Tender Frog House, a game which is described by its creator as "a forum post of a game", is cynical. It's not that it's technically wrong about many of its comments on wholesome games. In fact, its response to wholesome games which view themselves as a unique political statement are incisive in their own way. These aren't wholly original ideas, but they are conveyed with a precision and a bite that calls attention. And they have truth to them. Certainly, being cozy is not a radical act. Those who make this claim are fooling themselves. But Tender Frog House comes off as taking a very broad swing against not just a particular subset of wholesome game creators, but about twee art, and eventually the purpose art itself. And this is where the incisive critique turns into a cynical rat's nest.

Tender Frog House pre-empts my response by refuting the notion that this perspective is cynical, that this is simply a knee-jerk response that defends a conservative mindset. Well, guess what? It is cynical. But it's not cynical for the sake of its perspectives on wholesome games, but rather, its perspective on their ethos. Tender Frog House more or less explicitly states that those who create so-called "wholesome games" are in fact engaging in what amounts to a deeply conservative pastiche which only serves to perpetuate a fascist capitalist society. Further, those who find joy or pleasure in this art or view it as a means of expressing themselves are in fact experiencing a false consciousness which only furthers that fascist capitalist society.

This is an exemplar of cynicism: calling people phony. I refuse this. I refuse to adopt a worldview where people who find and make art that makes them happy is fascist. Tender Frog House seems to find no room for this; either your art is revolutionary praxis, or its reactionary propaganda. Could it simply not be that people make games about cute frogs because it makes them happy? Is that not enough? Why must art only serve the purpose of political action? Art serves many purposes, and just because it performs either an ineffective or maybe even ever-so-slight counteraction does not mean it is not ultimately worthy of being enjoyed. Art acts on us in innumerable ways, in the mind and the body. Not all of these experiences are worth politicizing. That which is anodyne may not cure anything, but that doesn't mean it won't pair well with some wine. As I stated, I think the notion that coziness, sincerity, and self-care are in-and-of-themselves radical is false. But that doesn't mean they aren't worth having.

Moreover, I haven't found supposedly more revolutionary "serious games" to be effective on that front, either. Tender Frog House certainly doesn't inspire me, either as an artist or as a political actor. Maybe I am projecting, but it seems it instructs me to adopt a realpolitik of aesthetics, where I may only offer affordances to or create that which is unequivocally revolutionary. Well, personally? I have found little of that art enjoyable. I have played the Molle Industria games, and others. These games do not invite any transformative thought, and they are incredibly didactic (and frankly, not particularly persuasive). I don't think art is a particularly effective form of praxis, whether it's cozy or cynical. I'm not convinced any of these serious games bring us any closer to a better society than a cute game about frogs.

Let's stop pretending art is a uniquely precious vector for political action. I doubt that line of thinking leads anywhere. But who knows. There is a reason Adorno hated jazz. I think time has proven him wrong. We'll just have to wait for time to pass to see about Tender Frog House.

Outer wilds es un rompecabezas sin piezas que además no dice serlo. A lo mejor soy gilipollas, pero yo no me di cuenta de que todo el juego había sido un único y gran puzle hasta llegar al final, algo me hizo clic en el cerebro y me sentí en pañales.
El único motivo que hay para explorar es saciar tu curiosidad, y lo más importante que ofrece el juego es la exploración, historia y aventura van tan juntas en este juego que son un solo elemento, la exploración necesita de la historia y viceversa.
No es un juego que necesite nada más, el universo es tan interesante que se juega solo, puedes amputarte brazos y piernas y el protagonista sigue avanzando por el universo movido por la curiosidad. Las primeras veces que visité los planetas me quedé asustao, acojonao, pero cómo se le ha ocurrido a alguien hacer estas cosas, de verdad.
Os recomiendo jugarlo a dos pantallas, una con el juego y otra con un excel donde tengáis listados todos los santos de la iglesia católica para ir cagándoos en sus muertos uno a uno, he muerto de las formas más torpes del mundo, he hablado con un amigo que se pasó el juego y he descubierto por lo menos tres formas de morir que él no sabía, pero lo que me he reído jugando no está pagado.
Me siento muy feliz cada vez que acabo un juego de este tipo, que clava un aspecto del diseño, que empuja el videojuego un poquito más allá, que engancha a los grandes estudios del cuello y les dice: "no váis a motivar a un jugador a explorar un mundo virtual de esta forma en vuestra puta vida" y que aún encima tiene un final esperanzador que puede hacerte mella e incluso ver la muerte con otros ojos.

