silentchad2004:
using data mining, conventional mining, divination, and star charts I've uncovered shocking lore implications involving the 1999 teen choice awards, eddie's skull circumference, and the last herakleopolitan pharaohs that challenge everything you thought you knew about james. it all starts with the hex code for his jacket, which I'm sure many of you already noticed is #303828, a clear reference to the roland TB-303 commonly used in chicago acid house. to understand this better we'll first need to return to the topic of jean baptiste point du sable's whereabouts in 1780 and how they tie in directly with merikare of the 10th dynasty[...]

the fans:
obviously. it's soo obvious

masahiro ito:
😭😭😭

considering WotC and chimera squad were already Figurative Marvel Shit, the pivot to Literal Marvel Shit is about the least surprising thing ever; if you didn't see this coming I suggest staying out of the entrail reading business. the real surprise here's that everyone buried the lede blubbering about deckbuilding stuff so thoroughly that I had no idea this was Meet n Fuck Marvel

not since borderlands 2 has a game's dialogue filled me with the primal unease of an ape seeing a particularly snakelike vine. started this up while my wife was in the shower and when she texted asking if I could make some coffee I knew the choice was to smash ALT+F4 or risk being divorced on the spot

the cardgame bit I'm kinda whatever about. I think I'd like it more if the camera was positioned anywhere else and it didn't lean so hard into Epic Cinematic Presentation that even the most basic actions take a century to unfold. it's cool you can do the type of MTG blue deck bullshit where your turn lasts so long the person on the other side of the table regrets being a nerd, but not cool enough to endure the simpering social layer, endless cutscenes, and deranged tutorializing that make up the bulk of the game

have to imagine you'd have a better time stuffing hulk hands in your ass while playing slay the spire

where most roleplaying spaces unfurl into greater mechanical, numerical dimensions, this only gets more and more hazy and frictionless over time; taking on a melancholic quality as you soar and glide effortlessly thru the world, decadent accumulation carving an ever-increasing gulf between You and Everything Else

sprawling curiosities, unreliable histories, and warbly metaphysics never making peace or finding balance with the ceaseless extrinsic rewards. excavation and communion of the dream growing distant as you pawn off Squirming Godlings to the highest bidder, buy out every house on the market, and upgrade weapons you don't need to kill things that pose no threat to acquire items you won't use

it's all the more uncanny cos none of the perverse little interloper privileges are of much benefit to you. save for a couple sloppy dungeon crawls dredged up out of the early 2000s there's hardly anything that demands to be solved thru violence or expenditure. all that hard power amounts to nothing compared to having a bunch of stats invested in candles

I agree with more or less every criticism that's been brought up to some extent, and I'm pretty sure that people who say it's like king's field probably send cryptograms to local newspapers when they're not LYING on the internet, but I like what's here more than I'm bothered by what isn't: the exploration and quaint little cartography; the surprising tenderness; the strange, incidental mode of unheroism; the disinterest in blood n bone problem solving; even the shameless Michael Kirkbride ReShade bits

when you make The Object Graveyard I can no longer take umbrage with your boss hitboxes being too tall to hit my character or the earlygame revolving around lockpicking for lockpicks so you can lockpick for exp to upgrade your lockpicking. I don't care, I just wanna see what's on that island over there

anyway, check it out: the swords are kissing

only so many times I can go thru the same floors with the same enemies and the same bosses and the same weapons and the same everythings. for something so lauded I expected some variety. I'm sure some bozo will tell me "umm actually curse, there's six billion lines of bespoke artisinal stone baked dialogue" but you can blow it out your ass if the whole thing's contingent on slaving away in the metalayer currency mines for hours on end

every room seems to go on forever man. imagine if in isaac or monolith you cleared a room and then it filled back up with the same shit five more times. what the fuck guys? you have like four enemies per zone, you don't need to rub it in. is the expectation that I'm basking and luxuriating in these encounters? I'm not. I'm bored before I hit the third floor

maybe it gets better once I suck up to every NPC and collect all the gizmos and upgrade the weapons and upgrade the dungeon and upgrade the shop and upgrade the trinkets and fill out my pokedex, but I'll never know. I fuck with greek mythology when it's about cronus eating his kids and perseus cutting heads and severed testicles goin in the sea, but I don't think I'm the target audience for this kinda snarky post-tumblr young adult stuff. I'm glad folks like jacking off to it, I guess?

probably beats playing it!

