Ori and the Blind Forest has lovely visuals, a simple and heartwarming story, and some really inspired ideas for platformer exploration, but artificial difficulty and hiccups in the interactions between movement options and the environment can make it more of a chore to play through than it should be.

There are a few ingredients for a guaranteed indie smash these days: Metroidvania layout, difficult platforming sections, and a somber and largely wordless story. I don’t mean to be too cynical here, but it’s the combination of these elements that brought smash success, in particular, to Hollow Knight and Ori and the Blind Forest. Eventually, I’ll try to unpack what disappoints me with the former game, but having just finished a playthrough of the latter and having recently played a fantastic Castlevania game not too long ago (Circle of the Moon), I have some fresh thoughts on why these trendier indies have a hard time appealing to me.

Let’s start with the basics: there is some inherent tension in the different design elements at play here. Metroidvanias reward, at their best, expansive exploration. Getting lost in a world isn’t necessarily the point, as many of the best in the genre guide you along almost invisibly, but coming up to doors you can’t open or ledges you can’t reach and circling back later is part and parcel of the experience.

This can be strongly at odds with incorporating difficult platforming into the formula, as it becomes unclear at times when you’re failing to execute a complex task vs. when you’re just not supposed to go somewhere right at the moment. Ori falls into this trap most often in the opening sections of the game, where you have limited movement options. Sometimes, a wrong turn will land you in a bed of spikes, and you’re given very little time to react and reflect on what just happened before you’re respawned. It can be extremely confusing when you’re just missing where they want you to land from a long drop or when you’re being told to back off. Ori’s solution to this problem is inelegant: the map (along the main story path, which is mostly what I stuck to in my own playthrough) has very few turns to it, so you basically go and check off everywhere else and then heave a sigh and get ready to die a few times to map out where you’re supposed to go.

And you might as well get used to that feeling of hitting spikes and not understanding why, as the game will mercilessly throw them in your path as often as possible. Following the critical pathway down after a difficult section? You better fucking have resources on hand to pop a save because there’s no telling what’s down that pit. The camera moves somewhat cinematically to follow you, and it can have a hard time catching up with the floor before you do. Later on, are you trying to see what you can reach with a charged jump? You’re almost definitely going to smash your head on spikes. I became so conditioned to this that in the second dungeon, I spent about ten minutes trying to figure out a puzzle (a puzzle that’s basically supposed to introduce you to the gimmick of the dungeon) because the blades of grass sitting on a random platform looked too much like spikes to me to trust that I could land on it and use it as a sounding area for what I was supposed to do.

This gets even worse when you’re not solving a puzzle and in fact know what you’re supposed to do. Later on, you’ll have to boost jump off of wall surfaces, and this sometimes requires you to go at an upward diagonal angle. Because you know being off by a centimeter will smash you into spikes, you try some precision aiming and… Ori has slid himself up the wall and into some spikes that are just there for the fuck of it. Like the Metroidvania elements, the spikes that litter this game feel like window dressing, adding an artificial challenge where decent game design would have worked just as well. I get it, the forest is hostile, but there really has to be some other way to separate out narrow landing areas that resets your position with the platforming challenge that doesn’t kill you for being slightly off.

This is annoying in regular play, but the game’s obsession with cinematic platforming sections means you’ll be going up against this as the game expects you to basically learn flawless execution for some really difficult platforming sections. This kind of thing is fun in Rayman’s racing levels, partially because those are optional and partially because you’re well aware before you jump in what’s going to be in store. You also know that Ubisoft has honed those levels to mechanical perfection, so once you learn a piece, you’ve learned it forever. The weird physics of Ori are far from perfect, despite what you’ll bafflingly see on this page and other reviews. I did the second and third “escape the area” sections over and over, and I can tell you that exact, identical execution sometimes randomly landed Ori just a hair short of where he was supposed to be or ran him out of rhythm with the elements around him, resulting in damage or death. The very final gameplay section has an all new visual element that you have to compute perfectly the second you hit it or else repeat about two minutes of technical gameplay all at once. And, I can confirm, that element is not mechanically wound. There’s RNG involved in the spacing of the stuff, which means you can kill yourself through no fault of your own besides keeping pace.

It’s worth going into that element a bit more. I’m surprised I don’t see more complaints about the Bash mechanic. Jesus Christ, Bash. Okay, so when you first get Bash, it’s the coolest fucking thing ever. It feels really fresh to me. Maybe I’m missing what game they stole it from. You basically can grab a projectile or (some) enemies in a sort of stasis field and redirect their momentum around Ori. This has two uses. The first is movement, where you’ll utilize an enemy or their projectile to shoot yourself, say, upward, to reach heights you couldn’t normally. The second is for breaking stuff, where you’ll either redirect projectiles or enemies into vulnerable surfaces or other enemies to progress. It’s a really, really fun mechanic. On paper.

The trouble sets in when you reach some of the more technical situations later on. Some pathways require chaining of multiple enemies’ projectiles to reach where you need to go, and these enemies’ lock-on is really unpredictable. So you’ll be in the air with minimal room or time to adjust, and if a projectile shoots too low for you to catch it, say hello to your old friends the spikes. At least that can feel like your fault. Try enemies that just randomly stop deciding to shoot at you, leaving you to slowly fall to a lower level or (let’s be real here, it’s Ori’s favorite thing to do to you) your death on fucking spikes. These sections are miserable and take one of the best mechanics in the game and ruin them. I went from extremely excited to Bash everything in sight to feeling extreme relief when the mechanic was set aside.

