"The prolonged day's pleasantness is short lived, I sigh deeply as it comes to an end"

A look at escapism by presenting you with a video game with all the pretense of excitement cruelly stripped away from you the longer your stay in paradise goes on for. Yet as cynical as that sounds, the game is far more heartfelt and interesting than most people's descriptions will let on.

One of Suda's best, and the spiritual successor to Takeshi's Challenge

There are games out there where it is very easy to tell people why its a masterpiece. People can watch video essays on why a game like, Silent Hill 2 for example, does an amazing job with its storytelling through environments and gameplay, and understand to a point where they never have to really play it themselves. Bloodborne, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. Bloodborne is a masterpiece that only those who have played it will truly understand why this game is a masterpiece of game design. It is hard to really describe why this is, but I will try my best.

Bloodborne, at its core, is another Souls-like game from From Software. The setting is completely different from any other Souls game, opting for a more Victorian-era setting with some heavy Lovecraftian inspiration. The player is thrusted into this world to be a hunter, seeking to kill the monsters that have plagued this cursed town.

But, as many FromSoft fans know, there is a lot more to the story and world than meets the eye at first. Through cutscenes, dialogue exchanges with NPCs, item descriptions, and boss encounters, the player learns more about how this place was created and what exactly they're really working towards.

While lore enthusiasts only make up a certain percentage of Souls players, most agree that the gameplay is what makes the Soulsborne games so damn good, and Bloodborne is no exception to that. The game broke free of the expectations that people had for Souls games. Instead of being more methodical in your approach to enemies, picking times to strike, block, and parry accordingly, Bloodborne elects to be more about crazy offense. There are no shields (well, effective ones anyway) to protect the player, so they must rely on dodging and parrying. Bloodborne even rewards those who goes on the offensive by letting players regain some lost health if they attack enemies at a certain time as their health drops. The combat in Bloodborne is absolute perfection. Everything is balanced by these simple mechanics to create combat that feels so satisfying.

The bosses in this game are also incredible. Yeah, theres some that are just okay or downright bad, but most of the bosses are absolutely fantastic, well designed, and memorable. The music is absolutely godlike as well. It goes from melancholic melodies to epic orchestral pieces, and they all slap.

The game is not perfect, however. Yes, its a 10/10 GOATed experience, but there are things that can be a little lackluster at times. For example, Arcane, the replacement for magic, is severely lacking here. There are a moderate amount of spells for players to use, but they are all pretty weak and aren't very effective against most bosses or fast enemies. The game also SEVERELY needs either a PS5 upgrade or a PC port, as the 30 FPS make this one of the more difficult Souls games to play because of its low native framerate. The game still looks gorgeous, but could use a big boost.

This is one of my favorite games of all time. The world and gameplay of Bloodborne fit together to make the perfect vibe and tone for this game. Everything about it makes me giddy with excitement. It's a true work of art, and a masterpiece game that I highly recommend everyone play at least once in their lives. No videos on YouTube could ever provide you with the memories and experiences that playing this game has to offer.

America, America, Chicago to Missouri. When i think of the USA's depiction in video games produced within it's own borders, my mental state is assaulted by images of heroic patriotism, defenders of the glorious nation and it's allies repelling evil invaders and bringing honor to the fatherland. The parallel domestic depiction of the nation would of course be the titles that revolve around the mindless violence and larceny that civilians feel compelled to commit, the equally-popular crime game that represents the nation in a simultaneously similar and opposite way.

The foreign idea of the USA has only ever been critical from my experience. Games like Wolfenstein criticize the torrid history of racism and oppression, while games like Dead Rising are simply extended hitpieces on the for-profit medical and general media calousness.

One would then consider Japanese developers when it comes to making American games. The seemingly apolitical hyper-reality action game that's fueled by nothing but pure adreneline and admiration for the American-made tales of military might and superheroism in ordinary soldiers.

Sakura Wars V falls somewhere outside all of them. A game released in 2005 that attempts to romanticize The Big Apple in the way the previous games had done for the settings of Tokyo and Paris. So Long, My Love is a game about New York created through the perspective of a Japanese developer writing a story about a japanese immigrant living life in the city. It's a simple game about learning to live with the hustle and bustle of the greatest in the city in the world.

