96 Reviews liked by efrencito
This review contains spoilers
Finally, after all these years, all this waiting...a sequel to Metal Gear Solid 4.
Less of an elegant melding of the design philosophies of Xenoblade 1 and 2 and more a Burnout-Esque car crash of systems, careening discordant mechanics at each other again and again, piling mechanic upon mechanic upon mechanic, leaving each one shattered by impact, until finally, just when it would be funniest to...another system comes screaming in and collides with the pile-up. On paper, Xenoblade 3 seems like it might really be the best of both worlds, but paper is famously two-dimensional. Practice reveals that Xenoblade 3's complete incoherence, its inability to make any single element of its design work fully with any other results in a game that was, for me, actively unpleasant and frustrating to play through.
So many things about Xenoblade 3 reward you with experience points, be they sidequests, chain attacks, or exploration, and certainly the most fun I had in Xenoblade 3 was the initial thrill of abusing the chain attack to get 1000% extra EXP and go up like 4 levels at once. But because the ability to level down to keep apace with the level curve of the main quest is bafflingly locked behind New Game+, and because fighting enemies below your level substantially slows down the unlocking of your Jobs, which the game encourages you to switch near constantly but also encourages you to remain on a single job so that others can use it too, what gaining that EXP practically means is a short burst of endorphins at seeing Number Go Up in exchange for an hour or two of staid misery as your progression grinds to a halt and you languish in a party composition you aren't enjoying so that you can unlock one you do like later. A game where you are punished for progression, and punished for not progressing by potentially missing out on the first game in the trilogy where there is more than a handful of sidequests with actual stories and meaningful gameplay unlocks in them. Xenoblade 3 represents the point where the memetic maximalism of the series, something I have always enjoyed about it, finally buckles and collapses under it's own weight, the cumulative effect of all this is being that you are left with a game built on systems of rewards that actively work against things the rest of it is doing, that make the game frustrating and unpleasant to play, the RPG design equivalent of being pulled in 4 separate directions by each of your limbs.
The story produces a similar effect. While the pretty great core cast provides a solid foundation for the game, thematically or stylistically there's not a single theme or idea that Xenoblade 3 brings up that it will not at some point contradict or muddy, not a single thing it ever fully commits to. Sometimes this is borderline parody, like the scene where the party rages with righteous fury at members of Mobius for having the temerity to treat killing people as a game, only to then in the very next screen meet a hero character who treats killing people as a game that every single character is completely on board with except for Eunie, who is chided for the crime of consistency and is asked to undergo a sidequest character arc in order to stop committing it. It often has the feel of a first draft, especially in how characters significant to the histories of our crew are introduced in flashback seconds before they reappear in the present to have a dramatic and tearful finale. Down to the very basics, the broad theme that comprises so much of the story and the gameplay, of two disparate peoples doing good by coming together, is shattered by an ending that sees their separation as a tragic necessity. By any conventional standards of narrative or mechanical coherence, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is an unmitigated disaster.
This isn't a unique failing of this game, however. Some of this is not unique to Xenoblade 3, but rather represents a degree of exhaustion I have with elements of Xenoblade that have remained unchanging. Xenoblade has always taken influence from MMORPGs, but it's influences have never really extended beyond the experience of the player character. Playing through raid or even dungeon bosses in an MMO, with their own discrete mechanics and designs that throw wrenches into your rotations you must react to, alongside Xenoblade 3 thoroughly demonstrates that if Xenoblade is a single-player MMO, it is a single-player MMO where every single enemy is a mob, where every single fight plays out almost the exact same way. Whether you are fighting a lowly bunnit or the God of Genesis, you're going to be just trying to execute your rotation all the same. And the rotations themselves are incredibly simple, the actual challenge is navigating around the uniformly terrible AI of your squadmates. The chain attack has always felt like a concession to this, and never more so than here, where at almost any time the + button lets you opt into a mode of play that tosses out basically the entire rest of the battle system to play a minigame that also happens to be a completely dominant strategy that is more powerful than anything else in the game, at the cost of being incredibly drawn-out and boring. Similarly, the world design, which is basically the same as the prior games but much wider, exposes just how uninteresting these spaces are to explore when the visuals and atmosphere aren't doing the heavy lifting. But Aionios is a particularly bland and staid world, with precious little interesting visual scenery and barely buoyed by a soundtrack that, Mobius themes aside, I found almost totally unmemorable. Both in the things it takes away from prior games that may have distracted from it, and the things it does itself, Xenoblade 3 does an admirable job at demonstrating the rot at the core of this entire series, the flaws and failings that have always been there, brought into the light more completely for the first time.