And a lot of that relief came from the fact that when you’re not being put in scripted chases or set up for platforming failure for the fuck of it, moving Ori around feels really nice. The lack of precision allows you to focus instead on momentum, and chaining together movement techniques to just get around is really fun. It feels like blasphemy to compare these two, but it really does feel like the movement in a Mario game when it works. The issue is that Mario is in some of the best games ever and gets to utilize that movement in enjoyable levels, and Ori is usually stuck coming to a complete stop or an early demise before a flow state can be reached.

It feels almost like bullying to add this in, but the combat in this game is just wretched. There’s five enemies: jumpers, splitters, moving projectile spitters, stationary projectile spitters, dive bombers, and chargers. The same boss is used in all three dungeons with a palette swap and does not even vary tactics in each one. Please do yourself a favor and upgrade your attack, as without the upgrades, the combat will take even longer, and no one deserves to deal with this combat longer than absolutely necessary. Enemies are haphazardly placed to basically cut your momentum, forcing you to stand in one place and spam the attack button until they’re done wigging out and you can go back to playing the game. At worst, they will keep themselves on a ledge or narrow platform you have to land on and basically force you to tank damage to proceed. Not fun.

This obsession with artificial difficulty and sloppiness in level and combat design is a real shame, because there is a lot to love about Ori. The visuals are very pleasant, and I didn’t have an issue with saminess of environments, as I think they played around within the forest theme pretty wonderfully. The story is genuinely very touching for as simple as it is. And it’s fun to have a narrowly honed, somewhat linear game beneath the Metroidvania pretense. I wonder if there were just built-in checkpoints and the team got to just make a platformer if the strengths around movement and abilities could have been honed a bit better to less maddening effect.

Unfortunately, this was one of those games I left more relieved it was over than glad I had engaged it. I had plans to go on to Will of the Wisps, but I think I’m going to pass for now and revisit the series at some point if I get word that they’ve improved on my complaints, which seems unlikely given that everyone seems to have nothing but effusive praise for the games. Oh well.

While Wandersong begins with pitch-perfect puzzles and story beats, its writing quickly becomes quite one-note, and the dragging coda will likely dissuade players from enjoying repeat performances.

Wandersong is the story of a young bard whose mission, in the face of a looming apocalypse, is to gather the pieces of the mythical Eversong, the united musical intonations of all the living, to repel disaster. The bard is joined by Miriam, a cynical but talented witch, and they visit a great many locales filled with unique denizens to seek out the keepers of the pieces of the Eversong, the Overseers.

Early on, it is established that the bard is not the hero of this tale—that would be The Hero, who wields a sword that shoots lightning and wishes to kill the Overseers to accelerate the end of the world and the creation of the next. The bard and Miriam pursue their mission peacefully, with the bard’s musical stylings the key to their success (reflecting the game itself, which with a couple notable exceptions, excels most in its choonz), whether it’s in convincing townspeople or animals to help them or by generating magical spells.

Thus, the game has a very simple subversion as the core of its gameplay and narrative. While the concept of the traditional video game hero as a raging murderous psychopath and the player’s insertion into an unbecoming, non-traditional hero isn’t new, the game uses it well enough for the opening hours. The bard and Miriam are likeable enough characters and play off each other well. You really get to share the bard’s stupid optimism and distrust of The Hero. And then it’s fun to suddenly find yourself playing as The Hero for a brief section, playing a serviceable action platformer.

As the bard, you will constantly be met with pastiche of different genres. While you’re basically always playing a puzzle platformer, some towns will have light life sim elements with day/night cycles or require small fetch quests or play more like a narrative-focused “walking sim” like Night in the Woods. The dungeons, if you can call them that, always have a new singing-controlled gimmick. Boss fights and Act-ending puzzles (used to actually learn the Earthsong) are varied enough to stay fresh, and when they work, they work well. The gameplay never gets particularly interesting, but the novelty is entertaining enough for a while.

What’s really going to make or break the game for you is if you enjoy its writing. While, like all things in Wandersong, it starts off delightful, a nagging sensation begins to form as you get deeper into the story. The problem for me is this: every single character speaks in exactly the same voice. For a game like Wandersong, where a large part of the appeal is in charming dialogue and character writing, it’s a huge issue when everyone sounds like a standard online millennial. Every single character has the same obnoxious, vaguely sarcastic way of interacting with one another. When it comes time for a character’s arc to develop, no matter what the character’s troubles or ostensible personality traits, they become unbelievably emotionally intelligent and open. I can certainly understand and appreciate that the bard is a wonderful, charming force for good in the world, but these kinds of characters typically need foils, and even the gruffest and rudest denizens of one of the half dozen or so locales the player visits talks in the same, y’know, um… voice. I certainly would never ask a game with the charm and optimistic aim of Wandersong to create emotionally ambiguous resolutions for its characters, but having the characters be characters instead of vehicles for snappy dialogue and repetitive themes about accepting themselves would be greatly appreciated. While the character designs are lovely, and I admire the ambition of creating a great ensemble cast the player would become invested in for the grand resolution, simplifying the game to include fewer characters might have helped to add to the variety of proceedings and allowed some time for characters and their arcs to breathe. By the end of the game, I found myself completely disinterested in hearing the same fucking tone of voice from another town full of people and trying to keep it down when it was force-fed to me during required story interactions contained to the main few characters.

