Zach, I was thinking earlier about what we were discussing. Movies that are "so bad they're good." I don't think I can place exactly what people mean by this. If something is good, well then it can't be bad. Perhaps what people mean by this is they enjoyed something they feel guilty of enjoying... a "guilty pleasure". Zach, I think people are, in some way, afraid to enjoy things that are too earnest or too raw in their emotions without putting up a veneer of irony. Do you remember when we played Pathologic, from 2005 and developed by Ice Pick Lodge? Oh, that was a great game.

It's often heralded as "janky" a term usually used to describe systems of gameplay that are either nonfunctional or obfuscated, purposefully or not, by the developers. It's a great game, Artemy Burakh's best performance. Its systems are often difficult to understand or directly averse to the player, which many disdained but I think makes it one of the best games of its release year and even the entire generation. The mere act of moving through a town and engaging with its many denizens allowed the player to become more deeply immersed in the narrative. It's even better with the map, which helps you become more easily acquainted with the landmarks and points of interest around town.

Zach, do you remember when we played Deadly Premonition, developed in 2010? What an amazing game, one that as soon as I finished it I knew was going to stick with me. All the details, the lovingly rendered town evoking memories David Lynch's telelvision series Twin Peaks. But there was another nostalgic aspect when I played it on my Nintendo Switch, Zach. Do you know what that is?

Exactly Zach, the early HD era of Japanese game development! The plasticine textures and oversaturated lighting were derided in their time, but I've come to appreciate the artificiality of it all. Zach, all of that was derided when this game was released, on top of myriad performance issues. But those performance issues are hard to fault the developers for in such a tumultuous environment for game development, and luckily the rerelease irons out the worst of them. I've never felt so immersed playing a game that looked so artificial! Even the occasional stuttering served as an almost Brechtian reminder that the world of the game was a false world with layers upon layers of detail building up to create a world that feels so real but loves to remind you that it is false. This veneer is furthered by the narrative, about a town's dark secrets being forced into the light by an outsider. In the narrative, it's not just you and I, Zach, it's the player.

And how does the player play, Zach? A lot of the game's critics would compare it to something like the survival horror titles of the time, but I don't fully agree. The overpowered weapons doled out by completing the real meat of the game, the sidequests, serve to trivialize the combat sections only a few chapters into the game. It's almost as if the shooting is only a further device of alienation. The shooting only serves to divide up the narrative segments, whereas most games do the opposite. It's almost as if the gameplay systems here are all serving the narrative, in lieu of classical gameplay wisdom that it should be the opposite. Zach, do you know what game I'm thinking of that also does that?

That's right, Zach, Pathologic. I can't speak for the director, Swery, but I believe at least a part of him was inspired to build a similarly plagued town falling apart at its seams. The big difference being the unshakable optimism of the denizens until the eleventh hour. Zach, I can't help but smile remembering the twins, or Emily, or any number of side characters who refused to let the world break them, even as it broke around them.

Zach, am I boring you? I'll stop now.

At this point in my life, I am currently at stage 3 of this game- Hormonal Bullshit. I've spent two decades fighting my way to get past stages 1 and 2, doing everything I could to resist before I knew I had no other options. And now I'm here. 3 months on hormones- low dosage patches to start, due to a genetic predisposition to blood clots. As a result, these early transition stages will always be a few months behind the supposed benchmarks. But the hormonal fluxes are still there. And it feels like a losing battle- something that won't get better.
Stage 4- It Gets Better?- is the exact message I needed to hear. This is all worth it in the long term. This is necessary to be who I want to be- no, who I am. Eventually, maybe, just maybe, I will be happy with where I am. This message rings out beautifully in Dys4ia.
The abstract visuals and audio design, the blunt writing, and especially the hole-in-the-wall moments of gameplay- they all accentuate the message of the game dramatically. They are what make this an experience anyone can learn from or be inspired by. Dys4ia is a lesson on self love in a world that seeks to bring you to the brink- and it makes me feel seen.

