"oh but the speed stages are too easy and badly designed and control poorly"

"oh but the shooting stages are slower than in sonic adventure 1"

"the treasure hunting stages are lackluster and underdeveloped in comparison to the other two kinds of missions at best, and overly convoluted and artificially difficult at worst"

you know, in my quest to 100% this game for the first time in my 22-year sonic adventure 2 career, i was worried i'd ruined the magic of the game for myself. mastering this game is grueling, man. it's one of the most tedious, difficult, and demanding collect-a-thons ever made, and after a certain point the cracks in the foundation of the basic game design begins to show as sonic adventure 2 begins to burst under the weight of its own ambition. there are only so many times you can handle playing the same set of missions over the same set of levels clearly not designed around them before you start to feel a little wearied, you feel me?

but i think my saving grace was the fact that i opted to gather all of the mission emblems before i actually completed the main story. after getting every A-rank from city escape all the way to final chase, i strapped right back in to the last story and let it enfold me. it's kind of funny how a lot of the things i cherished heavily at one point due to nostalgia vision and their impact on me lose their luster when i revisit them - sonic adventure 1 itself isn't immune to this, nor are other contemporary classics like half-life 2 or the original bioshock that were equally impactful on me - but nope, sonic adventure 2 still makes me feel like i'm standing on the fucking ceiling every time i strap in and let the main campaign take me. i mean, sure, the game is strongest as a 5-hour tour de force where it can showcase the strengths of its perfected gameplay loops without having to stretch them thin over a bevy of tasks not suited to them, and a few of the levels actively work against what the game's mission statement is... but what does any of that matter in the long run when sonic adventure 2 is simply the coolest game ever made?

by june 2001, the writing wasn't even on the wall anymore - the wall had actively been blown the fuck down by a monolithic black juggernaut sent by sony to wipe the floor with any and all competitors. the dreamcast had already been discontinued in march after a less-than-three-year lifespan, and with sega's transition into exclusively third-party software development the future of the company and its individual identity was cast into utmost obfuscation. it would be all too easy to just bow your head and duck out quietly here, but sonic team didn't seem content to just sit there and take it. if they were gonna sink, they must have planned on going down with the ship, because sonic adventure 2 is a masterclass in confidence - narratively and mechanically this is the best game that they ever made, and it knows it.

i think i could make an easy case for sonic adventure 2's complexity and depth if i compared it to devil may cry 3 (a game which has a lot of story and stylistic parallels to sonic adventure 2 as well... hmmmm): it's easy to waffle your way through each level and just keep going after you stumble, keeping a skill ceiling just low enough that you don't drown in the insane amount of shit going on... but part of the reason why sonic adventure 2 has such a reputation for its insane 100% status is because playing sonic adventure 2 well takes a lot of skill, practice, and willingness to learn. between the points system actively rewarding stylish gameplay and optimizing the living hell out of every second of your run, the fact that even one mess-up can potentially mean a restart, be it due to failing to maximize your point accumilation or (even worse) dying and starting with 0 points from whatever checkpoint you'd hit before that point. granted, many of the missions actively work against this design philosophy (especially since the same set of 5 missions is copy-and-pasted onto probably 95% of the stages, regardless of genre or level design), but when it hits? you get what you put into it. i've been eking away at sonic frontiers for the past sixth months or so, and it's perpetually perplexing to me that they apparently still don't know how to make sonic control well when they got it right twenty-three years ago. i'm starting to think we'll never get platforming levels like metal harbor or final chase ever again, or even the utterly deranged examples set by cosmic wall and mad space...

all right. sit the fuck down with your jututsu kaisens and your chainsaw mans and your my hero academias. bleach? one piece? dragon ball z? hell, fucking full metal alchemist (the indisputable GOAT in my opinion)? you all take notes too. this is the real shit, motherfuckers. REAL SHOUNEN. all killer, no filler. a series of picture-perfect Moments flawlessly interwoven together with just enough internal rhyme and reason to convince you to Go With It and not think about it too hard, all while having enough genuine substance and things to say for its children-and-teens audience to chew on. there's a reason that you hear people recite basically every cutscene in this game word for word during GDQ runs: everything from the iconic jungle clash between sonic and shadow to the mundane little moments like amy, knuckles and tails chilling on the side of the road just ooze style and personality, even when the story at hand is so boneheaded and numbskulled that you can't really get much out of it besides the raw adrenaline pumping through your veins. i even think the weird mo-cap on the anthro actors gives everything a lot of personality and charm, if only because this is the only time that sonic and co have felt like real people and genuine action heroes to me: it's little things like sonic assuming a cool guy fighting pose when he's about to square up with eggman, or the sheer cuntiness in rouge dangling above the eclipse cannon when introducing herself to eggman and shadow. sonic has always sort of had this reputation as being a silly scrimblo bimblo cartoon series, and it is that, but for one brilliant moment of clarity it commits to the bit and makes sonic actually as cool as he purports to be... and he's got enough swag that it actively rubs off on everyone and anything around him.