Outer wilds ha llegado en un momento raro, estando desempleado, con mucho tiempo libre.
Me ha ayudado a recuperar un hobby que un trabajo que no me gustaba estaba eliminando de mi vida, y me ha ayudado a recuperarlo de la mejor forma posible, haciéndome sentir un niño pequeño.
La sensación de novedad, curiosidad y descubrimiento al jugar outer wilds hace que sea como jugar a videojuegos por primera vez en tu vida, es la aventura en estado puro.

qué chikitas se ponen las estrellas antes de estallar no? i mean how cute is that? un besazo a todas las supernovas del mundo 😘

at several points in the duration of the new colossus, i have to admit i enjoyed it more than the new order. that's not a reflection of the quality of the new colossus - everything is worse here - but it's a reflection of the fact that i can play this kind of game on PC now. no doubt in my mind if i had played this on console i would have thoroughly hated it. mastery of doom '16 and even eternal on console is achievable, because despite being pc games at their core the tenets of their mechanics (forward momentum at all costs, easily defined hurtboxes and hitboxes, hit and run strategy, weapon chaining, enemy prioritization) are within the realm of gamepad execution. ultraviolence, demanding though it is on a pad, remains an exhilarating affair. wolfenstein, with its emphasis on overwhelming the player, is far too reactive to have struck such a balance. your reliance on headshots and general precision is too great, your movement too improvisational and prone to jerking around, your fight against enemies who can rip you apart is breathless and unabated, all while no resources exist to readily replenish you. these games are simply more at home in this environment. so i did end up having fun, with the difficulty tuned up to my liking, at times greatly so, but there's a paucity of virtues here actively enabling that enjoyment. everything here feels like a first draft, so there's not actually a lot of refinement to the formula, but rather a feeling that things have been pared down, particularly with regards to stealth - not only are your approaches generally more restrictive due to less intricate level design, but your objectives are placed too 'conveniently' (ie the commander, who may call in reinforcements if alerted, is almost always just before the next segment of the level) for their consequences to matter. this also ends up greatly frustrating in the case of the titles optional ubercommandos, equipped wIth kampfpistoles that can easily knock you down and slug you while you're getting up, forcing you to restart several of those segments from the point of origin.

some of the loudest umbrage concerns the issues people have levied with the titles level design, actually. and its true that exploring this cluttered, often inadvertently abstruse geometry often yields little purpose or reward, and sparks no imagination. there's a moment halfway through when you gain access to one of three movement options, for instance, and as soon as you think levels will open up as a result, what ends up happening is the next barrier to progress will simply have three methods of progression all literally right next to each other (in this case a gate, a vent, and a window) to accommodate you and make sure you didn't have to look too hard. even beyond several frustrating incidents like this, in general i think this games problem has less to do with its errant level design and far more to do with its lack of meaningful escalation. the worst offender of this would have to be the final level reusing one of the opening levels environments to do much of the same, culminating in a shrewd arena fight that's only a little bit more taxing than its predecessors, and before you know it the games abruptly over in ten minutes. but there are several instances of this kind of deflation, partially a result of the games lack of evolution and scale. a dream sequence played out for subversion hardly feels like a climax because anyone paying attention can recognize it's a dream; a trip to venus that invokes the aesthetics of doom hardly feels as playful, missing the spark of adventure often found in the new order; a title depicting revolution spends so little time with any perspective that isn't BJ's.

that last point is crucial, because the new colossus is endlessly hokey. any intriguing subtext raised in the first half is promptly dropped in the second, where the game quickly becomes more embarrassing by the stage (either be a machismo-laden power fantasy or don't, stop interrogating this thread half-heartedly especially if you're going to contradict all of your imagery). configuring its assault on nazi ideology through a lukewarm 'the old shall perish at the hands of the progressive young' lens or, worse yet, a game about abusive parenting, ends up really cartoonishly flattening a great deal of the games narrative threads and stakes. BJ, the only mover and shaker in the story, is the only perspective afforded any material representation, so despite being a story about revolution enlisting all walks of life one never gets the sense they're truly liberating anyone, changing anyone's ways of lives, or making any sort of impact. by the time the game resolves what little conflict against its antagonist it had, and it closes on a truly awful cover of a song i won't be spoiling, it becomes apparent it couldn't have ended any other way.

don't be surprised if this eventually turns to 1/5, is all im saying (it did, i can't stand this kind of superficial treatise that people regard highly that nevertheless remains every bit as regressive and annoying as other works before it). discussing whether or not a game has 'aged' mechanically often gives me pause, in part for me because it's difficult to definitively say that they can, but wolfenstein II is an instance of an all-too common type of game: one that has aged narratively. and it's only going to get worse and worse from here on out

On September 11th, 2001, the World Trade Center in New York City was destroyed, the aftermath of which would change American culture in ways we can still pinpoint decades after the fact. The greater minutia of the War on Terror or the Bush Administration is not something I'll be delving into here, but what's important here is that specific period of time, where the tragedy was still warm on American minds and the War on Terror was just beginning, because it's that specific cultural maelstrom that gives birth to something like Postal 2.

