You know how it is. The most an artist's death has gotten me to cry in a long time - the infectious creative energy I've felt lent down to me from his work is something that'll never leave me. And just like everyone else, I've found myself pouring through dozens and dozens of heartfelt tributes to the man's legendary career. But reading it all got me thinking...ain't the meat and potatoes reputation Dragon Quest has earnt itself kind of like, an error? An impossibility?
So, lemme ask you a question: when's the first time you saw something that made you think "Dragon Quest is cool"? I couldn't tell you what mine was, but recently finishing a full playthrough of the original NES Dragon Warrior pulled me back into the correct reality in which this series was not "generic", but an outlier in style. Toriyama's enthusiasm to play the hits puts the personality on display in its monsters maybe 20 years ahead of the curve. As an aside, I also recommend to anyone playing any older Dragon Quest to look up some scans of the old manuals; the effortless coolness of his artstyle had already bled into DQ's identity.

You could call this game a "grind", but the grind is the gameplay and the gameplay is good. Each individual battle is simple to solve in a bubble, but enemies are split between the ones you can defeat with or without expending resources - instantly spiraling the world into an ever-evolving puzzle to solve. Planning out a trajectory of travel immediately prompts a dizzying amount of dice rolls in your head: how many resources should I spend to gain EXP? How much should I dice roll running away, and how much magic will I have left to heal myself up considering both the expected and unexpected outcomes? Inner workings filled with perfect math to never quite satisfy things with a clear answer; but what raises this from good to great is how through my entire time playing the game, I always undershot my potential. Enemies that are apparently stronger than you can be taken down with perfect resource management, finding consistency in a haze of lottery tickets that makes you feel genius every time you take one down and keep a little more magic for the rest of the trip than your last encounter with the same guy.
And in comparison to how grinding is often characterized as a boring chore-like task, I think playing this game is way closer to exhausting - you can do a good run, and do another, and then lose to a Skeleton you've already defeated 10 times and now half your gold is gone. You probably haven't even made it halfway to the level you want yet! But for every moment of flighty confusion, there's also a moment where you get to level 3, gain heal, and kill the first slime you see in one hit.

and that's how they get you

Random encounters are most frequently characterized as one of those unsavory bits of RPG we chop off, but playing this helped click into place how much texture can be applied to identical floor tiles simply by the difference in looming threat. The invisible encounter sheet constantly shifting under your feet giving cool and hostile sensation to each step, and when you realize you can kill something that once scared you off, the level design changes. Reinforces the process of seamless non-linear exploration with an information game unique to the format - a grind made engaging by the real question being where to even grind in the first place. This is an RPG with no vestigial limbs. Every single part of an RPG you've questioned the integral elements of is present working in perfect harmony with each other; last year, I found myself actively frustrated playing a newly released turn-based RPG in which the mindlessness of each individual encounter serves no purpose. Without long-term resource management, of course random encounters are boring! Or, in contrast to RPGs where levels feel like guided progress, here, lower level enemies to begin to run away, breaking the consistency of previously successful sources of experience and gold. Now, with every moment of newly found strength matched by a push out of my comfort zone, I'm like "ohhh i get it now"

and they got me

This is all coming from a relatively young person's perspective (i turned 22 around when i wrote most of this happy birthday me :D ), so there's this tough balance to reach when it comes to simultaneously embracing that sometimes, traits of oldness are endearing to me, and making sure I don't sound like I am looking down on something, or it's a novelty.
In the past few months, I ended up playing a bunch of games from the mid-late 2000s, and it was easy to lose yourself in a sea of fifteen year old Gamefaqs threads, and chat with people just a bit older than me who experienced all these things organically in their childhood. Especially due to growing up with games from the same era, it was easy for me to imagine myself playing these as a kid, wondering how this could've effected me sooner. Dragon Quest on the contrast is for a bit older of a generation than me, especially with some of its strongest cultural imprint existing beyond language barrier. I played this alongside someone close to me - we honestly couldn't stop gushing to each other about how satisfying the sleuthing was as we kept a million notes marked down. There's a great moment in which a secret that's visibly hinted to you in one of the last towns has an equivalent but invisible secret in one of the first towns; this is one of the oldest games I've played with a strong design language. Things like this got us close to that ideal you hear of pen and paper hint tracking. Eventually, it became natural to feel like playing the game like this was making me fall into the past footsteps of someone else; it's hard not to romanticize it like we were 2 little kids playing the game lit by nothing but the humming static of a CRT. And even though I've literally known people not even a decade older than me that grew up with this game, it's immersing myself in a distinctly different time-frame from usual that makes that era feel so far away. It's that solidarity with a perspective just out of reach that starts positively haunting the game with the ghost of lived experience.

If you asked me what I thought of this whole modern anthology of Fire Emblem, I’d probably say something like “it kinda sucks but its so weirdly compelling im gonna keep playing them until i die”
I replayed Awakening last year, and it showed to me that its maximalist approach to revitalizing the series has aged like milk - both in gameplay and tonally.
Fates: Conquest shows a team who genuinely has the skills to improve this framework, but the series was then tossed to another team for Three Houses; the game receiving an improvement in tone, but generally rolling its gameplay innovations back. The qualities and content of each entry feels like a dice roll, but that’s probably the most compelling part; you could probably make a masterpiece if you mashed these games together. And while I’m truly hoping one day we’ll see that to fruition, I think we all knew this wouldn’t be the game the moment that trailer dropped. Instead we all thought
“is that a toothpaste girl”

PRESENTATION
The infallible strangeness that Intelligent Systems keeps trying to turn their war simulator into a poppy smash hit is not lost on me, but some things take higher priority in that discussion. This game contains a toothpaste girl. She is somewhere in here. It’d be punching below the belt to bully this design, but it feels like one of those designs that could only exist in lighting that compliments them, and her 3D model doesn’t make me feel anything. Sucks that Mika Pikazo was brought in as lead artist for the game that ditched illustrated portraits, because the game doesn’t get to play to her strengths. The overconfidence in its 3D also bleeds into the game’s map presentation - barely any of your party members have immediately readable key-poses, with toothpaste girl’s hair colours being the only relief from this frustration. This combined with some poor colour choices for the game’s four enemy range indicators resulted in me playing most of the game fully zoomed in.
Even the battle animations–the main part of the aesthetics I’ve seen praise for–have their own polish issues, their slick movements almost always undermined by bad camerawork. Sharp jump cuts before attacks land already result in busy visuals, but where it’s most obvious is how it clashes with the game’s readily available x2 speed button - making even the most basic attack animations unreadable.
And while this game’s art design isn’t a complete loss–there’s some wonderful cutscenes here and there–what surprised me the most was a soundtrack that’s just...not good? These games don’t like worldbuilding very much, so Awakening’s accordion-romanticism, and the Scot-Noir broodings of Fates: Conquest do a lot to enrich their worlds - it’s only natural this out of touch J-Rock leaves the game feeling toneless. With notable composers such as Takeru Kanazaki and Hiroki Morishita still present, I would never want to blame the individual creatives on the project, because you can tell this modern direction for the series has a lot of corporate influence.