you've turned to page 56 in our lovely gamedev cookbook--wanting to create a smash indie hit yourself? not to worry, i have you covered. first, you'll want some hyper friendly, super inoffensive art. really smooth those edges. "wait, i want a dark twist to it!" of course you do, because your indie darling isn't taking off without one. now what you're gonna do is contrast the inoffensiveness with, i don't know, edgy scribblings found on an eighth grade desk or somewhere in the 2008 archives of deviantart? obviously we can't have anything ACTUALLY visually disturbing or raw, because then you're going down the hylics path, and noooo one cares about hylics. no, it needs to be scary in the same way a hatsune miku vocaloid music video about a "serious" subject is scary--draw a circle a bunch over itself until it's got a tone of lines and looks super disoriented. creepy, right? yeah just do that for everything.

well, that's pretty much it! with the cutesy sparkle artstyle contrasting just the right tint of edge to unnerve slendermen veterans, you just need some basic, serviceable writing and to hire a musician better at music than you are at game dev, and you've got a real shot at things (but make sure it's real easy, too, or your players are gonezo)! what, don't believe me? just take a look at undertale, OFF, super paper mario, doki doki literature club: cute presentations, horror twists, easy to beat. except... you know... every single of these games (okay, maybe not doki) does omori's job better in just about every single way. see, these games have biting writing and make bold, aesthetic decisions, and they all do it in brevity. off, hylics, space funeral, and undertale may all be inspired by earthbound, but their developers each understood that aping its absurd, overly stretched out game length is a BAD idea. hoh, but not omocat!

no, in fact, omori is actually longer than earthbound.

and to what purpose? because after over eight hours, i'm completely checked out of this endurance tester designed to absolutely waste your time. and i'm not saying that in like a "every second of this game sucks" way, but a "no seriously, there is so much garbage and fluff in this game designed to waste your time". backtracking plagues omori like a virus as you juggle tasks and side quests that amount to a lot of holding one direction forward while running for five, six, twenty screens. worse, the game lacks the grace to let you run up and down ladders, so those to-and-fro journeys are best aided with a phone in your free hand. there's this minecart section where you slowly drift down a lane for two screens until coming to a missing piece that then... slowly sends you back another two screens. but perhaps the absolute most grating time and effort waste comes from trying to navigate absurdly inefficient menus.

no, seriously. here's how many actions i have to get through just to heal a party member with another member's heart spell.

1) b button for menu
2) 3 analog clicks to the right
3) a button to select "skills"
4) 3 analog clicks to the right
5) a button to bring up health character
6) a button to select healing spell
7) a button to select "use"
8) 1-3 analog clicks to the right to select character to heal
9) a button to heal
10) 4 b buttons to get out of all the menus and back into the game

holy fuck.

i'm being really hard on the game's pacing because it really, truly is miserable. it's annoying that nearly every object has a useless description attached--does pressing A on, what, a fire hydrant need to give me a text box that says "fire hydrant"? no shit. tell a joke or don't have the box at all. enemies respawn every new screen catching you in a battle with whatever variation of rabbit you're definitely sick of fighting by a certain point. the dialogue's the worst, though, and i'm not even yet discussing its actual quality: it's just so much. there's so much of it (like this review). there is so many words used and a fourth of them are to any actual merit. so much dialogue is wasteful, unfunny, flat, basic, and bloated, and you just sit through it hoping someone will say something interesting.

they never will. omori's a game that decides earthbound wasn't insufferably quirky enough and proceeds to ham it up to infinity but with little purpose, and it results in writing and a world that feels disingenuous. not always, of course--there's a very specific interesting contrast that occurs in the dialogue when you first go from real world back to dream world, and it feels poignant and interesting. this feeling also lasts a very limited amount of time as you realize, yes, you really HAVE been ripped from the curious part of the game and sent back to a creative wasteland, the game proceeding to hammer in a point you already got two hours ago.

let's talk more about that real world dream world contrast more but, first, the combat. it's actually pretty clever and i enjoy the synergy between your characters and how to manipulate that to take on even the biggest of challenges. but then, the game presents a different problem where MOST battle encounters will not actually involve using the system in any meaningful way, the simplest and most straightforward (and successful) way of fighting through your enemies being a mash A fest a la OFF. why? because nothing in this game has any fucking health. and you know what's really crazy about that? the people who play this game do NOT fucking care about the combat. oh, what, you think that's presumptious of me? at the time of writing this, only 29% of players bothered fighting and beating two optional minibosses early in the game. meanwhile, 60% of players finished the first dream world day (taking place post-minibosses)... which means another 40% didn't even bother to get that far.