of course, this is maybe sonic the hedgehog's most controversial foray into genuine pathos... but i think everybody hams up the perceived "edginess" at the heart of the game without considering whether or not it's all in service of what the game ultimately has to say. sega knew that this would likely be their swan song, and the introspection and reflection littered throughout the script and reflection reflect that perfectly: sega was going out with a whimper after exploding onto the game scene with a bang, and the sort of questions the story poses reflects that perfectly. what happens when you're not who you thought you were, or when the people you define yourself by aren't who they thought you to be? the consistent anti-authoritarian throughline (sonic adventure 2 is an explicitly anti-police and anti-military game, and i'm not exaggerating even a little) reflects a willingness to distrust that which is portrayed as the unambiguous and untouchable good within our society. eggman's idolization of his grandfather is broken when he beholds dr. gerald's descent into wickedness, perhaps coming to understand his own lust for power and control as something less than the true tragic evil that now lives on through the blood in his veins. rouge's loyalty eventually yields not to her government benefactors or to her own selfish desires, but to her endearment to knuckles - an act which seems to even surprise herself by the end. hell, tails actually manages to make good on his "being independent from sonic" character arc from the previous game, considering that he breaks free from the mold of being a simple sidekick and is probably the single largest driving factor in the hero storyline from the moment sonic gets arrested for a second time.

last but most CERTAINLY not least, shadow the hedgehog's obfuscated memories and trauma-laden motivations all act to obscure and suppress the genuine kind heart and noble intentions he was born with and made for, perhaps being the embodiment of the game's study of and statements against the very concept of dualism. you would think that sonic's comparative lack of depth would make him stick out like a sore thumb here, but if anything i think this is the one and only example of that one-note characterization working to his favor: sonic simply is who he is, and his acceptance of his simple nature allows him to be who he is effortlessly without any kind of cognitive dissonance or baggage keeping him burdened to the past or anchored to laments about his present. he holds himself to no particular moral standard or self-image save for doing what he simply feels is appropriate at any given moment, his need for self-indulgence and going with his heart mercifully counter-balanced by the inherent purity of his character. shadow yields the title of "ultimate life form" to sonic not out of a recognition of his physical power or infalliability as a person, but because sonic's ideology is simply the way to be: unapologetically, violently, proudly yourself, unfettered to the artificial molds arbitrated your society, your past, or even your own everyday insecurities.

when i say sonic adventure 2 is one of the all-time top game narratives, i don't mean that it reaches the ideological potence of something like disco elysium or the inscrutable complexity of chrono cross, my personal favorite game narrative... i just mean that for the kind of thing it sets out to accomplish there's simply nothing better than it. crucially, to understand this the same logic applied to the main cast must be applied to sonic adventure 2 itself. yes, sonic the hedgehog is a silly series for silly children about silly cartoon animals... but if you look past that exterior and let go of all the pre-conceived notions you might have forged about what sonic apparently is, something special awaits you: the reality that sonic adventure 2, top to bottom, is one of the greatest games ever made.

I’ve always been interested in FF12 aesthetically and it has been on my list for quite some time - now that it’s leaving PS Plus I had enough motivation to prioritize it and see it through fully to completion. I enjoyed my time with it greatly for the most part and am glad I finally played it.

Many people will talk about 12’s gameplay as if it’s a black sheep in the series, but having played other entries before and after, and both MMOs, I actually think it’s the gameplay is extremely fitting for where Final Fantasy was at when it released. It truly feels like a single-player evolved version of Final Fantasy 11 but with a stronger cast, less required busywork, and a solid trust system. If you approach this game with that understanding, I think it’s quite enjoyable and has considerable depth. A lot of what became Final Fantasy 14 (particularly ARR and later) also shows through in this game, which makes sense considering the large overlap in the development teams.

