It's been a journey of give and take: whenever I was really in the flow, it always managed to find a way to snap me out; and whenever I was losing my grip, it always found a way to yank me back in. Every great aspect of the game had its evil antagonistic clone that wasn't *equally* bad, but powerful enough to hurt the game's stronger points. Each great and charming character obscured by a slurry of aggravating witnesses, with humour that at a moment's notice can swing between genuinely funny and aggravating to even mash through. The great drama, spectable and flow of the trials broken by how abruptly they can grind to a halt when they demand the use of details from earlier conversations that have absolutely no record in the moment. And the compelling stories, themes and character arcs numbed by all my problems dragging me out of the experience as they grew harder to ignore.

I'm happy to concede that some of this stems from my own personal problems. I'm not incredibly attentive and my memory isn't very good, so a lot of the details I forgot might have been easier to keep track of for others. For similar reasons I felt like I had to push through most of the cases in one day, which naturally led to a lot of fatigue especially in the longer cases. Problems that started out feeling small but only got larger and more gnashing as I pushed through, to the point where even as I was watching the (probably really good) climax to the trilogy, I couldn't shake my resulting lack of investment and the feeling that I only finished it up out of obligation more than anything else. All that said, I did have more fun with the games than I'm probably letting on - I think the fact that I cleared three of them despite my brain's impressive resistance to everything these games expect from you speaks for itself.

I was a bit hesistant to post this considering most of it is dedicated to me talking about how challenging I found the silly lawyer games on a highly personal level but I don't think it holds any less 'merit' just because of that. We can try to ignore and talk around it but ultimately our own personalities and preferences are going to affect how we view and engage with anything, and that goes as much for my highly-personal musings as much as somebody else's ostensibly 'objective' review. Besides, I think stupid people deserve a voice as well <3

At risk of beating a dead horse, I think the weakest part of Path of Radiance is easily its relatively low difficulty. To preface, this is from the perspective of a series veteran (“awakening babies” get to call ourselves vets now, how lovely) with a very intimate understanding of what’s ‘good’ in these games, but I started playing with 35% increased enemy growths, later bumped it to 55% and I still felt like I was cruising through most of the mid to lategame chapters. A lot of those chapters lack any sort of pressure to threaten your strong units or to push you to move faster (the latter camp usually being enemy thieves that a good mount can easily reach) and boil down to being very sluggish ‘fields with enemies’ that let you tackle them as risk-free as you want. Combined with how high growths are and how BEXP lets you blitz even further ahead of the curve and I think most of the game lacks bite even when the enemies are boosted to the point where they border on unfair. It has a lot of interesting things going on in theory - side objectives for BEXP, forges being limited to one per chapter, some cool gimmick chapters late on (CH22 is just a pokemon strength puzzle and I kinda love it) - but the game never has quite enough friction to bring out its own potential.

But the draw of PoR mainly comes from the strength of its writing. The majority of the character writing is very realistically grounded in the game’s settings and situations. Every support and base conversation is lovingly woven to bring out subtleties of the cast’s personalities, worldviews, personal struggles, dynamics, their growth or lack thereof. Their personalities are strong but not exaggerated (for the most part) and the interactions are full of little remarks or conversations that feel unexpectedly resonant or meaningful. It’s a lovely cast that’s very difficult not to fall for. While the story itself has a large focus on Fantasy Racism and does stumble a little into its trappings (primarily its tendency to categorise all Kilvans in one particular way), its angle towards it feels very carefully-written and used in a way that attempts to earnestly explore attitudes towards prejudice. It uses its depictions to present the importance of uprooting systemic oppression and breaking the self-perpetuating cultures of hatred that it brings, and how vital it is to do so despite how much of a Herculean task it is in reality. It all further feeds into a broader theme held up by scenes beyond how it presents discrimination - how understanding and righting past wrongs is vital to be able to truly move forward and make meaningful change or growth. It’s the *honesty* of all its explorations, more than anything, that I found so unexpectedly disarming.

It caught me off-guard with how much I ended up liking it, but it’s really easy to see why it’s so beloved. If you don’t mind it being slightly defanged on the strategy end, it’s a lovely, warm and charming game that’s surprisingly confident in its writing.

I've noticed that games like Ico - games that commit their entire being to presenting a particular feeling or mood - are harmed even more by the slightest annoyances, since once the immersion is broken there's a good chance it has no more legs to stand on. At its best, Ico was a beautifully-woven fairytale world portraying the struggle and necessity of absolute trust between two complete strangers. At its worst? It couldn't make me feel anything.

There's a lot about this game that feels intentionally awkward in service of that mood - the difficult part is that the things that felt intentional are the bits I like the best! As an example, the combat isn't exactly "fun", and that seems to be a pretty major sticking point for a lot of others who dropped off the game - but my first few combat encounters were absolutely mesmerising. The weightless swings and the tendency of the shades to dodge and outmaneuver rather than overwhelm gave this delicate feel to the combat that perfectly complemented the aesthetic. But it's the little things I picked up on that *didn't* feel intentional - or specifically not in service of anything - that started to get to me. To use the same example, after a while I started noticing that some combat encounters took a wearily long time; as I later realised, shades that successfully 'capture' Yorda disappear into the same portal and seem to take a long time to reappear. You're bound to get knocked about and have her get dragged down at some point, but the feeling it gave off quickly changed - I'm not feeling tension for Yorda, I'm feeling annoyed because I have to wait around for the shade to come back. Parts of the game also felt like they had a *lot* of combat encounters - combine with the intentionally awkward combat and the previously-mentioned issue and I just groaned whenever I heard the cue.

I do want to make it clear that the combat is far from my only issue, and it was a pretty wide spread of minor annoyances that snapped me out of the experience it tried to convey. I just don't want to come off like I'm bashing this game. I have a lot of respect for it, despite my ultimate decision to drop it - I just wanted to express this feeling I've had welling ever since I tried Rain World last year, and Ico was just a much better vessel for doing so.