It's probably easiest to describe the Infinite Wealth experience by describing my final 90 minutes of play.

The beginning of that block was spent running between every restaurant in town to order, literally, the entire menu on the off chance of catching one of the stupidest conversations conceivable between my party of characters whom I've grown quite attached to. Stupid jokes, everyone piss drunk and fucking up every enemy encounter we ran into, and the sheer absurdity of how much food I shoved down their throats on my quest to max out Kiryu's levels through any means necessary.

90 minutes later I experience the emotional nadir of my gaming career with the abject emotional sucker punch of the game's final musical sequence, an experience that had me in tears. Not to linger of how much of a loser I am, but it wasn't a misty-eyed sniffle so much as a head-in-hands bawling. The clarification is worth it to highlight the emotional capability of Yakuza 8, and for people who have played it, there's absolutely no mystery when it comes to the game's secret weapon.

Anyone who's played Yakuza 7 will sing the praises of its protagonist Kasuga. There's no surprises left to be found in this eighth installment; Kasuga is Kasuga is Kasuga. And what Kasuga is is a supernova of charisma. It's foolhardy to make a claim on the entirety of fiction across mediums, but contained to the realm of video games I feel pretty confident in singling out the writing of this character for excellence. Without going into a full character study, I'll say that the writers have found a successful mix of emotional depth and unwavering moral compass. The latter might imply a lack of growth or arc, but instead it's a constant string of challenges for Kasuga's character to shine through. Even if you know where it's going, it's never not exciting to see him keep on the righteous path despite all that goes on around him.

(This is my first parasocial relationship; how am I doing?)

It's the attachment to Kasuga that enables the emotional climax of the story. What, to me, initially seemed like an unrealistic act of forgiveness became the only logical course of events. Of course he resolved things this way, he's Kasuga. It's difficult to write about without spoiling things overtly, but it's a moment that will stay with me for a long time. One of my favorite scenes I've experienced in fiction.

Something I find fun to speculate is the complete opposite experience one could have while playing Yakuza 8. Infinite Wealth has two protagonists, of course, with the other being series idol Kiryu. I'm a secondary; I'm a late-comer Kasuga stan. For most fans Kiryu is the star of the show, and Infinite Wealth is a (backdoor?) tribute to the character and the series. A surprisingly large percentage of the content is dedicated to sending off Kiryu.

This includes references both overt and subtle to events and characters from all of the previous games in the series. Even random spinoffs like that survival horror zombie game (???) are paid homage. This is contextualized as Kiryu making peace with his life in light of his cancer diagnosis. I'd lying if I said it wasn't alienating for someone with no point of reference, but it's very easy to see that the game is not interested in catering to that group. Most of said content is optional, anyway. It's nice that fans have a chance to participate in a living funeral.

Kiryu has his own arc and spotlight within the game, including a scene immediately following the final boss that strikes me as particularly moving should one be familiar with the character. The notion that someone could have as strong of an emotional reaction as I did for a different character speaks to the quality of the game's writing.

I had been penning this review in my mind as I waddled along what was ultimately an 88 hour adventure. Until the story paid off at the end, I had envisioned most of this would have been written about the design of the open world.

Open world's in games are almost a joke these days. You look at your map, see thousands of icons that don't mean anything, climb a tower somewhere, and click fast travel buttons the vast majority of the time. Infinite Wealth has some of this nonsense, but it was the first time I had felt naturally encouraged to explore a world in a very long time.

Several of the side activities presented in the game are intrinsically fun to work through. Aloha Links, the friend making mechanic, simply asks you to press the dedicated Aloha button in the vicinity of certain people on the street. There's 200 potential friends and you bet your ass I found them all. There's a nice sound effect that plays when you form a link, Kasuga looks like an idiot as he mispronounces "aloha", and everyone on the street is having a good time. It's a pleasing gag that, when combined with watching a friendship meter fill until you make a certified buddy to cross off the checklist, never gets old. Take a taxi everywhere and you'll miss so, so many friends. It's just not done!

Other things you would miss include the photo rally that tasks you with snapping pictures of key locations for extremely minor rewards. But of course the reward is in the fun of the treasure hunt itself, as the items you need to photograph are only relayed to you in the form of small, context devoid image that forces you to suss out where it could be. It's very satisfying to be wandering around only to get a sense of déjà vu from some landmark and realizing it's on your list of to-shoot photos.


I had a lot of fun with these two mechanics, but they are admittedly minor. What wasn't minor was the effect they have on your play through. You walk around more, you fight more enemies, you get more resources, you upgrade your weapons more, you happen across more opportunities to train your team of Pokemon (Yeah), you take some time to do side quests, you find the hidden conversations your party could have only by walking by certain locations, your relationship level rises, you work through the party members' individual quests, and I could go on.

The point is that be tacitly encouraging players to actually inhabit the game world instead of warping around it constantly, the game naturally and smoothly delivers a drip-feed of its systems. In other games grinding of some sort would be necessary. Grind for resources, grind for experience points, grind for opportunities to raise your bond with your party. Infinite Wealth incentivizes and trusts the player the find perfect gameplay rhythm that the developers had built into it. It's very impressive.

When you have excellent, well-considered gameplay alongside a story capable of genuine emotional connection. That's a winner. Yakuza 8 is incredible across the board, and the only thing left for me now is the crushing void felt in its absence.

Sonic Frontiers is a game whose quality scales inversely with how closely it is examined. If you jump into the over world for 15 minutes to run around and collect stuff, maybe play one level without aiming for S ranks, you'll probably have a pretty good time. You'll reflect on how Sonic has finally taken a step forward after years of stagnation, and put your controller down contented with the existence of Frontiers. The experience doesn't fare so well under almost any other amount of pressure.

Over the course of my 24 hour play through in which I completed as much of the game as possible, the cracks in Frontiers's visage were both large and apparent. Almost every system in the game breaks down the longer one plays, and the flaws become impossible to ignore.

I have always been someone who enjoys collecting items in open world games, so it was incredibly disappointing to see that not even this was immune from the wide scale bumbling that plagues Frontiers's mechanics. Initially the various collectibles are presented as both meaningful and plentiful, the best combination. If there is both many items to collect and a good feeling for doing so, the player is incentivized to seek them all out. This extended to all of Frontiers's various tchotchkes and baubles: gears get you into levels, keys get you chaos emeralds, the red and blue stones increase your power and defense respectively, and memory stones get you side story segments. A lot of these items are even marked on your map, further incentivizing players to track them down. It all felt meaningful.

The air was promptly taken from my sails upon discovering how easy it is to circumvent the exploration to get all of these. Literally every single collectible is attainable from the fishing minigame in such a quantity that there is no need to engage with any other part of Sonic Frontiers. One can find the fishing minigame, spend an hour there, go fight the boss of the area they're in, and repeat. The one thing gating this abuse is the currency needed for fishing, which is also known as the currency that more-or-less rains from the heavens every so often in the over world. It is gated in name-only, as the average player is going to accumulate hundreds more of this currency then they'll ever need.

This secondary way of attaining items has two mind-goblin-esque effects on the player: Any effort into exploring and finding items now has the convenience of The Alternative to overcome lest it feel like a chore. There is also the knowledge of the fact that collectibles aren't finite. It's a lot easier to motive oneself to collect 120 stars in Mario 64 than 120 of an infinite amount of stars. The former feels like an accomplishment; the latter feels arbitrary. Having initially started Sonic Frontiers with the goal of finding every collectible presented on the world map before sliding into Big's Fishing Adventure for hours on end, I find it hard to overstate my disappointment.

Said Fishing Adventure is the only part of Frontiers that is a consistently enjoyable experience bereft of frustration. There is one location, one song, a repeating cast of fish, and it's awesome. The gameplay is extremely simple, but the slot-machine-esque feeling of waiting to see what you pull in and how many tokens it brings with it never got old for me. Had it been better designed so as to not trivialize the entire game, I'd say that this is the best fishing has ever been in a game. The depth of other fishing games cannot measure up to the comfiness.

