Sentado a beira de um velho pé de Jatobá, Noite de lua minguante, o vento grita histórias as folhas das arvores. Em algum vilarejo, o povo anda por ali. Seus passos são lentos, arrastados. As casas de madeira, com suas janelas estreitas e portas baixas, parecem ter emergido da terra, como cogumelos na merda após a chuva.

O velho Joaquim, de mãos enrugadas e olhos cansados, senta-se à soleira de sua casa. Ele acende um cachimbo de barro, o fumo dançando em espirais ao redor de sua cabeça. Seu olhar se perde no horizonte, como se buscasse respostas no mato.

O jovem Ronaldo, com um boné batido e pés descalços, caminha pela estrada de terra barrenta. Ele carrega consigo um saco de grãos, sua contribuição para o celeiro comunitário. Seus passos são firmes, como se ele fosse o guardião de uma tradição ancestral.

À noite, quando as estrelas sobem aos céus, os habitantes da aldeia se reúnem na praça central. O fogo crepita na fogueira, e os rostos com reações diversas se acendem pelo fogo. Eles contam histórias de heróis esquecidos, de batalhas épicas, tragédias malditas e de amores proibidos. E assim, a aldeia vive em seu próprio tempo, alheia às pressas do mundo exterior.

É necessária uma delicadeza muito especial para fazer, de uma história de suspense, várias histórias de amor. Mas a resposta está na tragédia: o mal original está muito distante, e vivemos apenas suas consequências. Nesse contexto, os símbolos do horror têm uma dimensão de profunda, inescapável tristeza, e então faz perfeito sentido que o jogo te guie no cabresto: não há quebra-cabeças para resolver. Os fantasmas estão implorando para que você conheça a história deles. O que você tem que resolver é aquilo que eles também não entendem sobre suas próprias histórias. É também aí que a fronteira do psicológico e do sobrenatural precisa ser rompida. Inúmeras janelas irreais para uma realidade acontecem por mudanças de ponto de vista e técnica narrativa -- mas não é à toa que, o tempo todo, existem efeitos de tela e moldura. O efeito sobrenatural é psicológico, tanto sobre Lixuan quanto sobre você, na medida em que você só pode compreender aquilo que as entidades que te assustam compreendem.

Por isso, a relação com os vivos e com os mortos tem tanta força. A tragédia já aconteceu, mas continua a acontecer mesmo que você a desvende. O mundo de Firework é inteiro de papel, literalmente: e no papel que se escrevem as verdades a serem descobertas, é do papel que se tiram os simbolos para materializar os desejos dos personagens e é no papel que sai uma foto tirada sem querer numa cabine. E papel pega fogo.

sensações oníricas recortadas e verbalizadas em uma revista artesanal -- expondo aquilo que é "delicado", aquilo que é "íntimo", aquilo que pode até ser "cringe" se você se olhar numa posição pouco sensível, mesmo que em retrospecto da situação

a necessidade de se expor em relação à problemática do deslocamento interno, representado pelo sonho, me aproxima de uma introspecção um tanto mórbida e até bruta de certo modo -- não estou sabendo demais? e o que é o 'demais' pro ponto de expressão de uma obra de arte?

pequenos trechos pouco legíveis do texto e toda a estética visual das páginas da revista retornam essa brutalidade do texto com algum carinho -- essa exposição, crua e pouco espaçada, que assume a perdição do ego no sonho, no fim das contas, aprisiona e liberta as sensações oníricas, deixando-as se propagarem pelo nosso cerne -- do talvez à afirmação final, provavelmente a frase mais legível do jogo, livrando-nos da rejeição do cerne.

weirdly the complete antithesis of what mcgee was going for in the sequel,, the sequel is bright and colorful but ultimately dour and overly dark in tone and story. this is one of the most dark looking games ive ever played and the map layouts for each level are so utterly confounding and disorienting, a labyrinthine hell constructed by others specifically for u to suffer during. the first is a game about growth and progression, forgiveness and regret and the pain that comes w both, the sequel is concerned w regression and ig I just don’t vibe w that as much. this belongs more to an era of game design like max payne or rule of rose where ur small and the world is big and there’s plenty of ppl who don’t want you to exist within it. the structure of every world is chaotic and dizzying and scary! I love some of the weirdo imagery the enemies can conjure up like the flying bomb dropping bugs that seem almost military like.

there’s so much being said here even w like v minimal actual words being said,, alice herself conveys sm through grunts and screams it’s actually kind of wild. a simple jump to a ledge sounds blood cur-tingling and filled w anger + desperation. idk to see her suffer so often and in such extreme ways and come out the other side (at least for this game) a better and more whole person is rlly fucking fulfilling and satisfying to experience.

part of me wishes there was a third game and a better ending to both alice the character and the series, but also I realize that this series obv took a lot out of mcgee and was coming from a place that’s maybe better left sitting dormant for his own mental health. he seems kind of happy as a retired old guy living in shanghai that’s left behind a wealth of art that means a lot to a lot of ppl and now just makes emo plushes that while don’t mean rlly anything to me obv mean something to enough ppl. I think that’s nice ^_^

That nonexistent game that a random kid plays on an X360 with a PS4 controller in a random movie. randomly made up for that random movie. Almost metatextual.

