 2010 - which was before any of the other games I mentioned earlier. I’d go as far as to wager that BioShock 2 may very well be the first game of its kind.

At the most core level “sad dad games,” by and large, aren’t actually about parenting. The burden of caring for a child is more often than not just that, a burden for the protagonist to endure, overcome, and eventually accept. With this the focus is not on the child but on the ubiquitous manpain of the protagonist, rife with dead wives, dead children and the grizzled worldviews that often result from the trauma of the protagonists the games focus on. Players are guided down a linear tract of story beads where their failure to “parent well” more often results in the death of their child, the usually-stern manner in which they guide the child (usually little more than an NPC for a 15-hour escort mission) otherwise presented with little question beyond the occasional gray morality or hints at a more unfortunate reality beneath the surface of the parent-child relationship.

BioShock 2, meanwhile, fundamentally understands that parenting is not simply taking care of a helpless child and that best intentions a good parent does not make. Delta, the protagonist of BioShock 2, is similar to the archetypical “sad dad” in that he did not necessarily want his daughter Eleanor nor was he in control of the circumstances that led to the establishment of their bond. The point that Delta (and his story) proves is that regardless of one’s efforts to be a good parent - or lack thereof - we impact our children and mold who they are simply by existing, even if we erect barriers to hide our children from the horrifying humanity of their idols or make a conscious effort to sever that tie wherever possible. Delta is obligated to action by Eleanor’s pleas for his assistance, but his actions are otherwise independent of her influence… but, inversely, Eleanor is not unaffected by Delta’s choices and their own influence.

One more innovation of modern gaming - particularly in the roleplaying sector that had its own boom in the mid-to-late 2000s, of which both BioShock games can be considered a part - is the morality system, in which choices are purported to make a genuine impact on the world around them and be able to play any way they want. While fine enough in theory, the morality system has earned something of a reputation as a joke within the greater audiences of the games that employ them: typically there is precious little room for nuance or gray areas in the options available to the player and the subsequent characterization of its protagonist, with the two tracts of ethics usually presenting a hard swerve between “angelic paragon of virtue” and “second coming of every historical despot”. Worst of all, most of the time playing a morally good character often means abstaining entirely from a solid chunk of the game at hand’s mechanics (usually some of the more fun and inventive ones, particularly in games that seek to paint acts of violence as an indiscriminate and non-negotiable evil), thus meaning that the player cannot reconcile their desired playstyle with the type of character they wish to play. There is potential for these limitations to be meaningfully integrated and result in ludonarrative harmony, but such potential often goes unexplored or underdeveloped and in the end the game is saddled by excess that provides little more than excess baggage that would better be left by the wayside.

Consider me surprised, then, that BioShock 2 not only has one of the most robust and complex takes on a morality system in a modern game (if not the most robust and complex) but that it almost almost completely leaves the game unfettered by its presence: there are marginal mechanical benefits to certain moral choices, but those are equally matched by mechanical benefits on the opposing side of the moral divide. The choices that Delta makes thereby become displays of his character at the player’s whim more than pragmatic decisions made so that one can have fun in the way that they choose while also roleplaying Delta in a way that befits the narrative they choose to tell. Moreover, certain conventionally-evil actions do not exclude Delta from erring on the side of good, nor do occasional acts of altruism necessarily negate any other wrongdoing he might knowingly cause on his journey through Rapture.

Of course, BioShock 2’s morality system is not wholly excluded from the storytelling, nor does it deserve commendation off the basis of an apparent lack of investment in making Delta’s morals factor into anything more than the plot itself. Remember: Delta is a father, and parents inevitably and unavoidably mold their children in their image regardless of intent, desire or forethought.

Eleanor, in essence, is BioShock 2’s morality system: while Delta will be relatively unaffected by his own choices short of certain practical benefits (namely in the amount of supplies and resources available at his disposal, or more accurately which supplies and resources) Eleanor is watching his each and every move, learning from him, and drawing her own conclusions and lessons from the whole that is synthesized out of Delta’s actions, choices, and the throughlines (or lack thereof) therein. Delta is but one man, and while he is a mere drop in the veritable ocean of opposing forces, ideologies and ethics in Rapture there is nobody more important in the world to Eleanor than Delta. Much like other games of the period Delta’s choices fail to make a meaningful impact on the world at large or the specifics of his story, but then they don’t really need to. To the one and only person to whom he is absolutely everything, Delta’s path is the word of God and the example that must be followed under any and all circumstances.