Story
We could talk about this game’s plot, but that’d require it to have one of its own; it’s more of a greatest clips montage edited in Sony Vegas with a ton of colour aberration and dubstep. We could also talk about how the crossover element here feels misguided - the broadly personified protagonists of the series were made to be reactive, rather than interactive, so they all feel like uncharismatic brick walls here. This game did nothing to fanservice me as a follower of the series, but more importantly (to the developers), it did nothing to sell me on the characters I hadn’t played the games of. The villain here isn’t even the storyline, it’s really the scriptwork. Early on into the game, a character is mortally wounded, and as they die in your hands, they spend their last moments explaining that they are not dying because they were shot by a big evil magic orb, but because of some high concept lore machinations. In their dying moments, they hand you a macguffin.
At the climax of this scene, toothpaste girl does a “pinky promise” with this person, which despite making me instantly burst out laughing, is in fact a choice! A choice made by the Tetsuya Nomura impersonator you hire for your kid’s birthday party, sure, but it does paint her as someone who is emotionally stunted and clings onto childish mannerisms. But toothpaste girl takes on her role as goddess-worshiped-by-everyone-in-the-world in strides, is immediately complimented as “humble” and “human” by everyone she meets, and is also apparently just the greatest tactician in the world! This is at least partially the fault of a vision messied by corporate; the director of the game noting in interview that Nintendo asked them to tone down the worldliness of toothpaste girl. Where’s the censorship controversy about that, huh, gamers???
I’ve seen this plot pitched as a sugary saturday morning cartoon romp, but it sorta just lacks the humanity for me to see it as sincere - a key trait to loving that style. That’s not even to mention the even more obvious contrast: how this plot is driven by tragedy without moments of relief. It’s an e10+ war game, but it’s still a war game - we’re out here playing tactics ogremon red and blue version.
But…I know and you know that this sort of analysis isn’t going to get us closer to understanding why people like these games. Talk to any Fire Emblem fan–and don’t grit your teeth too hard thinking about that, I did it for you–and they’ll tell you they like these games for literally one thing.

It’s the gameplay.
The gameplay is alright, I played on hard classic and had a good time with it. The real standout here is Break: a new system where if you win the weapon triangle RPS, you knock your opponent’s weapon out of their hands until you hit them again, or your turn ends. Making it easier to play your turn damageless enables this game’s goals as being a more aggressive Fire Emblem; encouraging you to stand your ground and make confident offensive plays, so you can wade through the onslaught of enemies. There are also secondary roles tied to classes; grounded offense units have Backup, the ability to join other teammate’s attacks, for example. Armored units are the real winners here, they’re given an immunity to break, which makes them the most interesting to pilot they’ve been in years. The cherry on top here are the Emblems, which exist on the same wavelength of Pop game design as supers in a fighting game. They’re all flashy comeback mechanics that give you buttons that are fun to click and make the good numbers happen, but I also love how they’re very flexible if you use them to prop up a unit’s flaws, or play to one's strengths. I like how they their big fuck-off buttons don’t necessarily feel congruous with each other either; they’re like giant puzzle pieces that you have to attach a million microscopic ones onto to complete the picture. The way that Emblems can flexibly be moved between units makes this the most prep-centric Fire Emblem I’ve played!!! yes i love nerd shit :)

But for all of this to work, the map design’s gotta be strong. And it does start rock solid, lots of well placed secondary objectives like running thieves to keep you on pace. But Emblems, for all I like about them, definitely ripple out negatively into the game’s balance - this game mostly runs on “defeat the boss” win conditions, so every boss needs to have multiple health bars to counter Emblems. It made me feel like a badass to kill them in a single turn the first time I did it, but when I realized the map design heavily enables this playstyle, it started stagnating pretty quick. That’s when Chapter 17 rolls around, where you face down six bosses on a single map, with knights and dragons creeping in between. Not only that, but one of those bosses was a huge knowledge check for me - being a mage knight with both massive defense and res made me unable to kill him in one turn, all while another boss was barreling for me. I had to carefully exploit break, and position my backups around him in a way that didn’t get them killed by a combination of the two bosses attacking me. It’s genuinely a series highlight chapter to me, so it’s a shame it doesn’t last; you spend the rest of the game fighting those same bosses in different, smaller orders. Not only does this fail to progress the challenge of how you play around bosses, it’s also just…lame. Significantly less cool. And the developer’s priorities were different from mine, because the last 4 chapters of the game instead introduce stage hazards that border on being gag levels at times.

While playing this game, I ended up thinking “maybe if I’m having this little fun with a Fire Emblem, it’s time to graduate to maddening” quite a bit, but then I ran into another problem
…This is the most prep heavy Fire Emblem
Once you’re finished with a map, go ahead and run around its overworld for a few minutes picking up items. Then load into Somniel–the game’s Monastery–and play a bunch of minigames to activate surprisingly noticeable temporary stat upgrades for the next mission. Lastly, remember to read those 650+ supports (that’s over twice as many as Three Houses!), and 1300+ bond conversations. While the Monastery system and how it clashes with the replayability of Three Houses is definitely worth critique, and on paper, Somniel does sound better–being entirely optional and not attached to a calendar–it’s easy to see why Somniel misses the point of Monastery. Simply put, every decision I make trickling down from a bigger macro decision made it at least feel like I was playing a video game while I was in the Monastery, and Somniel feels like I’m doing mobile game dailies. It’d be a lie to pretend hard classic was difficult enough to require those temporary buffs, but I can only imagine the looming frustration of losing in Maddening, and thinking “I should’ve played that fucking fishing minigame”... That isn’t even commenting on some minor issues, such as how Emblem customization is managed from 2 rooms in Somniel that have a 10 second loading screen between each other, making me wish the whole place was just a menu. I only started enjoying the game at all when I started doing some self care; choosing to not interact with a lot of its frustrating mechanics, but… if I’m playing this for the gameplay, and even the gameplay loop is awkward, what am I even left with?

The combat.
The combat is alright, I played it on hard mode classic, and had a good time with it. But like, dude. DUDE!! Every time I read someone call this game a “return to form”, I feel like I have temporal insanity!!!! This game’s idea of fun is herding your sheep, rolling for gacha pulls, and giving your fav 11 year old a wedding ring!!!!

I could probably pump out a graphic like this:
PRESENTATION: 60
STORY: 30
GAMEPLAY: 65
OVERALL: 51.666666666667
but it’d be a disservice both to understanding why people like this game, and why I don’t like it. Fans of this game have gracefully chosen to appreciate it for the best parts of its vision, shielding it out of what I can only assume to be genuine empathy, which kinda owns. But when I put it down, it felt like this game’s loop demands your immersion into its world, and trying to play it the way I did is something it rejects.
These fuckin’ Fire Emblem fans, dude, I watch them perfectly cleaning the dirt off a burger they pulled out of a dumpster, and I try to mirror them and just get stale ketchup all over my hands.
…So. Is Engage worth playing? I probably won’t have the most time-withstanding take on the game, but I’ll tell you what I know for sure


you should probably not buy the new nintendo game just to be in on the conversation with your friends
you’re thinking of “getting into fire emblem” and you haven’t even cleaned ur room today??? say it aint sooooo 😱😱😱😱

How many people don’t know that Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards has mini-games? If you open the options menu, there’s a little 4 player mini-game tab, containing 3 mini-games: 100-Yard Hop, Bumper Crop Bump, and CheckerBoard Chase. I was one of those people until about a week ago, I stumbled haphazardly into the depths of CheckerBoard Chase… To summarize it, it’s a simple Bomberman-adjacent arcade game where characters walk around on a big platform, and whenever you press A you clear out a line of the platform in front of you. The goal is to stay on the platform without falling into the destroyed lines. What would seemingly be a simple, throwaway mini-game developed for some presumedly arbitrary reason ends up having a whole lot of depth when you search for it.

First off, let’s talk about the line-clearing itself. The platform is visually broken into a simple 8x8 tileset, and you clear 1 block wide lines from where you’re standing to the stage’s edge. Clearing a line itself has a bit of startup and animation recovery, so if you and someone else clear lines in each other’s direction, you’ll only barely make it off the block before it falls. If you acted a split second late - you’re gone. You might not even clear the lines at all if you don’t click it fast enough, you’ll get stuck in startup and fall through.