I'm in love with the way EO leverages the DS to digitize manual mapping. absolutely wonderful, beautiful stuff that captures the spirit of the genre a billion million zillion times better than any automap ever could. in a perfect world this would've heralded imitative ports of every drpg under the sun, and all of them would've been strong contenders for the best versions by default. unfortunately we live in the eternal piss and shit dimension so I'm doomed to pout about the missed opportunity for the rest of my life

as for the rest: game's like one of those images where either you see the old crone or the smokin hot babe; the lamp or the smoking hot babe; the white and gold dress or the smokin hot babe. you know?

from what I gather if you're coming at it from an EO perspective this thing feels like it was coded straight into zhoukoudian limestone by the peking man. folks act like it's the dustiest, crustiest, most satanic verses ass antipathetic crawler ever made. they're out here throwing blankets over their ds at night like a furby to stop it from talking backwards and shit

but if you're coming at it from a broader drpg perspective it's almost the complete opposite: decidedly modern, breezy, and accommodating; its push toward transparency, telegraphs, and convenience at odds with the core tension loop pre-bradley wizardry clones fundamentally rely on

I fall into the second category and found most of this to be pretty dry. by the time I hit the 5th Stratum I was approaching vegetative status, zoning out and mashing A with one hand while reading scandalous celebrity gossip on my phone in the other. hovering out of body, well above the dungeon rather than being subsumed by it; existing outside of stress, anxiety, and uneasy decision making. EO just doesn't got the stomach to wrench your guts around, put you on the perpetual backstep, or fill the role of derelict steward the way the most successful clones do

which is fine! I like most of the experimentation here in isolation; there's a dialogue happening that's a lot more interesting than reheating 1980-1988 endlessly. the deterministic angle opens up a lot of unique design avenues; character building could easily swerve toward embracing shortform tactics over longform attrition, and moments like B20F show that FOEs can be more than softball fodder goin woop woop woop in a 3x3 grid. there's a lot to be excited about, it just needs to be contextualized in ways that flatter rather than compromise

more than anything EO needs to stop being uncomfortable in borrowed skin and start being comfortable in its own. no reason to be another mediocre wizardry when it could be a great etrian odyssey 🌈 ⭐❤️

the discomfort zone got too comfortable so we made the comfort zone discomfortable. samus: meet samus

where super dove uncritically into the power fantasy that metroid II (the game with a literal Genocide Counter in the UI) unmasked and deflated, this feels like it's turning it inward against you personally. Your body, Your likeness, and Your autonomy hijacked; Your celebratory past tense role as (repeated) casual annihilationist to reckon with and cower from

it operates as something of a Super Negative Image Metroid: an inversion right down to the uncomfortable, choking grip of the direction. all that clammy ADAMsplaining, those sequestered zones, the redline urgency; everything's dialed perfectly into the exact same channel with uniform intent. even the woozy alien psychedelia's been spirited away in favour of clinical, detached interiors and astroturfed xerox biomes with some of the most appropriately sterile Oops No Backlight lighting on the GBA

and no, it obviously doesn't accomplish the same things as its predecessors, but it's not attempting to. this is a game about lack of control, and altering the format would be akin to breaking the spinal column that holds it upright. fusion's big successes (the pacing, brevity, tonal and thematic consonance, and delicate curation of tension and challenge) are the result of its structural changes. being shunted around a tiny sarcophagus isn't a flaw, it's the entire premise. duh

even without all that though it's impossible for me not to love a game with nightmare, the Profaned Baja Blast Suit, AQA's sunken banger, shots like this, and those absolutely unhinged ridley screams

quite possibly the best SA-X heavy fusion since the sultry sounds of steely dan

outside of the (understandably) on-the-nose coloured doorways nearly every instance of environmental interaction is rich and tactile. thirty years later it's still a wonder to grope and paw at every (Possibly Maybe) malleable surface and leverage every new upgrade toward greater structural manipulation and command

in ensuring how and when are given as much significance as what and where it forms a relationship between actor and environment that bears uncommonly personal patterns and markings as you learn to use Your body as an implement to interface with the world. sidepaths and back alleys that carve Under - Over - Through reshape the familiar thru layered mechanical discovery and shift the internal v external dynamic in turn; mastery of the self begetting exponential mastery of the other

a fitting problem then that the biocircuitry, plunging intestinal mazes, and gloomy dark ambient synthesis quickly become less something to endure so much as to dominate; the dissonance for show, and the brutality nakedly glamorous and one sided. so much of it exists in service to the pursuit of (Your) power, kneeling with its neck outstretched waiting to feel bones shatter for Your gratification. sure, I feel obscenely powerful, but I'd rather feel anything else

