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.

If Kingdom Hearts was about a group of kids who in their yearning to grow up - despite daydreams of a vaster world - had never once imagined a world without each other, Kingdom Hearts II follows up by painting a group of teenagers who have already learnt what departures feel like. As time trickles down, and your mind prepares you for the pain of goodbyes, you begin to already distance yourself before the end has even arrived; the memory of the last thing you ever said to someone being something insincere.
The type of shit that makes me wanna call Square Enix's engineers "Architects". If you didn't lose it at the spear cutting little strands of Axel's hair, you don't love video games. So many people had praised this prologue, but somehow I can't help but think I still underestimated it - this arc aims so high at bringing its evocative, teenage-angst ridden storyboards to life.

Then something strange starts to happen. You just finished a three hour trek through existentialist melodrama, and now you're playing as Sora and friends on another Disney adventure; forget about that other stuff for now. I'm not here to discuss if Kingdom Hearts as a whole is stupid - we've all gone through that already, and I truly do love this series - but it's clear to me that we're growing out of its blueprint here. I wouldn't like to romanticize Kingdom Hearts 1 - the way it implements the storyline into the Disney worlds has always been teasy - but even its emotional scenes fit into the disney-shaped mold of tones better (remember the forced smile scene?). Cashing in on three years of loose ends had a steep price on the series' cohesion.

II's fractured feel doesn't end at the storytelling. Critical Mode - a post-release addition - has this lustrous reputation behind it as a pinnacle-of-the-genre action game. But as someone who decided to follow that fable and play through the game for the first time through critical, it couldn't be less apparent that the game wasn't designed around this difficulty. The way the game is so eager to simplify itself for a cool setpiece, you can tell this game was originally made to let little kids feel cool. The average character action game fan would lose their shit at the amount of distractions at play here; its new core mechanic is advertised as a QTE button. We all saw something special sparkling in its stitched together identity, though. But why?

The Roxas fight was a bit of an eye-opening example for me: shortly into the fight, he uses a desperation attack: shooting instant-death spheres at you for about five seconds straight. I just couldn't figure out how to dodge it, so I searched for runs of the fight on google, and found:
-Using movement options that I hadn't yet unlocked in my playthrough
-I found one video of a dude walking horizontally into the wall to move at slightly less than regular speed, but couldn't replicate it. unserious
-...most of the videos force the game to skip the phase entirely by doing a tight combo sequence that I wasn't skilled enough to replicate either
And so, the solution I ended up using was to simply use an attack that made me fully invincible for ten seconds at a time. Most intelligently designed game's balancing would crumble under the weight of a single move that functions like that even existing. Sora's toolkit has this irresponsibly large volume to it, so something like a Limit being able to exist, and be a well-balanced creative response is a testament to its design.
Just in my experience playing a lot of action games, putting too much emphasis on parries tends to consume more organic, multi-applicable systems - like positioning, or whiff punishing - and place all the weight on memorization. But Final-Mix-on-crit marries it all together with such finesse!! Long-ranged attacks and safer defensive play are both provided via slick management of your remaining Magic, so when you're burnt out of magic, things gets volatile. Dodges and parries gain equally important weight; every second shaved off your magic burn-out is a grasp to pull the momentum back in your direction. While fighting a boss, I'll form an ideal winning run of actions in my head; but there's always some unforeseeable scenario that'll force me to adapt to a different playstyle on the fly. Sometimes overwhelmed by my own range of options, sometimes the invisible numbers of a boss escaping a combo, sometimes literally just RNG. This is the truest definition of the label "Action RPG"

Anyways, it was like 4AM in the morning - it took me all night to finish the final boss sequence - and I'm sitting here, watching that final cutscene. I realized that any cynicism I had in my body had left it at this point. Unremarkable memories wash away as you get older, and sometimes, you don't return to the source of those memories for a long time; most of the longtime Kingdom Hearts fans I've spoken to seem to be perfectly comfortable discarding the "kinda joyless disney story retellings" part of this one from their minds. You could probably call that a "bias", but as I played this, I realized it's only natural to want to reward a project for trying to shoot as high as this one does.. Kingdom Hearts II itself feels like the type of project where everyone on its staff stared at the budget they had been handed to make a Disney game, and realized that if they managed to sneak it in there, they could shove every special idea they ever had into it. Everyone on the staff eventually became in on it. And by the time it was all over, I too, was in on it.

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

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 😱😱😱😱

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.

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.