2024 is when I decide to really get into the game I've bounced off the most in my entire life, after two Steam refunds and multiple sneers at genre labels on the back of the box specifically tailored to kill me.

The search for the "roguelite I can tolerate the most by being as close to deterministic as possible" ends by embracing the one that is more often flaunted to be a pure RNG-fest, an exercise in putting coins into a jukebox set on "shuffle" and watching the funny lights that happen to pop out that run. Reality is, a top-down cardinal directions shooter with no iframes crutch option (shoutout to EtG) is simply a pretty strong foundation to build your game on top of, and the enemy roster more than enough supplements it with the varied slew of contact, projectile, AoE, delayed, hitscan, chasing etc. monsters threatening space as well as any good action game would.
Concessions have still been made, a noteworthy absent here is enemies anticipating and shooting towards the direction you are currently moving to, the game is clearly welcoming towards the casual gamer's proclivity towards circlestrafing while shooting inwards as the default approach (shoutout to Doom '16). By its randomly generated room nature, it can never properly contend with the handpicked enemy compositions you'd find in a regular action game. What's there is still solid at hell, and the default 1x1 rooms are small enough that their boundaries alone make good arenas to test your skill in weaving between threats, target prioritization, and all other conventional real time skills. The end result is a blazing fast sequence of densely packed encounters that rly make u think & execute before screen scroll is even over, and allow me to reiterate it's so funny this went down in history as The Luck Based One while stuff like Dead Cells me has me repeating 10 minutes of trite every time I want to see something that doesn't bore me. AND you get to put a coin in the funny jukebox too!

The gallery of inscrutably named items enriching the loot pool that make up its main form of progression are what make TBOI infamous, potentially turning your pathetic pea shooter into the most bullshit ms paint rain of death conceivable. I personally don't mind, for now (more on that later), the power gap between the run ending powerups and the purely utilitarian ones, I genuinely would enjoy the overall game much less if it allowed you to consistently become a walking AoE nuke devoid of the minutiae in spacing and fundamentals I've been rewarding with lavish praise until now - what I do enjoy is seeing how every run makes me recalibrate my mental stack on the spectrum between "positioning Isaac well to hit my enemies" and "positioning Isaac well to dodge shit", feeling like I'm really getting my money worth from apparently lame synergies that still allow me to remove either end from the equation. Some of my most successful runs aren't omg ludovico + azazel ggs we take those, but low damage regular-ass shaped projectiles Isaac having spectral, piercing, and homing, allowing me to keep my eyes glued to him and nothing else thereby maximizing evasion. I consider all of this very healthy for the skill ceiling of the game, and it turned what I initially expected to be a "low effort game for when you are sleepy" into a LOCKED IN kinda of mental effort that leaves me wanting for a cigarette, and maybe lying on the bed for a bit, after an hour and a half like the best of 'em.

... That's where my review of the game would've ended a couple of weeks or so ago, being an expanded version of my initial thoughts when I was still early in run progression, halfway through current objective of killing Mom's Heart 10 times (the second "end of run" final boss, arguably the end of the tutorial). I maybe would've added that the game needed some kind of RNG mitigation like a minimum damage floor the lower you go in floors because I want to turn every game into KH2 as it's the stat that most damages a run through sheer bad luck (the game is not beyond this kind of rigging, ie Hush's light pillars are tailored against your current Speed stat so that they are always avoidable). However, the more I progress and unlock final bosses, the more the effects of a bad/unlucky run are felt.

The question that takes up increasingly bigger space in my head is, how does the game incentivize not giving up on those bad runs?

One of the most exciting things about the game is the Devil/Angel Room system. tldr, by doing no damage runs on specific floors you get rewarded with the potentially best shit in the game, starting from the second one. That's another thing I, initially, unequivocally loved, another piece of the puzzle that turns even the lamest, earliest rooms in something requiring proper finesse as bad plays quickly compound into a more miserable time than it needs to be.
If I get hit and miss out on them, my bad, right? Well yes, but no, because only RED HEART damage counts against a no damage floor, and you can find BLUE HEARTS which act like armor above your regular hearts, and, just like regular hearts, each of them takes two hits to deplete. The no hit run turned into a doable 2-hit run. Maybe you are really lucky and drop multiple blue hearts, it's now a 4/6-hit run and now you are coasting so hard it's not even funny. Maybe you get neither and gotta play it straight, and get hit at the very last second of floor 2, and oh, actually there's a pity system and the earlier you get one to spawn the faster you snowball by making others spawn next and you just missed out on all of that, and oh, the rest of the run is also going like shit, and oh, you find yourself flouride staring at the time counter wondering why you shouldn't just spam R(estart) every time you want to play the game hoping the first floor's RNG dumps a bunch of blues on your lap.
How am I incentivized to keep going instead?

From what I gather, you eventually have to gauge how well a run is going by yourself and pick a proper boss to end it. "If it's going great, try for Delirium or the Repentance content, if not, stop at Mega Satan or even the Lamb, if it really sucks cut your losses and end at Sheol/Cathedral". Or something like that. That sounds palatable NOW that I have unlocks to work towards to against any of them, but once I only the very top echelon left, what the fuck do I personally get out of ending a potential run halfway through at Cathedral? I'm the guy who least needs extrinsic rewards such as unlocks/achievements to enjoy the act of play, but 30 minutes to beat a final boss I've already done dozens of times is still 30 minutes.
What incentive do I have to stay on a run that's gonna end early and on a technicality?

I'm not gonna write a proper conclusion because this is a review I'm specifically keeping open for the inevitable reevaluation as my worries are either assuaged or confirmed by what's waiting for me ahead.




Uncharacteristically of me, I'm gonna put up a list of my pain points while I spitball solutions, which ultimately show you just can't take the fight out of the RNG hater.
1) As mentioned, put some kind of damage floor, or implement a pity system for DMG UP items, or have DMG UP on more items, or whatever needed so I don't have to look at 3.50 Damage on floor 8 (afaik the truly busted damage shit comes from specific multiplier items, not from the humble +0.4s)
2) Introduce some kind of mild pity system for bombs and keys for the first three floors (skipping out on MULTIPLE treasure rooms because you get zero (0) keys for ten minutes is just mind numbing)
3) Remove Hard Mode's changes to shops, namely that they can spawn at a lower quality level than what you currently have them upgraded at (they can't even spawn after the halfway point of a run at all, they require resources to enter, sometimes they are not a shop at all but it's a miniboss, they are not guaranteed to have stuff you want in them, is the additional dice roll really needed?)
4) Change how blue hearts interact with Devil/Anger Room chances or change how they spawn on the first floor. My most immediate idea is "just make one and only one always spawn, but hide it behind multiple layers of rocks so the player needs to choose whether it's worth consuming like three bombs when they can soldier on and try their skill instead", but people would just start Restart spamming for plentiful enough bomb drops instead. Plus characters that fly wouldn't care.