Line clearing itself is a 2 stage mechanic; first a line is highlighted one by one in a split second, then the blocks start falling in order. Because of this, there’s even a sort of proximity system going on here - blocks fall faster the closer you are to the ledge. Not only that, but characters have tangibility to them; you can bodyblock! This means that when you’ve positioned correctly, you can hold someone in a corner and quickly get a confirmed kill on them.

Walking in this game is slow and doesn’t have any diagonal movement, but line clears are can be easily reacted to from afar. It’s about when you choose to walk that the skill lies, as the advantageous and disadvantageous spots on the stage are constantly changing as blocks fall and respawn. Walking for too long can often lead to you being pushed into a disadvantageous position if you can’t defend your own ground, but long stretches of watching are especially important to the end-game as the stage closes in, and bad line clears become more punishable.

If you’ve been locked in the corner, you can clear the spaces on the map where your opponent can get a confirmed kill on you from - if you’re fast enough. Though of course this sort of playstyle is risky, as you’re forcing yourself to stick to what’s usually the corners of the stage, which begin to fall as the match progresses. That’s a comeback mechanic with at least as much design intelligence as Guilty Gear: Strive.

I’ve been able to find a lot of fundamental e-sportsy game design here: from positional advantages to concepts like spacing. This is at the very least an EVO side event-worthy game that can sit in the corner next to Puyo Puyo and those Sailor Moon SNES fighting games!! Breaking this game’s subtleties open and scouring for crumbs of depth can really teach you a lot about the simple arts of game design as a whole. It’s often the rigid, initially awkward aspects of a game that lead to its depth. When analyzing a game as sheerly un-emphasized as a little mini-game hiding under the floorboards of Kirby 64, it’s hard to see where intention starts and ends. Yet ultimately as players it’s our right to breathe meaning into the dusty ashes of whatever we stumble upon. Grassroots is beautiful. Made me feel like a Ryu player circa 1994 on the sticks, feeling out their buttons. “Feeling a standing fierce here” I whisper, eyes shut tightly, as I launch a Waddle Dee into the pit of oblivion

I played Kirby 64 by the way. I don’t remember what happens in it it was a long time ago

A game that's impossible to not find alluring, if you've ever had the optimism in your heart to believe that something this charismatic wouldn't eventually fall into the limelight it deserves. Deeply in love with a lineage that has never been able to capture the zeitgeist as much as it naturally should. It's also teetering on a mid-life crisis that I suspect has drained everyone involved with the series to some extent - it’s your Dad’s newfound obsession with motorcycles that wakes you up early in the morning from how fucking loud it is.

Guilty Gear has always had an infectious self-obsessiveness to it - the way you can sense its author let these characters and elaborate stories churn in their head for years, and the way its visuals bring said character's fermented personalities to life is incredible. Phrasing this very expensively produced game like it's a one-man passion project would be misguided, but it's hard not to feel excitement seeing someone's twenty year old notebook scribblings brought to life so lavished. Fleeting glimpses at a full spectrum of human experience within the cast as each hand-animated frame of emotion cascades in its character's faces. The soundtrack echoes a similar feeling; the in-character lyricism creates a bridge between the series' hieroglyphic storytelling and links it to the writer's spirit with excessive clarity and newfound sincerity. Bluntly think the composition is a lot worse than previous entries in the series; the songs barely even function as songs in-game due to often having intros that go on for as long as a full round. And yet, there's something oddly beautiful in how this soundtrack is largely comprised of 5-7 minute long theatrical anthems that you'll literally never hear the entirety of in a single match; the indulgent opportunity to write a musical about your OCs was chosen over creating a soundtrack that suits its source material...I get it. Twenty years of storytelling conclude with the stage curtains raised, resolution brought to a cast that had clearly been rotated in its creator's mind nonstop for longer than I've been alive. Real inspiring.

Despite that, a haze of low morale permeates throughout the community. At launch, the game was praised for its netcode; you could actually play this one with your friends from a different continent, and the fans didn't have to patch it in themselves! But after proving the necessity of rollback to its contemporaries, it's beginning to fall behind. It's sad that I played this game for the first time nearly four years ago, and its lobbies still constantly break on me. Makes the Open Parks feel like walking through someone else's property without permission. Someone dubbed "hackerman" by the community routinely snipes streamers by destroying ping and crashing games - and it's really funny seeing developers also refer to them by that name - but frustratingly still unsolved. And at the core of all of the maelstrom of discussion is the game's modem of modernization: its "casualization".

It might seem obvious at first, but who are these simplifying changes for? The classic high low mix-up system enriches every fighting game with goals of mindfulness; becoming aware of your opponent's tendencies during long sessions is a deeply rewarding process. But when you're starting to learn fighting games, and haven't tapped into that awareness yet - especially if you're playing short sets with randoms, rather than with people you know - it can feel random and frustrating. This is where Strive's simplification becomes a problem: Small health bars and a lack of strong defensive systems result in very turn-based defensive play that is oppressive even at high level. Strive puts more emphasis on the moments you lose a single mix-up taking a chunk out of your health, and makes stages smaller and air-dashes weaker. The neutral in this one feels claustrophobic with so few layers of approach, and so much to lose from a wrong guess; this isn't fun for me, but it's especially not fun for anyone new. Strive is trying to untangle itself from a set of system mechanics that series elders routinely used to bully any new Xrd player, but it seems that they've built a game that still leans towards people who know how fighting games work. Now that the game has had a few years, I can tell there really is a niche for this: I know a lot of people who have been fighting game loosely for years, picked up Strive, and actually got good at it. The first opportunity they've ever had to feel truly successful at a game wrapped in the same packaging as the other anime fighters they've loved, but this time they arrived on-time to grow alongside everyone else. So, is Strive just an expensive video game therapy session, telling its players the obvious fact that you can get good at any fighting game if you just...play it. a lot. I think the answer to this comes down to personal preference...so, I guess I just gotta say how I feel.

I like Guilty Gear: Strive. I like it more than most of my friends who are critical of it, even! It just doesn't have my favourite parts of Guilty Gear - to play a game that is so endlessly in-depth that there are countless routes for improvement in every direction - but it captures the true core appeal for 90% of people, which is playing as the coolest cast of characters ever. I am not immune to this. I just miss when it truly embodied the term "anime fighter": dynamic poses hit in mid-air as both players push to break the game's speed limits. I wish Strive compartmentalized that feeling better, even if it was easier. Regardless, I still felt blessed to be able to share with a lot of my friends what's special about this series. Whenever I had the opportunity to teach someone the game, I'd keep doing really obvious tricks like roman cancelling moving specials into throws, and they'd be like "woah!!". It was cool to see the light in someone's eyes as they learned how to express themselves through a fighting game for the first time. An extreme sense of both passion and compromise runs through Strive's hulking mass - this sorta thing is still difficult to discuss, and its goals are impossible to obtain without crucial sacrifice. Strive both yearns and succeeds to bring people together, and it's hard not to get emotional seeing a series I've loved for a long time change people's lives. It's just a little too socially awkward to connect to every other person; a biomechanical beast wearing casual clothes.