What strikes me so hard about the game is just how positive it is about the USA, in all aspects, and how it attempts to blend american cultural values and rhetoric together with the usual themes associated with this kind of story. At a certain point in the second half of the game, The Revolutionary War, The Civil War, and the two-party system are cited as examples of americans putting aside their differences to work for the greater good, the typical "power of freindship" story being compared to these concepts. There is a certain knee-jerk reaction when to be had when the game beats you over the head with narrative of New York being a city of hard-work and dreams, a cultural melting pot of people that accept each other. Since stories usually have this little thing called "conflict" things aren't peaceful and just 100% of time, the game delves into the topics of racism, organized crime, class divide, gentrification, poverty, and homelessness with only slightly more intricacy than you would expect from a game about a theater troupe fighting demons with giant robots.

As for things like gameplay i felt somewhat lukewarm while playing it, but was ultimately satisfied by the unique semi-real time strategy combat, and the heavily unique usage of setpieces. No two levels in this game felt the same, but that could also be a flaw since it means that you have to spend your first attempt at basically every map just figuring out what you were doing. I find the concept of trial and error to be antithecial to a good strategy game, a strategic victory should be brought by proper thinking, not brute force. I did strongly admire the overwhelmingly variaty between the 6 playable characters, all having their own types of attack, move range, super attacks, even their animations have so personality in them, it's the kind of attention to meaningful detail that is rarely seen in modern games.

Not being able to skip animations is always a bummer, and it's not any different in this game. I was playing this on an emulator and making frequemt use of the speed-up function, but even then the tedium was palpable by the end. It's a thorough mixed bag in terms of combat.

As for the VN elements, Sakura Wars has always been the series that i felt accomplished this sort of non-gameplay the best, the high points of this game are all the dialogue and QTE segmants, due in no small part to the genuinely excellent character writing. Even when certain characters aren't the focus in the story they still really stand out, this is one of those stories where the smaller moments are going to stick with you the most.

Choice in Sakura Wars falls inbetween the two pillars of "nothing you do matters" and "every route is a different story entirely", there's more than a few moments in which you make a choice only for it to essentially be erased in order for the narrative to proceed as planned. Your choices will never matter in the grander scheme of things but i found myself making plenty of decisions that felt like they actually affected my enjoyement of the game, again, some of the best parts of this game are entirely optional.

The one thing i genuinely HATED about this game are the technical aspects, the atrocious audio mixing that makes the (often bad) voice acting borderline inaudible at times, the slow-ass UI, unintuitive button assigments, etc. Most of this is probably just the fact that it's an old game.

Overall, i can't name a batter japanese game about america, nor can i name a better dating sim/strategy hybrid video game. Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love left a fairly large impression on me by the end, to the point where i was thinking about going back to it several different times over the 6 years it took me to complete it. It's the black sheep of the series, and the game that some might say put the franchise on hiatus for nearly 15 years, but i never once felt that this game was anything other than stellar.

While I still have the post game to go, I have seen the credits roll on Legends Arceus. And my god, what an absolutely fantastic game this is. This is up there with HGSS, Platinum, and Gen 5 for me. But what makes Legends Arceus so great?

It is truly hard to describe why this game resonates so much with me. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of flaws here. The graphics are a bit rough (not ugly, not stunning), there could be more trainer battles, and there is a little bit of jank at times when it comes to several aspects of the game.

But everything else here is so damn addicting and fresh. Pokémon desperately needed a change to the formula. While some entries tried to innovate here and there, particularly Sun and Moon, Legends Arceus blows up everything that we thought Pokémon could be.

I won't go over every single change or new mechanic that Legends Arceus throws at you, but we get new battle mechanics, new balancing, open world exploration, wild Pokémon that you can sneak up on and catch without battling, and so much more. It is sort of a mix between open world and Monster Hunter-esc areas that have their own ecosystems and Pokémon to catch.

Because of the Pokémon being in the world for you to approach and catch in a myriad of ways, I actually want to complete the Pokedex in this game. That's something that I have never really wanted to do in a Pokémon game before.

The story and characters are also great in this game. While it is nothing groundbreaking, its very entertaining and the writing is sharp. I know some people complain about the lack of voice acting, and maybe this is just nostalgia talking, but I don't really think the game needs it. The writing is good, wholesome, and entertaining throughout the whole ride.

I just couldn't put this game down. Is it perfect? Hell no. There definitely needs to be some improvements if GameFreak plans on making this the new standard for Pokémon games. Which they absolutely should. This game has made me fall in love with Pokémon again; as if I'm 9 years old playing Pokémon Ruby again for the first time. Don't listen to people trying to review bomb this game simply because whiny Pokémon fans can never be pleased. Legends Arceus is easily the best Pokémon game on the Switch and proves that the future is bright for Gen 9.