Our children inherit most facets of our being not only without regard for if we intend to pass ourselves on, but whether or not they intend to be molded so intensely by us, even in our absence. Some grow up idolizing their parents and embodying the cliche of wanting to be just like Dad, while others end up haunted by their childhood experiences long after the fact in spite of putting every possible barrier between themselves and their predecessors. Regardless, all must eventually face the reality that their parents were people with complexities, idiosyncrasies, and contradictions much like their own, and that the inherent isolation of bearing a conscious mind means that they will eventually have to accept they may never have answers to the questions they have about their parents and the upbringing they gave them.

Eleanor is no different: the archetypal sad dad game ends with tentative understanding and unconditional acceptance between the father and child, but what lessons Delta leaves Eleanor with in the wake of his death are for her understanding and her understanding only. Though Delta does not speak and his choices are entirely at the whims of the player, he is given characterization and definition through Eleanor’s understanding of their time together and the conclusions she came to about things left unsaid and questions left unanswered, dependent not on a single variable but on the specific interplay of the many different variables at play as Eleanor looks upon Delta’s legacy in retrospect. She may consider Delta to be an unconditionally kind soul who believed in forgiveness and redemption for all who were willing to change, she may consider Delta to be a protector of the meek and innocent who brought righteous vengeance down upon the wicked, she may see Delta’s cutthroat survival tactics as a necessary evil in a cruel world, or she may take the brunt of Delta’s malevolence and seek to perpetuate the cycle of violence that he was unable to break or escape. She may even find herself confused and conflicted by the contradictory manner in which Delta lived, unable to find clarity or answers in his absence and left wondering for the rest of her days.

Most remarkable to me is the ending in which Delta exhibited sin and virtue alike in equal measure and is given a final choice at the game’s conclusion: to save himself by allowing Eleanor to harvest his essence and let him live through her, or to deny her the opportunity and let himself die a true, final death rather than let an individual such as himself carry on through the world. Should Delta choose the latter Eleanor will interpret his actions as an acknowledgement of his own role in perpetuating the cycle and willingly breaking it with his own death, choosing to give Eleanor a chance to begin anew and redeem herself by living in the way that he never could. The amount of nuance in the conclusions that Eleanor can come to depending on the life Delta lived is frankly unprecedented even today, and not only do I find other “sad dad” narratives even more unfulfilling in the wake of BioShock 2 but I also question why morality systems in games continue to only have two or three options by which a player’s ethics and morals might be defined or framed.

Regardless of whether he meets a final end atop the lighthouse or if his consciousness lives on as a part of Eleanor’s, Delta’s spirit continues to linger even in his death: in the best of outcomes Eleanor declares that Delta is her conscience, always whispering over her shoulder even in his absence, and in the worst of outcomes Eleanor resigns herself to the fact that Delta never wanted her but he defined her nonetheless… even if only in his apathy and the misanthropy he was willing to show the world around him, including his own daughter. We cannot escape the ways in which we were raised and the ways in which we were not raised, nor can we ever have full control over the ways in which we impact our own children. BioShock 2 understands that better than practically all of its contemporaries as perhaps the first and only “sad dad game” that is actually about being a parent.

Naturally, BioShock 2 is not content to simply ruminate on the nature of parenting with relation to the introspective elements of its writing: while it’s true that BioShock 2 is far more of a character-driven story than its predecessor, I think it’s disingenuous-at-best to write it off as inferior off the basis of less focus being put on its political writing… namely because I think the political writing in BioShock 2 not only builds upon the original game’s messaging but elevates it into being one part of a greater whole, recontextualizing the overarching narrative about the manner in which extremist ideologies dehumanize those who live under their standards, regardless of the direction in which the political ideals themselves swing.

With this in mind an elephant in the room must be addressed before proceeding any further: BioShock’s politics are often notoriously misguided in intent even if the result ends up transcending the vision of the writers at hand. BioShock is a satire of libertarianism written by a libertarian, and BioShock 2’s attempt at critiquing socialism is rooted in a desire to espouse an act of divine centrism: have we considered that both sides are bad?