what this tells me is that half of omori's actual playerbase don't understand the combat system and don't care enough to learn it, and they're just here for the very syrupy soft pastel story. oh, and i'm saying that with confidence because i'm among the only 10% that did not return a character's high five. it's telling.

additionally to combat, i really enjoy the effort put in to give several enemies different "mood" states that may reflect new animations and designs, and that's really cool. the battle ui is sharp, even, and its a great use of colors all around--easily beating out the utterly generic world design otherwise. but getting back to the real world/dream world contrast, what really bothers me about omori is that the game rips this system out of your hands and gives you something immeasurably boring to work with in the real world. but the thing about said real world is that it has the more "interesting" narrative going on and so, when you're sent back to the dream world, you've got the fun(er) combat back but are trapped with a half of the story that you don't care about or don't really need to hear. additionally, the real world shows just as much creative prowess as the dream world in its design--all a series of hallways. it's really flat.

there's moments of charm, like the sound effects similar to animal crossing on the gamecube, pushing over a cardboard dumptruck, and a character that holds a trophy for "most horse second place". and there are moments of complete reverse charm where the intention is inept, like a list of "whatchamacallit"s to collect, a character named smol, and that entire cheese rat segment that just goes on and on and on... like the game. like the game does. the game goes on and on.

i don't know, i've written SO much about this game i clearly don't enjoy, and a majority of where this is coming from really is in response to critical reception i can't understand whatsoever. and i didn't understand the reception undertale got six years ago and felt annoyed by its heavy presence on the internet, but then, well, i started playing it and the experience was instantly lovely, and there was no "oh dude just play thirty hours to get to the cuhrazey part!". it was fun from the start, like a video game should be, and half the length of omori, too. as is OFF, and hylics, and barkley, space funeral, ib, yume nikki--all of these brief indie rpgs i would recommend to anyone over playing ape inc's sloppy seconds.

when i look at omori, i certainly do see omocat in its design: bland, easily digestible, inoffensive, and round edged--just like those t-shirts. and then i realize what this game really is.

i'm trying to think of when exactly i heel-turned on the pokemon series... i cut my teeth on third and fourth gen, returning back in time for gamefreak's arrival onto the 3ds with x and y, and the cracks certainly showed then, but nothing could have been more damning than the release of omega ruby/alpha sapphire, its absence of the beloved frontier explained away in an interview citing "well, who the hell finishes these games anyway?" and that sort of blew my mind, hearing a game director outright handwave inattention to the delivery of their own product with "oh, who cares?"

inattention... is certainly one word that comes to mind when playing pokemon legends arceus. the entire game feels cobbled together from breath of the wild's sloppy seconds, some mmo styled fetch quests and tasks, and youtube videos of pikachu running through an unreal engine wheat field, comments repeating one another with "THIS is the game eight year old me dreamed of playing!"

well, dream bigger.

here's the gameplay: you, the player, enter a map from rust with unloaded textures. in this ugly mess of morrowind bump mapping, you run around and collect resources. of the many things you can make with them, a pokeball is one, and that is how you'll build your team. once you've lobbed enough of the things at unsuspecting wildlife (or suspecting because you ran full steam ahead and threw the damn things like mad), your new goal is to train the team and fill out the pokedex... in addition to completing story beats, of course.

but let's talk pokedex. capture a 'mon and move on, right? wrong. capture 5 of that mon. kill 7. see it use 'ember' four times, and so forth. you do this for every single pokemon, these series of menial tasks designed to give players SOMETHING to keep them in their far cry 2 usermaps long enough so that they don't run through the game too quick. and you have to do this, by the way--the pokedex acts as gym badges do in the mainlines, each badge ("rank") allowing you to use higher leveled pokemon. don't give a shit about screwing around with budews and geodudes? well you better, and you better do it often lest you lose control of your own pokemon.

how about the battles? it's funny--i feel like the initial trailers made combat seem more involved than it really is, which is... your standard turn based affair, really. there's some reworked 'speed' stuff going on, but it's genuinely whatever you're used to from the mainlines with the strange addition of being able to walk around and harass the poor beast you're fighting (or, rarely, its trainer). it's fine, too--don't mess with what works. it's actually fantastic how smooth the transition is in and out of battle, too, a player in legends being able to cut through five starly in the same amount of time a bdsp player might take with just one. this begs a question, though: why no multiplayer? huh? it's the same battle system as anything else, so what's the excuse? why can't i go fight my friends with the shiny zubat i nabbed? gamefreak can't handle seeing me run around in an arena crouching really fast in front of the opponent?