When not exploring or fishing, Sonic is repeatedly subjected to various sections of "speed gameplay", and this is where the game is near-unsalvageable. A thought occurred to me while playing: Sonic games have always encouraged the player to spend as little time actively playing as possible. How many times has a Sonic game been so uncontrollable that the dominant strategy was to maneuver oneself into a place where one didn't need to touch the controller?

"Thank god I'm on a rail for 10 seconds, I won't go flying."

"Whew, a loop, I can relax for bit."

"Lightspeed dash, what a relief."

The controls in Sonic games have always been so bad that they are liable to kill the player if control isn't wrestled from their grasp. "Wrestled" is the wrong word, as it implies a desire to retain that control. No, Sonic games have Stockholm Syndrome'd the player to the point of engaging with an experience they actively seek refuge from while it is ongoing.

Frontiers, of course, is no different. The controls in the speed sections just do not function. What's amazing is that they do not function in consistently different ways; the developer introduces a drifting section for one level solely to remind the player that despite all the time that has passed they still don't have that one down yet. It is very telling that Sonic Team designed these sections to be 90 seconds long, on average. Any longer and S rank runs would have completely fallen apart lest the controls test the player's patience beyond their limits.

These control issues do crop up from time to time while exploring, though not nearly to the same degree. Putting aside the woes of the meaningless collectathon, exploration feels janky. Players are liable to get roped into invisibly marked 2D sections without a way out, or get pushed and pulled by scores of bumpers and boost pads that leave them far off the path they were traveling. How incongruent these items are with the world only adds to the frustration of it all. The lack of apparent intuition in their placement also makes parsing them difficult; it's not uncommon to pan the camera around looking for some improbable link of springs and rails between where you are and where you need to go, especially in later game areas. Finding these paths is too difficult as everything tends to blend together.

On the opposite side of difficulty would be the combat, something so easy to trivial that one wonders why the devs bothered.

Two things gate Sonic's ability in combat in Frontiers: Power upgrading items, which as established are plentiful and easy to max out on, and unlockable moves. The latter is worth focusing on. Initially it appears to have depth; there is a skill tree and many options for every encounter. However after only a couple of hours one can unlock the entirety of said skill tree. That is a disappointing experience unto itself, as it's almost always better to use one move, The Most Powerful Move, over and over instead of doing anything else. There is so much effort and focus put onto a system that may as well not exist. Again, it falls apart under the slightest pressure.

Frontiers's use of quick time events in its boss fights deserves to be called out. The bosses, which were already imprecise and confusing affairs of Super Sonic darting all over the screen until getting clipped by an attack, didn't need an extra element of frustration to reset the player's progress towards the end. But Sonic Team thought it impossible to enjoy a "bad ass anime moment" of Super Sonic unless the player was there to hit square with the same rhythm employed for the fishing minigame.

What hurts about all of this is how close Sonic Frontiers is to working. The character writing has never been better. The soundtrack has elements that take steps in new directions while also containing moments that meet the expectations of older fans. The game is different, something that should always be praised from established franchises. It's such a shame that all of its systems are as half-baked as they are.

Despite all of those faults it's not difficult to imagine a few tweaks that would vastly improve Frontiers. Indeed, I can only imagine that mods to the PC version are fixing that as I write, but it would be disingenuous to consider those while writing a review. As released, Sonic Frontiers is a mess. It has the ability to entertain if one really squints their eyes and takes frequent breaks, but it will disappoint anyone looking for meaningful experience.

The reputation of the Souls Series has long been its downfall. Dark Souls 2, with its global death tracker prominently displayed at the beginning of the game, delighted in making encounters artificially difficult by adding a multiplier to the enemies one would face at a time. Dark Souls 3, having seen that players took to rolling through attacks to avoid them, added immense amounts of unnatural delay to all boss attacks to punish players for dodging prematurely. All of this felt too meta to thoroughly enjoy an experience. Instead of an organic challenge galvanizing the player, the omnipresence of an unseen hand ensuring a needless difficulty discouraged them.

It was only Sekiro and Bloodborne, two games unfettered with a similar name to their predecessors, that managed to iterate on an increasingly stale formula in a satisfying manner. The latter leaned into fast paced aggression following the all-time slow pace of DS2, what with its lack of shield options and healing-by-damage-dealt mechanics. Sekiro turned the entire combat system on its head by introducing the slightest amount of depth. This was not only evident in the parrying system but also the variety of combat arts one could unlock. These games weren’t without flaws, but they felt more like a studio expressing itself rather than one needing to deliver on the promise of the baggage that comes with “Souls”.

Which is all to say that I had high expectations for Elden Ring. Despite the mechanical similarities this wasn’t a Souls game and thus From Software would have more freedom to craft whatever experience they wanted to deliver to players. Unfortunately they seemed to intentionally aim for derivative, and the parts of the game that displayed innovation floundered.

I think the problems here can be sorted into two boxes: Old and New.

The old problems I wrote about earlier: there are still too many multiboss encounters. Exacerbating the issue is that the bosses in question were clearly not designed to gel with one another a la Ornstein and Smough or double Maneaters (the rare times pre-DS2 games played this card). This is easy to see based on the fact that without fail players will encounter half of a multiboss fight elsewhere in the game, sometimes even paired with a different partner.

These bosses, solitary or otherwise, are still full attack delay out of nowhere. Imagine cutting into your steak as you eat dinner. You spear it with your fork, raise your knife, wait the customary 3.5 seconds, then cut in. Ridiculous, no? Imagining the steak strafing around you as you rotate in place during those 3.5 seconds only serves to weaken this metaphor, but hopefully you see my point on how unnatural this all feels.

It’s almost paradoxical in a way. If bosses take forever to attack, then it should make fighting two of them at once more manageable. This is true, but it misses the point. The problem here is never the difficulty, it’s the feeling one gets from the encounter. Organic vs artificial. Natural vs unnatural. The more these scales tip towards their latter ends, the less patience the player has to tackle a challenge put before them regardless of its difficulty.

These topics have been written about for years since prior From games have released, but luckily Elden Ring also provides plenty of new topics for discourse insofar as missteps.

The largest issue, perhaps with the entire game, is how the open world impacts the player experience. I have never seen a game that demands as much self-regulation on the part of the player as this one. Almost any challenge one comes across can be circumvented and returned to later at a higher level. And I want to be clear, I’m not speaking of grinding. That was always an option for lower skilled players in previous games.

No, one can go encounter new novel experiences, level up naturally, and then return to a previous roadblock hours later. While this might sound like a positive to some, it only serves to undercut what could have been a carefully designed difficulty curve in a more linear game. What makes this so problematic is the fun delta between something that is challenging and something that isn’t.

Combat remains relatively shallow in Elden Ring, and when one applies that shallow combat to an easy to defeat enemy, the triviality of the experience can only result in boredom.

I spent plenty of early hours pushing myself through the Caelid area of the game, one I now know is meant for somewhat higher level players, such that by the time I reached the Liurnia area I demolished everything. The magic academy? I don’t think I died once in my time there. It took some time before my level reacclimated to my surroundings, but the threat of sabotaging my own experience was always there. The fun I had in Caelid came at the expense of my fun in Liurnia.

This all comes down to agency and information. I believe that this is a high agency, low information game. You can go anywhere, but many of the game’s systems and objectives are hidden from you. For someone who loves adventure games, this is the dream. But it absolutely does not gel with the need for challenging gameplay and the game’s RPG mechanics. And it is all caused by the decision to go open world.

What does the open world offer? Surely not the agency I just spoke of; that was still present in spades in the much more linear Dark Souls. But it does offer discovery and diversity, both of which are quite meaningful.

Part of the fun of Elden Ring is the social aspect. Chatting with friends, conversations would often follow a pattern of:

“You know this thing I found 20 hours ago?”
“What the fuck no?? I never found that. What is it?”

And that latter surprise was both genuine and matched with an equally strong sense of interest. In an era of games that don’t do much to endear themselves to players outside of a visceral yet fleeting sense of “fun”, Elden Ring’s sense of discovery is sorely appreciated. It also plays into a feeling of diversity between any two players’ experience.

Looking at things in context, I’m happy Elden Ring’s open world exists to differentiate it from the other games in the “series”. They are all dangerously close to being identical, so any identifying characteristics are appreciated. But the decision to marry that open world with these gameplay mechanics was a misfire. This is yet another reason From shouldn’t shackle themselves to “light attack, heavy attack, roll”.

