ikissgirls
2023
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 😱😱😱😱
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 😱😱😱😱
2023
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!
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!
2023
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･` )
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･` )
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
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
2021
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.
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.
2004
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.
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.
This review contains spoilers
[This will contain spoilers for both Crisis Core, and the original FFVII]
Something I don't see a lot of people talk about is how much that disc 3 super-secret Zack flashback cutscene in the original VII rips. Squaresoft's brazen over-dramatism manages to enrich a character with life in such a short time.. Zack is just a peppy boy who loves the sound of his voice so much that he can have a conversation with a comatose dude, and walk away from it satisfied. His death goes on to leave a paralyzed Cloud idolizing his lost friend, subconsciously glamorizing a life that ended without fanfare the moment he tried to escape the system.
Coming off of Crisis Core, the main thought in my head really was...
Did Zack even improve as a character after all of this?
There's some additions I do like here and there; the way Zack is afforded no agency by the plot - aimlessly hovering between the military he serves, and the war against it. The envy he feels for those who have the option to stand up for themselves; it's sooooo almost there. But the plot is just unwilling to express these feelings in anything less than an artsy cutscene. Like..."Those wings, I want them" is coooool but please, let these characters express some mundane natural emotion for once. Maybe I'll regret asking this sort of thing one day; disliking the vision of developers who perfectly capture angst both unspeakable, and awkward when spoken aloud. But every Kingdom Hearts game I've played has the clarity of sincerity somewhere in there. This game's just less well written than Kingdom Hearts
All of this game's problems stem from the way its narrative economy is distributed like the dril candles tweet. There is not a single chapter in this game that spends its time in the right places. When I streamed this to my friends, some of them joked about how often Zack says "huh?" - but it began to become a serious problem that despite playing a reactive role in the plot, Zack doesn't really have reactions. Zack's moment to moment dialogue never quite breaks out of just being another spunky Final Fantasy protagonist pastiche; it becomes obvious this is the spin-off none of the creatives daydreamed about on their lunch breaks. Nojima's side hoe. It's distressing seeing them show us the truth behind a moment like how Zack and Aerith began dating - telling it like the same military boy out of water love story that Cloud went through - and realizing that whatever vague idea I had in my mind was more creative than what this story had to tell. Cloud's entire arc is about him learning that he doesn't need to be Zack, so why do all of their life events have to parallel?
what's up with that one monologue from aerith about hating things that aren't normal. what the fuck lol
But the ending is good. I could nitpick it for sure. I'll at least acknowledge that leaving off on Cloud saying "I'm your living legacy" totally sucks ass, it's the exact opposite of what he needs to learn; he needs to stop trying to be other people. I still like Zack’s death in the FFVII scene more - the rawness of three lone officers gunning him down hits harder for me - but yeaaah, it's iconic. The scream into the fucking Zack AMV rules. But what gets me the most is that this scene isn't even better with the contents of the game. Crisis Core is not a good game, CRISIS CORE FINAL FANTASY VII FULL ENDING & CREDITS (HD) on youtube dot com is. This game was never even about Zack, it was about some other guys.
I think I would hate this game if I saw nothing in Angeal or Genesis. The entire narrative's run-time is cashed in on them, consistently choosing them over meaningfully expanding the few core details we knew about Zack. I think I got close to "getting" Angeal - obv a lot of commentary on wanting to follow the footsteps of flawed idols and the stuff - Genesis was just kinda funny, though. hes gackt up. i laughed rly hard when the game posited that genesis was in the room when sephiroth went crazy at the nibel reactor. But no matter how good of a time I can have watching some fun 2000s Square Enix cutscenes, there isn't a sense of fun in the moment to moment, to give the game any flow; the gameplay SUCKS!!!!!
in our heart or hearts everyone going into this knows at this point that the compilation is the equivalent to those netflix star wars spinoffs. most people are aware of this, and most people also seem to like it anyways. the truth is that what makes square enix unique is that they can't help themselves from imbuing all of their projects with heart. anyone who has ever cried to one of their mickey mouse games should know this. crisis core was always going to be a story about salvaging good human artistic passion from a game assigned to be trashy from birth, and i went into it with the most hopeful mindset i could.
and i dont know if i got anything from it
im still gonna be nostalgic for it in like 5 months
guys im going back to 7 rebirth and i still dont know what cissneis deal is im so fucked
Something I don't see a lot of people talk about is how much that disc 3 super-secret Zack flashback cutscene in the original VII rips. Squaresoft's brazen over-dramatism manages to enrich a character with life in such a short time.. Zack is just a peppy boy who loves the sound of his voice so much that he can have a conversation with a comatose dude, and walk away from it satisfied. His death goes on to leave a paralyzed Cloud idolizing his lost friend, subconsciously glamorizing a life that ended without fanfare the moment he tried to escape the system.