The gameplay similarly sees the wheels fly off by the end of the game. The challenge never develops at all, and instead puzzles just cycle through new gimmicks. This is perfectly fine, but just as a mechanic seems to feel like it’s working and producing some interesting gameplay, the game cuts it off. So you’re constantly teased with fun scenarios with new abilities, just to have them ripped away for an exhausting stretch of dialogue before you move on to the next puzzle gimmick that will be completely under-utilized for a good 75% of the time you’re using it. The ending stretch doesn’t even feature fun gimmicks to begin with and often feel like tedious, simplistic slogs. It’s in these moments, where you’re sitting there doing something stupidly simple, that the little quirks start to feel extremely irritating.

My performance in the game is not really impacted by my ability to keep up with a piece of music or gameplay (the worst penalty is moving back about twenty seconds in a boss encounter at absolute worst), but I’d like to hear this song properly or react to this boss quickly (mostly so I can get one of Wandersong’s horrible boss battles over with faster). Why, oh why, does Wandersong’s metronome feature for pointing out which direction to mash your right analog stick not function like any other rhythm game ever? And why did they put dead zones between the eight input directions of the controller when your stick is resting at center? I’m not playing this on the GameCube. I’m not gonna be able to switch from one side to another (through dead center, always, for boss battles) with pinpoint accuracy if you make the dead zones show up when they’re most cumbersome!

Honestly, if Wandersong were a bit tighter, trimming off some of the more redundant areas to make a solid, say, four-act story with varied and interesting characters, these gripes about the mechanics and dialogue would probably be much more minor. But subjecting myself to seven hours of this felt like complete misery by the end. And for those of you who have finished the game, I’ll just let you imagine how red my face was as I played through that endless, tuneless epilogue cutscene… twice…

Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse expands on the linear action game roots of the original with some welcome and exciting additions, but it suffers from some notably unfair design choices and poor balancing of certain challenges.

After the significant departure of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, the series would return to linear action platforming for a series of new releases over the next generation of gaming. Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse once again sees the player controlling a Belmont (this time Trevor) as he makes his way to Dracula’s Castle. Trevor explores the world around Dracula’s castle in a branching level format, where key junctures will take you to different locales and stages. Essentially, the game streamlines the exploration elements of its direct predecessor to give the player the same sense of forward momentum as the first game. Continues are handled the same way as the first, where a minimum of three are granted, with failures resulting in stage resets and game overs resulting in larger level resets. Subweapon upgrades are once again temporary and are lost upon death.

The biggest change introduced to Castlevania III is the addition of three additional player characters, called spirits, who will join Trevor on his quest once they are met: the witch Sypha Belnades, the acrobat Grant Danasty, and the son of Dracula himself, Alucard. The player will always be able to control Trevor Belmont but can switch to one of the other spirits once acquired by pressing Select. Spirits introduce new attack patterns as well as unique platforming abilities, as well as offering separate endings depending on which is with Trevor upon completion of the game. Spirits’ paths are generally designed with their abilities in mind before the game bottlenecks at Stage 8 at the entrance to Dracula’s Castle. I played the Alucard path myself, and it’s all that I can comfortably comment on, though I plan to play through with the other spirits and with none of them at some point in the future, at which time I might edit this review.

Giving the player new platforming abilities in particular seems to have been a big inspiration for changing up the challenges of the game. Light puzzle platformer segments (really mostly pattern recognition of falling blocks) and auto-scrollers have been added to this game. The results are a bit mixed, I must admit.

Early on, these new mechanics feel fun and fresh, but by Level 7 in particular (along the Alucard route, at least) they become downright sadistic. For one thing, you have to clear seven consecutive stages ending in a three-boss gauntlet. The first several of these stages are light platformers puzzles, and the final few are massive combat gauntlets. They help to demonstrate some of the big problems of the game. Puzzle platforming is unpredictable and frustrating until the pattern is identified, at which point it becomes quite tedious. One section in particular takes a total of two minutes to finish up, and you’re just jumping between two squares to avoid successive blocks. Using these kinds of challenges doesn’t really play to the series’ strengths, as jumping has always felt a bit cumbersome in these games. Auto-scrolling is even worse, as the game is fond of hurrying you along with gradually breaking blocks to force you into a bottomless pit. That’s not really a big deal, and I actually like auto-scrollers in general in moderation. But here, the top of the screen, when it isn’t killing you with a screen wrap, is perpetually popping in a bit slowly. The amount of times I would make it to higher ground only for an enemy to suddenly spawn on top of me and knock me off a platform was too high.

Combat in general has completely abandoned the tough but fair model of the first game, as Castlevania III reversed course to include quite possibly the worst feature of the NES era: infinitely respawning enemies. You absolutely must be moving forward at all times, as strong enemies will respawn frequently. It’s never as bad as Ninja Gaiden, where there are looping spawns above pitfalls that will force you to die and reset a stage, but there is certainly an inordinate amount of unavoidable damage. The complaints about stairs in the first game typically fell on deaf ears for me, as careful planning was usually enough to avoid damage. Not here. Without the right subweapon, you’ll definitely be smacked for a quarter of your life bar consistently as you near the game’s conclusion.

All that said, when the challenge is fair, the game is tons of fun. Being this much more difficult than the already tricky first game instills a real sense of accomplishment. The situations involving enemies are much more varied and interesting, and the locales are cool. Boss difficulty has been curved a bit better, with earlier bosses not being quite the pushovers that the Phantom Bat and Queen Medusa are in the first game but mid-game bosses not being completely impossible like Igor & Frankenstein. The Grim Reaper appears once again and is as horrifying as ever, and Dracula’s three-form final boss fight is a real thrill. A special boss closing out your final approach to Dracula’s Inner Sanctum is a particularly exciting and challenging encounter that shows off some of the best elements of the series at once.