A new game engine would not necessitate a strict monitoring of a difficulty curve that could be undercut so easily. And it would surely be more interesting.

All the same, I can see why they’ve stuck to this. It is fun to fight big bosses while rolling around and punishing their weak points. It’s thrilling when you run out of healing items and the boss is almost dead. But sticking with what works isn’t how one makes a masterpiece, and it’s not how one commands respect for one’s art.

I feel compelled to issue an immediate correction: this isn’t “one’s” art. This game was made by a duo of directors: Miyazaki and someone I will only acknowledge as “the Dark Souls 2 guy”. My enjoyment of this game decreased noticeably once I learned this, as the more confounding areas and encounters of the game suddenly had an explanation behind their presence. The game was tainted.

I’ve been very harsh on Elden Ring, but only because I believe the floor on Souls games to be relatively high. My rating is still a 4/5; I still put 170 hours into it between my 1.25 playthroughs. I’m still playing it. I don’t need to tell you exactly why this game works. But when a series is this successful and this committed to reusing concepts, it’s much more important to note what isn’t working rather than what is.

One final note: there has been a lot of discussion on difficulty options in this series. “Should they be added?” etc. The clear answer is that they’ve had an easy mode since the original Dark Souls: summoning. They’ve had final resorts for people who are stuck: grinding. And now with Elden Ring they have another option for those of blunted progress: ignoring the problem altogether for several hours. Any calls for a mode labeled “easy” are willfully ignorant of the options available to them. And if these options aren’t enough, you can always load up a different game.

Pretty good. 4/5.

Having never played the first Dragon's Dogma, I was relatively surprised to see the buzz Dragon's Dogma 2 was receiving on social media up to and after its release. In addition to the normal marketing materials, users that had bought and played the game were almost uniformly glowing in their assessment of the title. Twitter was abound with clips of their exciting battles and exploits, and the phrase "Game of the Year" had been bandied about. Now, recency bias is a potent thing, but I was certainly intrigued by this reception. So, after making the conscious effort to temper my expectations, I bought the game and dove in.

There's a lot of elements to Dragon's Dogma 2 that impress. Chief among them is that the game has a complete and total commitment to immersion. Going through the quests, both side and main, demands an approach in which the player views them as events coherent with the world as if it was a real environment and not a complete work of artifice. The game leaves things up to the player's common sense to suss out, which is much more satisfying than endless prompts and quest markers that have become standard in open world games over the past couple of decades.

This is an attitude that permeates much of the game's design. Fast travel, while possible, is minimized in an effort to make players immerse themselves in the world. At times inconvenient mechanics such as encumbrance and the effort needed to make a safe campfire for resting are real concerns of would-be adventurers that other titles regularly choose to gloss over. Monsters aren't drones lurking in designated places doing nothing until activated by the player. Instead they are convincingly wild in the ways they show up unexpectedly in would-be "safe" areas such as towns, or they are much stronger and larger than the player could ever hope to be at the time of their chance encounter.

There's many more examples one could list, but when playing Dragon's Dogma 2 you feel like an adventurer in a fantasy world with all of the responsibilities that would entail. It's not always easy or glamorous, but that's why it's an adventure and not a theme park.

This approach to design is so respectable that it breaks my heart that the moment-to-moment gameplay of Dragon's Dogma 2 has been so utterly fumbled.

Combat is an integral part of the experience that no player could possibly hope to avoid, and yet it is so bland. Physical attacks carry no weight in their hits, magic barely registers as connecting, and monster health pools can be so large that encounters regularly feel like slogs. The pawns one can hire have the potential to carry the player even while below their level, thereby removing any feeling of contributing to a fight at all.

While problematic on its own, this flaw is doubly severe in how it compounds the issues Dragon's Dogma 2 already has. With players not having so many fast travel options, at least in the early game, they will be traveling on foot quite often. This, in turn, means they will be getting into many combat encounters. Exploration is thereby discouraged, as excursions out into the wild bring with them the drudgery of combat. In turn, viewing monsters as boring instead of threatening shatters the immersion the fast travel decision was supposed to promote in the first place.

This is not the only example of poor game design clashing with the mission statement of the game. Pawns, as a system, are a baffling choice to me. The developers want players to feel engrossed in their world, but the pawn system is one of the most grossly artificial I could conceive of. While there are in-universe explanations for their existence, the amount of player-made mommies I encountered with immersion breaking names scuttled that meager effort almost instantly.

It's not only the intrusion of other players' inclinations into my fantasy world that makes the pawn system a poor design choice. The adventuring party, as a concept, has been central to the RPG genre all the way back to early titles like the first Final Fantasy. The appeal of the party as a mechanic is two fold: In terms of gameplay, one can balance their approach with characters of different specializations. In terms of story, many players enjoy growing alongside and getting to know their certain characters over a game's runtime. The pawn system of Dragon's Dogma 2 executes the first premise decently enough, though it's not so necessary when the player can change their own class so easily, but it actively bungles the second.

With half of my party so blatantly being temporary, man-made golems instead of anything resembling a character it is so hard to accept the party as a legitimate, in-world construction. If I am constantly going to be reminded that most of the people on screen come from the world of XxDickSucker420xX, how in the world is a restricted amount of fast travel going to draw me into the world of the game?

And boy, one will be reminded of that often. The pawns in this game chatter incessantly. They chat about elements of mild import to the player, such as locations of items, and they also chat about absolutely nothing often to comedic effect. The former has its uses, though I still would prefer it toned down in frequency, but the latter is incredibly misguided. For party chatter to be interesting, the party needs to have personality. Pawns, by design, have no personality.

The artificiality of it all cannot be ignored. Even the name, pawn, drives home the point that these are beings with no humanity. So then, why is the game so insistent on contradicting that with attempts at endearment to the player?

The pawn dialogue highlights a separate issue: the writing. The outmoded form of English chosen for the game's dialogue is incredibly jarring. Other series of games and certainly other works from other mediums have certainly gone down this road before; "old English" is nothing new to people who have been around the block. But Dragon's Dogma 2 sticks out as uniquely weird in its phrasing. Rather than sounding natural the dialogue reads as a deliberate attempt at old English.

I'm not particularly interested in discussions of the accuracy of the words themselves. Art exists as a deliberate work by, and as such it is graded on the impressions of legitimacy, taste, and sense it leaves rather than its actual accuracy. Maybe people really did run around saying "yon chest", but in this game it comes across as ham-fisted.

Doubly jarring is the disconnect between this localization and the game's native Japanese. I played with English subtitles to a Japanese dub. I speak both languages. The dub had no attempt at using an archaic, period form of Japanese. To state the obvious, such a thing does exist and has been used for period pieces in the past. Localization discussions are simultaneously outside of my interest and above my pay grade, so all I'll say is that when a script constantly makes me incredulously cock an eyebrow, I am once again being drawn out of the game's world rather than the reverse.

There are other, smaller issues with Dragon's Dogma 2. The design of the monochromatic minimap is not at all a wise choice for dense areas such as towns; spell targeting is finicky at best; and the camera draws in too close during combat to properly see enemies. These, however, are not glaring flaws. No game is perfect, and most foibles are easily forgotten.

The reason I find Dragon's Dogma 2 to be so disappointing is that there is a clear indication of what the developers wanted to do with their game and how they wanted the player to experience it. The clashing of that intent with various mechanical decisions is a death knell, and a good example for others on how games must be coherent packages if they are to rise to the top of their field.

The glorious return of AA good-but-not-great. It's hard for that to sound like a sincere compliment, but I swear that Stellar Blade has the extremely endearing quality of playing like something you'd rent at a Blockbuster Video. It's too short, lacking in ambition, and structurally flawed, but the minute-to-minute experience is very pleasing.

A large reason why that is lies in the design of the game's combat. There's a focus on parrying attacks over tanking or dodging them that demands a constant focus from the player. Even minor encounters cannot be auto-piloted, and the need to always be "locked in" creates satisfaction when overcoming any obstacle.