The reason 9/11 is so important to Postal 2 is due to the fact that the transgressive nature of the game lies in its nihilistic social and political commentary about America: From offensive Muslim stereotypes modeled after Bin-Laden who violently ransack churches and yell about Allah, to a 1:1 recreation of the botched Waco Siege operation by the ATF, to a whole in-game task about getting signatures for a petition dedicated to making whiny congressmen play video games, Postal 2 is a game that could have only been made in the transitional post-9/11 period between 1997 and 2003. Yet, despite Postal 2's attempts to be an apolitical parody piece that spares no demographic or political party, there are some aspects to the parody that belie a reflection of post-9/11 American society. The Postal Dude, despite being a violent lunatic who has no qualms about violence, is a model American: He votes on Voting Day, he loves the Second Amendment, and he makes time to go to Church. The fact that the Muslim stereotypes are all part of a terrorist organization, yet reside in the heart of small-town Americana, running the grocery store and hosting their base of operations right in The Postal Dude's backyard, reflect the Islamophobia that was rampant in American culture at the time due to the 9/11 Attacks, the paranoid ignorance that led to wide-spread discrimination against Muslim-Americans. Compound this with critiques of the U.S. Government, from rampant police brutality, to a recreation of the infamous Waco Siege, to the bombing of a Muslim terrorist camp in Apocalypse Weekend by a gung-ho, hyper-violent military force in a way that reflects the worst of the War in Iraq, the post-9/11 nature of the game is prominent in it's bloodstream. It's a perfect time capsule of the era, sensibilities and all.

Following in it's predecessor's footsteps, Postal 2 aims to be transgressive, in a much more aggressive sense than the original Postal, in a way that feels like a direct, personal response to the controversy courted by Postal upon its release. One of the first missions The Postal Dude embarks on is picking up his paycheck from an in-game replica of the Running With Scissors studio, where he works and interacts with real-life staff members in-game, before the studio is besieged by moral guardians protesting against violent video games, who hypocritically, launch a violent assault the studio and its staff. The Running With Scissors office in-game is crafted with love, with photos of staff on the wall, real-world photos of documents, meticulously crafted office spaces, and a whole faction of RWS NPCs that will always support The Postal Dude and whom you are allowed to kill with zero consequence. All of this paints a meta-context for the game going forth: A direct response to RWS' critics and cultural legacy, at a time where Joe Lieberman was still in the headlines and Mortal Kombat was being presented in court hearings on violent content in video games. Where Postal was a statement, Postal 2 is a response.

The most interesting part of Postal 2 as a response piece to the criticism of Postal is the fact that it's entirely possible to complete the game without a single kill. While the original Postal was a mass-shooting simulator that required you to kill in a commentary on the casualness with which we treat violence as entertainment, Postal 2 amped up it's transgression to the surface-level with the political commentary on America, but reworked the core gameplay loop in order to put the impetus for violence on the player. While there are systems in place for all manner of violence and crass actions from a myriad of murder implements to a functioning arson and urination mechanic, there are also mechanics for the mundane: waiting in line, paying for your goals, getting arrested peacefully and non-lethal takedown methods for every enemy you encounter. The meta nature of the game is pushed further than the interaction between Postal Dude and his creators at Running With Scissors, with a complete lack of a 4th wall as the Postal Dude comments on and interacts with the player in a mostly jeering way. The game itself taunts you with tedium and annoyance in an attempt to make you go postal, holding a finger an inch from your cheek while claiming to not touch you. The violence is shifted from a requirement to complete the game to an optional way of approaching a situation, and the casualness with which the average gamer will resort to violence ties into the main underlying theme of the series: the prevalence of violence in the media.

In our entertainment, violence is the most common language with which we communicate. Even in something as innocent as Mario, you still engage in violence to reach your goals, stomping on enemies and bosses, even if the violence is abstracted enough to not feel weird over it. This is not a condemnation of violence in our media, but simply an observation. Postal was so controversial because of the fact it stripped away the layer of dissonance we create by contextualizing the violence in real-world terms: a lone gunman engaging in meaningless violence to fulfill his goals. Postal 2's commentary on violence is much less upfront than the original Postal's, but it's still interesting in the detached way in which it lets the player engage in it. If you kill or if you don't, Postal 2 passes no judgement on your actions. It knows you'll resort to violence just because it's what you're conditioned to do as someone who plays video games, but the only thing goading you into engaging in said violence is the tedium in place in our own reality. It's a horrifically offensive, ultra-violent jankfest. It's cathartic form of virtual rebellion against the mundanity of everyday life.

"POSTAL 2 is only as violent as you are."

Testing bilingual reviews on here.

