I had planned to properly review this, but I ended up having so much to say and a lot of ideas for how to convey those thoughts visually that I'd rather turn those thoughts into a more formal video essay. Still, given that it's the site's shared enthusiasm for the game that got me to sit down and play it after The Silver Case kind of knocked me for six with how exhausting it was to play, I just want it on the record that this game fucking slaps.

Running pedometer-measured circles around almost every other self-professed absurdist satire of the medium, Flower, Sun, and Rain is a genuinely hilarious, supremely confident piece that is so good and so ahead of its time that it kind of makes me look less fondly on a lot of games that clearly followed in its wake. It's got more going on than just insular commentary on the medium, but one of my major takeaways was just how much more accomplished and nuanced FSR is in this regard than much of its siblings. In taking video games apart, reducing them to their most fundamental elements, laying bare their sheer, unbridled, artifice, FSR doesn't bring video games down, it shows us why we love them in the first place. Spellbinding.

This is a pretty harsh review, maybe one that is not reflective of how I felt about the game for a significant portion of its runtime, but I'm angry at how many things about this game legitimately infuriated me, and how only a few people are willing to talk about them.

There's definitely good stuff here. The cast is charismatic and likeable, the "Essence Of" animations are very funny, and the game has a lot of charm in how it interprets the conventions of classic JRPGs into the modern Yakuza universe. The soundtrack bangs harder than it has any right to, almost certainly the best of the Yakuza games I've played. Yakuza: Like a Dragon wears a shit-eating grin and an attitude you can't help be swept up by, but as the hours drag on and on, the charm wears thin, and the flaws stick out more and more, until I had grown to resent and even, to a certain extent, hate a game I once loved.

The plot is a complete mess that changes gears completely every three chapters or so, leaving me with a near-constant state of narrative and thematic whiplash, which would maybe be forgivable if this was a 30 hour game, but it's far closer to 60, 70, even up to 100 hours long. At least it's fun for that length, right? Well...

I'm a big fan of JRPGs. They're probably my favourite genre. And I love turn-based combat...when done well. When I heard that Like A Dragon would be a turn-based RPG, my excitement couldn't be contained. It felt like they were making a game I had dreamed about for years. So trust me when I say that the battle system of Like A Dragon is the worst I've experienced in a big JRPG in years. Progression is thoughtless and on-rails, with the only choice being which one of the game's jobs you want to be grinding at a specific moment. Moment to moment, the combat offers no interesting choices, almost every encounter playing out the exact same way: big AOE attacks if enemies are clustered together, or big single-target attacks if they aren't. Boss design is routinely awful, with the game almost always simply resorting to having the boss be a big tough guy with loads of health and resistances that does a fuck-ton of damage, without any other mechanics to make them feel distinct or memorable or fun. Artificial difficulty abounds in the final third, with both the Chapter 12 and Chapter 15 bosses literally having the game tell you to grind out about 10 levels before facing them, OHKO attacks that can hit your main character with little warning and give you an instant game over, wiping out all your progress through these overlong boss encounters, and dungeons as a whole containing almost no save points. Do you have a life you'd like to get back to anytime soon? Tough luck, buddy! Stick it out or do that shitty final dungeon where you run into the same room and fight the same enemies about a dozen times all over again.

And all of this would be bad enough, if not for the fact that the battle system is the vehicle by which the game delivers the truly unpleasant politics it has beneath it's surface-level charm and empathy. Through the cutscenes, the game affects a facade of being caring and empathetic towards sex workers (though that in and of itself is fairly lacking in nuance) but the former sex worker in your party, Saeko, is reduced to a caricature of feminine stereotypes when she's in battle, having a set of "female exclusive" jobs with abilities like "Sexy Pose" and weapons that are handbags. The game earnestly tries to convince you that it really cares about the plight of Japan's homeless, up until the point the game's "metal slime" equivalents are revealed: largely defenceless homeless men who you are encouraged to seek out and kill as fast as possible for an enormous EXP bonus. The initially charming and funny way battles are framed, as the overactive imagination of a central character raised on a diet of Dragon Quest, eventually left a bad taste in my mouth as Ichiban kept imagining deeply offensive caricatures of black men and trans people for him to beat up with his baseball bat.