After finishing some of the longer boss fights, I'd find myself out of breath from how much mental energy had been consumed paying strict attention to the boss's move set. It made the victories feel noteworthy even if the bosses themselves weren't so difficult.

It's intrinsically fun to engage with Stellar Blade's combat system, and because of that I can forgive the fact that the game is disappointingly easy. Any difficulty experienced in the game came from a variety of poorly designed "set pieces" that take place largely out of combat.

A key example would be one of the few turret sections in the game in which the player must run from and avoid rocket fire in an enclosed area. The projectiles cannot be blocked or parried, and they can unreliably be dodged, so the dominant strategy is just to dart from cover to cover. But the movement of the player character never felt precise enough for this to be a worthwhile exercise, and at several points I had to eat frustrating deaths that felt more-or-less random.

Other poorly designed areas that spiked the difficulty curve include most encounters with several basic enemies at a time. The combat system of Stellar Blade does very poorly in handling multiple enemy combatants at a time. The player can get stun locked and comboed out easily; the camera isn't very responsive in switching between targets; moves are often impossible to interrupt into a parry given an unexpected move from a second enemy that was off-screen. One often feels at odds with the game engine itself when trying to deal with multiple enemies at once.

The pace of the game is another glaring issue. The way the player accumulates upgrades and resources seems way too rushed in relation to the progression through the story. Paradoxically, several key skills for basic combat are for some reason locked through the first few hours of the game. It never feels like you are at where you're supposed to be. Either you're lacking in the ability to access a counter for a key type of attack or you have hundreds of thousands of dollars with which to buy everything you could ever need.

It's not only the pacing of player progression that is under-cooked but the pacing of the level progression as well. Stellar Blade includes two types of levels: linear corridors that largely indoors, lack a map, and are more tightly designed, and vast, wide open spaces with enemies more or less plopped out anywhere without much regard.

The open levels take so much time to thoroughly explore but do very little to move the game along. The linear levels are the opposite in both regards. The end result is hitting plateaus that stop the game and its story in their tracks after a period of smooth progress. I enjoyed both types of levels, as they succeed at offering different experiences, but more care should have been made in unifying them into a complete package.

Other flaws include the soundtrack, which was a complete miss for me. The music chosen to overlay much of the game was not only forgettable, but extremely jarring with the tone of the environment's design. In the abstract I can appreciate a bold stylistic decision but this one did not land in the slightest.

The voice acting is another issue. I generally like to play games in a language I both A. understand, and B. can expect good performances from. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I found out that the North American version of the game lacked a Japanese language option. It had a bevvy of other European languages, and the game's native Korean, but Japanese was left out. I chose English, and was quite disappointed to hear some of the worst voice acting of my life from all of the minor characters. The three main characters, luckily, were performed well. But every side quest begged me to skip the voiced readings of the dialogue. Shout out to the mechanic loli whose sister died; absolutely terrible work.

Given the discourse that surrounded this game's release, I'm going to give a straight comment on the character design: I enjoyed this game more due to Eve's sex appeal. I enjoyed this game more because great care was put into her design and the design of her optional outfits. Since the beginning of art as a concept human sexuality and sex appeal have been key to many works, and that remains true here. There is no reason to deny or downplay what this adds to the experience.

Is there a lot wrong with Stellar Blade? Yes! Of course. Hell, the logo does a better job spelling out Stettar Blade than anything else. Did I have a great time while playing it? Naturally. In a world of bland, bloated AAA releases and soulless games that live as a service, one has to appreciate a game with a vision that exists as art artists wanted to create. Warts and all I value Stellar Blade.

I'll probably rent it again in a few months to try a damage-less run over the weekend. Pick up some Nestle Crunch while I'm at it.

I'm not entirely sure why I bought Signalis, but I now know I was in error to do so. The most charitable thing I can say for the game is that I am absolutely not its target audience: I scare easily in horror games, have little interest in them, and have never played the early Resident Evil or Silent Hill titles Signalis is clearly looking to ape. Despite that, I gave Signalis the old college try only to find a mechanical mess of a game whose problems can't be waved off as genre convention.

Signalis is a really good example of incentives in game design and how they can undercut an experience. The game design starts off with some good ideas: inventory is limited to add consequence to combat encounters; there are no autosaves to ratchet up the tension; controls are clunky enough to discourage a more action-oriented style of play. All of these decisions seems like they would mesh well with a survival horror game, yet they ultimately are the undoing of anything resembling immersion in the game or its world.

The core of the issues lies in how optional all of the game's encounters are. The vast, vast majority of enemies can be ran around and avoided without fighting them. Given how limited resources are, this becomes the dominant strategy. Why waste ammunition or risk incurring damage when it's easier to hold the run button and weave around? It's also faster. On a base level, there's very little reason to engage in the resource management the game is very clearly pushing as a means of creating tense gameplay.

Without resource management being impactful, the limited inventory space suddenly becomes an inconvenience rather than a conduit for strategy. A good example played itself out many times over my run through the game. I'd have a full inventory, encounter a necessary key item pretty far from a safe house, and suddenly have a decision to make. I could run back to the safe house and rearrange my backpack to have space for the item, or just fire off some rounds to clear ammunition from my inventory to pick up the item. Or use a healing item unnecessarily again in the name of making space. Without the combat encounters putting stress on these resources, the player is free to essentially waste them. The whole exchange breeds contempt for the inventory system. Once I understood how the game worked, I never really needed to plan a load out. I wonder why the inventory was built this way to begin with, other than this system likely being similar to an old survival horror game.

The lack of an autosave feature is another way Signalis calls back to its inspirations, and this is another mechanical misfire. The threat of a death that will meaningfully reset progress only works if developers commit to that notion. There needs to be stakes, usually in the form of the time investment since the last save. Signalis refuses to raise these stakes through the vast majority of the game. Areas are small, with all of the action taking place within 20-40 seconds of a safe room. Players are free to run back to the safe room every time they accomplish something, no matter how small, thereby ensuring any death won't ding them too much. Hell, this constant saving is doubly encouraged by the previously mentioned inventory system; the only place to dump the items picked up on any excursion is the same place the player saves the game. The combination of the level design and the save system works to deflate the tension, which is a bizarre undercutting of the only possible reason to design the save system this way in the first place.

All of Signalis's mechanics seem half-cooked; a "wouldn't it be cool if" whiteboard list that never coalesced into a meaningful experience. Which is a shame, because aesthetically the game works much better. The graphics and sound design both do a good job in creating an unsettling atmosphere. But unfortunately that really doesn't mean anything when the gameplay doesn't work in service of the horror experience.

What players are left with is at times boring, at times frustrating, and thoroughly samey. No matter what is happening in the story you can count the fact that you, as the player, will be bobbing and weaving through enemies to find the square peg in room A, stick it in the square hole in Room B, to unlock access to the circle peg that is needed in Room C. Perhaps this is evocative of old Resident Evil games, which even I know have a reputation for this kind of nonsense, but I'm flabbergasted that someone thought it was engaging gameplay in 2022.

If they were set on making an homage to Resident Evil, they could've also copied the respect that game surely had for its players; I can't imagine there was ever a puzzle room in an RE game that had a note not five feet from the puzzle outlining its solution step-by-step.

I was beside myself when I found this. The puzzle it spoiled wasn't even difficult; none of the game's puzzles are difficult. Do the developers truly think that little of their audience?

I'll end by describing my last experiences with Signalis. I beat the game, found the ending to be lackluster, watched the credits, and looked up what people were saying online. I found some discussion of the final boss, an encounter I never had. Wouldn't you know it, the player is supposed to start up the game again to continue the story. So I did, and I played for another hour or so. What I expected to be a short story sequence opened up into a full 'dungeon' of sorts.

I'd had enough. I closed the game.

Signalis isn't scary. Signalis isn't fun. And for a game with a story that is so clearly open for interpretation, Signalis isn't even interesting, and that's what's most disappointing of all.

That's a lie, the most disappointing part is that it's not fun. God damn.

Donkey Kong 64 is well known as a veritable disaster, and as such this might be the most redundant review I will ever write. That said, journaling is cathartic, and this is the only way I can think of to exorcise the demons currently plaguing me. In the case of DK64, that's a lot of doin', so let's "jump" right in.