And it almost works. It genuinely, sincerely, almost works.
The world of Xenoblade 3 is a literal mash-up of the worlds of Xenoblade 1 and 2, a staid, in-between world maintained in eternal stasis and backward-looking by a group of (awfully-dressed) manchildren who treat all of this as consequence-less entertainment for themselves, who hang out in a theater watching clips from the world outside as if they are little more than episodes of a weekly seasonal anime. This lack of coherence, the way the writing never takes more than a step without stumbling, the way the ungodly chimera of systems and mechanics makes simply existing in Aionios feel genuinely stressful for me, against all odds does manage to feel resonant with the parts of the story that are about how existing in this singular moment is awful, how we need to forcefully draw a line under all this and move on. When characters talk about how much they hate this world, I sincerely agree with them. I hate it because the time I have spent here, because I have hiked across its vast empty wastes, seeing off dead bodies in a spiritual ritual reduced to a Crackdown Orb, because I have fought the battles of this endless war between Keves and Agnus and found them to be unpleasant and unsatisfying, because I have found the carrots of progression it offers to be hollow and tasteless. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 earnestly and sincerely represents a formal boldness that I genuinely did not think Monolith Soft was capable of, a willingness to produce a game where the act of playing feels terrible in order to underscore its point about how the world it presents must be ended. Even if it's lack of materialism and eagerness to abstract it's themes means it's never going to hit me like games that name their enemy (I've seen people talk about XB3 as an anti-capitalist game and while I can see how it's talk about destroying the Endless Now would be resonant with feelings like that, I'd like to direct your attention towards the early scene where a nopon explains the Free Market to the party and they all go "that's so poggers" and also the unbridled Shinzo Abe-ness of certain scenes, you know the ones) it nonetheless represents Xenoblade going further and reaching higher than, frankly, I ever thought it capable of. When a late-game boss starting randomly spouting contextless lines from Xenogears' theme song, I knew that some part of this game knew what was up.
I wish the rest of it did.
Perhaps Xenoblade 3 would be dishonest with itself if it did not also muddy and fumble the one part of it tying all the disparate strands together, but by indulging in earnest and straightforward nostalgia to an almost comical extent. One of the earliest things that intrigued me about Xenoblade 3 was how each of the two nations is ruled by a figurehead representation of a prominent waifu character from a prior game, where the uncritical worship of these characters is manufactured and exploited in order to maintain the endless war machine. It was cutting, it was incisive, and seemed self-aware, however briefly, of just how wretched the fandoms of these games are. Of course, it couldn't last. By the end, these figureheads are replaced with the Real Versions of these characters, who actually are uncritically good and brilliant and worthy of worship, whose immense power is absolutely necessary to destroy "The Endless Now", and also my willingness to find something that means anything in this mess. The one thing you absolutely cannot do when making a story about clinging to the past being wrong and bad is to parade around that same past as if it's the second coming, to indulge so completely in uncritical fanservice that buries anything interesting beneath tuneless self-indulgence that sounds like a thousand teenage boys yelling "BRO PEAK FICTION". If Xenoblade 3 isn't willing to commit to what it's doing, why should I? Why did I spend 100 hours of my life that I will never get back on a game that's just going to throw away everything interesting it's doing a the final hurdle? What was the point of any of this?
The angry tone of the prior passage is not how I feel now, given time to relax and reflect on the parts of the game that do genuinely work for me, like the main party (Eunie and Taion prove that Monolith Soft is in fact capable of writing a good romance, they have thus far simply chosen not to) and, of course, the parts that Really Don't Work, which are the things that worked most of all. But I'm not really able to get over that the one thing I found was truly interesting and exceptional about this game was something it just couldn't resist the allure of Servicing Fans enough to bring home. With Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Monolith Soft set out to prove that Xenoblade cannot continue the way it is, and the worst part is that they succeeded...just in a way that convinced me that the problem might lie deeper within Monolith Soft, not simply with Xenoblade itself.
