an odd one out of suda's ouevre. largely avoids the fixation on violence grasshopper's games are known for, foregoing the hard boiled cybercrime noir of the silver case, the post-9/11 sentai horror bloodbath of killer7, and the sillier nerdfighter grindhouse bloodbath of no more heroes (which would set a pattern followed by most of the studio's subsequent games as bloodbaths, with suda only occasionally as the director. its humor is also pretty close to fsr's at times). tonally very different from these but thematically very familiar, flower sun and rain should be taken as both sequel AND side story at once to tsc, and its very hard to talk about without also bringing up that game, in a way i dont think is as true for the more standalone k7 or nmh. there really is an appeal i'm finally starting to understand with taking tsc, this, and likely 25th ward--which is next up for me--as a trilogy with its own arc.

the silver case itself, as the starting point, is obsessed with the internet and the city, finding a formal link between the two. it's in the clacking text boxes, the film windows, the backgrounds with rotating numbers and flashing shapes and out of context phrases, altogether an abstracted space of words and pictures that feels like website presentation. its also in the player movement thats restricted to hotspots with rigid pathing befitting of street grids, apartment buildings, your home that you make the same linear motions in everyday. both feel non-naturalistic and cramped, but that just emphasizes the experience we have with these spaces. surrounded by cold geometric cells online and off, everyone so close together yet so far away. it gets exhausting, being unable to find ourselves outside of these boxes, to get some picture of truth. the game recognizes the need to reach for the light within yourself, outside of this darkness, but what would that even look like?

fsr shows a world "outside" by taking the reverse approach. your movement is "freer", your sense of space perceivable with the player character's own two legs in relation to analog control. hotel guests, staff, and people of the island get in your way to ask for "help", more or less, with tasks that are nonsensical in their solution and often ridiculous in their premise too, but the experience of it creates a sense you are working for a net good out of mondo's own developing kindness. you gain more and more of the world to move in until you eventually feel your sense of self stretch across long roads and pathways--literally as the in-game guidebook itself says. you can check bathrooms, take unnecessary detours, hear the rolling waves and the chirping birds. maybe this is where you can find the light.

but this "naturalistic" feeling of freedom the game allows compared to tsc, however, belies the truth of lospass's paradise as being just as artificial as the 24 wards, in a different way. the puzzles you help others with are just solved with codes based off relevant trivia from a pamphlet, blatantly mechanical logic as it can get (reminds me a little of riven, though the juxtaposition of natural and unnatural here is more unmistakably intentional). the staff hide themselves behind friendly smiles, and some of those you help may be tricking you. the hotel, a temporary place to stay, is the only "living space" you can find. structures feel too new, too slick, to feel some engrained identity behind them. the island lost its own past, perhaps even had it stolen, with whatever it is that looks like "history" you find not necessarily being factual. it goes beyond feeling touristy, it's like people can't really live and be oneself here for all that long.

what i like about flower sun and rain not being a silver case sequel in name is that its another way the game frames itself as an escape from the confines of the wards--meaning then that 25th ward may be a return to the grime so to speak, to confront that space again. fsr is trying to forget the past that built it, only to find a new kind of artifice that reminds you of the one you knew before. this doesn't mean the game is saying its escapism is ultimately useless and selfish though, because when you're in the dark it might be a matter of needing to see something different, anything else, to gain a better understanding of yourself and your past that made you yourself. new memories tinged by a new sun, even as artificial light, might be whats needed to really move forward.

loved doing math homework and taking daily jogs on my tropical vacay. ps the walking around wasn't even as bad as it was made out to be, you guys are just weak and need to break your brain like i did with aimlessly backtracking for no real reward in other games that have even larger and emptier worlds

In one of its previews, Hideaki Itsuno was deliberately evasive when asked about why Dragon’s Dogma II’s title screen initially lacks the II, saying only “nothing in this game is unintentional.” You can draw whatever conclusion you like from that, but I think I’ve a different interpretation from most – it’s less a signal that this is a reimagining or a remake or whatever else in disguise than a display of confidence in how well he and his team understand what makes it tick.

As much as I’ll never wrap my head around how they got the first Dragon’s Dogma running on 7th gen hardware (albeit just about), I would’ve said it was impossible not to feel how much more II has going on under the hood in even the briefest, most hasty of encounters if it weren’t being so undersold in this respect. While my favourite addition is that enemies’ individual body parts can now be dragged or shoved to throw them off balance, tying into both this new world’s more angular design and how they can be stunned by banging their head off of its geometry, yours might be something else entirely with how many other new toys there are to play with. One particularly big one’s that you and your pawns can retain access to your standard movesets while clinging to larger enemies if you manage to mantle onto them from the appropriate angle, but you’ve gotta watch out for the newly implemented ragdoll physics while doing so, since the damage received from getting bucked off now varies wildly depending on your position at the time and the nearby environment as a result of them. Successive strikes create new avenues of offence akin to Nioh’s grapples, pressuring you to get as much damage in as you can before letting one loose and taking your target out of its disadvantage state, while also enabling you to keep them in a loop if you’re able to manipulate their stun values well enough. Layers of interaction just keep unravelling further as you play – controlling the arc you throw enemies or objects in, tackling smaller enemies by grabbing them mid-air, corpses or unconscious bodies of bosses now being tangible things you can stand on top of instead of ethereal loot pinatas… I would’ve taken any one of these in isolation. To have them all, plus more, every one being wholly complementary and faithful to the scrambly, dynamic, improvisational core of Dragon’s Dogma’s combat? It’s i n s a n e to me that someone can undergo even a confused few minutes of exposure to any of this and reduce it to “more of the first” or what have you.