As with the year's other big disappointment, Doom Eternal, the awful attitudes this game has beneath the surface have gone almost completely undiscussed by the wider gaming press, with only Dia Lacina's piece (which I initially thought was harsh but now reads as almost startlingly on-the-point) and a few people on discord and twitter acknowleging it. When the game asked me to grind out levels in a boring-as-fuck sewer dungeon right before the final boss, where it had me beat up trans caricatures that made me a bit sick to look at, I found myself getting really angry that I wasn't warned that this was waiting for me.

If you watched "YAKUZA: LIKE A DRAGON: FULL MOVIE 1080p 60fps" on youtube, or played the first four or five chapters exclusively, you might be forgiven for thinking that this game really is an empathetic portrayal of people on society's bottom rung rising up to reclaim their lives. But the actual game doesn't bear up to that scrutiny. It pretends to care about subaltern, and does a good job of pretending, but it doesn't. Not really. Not when it comes time to make shitty jokes at their expense.

When I loved Like A Dragon, I really loved it. There's truly moving scenes and moments, all the way up to the end. But when I hated it, I really hated it. And over time, the latter emotion won out over the former. In many ways, it is the true sequel to Persona 5. A game I was incredibly excited for, played obsessively through it's obscenely overlong length, and felt my enthusiasm sap out of me in real time over the course of it, until I watched it chicken out of landing it's themes home time and time again, until it's conservative attitudes bubbled to the surface, until my memories of the game, once positive and warm, turned cold and resentful in my hands.

The most I've been disappointed in a game in a long time.

One of the purest expressions of the childlike understanding of Play imaginable. Picture it: a painstakingly constructed diorama, each piece crude and small on its own, but weaving together to create little places, little stories, some sad, some thoughtful, some funny, all very very silly and creative, that in turn each weave together to a larger picture, a larger statement of the world and the vision it constructed it.

And then you come in with a wrecking ball, yelling "NEEEOORRRMMMM" and destroy it all.

Katamari Damacy captures Play how I remember it, silly, crude, anarchic, bursting with imagination and reflective of the world around me whilst having a callous disregard for permanence, consequences, and sense, with a voice from on high always on the edge of hearing, waiting to call an end to playtime.

Keita Takahashi's directorial work tends to lean more towards the idea of games as toys rather than a more modern conception of them, utilizing family-friendly graphics and very simple mechanics with de-emphasized win and lose states to make games that emphasize play for the sake of play, without drivers such as plot, mastery, or levelling up. However, Katamari Damacy raises itself above Noby Noby Boy and Wattam because of the constraints on that play it offers, the timelimits and the extra modes about avoiding or collecting specific items, are frictional elements that contextualise the experience wonderfully, like a father figure setting arbitrary tasks or constraints that push back against the barriers of a child's imagination. As much as I would prefer to just roll a big ball around sucking things up, these elements provide a sprinkle of thematic salt on an experience it would otherwise be easy to breeze through without thinking about.

And then there's the final moments of the final level, which twice now have struck me as a strangely lonely, boring experience where all you have left to do is hoover up the last few things in a vast empty space, a chore that pulls back the curtain on the artifice and pointlessness of what you've been doing. Where the diorama pieces just look pieces, when the dolls just look like dolls, when your imagination bounces right off them. When it's not Fun anymore, what is it?

There's a lot of really good pieces out there discussing this game from a variety of angles, and I agree with a lot of them, particularly those looking at the depictions of father-son relationships in the King and the Prince, but they aren't why I love Katamari Damacy.

No, I love Katamari Damacy because it makes me feel like a kid again. For good and for ill.

8-bit games often feel strangely lonely and alienating to me. Do you feel like this? I can't really put my finger on why, exactly. Maybe it's because so many of them are such well-trodden ground by now, that it feels like everyone else has been and gone, leaving me alone, crawling amongst the wreckage the words of others have left behind.

Few games tap into that feeling more than the much-maligned Final Fantasy II. There's really no way to say this without sounding hyperbolic/unhinged/pretentious, but it's a game that I am absolutely convinced has a true Soul, one that exists beyond the cartridge, and in the heart and imagination. In the same way that many people develop emotional attachments to their cars and end up attaching human characteristics to their errors and singularities, evolving them into quirks and endearing character flaws, Final Fantasy II's straining ambition gives it an utterly human character to me, a mess of quirks and ideas and wholly distinctive character traits that are entirely its own. Even when the game has serious issues that can impact my enjoyment - namely, the dungeon designs, the one part of the game I find largely indefensible - I find myself endeared to it completely. "Oh, you, FF2!"