Ultimately, I just think these games aren't for me anymore. I really gave it the best try I could, but I'm content to let the people who do still love them enjoy it themselves, whilst I let time turn it into a faded memory. The best Xenoblade, on paper? Definitely. But then, cardboard cut-outs don't make for great company, do they?
Less of an elegant melding of the design philosophies of Xenoblade 1 and 2 and more a Burnout-Esque car crash of systems, careening discordant mechanics at each other again and again, piling mechanic upon mechanic upon mechanic, leaving each one shattered by impact, until finally, just when it would be funniest to...another system comes screaming in and collides with the pile-up. On paper, Xenoblade 3 seems like it might really be the best of both worlds, but paper is famously two-dimensional. Practice reveals that Xenoblade 3's complete incoherence, its inability to make any single element of its design work fully with any other results in a game that was, for me, actively unpleasant and frustrating to play through.
So many things about Xenoblade 3 reward you with experience points, be they sidequests, chain attacks, or exploration, and certainly the most fun I had in Xenoblade 3 was the initial thrill of abusing the chain attack to get 1000% extra EXP and go up like 4 levels at once. But because the ability to level down to keep apace with the level curve of the main quest is bafflingly locked behind New Game+, and because fighting enemies below your level substantially slows down the unlocking of your Jobs, which the game encourages you to switch near constantly but also encourages you to remain on a single job so that others can use it too, what gaining that EXP practically means is a short burst of endorphins at seeing Number Go Up in exchange for an hour or two of staid misery as your progression grinds to a halt and you languish in a party composition you aren't enjoying so that you can unlock one you do like later. A game where you are punished for progression, and punished for not progressing by potentially missing out on the first game in the trilogy where there is more than a handful of sidequests with actual stories and meaningful gameplay unlocks in them. Xenoblade 3 represents the point where the memetic maximalism of the series, something I have always enjoyed about it, finally buckles and collapses under it's own weight, the cumulative effect of all this is being that you are left with a game built on systems of rewards that actively work against things the rest of it is doing, that make the game frustrating and unpleasant to play, the RPG design equivalent of being pulled in 4 separate directions by each of your limbs.
The story produces a similar effect. While the pretty great core cast provides a solid foundation for the game, thematically or stylistically there's not a single theme or idea that Xenoblade 3 brings up that it will not at some point contradict or muddy, not a single thing it ever fully commits to. Sometimes this is borderline parody, like the scene where the party rages with righteous fury at members of Mobius for having the temerity to treat killing people as a game, only to then in the very next screen meet a hero character who treats killing people as a game that every single character is completely on board with except for Eunie, who is chided for the crime of consistency and is asked to undergo a sidequest character arc in order to stop committing it. It often has the feel of a first draft, especially in how characters significant to the histories of our crew are introduced in flashback seconds before they reappear in the present to have a dramatic and tearful finale. Down to the very basics, the broad theme that comprises so much of the story and the gameplay, of two disparate peoples doing good by coming together, is shattered by an ending that sees their separation as a tragic necessity. By any conventional standards of narrative or mechanical coherence, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is an unmitigated disaster.
This isn't a unique failing of this game, however. Some of this is not unique to Xenoblade 3, but rather represents a degree of exhaustion I have with elements of Xenoblade that have remained unchanging. Xenoblade has always taken influence from MMORPGs, but it's influences have never really extended beyond the experience of the player character. Playing through raid or even dungeon bosses in an MMO, with their own discrete mechanics and designs that throw wrenches into your rotations you must react to, alongside Xenoblade 3 thoroughly demonstrates that if Xenoblade is a single-player MMO, it is a single-player MMO where every single enemy is a mob, where every single fight plays out almost the exact same way. Whether you are fighting a lowly bunnit or the God of Genesis, you're going to be just trying to execute your rotation all the same. And the rotations themselves are incredibly simple, the actual challenge is navigating around the uniformly terrible AI of your squadmates. The chain attack has always felt like a concession to this, and never more so than here, where at almost any time the + button lets you opt into a mode of play that tosses out basically the entire rest of the battle system to play a minigame that also happens to be a completely dominant strategy that is more powerful than anything else in the game, at the cost of being incredibly drawn-out and boring. Similarly, the world design, which is basically the same as the prior games but much wider, exposes just how uninteresting these spaces are to explore when the visuals and atmosphere aren't doing the heavy lifting. But Aionios is a particularly bland and staid world, with precious little interesting visual scenery and barely buoyed by a soundtrack that, Mobius themes aside, I found almost totally unmemorable. Both in the things it takes away from prior games that may have distracted from it, and the things it does itself, Xenoblade 3 does an admirable job at demonstrating the rot at the core of this entire series, the flaws and failings that have always been there, brought into the light more completely for the first time.