---------- Português ----------

Me decepciona mais no que poderia ter sido do que me impressiona pelos seus méritos - principalmente, sua identidade visual fantástica. Linear assim como uma máquina de Rube Goldberg que tanto o inspira; só tendo graça na primeira vez que o maquinário se desenrola - rebobinagens travam as engrenagens e te forçam a seguir o caminho restrito que tanto comprime o jogo. Adoraria ver as mesmas mecânicas sendo aplicadas em um jogo cuja filosofia de design fosse mais aberta. Quanto ao mistério, não acho que me importou muito em momento algum, porém escalou bem a tensão do jogo nas fases finais. Missile carrega o elenco.

---------- English ----------

It disappointed me in what it could have been more than it impressed me by its merits - mainly, its amazing visual identity. Linear as a Rube Goldberg machine which inspires it so; it only amazes in its first run - rewinds slow down the gears and force you to follow a strangling, rigid path. I’d love to see these same mechanics (time rewind; travelling through machine-like mazes) being applied in a game with a more open-ended design philosophy. As for the mystery: it didn’t really stick to me at any point, even though it scaled the pacing and the tension well enough at the final chapters. Missile hard carries the cast here.

Just... feeling really underwhelmed. Maneuvering yourself via horrible controls through scenarios that fail to feel alive. Any hint of authenticity drops when you're given arbitrary objectives that mean nothing (yet you get money for some reason). Its narrative clashes with its gameplay. The characters the game frames as "your friends" serve no purpose but to pose for your photos. You can bing bing wahoo your way to the UN's military tent and come out unscathed, despite there being a message about the use of oppressive force. The game acknowledges there is no reason to judge you on your pictures, since beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Then why is there money to be gained from them? Why give you these nonsensical objectives? Why gatekeep equipment behind them?
"But it's a photography game!" You might say. But it stopped being that the moment the game placed me in the context of a dying world. It wasn't a game about filling an objective list anymore. When I wanted to understand the world, all I got was surface level commentary that's been part of the aesthetic for years. Despite my investment to see Umurangi Generation rise above the path that it started to tread, it was determined to be the same as it was from the beginning, through and through.

And yet, I find myself with conflicting feelings. Are the same things that I complain about part of the message? The price tag attached to every photo is an indication that capitalism will makes us work our asses off even when the world is about to meet its demise. The system continues to profit of off disaster, even if that disaster will mean death for the world.
Hopelessness is felt all throughout every other civilian you come across, with the end of the world being met with tiresome eyes. What are we even supposed to do...?
This perspective only troubles me. Does Umurangi Generation really hold such a cynical view of our future? What can we do to stray from it, if we even can...? I'm not sure what to make of it.

I cannot read the future, and this game can't either. "The last generation who has to watch the world die". I hope we do not meet the same fate.

the ruinous open world (that removes the possibility for the deftly choreographed scripted chase sequences that were so engrossing in the original), more realistic scenery/lighting design (that dulled The City of Glass's overexposed starkness) and bland CW-show storytelling that's "more cinematic" (but also way more intrusive than the OG's hilaribad and brief disney channel cutscenes) perfectly illustrate why developers should never listen to fan demands and should only ever listen to ME!!!!!!!! why would you EVER put a skill tree in something like this?!?!?!?!

at least the Solar Fields ambient ost is still ace

As you can see, this one is pretty much a hit or miss, you either love it and it changed your life, or you hate it.
My main concern is the extreme content: the unnecessary explicit sexual violence and the other gross hentai bullshit. Narratives don't need to show this kind of content to make a point about bullying, and those scenes exist solely to appeal to fucked up people, this is something that you can't ignore.
The story starts good but it gets bad on the second half, where they introduce a character and she becomes the main focus of the story (also, everything about her and her relationship with the protagonist of those chapters is gross and fucked up, and it's the kind of stuff this medium needs to leave behind to improve).
The visuals are okay, the scenery CGs look good but the sprites can look wrong sometimes.
The soundtrack is excellent, I used to listen to it everyday after finishing it and I still do from time to time.
People often have the misconception that this is some incomprehensible philosophical thing but it actually is pretty easy to understand, but the things could turn you away from reading it lie on the extreme content.
Despite everything, I still like this VN, but I can't recommend it.
P.D. Zakuro is an angel and deserves the kimika ending

First replay since release! Quite glad I could shake the bugs out of my distant memories of this game being somewhere near perfect. The ways in which it's weird and frictional definitely give it some character, though. Mirror's Edge's campaign kicks off with relatively simple flow-state platforming that eases you into the control scheme with clearly signposted goals that offer a degree of player freedom which made the journey from A-to-B feel like my own. 'Runner Vision' is still a neat little gimmick as an outright replacement for waypoints and such, acting as both a diegetic and stylised way to subtly suggest to the player little tricks that they could be doing to nudge them in the right direction. Surprised to learn that the game really shines whenever a train is nearby; intense little segments that feel so fast n lethal they shredded years off my life.