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I love the way exploration works here; the refusal to budge on fast travel save for diegetic ox carts, snatching back dark arisen's infinite ferrystone, and stretching the landmass both horizontally and (especially) vertically is wonderful. in many, many ways it's a bigger, slower, denser game, and they did it all while focusing on the most mundane environments devoid of giant theme park attractions bulging from every flat surface

likewise I love the idea of elaborating on the sense of traversal and moving toward a holistic spirit of adventure. deteriorating health ceilings aid attrition and help answer the inherent slime of menu heals, and having campfire rests operate as something of a risk/reward mechanism goes a long way toward giving each journey a greater heft and substance

even something as transparently gamey as designing the map as a network of funnels and chokepoints stippled with smaller threats and crosshatched with bigger ones was very clever; it's all just nouns crashing against nouns as they fire down chutes, but when coupled with the meaty physicality of the game's interactivity it goes a long way toward building up those Big Moments

but the consequence of trash mobs operating as speedbumps means moment-to-moment encounters operate more as filler than anything you could consider independently engaging scenarios. it also means that despite the map being several times larger than gransys it ends up feeling a lot more suffocating due to all the overlapping nouns slamming and interrupting each other without end

I just about luxuriated in the rare opportunities to enjoy brief spells of negative space; I savoured it like one of those FMV steaks. I'd kill for more moments like the arbor or the battleground where I was able to inhabit the world as a pilgrim or wanderer rather than serial wolf slaughterer or battahl sanitation expert, but they're very few and far between

there's no escaping the impenetrable walls of goblins, wolves, harpies, and saurians polluting every inch of the world. the already slender DD bestiary's been ported over nearly 1:1 with about as many additions as subtractions, and between the absurd density and massive landmass the variety ends up looking and feeling significantly worse than it did when it was first pilloried twelve years ago in a notoriously incomplete game

when the Big Moments do happen they're often spectacular, and it's easy to see why the chaotic intersection of AI, systems, and mechanics was prioritized so heavily and centered as the focal point of the entire experience. early on every bridge that breaks behind you, every ogre leaping from city walls, and every gryphon that crushes your ox cart feels huge and spellbinding; the game's at its best when all the moving parts align just right to achieve dynamic simulacrum, leveraging unpredictability to carry encounters well above their station

where that stuff loses me most is in the complete lack of friction. for a game with so many well considered means of drawing tension out of discovery it manages to render most of them meaningless when you're never being properly threatened enough to let them kick in. camping, eating, crafting, consumables, ambushes, and setpieces all take a significant blow from the chronic lack of bite, and it's frustrating to see so much potential go to waste when everything's already set up unbelievably well for success

even if you choose to go it alone, or do as I did and run with a party of two (ida + ozma: wily beastren + weakest creature), it only does so much when every corner of the map has CAPCOM Co., Ltd superpawns and npcs popping out of the ground to aid you unbidden and monsters are all mâché sculptures begging to be stunlocked. where's hard mode? why does it feel like everything DDDA did right got ignored? we just don't know

I'd have been happy if the game yanked a bit of control back with some kinda endgame/post-game dungeon, but there isn't one; there aren't really dungeons in general. in opting for quantity (50+!!) over quality we end up with none of them feeling particularly curated, and none of them having the scope or menace of the everfall, let alone bitterblack. no ur-dragon either, which is just baffling. the entire run from endgame to post-game is a gaping hole where something oughta be but certainly isn't

when I hit credits I felt almost confused, like I'd just been tricked into playing a remake or reboot of the original dragon's dogma that somehow had less material stretched even thinner. I enjoyed what I played for the most part, but the more thought I put into it the more it feels compromised and unfinished in all the exact ways itsuno promised over and over it wouldn't be this time around

there's a lot to love here: stuff like fucked up modular teeth, the sphinx, seeker coin platforming, pawn bullshitting, the dragonsplague, cyclops ragdolls, opaque sidequests, intentional tedium, and routinely bizarre interactions. much of what was good in the past remains good, and even bits that stumble backward generally land someplace close to decent regardless. some of the vocation/gear downgrades aren't to my liking, and there's an odd shallowness that hangs over the experience, but I think I liked it?

I just don't really get it

at first blush clear sky's beautiful: rich sunlit autumn with its blues, greens, oranges, and browns warm and radiant; chornobyl's surface murk all but lifted entirely and soaked up into the soils and waters and still breathing bodies that inhabit the zone

but it soon becomes plain that the cosmetic changes are something of a diversion; sleight of hand that draws the eyes away from the coming suckerpunch: twenty odd hours of being flanked by grenades, bled to death, mulched by MGs, and robbed blind. a cursory search shows that the lion's share of its legacy revolves around torturing and bamboozling those who expected a straightforward sequel to SoP instead of an Iterative Pain Milker, but as the saying goes: "you opened it, we came"

the heart of the experience is nothing short of broken; theoretical emergent turf wars reduced to ceaseless big boss killing field masturbation due to poor macro level AI and myriad bugs and glitches. every claim and conquest soon snuffed out or stolen; all elaborate actors, a-life improvements, hard fought battles, pleas for help, and catastrophes rendered as droning background noise. this world is doomed, and your input is worthless