I don’t think any series has come and gone throughout my whole life quite like Pokémon has. Thinking back to 2019: I played through Pokémon Crystal with a band of friends, and it brought back a lot of my dormant love for it. We planned our teams together, helped come up with nicknames, and tried to each catch a shiny of choice before the end of the game. By the end of the game, not only did it have that usual special Pokémon feel like you really went on a journey with your lovingly raised lil guys, my other friend’s Pokémon had also floated vaguely through my mind. Pokémon’s natural strengths of telling little wordless stories through your playthroughs all seem to shine when you do it side by side with others. Recently I’ve been playing Dragon Quest 3 - I named my party after my friends, and was really endeared by how their classes naturally make them interact with each other. 2 of my other friends, who are besties, are a mage and a priestess, and the mage is frail so the priestess has to heal them a bunch. Gotta love how classic RPGs remind me of people, but I gotta love how Pokémon brings my friends together at least just as much.

And at this point, it’s fair to say that Pokémon’s natural social subtleties are proven to be more than theory or novelty. The iconic 90s Pokémon boom pushed the series so far into the collective consciousness that it made people fear it was a cult - and they were probably right. Those catholics laid in bed in a cold sweat despite the pistols in their wardrobes, because they knew that Zubat was an entity that could not be killed in as simple ways as bullet murder. The uniqueness of every person’s playthrough would prove to lend itself perfectly to internet content; nuzlockes and all their siblings spawning an endless stream of noise forever. Twitch Plays Pokémon proved to us that democracy is not real, only for Pokémon Go to prove that world peace might still be possible regardless. So when I tell you all of this, you have to believe me that 4 player co-op is the most natural evolution to the series since Scizor.

Scarlet and Violet arrives as the first games in the series with cooperative multiplayer, and well, I think they nailed it! Mind you it’s not true co-op in the sense you battle against enemies together, but more MMO-esque in that you all simultaneously exist together while the story goes by. I recall the first few hours of the game; me and 3 friends immediately came together to make absolutely no story progress, and just spelunk around looking for some of the new weirdos this game added. Pokémon’s social nature has always linked me up with people to have casual conversations suddenly interrupted by a “DUDE IS THAT PHANPY”, but this time, we were all screaming. Stumbling onto cool Pokémon spots feels particularly special when I’m bugging my friends to follow me so we can catch that Flamingo Pokémon.

One story that stuck out to me the most is one much further in. I bugged my friend to check out this giant cave I found, and they say they’ll search for the new rock Pokémon Glimmet in it before logging off. We spend like, literally an hour running around, trying to find this thing, and we just can’t. I came up with this plan on the spot: dude…what if we just make a bunch of sandwiches until one of them gives us a rock encounter buff. And I scroll through the unchanged 2000s interfacing of Serebii, and find out that the combination of bacon, watercress, mustard, jalapeno, and egg might do the trick. This game forced my hand into making bizarro sandwiches, and I obliged faithfully; not too long after succeeding, we found a little crevice in the corner of the cave where a bunch of them spawned. It’s kinda silly, but that moment felt special - Pokémon Scarlet had forced my hand to try strange tricks to find an equally strange obscure new Pokémon in its corners. Simulacrum of Pikablu-flavoured playground rumours waft through this game endlessly, and unraveling even the most incidental of secrets feels like a revelation. At this moment I had to equate Scarlet and Violet to a dungeon master, casually weaving scenarios for my friends to lightly problem solve together. But of course, in a game as big as this, superficiality isn’t absent.

So here we enter the “oh god oh fuck they messed up” section of this: this game launched like it needed at least another year of polish. I continuously thought while playing “how do i even like…talk about this game”. Rather than outrage or laughter, I’m in this middle of the road perspective where all I’m thinking is…I hope the people who developed this game are okay, it looks like a crunch nightmare. Seeing a composer of all people apologize publicly for a music related glitch broke my heart. I just tried to ask myself as honestly as I could: how much does this game’s launch state actually affect my enjoyment? And the answer is like, yeah, it hurts the game a lot. Where it hits the game the hardest is its pacing - you can really feel how vestigial Pokémon is of 80s game design. As my game sputtered and paused in battles, I really felt the slowness of the game reporting the weather, every individual stat’s increase, every little attack in a multi-hit move, and so on. It didn’t help that this game is lacking the ability to turn off attack animations or “would you like to switch your Pokémon” prompt, unlike previous entries. But anyone who has ever loved a low budget PS2 game like it was family knows that sometimes you don’t just love the game barring the jank, you roll with the jank.

When Nintendo announced this game would have no level scaling, fans took it as something worth controversy, but I saw opportunity. I inject difficult scenarios into these games more every time I replay them: just earlier this year, I did a Pokémon Yellow playthrough where I did the second half of the gyms backwards to fight the hardest ones early. I was ready to be my own dungeon master once again, and I kept my rules simple: no using items from my bag during battle, rely only on held items only, and no use of the new gimmick. I’ll be honest, it didn’t start out all great: I went through the first 2 gyms overleveled from all the catching I was doing, so I had to break out the heavy artillery. I started using 2 teams instead of one, so one could ferment in my box and be underleveled for any challenges I needed. The third gym I fought was the first serious challenge the game had thrown at me; its leader uses the game's gimmick to create a Pokémon with no weaknesses, and it was pretty tight with my team of trashy level twenties. This game has eighteen badges split across its three storylines, and I had challenged one of the Titans already - a boss fight against a giant solo Pokémon. I realized my team was perfectly fit to disable them with ease, having lots of attack and special attack dropping moves, so a thought came to my mind…what if I beat them all right now?

And well, I did it! My entire team was dead besides my Dachsbun, who managed to deal the killing blow to this level 56 Titan. Every titan gives you a new mode of overworld control, and so I had beaten the Metroidvania out of Scarlet to make the rest of my story progress breezy. It definitely felt like the biggest achievement I ever made in this game. Every Team Star boss fight except one took me multiple tries as well, they use special boss Pokémon designed around inflicting specific status effects on you. But I’ll admit, I felt like I would never have a Gym fight harder than that electric gym for the rest of the game after that. I just kept getting to them later than the game expected me to! Worst of all, my best ally had turned against me; the sandwiches I made gave all my Pokémon magic Power of Friendship dodges during story fights.
All things considered, I think this first run I did had decent success, but the amount of times I got to a gym overleveled only to be underwhelmed was a bit frustrating; there’s no indication of a badge’s challenge until you start the fight. Weirdo RPG difficulty obsessives definitely have a lot to chew on here, though - I can only imagine a more thoroughly planned run would be able to turn this game inside out. Especially with how none of the basic overworld trainers are mandatory fights, this game is basically a challenge runner’s dream: a Pokémon boss rush game where you can challenge level 40 bosses with level 10s without large amounts of prep.

The most interesting thing about Scarlet and Violet’s approach to open world is how fermented it feels. Only a few traces exist here of the tried-and-trash Ubisoft tower design, and this certainly isn’t Grand Theft Auto: Like a Dragon - the reality is that this game is basically an 8th Gen AAA NES RPG. Dying ligaments of game design ripped out of Miyamoto’s attic seem to cake both this game’s biggest strengths and flaws. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are the 2nd best Dragon Quest 1 remake, and they are a D&D session with all of your gay friends. While I see a lot of its core game design as inelegant, this game is all I could ask for when it comes to naturally conducting spontaneous storytelling. Pretty fun ostensible corporate trash to recommend your friends with eighteen asterisks.

This was the first game I ever pre-ordered, but this game still feels like The Future to me. That subtle plaid-on-minimalism box cover reminds me of newly bought plastic smell. Down to the cold electronic tones of the menu SFX, or the way the bottom screen cascades on touch. The watery keyboard on brash electric guitar; the instrumentation is always bleeding these fittingly digital moods. The genuine coolness to how the protagonist's outfits manage to make american jean and cap fashion look. The neatness of its tech-y flexes; hearing instruments flow in and out of place in towns, adorable cinematography during gyms. The way the attacks animate snappily in a way that makes this the first entry in which leaving them on is still fun; this is the only Pokemon game that surpasses adorable simplicity and becomes stylish.