As usual with my writing, this review is going to be focused on Final Fantasy VII Remake’s gameplay, an aspect of which I regard highly but might be easy to overlook for most people who play the game, mainly due to the game’s own fault. I did enjoy the game’s other aspects enough that it motivated me to play the original game to completion and I will leave it at that.

I played this game on a whim during the PC release, so I never got to experience the original PS4 release from which Intergrade apparently made many adjustments (changing animation canceling, adding unblockable telegraphs, changing how some materia work, adding quick retries).

When I first played it, I didn’t expect to like the combat much, I was just here to look at pretty characters and listen to good music cuz I was bored by everything else at the time, but was very pleasantly surprised by the combat system in play, so much so, that after reflecting back on it and replaying it multiple times since, I can easily say that this is best new combat system created within the last decade. A focus on resource management, controlling multiple characters at the same time and coordinating their actions, giving each of them compelling action mechanics that can feed into a game plan involving your full party, and nuanced defense compared to most action games make this one stand out from most of its peers. To try to describe why I like this combat system so much, I’d actually first want to talk about my biggest issue with it:

Enemy Health is too low.

Final Fantasy VII Remake’s battle system was designed by Teruki Endo, a Capcom game designer who has worked on the Monster Hunter series since Monster Hunter Tri. Given that Monster Hunter contains my favorite combat in video games bar none, it’s not a surprise I ended up liking this game so much. There are some shared elements in the design enough to make me suspect something after fighting the Type-0 Behemoth. For one, both of these games go out of their way to de-emphasize i-frames as a defensive mechanic, with Monster Hunter having very few to make you to consider many variables when trying to i-frame attacks, and FF7R choosing to have literally none, thus forcing you to heavily consider which attacks are dodgable and which you are better off blocking, and making your choice of direction and situation really matter when it comes to how you use the roll. The current trend of action games thrives on timing-based mechanics and challenges, this game and Monster Hunter are the only modern action games to my knowledge that deliberately make it so that good timing can’t nullify most attacks in the game, and that’s a breath of fresh air unlike any other for me.

To get back to my criticism of the game’s balancing, another similarity is that both of these games are designed with tanky enemies in mind. Much of the depth is placed in the realm of damage optimization. When the enemies are big damage sponges, players are forced to actually interact with the mechanics that allow them to maximize the damage they get from their openings. It’s an easy way to add a lot of depth to fights and make them really replayable as you learn how to take advantage of the patterns better to set up the perfect punishes. Whereas Monster Hunter creates the depth in its damage-dealing through complex weapon movesets that require precision and monster behavior knowledge to take advantage of, FF7R does it through a bevy of system mechanics that govern enemy states; a Stagger system that borrows heavily from FF13 but adjusting its dynamic to be more suited for a real time action game. However, when the enemies die too fast, most of that depth does not come into play.

So let’s get to the nitty gritty: How does this combat system work and how does high health make the game better?

The core mechanic of the game is ATB, a real time translation of the ATB system from the original where you waited for a bar to fill up before being able to perform any actions (spells, items, so on). In Remake, instead you fill up the ATB bar by controlling a character and hitting enemies or blocking attacks. Your choice of character to control is also the choice of who you are giving ATB to, as the other characters only gain ATB slowly when not being controlled. Carried over from the original, defensive and offensive actions both compete for ATB, but with Remake being more of an action game, damage is generally avoidable (but not always) and thus allowing yourself to lose a lot of HP means losing attack opportunities in the future with spending ATB to heal, as well as Mana which is a limited resource on Hard Mode.

I find it important to note the value added by attacks not always being avoidable in this system. Most action games stick to completely avoidable damage because heals/HP often represent a number of mistakes you can make before a Game Over, and healing commitments ala Souls usually just means needing to miss on an attack opportunity before commencing with the regular game, which is good for tension. But in FF7R’s case, the fact that healing takes from a dynamic resource which you actively create with your in-game actions gives it enough depth that it justifies having enemies be able to pepper you with chip damage or giving some bosses unavoidable attacks that make you consider protective spells and pressure you to keep your characters always topped up in health.It makes the resource management all that much more demanding when damaging enemies properly isn't the only thing you are thinking about, and the game goes the extra step of giving you a variety of different healing abilities with varying benefits and costs, allowing you to adjust the way you need to play around Health as a resource. An example would be the difference in using Cure, the regular heal that consumes ATB only heals one character at a time, or Pray, which requires two ATB but uses no mana and acts as a wide heal, letting you save mana for other actions but requiring a bigger commitment to use and smaller healing numbers offset by being an AOE heal.

To get into offensive uses of ATB, it’s mainly used to interact with the Stagger system and it’s what makes using all the characters effectively so important. The basic rules of this system is that all enemies have a Stagger bar under their regular health bar, which starts empty and when filled up puts enemies into a Stagger state (BURST in the Japanese version of the game) where the damage dealt is multiplied for a short period of time. The way in which the player increases the Stagger bar is something that can change completely depending on the enemy, but generally to really Stagger efficiently you need to put the enemy in Pressure state (HEAT in Japanese) where the enemy takes multiplied stagger damage. For most enemies hitting them enough or using elemental weaknesses can put them in Pressure state, and then using certain abilities that deal high stagger damage puts them in Stagger very quickly, and from then you use your pure high damage abilities to take advantage of the multiplier…
But an issue arises! Using your ATB bar to induce the Stagger state as quickly as possible often means you don’t have any ATB left to actually do much damage during your short burst window as your regular attacks don’t actually do much damage, making it feel wasteful and causing you to go back to square one trying to fill the stagger bar again. Careful management of all characters is how you play around this.
An example situation early in the game would be to have Cloud induce the Pressure state with his flurry of attacks, but not before you are sure Barret has a bar of ATB ready to hit them with Focused Shot once Pressure is induced, while Cloud saves his bar to deal big damage in the burst window. Another option would be delaying when you induce the stagger, use character specific mechanics or materia setups that give you additional ATB when you need them, and many other possibilities. But the point is that you can easily overspend ATB to achieve Stagger, and the ways you can prevent this and balance this create very compelling moment-to-moment decision making and planning.