While the levels are clearly a bit unbalanced due to experimentation with different character abilities, it’s undeniable that these shaky first steps set the foundations of a formula that would eventually make the series a staple archetype that has been done to (un)death in the contemporary indie scene but was honed into deeply loved masterpieces in the coming decades.

Castlevania’s closing chapter on the NES really insists on doing more in every way possible, and while it gets muddled by its indulgence of all the worst tropes of NES game design, its ambition is admirable.

Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is an unfairly maligned game that prossesses an ambitious approach to world design, fun combat encounters, and tricky dungeons. It still generates a true sense of adventure decades after release.

Castlevania II follows the NES-era trend of ambitious and weird sequels. It eschews the straightforward stage layout of the original for a proto-open world. You once again take control of Simon Belmont and find yourself in a town where the first NPC you chat with will tell you to buy a White Crystal. The manual says it gives you light magical powers, and your inventory already has the 50 hearts necessary to buy it from one of the first merchants in town. You then have the option to go left, where a poisonous swamp awaits if you manage to fight your way past the strong enemies that introduce this area, or to go right, where you’ll find much more manageable enemies and eventually encounter your first manor.

The gameplay loop remains pretty much the same throughout. Show up to town, buy up sub-weapons (now permanently held and, with some rare exceptions, repeatedly usable without heart consumption), whip upgrades, and consumables while chatting up all the locals. Leave town, go through an area with lots of enemies and usually some branching pathways. Arrive at a manor and go through it, being sure to find a merchant to sell you an oak stake and then using it on a glowing crystal to capture one of the five pieces of Dracula necessary to advance on his castle and destroy him.

There are two notable mechanics added beyond accruing hearts to purchase permanent upgrades: a leveling system, where a fixed amount of Experience gets you a boost in overall damage resistance; and a day/night system, where enemies will become stronger but more likely to drop large amounts of hearts at night, but towns will only be open and available for exploration during the day.

The general shift to permanent upgrades in the form of purchases and levels is a welcome one, and it works on the same risk-reward as Dark Souls later would, though with a bit more wiggle room. If you lose all your lives and get a game over screen, your experience points and hearts will reset to 0. So you’re incentivized to grind close to a town on easier enemies at night to be sure that you can get what you need. On the other hand, the more day/night cycles you go through, the worse ending you get. In this way, you’re encouraged to go into manors, where time doesn’t advance, to do the grinding necessary to get upgrades and level ups, though this brings greater risks with harder enemies and the necessity of back-tracking through enemy territory to merchants. Perhaps most notably, you get infinite continues with these resets as your only punishment. Most of the time, your respawn is exactly where you just died. It’s a fun system to approach, though mileage will vary widely based on how well the combat clicks. I find the whipping to remain fun, and turning my enemies into small balls of flame didn’t get old, so I was more than happy to do extended grinding sessions that are basically necessary for game progress for a standard player.

Though these choices are a bit more explicable for a post-Dark Souls audience, one consistent source of criticism⁠—and one that has inspired fan mods to basically completely overhaul it⁠—is the in-game hint system. The clues are intentionally cryptic, both in English and Japanese, but a prevailing rumor about a poor localization job (mostly based on innocuous typos such as coming to “prossess” parts of Dracula) has led many English-language players to completely ignore what hint books and NPCs tell them.

It’s my firm opinion that spending two seconds looking at the manual clears up the central mechanics of things like using oak stakes to finish manors. NPC hints are for the most part useful, with lies and useless dialogue coming more at the end of the game when you’re not really in a position to need many more hints or hand-holding.

The game would be entirely playable blind, in my opinion, if there had been one small change. The blue and red crystals, which gatekeep parts of the map until the player demonstrates readiness by acquiring them, either have impossibly hidden clues that indicate how to use them or none at all. The manual really could have just had some flavor text about kneeling to access the magic power or whatever, and I think they’d be pretty straightforward with hints that are already present and visual information in the places where you use them. The ferryman is actually doable entirely with in-game information (as long as you retain the information that “the curse” is related to Dracula’s pieces) but would have probably been more elegant as one unified hint about what the ferryman likes rather than a lie about garlic that’s supposed to make you think about what he actually does like and a hint about the Dread River and the curse.

Manors are laid out in pretty neat ways. They consistently feature tougher enemies (though the enemy placements usually end up making the actual encounters easier than the overworld) and they’re fun and weird to explore. The player must keep constant vigilance for pitfalls and fake wall blocks to navigate deeper into them, and some of these get a bit tricky in the later manors. Again, there seems to be some grief about the way pitfalls work, but without this bit of puzzle-solving, the manors would be extremely straightforward areas with less challenging combat than some overworld areas and a bit of grinding for those who couldn’t get through them with 50 hearts still on hand.

One unfortunate change that came with manors was the gutting of boss encounters. I can only imagine that this was in part an attempt to give players a bit more choice in which manors to tackle in which order, but the game is very linear overall, so that doesn’t resonate entirely for me. Perhaps there just weren’t enough upgrades that the team wanted to have tied to bosses. Only two manors and Dracula’s Castle even feature bosses, and one of those bosses is a bit easier repeat of the Grim Reaper fight from the original game that is technically skippable, though the weapon he drops is very useful for the rest of the game. It’s just a shame, because the original game really has some great boss encounters, and these bosses are all pushovers, even without Sacred Flame, which I did not find on my playthrough. At least the visual designs of Carmilla and Dracula are pretty cool.

Though it misses out on some of the pure action game DNA that made the original so wonderful, Simon’s Quest has some great adventure elements and light RPG mechanics that, though less universally praised than the original’s tighter combat and level design, offer a lot to the right player.