And it almost works. It genuinely, sincerely, almost works.
The world of Xenoblade 3 is a literal mash-up of the worlds of Xenoblade 1 and 2, a staid, in-between world maintained in eternal stasis and backward-looking by a group of (awfully-dressed) manchildren who treat all of this as consequence-less entertainment for themselves, who hang out in a theater watching clips from the world outside as if they are little more than episodes of a weekly seasonal anime. This lack of coherence, the way the writing never takes more than a step without stumbling, the way the ungodly chimera of systems and mechanics makes simply existing in Aionios feel genuinely stressful for me, against all odds does manage to feel resonant with the parts of the story that are about how existing in this singular moment is awful, how we need to forcefully draw a line under all this and move on. When characters talk about how much they hate this world, I sincerely agree with them. I hate it because the time I have spent here, because I have hiked across its vast empty wastes, seeing off dead bodies in a spiritual ritual reduced to a Crackdown Orb, because I have fought the battles of this endless war between Keves and Agnus and found them to be unpleasant and unsatisfying, because I have found the carrots of progression it offers to be hollow and tasteless. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 earnestly and sincerely represents a formal boldness that I genuinely did not think Monolith Soft was capable of, a willingness to produce a game where the act of playing feels terrible in order to underscore its point about how the world it presents must be ended. Even if it's lack of materialism and eagerness to abstract it's themes means it's never going to hit me like games that name their enemy (I've seen people talk about XB3 as an anti-capitalist game and while I can see how it's talk about destroying the Endless Now would be resonant with feelings like that, I'd like to direct your attention towards the early scene where a nopon explains the Free Market to the party and they all go "that's so poggers" and also the unbridled Shinzo Abe-ness of certain scenes, you know the ones) it nonetheless represents Xenoblade going further and reaching higher than, frankly, I ever thought it capable of. When a late-game boss starting randomly spouting contextless lines from Xenogears' theme song, I knew that some part of this game knew what was up.
I wish the rest of it did.
Perhaps Xenoblade 3 would be dishonest with itself if it did not also muddy and fumble the one part of it tying all the disparate strands together, but by indulging in earnest and straightforward nostalgia to an almost comical extent. One of the earliest things that intrigued me about Xenoblade 3 was how each of the two nations is ruled by a figurehead representation of a prominent waifu character from a prior game, where the uncritical worship of these characters is manufactured and exploited in order to maintain the endless war machine. It was cutting, it was incisive, and seemed self-aware, however briefly, of just how wretched the fandoms of these games are. Of course, it couldn't last. By the end, these figureheads are replaced with the Real Versions of these characters, who actually are uncritically good and brilliant and worthy of worship, whose immense power is absolutely necessary to destroy "The Endless Now", and also my willingness to find something that means anything in this mess. The one thing you absolutely cannot do when making a story about clinging to the past being wrong and bad is to parade around that same past as if it's the second coming, to indulge so completely in uncritical fanservice that buries anything interesting beneath tuneless self-indulgence that sounds like a thousand teenage boys yelling "BRO PEAK FICTION". If Xenoblade 3 isn't willing to commit to what it's doing, why should I? Why did I spend 100 hours of my life that I will never get back on a game that's just going to throw away everything interesting it's doing a the final hurdle? What was the point of any of this?