The first problem to rear its head occurs right in the tutorial and first minutes in the game: the imprecision of the controls and platforming. Rare was smart to give each kong a mid-air attack that grants some hovering, as course correction for every meaningful jump is necessary. Two things exacerbate this issue: the camera and the game's hitboxes. The former ensures that whatever the player's target is will never actually be visible to them when they need it most, and the latter makes touching barrels and collectibles are frustrating affair.

For a platformer, Donkey Kong 64 just feels very unsatisfying to grapple with. Movement isn't smooth. Jumps are fraught with peril for all the wrong reasons. Combat is extremely basic and plagued with the issue that it's impossible to call out the attack you want on demand. (Want to do a running attack? Enjoy randomly stopping dead in your tracks a quarter of the time.)

Perhaps the problem with the basic control of the game is why Rare decided to largely center it around a variety of "fun" minigames. Each of these takes the player out of the level and shoves them into a dystopian barrel world. It's actually quite an impressive degree of immersion-shattering that I've yet to see replicated. These minigames range from trivial, to frustrating, to bugged. Not a single one of them is a worthwhile experience, and the fact that they make up so much of the game's runtime is embarrassing.

The existence of the minigames has the knock-on effect of trivializing level design. Instead of building unique objectives into the landscape of the level, as other platformers do, Donkey Kong 64 is content to build countless little houses each with five little doors that each house a fun little minigame. This schema is returned to again and again, all the way up to the absolute nadir of the game's level design, Crystal Cave, that features two of them in close proximity to one another. Add in the fact that one of the kongs' objectives each stage is to kill a basic enemy and you wind up with quite the uninspired objective list.

The true objective of the game, though, is the mental calculus of routing an efficient path through the levels to minimize one's time with the game. The true joy of Donkey Kong 64 is that this efficient path does not exist. All levels essentially have to be traversed five times, as the developers were keen to put kong-specific collectibles in dead-end rooms that serve no purpose other than reward a different kong for finishing a minigame or some other bullshit. The mental burden is on the player, then, to make the best of a bad situation.

Put another way, Donkey Kong 64 is the ultimate Traveling Salesman Problem Simulator, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy that at least a little bit.

It's very clear that Donkey Kong 64's grasp falls short of its reach. They wanted eight unique levels, but couldn't find compelling designs for all of them. They wanted 200 bananas to mog Mario 64 but couldn't think of unique objectives. They wanted to include unlockable powerups but most of them fall in the bucket of "You can now ground pound a different colored switch." They wanted boss fights but half of them are recycled. They wanted five kongs but they play identically.

It's tough to categorize Donkey Kong 64 as anything but a total failure with so many unrealized goals. I don't think that's a particularly saucy opinion, but then again who needed a review of Donkey Kong 64 in the year 2023?

It's an almost unheard of experience for a game sequel to completely obsolete its predecessor. To drive this home, let's actually examine that claim.

Iterative sequels are the first to spring to mind when considering where this phenomena might happen, but they often come with a revolving door of features between every couple of releases that ensures some instances of the franchise will excel in different areas. Sometimes the game engine will receive minor tweaks in ways that take two steps back while graphics or gameplay options take one forward.

Other, more narrative games will generally be more of a side grade at best. Judge a game for its story, and the next game most likely has a different story rather than an objectively better or worse one.

Other sequels, poised to put their older siblings in the trash are hobbled by outside hands. A famous voice actor getting fired or upper management pulling funding, time, or creatives. Maybe there's simply a bold creative direction taken in good faith that does not pan out.

It's not really a mystery that I've been building towards Tears of the Kingdom completely obsoleting Breath of the Wild, but I hope you have a sense of how miraculous that is. The timbre of games development is so intrinsically hostile to this happening, and the fact that Tears surpasses one of the highest quality releases of the last decade only solidifies the achievement.

"I'm never playing Breath of the Wild again." was a persistent thought throughout my time with Tears, so let's see why that is.

The spirit of exploration has essentially served as the mission statement for this current iteration of the franchise, and it was extremely pleasing to see the continued embrace of the ethos. New, extremely hostile environments are introduced in Tears in addition to the base Hyrule map we knew from Breath of the Wild. This is a good choice, of course you want new content, but Nintendo played it perfectly by being hush on 50% of the world map prior to release.

What better way to make the player feel like an explorer than to present them with literally an unknown land?

The theme of exploration is a perfect fit for the amount of agency the game trusts the player with. Tears is a game with a lot of content. A lot! Killing all monsters, finding all caves, finding all Koroks, all shrines, all light roots, upgrading all equipment, all the side quests, all the side adventures…

A lot!

But the game is smart enough to not let this get discouraging. A daunting number like 900 Koroks turns off all but a select few players. Nintendo recognized this and did the smart thing of not gating a substantial reward behind it. The same goes for basically all of these “check list” items: If the only players who are going to bother are the players who feel intrinsically rewarded by the journey to get it done and the subsequent knowledge that it is done, why not let that be the main reward? The game knows players will curate their own experiences insofar as what is and is not worth their time to complete. Just as an explorer chooses and makes their own way through the world, a player of Tears of the Kingdom can be an agent of the type of experience they want to create.

It's an extremely good example of ludothematic harmony. Games often tout an adventure focus or an exploration tag, but it's one thing to ship a copy of Horizon Zero Dawn with a preorder bonus of the game map showing all the places to find treasure trundles lest the player ever really be surprised, and another entirely to let the player control Link for about five hours before accidentally falling into a hole and stumbling upon the other half of the entire world.

Breath of the Wild was another game with a lot to discover, but, save for the first moment encountering a dragon, nothing was ever as surprising or truly unknown as some of what one will come across in Tears. I try not to phrase this as anything too derogatory; my point isn't that Breath of the Wild has shortcomings, but rather that Tears has surpassed a masterful game.

Let's go back to those dragons from Breath of the Wild. Cool, right? The devs agreed, so they brought them back, made them easier to interact with, gave them (and others) a much more prominent place in the game's story and let them figure into the climax. If you want a cool dragon moment, Breath of the Wild has been once again made redundant.

It's this ability to perfectly hone in on what worked, why it worked, and how to rework it beyond that to be even better that pervades Tears. Shrines are another example. Fun physics puzzles that regrettably included a few too many samey combat challenges? How about replacing all of those with extremely unique no equipment scenarios? Too many shrines dotting the landscape reducing the fun of finding them? Much more of them are hidden in caves or in the sky to restore the fun challenge of accessing them. Shrine quests were pretty fun little puzzles and those stick around largely unchanged.

The Great Fairy fountains were a favorite, of some, in the first game. Upgrading gear was fun, for some, and most people were a fan of Great Fairy redesigns. Of course Nintendo would bring these elements back, but they did so with the good sense to attach fun, meaningful quests for unlocking each fountain. One more thing they identified as worthy of bringing forward and spared no expense improving. The fact that said quests gel perfectly with Tears’s new physics tools is particularly inspired.

These physics powers are yet another aspect of Tears that obsoletes Breath of the Wild. How quaint is making an ice block when you can scale through solid matter? How blaise is picking something up when you can now pick it up and attach it to anything? What is the more impressive invention: Localized time travel, or a bomb?

Could I tempt you with a square bomb?

Not all of these are intended direct comparisons, nor are all of these questions fair, but it’s pretty clear that Link has a larger variety of options this time around with his powerset.

The tools in Breath of the Wild were impressive in how they played with each other. Bombs could jettison the things one put in stasis, or the ice blocks would elevate objects placed onto them. It was a cohesive kit that gave players the most powerful iteration of Link to date, save for Soul Calibur 2.

Tears kicks things up a notch by not focusing on the intra-activity of Link’s kit, but the interactivity of all the ways it can modify the various objects occupying Hyrule. This is most easily seen with the contraptions one can build with any interactable object, but the weapon fusing system goes even deeper. I imagine it will take players cumulative years before they stop seeing videos of new possibilities posted online.

Did you know a wing shield gives you a higher jump out of a shield surf? Did you know a floating platform arrow will fly for a bit before spawning a platform for link to use, thus grating stable ground in midair? Have you ever made the butter sword?