The gambit system is daunting at first, but quickly makes sense when you consider it as an assisted gameplay function. The easiest one to understand is attacking: this game would be quite tedious if you had to hit attack constantly, so you can set a gambit to hit attack every time your cooldown ends. You might want to automatically resurrect a character when they die. Automatically heal when you are below 30% of your HP. From this perspective, thinking of it less like “programming a character entirely” and more like “what do I want it to do by default with me still interjecting regularly” makes it easier to build a gambit system for yourself. The system is limited, but can be used effectively to avoid overly needing to micromanage your team while letting them do a considerable range of actions. Coming from more recent Final Fantasy entries, I actually appreciated the very wide range of status effects and vulnerabilities, which felt much more like earlier entries in the series in a good way. The gambit system can also be used to deal with many of these status effects automatically, and ultimately, these statuses can be used to break the game which is always a fun learning moment in any FF.

The plot is mostly fine: you’re a team of sky pirates and orphans helping a princess in exile get her kingdom back with her retainer. That focus is pretty clear from near the start of the game. The playable and non-playable characters have interesting connections and, other than Penelo who makes hanging around Vaan her entire personality (but makes a great healer!), everyone else seems to have an interesting backgrounds and driving factors. I found Vaan a little grating at times, and Ashe a little more passive and opinionless than I’d have liked, but overall was interested in the overarching narrative. Without spoiling much, the villains are layered and often sympathetic in some ways, which I think some people found dampening but after reflecting I found it kind of interesting. It sort of feels like not a ton gets resolved at the end but I think enough does that the basic plot feels complete and the main objectives feel satisfied, which honestly doesn’t even happen in most modern games now.

I previously attempted finishing this game on the Switch version, and remember struggling due to a lack of money and gear. Part of that is due to the importance of stealing in this game - if you’re not getting loot constantly and completing hunts, you aren’t making the most of your time in Ivalice. Loot is the primary way to make money early in the game, and selling loot earns you gil for buying new gear. Having a character set to Steal automatically for any full health enemy meant I had a very regular stream of loot incoming, so I never was stressed for money. Hunts also give good rewards, and eventually offer you the opportunity to get a specific set of accessories that ROCKET how much money you earn. At that point you can basically buy anything you want at any time.

While I never played the original, the Zodiac Age changes make this game much better than I would have imagined the original being. There is a 4X speed mode, which I used more than I expected to get through some of the grinding in the game. Without it I easily would have spent well over 100 hours playing, and probably wouldn’t have looked for some of the rarer gear as much. The licence board is very well done, and lets you try a lot of combinations of jobs and espers to build a set of 6 characters that work the way you like. These licences also lock different armor and weapons behind jobs, and because characters can have two jobs, you can make combinations of gears and abilities as well. The loot system in the newer version uses a lot of chests with random chances at providing different gear, which is fine for the most part, but also means some fairly critical skills are behind random chest spawns. This isn’t common enough to truly bug me, but felt a little odd.

I think this would only impact you if you went for a full 100% playthrough, as do most of the more tedious parts of the game. Someone who is mostly just hitting plot beats with light side content I think can have a satisfying journey - because of all the side content I did I felt exceptionally overleveled for the final boss, so it’s not necessary to overly grind to finish the game.

I had one main gripe with the game - the licence board is buggy and sometimes crashes when you open it. A few times I opened it directly after beating an Esper with the goal of getting the licence on my board, and the game crashed before I could auto save. This has apparently been an issue for years in the final update of the game and it should have been fixed by now. Smaller gripes are the plot being kind of whatever at times, and a little bit of tedium in some of the side content.

Generally, I think the game is fun and would recommend it. A solid JRPG with complex gameplay and layered decision making, wrapped in an MMO-like casing.

The game has fun but mostly simple puzzles. I was only stumped by a few. Mostly the challenge sometimes came from running out of lives (ugh) or the time limit, but with the punishment being starting over, these really just serve to waste your time rather than actually be a challenging factor.

Love the cutscene animations and presentation of this game. I love the jumps and tricks you could use to get around. There's a lot of room to optimize how you solve puzzles, but I'm not into that kind of thing.

Decent game, I had a fun time picking it up here and there, but I won't be bothering with the postgame.

My long journey to Hi-Fi Rush began when I was 7 years old, during the absolutely sweltering summer of 2003. It was one of those weekends where my family and I were "driving into town", because everything good was in Chattanooga and not where we were living. They took me to the local Circuit City (lol) and on the clearance rack they were "pennying out" (selling for a single penny to remove from the inventory system) a variety of cast-off video game and computer merchandise. One of these cast-offs was a little demo disc known as the Nintendo GameCube Preview Disc. It contained four demos, but my parents would have had a shared aneurysm if they saw me playing Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, so really, it only had three.