The angry tone of the prior passage is not how I feel now, given time to relax and reflect on the parts of the game that do genuinely work for me, like the main party (Eunie and Taion prove that Monolith Soft is in fact capable of writing a good romance, they have thus far simply chosen not to) and, of course, the parts that Really Don't Work, which are the things that worked most of all. But I'm not really able to get over that the one thing I found was truly interesting and exceptional about this game was something it just couldn't resist the allure of Servicing Fans enough to bring home. With Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Monolith Soft set out to prove that Xenoblade cannot continue the way it is, and the worst part is that they succeeded...just in a way that convinced me that the problem might lie deeper within Monolith Soft, not simply with Xenoblade itself.
Ultimately, I just think these games aren't for me anymore. I really gave it the best try I could, but I'm content to let the people who do still love them enjoy it themselves, whilst I let time turn it into a faded memory. The best Xenoblade, on paper? Definitely. But then, cardboard cut-outs don't make for great company, do they?
Twelve Minutes
2021
“Is this what other video games are like?” was my girlfriend’s only response after we finished this. It’s the first game she’s beaten that wasn’t on the Nintendo Switch.
Like many people around the world, coronavirus made her into a gamer - a combination of lockdown boredom and watching me play video games every single day of the week convinced her to find out what all the fuss was about. She’d played plenty of Mega Drive and PlayStation as a child, but, like most normal people, fell away from the hobby when school, sex and other pressing responsibilities began to take hold.
The Nintendo Switch is, of course, the ideal console for re-introducing someone to the world of video games - capital-G Gamers may rankle against Nintendo’s minimalist UI for dummies, baby-friendly options and softly-softly in-game tutorials, but watching a newly-minted member of our organisation come to grips with gaming via Nintendo’s safe, friendly little ecosystem makes it undeniably clear what The Big N are up to when they remind you that “A” means “Jump” 10 hours into Super Mario Galaxy. A twenty-second irritation for you is a life-saving clarification for someone who still has to hold the controller up to their face to read the buttons.
Within 18 months, Nintendo has gradually guided my girlfriend through the worlds of Animal Crossing, Super Mario Odyssey Captain Toad, Bowser’s Fury and many other great wee games, eventually climaxing in her getting a near-100% completion stat on Breath of the Wild last week. Unfortunately, as the daily blood-thirst for Yet Another Nintendo Direct proves, Nintendo only make so many games - even for more laid-back fans - and my girlfriend has near enough run the Switch’s first-party well dry.
Which is where the Xbox Series S comes in - while peering through pop-ups and paywalls at countless click-baiting “Best 2021 Games” lists to find new things to enjoy, we found that a lot of interesting stuff that appealed to us - Sable, Forgotten City, Psychonauts 2, Twelve Minutes - were heading straight past the Nintendo Switch and only coming to Xbox and PC. While I have a pretty good PC that could reasonably play all these games, I would never willingly subject a human being I care about to PC Gaming. So we bought an Xbox Series S instead.
In many ways, the Series X|S is the Switch’s antithesis, for worse and for better - a confusing smorgasbord of hardware options that are laser-focused on performance and deeply-integrated online components, with a homescreen that relentlessly bombards you with options, adverts and other worthless media tiles - it’s genuinely amusing that a games console hides its video games in a sub-menu that sits alongside Disney+ suggestions (when you haven’t even downloaded or enrolled Disney+ on the console!) and adverts for games you already own within said sub-menu. Needless to say, starting an Xbox game can be a daunting task for anyone who’s used to just pressing the power button and clicking on a big picture of the game they want to play. Between my “””smart””” TV and the Xbox, I now have to run a gamut of broken advertising just to play a little bit of Blast Corps in glorious 4K. The next generation of gaming is here, folks!
The Series S would be an outright contemptible little device if Microsoft hadn’t essentially mastered their ability to give console players a comfortable PC-like experience of near-infinite diversity in near-infinite combinations, all from the comfort of a controller. This thing has the best multi-generational compatibility of any console I’ve ever owned - surpassing even the mighty Nintendo DS and O.G. PS3. It’s confounding/astounding that I could, technically, if I really wanted, sign in to a workplace Teams call on a device that simultaneously allows me to swap between Halo 2, Daytona USA, Symphony of the Night and Halo Infinite. I could give my daily team brief using a Turtle Beach headset plugged into an Xbox controller while playing Conker’s Bad Fur Day, if I really wanted to! Does anyone want that? I don’t think so, but Microsoft have made it possible, for some reason! The next generation of gaming is here, folks! (If you can play Microsoft Teams on an Xbox console, does that technically qualify it for inclusion in the Backloggd archives? I’d love to read those Top Reviews.)