it's exhausting, and even more so to know a great deal of it's the result of a series of inefficiencies so great they actively sabotage the very firmament. at times it almost feels like a comedy of errors when the stoned anarchists or authoritarian paramilitary freaks manage to bungle every single lead or advantage you give them. five idiots loping so slowly across the zone that by the time they arrive (if they even bother) they're inevitably pressed into hamburger by the dozen guys who somehow respawned in the interim

when sutured up nicely with the likes of Sky Reclamation Project it lurches upward, alive. all the blood for blood's sake recontextualized: the junkyards and warehouses turned sacrificial pits summon successfully, allies arrive, and land changes hands; guns still jam, MG nests still butcher, and grenades still flow freely, but there's purpose and direction granted. movement in the zone is given breath and motive outside of the infinite looping thresher, conflict finds a utile path, and there's reprieve and closure and tangible winners and losers. unfortunately, it lasts about an hour

once you join a faction you'll walk point-by-point through enemy checkpoints, get into a few scraps, take their base, and that's about it. somehow adhering to intentionality and giving all the dopey wind-up toys a chance to fulfill their goals and retire does nothing but harm. without the futility it oddly ends up even more meaningless; all perpetual motion and conflict rendered still and dull in the blink of an eye. omnipresent inferno degraded into sidequest

the more I dabbled with alterations the more I came to feel that shaking it from its stasis and evening out the unintended caustics made for a lesser experience. SRP's default settings are undoubtedly the best option for keeping clear sky roughly in line with its original intentions, but the tradeoff between the accidental and the deliberate isn't always worth it

if you tinker a bit further there're countless other options that make "improvements" to the likes of ballistics, enemy behaviour, and damage values, but almost all of them do so at the cost of its core identity, sanding it down to another shadow of chernobyl at best and another call of pripyat at worst. most of SRP's optional addons in particular feel designed from the ground up to wrench its teeth out one by one, and while I'm not gonna be a shitty cop about how people wanna enjoy things, I can't help but feel like docile's the wrong look

for me clear sky's best as an experience in overwhelming reduction — of the player, of power, and of dominion. a living space occupied by the dead and a set of systems in perpetual, unavoidable collapse. gears turning and great machines moving in an endless cycle of yearning greed and control. one big dumb bright cozy purgatory

win today, lose tomorrow. spin the world's wheel again

so first thing's first: X86000 version is better than the windows version, and you're probably gonna want some kinda autofire. I use XM6 Pro-68k's built in option, but you can do whatever you want cos I'm not your dad. you can even ignore my suggestion and let your arm balloon into a hellish rod of ruby muscle and errant bone, just as koichi yoshida intended. people will wonder if it's infected or filled with saline or if you're some kinda lab experiment and maybe you'll get a chance to tell them "no, I'm just honourable" before someone calls the national guard and they shoot to kill with those long bullets that explode human heads

maybe you can even survive the first shot and amble into oncoming traffic, horrifying children and dogs and doglike children alike with your heinous appendage as vehicles swerve dramatically out of the way like salarymen about to drive into the ocean

maybe you'll escape your pursuers and find yourself in an old growth forest, the perfect resting spot for the beast you've become. your freakish arm will be a warning to others and you'll spend the rest of your years tearing bark off trees to suck down termites and carpenter worms. once in a while someone will stumble into your leafy manse and see you, but thankfully their photos will be inexplicably blurry and your existence will be deemed a hoax by all but true believers. your family will mourn the son or daughter they lost, your boss will replace you with someone they can pay less, and life will go on as it does so beautifully

in your final moments maybe you'll smile and think to yourself:

"what the fuck does curse know anyway?"

I can simply no longer idly stand by while users with names like realbabymario who probably wear polos and adhere to their local exterior property maintenance bylaws say games are "like crack smoked crack"

if you'd like to keep comparing computer entertainment software to drugs I'm going to hereby require evidence that you've done them. to this end you may send a video clip with your username and partaking visible as well as a signed letter of guarantorship from your dealer and That Guy who's always chilling with your dealer to my personal address: johnerowid@gmail.com

anyway, more games should feel like technoweapons. I wanna feel disoriented and unhinged and experience immediate changes in my mental state. I wanna turn it off and feel like thick, heavy cables were yanked from base of my skull. the word visceral was commandeered by marketing freaks selling gratuitous 7th gen killporn animations to teenagers, but once in a while you get a chance to remember what it actually means

some games can take hours and hours to draw a potent reaction from you; this one takes a few seconds. soon as the garish flashing, unbearable speed, and famicom techno hits you immediately understand the experience and the relationship you're gonna have with it

one of the most convincing displays of technical wizardry you'll find in 1992 or otherwise. this is the exact moment yagawa the grey turned into yagawa the white. these boys weren't just cooking, they were on that molecular gastronomy shit. that FFIX 99 frogs shit. that meowscular chef shit — no dango in sight

this hits me like saying games "feel like they were made in an albuquerque RV" hits guys who think mexico's literally yellow

🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