It's hard to romanticize nostalgia when your memories conflict with it, though; I know my younger self was a little disappointed with this one when it came out, and I spent a lot of this playthrough thinking about the superficiality of such feelings. A big reason at the time was that the raw amount of content these games have took a dive starting with this entry, but that's less relevant on replay. Unova is small though...you can feel the effect of moms complaining their kid got lost in Sinnoh down to the very shape of its map. My #1 issue with this game is that its straightforward routes don't make me feel things; the sense of journey is furthered through storytelling rather than quaint exploration, and neither sides of the team are equipped to thrive under that circumstance. Playing this back to back with the Scarlet and Violet DLC made me realize this series has reached a point in which it has genuine cutesy adventurous spirit to its dialogue that this one hasn't sharpened
When this game came out, a certain Youtuber micro-controversially stated the reason they didn't like this game compared to previous entries was that it had a serious story, and they played these games for escapism. Usually, I fundamentally think nothing like this, but on this replay, I think I got it; Team Plasma's plotline is icky. The obvious comparison the game is making of Pokemon battles to slavery requires the game to use historical abolitionism language that comes off as awkward being evoked without nuance by cartoon cultists. N is who all the salvageable plot forms around, but you sorta have to read his dialogue in a bubble and forget what he's textually talking about.

And to just jog a last few nitpicks: I've always liked the all-original Pokemon lineup; it does a lot to combine that new overfamiliar sequel feel: where you catch a Pikachu, and a Lucario, and a Gardevoir, and you're like "yep im playing the new pokemon". This time around though, I really caught how occupied the new Pokemon are in replacing mechanical functions. To give a crack-comparison, it's like how Street Fighter III is all about The New Generation, but is still too afraid of moving on to not throw a discount Guile or Dhalsim here and there (Necro is so much cooler than Bouffalant, though). It feels right to appreciate the precedent, but no wonder Black and White 2 is more fun when its idea of an exciting mid-game type combo isn't Grass/Poison or Water/Flying. And not to beef with composers that nobody reading this knows the name of, but i hate shota kageyama i hate that guy. The game's general sound is so cute, but a scathing bulk of the tracks are these boring major key solo brass thirty second loops, and it stings. If you don't feel like browsing through track credits to get a feel for his style, listen to this Smash remix he did lol. Genuinely shocked that they thought getting lost in the alleyways of Castelia would be exciting set to a song that loops so quickly.

Anyways, I was satisfied that I was able to put these criticisms into words more in-depth than before. Felt like I had really gotten in touch with understanding that mild disappointment I've always had for this game - and then beat up a legendary Pokemon with my little guys, got to the cool last scene with N, and was totally pacified. I tend to find that the process of writing a critique can narrativize one's opinions, leading to it being easy to stretch frustration in one's head for the product. But I wrote 700 words of complaining about this game, and I still like it, so I guess the strength of the series formula just came clutch? It also helps that Pokemon is like a secondary language for people who grew up with video games - I've gotten to know so many people in my life who all have this shared experience of being a kid, and excitedly playing this game. It adds a lot of weight to this entry as a shared social experience in a series of games empowered by social experiences; we all got together and talk about which little guys we have core memories of from our youth while I played this, and it was nice. Just a good time. And I was pretty harsh on the plot, but I appreciate that it essentially functioned as a narrative trojan horse - exposing children who had never gotten anything out of a book before to what a story looks like, one about something that they unfortunately might be familiar with: abusive parents. Giving children something fictional to feel less alone through, and the formative memories people tend to have for this plot are literally so much more valuable of an experience than my ancient gamer ass being like "wow the baby game isn't well written" lmao. I think that's why N - a character whose moment to moment dialogue kinda sucks - still manages to have enough real estate in our brains for me to see fanart of him once a month on my Twitter timeline. I don't think I get this one like you all do, but I think I "get it" in the sense that we were all there and we all know volcarona goes hard

Ah, Street Fighter V…what a fucked up little creature you were. On one hand, I truly believe you matured into something vaguely charming by the end of your run-time, be it through fantastical idea-driven character kits or Dan funko pop music videos. On the other, you never really grew out of being stamped from head to toe with e-sports stickers, even on dead children’s skulls. My only wish was that the creatives who seemed to be genuinely passionate could pull out all the stops this time, pleading to the higher ups to let this one have a soul.

I’d describe my experience with Street Fighter 6 so far by quoting a friend; “I like the game more every time I play it”. My first impressions trying the game were marred with occasional looks of concern; the game is trying to do a LOT at once. And with the way the Drive system is designed, if any part of its tightly intertwined systems didn’t work for me, it’ll get tangled up and fall apart. So, let’s talk about Drive.
Read an interview with any major Fighting game developer, and you’ll see a lot of talk about wanting to get players to the juiciest part of a match as fast as possible. The gamers yearn for no neutral, get us to where we hit each other with the big buttons NOW! As a genre veteran, these changes are not for me, I like neutral! Yet, I think Street Fighter 6’s core systems play a perfect balancing act for both demographics - every round of the game starting with a full Drive gauge results in every match’s pacing left entirely in the player’s hands. When I was watching EVO, there were parts during the grand finals in which AngryBird (awesome tag, btw), as Ken, would literally Drive Rush to the opponent every single time they won an interaction. This naturally scared me that Drive Rush would be too centralizing, so I tried to glue myself to the opponent like that online, and, well…IT'S HARD. If you find the right opportunities, you can consistently dump and regain meter and have complete control over the match, but mess up once and you’ll get sent to burnout. It’s exhilarating! You can also tell that these mechanics are supposed to double as crutches as you learn how to control your character, so the way it enables a character’s strengths feels like it’ll only get less rigid as time goes on. Drive Impact’s been and still is pretty contentious; makes me think back to what Daigo said about it being too overwhelming for new players, but not that relevant at serious-level play. It has a lot of tiny nuances, though - spending gauge on it to get rid of your opponent’s gauge feels so frenetic. This comes up both in blockstrings and combos too, it ends up complimenting the system’s back and forth greatly. My gut tells me this mechanic will always feel a bit meatheaded, but it does meaningfully elevate the sense of scramble in every match I play. The input does feel a bit awkward on my big stupid fightstick, though…
Overall, Drive has injected the game with a certain je ne sais quoi in which what you get out of this set of system mechanics is genuinely diverse from player to player. I think that is neat :)

With this clean of a learning curve, I’ve gotten a hold of a few characters so far.
Ryu received a new move in his toolkit: Denjin Charge, allowing him to charge up his next special, although it’s a bit weak as an oki. However, where it becomes a necessity is in fireball wars, so that you can take reins of the match’s pacing at a far range. It’s also the first in a long line of recurring trends in the cast of distinct resource management bars. In characters like Ryu’s case, these tools often work in the character’s favour to force the opponent’s hand into spending Drive gauge in order to make a push, although others also can use their own Drive to build up their resources too. And on a more macro level, this also counterbalances how the meter works in this game, since Drive’s ever presence means you don’t really have goals to work towards other than raw damage via Supers. Interesting stuff!

Ken, on the other hand, is the pace breaker. He's got a command dash that gives him a Shoryuken that goes through projectiles, or a Tatsumaki that drags your opponent to the corner. Alongside a new special, Dragonlash Kick, which can anti-air people from across the stage to get in. Ken has all the tools in the world to make big callouts from mid-range to twist through the game’s spiraling offense. This alongside all of his weirdo kicks returning embodies the ethos of the returning cast of this game having matured, now operating at their fullest form.