Game Freak, don't make this a side series. Every Pokémon game from here on out needs to build upon this amazing foundation you have laid out here.

an odd one out of suda's ouevre. largely avoids the fixation on violence grasshopper's games are known for, foregoing the hard boiled cybercrime noir of the silver case, the post-9/11 sentai horror bloodbath of killer7, and the sillier nerdfighter grindhouse bloodbath of no more heroes (which would set a pattern followed by most of the studio's subsequent games as bloodbaths, with suda only occasionally as the director. its humor is also pretty close to fsr's at times). tonally very different from these but thematically very familiar, flower sun and rain should be taken as both sequel AND side story at once to tsc, and its very hard to talk about without also bringing up that game, in a way i dont think is as true for the more standalone k7 or nmh. there really is an appeal i'm finally starting to understand with taking tsc, this, and likely 25th ward--which is next up for me--as a trilogy with its own arc.

the silver case itself, as the starting point, is obsessed with the internet and the city, finding a formal link between the two. it's in the clacking text boxes, the film windows, the backgrounds with rotating numbers and flashing shapes and out of context phrases, altogether an abstracted space of words and pictures that feels like website presentation. its also in the player movement thats restricted to hotspots with rigid pathing befitting of street grids, apartment buildings, your home that you make the same linear motions in everyday. both feel non-naturalistic and cramped, but that just emphasizes the experience we have with these spaces. surrounded by cold geometric cells online and off, everyone so close together yet so far away. it gets exhausting, being unable to find ourselves outside of these boxes, to get some picture of truth. the game recognizes the need to reach for the light within yourself, outside of this darkness, but what would that even look like?

fsr shows a world "outside" by taking the reverse approach. your movement is "freer", your sense of space perceivable with the player character's own two legs in relation to analog control. hotel guests, staff, and people of the island get in your way to ask for "help", more or less, with tasks that are nonsensical in their solution and often ridiculous in their premise too, but the experience of it creates a sense you are working for a net good out of mondo's own developing kindness. you gain more and more of the world to move in until you eventually feel your sense of self stretch across long roads and pathways--literally as the in-game guidebook itself says. you can check bathrooms, take unnecessary detours, hear the rolling waves and the chirping birds. maybe this is where you can find the light.

but this "naturalistic" feeling of freedom the game allows compared to tsc, however, belies the truth of lospass's paradise as being just as artificial as the 24 wards, in a different way. the puzzles you help others with are just solved with codes based off relevant trivia from a pamphlet, blatantly mechanical logic as it can get (reminds me a little of riven, though the juxtaposition of natural and unnatural here is more unmistakably intentional). the staff hide themselves behind friendly smiles, and some of those you help may be tricking you. the hotel, a temporary place to stay, is the only "living space" you can find. structures feel too new, too slick, to feel some engrained identity behind them. the island lost its own past, perhaps even had it stolen, with whatever it is that looks like "history" you find not necessarily being factual. it goes beyond feeling touristy, it's like people can't really live and be oneself here for all that long.

what i like about flower sun and rain not being a silver case sequel in name is that its another way the game frames itself as an escape from the confines of the wards--meaning then that 25th ward may be a return to the grime so to speak, to confront that space again. fsr is trying to forget the past that built it, only to find a new kind of artifice that reminds you of the one you knew before. this doesn't mean the game is saying its escapism is ultimately useless and selfish though, because when you're in the dark it might be a matter of needing to see something different, anything else, to gain a better understanding of yourself and your past that made you yourself. new memories tinged by a new sun, even as artificial light, might be whats needed to really move forward.

loved doing math homework and taking daily jogs on my tropical vacay. ps the walking around wasn't even as bad as it was made out to be, you guys are just weak and need to break your brain like i did with aimlessly backtracking for no real reward in other games that have even larger and emptier worlds

90s is probably the most overused term to describe soul hackers, but what better way is there to put it? your love for this game will totally be down to how much you vibe with this era's design sensibilities. there are an array of random experimental mechanics like loyalty you'll either find incredibly endearing or unnecessarily clunky. personally i love the genuine attempt at immersing the player in the summoner's shoes. try to form a perfect team for a tricky fight and demons of opposing alignments might refuse to cooperate. or you may run out of magnetite and they'll turn their backs on you altogether. managing your demons can be a real pain in the ass and i'm all for it.

how can i forget the soundtrack? the perfect soundtrack to complement its atmosphere. every sound is drenched in this dreamy digital echo, with lots of spacey synths that invoke feelings of the mechanical nature of this rapidly digitising world. trudging through algon headquarter's narrow hallways as the ominous tune transforms into a hopeless synthetic melody is fucking beautiful. or wandering aimlessly through the vr art museum in that droning ambience, as if lost in a dream you can hardly make sense of. a beautiful work