On a console that neatly demonstrates many of the things that make playing modern video games a surreal Kafkaesque nightmare, Twelve Minutes is more or less a perfect package of everything that’s shit about those video games themselves: repetition of mindless tasks; the banal trial-and-error dragging-and-dropping of [USE] [ITEM] [OBJECT] that has plagued adventure gaming for three decades; trying to click on things that are too small; clicking on wrong things and having to slowly watch wrong things unfold; watching polygonal automatons walk slowly to their destination; watching polygonal automatons bump and jerk against and around each other; watching clunky plot unfold at sub-iceberg paces; watching accomplished actors of stage and screen recite from torn-out pages of school play dialogue; hearing that same dialogue again, and again, and again on your way back to the destination of your next clunky plot point; cognitively-dissonant clashes between gameplay and narrative; and, of course, one of video gaming’s most reliable staples - unnecessary, senseless and gratuitous violence against defenceless women.
A game about a police officer exploitatively wielding his authority to prey on a woman in myriad horrific ways is never gonna come out at the “right” time, but playing Twelve Minutes in the ongoing moment of the Sarah Everard case feels so sickeningly sour. It’s morbidly impressive how quickly the game lets you watch a woman get handcuffed and choked out. It’s even more impressive how quickly the game gives you unprovoked player-driven options for violence against your own wife! The next generation of gaming is here, folks!
Early on in Twelve Minutes, “a prestige mystery-thriller timeloop game” (Annapurna Interactive press release, 2021), we realised you can grab a knife and stab your wife while she sits on the couch reading a book. Don’t worry gamers! We had to do it to gain more precious intel about a pocket watch that helps move the mystery along! It’s wholly justifiable woman-murder! There’s a mystery to solve! When we worked this part out, there was no “aha!” moment that usually comes with solving a puzzle in a video game. Just an instinctive revulsion of “do we have to do this?” - and not in an introspective, meaningful way, like, say, that fateful R2 press at the end of Snake Eater. Just a pained, mindless “ugh” while dragging the knife to the wife. A far cry from turning into a funny little jumping cabbage to collect power moons in Super Mario Odyssey. Video games provide infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
Nonetheless, we persisted on the assumption that the game would address its own inhumanity in pursuit of a greater goal or message. It’s a “prestige” game, after all! This is the kind of high-calibre gaming that only the next generation of video games hardware can provide! Of course, it never did - Twelve Minutes is never interested in examining itself, even though it has all the endlessly looping time in the world to do it. Another example within the prior example - American Husband (Scotland’s James McAvoy) resists the player’s first suggestion to carry out the act of wife-stabbing with a weak-willed “No…” refusal before capitulating on the second attempt. What does that mean, really? I hoped the game was taking a page from Deltarune’s playbook by suggesting that the player and the player-controlled husband were distinct entities in the Twelve Minutes world, but alas - we already established that this game is a portrait of every blemish and pimple on the face of video games. There’s no space for interesting thoughts here! Ignore that cheap gesture in the general direction of drama and get back to stabbing your wife! You need to stab her to get The Facts! You’ll be absolved of your crimes on the next loop anyway.
Fortunately, the game’s incoherent and incompetent tone often comes to your rescue whenever it forces you to do something rotten. Immediately after shanking his wife (for the third time) for having the temerity to read a book on the couch, we commanded our witless hero to sit down and eat his chocolate mousse. He remarked on how tasty it was, then read a book on the couch with his dead wife, behaving more like an auto-piloting Sim than a Serious Protagonist. It was a very good bit of morbidly dissonant ludo-narrative giggling, and a rare moment of joy in a game that is trying so very hard to be mature. Remember the Groundhog Day montage where Bill Murray trial-and-errors his way around diners and offices? All those bits in Edge of Tomorrow where Tom Cruise bit the dust in increasingly sadistic and silly ways? Weren’t they fun! No room for that here. We’ve got women to kick in the ribs!