It doesn't take particularly long for the game's priorities to shift to something more akin to the jumping puzzles in like, Half Life 1 or something? Often throwing you into very dense obstacle courses or industrial interiors that demand a surprisingly great deal of spatial reasoning. With Runner Vision dialling down the closer to the finale the game gets, I found myself having to stop and survey the area for anything resembling surfaces I've come to know are scalable. On one hand, it's alarmingly rare for a Triple-A title to demand such a thing from a player - but It becomes fairly clear at some point that the game has more or less forgotten the thrill of scaling rooftops and communal areas in an unbroken sprint. A handful of areas feel downright lazy however, I don't demand that a game's world caters itself to the player's moveset, but it becomes fairly apparent that Faith loses her place at points - namely the ship and carpark shootouts which are neither visually interesting or engaging to navigate. Oftentimes you're thrown into a dense warehouse area filled with props and mezzanines that it becomes a game of finding the red door of progression.

All well and good, I don't really mind all of those temporary roadblocks much. I've even had quite a bit of fun looking up speedrun tech and going back through chapters just to absolutely crush them. The kickglitch makes you feel like you're in the fuckin Matrix or something. One of my biggest gripes is honestly that the game is absolutely gorgeo, but it really doesn't want you to appreciate it. Stand still and admire the view, the incredible lighting and texture work that wouldn't look out of place in the current-gen game roster, and a squad of armed feds will eventually come and pepper you down. You can't just put Nvidia PhysX Technology into your game and not let me fuck around with the curtains.

Audiovisual hyperbombast coated in that sweet, sweet Sega Dreamcast slime, a synesthesia-induced trip through techno-dreamland sculpted in wireframe and cast in the chromatic sheen of neofuture web-scapes. Following the steps of an allegorical hackerman, you annihilate endless waves of antivirus battalions as you fast track your way to each area’s AI boss battle. Along the way, beats mix with the game's pseudo-experimental approach to sound design, to form a rich sound system of eclectic cadences tightly wired in orchestra hits and synth crashes.

Themed broadly on icons of civilization and humanities broader evolution, each level leading up to Area 5 is a tease at what the game represents, a build to the game’s grander view of humanity and the inevitable future of human life. Speaking less pretentiously: You are here for Area 5, backed by the flawless masterpiece “Fear”. A crescendo on the themes the game is throwing down, the level spins a tale on the birth of human life, rising from the oceans as millions of species ebb and flow with the tide of time, culminating with the final step of live, another evolution to the afterlife, the void, the Other.

Weightlessness and audiophilia are the key components of Rez, in design and in execution. Flawlessly, the game encapsulates this ephemeral bliss I can only associate with Detroit Techno and 90s Hollywood Hacker pop culture, a flashpoint reflecting on a prior decade’s genre evolution, razed to the ground and resurrected as a new, hi-tech, form. A crisp single-hour runtime packs in a feeling that can only be associated with the era it comes from, inseparable from the past while looking to the future in cautious optimism.

Speaking as simple as possible: Rez rips. Play Rez. It’s on so many things. Go for it. Mess around with Area X too; such a fun addition.

not a poorly crafted experience in any sense and i'm sure theres a lot here i lacked the generosity to find but i felt like i could completely visualize the creators' concept and reference stack with such exact clarity that it became distracting:

femininely morose akihiko yoshida and ayami kojima art/
lilting twinklechoral keichi okabe-wave ost/
vanillaware storybook Spine animations/
folklore character collection combat/
soulstroidvania wielding its genre structure of labyrinthine sparseness to spin a ludically obvious yarn about seeking ~ absolution amidst decay ~

-- and I had to uninstall because the returns are so diminished for me at this point and it was genuinely making me sad that such a clear and passionate labor of love could feel so utterly taxonomizable and consumed by its own clockably interrelated references

at this point idk its just kind of upsetting to play something with such a rigorous and dogmatic commitment to its reference material that doesnt seem to extend very far beyond the world of games themselves, even if said games are all things i find personally beautiful and worth emulating. felt like a very workmanlike and glossy medley of touchstones from works that clearly moved the creators--but executed in a sort of surface way that belies their inability to cogently, personally express how said works resonated beyond mere facsimile. no judgies girl i relate and its why i havent reliably maintained any true semblance of a dedicated art practice for years!!!

tldr; i saw myself in this and i didnt like it

combat queen is a disorderly stew of the greatest forms of art known to man:
- on-rails shooter
- live action fmvs
- tank control survival horror
- digital cinematography
- cute girls with energy rifles slaying hordes of insects

taitos patchwork approach to design makes sense - this is clearly a low budget affair and most of its features are indicative of that. a bit of this and that for a scuzzy exploitation medley. hard to dislike, aside from overly long unskippable cutscenes.