- Sonic Adventure DX, which was what got me to pick it up in the first place after playing the absolute shit out of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle.
- A strange game called Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, which I had a close eye on because they were talking about it in Nintendo Power and it was from the Sonic guys.
- And finally...a little game called Viewtiful Joe that absolutely blew my little 2nd grader mind.

I played that demo over, and over, and over, rewinding and fastforwarding and slow-moing with my newly-acquired VFX powers, and my parents, bless them, actually cared about and paid attention to what got me excited and passionate, because being inured to child-raising with a then-in-vogue-but-now-outdated pediatric dogma that children with autism are "stuck in their own little worlds" meant they felt an intense pressure to pay attention and reward any sign of neuron activation.
My dad thought it looked promising, because he's always had a fixation on superheroes, and he was online but not extremely online enough to differentiate "superhero" from "tokusatsu", so they preordered it for me.

Maybe I'm overstating it, but what followed on October 7th, 2003, was something of a religious experience. We picked it up from Rhino Video Games (rip, you're excused if you're too young to remember when there were tons of cool video game store chains before GameStop bought them all just for the land value), and I played that game like crazy. Back then I could never get past the absolute brutal boss rush that has you fight every boss you've already fought back to back, ending in a fight with the vicious and cruel boss of bosses Fire Leo, which, if memory serves, sends you all the way back to the beginning of the boss rush if you fail. Pretty far for a 3rd grader though it may be, I didn't quite have what it takes to reach the ending, but that game planted a seed that altered my personality for good. Henshin-a-go-go baby!

A few months later my dad handed me down his GameFAQs.com forum account so I could ask for help being stuck on the opening stage of Sonic Heroes where you play as Team Chaotix. With not a ton to occupy my time, I went on the the online to go "surfing" on this new and exciting ""web"". GameFAQs had this sidebar where they would show game industry news from their sister website, GameSpot. This meant I started paying attention to industry news, and it became apparent to me that Viewtiful Joe didn't just come out of nowhere, it came from a small outfit within Capcom called Clover Studios, that benefited enormously from institutional knowledge imported from other parts of Capcom.
I gobbled up every mention of Clover, they quickly became my favorite of all studios from the moment I even had a concept of developers.
I learned that games were not the subject of immaculate conception but rather an intense process of iteration and cultural feedback, that they existed within a canon.
I learned that Viewtiful Joe was part of a miniature canon of five games for the Gamecube known as the Capcom Five, which was really more like the Capcom Four because one of them, Dead Phoenix, got cancelled before I even heard about it. You know, for a game that never was, its title is so on-the-nose you'd be excused for thinking I just made that up.
I learned that I was supposed to be angry at an evangelical Floridian lawyer named Jack Thompson.
And, most influentially, I learned that Viewtiful Joe was the singular vision of a cooler-than-cool motorcycle-riding custom-Oakleys-wearing 80s John Hughes movie protagonist character of a man named Hideki Kamiya.

The very next year (wow, remember when amazing sequels used to only take a year? what the fuck happened?) I got Viewtiful Joe 2 on release date. I followed every bit of news about Clover Studios, heard about these wild new games they were making called Okami and God Hand, had my little pre-teen heart absolutely shattered by the news that Clover had shut down, and then subsequently kintsugi'd by the news that they had reformed into a new studio fittingly named Seeds. And then Seeds merged with another studio, and became this new studio called PlatinumGames, and that the auteurs behind Viewtiful Joe, Okami and God Hand had went with them, and they signed a contract with Sega to give them a whopping FIVE new games, all of them being next-gen, paralleling the famous Capcom Five.

In 2003 I played Viewtiful Joe. In 2004 I played Viewtiful Joe 2. In 2005 I played Viewtiful Joe Double Trouble for the Nintendo DS (and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney! but aside from Shu Takumi's bromance (and possible unrequited love?) for Hideki Kamiya that's not particularly relevant).
In 2008 we were really really poor that year (huh I wonder why) so that Christmas my parents bought me a used PS2 Slim to replace the PS2 that had broke to where it keeps showing that scary red screen, and with it came a newly-released Greatest Hits reprint of Okami, which had me jumping up and down with joy that I had finally found a copy, because it had become low-print-run eBay scalper bait from pretty much the moment it came out. I subsequently do every sidequest and acquire every Stray Bead, leaving absolutely no stone unturned to adequately pay tribute to my idol Hideki Kamiya.