I’m not opposed to video games and other artworks depicting our ugliest inhumanities, but I feel like it has to be to some meaningful end. Twelve Minutes is so obsessed with presenting itself as maturely as possible that it ultimately comes off as immaturely meaningless as it possibly could - no amount of prestigious acting credits or allusions to brutal murder and rape can save it from coming across like a Christopher Moltisanti spec script. Like a corny mafia movie, Twelve Minutes lets you watch a woman get punched, kicked, choked and stabbed - again, and again, and again, and again, and again (Achievement Unlocked, by the way!) until you’re bored. Then it’ll introduce something about incest, for some reason. The perfect introduction to the world of video games beyond Nintendo’s borders. The next generation of gaming is here, folks!
If Bowser's Fury was the initial hint that Nintendo have struggled to keep their production line on-track during the panny d, Super Rush is the outright confirmation. Uniquely fascinating in the sense that it's probably the most unpolished, uncharming and unfinished game Nintendo have ever put their seal of approval on; the UI would looks like it came from a McDonalds self-service kiosk and the characters in the story mode keep referring to game mechanics that don't exist, like sleeping to restore stamina and eating to get buffs. With Birdo repeatedly forcing you to go to bed in the middle of the day for no apparent reason, the Golf Adventure mode makes for a surreal experience - it's almost as if one of those dodgy mobile game developers who make Pokemon knockoffs somehow managed to get their hands on the real Super Mario IP and are now sharing their Early Access build with Kickstarters.
So how in the heck is this a 3-star game, I hear you ask?? Well, the golfing is still absolutely rock solid. Aside from committing the cardinal sin of removing the third tap from the holy three-tap trinity, there's nothing here I'd really change when it comes to good old-fashioned arcade golfing gameplay - it's all mechanically on par with Everybody's Golf at this point, if not better in some cases. The addition of the range/elevation finder is a neat little feature for golf math nerds, and ironically it feels a whole lot more important and worthwhile to the experience than the Super Rush gameplay gimmick they chose to slap on the game's title.
Super Rushing isn't outright terrible (Yoshi turns into an egg! Toad bounces on his head!!), but it does often feel like you're punctuating your shots with those moments from Breath of the Wild where you had to make Link jog-sprint-jog across an open field for 10 minutes while mindlessly balancing a stamina wheel. That you can't combine rushing and jumping feels like a ridiculously constrictive oversight, and I'm surprised that a free-roaming golf game with Super Mario in the title doesn't encourage players to do some fun platforming. Being able to track, analyse and anticipate your shot in-flight is pretty fundamental to a golf game, too - so it's a little disappointing that the main mode pushes you to just forget about all that and book it to the fairway instead.
On the whole, this isn't really worth the ridiculous £50 price tag that's been slapped on it - Everybody's Golf was a budget title for the PS4, and I feel like it had a ton more content, polish and character. That Nintendo feel comfortable putting out a kneecapped title like this at full price just goes to show how hard they're now dominating the marketplace, perhaps even at the expense at their own reputation for quality. Like with Monster Hunter Rise, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the development team are going to use DLC to bring the game up to version 1.0. A real sad thing to have to type.
So how in the heck is this a 3-star game, I hear you ask?? Well, the golfing is still absolutely rock solid. Aside from committing the cardinal sin of removing the third tap from the holy three-tap trinity, there's nothing here I'd really change when it comes to good old-fashioned arcade golfing gameplay - it's all mechanically on par with Everybody's Golf at this point, if not better in some cases. The addition of the range/elevation finder is a neat little feature for golf math nerds, and ironically it feels a whole lot more important and worthwhile to the experience than the Super Rush gameplay gimmick they chose to slap on the game's title.
Super Rushing isn't outright terrible (Yoshi turns into an egg! Toad bounces on his head!!), but it does often feel like you're punctuating your shots with those moments from Breath of the Wild where you had to make Link jog-sprint-jog across an open field for 10 minutes while mindlessly balancing a stamina wheel. That you can't combine rushing and jumping feels like a ridiculously constrictive oversight, and I'm surprised that a free-roaming golf game with Super Mario in the title doesn't encourage players to do some fun platforming. Being able to track, analyse and anticipate your shot in-flight is pretty fundamental to a golf game, too - so it's a little disappointing that the main mode pushes you to just forget about all that and book it to the fairway instead.