core to the experience is a dichotomy between health and ammunition. at the pause menu you can siphon away health to store ammunition, or vice-versa, which is the kind of player-centered decision that can help in a pinch. naturally this limitation of resources has implications for the rest of its level design - on-rails levels arent based around enemy prioritization and a quick trigger-finger but instead more closely resemble cardboard cutout shooting galleries. not every bug will attack you and most arent visually distinct in type or movement pattern, so the game revolves around scrupulously racking up the score while aiming for a high enough quota of slain bugs to replenish health and ammunition by the end of the stage, which is rendered somewhat difficult by bug hitboxes. this mechanic also means you can save into an unwinnable position - there's one bottleneck stage in particular that reflects an Absence of Design and that you'll most likely want to trek into fully stocked-up if youre aiming for the 1cc. likewise, the tank control stages are simple pacebreakers with occasionally fun gimmicks. the expectation isn't to be an adroit dodger ala resident evil, but instead to calmly and efficiently carve your way through as many overgrown fauna as you can.

this certainly can make the experience one-note in execution and its very much capable of being reduced to nothing but a mere trinket or novelty but i'll be damned if it isnt replete with an abundance of charm. this is the kind of frantic, unpredictable energy modern indie devs should be aiming for, not some marketing guru endorsed wholesome sludge. i wanna ride with my gals in a pink jeep fending off all manners of insects in metropolitan/rural japan. more lurid and raunchy less catering to twitter/IMDB users ala Going Under (2020) Developed By Aggro Crab and Published by Team17 or Twelve Minutes (2021) Developed By Luis António and Published by Annapurna Interactive

i keep thinking about strangereal. strangereal is a terrific name for the world of ace combat. it aptly denotes the franchise’s mechanics, functions as a wry descriptor for the series’ daredevil aesthetic, and evokes a fantastical image. when it’s working effectively, the realism of strangereal is achieved by means of a kind of unconscious shorthand.

speaking anecdotally, a surprisingly significant number of people look at an ace combat title – the box art, the community, brief snippets of gameplay – and uncharitably make the assumption that it’s plane call of duty. given project aces’ reverence for realistic fighter jets, high altitudes contrails, and dogfighting dusk to dawn, this isn’t necessarily an unfair assumption to make. it’s sometimes uncommon for media to be so attentive to verisimilitude in the little details while simultaneously dabbling in the kind of magical realism that ace combat does. ace combat has top gun romanticism in its veins; it has more in common with afterburner than it does with microsoft flight sim. its primordial essence might as well have been scooped from galaga. but make no mistake, ace combat will imbue its systems with all the affectations of reality. you’ll learn a wealth of complex maneuvers to navigate three dimensional space, all the while stalling accidentally, evading the onslaught of enemy missiles from your periphery, and avoiding crashing into complex architectural spaces. the open air becomes your arena, cities and their edifices your escape shafts, ravines your trenches. it’s tempting – and very funny – to say this is a series about locking on to green squares and waiting for them to ding red, but the core gameplay loop finds its sense of pure excitement in all the minutiae, the calculations (yaw, roll, pitch, speed, missile trajectory) you have to make in order to synchronize with your jet and down a target. the moment you start becoming more comfortable using your regular outfitted machinegun in aerial engagements is the moment you ascend. it all comes down to your nerves. immelman turns, chandelles, cuban eights – cramped tunnel runs. you might call the experience holistically ‘strangereal’. but the most important thing is, of course, that this is a very highly attuned, enthralling natural drama that occurs in all the games – that of plane maneuverability.

ace combat’s strangereal setting is designed as simulacra over facsimile – where realities contend with abstraction. our history and theirs sometimes align, but only to invite comparison and perspective. the bleakness of electrosphere’s setting of strangereal seems callously exaggerated in its lack of regard for bodily autonomy, free will, and self-actualization, but its developers were only drawing upon influences readily understood unconsciously, enlisting production ig’s aid in setting the tone by way of formal shorthand. electrosphere, in depicting a world impoverished and emancipated by the whims of megacorporate warfare, grapples with the tenets of a large body of cyberpunk work depicting profound trepidation over technological revolution, with the venality and frank hostility of nations beset by late-stage capitalism, and draws upon a wealth of easily comprehensible mixed media – the advertising wars waged by microsoft and apple come to mind as a heady influence. this is deliberately reflected in electrospheres plane design. one dominant corporation, neucom, is sleek, futurist, impossibly glossy and curved; general resources, reflecting a down-to-brass-tacks utilitarian brand, serves as their stylistic inverse. this, too, is shorthand. it furthers the realism of strangereal while also exploring new ideas.