There is no other game quite like Final Fantasy II, and there probably never will be again, simply because we now have so much ingrained knowledge of how systems like these are supposed to work, how stories like this are supposed to be told. The lessons learned from games like Final Fantasy II have taken root in the future, but in so doing, the games themselves have been left to languish in retrospect's austere halls.

If I had to sum up the soul of this game, I'd say that it's character can be drawn out through one of my favorite anecdotes in video game history (https://twitter.com/woodaba2/status/1331685180285874176?s=20), the story of how Ultima, the spell sought after by the heroes that Minwu, the most stalwart and useful of the guest party members, gives his life to unseal, only to find it ultimately useless. Although "fixed" in subsequent releases, the emotions this bug inspires live on in the "correct" implementation of Ultima, that being it growing in power the more spells you have mastered, and it takes quite some mastery to push it beyond the bounds of Flare. Even if you do unleash it's full power, that power comes from the user, not the spell: in the hands of a party member without spells, Ultima is powerless.

Unintentional though it may have been, this moment is core to the heart of Final Fantasy II and why it remains incredibly impactful to this day. Common storytelling logic - and, indeed, the original intention of the script - holds that Minwu's death would allow the heroes to find the weapon they need to overthrow the evil Emperor once and for all, but the programming of Final Fantasy II, astonishingly present thanks to the myriad bugs and systemic quirks the game is infamous for, rebels against this idea. "No," it says. "Ultima is but the loudest cry of a far bygone age, echoing almost silently into the future. Minwu died for nothing."

When Aerith dies in Final Fantasy VII, the party is struck by the suddenness of it, but eventually come to understand that she died casting a spell that may save the planet. They can find meaning in what she died doing, even as they mourn the death itself. But in Final Fantasy II, people die and often, their deaths are senseless and without meaning. Perhaps characters like Gordon, who dies from his wounds in his bed, marking your first real mission for the Rebel Army a failure, may have inspired tragic cutscenes in a SNES or PS1 RPG (though I should stress that this game does have the integral addition of choreographed cutscenes punctuating critical moments, but I'll let New Frame Plus discuss it better in their excellent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xapVOKEMk6A), but here, a death like this brings with it only the hole they leave in your party, a wound on the very battle screen that no one can entirely replace.

Not to say that characters are entirely mechanical, like they are in the original, but certainly the game leverages the mechanical boosts the guest characters offer you to make you truly feel their absence. Despite his sparse dialogue, Minwu, the ass-kicking white mage sporting one of early FF's best designs is beloved by fans because he is a crucial asset in battle, and his loss is deeply felt by a party that has no doubt by this stage come to depend on him. Your permanent party members, the vectors through which you'll explore the game's revolutionary levelling system - now thoroughly jacked by The Elder Scrolls, becoming the foundation for the most popular RPG in the world - wherein your characters grow organically through play from orphans who are destroyed in the first battle of the game to distinct archetypes of your own choosing. In my last playthrough, Firion became a master of bows and magics, while Maria took up Leon's fallen sword and became a dual-wielding powerhouse. You can become incredibly powerful in your chosen niches quite quickly in the remakes of this game...not that it will help you against the might of Palamecia.

Victories against the Empire are hard-won, difficult to come by, and often, negligible or even fruitless. Even slaying the Emperor in his palace only allows him to rise again, more powerful than ever before, as the Emperor of Hell itself. By the time you begin the final assault on Pandaemonium, there's a very real sense that there's not much of the world left to save, so devastated has it been by the conflict, leaving you wandering alone in the wreckage of the world listening to the crucially melancholy overworld theme (https://youtu.be/SaCLoLBdxTU). A later Squaresoft title on the PS1 leaves its world in a similar state going into the final dungeon, but it never hit me there quite like it does here because that game is filled with so much exposition and character moments that there's so much else to think about and consider. Final Fantasy II drowns you in the sensory silence of it's empty world, and it is deafening.

But still, you press on.

For those you have lost. For those you can yet save.

Because the deaths of Minwu and the others, they can't have been for nothing.

You can't let them be for nothing.

Most people don't get out of this game what I do. Heck, even I often don't get out of this game what I do in my moments of highest appreciation for it, as it exists in experiential aggregate, forgetting the miserable dungeons and the way the game is almost completely broken in it's original form. But there's no doubt in my mind that this is a special game, that does very special things. You may argue that those things are unintentional, sure, but does that matter? Games like Metroid II: The Return of Samus have come to be seen in bold and incisive ways that grow beyond their original intentions, so allow me to plant my flag and say that Final Fantasy II deserves to be acknowledged and appreciated much the same, as a defiant Wild Rose, rather than be left to wither and dry up on a sad, lonely outpost on the road to a future that left it behind.