On the contrast, all the newcomers are designed with naturally intuitive simple move-sets that teach new players how fighting games work through pointed strengths and weaknesses. My only gripe being sometimes these characters feel too simple for my taste - or maybe Manon’s moveset essentially just being 2 grapples, a DP, a low, and an overhead is just lame. Consistently wonderful art direction, though; Jamie, for example, comes off as the type of character with so many moving parts to his design, I don’t know if he even would’ve worked in the aesthetic plateau of Street Fighter III.

Even the soundtrack! Lots of friends who have similar tastes to me don’t like it, fuckin’…JPEGMAFIA said it sucks, so maybe I’m just wrong on this. Don’t get me wrong either, I don’t like every track or anything, Marisa and JP’s themes are kinda sleeper. But…my heart soars at playing playing scroungy high risk mid-range against Ryu, or making quick decisions every second against Jamie. Every track in the game shifts with every single round, even the stage themes!! And all I can say is that not just through being dynamic, but on a compositional level, this is the first Street Fighter game since III in which the songs match the flow of battles. Like, Rashid’s theme uses an uncommon time signature, these guys know what they’re doing. I also know some Brazilians who have vouched that Blanka’s theme has a studied understanding of Funk carioca, so being cultured is a plus too. And when I say we’ve returned to something similar to Street Fighter III, I must also emphasize that this is not a throwback soundtrack either. You’ll hear traces of trap, k-pop, cloud - this is the first entry to progress the series’ place in time in 25 years, but time didn’t stay still. So, will Street Fighter 6 embody our modern culture as well as Third Strike encapsulated the 90s? no but i can dream

If there’s anything I’m not completely on board regarding how people talk about this game, I’m not sure how much I personally value its capital C Content quantity. World Tour’s kinda got that stank over-budgeted PS2 game pussy, in a “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore, and you can tell why they stopped” sorta way. I unfortunately did not enjoy my short time with the mode much - balancing story mode through the means of RPG stats, rather than the actual expressive mechanics of a fighter, catches the appeal of neither for me. I am not a superfluous gamer girl and if the punching is good I don’t need this stuff!!!! But I get it, I do honestly get it! We’re fighting game fans, we know these games only matter if people play them, and we pray for those big money pitches on the back of the box to make an impact on people. And this time, they did!! It actually worked!!

STREET FIGHTER IS BACK, DUDE!!
I CAN ASK MY FRIENDS WHO AREN’T COMPLETE LOSERS TO PLAY IT WITH ME
THERE’S LUKE X JAMIE YAOI ON MY TWITTER TIMELINE
EVO JUST HIT A NEW ATTENDANCE WORLD RECORD
I DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TO MENTION THE GOOD NETCODE, MATCHMAKING, OR CROSS-PLAY, THAT’S HOW FAR WE’VE COME
I’m apparently easy enough to please that I genuinely enjoyed my time with Street Fighter V, after purchasing Champion Edition in 2021. So, the best way to describe what it means to me for Street Fighter to be ‘back’ is that I’m going to make memories of this series again. Seeing and helping friends learn it, fighting long-time rivals and feeling the rush of tension and joy, or just kinda mashing out and laughing… It’s a dream come true!! Let’s not let it end too quickly :)

(Written with only about 60 hours of playtime and I’m a platinum player, don’t take my thoughts too seriously compared to a pro ´･ᴗ･` )

My first impressions of Pizza Tower were that it embodies the concept of a fangame, not just due to its obvious homages to an existing franchise, but due to how its definition of coolness is so video game-y.
EVERY LEVEL A NEW IDEA
KEEP UP THE MOMENTUM
PARRY EVERY BULLET
GET THOSE HIGH RANKINGS LIKE ITS LIFE OR DEATH
GRAPPLE TIL’ THAT COMBO COUNT’S IN THE HUNDREDS
GET EVERY ONE OF THOSE ENDINGS EVEN IF IT TAKES A THOUSAND HOURS
THEN SPEEDRUN FOR A MILLION YEARS
And through an incredibly tight set of influences, and some honest to god brute forcing, it all works out! What impresses me the most is how the “get to know it, then blow through it” design ethos of Wario Land 4 so perfectly overlays onto the mesh of a Sonic Rush-ish speedrun game to create something so immediately rewarding.

Peppino really steals the show here; controlling this bumbling chef feels like manning a well-oiled machine. Where I was most impressed with the game’s tactile nature is how you control his speed; to go fast, you gotta throw out a lot. While dashing, your jumps become stone cold arcs reminiscent of classic Castlevania, and your only actions out of it either push back against your momentum, or have their own foresight-necessitating fixed arcs as well. Gotta love stuff like how turning while dashing has a massive lag to it, and you’ll just freeze up and fall to your death if you drift off an edge. That’s that good Super Metroid type clunky!!
But when you shine a light over a game; interrogating it as a precision platformer–a practice the game itself encourages through its ranking system and playthrough judgements–things get a bit messier. Having done a few P rankeds and watched some speedrun gameplay, I can’t help but think the game evolves into a less interesting version of itself at high level play. The game’s stick shift-y movement can be easily teched around through the instant boosts of speed through canceling a grab into a crouch, getting you full speed dashes almost instantaneously. The dash’s true invincibility then ripples out into downplaying other core mechanics, such as the necessity of your grab and parry, and makes slowing down much less of an awareness-requiring commitment. So once the game has been broken down into a simpler run-and-jump formula, it becomes noticeable how little there is to learning its flow; you'll never see something like a Sonic game’s multi-path routing, for example. While it’s too early to tell what this game will look like at maximum capacity, I already feel a bit disappointed with the cool factor of my perfect runs; on paper, this is one of the most frenetic speedy action games I’ve ever played, but in reality, it’s a bit coarse. This is especially frustrating due to the game’s lack of playgrounds to challenge yourself - you're really just picking between its entirely precision-based P ranks, or its death-less, punishment-less go-for-literally-any-other-ranks. Pizza Tower is an incredible first run game - defined by its constant bombast of new ideas to the face, and the sheer kinesthetic joy of suplexing wads of cheese into the ground, but as of right now, but I can't say I fuck with the game's replay value despite its breezy runtime. Wow, this really is a Nintendo inspired game!

And while it’d be pretty shallow of me to compare this game too intensely to Wario Land 4–they are literally not that similar in motion–I was a bit disappointed in the places where this game was less transgressive than its forefathers. Just look at how loosely those boss fights are integrated into the game's rules compared to Wario Land 4’s time limit fights! In general, I thought the bosses were a bit overbearing; testing me on the same things repetitively, in a way that always fell behind my skill growth and memorization. Generally, I’d lose some attempts, unable to keep up with the stamina required for their length, then I’d beat them completely one-sidedly later on - which I would usually see as a sign its mechanics were taught well, but it felt a bit extreme here.

Despite all those negative ramblings I have for the game, though, its energy is absolutely contagious in a way that makes it near-impossible to hate. Easily one of the greatest games ever made to not play and watch a friend play instead–and I mean that as un-back-handedly as possible–I deliriously spectated one of my close friends playing this before I got my hands on it myself, and every time I turned to my screen, I saw Peppino getting up to something I had never seen before. Genuine every-frame-a-painting shit. And their enthusiasm for it was just as contagious too, I think I literally liked this game more before I had played it. This friend came out of the closet a few days ago, so I am being very nice to them by telling them I love this game instead of “yeah its great but the postgame experience just made me want to play sonic 3 instead”. What I’m saying is, I love my friends, and I don’t love Pizza Tower, but Peppino won me over, so he gets to be one of my friends too. Therefore, I appreciate Pizza Tower in the same way I appreciate a first meeting locale, or a hang-out spot, or
a fuckin pizza
Pizzas come split down the middle so they can be perfectly leisurely shared amongst a group
Pizza really is the food of friendship…😳

[3/25] silent edit notation: nvm games antisemitic i don't even like it a bit anymore i'm gonna be real. just like a complete mood souring. i don't even edit my reviews usually, i like preserving the exact authentic amount of grammatical errors and dumb shit i've written over the years for reasons that are too vague for me to explain, but i kept wincing thinking about how i wrote "near-impossible to hate" and found out that there's an enemy named "tribe cheese" that does tomahawk throws, war cries, and rain dances like 2 days later. buddy, that's at least 2 too many details to even be worth being remotely charitable!