All the characters have extra mechanics that add layers to this Stagger system and ATB management. Barret has a big attack on a cooldown which gives an ATB on use, a free bar on short notice whenever needed while the cooldown is up, but it also makes you constantly need to keep Barret’s cooldown in your head while you switch to the other characters who are more efficient at dealing damage on their own so you can be ready to switch back to him when the time is needed. Tifa has a system where she can buff herself and expend those buffs to perform attacks that increase the Stagger damage multiplier, making you need to spend ATB stock her up with buffs before the Stagger is induced and having her do her attacks early in the Burst window in order to give other characters the chance take advantage of the increased damage.

But here’s the thing…optimizing ATB usage, becoming proficient at staggering enemies, and needing to consistently learn how to avoid attacks before their damage burns through your MP reserves isn’t something that will matter if the enemy dies too fast. For FF7R’s normal mode, that is the case most of the time, and even in its Hard Mode I’d say enemy health is still too low.

I think what I find amusing about this flaw is how it really is just enemy health that is the issue. The damage they deal is fine, the underlying mechanical design of nearly all the enemies and bosses is excellent, and the systems of the game scale very well. Installing a mod on the PC version that simply doubles the enemy health, making no other changes, actually makes the game a lot better in my opinion while still feeling very balanced and well paced combat wise. It shows how strong the core design of this game is that you can simply beef up stats like that and the skill ceiling is more than high enough for it to work, giving you the room to push yourself and letting you actually get exposed to the design of the enemies when you need to contend with them for much longer.

I get that this combat system can be pretty difficult to play properly and apparently people complained about bosses taking too long even in the vanilla game normal mode but It’s a massive shame that the game locks hard mode behind a full playthrough and it doesn’t give you many variables to adjust your own difficulty, since level ups are forced and your damage/health is always scaling with it. This wouldn’t be a problem if more difficulty options were present, but if the game really didn’t want extra difficulties, items that limit XP growth could have been cool too. Regardless of this, I still loved the game’s gameplay, and the existence of many challenge mods on PC allows the game to realize its full potential and I really recommend trying 2x HP even on your first playthrough.

Now I wanna get to the enemy design. While the regular encounters and enemies can be very fun too, the game shines brightest during boss fights, of which there are many. The game demonstrates very strongly how the mechanics of staggering change heavily per encounter with its first boss, the Scorpion Sentinel, who changes to a different method of stagger in each of its 4 phases. Initially it works like a regular enemy who just needs to be hit with regular attacks and thunder magic until it goes into Pressure state, before using the ATB you stored to use staggering attacks in the pressure window. Then in the second phase you need to hit a weakpoint on its behind to break a shield that makes attacks bounce off otherwise, successfully breaking the shield puts the boss in a very long Pressure state until the shield regens, allowing you to get multiple Staggers if you use the window correctly. The third phase has him only entering Pressure after performing a highly telegraphed laser attack, making you stock up bar in preparation for the attack and take advantage of Barret’s ability to use two ATB for single powerful attack that fills up their Stagger bar, compared to Cloud who cannot fit in two ATB attacks during the Pressure window to stagger the boss. In the fourth phase the boss begins healing itself and requires you to break its legs in order to induce Stagger and stop its self-heal. It’s a crazy demonstration of mechanical variety and maybe one that happens far too early as most players don’t really get the system yet and sadly the balancing means you can beat it with all this stuff going over your head.

This stuff only gets expanded on with more unique and demanding gimmicks. Two notable ones I wanna mention in this review are Hell House and The Valkyrie.

Hell House requires the player to hit the house with elemental magic based on which attack its using, as each attack it performs will change its attunement to a different element. The interesting thing about this is that often the character being attacked does not have the time to cast said magic after dodging the elemental attacks, so it’s up to the other character to cast the spell while the aggro’d one dodges, meaning your opening is not after the attack but during it. The player actually very directly controls the aggro of enemies in this game since they will always target the character you are controlling upon the start of their attack, and due to the different defensive options available to each character, you have to be very careful about when you control a character as Aerith or Barret have much more limited defense to trade off for their ranged attacks and utility, but you still need to find the right time to control them and generate ATB with them but switching back to a more mobile character in time for the next attack.

The Valkyrie is a very interesting boss in Hard Mode, its a flying robot (with an amazing boss track from guest Ace Combat composer) whose final phase adds an orbital laser that tracks the currently controlled character and detonates upon catching up to them, which is something you’re supposed to use to your advantage as the Valkyrie also shields itself during this phase preventing it from taking much damage or stagger but one can break the shield by hitting it with its own laser. On normal mode its a fairly easy task of simply letting the laser catch up to you during the attacks that leave the Valkyrie floating still, made more interesting by the fact that all of the robot’s attacks control space by leaving sleeping gas clouds and fire spots around the arena limiting the way you can move while dodging its attacks and escaping the laser. However on Hard Mode, the behavior of the orbital laser changes completely, instead it now refuses to detonate even when it reaches your position until the Valkyrie hits the controlled character with another one of its attacks and locking said character in hit/block stun, and the laser will detonate inflicting heavy amounts of unavoidable extra damage. It creates a much more interesting dynamic where you either need to forget about trying to bait the laser entirely, needing to rely on much harder tactic of trying to punish it during certain attack animations that turn on Pressure state, or you can also be creative and try to give Barret a buffet of defensive materia and buffs and to allow him to tank the laser at full health and score a stagger that way, but setting up the situation for that is not easy either and requires heavy investment and sacrifices in other areas.

These are just some of the examples of the creative boss design in this game, but there is so many that test you in so many ways, creating new problems with a system that offers many creative and compelling solutions for you to execute. I would be here all day if I were to write about all of them.

Instead I will move on to touch on the Materia system and my few gripes with the game.

Materia serves as your way of having many different builds and possible playstyles for each character, changing your available toolkit and stats to a considerable degree. The most interesting materia are the ones that let you change the flow of ATB in combat, there are ones that allow a character to spread ATB to other characters by spending ATB themselves, or get a free bar by performing three different ATB commands in sequence. Paired materia and its rarity can also lead to interesting playstyle changes, like one that makes a specific character always do a spell of your choice automatically regardless of their available ATB gauge after the player-controlled character does an ATB command.

As far as magic spells go, I really appreciate how the different magics have different properties attached with variable base damage, making them useful for more than just hitting an elemental weakness. Ice is a delayed bomb attack meaning you can’t use it on a moving target without a plan but it deals the highest damage making it useful even on things that aren’t weak to it, Fire is shot as a projectile and thus the angle needs to be considered if you want to hit a certain part of a boss, while Lightning is hitscan and strikes from the sky, allowing it to hit any enemy part with perfect accuracy but it does the least damage as a tradeoff.