Nearly 35 years after its release, few action games have managed to match Castlevania. This game has it all: satisfying combat, a good difficulty curve, engaging bosses, and—most notably for its time—very fair enemy placements.

In Castlevania, you play as Simon Belmont, wielding his notorious whip to take on various challenges on the floors of Dracula’s Castle as you ascend to fight the Dark Lord himself. Each level is made up of three stages, with a boss at the end of the third. If you die once, you reset to the beginning of the level. Get a game over, and you’re returned to the beginning of the three-stage level.

The basics of the game feel great. The whip flies out with a satisfying snap, and it’s a joy to learn the spacing necessary to take on tougher foes. The whip can be upgraded to extend its range and improve its attack power. These upgrades are generously placed so that if you die, you’re likely to have your whip back up to its third upgrade in decent time. The various sub-weapons you can get (and upgrade with their own “shot multipliers”) are all enjoyable to use and experiment with. The awkwardness of the jump (you need to simultaneously press a directional button and the jump button to jump diagonally, and you can’t affect your trajectory while in the air) is the only thing that gives away the game’s age, but there are luckily not many technical platforming sections.

Enemies have some patterns that are challenging but not bullshit to learn. The most notorious are surely the flying Medusa heads and the erratic, jumpy hunchbacks. In my experience, though there were some classic “get pushed into the water and die” moments, none of them were completely unpredictable like some NES games can be. The game is also coded better than the later Ninja Gaiden, where certain enemies can respawn at the edge of the screen and essentially halt all progress. Some people complain about unavoidable damage on stairs, and I don’t deny that it would be nice to be able to jump off of them or at least move a bit faster, but I don’t think there’s technically unavoidable damage on them at any time unless you’re rushing.

The real meat of the experience comes in the form of six boss battles that gradually ramp up in difficulty. The Phantom Bat is a simple enough boss to justify inclusion as a standard mob later in the game, and Queen Medusa isn’t too challenging for the most part. Mummy Man can be rough, as it’s the first two-enemy boss fight, but positioning can help to make it a laughable fight. Frankenstein & Igor are where shit gets real. These are the Ornstein & Smough of Castlevania NES. Frankenstein just kind of lumbers around and doesn’t do much but soak up damage from you, but Igor is a complete punk. He jumps around like a regular hunchback with much higher jumping arcs, throws fireballs, and can drain your health completely if he hits you into Frankenstein and decides to come and land on you during your recovery. It’s a ton of fun to get down the patterns and start properly managing two enemies at once, and it’ll prepare you for still more trying fights like the Grim Reaper and The Count himself.

Fortunately, this classic action game is well-balanced and well-designed enough to hold up. Rather than being a grueling slog to return to as many of the 8-bit era’s greats can be, Castlevania would fit right in with a decent number of contemporary indie games if it weren’t so much better than them.

While Dark Souls II largely misunderstands some of the core appeal of earlier games in the series and makes some divisive changes to core mechanics, it offers possibly the most expansive build variety of any Souls title and some of the games' best lore.

Dark Souls II has remained incredibly controversial since its release, and it is the most likely Souls title for newcomers to be told to skip entirely. While I ultimately think that this widespread dismissal is unfair, it's worth understanding the complaints while understanding what philosophical differences might have been brought by the design team to this title.

For one, Dark Souls II certainly substitutes quantity for quality in boss encounters. Many bosses feel samey and redundant, with a large amount of the roster consisting of outright repeats of earlier foes and an over-reliance on humanoid designs. While the bosses can be progressed through in a much larger variety of orders than earlier games even offered, the result is that they are poorly balanced around character progression and feel much easier this time around until a large spike in difficulty in the endgame. I didn't catch it my first time through, but apparently bosses are also much weaker to strafing in this game than the classic approaches of strategic blocking and/or dodging that characterize the highlights of the series.

The character building system in general has gotten an overhaul in the form of some stat adjustments from earlier titles. One enduring (ha) change was an overhaul of the way equip load is increased. In Dark Souls II, instead of Endurance (END) being a stat that increases both stamina and equip load, Vitality (VIT) has been reworked to increase equip load with the new stat of Vigor (VIG) used to increase the character's health pool. This makes a certain amount of sense and challenges players to more carefully weigh (ha again) how they'll balance having good armor with being able to execute more actions and take more hits, and it's in many ways an obvious way to deepen these calculations. Adaptability, or ADP, is a much more controversial change that was not extended. Essentially, ADP's primary function is to increase the new stat of Agility (AGL), which affects rolling invincibility frames. While this is a deeply loathed adjustment by the player base (including myself, as I am one of those obnoxious rolling curved sword katana guys), it kind of makes sense if you think of it as a secondary stat that Dexterity (DEX) users will need to invest in the same as Strength (STR) users will need to invest in VIT. It works great on paper, but rolling i-frames are too useful to players of virtually all playstyles, and it basically means that you'll be dumping early levels into ADP until it's at a level that feels good for you and then moving on to level everything else. Levels are also much easier to come by to offset these stat sinks, and it makes it too easy the enterprising player to rapidly become overpowered.

While some of these changes work and some fail, I do admire the team for trying to tweak the math in the game, and one of the most widely-praised changes to character building comes from power-stancing, the ability to dual wield weapons in a special stance utilized by holding Triangle with the right stat requirements that gives the player a huge new variety of ways to mix and match weapons. Combine this neat new feature with the most expansive weapon selection in any Souls game, and it's clear to see why even the biggest haters can find some merit in the PvP of the game.