let's get back to the map, again, where all these battles take place. there's not much going on in them. the moment you exit the city hub's gates and find yourself with newfound freedom (after an hour of excruciating tutorial), you see.... virtually nothing of interest. there are some poorly rendered trees out in front, and some... rocks to the left. some grass. there's mountains in the distance, but don't be deceived--this isn't an open world game. you aren't climbing that mountain. you're certainly welcome to piddle about around them, though, the only 'reward' for exploration ever being just finding large pokemon every so often (at turkey leg dangling higher levels, too). for all the ideas nipped from botw, creating intrigue in landscape design isn't one of them. it's just your very, very painfully average set of bump maps with repeating water textures, repeating dirt textures, repeating rock textures--

it's an ugly fucking game, is what i'm trying to get at.

"graphics don't matter!" graphics matter. they aren't the end all be all, but a book in light grey print on pages sopped with coffee certainly presents a more unenjoyable reading session than you'd like. it's questionable why the game is in this state at all, barely steps past the original alpha trailers. this is the part where i must iterate and reiterate: pokemon is THE most profitable media property in the world, eclipsing genuinely anything you or i can think of. gamefreak and the pokemon company bring in over 170 million dollars annually--so where the fuck has it all gone?

well, i can make a guess: straight into exec's pockets. these games hardly matter when the pokemon company's biggest source of income stems from merchandise of all things, so here's the position pokemon legends found itself in at gamefreak: the studio wanted to make a nintendo-hire-this-man type game, they were told "sure, and you'll do it in two years!" to which someone probably complained, asking why so little time, how they'd have to dramatically cut down the scope and intent, to which they were probably told "so?" among "it'll sell regardless" and maybe even "no one finishes these damn things anyway."

and that's where gamefreak found themselves, having to create a scope actually manageable. it has its good little bits that the team knew they needed to get right, like going in and out of pokemon battles, qol changes making managing a team easier than ever (choose when they level? choose their names after? hell yeah), and even the brief interest of just hearing a faint, familiar pokemon cry quite near you... but it all takes place in these ugly, lifeless worlds sorely lacking trainers, sorely lacking cities and towns and settlements at all, sorely lacking actual level design and creativity and care.

so maybe it isn't inattention. in all honesty, gamefreak probably did the best they could given the time they had and the ideas they wanted to work with, and they knew the shit that was bad... was bad. the end result is a barely fun gameplay loop with tried and true designs smothered in mediocrity, in fetch quests and genshin tasks, in a lack of art style and cohesion, in sandboxes that fail to justify themselves, in a story that i wanted to spend a paragraph writing about but what the fuck ever, it's a pokemon story, that shit was always going to be bad.

let me wrap this review up by describing the (spoiler free) circumstances leading up to deciding i'd had enough. i did my fair bit of exploring and leveling up, and it got very old very quick, so i plowed ahead with the story and ended up at a boss fight with baby's first dark souls mechanics on display--one i ended without even using a pokemon. this granted me access to a new area, and it was there that i found the same ugly level design but with 50% more brown. i hightailed it to a ruin (which was a large, square, empty box) and met a character who hated my guts. i found three bandits after a hyped up cutscene all to just face one level 23 pokemon, and then i returned to the ruin character who now suddenly loved me as a result, her character arc completed in the span of 5 minutes, and i then realized that if i wasn't playing any longer for the exploration, and i wasn't playing for the gameplay, and now i didn't even care enough to play for the story... then there just wasn't any reason to play a minute more.

gamefreak could've done better--even if you end up playing and loving legends, you may still find yourself agreeing with that sentiment. but they won't do better, and they won't have to when these games sell the incredible gangbusters amounts that they do. the pokemon company knows this, and that's why gamefreak's never going to get the dev time they actually desperately need. so long as half baked $60 early access crap like this is peddled out and sold in the millions, nothing will ever change. in other words...

should you buy pokemon legends, you aren't supporting a brave new direction to take the series. you're supporting a grindhouse dev studio forced into mediocrity, and that's the direction they've gone for the past decade, and it'll be the same till they or this series dies. just don't forget an arceus plushie on your way out.