In the Intergrade version, the game handles the need to restart fights to change your materia setup to suit the battle pretty well, giving you a quick restart button for every individual fight. However, what sucks is that the game doesn’t have a Materia preset system which I think the game would really benefit from, having to re-arrange your team’s entire materia setup can be kind of a drag sometimes and it would be great if one could save presets and reuse them quickly.

I also don’t love how the game chooses to teach its enemy mechanics, which involves you casting Assess to get a brief description of the strategy you are supposed to use against them. Sometimes even this description is very vague and not helpful. I honestly think this game would benefit from Doom Eternal style tutorialization, which might be an unpopular opinion but I really think for a game as complex as this one having prompts that give you a general idea of what you’re supposed to do works out a lot better than hoping players bumble their way into understanding the mechanics. I also think many of the move descriptions are lacking and make it easy to miss out on the extra mechanics and nuances of each ability, which you can actually find on the Final Fantasy fandom.com wiki which populates its gameplay pages for the game with detailed info taken from the Japanese Ultimania (god bless whoever translated all that info and put it there). Like did you know that Barrett can press his ability button to cancel the recovery of every ATB command with a quick reload that cuts a couple seconds from his cooldown, or that the transition animation from Operator mode to Punisher mode contains a guardpoint that allows Cloud to his Punisher Mode counter attack without needing to be already in Punisher? There are a lot of hidden details to every character’s mechanics.

One final gripe I’m gonna mention is the aerial combat, though its a minor one as not many enemies fly in the first place. It feels pretty awkward and usually your goal is to use ranged attacks and put them in the ground anyways but I wanna bring it up because the sequel to this game, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has already been showcased and is overhauling that aspect greatly, making it so characters cannot go into the air automatically by attacking flying enemies and instead you must use specific new synergy attacks or ATB moves that put your character in the air and allow them to go for air combos and dodges while also giving them the ability to cast many abilities in mid-air. One of the bosses they’ve shown explicitly takes advantage of this and is a flying boss from the original that before acted as a way to make you use long range materia, now acts as a way to force you to use all the new aerial combat mechanics to hit it. It’s already making me giddy with excitement for all the potential these mechanics bring.

I really love this game, so much that I find it difficult to write about and describe properly with how many ways it layers its mechanics to create the kind of fun I enjoy. I think it’s already very polished and deep as is, but I am excited to see how they will be refined and expanded upon in the upcoming entries. And if you didn’t feel this way about the combat when you first played this game then I hope reading this has given you some insight into the sheer amount of quality design and inventiveness that I find hiding in its combat system….now if only they would give us better difficulty options in the next game.

andy blunden writes the following in Stalinism: Its Origin and Its Future:

"The bureaucracy, owing to its conditions of life, aspired to ownership of the means of production, but was excluded from this by Soviet law. Nevertheless, like all bureaucracies, they used their position to gain the greatest possible freedom from the control from the population."

blunden identifies the bureaucracy of a stalinist system as wielding the instruments of political violence on behalf of the proletariat (who won said instruments via revolutionary upheaval of a capitalist social order) while simultaneously negotiating greater and greater autonomy to conduct the state away from proletariat desires. this is specifically attributed to the isolation of the soviet state and the failure of international socialism in the wake of the russian revolution. when operating in a capitalist global economy and with the need to establish industrialized productive forces in a relatively undeveloped country, the bureaucracy organized markets and rigid economic control in order to create competitive parity with its neighbors.

these threads are woven tightly throughout your days as immigration officer in arstotzka. it presents the material contradiction at the heart of socialist bureaucratic rule cleanly: the regulatory actions of the bureaucracy can themselves be twisted into commodities. the ideal value of the officer's choice to accept or deny an immigrant's paperwork lies in its judgment on the fitness of a person to enter or exit a country; a binary moral evaluation of someone as a refugee, traveler, or potential productive labor vs an ideological dissident, terrorist, or purveyor of bourgeoisie exploitation. when this receives an exchange valuation in the form of "credits," a dialectic relation emerges. the need to keep one's family afloat in the face of daily expenses turns the throughput of the line into the driver of decision-making while the just impetus behind the officer's duty becomes less and less relevant. the game counterweighs this somewhat by instantly scoring you on your decisions, but it's only able to do so in terms of factual, unnuanced contradictions. forged seals on entry permits and stolen visas are smashed into the same category as those with minor typos in their region of origin and identification cards just a day or two expired. any means of quantifying the ideal behind the action of immigration squashes it into a degenerated new interpretation.

with this transformation of the action of immigration approval into a commodity, the state and its handlers are able to leverage it as such. when asian-expy country impor imposes trade sanctions on arstotzka, the latter fires back by cutting off access to its borders, withholding a service identical to its rival's cessation of the trade of physical goods. a fellow guard gets kickbacks off of detainments and cuts you into his share, giving the player the opportunity to reap rewards from detaining immigrants for virtually any small paperwork infraction. even terrorist attacks become easy paydays for the player, changing from unfortunate interruptions in your commission-based salary to a sigh of relief as a suicide bomber rushing the outpost is surgically eliminated by your hand. in all of these instances, the meaning behind these bureaucratic, theoretically necessary actions are gamified through their transformation into commodities. even the physical passports themselves are commodified by the end of the game, where surreptitiously confiscating above-board foreign passports gives your family the opportunity to create forgeries and emigrate into a different country.

in this way, the game forces the player's hand by accelerating a bureaucratization of the mind. I denied entry to a woman because she lacked an ID card even with a valid domestic visa; I immediately rationalized this because her excuse ("I left the country before ID cards were distributed") seemed incongruent with a supposed history that I had literally no basis for. at the same time, I applauded myself for making "morally correct" choices to weigh out my perpetuation of injustice, such as letting a woman join her husband even when missing her entry permit or denying entry to a pimp trafficking women through your checkpoint. in essence, the existence of the service I provided as a commodity gave the illusion of perpetual justice when I made discrete choices that defied the imposed exchange value, buoying the contradiction between moral ideal and commodified existence in the process. any sense of personal gratification off of these actions stemmed entirely from the fact that I wielded complete control over these people's lives, even if I occasionally offered benevolence. it succinctly shows the inability for meaningful revolutionary action by a single actor when perpetuating a regressive mode of a production. rather, only organized methods can viably allow for a true, international struggle for a classless society.

mechanically the game perfectly conjures the claustrophobic doldrums of work giving way to dull bouts of relief at the absence of any citation. chump sums it up rather tidily in their own review. virtually never a possible contradiction that doesn't appear during regular play at least once or twice, encouraging thorough play while simultaneously rushing you along.