Every object in Tears asks the implicit question: “What can I do with this?” The options are indeed exponential in scope, but the genius is how optional it all is. If you answered “No” to all of the previous questions, you likely didn’t struggle with the game. Everything is designed to be possible at the “base level” of gameplay; the skill floor is relatively low. The skill ceiling, or perhaps the nonsense equity, is extremely high to match.

A little knowledge goes a long way in Tears, and I imagine subsequent playthroughs will involve a lot of sideways thinking for the seasoned player. BotW had this too, but whereas in that game it involved the mechanical skill of pulling off unintended jobs from odd angles, Tears makes the edge gained feel much more organic as it simply stems from knowhow.

In this section of the review I will discuss the dungeons.

What a success! I was in the crowd (Minority?) that was happy to see dungeons replaced with Divine Beasts in BotW. They were relatively open ended, featured inspired designs, and had exciting attack sequences leading up to them. Unfortunately the nature of the puzzles involving moving the beasts wasn’t so exciting intellectually, and the boss encounters lacked personality. While the dungeons in Tears don’t require a rocket surgeon on hand to solve, they do largely ameliorate both issues.

Puzzles, save for one exception I still wake up in the dead of night thinking about, have a clear intended solution that of course does not boil down to “Move the beast this way”. As mentioned they aren’t difficult, but the need to find a new solution each time is just enough mental effort to keep the player engaged. As for the boss fights, they are simply night and day with BotW as they feature unique enemies that call for special tactics to take down. Fitting climaxes for the dungeons preceding them.

To find flaw, which I am almost (Almost!) loathe to do, the choice to repeat these fights in the Depths does not sit right with me. It’s never exciting to find the second copy of what was presumed to be a unique encounter, and the fights are involved enough to make taking them down multiple times a nontrivial task. These subsequent encounters lack coolness and demand time, which is a truly dreadful combination.

Coolness is salvaged, however, in terms of lore. Each dungeon is contextualized within the local lore of each tribe to varying degrees of subtlety. My first visit to any of the peoples of Hyrule saw me interacting with Gorons, and without the context of what was to come, I blew off Gorondia as a silly joke. Egg on my face when I rolled up there with my fat fuck boyfriend only to find it’s a literal Fire Temple. It was a cool moment, and while the surprise factor wasn’t there, the rest of the dungeons earned similar respect to their names.

What’s in a name, anyway? In Tears, the answer would be epithets. It’s somewhat standard practice to subtitle bosses like “Steve, Lord of the Clyde”, or “Brendan, Bane of Twitter”, but Zelda has oscillated between having these and not. Perhaps it’s their flakiness that makes their appearance cool, but the reason I bring them up at all is that the dungeons also have epithets in Tears. It’s the smallest thing, but it is quite enjoyable to know that the fire temple is “Lost Gorondia, Rediscovered” rather than just…the fire temple.

These small yet effective elements of presentation are omnipresent in the game. If the words of the devs are true and the game had a year plus of just polish, these are the types of tweaks I imagine they made in that time period. Or maybe Ganon’s health bar always grew longer and harder as his blood flowed into it. It’s hard to say!

From large to small, there really is not an element of Tears that I would not call a success. There are some lumps in the gravy as there always are, for example trying to corner the member of your ghost posse whose ability you need to use is a needlessly tedious process, and the control remains just as clunky as it was in BotW. There are some other flaws as well, but what I need you to understand is that it just does not matter.

A theoretically perfect game doesn’t exist, and thinking about games in that way only serves to devalue your experiences and tarnish your impression of the world. Tears of the Kingdom cleanly surpassed what I considered to be one of the greatest games of all time; the fact that it has minor foibles is as irrelevant as it gets. Taken holistically, the game is a 10, or a 5 as this site would say.

Put another way, in 6 months I’m not going to remember the awkward claw grip I had to employ at times, I’m going to remember how terrifying it was when my second foray into the Depths saw a Frox jump up to greet me, and the wave of fear that single encounter set off that lasted for dozens of hours.

Games, like art, as art, are experiential. I just had a perfect experience.

Don't let the rating fool you; Pokemon Scarlet is a deeply flawed, frustrating experience that is dead set on sabotaging itself throughout its run time. It has earned four stars despite its best efforts, and in the hands of a competent studio the game would have easily been a five. Its only saving grace is a formula that is tailor made to psychologically satisfy people on the most base, primal level. Anything one's higher functions might appreciate or notice is woefully under-cooked.

I suppose the latter is the best place to start; what exactly doesn't work here? In a word: everything. The game's frame rate is extremely inconsistent. Whether in the over world, in a battle, in a cutscene, wherever, one will be dealing with varying degrees of sub-30 frames. This even causes an amount of desync with the audio in the cutscenes. Had the frame rate been locked to a low number, that would have been frustrating but mostly fine. Instead, the game oscillates wildly when determining which extremely low amount of FPS it wants to present at any given time thereby ensuring the player will never get used to it.

The speed of the game is another element that drags it down. The game is slow. Glacially, monumentally, horrifyingly slow. This mostly manifests in the battles, which seem shackled to an engine that predates most of the series's fan base. Any stat change in battle takes a couple of seconds to come across to the player. Any attack needs to have its animation play out. Status effects like poison or sleep add time to every turn when their effects are possibly the easiest to automate.

What's frustrating about the issue is that it had previously been solved. The ability to turn off all of these animations has been mysteriously removed. This is a vexing change as it presents literally no gain to the player at the cost of their agency. Put more simply: who wanted this? Who wanted to lose options? This one change likely adds more than an hour to the average player's time with the game.

I need to beleaguer this issue further: Not long into the game I caught a big crab guy. This guy's ability was that when he would get hit four of his stats would change. Rather than playing the stat change animation once for all four, or two times for both the positive and negative stat changes, it played it four times. Every time it got hit in battle! My ability to use my favorite guy was impacted by the 60 seconds of waiting he'd add to my fights. It quickly became apparent that the optimal strategy for playing Pokemon was to dick around on one's phone while the battle's various loading screens played themselves out.

Speaking of loading, for some reason there's a ton of that going on as well. Not the typical loading screen, but every action Pokemon take in battle has a one to two second bit of loading before it comes through. Even throwing a Pokeball has this issue. Nothing at all feels smooth in this game, and that weighs more heavily on the player the longer they play.

The dual release nature of the game is also a glaring problem. I don't know how Gamefreak has been enabled in doing this for years, but whatever, I bought this game too so I cannot complain. Still, it is a transparent way of gating content for dollars. The core conceit of the game, the reason it works at all, is the "catch them all" ethos. This just doesn't work when the player knows from the onset that several of their favorite guys aren't in the game so Gamefreak can sell marginally more units. It's an incredibly anti-consumer move that should be called out every release cycle.

The story of the game is also a fumble. The framing device for the proceedings is a school. The player character takes classes, bonds with their teachers, and picks up little sidequests from the school. Or, they would, if anyone knew that content was there. So much of this content is essentially hidden from the player, as they are never told it is there nor incentivized to explore the school and find it. I imagine most people completed their game with taking the final exams nor getting their bond with their teachers to the highest level. It's hard to categorize it as a throwaway when this school veneer is the loudest of the game's design. Your character can never change from their uniform yet they will almost never actually go to class? A missed opportunity for a more satisfying integration of the school elements with the larger game systems.

Adding to the frustration of all of these issues is that they were fixed. Pokemon Legends Arceus, a singular release that was solidly constructed, was a major step forward for the franchise. It was fresh, fun, and a new take on the same formula. Arceus was developed as Scarlet was coming together, so it's not shocking the Scarlet doesn't borrow anything from that game, but man does Scarlet feel like pure regression. Arceus's frame rate was fine. Battles were quick and smooth. It had no partner game that siphoned off content. Hell it didn't even have DLC. The time travel story, while not extremely satisfying, was thoroughly referenced through to the end. It was a rock solid experience that will surely be forgotten now that we can see the sales divide between it and Scarlet. Gamefreak had a perfect opportunity for evolution with their franchise, but unfortunately it looks like they're going to press 'B'.