When I played Pokemon Scarlet, there was a part where fake video game glitch animations, and genuine visual errors were on my screen at the same time
It made me think "oh, someone's gonna write something good about this game"
Someone wrote something good about that game

I wonder how Satoshi Tajiri is doing?

Welcome to Bayonetta 3 / Hideki Kamiya’s Super Mario Odyssey / Yuji Shimomura’s Marvel Cinematic Universe. We hope you enjoy your stay!

At the heart of any good character action game (I hope people don’t dislike this genre term yet) is a character in which we can spend a whole game wrapping our brains around the depths of. In my eyes, the strengths of Bayonetta as a series have always been how it empowers the gameplay loop of self-expression - taking real life examples such as dancing, fashion, and eroticism, and mixing them with this ultra video game-y definition centered around combos and elaborate tech. And if there’s anything I am happy to say about this game, it’s that Bayonetta’s kit is incredibly strong this time around; most of my issues with Bayonetta 2’s gameplay have been shaven down. Her new weapons are incredibly cool in conjunction with each other despite the removal of arm and leg equipment, and there’s just a general sense that Bayonetta’s power has scaled further since the previous game. Every time I got a pure platinum trophy, I hit that platonic ideal of action games; I wanted to make an AMV out of my combos.
The new post-Scalebound cancellation therapy sessions mechanic known as Demon Slaves only contributed to this further: while you can’t control Bayonetta while inputting actions for your demon to execute, you move while your demon is attacking with inputs you buffered. My demons and I were doing NGE episode 9 sync kicks together by the end of the game. That being said, I did feel that Demon Slave wasn’t contested very much by the campaign during my expert mode playthrough, it’s just a bit too low risk high reward there. When I started the post-game, I immediately saw changes I was looking for in the form of enemies that are harder to react to at long-ranged than close-ranged, so the devs clearly know how to balance it.
While this isn’t really a new issue, I think Bayonetta is a bit too buttery smooth for my taste. Witch time is just such a powerful linear defensive technique that I can’t help but think it makes defense in these games a bit unengaging. I’m sure I’d feel the same way going back to the previous 2 games, but the incredibly fast dashes from the get-go, and the long-ranged safety nets of Demon Slave didn’t help my opinion of it.

This is where Viola could really come in and help, seeing as her central concept is having a parry instead of witch time. And I dunno…at least for me, Bayonetta games are about playing as the coolest character ever, and Viola just did not live up to Bayonetta’s kit or personality. Not enough variety in their single weapon, and their take on Demon Slave is notably less expressive. Throughout the game, your recurring humanoid rival character is the Beastman named Strider - who totally highlights the strengths of Bayonetta, as well as the flaws in Viola. He has so many animation mixups that bad witch times are a death sentence, and punishes lazy usage of Demon Slave by instantly killing them. On the contrary, Viola’s ability to infinitely hold a block button sort of makes fighting him super reactive and dull…

Bayonetta games have always been chasing the eternal question of how to fill downtime in action games, and this game is somehow closer and further away from it than ever. Closer in that the way our characters control in the overworld is super tight, conducting some genuinely fun platforming. But the developers have quadrupled down on the idea of Bayonetta as some gimmick highlight reel, despite how they were always top criticisms of previous games. Almost every chapter has some high-effort spectacle moment, and while these are the most visually engaging gimmicks in the series, none of them feel polished enough. You get this scene where Bayonetta rips her still beating heart out of her chest to perform a forbidden spell, and summons SIN GODZILLA - then the screen flips and turns it to a 2D fighting game perspective. It’s this perfect set piece slam dunk, and you play it for a bit, and you’re like… this is going a bit too long huh…oh no…the attack clash window is huge…guess i’ll just camp in the corner for a bit and shoot some projectiles... They made Kaiju Street Fighter, and forced me to play as Guile. These developers are fucking devious.
Maybe the lowest quality you’ll get are the Jeanne 2D stealth missions where you hide in womens bathrooms, and the healing spot is a shower that enemies will try to peep on her through. I was no longer playing Bayonetta: I was playing some 2 dollar anime shovelware game on steam called “Hentai Gear Solid” that my friend would gift me as a joke.

What I would like to briefly praise is the aesthetic direction around the antagonists - a huge departure from the roots of the series, but I digged it. Contrasting Bayonetta’s themes of self-expression, we get this villain literally named Singularity; fighting with mountains of assimilated human corpses. It owns. Also loved the underlying corporate tone of how every enemy has like, MOBA class descriptions lmao

Bayonetta 1 isn’t a game I’d characterize as having a smart story, but I would say it has a clever story - there is a difference! Rather than being a story that rode on emotional depth, the story always managed to set Bayonetta up to spark entertaining dynamics. She had this sharp charisma with every cast member, and could even make banter with the most generic of demon enemies fun. Bayonetta 3’s style is a complete u-turn; every encounter has to have emotional weight behind it, but nothing really interacts with Bayonetta. You’ll get this scene where she stands in front of a major character as they die - neither showing genuine human emotion, or cracking her iconic one liners. As a result, this game’s portrayal of Bayonetta is often awkwardly stoic during scenes that could absolutely be more than that! The returning characters now have more baggage than they ever did before; Enzo lost his family, and Luka has some tragic backstory now. You can really feel like they wanted to make Bayonetta as a series more mature - but if you asked someone what was mature about Bayonetta, their answer would be the character. Yet the storyline has chopped its focus up across a bunch of characters who never earned it. It feels like Platinum wanted to go for critical acclaim again; if Bayonetta 3 released 20 years ago, would it have “From the creators of Nier: Automata” on the box?

Bayonetta 3 is a game that likes Bayonetta less than I do. Or at the very least, it’s a game that is catering to a crowd they’re afraid of not liking Bayonetta. Every chapter has to have some grandiose gimmick that’ll stimulate your eyes and mind for a few seconds at a time - all so you can forget what game you’re playing. It’s ashamed to be an arcade-inspired game riding on replay value, so it kills its own replay value. It’s ashamed of being simple fun shlock, so it throws all this emotionally charged shit at you, hoping someone will miss the QTE and end up calling it peak fiction. And I’m just gonna be honest…this game’s critic bait! But killing the cynicism for a second; I know it’s true that while I, and many people who use this site would probably grin ear to ear at the idea of buying a literal Xbox 360 game in 2022, most of ours have red ringed by now. And while this is clearly a corporate production, I was impressed to see a Platinum game that felt at times like a true AAA title. I hope this game makes a lot of money, and before their staff is ship of thesius’d with age, they put out a genuinely uncompromised action game. Because as of right now, all I got was a sequel to No More Heroes 2.

Super Smash Bros. is such a unique slab of video game history. I’d like to think one of the reasons so many people care about Smash Bros. is because it’s a game that made people want to care about games. Super Smash Bros. Melee presented its players with so many interesting characters, and history books worth of information on every series within, and that grew with every sequel. The passion that Smash Bros. carries for other video games is contagious. The game design is also memorable; Smash games are sandboxes of silly interactions, and have a lot of intelligent design to make fighting games more accessible. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate isn’t about reinventing any of this, but it is the biggest game yet.