Many years ago, Dara O’Briain did one of the only good standup routines about video games. Video games, O’Briain argued, are the only entertainment medium that actively tests the observer, withholding their content behind challenges of mentality and dexterity. Albums, television shows and films will carry on regardlessly from the moment you press play; sections of a book that prove hard to read can be flipped past; but challenging sections of a game have to be bested or even mastered in order to progress. Want to see what happens next in Dark Souls, but can’t beat the Capra Demon? Too bad. Heard that Through Time and Space is one of the best video game levels ever, but can’t grapple with The Witcher’s inventory management and combat systems? Tough shit.

While there’s an amusing honesty to the bit, it kinda belies an uncomfortable truth about video games - that the parts where you’re moving the joysticks are likely to be the only moments of intellectual stimulation that most video games have to offer, with cutscenes more or less functioning as rewarding soap opera spectacle. It’s hard to discuss this kind of thing without sounding like a wanker, but it’s just a fact that even prestigious “adult” game-fiction like The Last of Us or God of War still rarely stirs anything more than an acknowledging “huh” in the players who’ve deigned to step outside the cultural borders of electronic entertainment and other mainstream media. Games narratives still tend to rely on cinematic cutscenes to convey information and drama, and most of the time said information or metatext is barely worth parlaying to the player - $10 million spent on comic book writers telling us “man is the real monster” or “depression is bad”. At their very best, our prestige video games are still just doing replicas of better movies.

killer7 differentiates itself from this convention in a number of ways. It’s a game that makes no concessions for those who expect a linear, event-driven narrative, peppering weirdo pseudo-plot and thought throughout map layouts, door keys (ever thought about what the Soul Shells are?) and helpful hints from dudes in gimpsuits who are prone to taking left turns into Baudrillardian philosophy while directing you to the bathroom. Textual and subtextual ambiguity reigns supreme. The gameplay (on Medium, at least) is unlikely to challenge the player all that much - aside from a few head-scratcher puzzles, it’s more or less a case of walking from point of interest to point of interest to open doors and shoot zombies. And, in a strange inversion of the problem outlined above, it’s the cutscenes and character dialogues that will tax a player’s brain far harder than anything that involves clicking buttons.

I think killer7 is a work of profound ridiculousness. Or ridiculous profundity. Something like that, anyway - I’m not quite sure of the precise term I need here, but I think Suda and Mikami are pulling from the playbooks of guys like Thomas Pynchon and David Lynch with this game - keep throwing potentially meaningful ideas and images at the screen, both within and outwith the realm of the cutscene, and let the true ones stick - the viewer will be too busy grappling with the good to remember the bad. It’s a technique that surprisingly few games dabble in, despite the supernatural properties of the medium and the obnoxious, inhuman lengths that most games require a player to play for.

So what are the good images here? Well, I guess it’s a function of the temporal, political and personal preferences of the player. Like abstract paintings, surrealist movies and post-modern novels, killer7 is wholly open to interpretation through your own kaleidoscopic lens. Unlike most game narratives that more or less bluntly prescribe a story and some associated themes (if any at all), killer7, like most Suda games, seems content to spray blood against the walls and do some interactive Rorschach testing with your psyche. Sure, there’s talk of American-Japanese relations and terrorism and borders and killers and the valise of our personae, but there’s nothing proscriptive or particularly didactic here - it’s more or less a presentation of post-9/11 realities that the player is asked to order and interpret as they see fit; a balancing act of feelings versus facts in opposition with fictions. Hand in killer7, the companion book for killer7, even (deliberately?) contradicts the facts of its own reality within the first ten pages - as if to highlight how pointless an endeavour Making Sense of it All is, especially in our Fukuyama/Fisher-influenced End of Capitalist-Realist History-Present.

By complete coincidence, I played through this game in parallel with the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, and finished it on the same day she was convicted - so Target 03: Encounter (Part 2) - where the Killer 7 head to an Epstein-pre-Epstein prescient-simulacra of Little James Island to take out an organ trader and implied child molester - held particular relevancy to me. The Jeffrey Epstein case and its relevant co-conspiracies are probably the best examples of what I’m prattling on about above - get ten, twenty, or a hundred people in a room together, and you’ll probably get a hundred interpretations of what the inner sanctum of Epstein’s reality really was - a whole smoothie bar of blended facts, news, fake news, Facebook news, speculation, fiction, fact and fuck knows what else. killer7 is often lumped together with The Silver 2425 as part of the “Kill the Past” series, and I think this info-meld of history in the melting pot of public consciousness is one of the chief relationships the games have with each other. Ironic that games about removing the past would so thoroughly realise the future of our present.