It looks like a remake of 007 Nightfire, constantly changing (that section in the fancy spy car with built-in missile launcher) and moving with ideas "borrowed" from absolutely every fps that has had relative impact. from the approach to the kinesthetic gunplay and set-pieces of Infinity ward and Raven software, through the parkour of Digital illusions and Respawn entertainment, to the powers of attraction and gravitational push of Chinese online shooters, and, of course, also Dark Souls lol. All in one, mixed and scrambled. A tasteless aesthetic mashup that finds a meaning like a rabbit hole towards a wonderland that fits as a prima, with all the influences in plain sight and without a defined aesthetic identity that personally inspire me with a certain tenderness, since although they denote a lack of personality At times, their ideas to create mechanical mashups with the ideas of others end up on interesting grounds by not having the need to innovate or be accountable to a public that demands "innovation" or "essence", and perhaps this is not the case, and if , this game is fetishist for the purest technical muscle.

Zack Snyder would like it.

for some reason the last time I played this like maybe 15 years ago i wasn't really into it despite loving it a whole lot when it first came out. i guess i wasn't feeling like getting into all the mechanics again and just kinda dropped the replay.

i can attest now after a long while that i was initially correct there's no other game like this in every aspect. it's stylish, it's gorgeous, it's really fun, it might genuinely be the Kamiya game with most attitude imprinted in it and that's saying a LOT.

Viewtiful Joe tells a fun light story both about how fictional worlds suck due to how stagnant they are and how shitty it feels to be a one-hit wonder in any art career. which is extremely ironic considering this game got like two sequels, one spin-off, a whole anime and then simply -disappeared- from the face of the earth aside from getting costume references and being in 2 vs. titles. No ports, no interest, nothing.

at the end of the day i think i might like this more than Bayonetta in regards to which is my favorite Kamiya game... while Bayo was definitely influential to me in a lot of important aspects, Viewtiful Joe might just have changed how i viewed videogames as a whole.

1. Awful as it is, I doubt I could have finished without the shutdown deadline. Xenoblade X took me 180 hours over two years - 30 with COVID in 2022, and 150 to get ahead of the shutdown in 2024. Maybe it was a good thing!!

2. I got really stuck in Chapter 10. I felt I had intuited combat, so I looked online for some advice. I realised I had absolutely no idea how the self-healing mechanic worked. It's easy to be annoyed when you have a moment like that, but I like it.
I don't understand why I win encounters, because the game doesn't want to tell me that. What I do understand is what to do to win, which is what the game actually taught me. Because I never managed to kill Xenoblade X, it feels more alive. Fights could always go either way, so I try my best to survive with the tools I have. I think that feeling is perfect for this game. I definitely think it's why I kept feeling tense in fights for 180 hours.

3. I was disappointed that after your mech starts flying about 120 hours in, the area themes all get replaced by a jaunty Sawano track. But I realise now that the Skell flying theme was actually a valiant, self-sacrificing hero, protecting the area themes from being zoned out by the player after 180 hours. Thank you, Monolith. Thank you, Sawano.

4. It's fascinating how good the side missions & affinity missions are. Xenoblade X's narrative is about a merc exploring a whole different planet, taking on the wildest sicko-inclined jobs, and spending time with their cool friends while nasty things happen to them. Xenoblade X is not about the main story, which is about 5% of the runtime. The moment you realise and appreciate that, you recognise how great it is to be engaging in X-Files nightmares through the cockpit of your giant mech.

5. Worth noting you only enter that cockpit after spending 60 hours on the ground earning your license. This is the true face of pinnacle.

there's something unimaginably beautiful about games that feel just like when i'm really tired with a drawing and i just decide to do whatever and put it out into the world, then i see so many wrong things with it that could have been fixed with time but then again i'm very tired so in no way i'm touching it again. makes me think how human work will forever be valuable, we're able to develop apathy for imperfections due to fatigue and that's honestly beautiful.

excluding the obvious deadline constraints the team had to put up with, this kind of ambitious, large scale, unpredictable, weird, aggravating, difficult, time consuming, tiring, agressive, livable world barely has any space in the sanitized UX focused world but yet here we are, yet after all the misinformation efforts by 20 year-certified dumbass Stephanie Sterling here we are experiencing what is probably one of the most feverish mainstream gaming efforts done by a big studio in the last decade. this is probably the most important game Capcom has released in a lot of years and i'm all here for it, because if you play the game you end up realizing the boxart is extremely funny and there are simply no other games that do this kind of thing anymore. like, my bf missed seeing a major scene with a character around the last part of the game because he never got any of the optional quests involving him how is this not pure art.

also gotta love the genre of games that you could easily swap a "thank you for playing" at the end with "fuck you for playing!!" and it would still make perfect sense. they're dear in my heart and i will protect them always