Level designs are pretty serviceable. The addition of the torch mechanic leads to some occasional interesting light puzzle elements or unique navigational hurdles, but this mechanic is certainly under-utilized. In Scholar of the First Sin, the only edition I've played, enemy placement is a bit egregious, and the prevalence of "gank squads" can be frustrating. This is balanced by enemies staying dead after multiple deaths, but it can be frustrating in low-level early areas such as No-Man's Wharf to feel that your options are to either repeatedly clear an area of seemingly endless waves of enemies or to avoid combat with well-routed runs. Later areas such as the Iron Keep and Shrine of Amana can be grueling. In general, it hurts that the levels seem to be designed to be combat gauntlets much more often than they're designed to be interesting to explore. Beyond this, world design suffers from a structure of essentially multiple linear pathways to take that are sometimes nonsensical in their execution (most infamously, the elevator up to the Iron Keep, which could have been remedied by the simplest of amendments - make the elevator ascend diagonally so that the arrival at the edge of a mountaintop crater is more obvious to the player).

The railroading of levels in this way and the over-reliance on combat to the detriment of thought-out world-building is definitely a reflection of what I suspect was a major failure of vision on the part of this particular team. While Dark Souls has always been marketed as "that really hard series," Dark Souls II enjoys indulging this conceit (including in very cringe-y immersion-breaking dialogue in the opening cutscene) in the worst possible ways.

While Dark Souls II fails to deliver some of the highlights of the series⁠—strong boss encounters and great level design⁠—it is unfortunately vastly underrated in its lore. Especially with changes introduced in Scholar of the First Sin (that were retroactively added to the base game, despite a lack of fanfare), the "Dark" path in Dark Souls games is deepened greatly by the addition of Aldia's story and his collaboration with Vendrick in trying to understand the role of humans in the gods' plan of continuing to keep the fire burning. Most of the best beats in Dark Souls III can be directly tied back to the way that the Dark Souls II writing team seems to have been just as fascinated by the existence of Kaathe as people like me, and it's admirable that a lot of this addition is delivered in a way that feels very organic to the way the first game presented its lore. The story fails to have the same clarity of purpose as the first game⁠—until I got my first Great Soul, I didn't feel that I was given much direction as to why I was going where I was going besides that it's a Dark Souls game and I'm supposed to move forward wherever I can⁠—but by the end is a contained and fascinating character drama that is probably going to be more readily understood and accessed by a greater amount of the player base than the first game's, and it tows the line well to not undermine the fundamental magic of the Souls storytelling formula by descending into needless exposition.

While I have to admit that Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin left me feeling more exhausted than eager to jump into NG+ (a direct contrast to literally every other game in the franchise), it's still an admirable action RPG that takes some neat creative risks. If you plan on playing Dark Souls III, be sure not to miss this vital installment. I promise it'll enhance that game for you on some level.

Dark Souls marries impeccably crafted combat encounters, environmental storytelling, elegant integration of gameplay elements and narrative, and perhaps the single best-designed world in the history of video games to generate the definitive statement of what video games as a medium can and should be.

Since first playing Dark Souls years after I should have (I briefly flirted with Demon's Souls shortly after its North American release and as a foolish youth despised it for its difficulty and spurned the series until I had a lot of time to kill and a used copy of Bloodborne taunting me from my shelf during a particularly dark time in my life) it has become my personal standard against which all other video games are judged.

With a single elevator ride down from the Undead Parish to Firelink Shrine, it evokes more awe and excitement than the biggest, loudest AAA action setpiece. With next to no explicit expository dialogue, it invites the player to co-create narrative out of gameplay, and it isn't surprising to me that war stories of battles with its notorious bosses or hard-won access to shortcuts remain fresh discourse even though we've had an intervening decade of daring plot twists and beautiful mo-capped animations vie for status atop year-end lists and Metacritic charts. No branching dialogue tree or stealth-vs.-combat decision-making has managed to match the feeling of total player freedom that Dark Souls provides. Beyond just build variety, the game never chastises the player for playing it "incorrectly." Rules are written, and they're written in stone. This combination of items that works in this way in this environment will always work that way and might help you to find a "cheese" strategy for overcoming a boss more easily.

If you're stubborn like me, you can throw yourself without items or co-op at the game's bosses and reach a much-lauded kind of high from perfectly getting down the specific rhythms and tells of a foe. The combat encounters are demanding and rewarding in kind from the very first few trash mobs that the player encounters, and the Souls series is rightfully lauded for creating almost uncannily balanced scenarios where player skill is the only factor in overcoming challenges. Compared to later entries in the series and pale imitations of the series as a whole, Dark Souls seems to almost go out of its way to avoid cheaply killing the player. Even the much-hated Bed of Chaos, though it might be better had it been reworked entirely to just be fair on its own, is balanced in its retention of damage over multiple attempts at killing it.

Exploration is fascinating, and the focused player can anticipate and map out how to progress pretty intuitively. The veteran player can look around the environment and, accounting for a small amount of artistic exaggeration, the world is unmatched in its cohesion. You can look from Firelink Shrine and see Blighttown and the Great Hollow, and they're exactly where they should be in the game world. Where a lesser team (or, you know, the same team in later installments as they got less focused on this bit) might have obscured vantage points in order to minimize player interrogation of the logic of their world, Miyazaki's team went a lightyear beyond. I often praise the world design in this game in the simplest way possible: I can close my eyes and walk through the entirety of the Lordran map and it makes perfect sense.