As with the Persona series however, these misguided-at-best intentions couple with a specific form of illiteracy in the topics they cover to create largely-accidental but nonetheless-astute takeaways that reach far beyond the original intent. In the specific case of BioShock 2, Andrew Ryan’s objectivist ideals are contrasted against his diametric opposite in Sofia Lamb and her collectivist vision of a united Rapture: Ryan held deep-seated convictions that every man should live for himself and himself alone, every man to be thought of as little more than obstacles to be overturned on one’s own path to greatness or exploited for one’s own profit.

Considering that capitalism is in and of itself a cult developed to the glorification and surrender of all values to the pursuit of feeding the beast (masquerading as worship of one’s own id), one might find it perplexing that the far-left opposite of Ryan’s beliefs are framed as a cult. However, I believe that the parallel works in the context of demonstrating the commonality between these two otherwise-incompatible belief systems: systematic dehumanization and clinical adherence to one’s ideals over the practical effects on the people who live under these ideologies. Lamb maintains a belief that the value of the individual self should be all but exterminated, so that one may throw themselves away in their entirety to the perceived benefit of their community. In The Rapture Family individual people are denied personhood and significance as anything more than droplets in the great ocean, viewed as worthless and worthy of being snuffed out if they maintain any semblance of identity or individual desire beyond mindless submission.

With this in mind I believe that BioShock 2 in turn contextualizes the duology’s overarching message as one that stresses the importance of compassion and goodwill, regardless of the ideology one believes in or the practices by which they go about making it a reality. Be it in a libertarian hellscape or an oppressive authoritarian dystopia, the means by which one can remove themselves from the systems entirely is to not only care about your fellow man but care about yourself enough to break the chains that bind you and lead the people around you to do the same. This is not to say that BioShock has any delusions of pacifism or grand anti-violence messages (after all, it is still a series of games about shooting people and violent pushback against one’s destined fate), however one sentiment rings truer than anything else with the entirety of the duology in mind: while compassion alone will not break the cycle of violence nor dismantle the power structures that perpetuate them, compassion is the foundation upon which the new world will be built. If one should take up arms and raise hell upon the world around them, let it be in hopes that their successors will never have to do so themselves.

Thus Eleanor once again re-asserts herself as the centerpiece upon which BioShock 2 is built: she is not only Delta’s living legacy, but a representation of the generation that follows our own and carries forth our ideals, hopes, dreams, and inherits the world we leave for them. Lamb needn’t have erected the perfect utopia that she dreamed of by turning her daughter into a vessel for all of Rapture’s thoughts, dreams and memories - she could have just as easily done her part to lay the foundation of her utopia by connecting with her daughter and personally instilling her ideals of compassion and benevolence into her. Perhaps Lamb’s self-flagellating guilt over her own perceived flaws and selfishness caused her to sever any emotional ties to her daughter and use her as the sacrificial lamb (pun wholly intended) needed to bring about an unconditionally-unified society, but then that distance caused more damage than her daughter viewing her as the human being she was ever could.

It’s a bitterly, depressingly vivid portrayal of an all-too-common conundrum that many children face in their relationship with their parents: for one reason or another, parents will go to indescribable and unexplainable lengths to avoid connecting with their children and opening themselves up to the risk of doing it “wrong.” Again: our children inherit our traumas, flaws and unsightly quirks regardless of whether we intend for them to do so or not, and attempting to avoid that reality only causes more damage than the horrifying ordeal of being known ever possibly could. In the majority of the endings Eleanor comes to see Delta as the person he is, warts and all, and grows all the better for it: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all the endings in which Delta denies Eleanor his love and compassion are the ones where she is content to perpetuate the cycle and take Rapture’s industrialized violence global, both of her parents having caused more damage in their absence than they could have possibly imagined they would have with their presence.

Now, we all know that BioShock 2 appears to have been purpose-built to analyze and pick apart a microgenre that it preceded in almost its entirety and still remains the best sad dad game in spite of likely being the very first one, and we know about the uniquely complex manner in which the player’s choices intersect with the narrative and its messages on parenthood and compassion… but how does it play? Not in terms of decision-making or ludonarrative, but the whole “shooting people” thing you do for the vast majority of the game’s ~25-hour runtime.