In 2010 I finally find a sunfaded-to-the-point-of-disintegrating copy of God Hand at the local outdoor drive-in theater/swap meet, for the low low price of 5 dollars. I remember it got bad reviews which is why I never played it, that on top of the aforementioned parental-aneurysm-inducing M-rating, but hey, I'm a teenager now, my parents just said they think I'm mature enough for the M-rating, and I end up playing the fuck out of that too. My online Venezuelan pen-pal who ended up introducing me to so, so many games I adored due to South America's vibrant culture of piracy, I mean, he said God Hand was fantastic, and I trust his word, so why not? (we haven't talked in probably a decade but we're friends on Backloggd so a shout-out to you if you're reading this, thank you for everything! thank you for Deadly Premonition! I hope we get to talk again one day, so much has happened!)
God Hand was directed by a man named Shinji Mikami, and word of mouth got around that he was really, really good at designing action games. 4chan-adjacent contrarians exalted it and used the famous IGN 3/10 review as fuel for their paranoid distrust of and superiority complex to game journalists. It became the subject of a meme comic template based on how the game's hidden excellence took everybody who played it by surprise. Tim Rogers then writes a review wherein, among many other extremely colorful metaphors, he compares moments in God Hand to "the feeling of catching a bully's punch, effortlessly uncurling his fist, and snatching out a fifty-dollar-bill". My bullied 15-year-old self nods, agreeing with his assessment.

In 2012, I played Devil May Cry 1 and 3 out of the HD Collection after the sage advice of the net told me to skip 2, and I played Ninja Gaiden Sigma Male, and I played the return of the Mikami and God Hand design ethos, a game called *dramatic title-screen-announcer voice* VANQUISH. I adored Vanquish, and I spent the next 11 years rawdogging estradiol and waiting for, finally, another action game bearing the stamp of Shinji Mikami. Thank you for reading so far into something this personal, you probably get where this is going, yeah? Keep going though.

In 2013, I buy the last game of Platinum's Sega deal, Anarchy Reigns, and I have an excellent, very fun month with this hypermasculine game while its online was still alive, getting my mind off the crippling anxiety of having just came out to my parents. The next month, I play Platinum's Metal Gear Rising, the first game they've made outside their deal with Sega, and like Jack, it rips. In 2015 I finally, finally get to play Bayonetta, because I always heard the PS3 version was bad, so I avoided it until I got a Wii U, and I am reminded of my intense fondness for Hideki Kamiya's trademark embracement of stylish action, camp, and cringe. Meanwhile, the man himself begins blocking basically everybody who speaks English to him on Twitter because most of them are begging for Bayonetta 2 on their preferred system and calling him slurs.

In 2016 I play Furi, a particularly inspired indie game specially crafted for "genetic freaks!" who are "not normal!" such as myself, while living out of a motel, on a Wii U Pro Controller while my dad sleeps in the same room. I finish the game at like 5 AM. The credits give a very special thanks to Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya, Keiji Inafune (lol, I'd put Akira Kitamura if only for Cocoron), Hideo Kojima, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Genyo Takeda (director of Punch-Out), Platinum Games, Grasshopper Manufactures (sic), and Treasure Co, in that exact order, probably close to the order I'd put them in too. Thank you for all the great games and memories! so they wrote.

In 2017, under conditions of more stable housing, I play Nier:Automata from Platinum, and it's great! But this review isn't about how I've been Facebook friends with Yoko Taro since before Drakengard 3 came out. Where are you, Yoko Taro? I miss you.
Also in 2017, Hideki Kamiya's next big effort, Scalebound, is cancelled by Microsoft, making me shake my fist in anger at the Xbox brand and how anything good it produces seems to be in spite of themselves. I make a post online about how they should retrofit it into Drakengard 4.

In 2019 I back The Wonderful 101 Remastered Kickstarter, because somehow I hadn't got around to playing it yet. Surprise surprise, as expected from a Hideki Kamiya joint, it was incredible. In 2020 I buy Vanquish AGAIN, the moment it got released on PS4, and in the midst of intense anxiety over an incoming plague and Bernie Sanders primary results, I finally accomplish the infamous "Tactical Challenge 6", iykyk. Sega has posted a survey for people who bought the Bayonetta/Vanquish collection, I spam every field with "VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2". My longing for the return of Shinji Mikami intensifies like a kid on their birthday remembering their dad who stepped out for a pack of smokes and never came back.