I dug up a review/piece I wrote about Earthbound in 2017 on my old blog. I'd like to post it here:

"What does Earthbound mean to you?

In Itoi’s interview regarding Earthbound’s U.S. re-release on the Wii U Virtual Console, he looks back on Earthbound and describes his views on it now as a playground he threw stuff in for himself and everyone else to play in, and that everyone takes something completely different away from these bits and bobs he's filled it with. A communal sort-of game, in which children make up stories and ideas as they go along and put it right in with the rest of the make-believe. When you have a group of friends in a playground, kids will often enter and leave as their parents drop them off and pick them up, and little by little the stories the group goes on changes as children come and go. Between zombies, aliens, the future, and whatever else kids either think about or wonder about their own world. And of course, the longer this goes on, eventually dark thoughts and feelings enter. Relationships form, and people realize things about themselves and each other.

A lot of the spirit of a shapeshifting make-believe can be found in the game’s stories themselves, as each town is going through some crazy problem, and as the heroes continue their adventure, each new scenario adds something completely separate to the mix of fictional situations, drawing from all sorts of American cultural iconography and imagery.

This is another reason the game is so interesting, it as an adventure through a self-parody of the American youth, the landscape of American suburban adventure (or as it is referred to in the game: “Eagleland”) with the coming-of-age spirit so prevalent in American fiction. But it is told through the mechanics, systems, and interface of classically Japanese role-playing games, namely Dragon Quest. The inclusion of (pseudo) first person battles (albeit influenced by psychedelic visuals, as they take over the background of each fight), a command menu, stat growth, and equipment/inventory all pulled from the Dragon Quest system. This combination of simultaneous parody of Japanese systems and American culture and iconography makes it a truly unique international cultural creation.

In addition to this, the localization of the game lends itself very much to the identity of Earthbound. Much of the Japanese humor that would have been lost in translation is rewritten, but still preserves the wit and verbal/deadpan tone of the original. The octopus statue blocking your way in a valley is replaced with a pencil, to allow for the invention of the iconic “Pencil Eraser” (Just don’t use it in a pencil store!), a now staple joke of the game, with which the identity of the American version of the game just wouldn’t be the same without. Of course, the “Eraser Eraser” continuation of the joke found later in the game acts as an even better secondary punchline to the same joke.

Much of the game often feels like a rambling collection of jokes, ideas, and views on the world. Nothing is quite told boringly or without clear authorial perspective. It brings to mind the sort of writing that books like Cat’s Cradle used, in which Vonnegut described as each chapter being a small chip of the whole book, and each chip is a little joke in and of its own.

The U.S. release, in specific, is the Earthbound I think of so fondly when I think of the game. And I find that name so fitting as opposed to its Japanese name.

Earthbound.

Despite all the adventuring, all the crazy, wacky, surreal stories you learn and experience, even with the threat and exposure to extraterrestrial life within the game, your characters, your experiences, everything you do is very much bound to the planet Earth. Every idea in the game, every character you meet, makes up one grand image of the world that the game, in essence, is presenting to you as you explore it with your d-pad.

The NPC’s of the game are some of the most iconic in any, and the reason for that is that their dialogue is written so unpredictably and humorously, but yet so truthful to their representations of their roles as humans. A businessman in Earthbound will not sound like a businessman you meet on the street. He will sound like a caricature of what a businessman would sound like, knowing that he’s a businessman in this world of hundreds of other people and hundreds of other types of people. And in knowing that, he has found joy and laughter understanding his place. Each character is a figment of themselves in the eyes of a child innocently wandering around.

There is a famous English saying, “it takes all sorts (to make a world)”, that is often used to understand strangeness or foreignness in the world and in people. People often use it when they find something difficult to understand, because of how strange and foreign it might be, so they make the claim that the world must be so big, that it must require all sorts of strangeness and foreignness and things of all sorts of manners hard to understand, for it to exist as big as it does.

Earthbound, to me at least, is like a literal, humorous depiction of that phrase. Every character, every strange, surreal person that appears so plain, has to be there to make up this world. This Earth that we are all bound to."

If you read it all, thank you