I only played an hour at a time but no matter what I always left with my eyes hurting from getting so focused, and my ears needing great silence for a while. This is kind of the point, it's a good thing. Thumper does absolute fucking violence on your senses, adapt to the rhythm or die. The game only bonuses you for being Perfect, meaning the worse you do on the track, the less it'll give you a chance to live. You have to be fit to survive. The end is great too, although, I think by the last hour I had numbed to the survival. I actually left the final boss feeling a bit lukewarm! I think Thumper relies too heavily on its repetition. It repeats to grind you, yeah, but then once you get used to it there's not really a trick it has left for you. And mastering Thumper isn't quite rewarding, because the mechanics when you strip away the aesthetic and that compounding pain, is too simple. I really wish the game did SO much more to break you, not simply by difficulty, but by overloading. My favorite moments were not in the compounding overwhelming synethesia, but simply not being able to even use my peripheral vision to figure out what to do next in the track because I was hanging on to doing the next steps JUST RIGHT so i was no longer hanging on a twig. Suffuse this game with more danger. I hope there's an inspired successor to this that goes that extra mile.

Despite being sort of a return trip to me I honestly didn't do most of these puzzles myself, I sequence broke really really really early in. So a lot of this was a first time!

And it's still soooo great, constantly fluid and intuitive. The sort of lesson culture also being a double for hints at what the puzzles are asking from you as well as the names of the rooms is a really Super Cool thing that I love about this. Said lessons do have a sort of pseudo-intellectual teacher veneer to it I think but it ends up working here? I think if it didn't have such a soft hand behind you it would feel repulsive but it also helps that the whole aesthetic is this very timely 3d flash game lighting/aliasing so it's earnestly put together in the end.

I love how everything is simple yet incredibly pushy on opening your perspective. Mechanics do not interact with each other persay but lessons carry over, to where what you're building is a sort of mental toolkit and actions to keep at heart. Progression is actually rather linear as every new mechanic will quite literally make an arrow to go next on the ground. But even if you get lost the game doubles as an exploration to find new lessons which will also help you with the dedicated path. I love that sort of soft structure and that result still evokes feelings of mountain climbing and a subtle 'journey' that culminates in your mind by the final step by step challenge.

The really only striking issue in my head here is the scope holds itself back. It can't build towards anything too complex and its ending note is really little to chew on. In a way that helps it from not feeling so "ooo what could it meannn" and more comfort piecemeal but it's always walking just at the edge of that tightrope from being truly inventive. Solid time, and honestly it just slots righttttt into my logical thought process for puzzles so it being an easy clear was a back to back serotonin hit. Can't really complain after that.

Dark Souls has strokes of brilliance, Ornstein and Smough is now one of my favourite boss fights ever, remembering how to navigate the world is a fun puzzle in a would-be-otherwise mindless game, and Undead Burg is a great starting area.

Dark Souls also spends many hours being absolutely terrible, having no respect for its player's time, and feeling wholly unplaytested.

The start of the game is definitely its strongest run, Undead Burg is a treat to move through and learn the way around, and I was having a good time up until Capra Demon. The combination of a boss that can easily kill you in the first few seconds until you have spent the time and runs to learn how to deal with the dogs, along with an either long or tedious run back is a horrible experience. Which highlights why I don't think the runs back to bosses after losing to them works. Most runs back consist of either taking some elevator or running a long distance without much conflict, or running past a whole load of enemies as you scootch your way through the fog door with their attacks swinging through you. I don't see how either is engaging gameplay. In the case of the Capra Demon fight, it only served to make the experience more tedious, drawn out, and frustrating. I did not feel like my time was being valued at any point running back to a fog door in this game. I understand the concept behind having to run back to the boss, but at least for anyone who can make it through the basic enemies and levels but has yet to learn the boss, I think its a complete failure and only serves to waste your time.

One of the reasons why Undead Burg works well for me is how long you stay in it, and have to keep moving through it in different ways to go to other places. This, I feel, is not really a factor for most areas in the game. Areas like Blighttown, Depths, and The Catacombs feel more like highways that you move through once or twice to get to the new area, especially after the Lordvessel makes their endpoints accessible. I wasn't really able to get any idea of Blightowns layout since I just made one easy descend, killed the boss, and then made one easier ascend. To go through Blightown again would be the same experience as my first time through, even though I had only seen it for the first time like two days ago. I wish these areas had reasons to go back to them. Darkroot Garden is seems like it would be a similar sort of area, but since I had to go there three separate times I've actually connected with it.

I can only really say that I like maybe three bosses in this game. Most everything dies too quickly and has nothing scary about their moveset to ever really give that much of a challenge. I cant say that most fights are more engaging than Asylum Demon (hell they literally copy this boss twice !,) and some feel like they flat out don't work and were never playtested. I can see Qualaag's slashes whiffing when you're close just another tutorial for staying close to the enemy being good, but why the hell does literally every attack of Sif miss? I can't imagine From testing this boss, getting in range to hit him, having every attack of his miss, and then feeling complete in their work. Far too much of this game is complete jank bullshit for me to really engage with it (like getting grabbed by Gaping Dragon without him ever playing any sort of attack animation).

There are simply not enough redeeming factors for this game to make the slog that it was worthwhile beyond zeitgeist.

part of the reason I love old-school sega games is because I just love the way their games feel. games designed by sega straddle the line between nuanced, logical physics and exaggerated, arcade-y physics with aplomb. the sega rally series captures this perfectly, where the terrain material and topography are intimately factored into the performance of your car while at the same time you can perfectly drift around corners and fly over hills with a bit of squash-and-stretch going on. the tightrope here is between making the player feel like they're in total control of the car (with the consequences that result) while simultaneously hand-waving the internal mechanisms that limit player expression. the early monkey ball games are the same way: the level design is punishing yet it's addicting because any strategy you devise can probably work thanks to how controllable the ball is. it's why I've stuck with this series so long: from barely making it past beginner as a young child, to learning the extra levels as a high schooler, to finally conquering master and master extra in both games as I whittled away time during a global lockdown.

that being said, I didn't want to go into this game with unrealistic hopes. I knew the original engine was not being used here, so I figured it probably would be a bit stiffer and maybe a little hand-holdy. after all, this remake is partially meant to introduce new players and give them leverage to actually succeed in comparison to the original games, where over half of the levels were tucked behind some serious execution barriers. when I popped it in for the first time this mostly held true: I ran smb1 beginner (newly christened as "casual") without much issue. it wasn't until I touched smb1 expert immediately after...