How did Suda51 know that the word’s top players would conspire to send an assassin after a sanctioned private ally of the United States government, a living evil who trafficked young girls with both personal and ulterior purpose? And how did he know a global pandemic would (temporarily) return humanity to a road-faring race? As is often suggested with Suda51 (see also: The Silver Case, No More Heroes) he may be one of gaming’s top producers of prophetic works. “Prophetic media” has been in vogue since March 2020 - references to media-elite paedophile rings in mid-2000s Nickelodeon cartoons; references to coronavirus in mid-2010s K-Dramas; references to Tom Hanks getting sick in mid-1990s episodes of The Simpsons. Wow! How do they pull it off?! Well, as with killer7’s imagery, I think it may be down to volume of produce rather than accuracy of content. The Simpsons is able to predict so much shit correctly because every ‘incorrect’ prediction isn’t even recognised as a prediction until it comes close to resembling some form of the truth we want it to be. The same applies to the images that Grasshopper’s games create.

Is this the secret to making remarkable, meaningful art and cultural commentary? Just keep producing, producing, producing until your images become resonant by virtue of the typewriter-monkey principle? That’s maybe underselling what Grasshopper achieved here - the foundations killer7 are built upon are more or less rock-solid. The cel-shaded mono-colour aesthetic is timeless, and the chosen palette for each Target is fittingly eerie. The control system, while initially awkward, is ultimately a solid compromise for a game that distills a gameplay fusion between Mikami’s Resident Evil series and Suda’s Silver Case adventure games - and it feels even better on PC, where 90% of the game can be played with just the mouse.

Although often cited as unconventional, I think the gameplay style of killer7 is a fairly logical compromise for these two creators, who seem more concerned with tone poetry and 2000s-exploration than providing a compelling and practical gamefeel. Anyway, it’s sometimes more important that a game feels good in the brain than on the hands moving the controller. killer7 is a game that locks its content away inside your mind, with progress often being made many hours after you’ve stepped away from the console and allowed your third eye time to process the images your two eyes have seen. It’s all in your head.

I cannot think of a single game that tops Killer7 in terms of stylistic cohesion. Nothing is wasted. Every element—visual, aural, ludic, and literary—is moving in perfect harmony towards a singular goal and when it reaches that goal it lands with the force of a bullet to the brain. This game feels like the antidote to decades of poisonous, pigeonholed triple-A design—a bold counter to the idea that these homogenous design trends won out because they are universally the best way to do things. More and more, games look the same, play the same, tell their story in the same damn ways. Suda, for his entire career, has been shouting from the rooftops: It doesn't have to be this way! We can (and should) do things differently! And no game screams louder than Killer7. Some day I hope we listen.

The 25th Ward: The Silver Case is a game about the internet, viewed through the lens of an authoritarian government that monitors its citizens and wipes them out with impunity via their government-sanctioned murderers to maintain the illusion of peace.

It's a game about how even in a "perfect" society where the people up top maintain an iron-grip on every minuet detail of its citizens lives, the biggest threat is the power of the individual and the propagation of ideas.

It's a game about the dehumanizing effects of violence, how those charged with keeping the peace are volatile, reckless goons who kill without remorse and never receive any kind of punishment for it. How killing is innate to the human experience, and how the will to kill resides in all men's hearts.

It's a game about trans-humanism. People turned into biological supercomputers built to retain petabytes of information. People who gain identity on the net. AI's so sophisticated that they become indistinguishable from their creators. People who ascend beyond the biological to become ideals, the purest form of information, unlimited by the notions of life or death.

It's a game about games and the people who play them. The relationship between protagonist and player. The rejection of industry norms. The eschewing of any kind of notion of traditional understanding.

The 25th Ward is a game I have a hard time writing about. It juggles a lot of topics, and yet, it sticks the landing with each and every single one of them in a way that is hauntingly prophetic for what was originally a 2005 flip-phone text-adventure game. It's a bit of a cop-out answer, but after a day or two of writing and rewriting this review, I really do feel it's an experience beyond words. It's a game that resonates even more today in the modern internet age, and it's view of the internet via a fictional social experiment of a city where the line between net and reality is non-existent is an intensely interesting backdrop for the triad of storylines that each explore a facet of this society and how it parallels the modern age.

"Don't depend on the net. Depend on the net. God lives in the net. The net will guide you to all answers and wisdom. Doubt the net. Save the net. Kill the net."