Coming off of Crisis Core, the main thought in my head really was...
Did Zack even improve as a character after all of this?
There's some additions I do like here and there; the way Zack is afforded no agency by the plot - aimlessly hovering between the military he serves, and the war against it. The envy he feels for those who have the option to stand up for themselves; it's sooooo almost there. But the plot is just unwilling to express these feelings in anything less than an artsy cutscene. Like..."Those wings, I want them" is coooool but please, let these characters express some mundane natural emotion for once. Maybe I'll regret asking this sort of thing one day; disliking the vision of developers who perfectly capture angst both unspeakable, and awkward when spoken aloud. But every Kingdom Hearts game I've played has the clarity of sincerity somewhere in there. This game's just less well written than Kingdom Hearts
All of this game's problems stem from the way its narrative economy is distributed like the dril candles tweet. There is not a single chapter in this game that spends its time in the right places. When I streamed this to my friends, some of them joked about how often Zack says "huh?" - but it began to become a serious problem that despite playing a reactive role in the plot, Zack doesn't really have reactions. Zack's moment to moment dialogue never quite breaks out of just being another spunky Final Fantasy protagonist pastiche; it becomes obvious this is the spin-off none of the creatives daydreamed about on their lunch breaks. Nojima's side hoe. It's distressing seeing them show us the truth behind a moment like how Zack and Aerith began dating - telling it like the same military boy out of water love story that Cloud went through - and realizing that whatever vague idea I had in my mind was more creative than what this story had to tell. Cloud's entire arc is about him learning that he doesn't need to be Zack, so why do all of their life events have to parallel?
what's up with that one monologue from aerith about hating things that aren't normal. what the fuck lol
But the ending is good. I could nitpick it for sure. I'll at least acknowledge that leaving off on Cloud saying "I'm your living legacy" totally sucks ass, it's the exact opposite of what he needs to learn; he needs to stop trying to be other people. I still like Zack’s death in the FFVII scene more - the rawness of three lone officers gunning him down hits harder for me - but yeaaah, it's iconic. The scream into the fucking Zack AMV rules. But what gets me the most is that this scene isn't even better with the contents of the game. Crisis Core is not a good game, CRISIS CORE FINAL FANTASY VII FULL ENDING & CREDITS (HD) on youtube dot com is. This game was never even about Zack, it was about some other guys.
I think I would hate this game if I saw nothing in Angeal or Genesis. The entire narrative's run-time is cashed in on them, consistently choosing them over meaningfully expanding the few core details we knew about Zack. I think I got close to "getting" Angeal - obv a lot of commentary on wanting to follow the footsteps of flawed idols and the stuff - Genesis was just kinda funny, though. hes gackt up. i laughed rly hard when the game posited that genesis was in the room when sephiroth went crazy at the nibel reactor. But no matter how good of a time I can have watching some fun 2000s Square Enix cutscenes, there isn't a sense of fun in the moment to moment, to give the game any flow; the gameplay SUCKS!!!!!
in our heart or hearts everyone going into this knows at this point that the compilation is the equivalent to those netflix star wars spinoffs. most people are aware of this, and most people also seem to like it anyways. the truth is that what makes square enix unique is that they can't help themselves from imbuing all of their projects with heart. anyone who has ever cried to one of their mickey mouse games should know this. crisis core was always going to be a story about salvaging good human artistic passion from a game assigned to be trashy from birth, and i went into it with the most hopeful mindset i could.
and i dont know if i got anything from it
im still gonna be nostalgic for it in like 5 months
guys im going back to 7 rebirth and i still dont know what cissneis deal is im so fucked
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.
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.