or take the strangereal of shattered skies for a comparatively more grounded approach. with terrain pockmark ridden at best (and irreversibly altered for the worst in many other instances) by a deluge of asteroid fragments following a global crisis, shattered skies immediately establishes political instability and humanity in crisis as the norm, which informs its setting and its depiction of warfare. this is a world picking up the straggling pieces after a semi-successful defense against a cataclysm of untold proportion, with these actions still inevitably leading to widespread devastation and the collapse of infrastructure. this is first introduced with the first lines spoken in ace combat 04:
“I was just a child when the stars fell from the skies. But I remember how they built a cannon to destroy them. And in turn how that cannon brought war upon us.”
the war in question is shattered skies’ continental war, which was triggered by loss of infrastructure, tensions with displaced refugees, and trade quotas. in brief summation, it involves the invasion of a nation with a railgun capable of destroying the ulysses asteroid, and repurposing it as an anti-aircraft weapon, and the fight to take it back. ace combat takes the struggles of reality – climate and extinction anxiety, humanitarian crises, warfare itself – and alters them through the lens of strangereal to convey its action. that, alongside the gameplay, is also a big appeal of the franchise.

all of these elements, depictions, and sensibilities coalesce to create a series that is continually compelling even at its messiest. shattered skies is the predecessor to the unsung war, and the franchise’s debut on the PS2. with that uncertain introduction, especially following the commercially unsuccessful yet wildly ambitious electrosphere, came a very solid, if unambitious title with a wide range of problems. the flow of its military campaigns made sense, its world was compelling and understated, its narrative quiet and melancholic yet taut, but it was sorely lacking in visual identity and mission variety. it returned to the traditional ace combat 2 military campaign structure of working towards an explicit goal through various missions, each sensibly placed one after the other. and the narrative emerging opposite this is one following the enemy aces who have no choice but to engage with you by the end, thus lending the proceeding battles weight through dramatic irony. it’s an unsettling moment when you kill one of yellow squadrons pilots for the first time and radio silence fills the airwaves, and it’s part of ace combat continuing in the footsteps of electrosphere: the necessary interrogation, however minor or subtle, of an arcade flight sim that feels great but derives influence from realism. this is something shattered skies nails (although electrosphere does it better) and to me it’s the crux of the series identity – it’s strangereal. it’s the feeling that this world could have been our own, but everything is affected by a layer of digital remove.

ace combat 5 finds this characteristic off-kilter reality in abeyance. the unsung war tips tips the formerly tightly wound balance (strange/real) far more towards the tonally ‘strange’, the magical realism. this isn’t the biggest problem ace combat 5 has, but it is absolutely the lynchpin of all my criticism because the approach undertaken by project aces in this game informs all the issues i have with it.

these changes, in my opinion, were seemingly made to ameliorate the problems people had with shattered skies. ace combat 04 is a dry but very candid and forthright title with a simple, but well-executed narrative. ace combat 5 has more personality from the get go and packs a bit more production value. the environments don’t look quite as dreary, the planes move a bit more responsively, and the cutscenes are 3D CG this time. on top of that there’s an actual cast of characters this time around and missions are usually set up with intrigue, so there’s a sense that something is happening to you rather than you being a lone agent in an ongoing overarching struggle. one mission starts from first person perspective as you remain in the cockpit, watching the bombs drop in your vicinity, before rushing to takeoff and defend the skies.

but this increased narrative focus carries with it several unique problems. i want to start with the first moment this became clear to me, because ace combat 5 opens decently enough that you might not notice the cracks in its seams, and with a charitable focus on the game one might not be so inclined to interrogate any potential mishaps or wrongdoings. seven missions into the game you’re pulled into a situation where you and your squad must lead a counter-assault against a submarine carrier; you had previously survived your last encounter with the submarine by the skin of your teeth. the submarines anti-aircraft weaponry consists of burst missiles which annihilate anything under an altitude of 5000 feet when it fires. you know this, your wingmen know this, the mission briefing specifies this – it won’t catch you off guard like it did the last time. on top of this you have now retrofitted a satellite with an orbital laser so that you have further means of dispatching the burst missiles.

the dilemma is this: lacking personnel with which to conduct the sortie, your commanding officers send your squadron and many cadets-in-training, affectionately named ‘nuggets’. despite their lack of dogfighting experience, they know enough that they’ll be able to hold their own against enemy ordinance, especially with full knowledge of what will be attacking them, no surprises.

wrong. all of the ‘nuggets’ died in the sortie because after three successful strikes, the orbital laser malfunctions. everyone realizes this and makes a big fuss over it, but rather than elevate aircrafts to an altitude of above 5000 feet within 30 seconds after the first warning from nagase (which, by the way, only takes three to four seconds to accomplish from a base altitude, if that) every single nugget perishes in burst missile range. this is because ace combat 5 is a game that for all intents and purposes begins favoring drama and wayward polemic at the expense of realism. it wasn’t a demanding altitude, a demanding time limit, or a demanding number of enemies and every cadet died to further the casualties suffered under war and to add to the cast’s understanding that War Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be, We’re All Cogs™. while i haven’t tested it yet, it would not surprise me in the least if the AI for the nuggets climbed to an altitude just below 5000 feet, and then right before the safe zone, they stalled so as to perish in battle.