167 deaths. 167 deaths without including expert extra no less, which I accidentally voided myself out of thanks to misreading the helper option menu that pops up automatically (protip to UI designers: don't make both your selected and unselected options bright colors!!!). these levels are no cakewalk, let's be clear, but I know these levels by the back of my hand. I've 1cc'd expert + expert extra in the original many many times, and even now out of practice I can manage 10 - 15 deaths. it just shocked me that this game felt so different, and so much less precise. in a lot of ways it felt like the original levels popped into Unity with a basic sphere physics plugin, and the results were not pretty. my roommates (also long-time monkey ball fans) also immediately wrote off the game after playing it. even though we had been so hype about finally getting an HD monkey ball - a monkey ball game that wasn't garbage and didn't require us to pull out our CRT - all of our energy immediately dissapated once we got our hands on the game.

so what exactly is the issue here? basically everyone agrees that the physics in this game are noticably different from that of the original, but I want to delve into why. after playing this game for quite a bit (all of story mode, up through master mode in smb1, all the deluxe levels, and poking around into other stuff here and there) I think I've narrowed it down to frictional differences between the two games. for those of you who haven't taken high school physics in some time, let me present the equation f = μN, where f is the frictional force applied parallel to surface we are moving upon (usually horizontally), μ is the coefficient of friction, and N is the normal force applied perpendicular to the surface (hence the name "normal"). before your eyes glaze over, let me connect these to some intangible game-feel statements:

coefficient of friction: this refers to how difficult it is to move over a material; for example, it accounts for why it's more difficult to slide your coffee table when it's on a shaggy carpet versus a finished wood floor. as it relates to the how it feels in this game, I'll borrow a quote from my roommate when he was playing the game: "it feels like every single floor is made out of glass"

normal force: this refers to how hard the object is pushing down on the surface, which in this case mainly refers to the gravitational force the object exerts. this scales with the mass, so we can think of it as how much the object weighs; a cardboard box is a lot easier to move than a full wardrobe. this affects the game-feel, as my girlfriend eloquently put: "it's like there's no monkey at all, and you're just rolling around a hollow ball"

so tldr: there's a severe lack of friction in this game in comparison to the original. in the original game, the ball was weighty, and the friction on the goal posts or ledges allows you to grip them easily (and a bit unrealistically for that matter). these things are boons to the player that go a long way towards making impossible looking courses just barely doable with practice. here the stages refuse to budge when you try to force them to, and you end up without a lot of the gravity-defying tricks you could initially pull off. I'll give some examples of situations that pop up that break under the new physics:

stopping the ball: this took a lot of adjustment for me, and while it's just a matter of relearning muscle memory it very noticeably makes some stages harder. in the original game you could stop pretty much on a dime (unless you were rolling to the point of sparks flying), whereas here the ball will sliiiiiiiide all over the place unless you very deliberately deccelerate. this is more of a general issue but a good example of where this becomes frustrating is Twin Cross, where you're expected to roll across a series of 1x1 tiles in diagonal lines. you need to keep a certain level of speed up to avoid falling off when crossing the corners of two tiles, but then also must deccelerate at the right moment to keep your ball from flying off at the end of a line (which itself is just a 1x1 tile floating in space). Edge Master also becomes more annoying than its prior appearances thanks to this issue, as staying within the bounds of the upward face of the first rotation becomes very precise given how much speed you gain when the stage rotates.

narrow lines: approach a ledge in this game and you'll notice that the bottom of your ball will just be barely close to the ledge when your character starts trembling and attempting to balance themself. compare that to the original, where the characters won't start said animation until their feet are literally touching the ledge, far closer to the center of mass for the ball. you basically have a lot less wiggle room on the edge, and it can become very apparent in certain levels that depend on this. kudos to the dev team for adjust Catwalk to accommodate, but on the flipside look at Invasion. I'd say this level was middle of the road in terms of its original difficulty, but here it's fucking brutal towards the end, where you're expected to navigate in a curve on a ledge around staggered bumpers. comments I've read on early gameplay capture on youtube were quick to point to this stage as one of the biggest difficulty bumps for a remade stage.

slopes: friction is the reason why we don't instantly slide down slopes in real life, hence why we use snowboards and skis instead of just standing on mountains waiting to gain speed. however, in monkey ball the goal is usually not to slide down slopes unless you're explicitly supposed to, and many levels depend on you being able to balance yourself on slopes either while waiting for a cycle or when speeding through before you have a chance to fall off. Drum and Twister back-to-back in smb1's ice world were originally breather stages, where you simply had to keep yourself balanced in brief intervals before reaching the goal. here they became much more precise than I feel was intended, as even slightly moving from the narrow top of the curve on either of these levels will send you careening to your death with no recourse. from smb2 I can absolutely not forget to mention Warp... oh my god Warp. this level was already surprisingly difficult in smb2, given that the flatter part of the curves here are covered with bumpers and maintaing yourself on a slope is already a trickier technique to learn (I see a lot of more casual players get stuck on Floor Bent from smb1 for this reason). here it's nigh impossible to do thanks to how little grip you have. Cross Floors is another smb2 example that requires a lot of practice in the original and here feels terrible to attempt.

centripedal force: some of you may have seen charity donation recepticles shaped like curved funnels (I've seen them in american malls at least), where you can put a coin into a slot and it will spiral around the funnel down and down until falling through a hole at the bottom, much like water spinning in a drain. there are multiple areas in the original monkey ball games that utilize this phenomenon to great effect, and it relies on the friction of the slope or wall that the ball is on to keep it from dropping out. however, when I first played Spiral Hard in this game, I was very surprised to find that I could not simply drop in as I was accustomed to, as even with a decent amount of speed the ball does not grab onto the slope and instead falls off. it took me several tries to successfully drop in, where I had to come in with an exceptional amount of speed, heavily tilt against the slope to avoid falling off, try to balance out before I lost the speed I needed to stay in, and then continue on my way. this level is already difficult enough as is, with a path that narrows the further it spirals down and a goal that is difficult to aim for, so I don't see why dropping in needs to also require a lot of set up when it didn't originally. the end of Stamina Master is also much more difficult than before thanks to this, as the spiral towards the end becomes nearly vertical, and I would often drop out of it completely before I reached the goal. the pipe stages also seem to struggle with keeping you moving, such as the smb1 expert extra stage Curl Pipe, where the second hill virtually always stopped me dead in my tracks (though I've had this happen occasionally in the original as well).