It is 2021. I finally play another Capcom Five game from way back when, Mikami and Suda51's Killer7, in 4K widescreen. They never collaborated again, anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. It is everything I was told it was. The m4m craigslist guy was right. I continue to miss Shinji Mikami so fuckin bad

It is late 2022. God Hand is selling on eBay for the high high price of 160 dollars, and people are buying, because it's worth it. I am reading the r/gamingleaksandrumors subreddit, as I am wont to do, even though I don't have a Reddit account. Some guy is posting about Microsoft registering a trademark for a new game called...HI-FI RUSH. They think, via process of elimination, that it could be an unannounced project from Tango Gameworks, Shinji Mikami's studio. They think it might be an action game! I excitedly message my one friend who watches my streams, similarly obsessed with this canon as I am, in the hopes that it could be that fabled second coming of God Hand. Could it be? Do I dare to hope?

It is January 25th, 2023. Microsoft just straight-up drops the game I've been waiting for for most of my life during a presentation I'm not watching, with zero fanfare. I immediately buy it based solely off reflex from my sympathetic nervous system, before my conscious mind can even comprehend what just happened. Despite having been ravenous for this for most of the time I've been a conscious human being, I save it for a rainy day.

It is late 2023. I am on mushrooms. I remember there is a new Shinji Mikami produced action game I still haven't played, and so I boot up Hi-Fi Rush. I quickly realize that by my personal barometer, it is one of the greatest games ever made, and that I would still be feeling this way even if I wasn't on drugs. It means the world to me that this game was allowed to exist, it feels like coming home.
The character action genre is my favorite genre of game, and I’ve always considered it the most pure, joyous, evocative genre of video game, they represent everything uniquely special about the medium while radiating a tangible aura of inspired fun, mechanical depth, flashy setpieces and an effortless sense of “cool” that shaped my personality more than I could ever untangle from myself.

I guess what I'm trying to get at by autobiographizing like this, is that I am glad this game exists at all, and from a young age, younger than I should have been to learn such a life lesson, the shutdown of Clover Studios taught me something really important. Don't be sad because it's over, be happy because it happened. Because it could've been so easy for it not to, you know? Everything about your life and mine only happened because everything landed in the right place, this game only existed because everything landed in the right place, it's so incredibly easy for something to never come together, or get cancelled before we ever even heard about it. With how many minds are warring for supremacy, it's an absolute miracle anything ever gets made at all, let alone a game this good and coherent and visionary. And just like I saw growing up alongside them, watching them rise from the ashes like a (dead?) phoenix with how Clover became Seeds became Platinum became Tango, you can kill a studio but you can't kill their spirit, the influence they have on the family tree of design. Tango will return.

It is February 29th, 2024. Leap Day, a liminal space that only comes around once a presidential term. I am on mushrooms again. I decide now is the time to finish Hi-Fi Rush. I beat the game a couple minutes after midnight, which disappointed me slightly because I wanted the achievement date to say the 29th. My first playthrough was on Very Hard difficulty of course, because this personal history has made me into quite the tryhard. I sit through the credits as a gesture of respect, of course. How could I not? I waited most of my life for this game, it's the least I could do. The director himself starts serenading me. I look around nervously, wondering if I am hallucinating this or something. I am not. Everything I wrote about in this review comes flooding back. It becomes apparent to me that the world is filled with overwhelming beauty, that it is truly beautiful that people can collaborate and make something with so many moving parts, and that it is beautiful that everything I've experienced and the ways those people like Mikami, Kamiya, and now Johanas contributed to a shared lineage made me who I am, and I feel loved and personally spoken to in a way I've never felt before. Of course, of course I cry my goddamn eyes out.

We somehow made it through

All of this.

Making things is hard,

Things never go as planned.

Too many features, not enough time.

We want the best

But can only do so much

With what we have.

So this is what we made.

We've never been more proud.

A game, a song, a million different pieces working together

Brought to you by all of us.

It may not be what you expected,

Everything

(Everything that you want)

But we did our best

And here it is:

A piece of our heart,

The hard work from all of us.

So please don't complain

And just enjoy.

Because at the end of the day, it's all just a game.

One we spent thousands and thousands of hours

Arguing, building, and polishing.

But hey,

No sweat. 😅