So then, what saves Scarlet from being abject garbage? Well, it's a Pokemon game. The core conceit of exploring a world, catching guys, training guys to evolve, and bonding with a team is a fun one. If anything, Scarlet proves that formula is impossible to bomb. If anything, the formula is heightened by the open world, a change to the series (A change first seen in Arceus) that I quite enjoyed. That, plus the appearance of Pokemon in the open world rather than traditional tall grass, made hunting them down an enjoyable experience.

As always when I play these games, I completed my Pokedex, and unlike past games in the series this isn't a tedious endeavor. Only the holdover mistakes from ghosts of Christmas past rear their ugly heads: some Pokemon must be traded to evolve; others only appear in Violet. With 400 guys to find, doing so in an open world is a big upgrade from having to shuffle around tall grass and sit through encounter loading screens for hours on end.

Another system that benefits from the open world is the progression through the story, or stories. Pokemon Scarlet has three different campaign threads for the player to follow and complete at their leisure. All three of these were enjoyable on some level, though there is a clear ranking to the quality here. The Team Star battles come in last place, with the titan Pokemon hunt winning out. Still, the ability to complete these and there various stages in whatever order the player wishes is a level of freedom I truly was not expecting. It was a necessary step to follow through with the promise of open exploration, but I wouldn't have been surprised to see this bungled as well. Regardless, what we got is what works best for the conceit of the game, and this is probably what will stick with me most after finishing up with Scarlet.

It's hard to understate this. It was fun to leave the "first" gym battle for the last of my 18 events just so I could bully some bug Pokemon. It's fun to climb a mountain range you've never been to before only to fall off the other side and land on some new gym you weren't expecting. It's fun to make a plan and then have it get sidetracked because you got lost. I cannot possibly imagine a Pokemon game without this set up, at least not one in the mainline series. If anything sticks around from Scarlet, I hope this is it. Hopefully Gamefreak doesn't then remove the map feature for seemingly no reason.

The common discourse about Pokemon Scarlet is something along the lines of "Wow this game is buggy but I've having fun! Look at these wacky glitches!", which is an accurate sentiment, but it's also a dangerous one. This game is fun in spite of itself, and any amount of forgiveness levied simply because of enjoyment is an anti-consumer attitude. We should not accept games this broken. We should not overlook flaws that run this deep. This game is fun, yes, but it could have been so much more than it is right now. These "wacky" glitches actively detract from the experience, and in dunking on the game that should never be forgotten.

Gamefreak has continuously been enabled by Pokemon. People are psychologically primed to enjoy collecting. The Pokemon themselves are often designed by committee to appeal to the most people as possible. The studio does not have to try to have a hit with these elements, and it's difficult to say that they were trying with Scarlet. Regardless of the game's quality, that feeling pervades the experience: nobody cared when making this. They shipped a broken, chugging game and just didn't care because it would make a billion dollars anyway. And it did.

It's up to all of us to personally decide how we feel about this arrangement. I knowingly bought the game so I'm a culpable party, but voicing dissatisfaction is important. Enjoying a flawed, janky experience is fine too should one do it knowingly. But the "Don't care; had fun" sentiment that seems so popular is a destructive one, and the destruction wrought is on this franchise.

Good lord. It's astounding to me that a game with the reputation that Pokemon Sword has managed to disappoint me. I could've sworn that I went in with eyes wide open; I'd play the game and have a good time despite the well-publicized flaws. After all, it's a pattern I have repeated to success a few times.

Pokemon Legends: Arceus was a game that everyone knew looked like dog shit from its announcement trailer. I bought it, and had an excellent time for several hundred hours on my road to 100%.

Pokemon Scarlet was (another) game that everyone knew looked like dog shit from its announcement trailer, and it was also one that was well understood to be complete and total jank. I also enjoyed that game for upwards of 100 hours.

So, as I sat bored one day, I figured "Why not but Pokemon Sword! I'm down for another hundred hour, janky adventure with subpar graphics." Of course, only the latter half of that statement ended up panning out.

First I'll describe the devil I knew. It's hard to be aware of Pokemon Sword without knowing its reputation for subpar graphics. Surely an odd thing to make a mainstay of the series, but god damn it let's let GameFreak cook. While this is most definitely a identify to have with this Pokemon title, it's almost redundant to take serious umbrage with it. The games are so consistently undercooked insofar as visuals that by this point you either accept it or you've moved on. It's a worthy talking point, but not a big contributor to my opinion of Pokemon Sword.

The flaws that only showed themselves over the course of my time with the game, however, were much more damning.

Part of the reason I enjoyed Legends Arceus and Scarlet so much was the sense of freedom and, to a lesser extent, adventure that permeated them. (You're probably enjoying a laugh at my expense right about now if you've played Pokemon Sword. Good beats.) Pokemon is a series that lends itself well to nonlinearity. The agency to seek out your favorite guys and build a team you connect with does a lot to enhance the experience; any amount of time you're forced to bond with the second-stringers is wasted.

Openness also gels with the games on a narrative level. Just about every one of these games is about a kid shoving out into the world to carve their own way. Having one's hand held and dragged through a linear series of events would be too dissonant with that idea. While it's easy to look at the latest games in the series and say that Pokemon has only just now reached that level of nonlinearity, the games have always had this down. Even in Pokemon Red one had a few junction points where the player could choose which boss encounter to pursue. You always had some amount of agency.

Pokemon Sword does its best to dispense with that idea entirely. There is always one (1) correct way to progress. Not only are there no other options, there are never any side routes for optional objectives or challenges. No, you simply are rushed through the main story until the game finally stops at some point post-credits with the message to "Go explore!" when there is no longer an incentive to do so.

Not that there would be much to explore, anyway. In addition to being a linear corridor, the world of Pokemon Sword is lacking in anything compelling to do or see. It's not even interconnected, as a few parts of it are cut off with only the loading screen of a train station linking them. The claustrophobia of the world design only exacerbates the death of the sense of adventure started by the game's linear progression.

And without an adventure to embark on, what is the reason to even play a Pokemon game? It's surely not the combat, which never even approaches a stress test demanding the player actually engage with it on a strategic level. It's also not the collectathon nature of a world with so many unique monsters; the absolutely glacial pace of any encounter discourages someone from catching 400 unique creatures.

I'm at a loss trying to answer that question. Why play this game? Why did I play this game? While I feel deflated now, it's nothing compared to how I felt when I finished the "post game content". Seeing my final play time fall shy of 30 hours was paradoxical in a way that inflicted psychic damage.


My time with Pokemon Sword was so insubstantial and mind numbing, and how dare it be this short??

Wonder is an interesting game because it’s good in ways that are new for the series while falling short in areas Mario is known to excel in.

I’d like to begin with what was the most surprising home run: the online, somewhat asynchronous, multiplayer. I had written it off as completely meaningless, but it consistently kept me engaged through to the end of the game. I’d really hate to evoke a certain title, but seeing other players along on their adventure and weaving in and out of their lives while occasionally offering support and messages was reminiscent of some game.

And it works really well for Mario! Someone’s standee marking the path to a secret exit, or a revive point placed before a tricky jump were two organic uses of a multiplayer system that might at first seem like a poor fit for a platformer. Being able to emote at other players and conquer courses alongside of them are less mechanically engaging but are extremely resonant if you’re a human being. I was conquering the game’s final hidden course alongside another player, and after seeing him respawn next to me a few times, we traded off waiting for one another as we conquered each section of the level. Overcoming that with a stranger whom I’d never see again was a novel moment of emotion I never got from another 2D Mario game. It wasn’t very deep, but it was unique in the series.

The older style of multiplayer is gone, and a loss of a feature is unilaterally a bad thing, but for solo players this system works incredibly well. If you haven’t used it I’d recommend replaying the game entirely with this feature.

Another, unfortunately, uncommon W for this game relative to its brethren is style. Wonder oozes style, and one can tell great efforts were taken so that every course presents something new. This comes out visually, but the mechanics of each level’s wonder fruit section are also incredibly inspired. Only one or twice was an idea revisited, which was great to see. Other Mario games simply lacked such mechanically diverse levels, especially in 2D.