but the troubles don’t really end there. the increased focus on the narrative proceedings and on wingman banter has direct ramifications for gameplay as well. several of ace combat 5s missions are unnecessarily padded so your squadmates can speak, ordained by the script, before progressing to the next stage of the mission. i played on hard difficulty and even then i was stunned to see that because i had dispatched all enemies well before the mission dictates that i should have, the mission simply continues to respawn enemies on the ground and in the air so that you have something to do to fill out the dead time. not only is this obscenely artificial once you come to grips with what’s going on, but it also throws a significant wrench into preparing for a sortie. i accept the premise that a mission briefing could be wrong so as to further the stakes and to amplify the tension of the gameplay, but this is a case where all your mission briefings might be lying to you and you have no way of foreseeing it. a mission with 30 ground targets and 15 aerial targets could easily become a mission with twofold that amount, with one particularly egregious mission respawning enemy bunkers repeatedly after you had already dealt with them. complicating this is both the lack of resupply lines from ace combat 4 and targets with greater health pools than prior iterations of ace combat, meaning you waste more ammunition to deal with enemies that were not specified to be there and you have to micromanage your ammunition to counter this fact in what is supposed to be a replayable, score-based arcade title. missions are stuffed to the brim with this kind of dead time and overindulgence in enemy count. one mission has you follow a truck for five minutes with zero friction – you cant even target structures so as to stop the trucks path. at least the mission where you flew slowly at low altitude for ten minutes possessed a semblance of mild danger. your wingmen barely make a dent in any of this despite any of the tactical orders you might try to give them. if you don’t believe me, kindly look at my squadmates numbers by the end of the campaign.

https://imgur.com/a/BfwCqNN

this is also the longest campaign in an ace combat title, topping out at 27 missions plus a victory lap. with the litany of scripted missions and gimmick missions that this title has, ace combat has never felt so much like an exhausting marathon. there are moments that it all works as a nice composite, but these moments are so few and far in between that the game is actively drowning in mud for most of it. it’s quite amusing to me that this entry in the franchise has the opposite problem of something like nier or drakengard – both of which are recipients of ace combat’s conceptual dna. in nier, the problem is the casts dialogue during battles, which are both narratively important and entertaining, but can easily be cut off by player input; in ace combat 5, the script, oftentimes for worse, obstructs player input in service of narrative. despite this, this can easily be interpreted in niers favour, which i won’t do for the sake of avoiding spoilers. ace combat 5 gets no such reprieve.

some of this might be excused if the unsung war had a good narrative, but it rather unfortunately registers to me as hisitronics. it’s bereft of the kind of nuance, humanity, or expressiveness of previous entries in the series in favour of aerial schmaltz. these characters are paper thin apex predators fighting against the machinations of war by doing hardly anything different from any other title in the series – indiscriminate slaughter. and far be it from me to reject something that has the potential to be subversive or satirical in intent, but nothing about the unsung war is even vaguely suggestive of this to me. it’s markedly less thoughtful than both electrosphere and shattered skies before it, without the comparative mechanical strengths of the relatively narrativeless ace combat 2. it sacrifices what works for an anti-war fairy tale that culminates in a squadron’s shared anti-war anthem, right before eviscerating the enemys offence entirely in a show of brute military strength. the whiplash is unreal to me. particularly so when the conspiratorial bent of the narrative seems like it will dismantle the kind of jingoist nationalism that fuels combative sentiment, but stops before even attempting to.

it takes a lot to pull me out of this kind of high octane schlock, but ace combat 5 represents the worst of both worlds. its lack of meaningful hooks renders its explosive highs destitute by the time you get there, and all the strengths it possesses as a mechanical ace combat title are negligible once you remember that they’re reflected better in the games before it. i much prefer the cowboy bebop-esque fatalism of something like shattered skies over the sluggish and preachy, constantly disconnected nature of ace combat 5. my argument here doesn’t intend to suggest that ace combat can’t be corny, but this tone should operate in tandem with the systems rather than disrupting them. and likewise, the mechanics should leverage the storytelling. because ultimately, project aces are right – in spite of the destruction they represent, planes are cool. they’re kinetic. they dance and joust in the skies. but so much of this game is repellant instead – it misses what makes ace combat work mechanically, and it misses what makes it work narratively. it aspires to the self-interrogation of games past, but instead opts for having your squadmate say ‘dogfights suck’ in the first mission of the game. its attempts to evoke reality are both underwritten and lacking in subtlety (yuktobania in this game is absolutely just russia; the antagonists in this game are cartoonishly committed to being evil). it ain’t strangereal, it’s just strange. and i can get similar, but more considered joys, somewhere else.