this would be a good time for me to also mention how the camera has changed significantly from the original games. the camera used to rather aggressively stick to the ball's back, whereas here the camera will follow your stick without really staying glued to a particular orientation on the ball. to solve this there is now camera control on the right-stick... this sort of defeats the purpose of the original one-giant-banana-joystick control scheme, but I'm sure plenty of players will feel more comfortable with it there. the big issue here comes when trying to line up straight lines: in the original game it was very doable to turn in place with the camera lining up directly with the center of the monkey's back. here it's already hard enough to turn in place given that you slide around with so little provocation, and now you must center the camera manually using... non-analog controls? yes, the right stick does not seem to have a real gradient of turning from my time playing with it, giving it little more functionality than d-pad camera controls. you can at least adjust camera sensitivity, but I feel like you're forced to sometimes go in and change it per stage, ie high sensitivity for when you need to turn quickly or steadily on fast stages, and low sensitivity when you line up precise shots. the latter was a necessity on Exam-C (a particularly infamous stage) and the aforementioned Twin Cross, as well as Checker, and it made all three of these stages much more tedious than I would've liked. sometimes the camera just breaks entirely, most notably on Centrifugal from smb2, where the speed of rotation in the giant wheel of death causes the camera to get stuck outside the level geometry, or flip in front of you to mess up the angle you're tilting the stage in.

I wanted to include this diatribe about the physics in here just to have some sort of document with the issues I've noticed with this game, and as to provide a detailed summary of why and where the physics are different without just saying they are. players who know the levels above might have noticed that they're virtually all pulled from expert and master: this is because the beginner and advanced difficulties (casual and normal) are totally playable regardless of the changes. that is not to say they aren't still difficult (I still have not beaten Polar Large in this game and, much to my consternation, can not even figure out a good route through it for some reason) but if you're coming in just to fuck around a bit, play through part of story mode, enjoy the cameos, and play minigames with friends, you're not going to notice the different game-feel to the extent of it being overbearing. on the flipside, I do feel justified in presenting my opinions on this in pedantic detail because beginner and advanced only make up 108 stages out of the 258 total stages between the non-DX games, which is to say that for over half of the game you will likely notice what I mentioned above unless you have never played the originals.

regardless of everything listed above, I've actually rated this one a bit higher than super monkey ball deluxe, a collection that still has the original physics intact. my rationale: banana mania is an amazing package overall. what honestly frustrates me more than anything about this game is that it perfectly captures the features and content I'd want in a remake of these games without the tight gameplay I originally adored in the originals. whereas deluxe (on ps2 mind you) was a poorly performing mess with overly-long course structure and a lack of improvements over smb2, this game is packed to the brim with extra modes, great cameo characters, and accesibility features. not everything really hits, but I appreciate how much effort and material there is here with so little development time.

the main game specifically deliminates between the first two games for its courses, unlike deluxe where stages from both games were interleaved. each course is 1:1 with their original set of stages, with extra stages now being unlocked if all the regular stages were completed without the helper functions active. master mode for smb1 is now accessible just by completing expert without the 1cc requirement or even extra stages being finished. there are also marathon modes for each, which while not as wild as the ultimate course from deluxe, still are great additions. stages in both have been rebalanced, with the original layouts being included in a special purchaseable game mode. overall the rebalances were really well done: probably the most notable for me was Arthopod, a stage from smb2 that was complete bullshit originally and has now been made less annoying to deal with by far by removing gaps. virtually all of smb1 master was rebalanced as well, with Stamina Master getting a much-needed nerf to its infamous middle 1x1 moving tile balancing section (which balances out the more difficult first and last sections a bit). the other master changes honestly make some of the stages like Dodge Master and Dance Master trivial, but I don't really mind considering that the requirements for obtaining master are less restrictive now. other changes are more subtle, such as adding curved inlets to the titular launchers in Launchers (which honestly don't help very much) or an extra 30 seconds for the timer in Exam-C (which helps an insane amount).

there's a story mode identical to that of smb2, with truncated cutscenes in mime retelling the lovably bizarre plot of the original. personally I don't mind this change, as the story isn't really that important or complicated. I'm a little puzzled at why they didn't use the expanded worlds of deluxe's story mode, but it's not a big difference either way. as I mentioned prior stages that were changed have their original versions present in a standalone mode, and all of the deluxe-exclusive levels have a mode as well. playing through them all back to back, I have to say I still like them for the most part, as there's a lot of great ideas present (maybe one too many maze stages tho). there are also a few modes that remix the levels. golden banana mode is probably the best of these, where you need to collect every banana in a stage in order to clear it. this actually changes how the stages need to be approached quite a bit. the opposite of this is dark banana mode, where any banana touched instantly causes a game over. while the idea is good in concept, they're designed for a level of precision I just don't think exists in this game. finally there's reverse mode, where certain levels start you at the goal and make you work your way back to the starting point. the best level of these is Free Throw, where they make you throw yourself backwards onto the starting platform in a cool twist. the others mainly just require you to tread the same path as whatever the hardest goal is, so they come across as rather redundant.

minigames are also back in full force, with all of the features from deluxe retained to my knowledge. the big thing that turned me off here was the lack of alternating multiplayer, which even in a patch could be such a trivial addition. I bought this on ps4, where I don't really have extra controllers to work with, and it's frustrating that my roommates and I can't play monkey target or billiards by passing the controller around. overall the minigames seem to be pretty much as I remember them from the old games, with all the customization you could want to boot. I can't really pretend something like monkey race isn't scuffed as fuck, but they were in the originals as well so it's pretty faithful. all that I played other than monkey target look very solid... monkey target is honestly a "Made in Dreams"-ass game here, but it's so annoying in its original form that I'll let it slide here. most of the other games here I can just experience via yakuza or really don't care that much about, beyond perhaps trying to go for completion later down the line.