However, this approach to level design isn’t without pitfalls. As each level needed its own unique selling point, there are fewer of them to go around. Instead of the usual eight fun worlds there are now only six.

But perhaps that’s for the better. Outside of the wonder fruit sections the platforming on offer is neither difficult nor particularly engaging barring the final level of the game. This is particularly strange for the series that made 2D platforming its bread and butter. Boss fights are also a simplistic bore.

No, Wonder is at its best when the basics of platforming are either stripped away completely or augmented with a mini-game-esque flair. In addition to the wonder fruit sections there are scores of mini-levels that ask players to go on scavenger hunts or do something else trivial as a break from the usual gameplay. All of these diversions are welcome, and while they don’t solve the difficulty problem, they are fun.

The implementation of new features is another typical strength of Mario, but the badge system in Wonder left a lot to be desired. I was hoping for them to be utilized in ways that necessitated picking the correct badge for a given level. Whether that be to finish the level or get all of the collectibles, I was expecting to need to use a variety of badges.

It’s worth noting that the game’s somewhat open structure would make necessitating a particular badge somewhat difficult in terms of level design, but multiple badges fill similar roles; expecting the player to have at least one to get an optional collectible would have been perfectly reasonable.

As it stands badges just don’t add much to the game. I kept the same badge equipped for the entirety of the game and was never at a loss on the road to 100%. Perhaps for the diehards the expert badges can fill in for the missing challenge, but self-regulation does not gel with difficulty as a rule.

A little more rapid fire now: Music? Not up to snuff. Voice acting? Oddly hit the mark; the characters all had personality in spades. Overall world design? Very well executed mix of SMW-style linearity with more modern, open spaces in which to hide secrets.

Wonder does a lot right, but the relative fumble of the basic platforming mechanics has me rethinking my affinity for this genre of game. It might be unfair to hold that against Wonder, but overall I still had a great time, so I won’t think too much about it.

By the way if you’re that Japanese Luigi who spent 20 minutes on the last level of the game with me, hmu.

An absolutely astonishing failure of a game. The fact that this game is regarded fondly by anyone for any reason is a fact I will never wrap my head around. My run through the game, or rather my run through the 60% of the game I could stomach before tapping out, was a revolving cycle of boredom, frustration, and bewilderment. I think it's worth going through each of those in turn to get to the core of why Metroid Prime just does not work as a game.

Boredom. The game is most easily broken down into two distinct gameplay experiences: Exploration and combat. Both of them, for different reasons, refuse to offer any excitement to the player. The game progresses on a completely linear path, which at best simply blunts any sense of adventure and at worst actively discourages players from exploring. Why take the time to travel down new paths when the vast, vast majority of them are locked behind progression checks in the form of various items? The game presents itself as having an open world, however it's anything but, and the mismatch of expectations to the reality of the experience does not serve Metroid Prime well.

Combat is another way the game attempts to lull players to sleep. The over reliance on lock-on mechanics removes the need to exert any amount of effort in the enemy encounters, while the abundance of health makes strategy unnecessary. The resulting combat systems are brainless, with every encounter playing out identically.

And man are there a lot of encounters!

Perhaps sensing how unfulfilling it is to wander the world, the devs opted to put a plethora of respawning enemies just about everywhere, thereby ensuring the player will be engaged in endless combat. The mental exertion of switching tracks from one brainless endeavor to the other is just about the only aspect of Metroid Prime that stops a Drinking Bird Toy from clearing the game.

These respawning enemies really highlight the most frustrating aspects of the game: backtracking and all the baggage that comes with it. It's a difficult topic to discuss, as backtracking is not inherently problematic, yet "Oh you just didn't like the backtracking" is a relatively easy cop-out. Backtracking is no problem at all in older (and newer) Metroid titles, so why is Prime different?

Being a first-person game, the movement in Prime is much clunkier than in any of the other titles in the series. The result of this is that movement is slower and avoiding enemies is more difficult. Both of these drastically change the dynamic of backtracking. Whereas in other games one could quickly (and skillfully) dash past or jump over enemies they've fought before whilst backtracking to an old area, Prime sees the player clumsily fumble through the arena. Combat, being as boring as it is, simply is not an option, but taking some damage while slowly bunny hopping through an area barely registers as a better experience.

So at this point, we can see that the player clearly does not want to explore unnecessarily. This is where Prime has the brilliant idea of giving less than zero direction on what the current objective is. Thus, the player has to wander around to every area they've been to before acquiring their latest item. What's beautiful are the amount of item checks that have a second item check right behind them.

Acquire the spider ball? Cool, just wander back to that area from two hours ago that has the spider ball track you remember. You trek around, trip over some enemies, arrive, and spider ball up only to find that you also need the grapple beam to do anything here, and thus have wasted your time. Then you have to plan your next move, again uncertain if you'll even be making any progress.

This tableau plays itself out endlessly over the run time of Metroid Prime. It's a hollow, frustrating experience. There is a hint system that kicks in after a variable number of minutes exploring. This only serves to soften the blow somewhat, as the dominant strategy becomes waiting around for the hint to show up, which is about as fun as it sounds .

What bewilders me is the reputation this game carries. What do people like about it? The clunky, meaningless, punishing exploration? The brainlessly simple combat? It's always good to make lists of three while writing, but there's literally nothing else going on here.

Scanning???

I've never failed so completely to grasp a game before Metroid Prime. It's not an emperor's clothes situation; I believe people are completely genuine in their admiration for the game. But I don't get it, and at this point, I don't want to get it.

Coming off the heels of games like The Witness and Antichamber, Lingo is probably the best iteration of this "Explore Esoteric Spaces at Your Leisure and Solve Esoteric Puzzles" subgenre. But rather than say this as a mark of high praise, it leaves me questioning whether this formula is even worth pursuing.

Several hallmarks of the genre that appear in Lingo feel unnecessarily obtuse. To give one example, why are these games so fascinated with the idea of forgoing explicit directions? An ill defined rule set allows for the highly fetishized "eureka" moment, but it also creates way too much doubt in the player once puzzles begin to scale up in difficulty. In some ways this works in the favor of the developer who can play fast and loose with the internal logic of certain puzzles because the rules were never set in the first place. Someone whom this never benefits is the player, as they are often reduced to feeling their way around in the dark.

This approach essentially sells out the credibility of the late game in favor of a more "immersive" early game. Perhaps this isn't a bad business decision, as the percentage of the puzzle genre player base that even reaches the late game self-selects for smarter, more forgiving, and more enfranchised players. Regardless, it's bad design propped up by those that feed on the obtuse.

Esoteric, at times non-euclidean, environments are another hackneyed cliche of the genre that really need to go. Throughout my run of Lingo all I could think was "How does this level design add to the game?". The player spends the vast majority of their time navigating samey white hallways that bend physical space to create a layer of confusion. In an exploration focused game with more tools to aid in that exploration, this could be fun. In Lingo, however, it mostly amounts to running around aimlessly trying to remember where a certain wall panel is. It's somewhat amazing that the game manages to take something fundamentally alien to our existence, non-euclidean space, and make it simultaneously boring and tedious.

This is to say nothing of the cumulative effect it has on the player's mental load. Puzzle games are demanding; the puzzles in Lingo are demanding. It takes a lot of focus to play this game. Adding the mental stress of remembering and navigating intentionally vague, confusing environments that ask rote memorization of the player more than any amount of cleverness pushes the game to a real breaking point. Lingo is very frustrating to play at times, and every element of its design reinforces that.

It's amazing, then, that Lingo is a frustrating experience even when the player knows how to solve the puzzles.

Often, very often, the player will be staring at a puzzle with a complete understanding of it. They know the logic of the puzzle, how to transform the word in front of them. The only problem is that the English language is vast, and many word games have many possible solutions. Thus the player will sit there guessing solution after solution, all of which should work, until they find the one that the developer chose arbitrarily.

"Uncertainty" is the eleven letter word that solves this puzzle: Lingo is absolutely plagued by it. From the exploration, to the objective of the game, to the puzzles you don't know how to solve, to the puzzles you do know how to solve, the player is always left uncertain about their actions. There is some fun to be had if one enjoys puzzle games, but ultimately the juice isn't worth the long, aimless, foggy squeeze.