The environmental storytelling Dark Souls employs is excellent and a real show of how the medium of video games can uniquely engage a player in narrative. Instead of just trying to balance gameplay and narrative elements (though, as I said, Dark Souls does this elegantly and simply with an in-universe justification for repeated deaths in the hollowing mechanic), Dark Souls takes on the challenge of exploring how a player can interact with a story in a way a reader or a listener or a viewer couldn't. To once again compare Dark Souls to its successors, it ties this staggering amount of lore to engage with to a fairly simple fantasy story. You have clear goals at all times: get past this guy who's guarding the jail you're in; ring these two bells; find these four lords; link the flame or, if you found a hidden NPC, refuse to. Because Dark Souls knows that despite well-crafted lore and a straightforward plot, you as the player will have endless opportunities to generate your own experience and tale of navigating Lordran and overcoming its obstacles.

It's telling that the biggest criticism levied at Dark Souls is that its second half after placing the Lordvessel isn't quite as polished and complete as its first half. I can't think of many games where their biggest flaw is that they don't continue to be perfect and settle for being excellent. I find the level of dread I feel in Tomb of the Giants to be a big addition to its appeal (not to mention its open-ended puzzle structure where you can either find a way to light the way by being in-tune with the game's logic or just trial and error your way down it). Duke's Archives has a deviously simple puzzle at its heart that is one of the best aha moments in games. New Londo Ruins's gimmick helps it to channel a great horror vibe. And Lost Izalith feels like a great late-game victory lap over enemies who were powerful enough to have their health bars splashed across the screen earlier in the game. Would I be ecstatic if there were ever an effort to bring them closer to the team's original vision for them? Hell yeah. But what we got is still better than most games, and it's telling that the standard they're set against is this game itself.

Ultimately, Dark Souls is a game and a series that has striven to stand out by being entirely its own entity. Its continued intrigue and success speak to the fruitfulness of making daring creative choices and trusting players to co-create art with designers.

Final Fantasy VII looms massively in the canon of modern JRPGs, and a mixture of innovations in video game narrative, excellent music and animation, and an engaging combat system have helped it to remain one of the best experiences you can have with a controller and 40 or 50 hours to kill.

Final Fantasy VII still has a ton to teach modern video games. The pacing of its plot is impeccable and has been gushed about for decades for a reason. Though the chibi graphics may be a bit off-putting to the most graphics-slobbering contemporary connoisseur, they remain charming, and the animated cutscenes are still striking and emotive decades after they've ceased to be technical marvels. The combat system deftly marries turn-based strategic RPG gameplay with a sense of furious forward propulsion with its reliance on active decision-making. Even in the less-than-ideal English translation, dialogue and exposition serve to engage the player in the world and character interactions constantly. There's really no reason to get into what makes this game so special, as it's pretty immediately obvious to anyone who's spent a few hours with it, and much smarter people than I have written about it to death.

There is one central plot element, though, that is delivered so masterfully using the specific language of video games as a medium that I simply must expand on it. It should be a fundamental building block of all video game narrative discussions and education, and I don't see it referenced nearly enough. I might just not be well-read enough. What I'm talking about here are the Nibelheim sections. They work on so many levels⁠—plot exposition, character development, vehicles for one of the most organic yet shocking twists in a video game⁠—but the one that is most central is player immersion in the act of roleplaying as Cloud.

Let's review. When your party leaves Midgar, they arrive in the town of Kalm, where Cloud takes it upon himself to recall his past in order to help everyone understand the origins of the mysterious Sephiroth, who has just killed President Shinra. He does this by telling them a playable story about his home town of Nibelheim, where Tifa also grew up. Right off the bat, we have a lesson I think many people have already taken from the game⁠—plot-essential flashbacks work much better as playable moments than as cutscenes or lengthy dialogue sections. So, you're playing in Nibelheim and Cloud starts telling the story of how he, as a first-class SOLDIER, was dispatched to Nibelheim alongside the mighty Sephiroth to look into some problems at a Mako Reactor there. During this flashback, Cloud's inferiority to Sephiroth in combat prowess is demonstrated by an encounter with a Dragon who will easily OHKO the player but is handily defeated by Sephiroth. Gameplay in Nibelheim mostly revolves around visiting childhood haunts of Cloud's and exploration of Mt. Nibel and a mysterious mansion in town where Sephiroth holes himself up after coming face-to-face with Shinra experiments in the reactor.

At this time, all the player knows is that they get to participate in telling the story of what Cloud did during this visit to Nibelheim, but the experienced player knows that his foggy memory is causing him, depending on your interpretation, to obfuscate events and lie or to incorrectly recall key details. This struggle to recall is a strong in-game justification for any wandering the player might do.

Much later, the player is again required to visit Nibelheim in pursuit of Sephiroth, and the player's memory of the town and Cloud's are one. We know exactly where to go to move the story forward, as we have played Cloud's memory, and Cloud in-game has that memory. To me, this is a fascinating case study in the way that growing player familiarity with a game's world can be integrated into the experience of roleplaying a character in that world. Sure, in open-world games or virtually any game based on exploration at all, the player and the player character are both in some or many ways blank slates that grow together in their grasp of how things work, where major locations are, etc. But here, we have a cinematic moment of a flashback that is told entirely in the language of video games and has a payoff that is equally unique to the medium.

Later on, of course, we have one of the most incredible psychological setpieces in any video game ever in the rebuilding of Cloud's memory, and again the player's participation is essential to the work of the characters themselves in rebuilding Cloud's memory and identity.

Outside of this observation, I don't have a ton to add to existing discourse about Final Fantasy VII. The game still plays great and even if you're spoiled on the particular big twist moments (Aerith's death is the big one) the way the story is told cannot be missed.