On the whole, this isn't really worth the ridiculous £50 price tag that's been slapped on it - Everybody's Golf was a budget title for the PS4, and I feel like it had a ton more content, polish and character. That Nintendo feel comfortable putting out a kneecapped title like this at full price just goes to show how hard they're now dominating the marketplace, perhaps even at the expense at their own reputation for quality. Like with Monster Hunter Rise, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the development team are going to use DLC to bring the game up to version 1.0. A real sad thing to have to type.
GoldenEye 007
1997
Essentially a battle between the two sides of nostalgia’s collectable coin: on one there’s the ugly and hollow self-perpetuation of “oddjob slappers-only natalya AI bad” that the Nintendo-Microsoft marketing machine is currently indulging in - cravenly memeing about the pause menu music while the game’s original developers call foul of an emulator’s exhumation in the replies column; but on the other side, despite it all, there remains a more sincere evocation of random-access memory here, one that arrives in unexpected moments - on this playthrough I was struck by the sound of Natalya shooting a guard off-screen in the eerie silence of Jungle, the way the cartoon violence suddenly veers towards reality in a rainforest soundscape that thrives upon an absentia of Kirkhope’s otherwise-welcome elevator-electrofunk. It felt good to be reminded of a time when this game felt so real to us and there was genuine fear in Xenia barrelling across a rope bridge with a grenade launcher… I don’t want to go back, but I do like to visit.
Like Pokémon Red & Blue, this is a game that’s ultimately doomed to be misunderstood and maligned by those that came after us. Despite playing this game for days and years on end, I’ve never been able to perceive the all-consuming glitches, bugs and jank these games apparently stink of. A recent Twitter thread recommended switching the control scheme to 2.3 Mode and then using the Switch’s built-in accessibility settings to swap stick and button inputs around in order to get the conventional twin-stick shooter experience; many replies praised the OP for “fixing” the game on behalf of Nintendo - but in what way was the game broken? Why afford yourself precision aiming in a game that is best left in the hands of a frankly glorious Auto-Aim? Why deny yourself the James Bond Musou experience of running down Control’s corridors with dual RPKs on full auto? Why not indulge in a couple of thoughts about how game designers in the 1990s overcame technical limitations that they didn’t even know existed yet? Other gamers in proximity to the thread lamented the fact that the re-release does not include upscaled or redone textures and character models, but I’m not going to get into the Midjourneyification of preexisting art because I don’t like to write mean things about consumers who just want to hitch a ride on a Ship of Theseus that bears the false flag of Goldeneye: 007. It aged poorly? So will you, soon enough.
Like Pokémon Red & Blue, this is a game that’s ultimately doomed to be misunderstood and maligned by those that came after us. Despite playing this game for days and years on end, I’ve never been able to perceive the all-consuming glitches, bugs and jank these games apparently stink of. A recent Twitter thread recommended switching the control scheme to 2.3 Mode and then using the Switch’s built-in accessibility settings to swap stick and button inputs around in order to get the conventional twin-stick shooter experience; many replies praised the OP for “fixing” the game on behalf of Nintendo - but in what way was the game broken? Why afford yourself precision aiming in a game that is best left in the hands of a frankly glorious Auto-Aim? Why deny yourself the James Bond Musou experience of running down Control’s corridors with dual RPKs on full auto? Why not indulge in a couple of thoughts about how game designers in the 1990s overcame technical limitations that they didn’t even know existed yet? Other gamers in proximity to the thread lamented the fact that the re-release does not include upscaled or redone textures and character models, but I’m not going to get into the Midjourneyification of preexisting art because I don’t like to write mean things about consumers who just want to hitch a ride on a Ship of Theseus that bears the false flag of Goldeneye: 007. It aged poorly? So will you, soon enough.
Tails Noir
2021
It's like browsing Deviantart.
in spite of being passable-to-okay at best in nearly every other aspect, this game's character writing is so unbelievably tight that i've thought about several of the characters on a regular basis for the past three years or so.
i think if these same characters were in just some dysfunctional high school setting it would be one of my favorite things ever. like i want fire emblem: euphoria
i think if these same characters were in just some dysfunctional high school setting it would be one of my favorite things ever. like i want fire emblem: euphoria