In a word? It’s perfect.

I disagree with the common assessment that BioShock 2 has “better gameplay but a worse story” than the original in its entirety, but honestly BioShock 1’s writing is pretty one-note and paper-thin outside of its political satire to begin with. The strength of the writing in BioShock 2 combined with the extent to which it perfected BioShock 1’s gameplay loop and ironed out every single kink is such a step up in every single direction that I’m surprised BioShock 2 isn’t the one often-lauded as one of the all-time greatest games and subject to constant scrutiny and scholarly analysis.

When I replayed BioShock I found the ideas at play charming, but a bit unrefined and one-note by current-day standards: for as many tools as you have at your disposal you’re still basically running around narrow corridors and wide-open arenas shooting at people. When playing 2, it’s amazing what making a few changes and trimming a bit of the fat can do: being able to wield a weapon and a Plasmid at the same time does wonders for finding combinations that synergize and changing strategies on the fly, while mechanics like the hacking system being simultaneously streamlined via a new minigame and expanded by means of the hack gun, the “bonus hack” mechanic and additions to the hacked-turret system are a much-needed second wind to systems that felt like cumbersome but necessary evils in the original game. The selection of weapons is well-rounded with each-one feeling fantastic and having a multitude of distinct situational strengths, as well as reinforcing one of the ultimate draws of BioShock 2’s combat: you feel like a Big Daddy, with weapons like the drill (and especially the drill dash technique) and minigun being a perfect measure of the distance between Delta and Jack (the protagonist of BioShock 1): Jack swung a wrench and wielded a tommy gun, whereas Delta carries the same drill used against the player in the previous game and holds a full-sized minigun with one hand.

All of these traits are given ample opportunity to shine with the game’s level designs, which feel far more tight-knit, detailed and full of chances to explore than the previous games… and with good reason, too: rather than constantly being on the offense as in the original BioShock, the Little Sister adoption system (and the recurring miniboss of the Big Sister that comes along with it) offers a welcome change in pace a few times per level where the tables turn and Delta is put on the defense, with some of the underutilized defensive elements of the original game (such as the Cyclone Trap plasmid, or the electric trap bolts used by the crossbow and harpoon gun). An element of strategy is introduced as the player is made to case their surroundings and lay traps, erect defensive measures such as turrets and tripwires, and ensure that all their bases are covered with regards to potential exits and entrances for the enemy mob to enter… not to mention the frantic scramble to find an optimal defensive position once the Big Sister’s shrieks announce her imminent presence. It’s another example of the aforementioned feeling of being a Big Daddy: not only is Delta an impossibly-strong manmade monstrosity, he is first and foremost a protector. Hell hath no fury like a large man with a large drill when his daughter cries for help.

In other words, it’s as remarkable of an achievement in terms of mechanics as it is narrative and ludonarrative. I still can’t comprehend why this is viewed as the ugly duckling of the trilogy when I view it to be the only truly great game out of the bunch, much less one of the greatest games I’ve ever played.

BioShock 2 makes a few missteps on the way there - some of the moral choices are a tad underdeveloped and over-reliant on verbal exposition rather than the environmental storytelling and non-linear piecing-together of the pieces that the Shock metaseries has always excelled at, and some might not be able to reconcile the writers’ political intents with what they inadvertently say (as well as BioShock 2 following the “sad dad trend” of condemning mother figures while focusing father figures) - but it never strays from its own path, nor is the journey or the destination any less exhilarating, thought-provoking, or remarkable of a work of art nor any less groundbreaking an achievement some thirteen years on. While it had been my favorite out of the entire series since its release, I was only 11-12 years old during my first playthrough and wasn’t expecting nor prepared to find so much depth and finesse in the manner in which it conveys its ideas upon a replay.

In sum: BioShock 2 is one of the greatest games ever made, very definitely the best game to come out of the era of the first-person shooter’s dominance in the seventh console generation, the best -shock game, and the best - and the first - sad dad game. It isn’t every day that you see one of the first (or indeed the first) example of a burgeoning genre outmatch all of its successors… and it was all done without the influence of Ken Levine too, thus proving once and for all that he’s a hack who has never and will never know what the fuck he’s talking about.