For me personally, the game is a bit hurt by reliance on JRPG gameplay tropes that continue to the present day in the genre. There are some abilities and items that are not easy to find without a guide that are basically essential to overcome a massive difficulty spike at the end of the story. I think that the optional endgame content should demand that you scoured the world for certain abilities and items, but Meteor basically only being survivable if you managed to find Big Guard blind is a bit bullshit. I'm pretty insistent on playing games blind, and the entire game's difficulty curved nicely with a bit of grinding, which I don't mind, but I still haven't found a single strategy for Sephiroth that doesn't rely on Big Guard or some other easily missable materia like the Knights of the Round summon or something.

Ultimately though, that one minor personal gripe doesn't hold me back from saying loudly that this is one of the rare games that absolutely everyone who cares at all about the medium should play.

Final Fantasy VII Remake has fresh things to say about the nature of remakes in a medium that is increasingly flooded with them but is unfortunately retrograde in more ways than one, resulting in a mixed experience.

The fact that Final Fantasy VII Remake (hereafter FF7R) exists and is as good as it is is a small miracle, given the notorious development hell of Final Fantasy XV and the mixed bag that was Kingdom Hearts III. Many fans desired but might have been afraid to expect a competent modernization of one of the most beloved games of all time. For many, FF7R did everything it had to do⁠—namely, put a fresh coat of paint on the opening hours of the 1997 classic. The new action RPG combat system is one of the best Square Enix has produced since Kingdom Hearts II and is a great iteration on the original game's Active Time Battle system (which, for the diehards, is included here, though I have not tried it out myself to see how it compares to the original). There are some expansions of certain areas, most notably Wall Market, that work really well and help to justify the extended runtime the game gives to Midgar.

The graphical updates are a bit uneven, unfortunately. Cloud's character model looks ready to be reused in FF7R's sequel on the PS5. Other named models are generally good, and the character design choices for these folks basically all hit. For the most part, however, NPCs are a bit uncanny when they aren't outright lazy. Lips flap across stationary teeth in one too many places for comfort, and body types and faces are reused like a game from much earlier than 2020. The most egregious offenders in the graphics department are the numerous textures that bafflingly just plain didn't load upon release, including ones you're guaranteed to see very early on such as Cloud's apartment door. I am not sure if they've fixed these bugs in the intervening months, but they dampened the experience somewhat.

Where the game suffers most, though, is in its vision of what expansion is. For every Wall Market⁠—where Cloud gets to participate in Yakuza-lite traversal and minigames and sidequests are at least entertaining for the characters and situations if not the gameplay⁠—there is a quest hub that just wants you to run through old MMO filler sidequests. For every Shinra Tower⁠—where you get to experience the lore of the Final Fantasy VII universe in an all-new way⁠—there is a Train Graveyard, where a somewhat charming traversal section in the original is padded out to be hours long. FF7R genuinely deepens the experience of the Final Fantasy VII mythos in more ways than one, but it does seem like the twin goals of having a proper-length AAA RPG and focusing exclusively on Midgar led to a great amount of redundancy and wheel-spinning. For the amount of sidequests there are, it's doubly troubling that the quality is so low. There's really only a handful in each of the few quest hubs, and if this is the best Square Enix can offer from what ostensibly would have been a larger crop that got cut down, it's worrisome what we'll be doing in future installments in the series.

The most controversial part of the game, of course, is the ending and what it reveals about an ongoing story element that players of the original will note is decidedly out-of-place⁠—cloaked figures called Whispers that seem to intervene in moments of potential digression from the plotline of the original. In the end, it is revealed that these creatures are guardians of the original timeline of Final Fantasy VII, in which Aerith dies, Sephiroth summons Meteor, and Holy saves the world, potentially at the expense of humanity depending on your view of the original game's ending. At the end of the game, Cloud, Barrett, Tifa, and Aerith march forward against Sephiroth, destroying the Whispers and apparently unshackling the world of FF7R from the original game's chronology. Sephiroth ominously shows Cloud a potential future that he wishes to work to avert. The most shocking scene for longstanding fans of the game (and most confusing for neophytes) is the reveal that in some timeline somewhere, Zack has survived the battle in which he died in the original chronology and is marching arm-in-arm with that universe's Cloud towards Midgar.

It's all very vague, and fan theories are numerous about which characters are clued into this metaphysical catastrophe, potentially because of insight from the original game's timeline or others. Without getting too far into that territory—I'm sure with Nomura at the helm, none of us will be able to deduce precisely how batshit this series is going to end up being—one thing I can say for certain is that these new additions to the plot are pretty cool to me. The Whispers are obviously a very thinly-veiled stand-in for vocal fanbases that actively resist change to beloved franchises, and while FF7R will need to stick the landing to justify this kind of glibness, it's refreshing in a space where media companies seem to be constantly hedging back and forth trying to figure out the most delicate way to give fans whatever they demand.

That said, the particular plot choices made are not without risk. The early reveal of Sephiroth has been explained as metatextually necessary given his ubiquity among video game fans, and I can buy that. But the survival of Zack is much more troublesome to the elegance with which the original weaved Cloud's character development, potentially one of the peaks of storytelling in video games up to that point and still a masterstroke to modern eyes. The potential for party members such as Aerith to have insights into the changes that are occurring in real time might complicate the ways in which this game was able to tease and poke series veterans without fundamentally damaging character arcs. But overall, there's quite a bit of new ground to chart and it could be done wonderfully.

If you want the original Final Fantasy VII, play the original Final Fantasy VII. It's a better game anyway. But I for one am excited to see where we go from here. Let's just hope that we don't have to kill too many more random rats along the way.