I also wanted to briefly mention the art design for both the menus and the levels, which are absolutely phenomenal. beyond some UI nitpicks I mentioned earlier I think the interface is very clear and clean, and feels like an accurate translation from the older games to a modern style. the world designs are really gorgeous, and blew me away with their accuracy. I really would not have thought a quickie project for RGG would capture the style and detail of the original worlds so well in HD, but they absolutely nailed it here. the banana blitz-era monkey designs I'm not crazy about but they do the job fine, and the cutesy redesigns of kiryu and beat are so fun; I still can't believe they're in the game!! the music has all been remixed as well, though I personally think they're pretty middling overall. the original soundtracks are legendary so I definitely didn't expect them to live up here, but they really veer into tacky EDM territory more often than I would like.

finally, I wanted to bring up the accessibility options, which are much-needed additions for newer fans looking to try the series out. you can use helper functions in each level to double the timer as well as open up a very useful slow motion mode for the cost of receiving no points upon clearing the level and disabling the extra stages for the course. I messed around with these a bit and I think they do a good job of covering the bases for someone learning a given stage. if stage is too taxing, you can also pay 2000 banana coins to mark it as cleared. which is a hefty toll but honestly worth it when poking around in the special modes to skip annoying levels that would take a lot of practice. finally, the jump from banana blitz has been added in as a purchaseable item, and surprisingly it doesn't void trophies/extra stuff like the helper functions (though it can't be used in ranking mode). when watching trailers I thought I wouldn't touch this at all but I decided to try it out when struggling on Warp and wow did it really save my ass. because the jump wasn't present in the original games, it opens up a lot of ways to break previously challenging level design, and honestly that became the most fun part of the game for me at points. skipping all of the tiring maze levels from smb2 feels so great, and I even managed to pull off a strat equivalent to the speedrun route for Stamina Master by jumping at the peak of the first ramp. it honestly made the final worlds of story mode a lot more enjoyable given how many frustrating and gimmicky levels are contained within it (they were bad in the original too, not just this game). when I eventually get around to smb2 master and master extra, I'm sure I'll have fun finding ways to break levels that originally took me dozens of lives to beat.

I think I've exhaustively covered every aspect of this game that I've played so far... and now that I've finished this giant wall of text I can finally move onto some other games. I don't think I've wasted my time with this game at all, and I'm glad this package exists, but man does it really not scratch that itch that the original games do. perhaps an engine on par with the original simply isn't capable of happening without the original source code available... but at the end of the day I'll still have the original games to return to when I really want to experience monkey ball as it originally felt.

Touhou, by and large, is something im not a huge fan of. Its a series of wildly varying quality that suffers from sameyness, a terrible fanbase and some general gameplay issues that pervade from game to game.

Most notably of these, Touhou stages are shit. The games are always defined by their fantastic boss battles, but the other half of the game is always, always, forgettable and nothing special. And this is where UFO really shines.

UFO's key is in its eponymous system, where collecting
3 UFO items of the same colour or of all different items spawn a UFO, a docile enemy that sucks up drops, and when it's sucked up enough and killed, drops additional items such as life fragments, bombs, or a shittonne of score. More importantly than this, on death, they cancel all enemy bullets, which is absolutely massive. It is frankly, a Genius system, mostly because of how it interacts with the existing Touhou item drop formula, how it encourages both clever stage routing and on-the fly adaptation, and encourages the player to be far more active in movement as UFO items are so important to both scoring and survival, and therefore it rewards weaving through bullets and take risks to make the most out of it. It is exactly the sort of thing Touhou stages need, and it turns the worst part of the EOSD-onwards Touhous into the best part.

Well, maybe. I think it's fair to say UFO also has incredibly rock solid bosses. Touhou never really falters on the bosses, and whilst I can hardly call myself an authority on them, they're great here, particularly Stage 6's boss.

The music is also just lovely. ZUN spices this one up a bit more than the other Post-EOSD games i've played, with the latter stages including some more varied instrumentation and styling to his traditional faire, which really works well. Stage 4 and the Stage 6 boss track are clear standouts for me and just make the game that little bit more special.

It's still a Windows Touhou, so the art is bad, it looks very similar to other games from the time, and frankly you have to jump through some hoops to get it in english and you're stuck with awkward compatibility and resolutions going up to the mighty 1280x960. Fuck you if you want it fullscreen, by the way.

But yeah, ZUN did it. This is by far the best Touhou i've played and just a top-tier STG in general. A fantastic gimmick accompanied by a Touhou game of high quality in the first place. As far as I'm concerned, this is his Magnum Opus.

I hope the money I unneccessarily spent on the Steam version of this game gets ZUN a nice beer. I almost forgive him for Violet Detector.

If there's anything out there, it's not going to be something we understand. We already have enough trouble at home defining ourselves, constantly pushed and pulled by gravitational forces we can't free ourselves from. A society crafted around making sure our culture is rigidly defined so that we can understand ourselves for what is human. But what is humanity, really? We keep pushing the ceiling of what that can be, and we project what is "alien" on things that are certainly human-like, because we have nothing else to draw from.

These are esoteric and difficult questions to answer, and even harder to do so when we're still stuck here shifting through our job yearning to free ourselves. Heaven Will Be Mine is queer, in every sense of the word. Queer in that it breaks me from my shell, liberating me and driving me to tears as it helps me understand my own way of expression and why I refuse to be circumvented by this "gravity." Queer in that it breaks between the line of reality to understand what seems strange, and help us transcend the grounded narratives we spin to keep us center. It's deeply personal too, with characters that each deal with their own traumas and flimsily work to try to understand each other in relationships that draw between romantic, heartfelt, and deeply serious.

For hours after I finished the route of Saturn I was in tears, and the route itself took me more time than it should've because I had to take a break to sit there in silence. I had to wrestle with phantoms of if I truly felt liberated, or if I really have grown out of the cage and pull of culture that people craft for me so that I may live. Am I really living my life here?

The discordant thoughts cross around for a while, and Pluto brings me back to center.
Saturn: "And you'd like that, right? Cutting loose with no gravity to tie you down?"
Pluto: "I think about that every day. It's so tempting.
You've got to be ginger with the universe, you know, Saturn.
Now that you're this strong, you've got to be careful. So much can go wrong."
Saturn: "I'll make sure to be very careful with the universe you love."

In another excerpt, Mercury asks "That's just it. Are we too attached? I want to be something new, and share it with everyone. Am I too heavy for this apple?"

The reading is dense, and it might not have to be. But it enraptures me and brings me close. I feel lost and I'm being given the proper guide to truly learn, even if I have to take every paragraph at a time, slowly. I'm shivering by the ending as I feel like I'm reaching a true understanding of why I'm queer, why I identify in the way I do. Why I WANT to live in the way I CHOOSE.

Saturn: "I don't owe them anything but, there's one more thing I can't stand.
Not being seen for what I am.
So, choose to come with us, or choose to stay.
But I won't be happy without them knowing what they're missing out on.
Look up in the sky, and see all the weird stuff we get to do with each other!"

And then I ascend, too.