The most defining trait of Smash Ultimate is the unique nature of its roster. The game debuted through a fantastic trailer titled “Everyone is Here”, revealing that every character that had ever been playable will be playable. This fantastically combines the sentimentality of fighting games: the attachment we get to characters who score us wins, and the sentimental feelings we hold for those series we love. When Everyone is Here was revealed, I was dumbfounded that Pichu was going to return to the series, a joke character I had grown attached to when I played Melee. Everyone has a main, and everyone gets to banner themselves through that main.
This also results in a new issue, in that the developers clearly had to prioritize quantity over quality. Why are there four Fire Emblem characters that are modified versions of each other, but Ganondorf doesn’t even play like he acts in Zelda? This is reasonable critique, but also feels like a worthwhile sacrifice. The hypothetical perfect Smash game wouldn’t have Everyone is Here, it wouldn’t need it; but Smash Ultimate puts it to great use. It honours Nintendo’s history, Smash’s history, and most importantly, a player’s own history. I may have tried Pichu in Melee in the first place because I loved Pokemon. But when they returned to Smash, I thought of my memories of messing with them in Smash more than my memories with Pokemon.
The game released 6 new characters, and 5 echo fighters. The most fundamental of these characters to my experience was Ridley. He was added due to fan requests, an important part of Smash Ultimate’s identity. He has this uniquely rugged bait-and-punish playstyle; Ridley in Smash made me feel like I was playing how Ridley would play Smash. According to the in-game statistic tracker, I had played Ridley for 65 hours, and 3 minutes. If Ridley wasn’t in this roster, I would’ve lost those hours of gameplay, which is longer than the entire runtime of some of my favourite games. If there’s any reason to believe in the power that a single character can hold, and why ‘Everyone is Here’ is a big deal, it’s that. The other new characters were fun as well: I enjoyed the Castlevania characters quite a bit, and King K Rool’s animations oozes personality.
Smash Ultimate would then enter a long DLC phase that lasted over 2 years, becoming the majority of the time we’ve had with this game so far. The most noticeable trait of the DLC was the quantity of characters from non-Nintendo series. By the end of this DLC, Smash Bros would have 18 non-Nintendo characters, which is more than the entire roster of the first Smash Bros. game. This rippled through the conversation around the game. When Smash Bros. could give us these exotic characters in rapid succession, I began to feel confused on what I even wanted from the game. Just the DLC for this game alone makes any thoughts I had about how Pichu in a new Smash game would be “awesome” sound unimaginative. I’ve recently seen conversations about how Banjo & Kazooie were the least memorable characters added in the DLC, but I can relate to those who wanted them. Banjo & Kazooie was what you’d consider a shocking luxury inclusion before we knew Smash could be this.
Smash Ultimate’s DLC lineup isn’t a linear representation of video game history, it’s more like someone’s personal video game best-of compilation. While the Dragon Quest Heroes and Steve are video game all-timers, the rest are from B-list obsession worthy game franchises. Smash Ultimate doesn’t live up to the idealistic idea that Smash Bros. could be a museum of global video game history, but these inclusions are very memorable either way.
Those DLC contains the most complex Smash Bros. characters yet. The DLC’s character kits are explosive culminations of game design inspired by their respective series, packed together to create unique play styles. Smash 4 set out to flesh out the series’ variety of play styles with its archetypal inclusions, and Smash Ultimate’s DLC often feels like much more inspired and refined takes on those archetypes. In comparison, most launch characters feel primitive. The most obvious flaw in this game design is that the DLC often relies too much on meters and second forms as a mechanic.

The roster is where the most innovation lies within Smash Ultimate, but there are iterative gameplay improvements as well. Smash Ultimate’s engine is a mid-ground of previous Smash Bros. game’s traits. The ending lag that moves have is so much faster in this game that it feels like they intentionally didn’t want any attack to feel committal. The lagless gameplay results in punishing an opponent's bad moves being downplayed by the game’s mechanics. Though, the changes to the speed of lag and being hit allows for Smash Ultimate to speed up the pace of the gameplay a lot. The game is just fast enough, but not too committal so that planning ahead and focusing on your opponent’s actions are easier for a broader number of players. While the game could definitely have some more momentum to its movement, it reaches a sweet spot of speed and ease of player control.
The game also has 115 stages, another boast used to justify the title of ‘Ultimate’. Almost every stage has been visually revamped, and they all look pretty. The new stages the game released with are only okay, but some of those DLC stages are great. The game also improves omega forms, introduces battlefield forms, and adds a ‘hazards off’ toggle, which allows for these stages to be experienced in many ways.
Then there’s the centerpiece single player mechanic, Spirits. Through several modes, including the game’s Adventure Mode, you experience many Spirit Battles. Spirits seem to use a rather low CPU level, no matter what rank they are. They dodge around, reading your inputs, but never seem to play that great. These matches are so stilted, they feel like puzzles where you equip the right thing and mash away. I messed around with equipment sets to see if I could have an optimally fun experience, and the best I got was from simply using the spirits the game recommended me. If there’s anything to like about spirits as a collectible in comparison to trophies, it’s that seeing illustrations by a large collection of artists conveys the diversity of styles between games better than character models do. The descriptions being gone is a huge loss, though.
Spirits just aren’t luxurious enough to be a centerpiece for a game like Smash Bros. Ultimate. They’re out of place, and don’t work as an incentivizing reward at all. There are other single player modes in the game, but all of them are bland. Smash Ultimate’s Classic and Spirit modes both constantly reference things, but the references are shallow. Trophies made me want to try new things, Spirits and references made me feel out of the loop.
This results in Smash Ultimate’s most pivotal flaw, that despite the incredibly dense amount of content it holds in its core gameplay, there aren't that many valuable ways to interact with that content. The single player content is mediocre, and the online netplay is aggressively terrible. The best way to play Smash Ultimate is through its main mode– Smash. And that main mode, while fulfilling its exact purpose, has proven itself to not be accessible enough. This has rightfully formed cynicism in the community for the game, and the truth is that everyone would hate it if this game wasn’t so dynamic. Smash became the most successful fighting game series exactly because it was multifaceted, because its ruleset customization allows for it to be played in so many flavours. Even if you only played the game with one ruleset for the entirety of your time with it, there’s more variety in this game than most other fighting games in general. Just one mode and some bad netplay was enough to form some great memories with the game.

Near the end of the final Smash Ultimate presentation, a list of statistics began to play, showing the numbers of how many characters, stages, spirits, and other things were contained in the game. During that presentation, a looming feeling formed in my mind, as I had realized that I had experienced this before, 6 years ago at another Smash presentation. In that moment I knew that one day, Smash Ultimate would also be nothing but statistics in the back of my mind, downplayed by fans in comparison to whatever game came next. The path to iteratively improving on Smash Ultimate has become rather clear, as its flaws have shown themselves over time. Smash Ultimate’s title of “Ultimate” has a deadline on it, and I’m sure the developers knew that as well. The game came out in a time in which the primary traits of Smash are now less unique. Crossovers are now a staple of our current brand of pop culture. Platform-fighters are a legitimized subgenre, one that has brought several games with fresher ideas than any individual mechanic Smash Ultimate brings. This made me wonder what made Smash Ultimate unique in this modern ecosystem, and why I kept coming back to it. And I knew that I wouldn’t have kept playing it, if not for the memories the game had flowing through its DNA. I knew I wouldn’t have wanted to keep playing if not for how I saw something new every time I played. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate celebrates old memories so that I can keep wanting to make new ones.