Your means of approaching enemies or general scenarios which return from the first game’re further changed by II’s more specialised vocations. Having spent most of my time with Warrior in both titles, I love what’s been done with it in particular. They’ve taken the concept of timing certain skills and applied it to almost every move, anything from your standard swings to its final unlockable skill becoming faster and faster as you time successive inputs correctly – this is only the slow, basic version of the latter and I still feel bad for whatever I batter with it – with chargeable skills now also doubling as a parry for attacks they collide with, similar to DMC5’s clashing mechanic. It’s emblematic of the devs’ approach to vocations in general; Archer’s relatively lacking melee options and litany of flippy, full-on Legolas nonsense encourages keepaway where its four predecessors were all slightly differing flavours of “does everything”, Thief trades access to assault rifle-like bows and invites stubbiness for being able to navigate this world’s much rockier terrain like it’s a platformer, Fighter no longer has to waste skill slots to hit anything slightly above your head and has more versatile means of defence in exchange for melee combat being more punishing in general, etc. It’s to the extent that choosing between any two vocations feels like I’m switching genres, man. In a landscape where people are demonstrably content with having no means of interacting with big monsters other than smacking their ankles, how is even a pretty simple interaction like this not supposed to feel like a game from the future?

On simple interactions, much of this would be lessened if it weren’t for the loss gauge in tandem with the camping system and how these accentuate the sense of adventure which the first game built. The persistent thoughts of “how do I get there?” are retained, but only being able to fully recuperate your health via downtime with the lads and/or ladesses fills every step of the way toward the answer with that much more trepidation, bolstered further by the aforementioned verticality and on the more presentational side of things by how your pawns actually talk to each other now. It leads to some very memorable, emergent experiences which are personal purely to you – one I’m especially fond of involved resting after killing a drake, having my camp ambushed in the middle of the night by knackers who were too high up for me to exercise my k-word pass and having to trek all the way back to Bakbattahl with barely a third of my maximum health as my party continually chattered about how freaky the dark is. I take back the suggestion I made regarding potential changes to the healing system in my review of the first game, because even superfans (or, maybe, especially superfans) can, and do, think too small.

I realise in retrospect that even I, on some level, was wanting certain aspects of Dragon’s Dogma to be like other games instead of taking it on its own merits, something II’s seemingly suffered from all the more with how much gaming has grown since the original’s release, the average player’s tolerance for anything deviating from the norm and, presumably, frame of reference growing ever smaller. Look no further than broad reactions to dragonsplague and its effects (which I won’t spoil) being only the second or third most embarrassing instance of misinformed kneejerk hostility disguised as principled scepticism which enveloped this game’s release to the point you’d swear Todd Howard was attached to it – we want consequences that matter, but not like that! Even if you aren’t onboard with this being the coolest, ballsiest thing an RPG has bothered and will bother to do since before I was born, how can you not at least get a kick out of starting up your own homegrown Dragonsplague Removal Service? You thought you could escape the great spring cleaning, Thomyris, you silly billy? I’m oblivious like you wouldn’t believe, had her wearing an ornate sallet by the time she’d first contracted it and still noticed her glowing red eyes every time, so I’m at a loss as to how it could blindside anybody. It vaguely reminds me of modern reactions to various aspects of the original Fallout; a game which you can reasonably beat in the span of an afternoon, designed to be played with a single hand, somehow commonly seen as unintuitive because it just is, okay? Abandon all delusions of levelheadedness: if a Fallout game with a timer were to release now, the world’s collective sharting would result in something similar to that universe’s Great War or, indeed, Dragon’s Dogma II’s own post-game.

For as many hours as I’ve poured into the Everfall and Bitterblack across two copies of the original, they’re not what I think of when I think of Dragon’s Dogma (or particularly interesting, in the former’s case), which is adventuring in its open world. In that regard, I can’t be convinced that II’s post-game isn’t far more substantial, comparatively rife with monsters either unique or which you’re very unlikely to encounter prior to it, changes to the world’s layout beyond a hole in the ground of one city, its own mechanics (one actually a bit reminiscent of Fallout’s timer), questlines and even setpieces. It’s got a kaiju fight between a Ray Harryhausen love letter and a demonic worm thing which, as of the time of writing, roughly 2% of players have discovered, and instead of being praised for the sheer restraint it must’ve taken to keep something like that so out of the way, it’s chastised for it?

I’m not sure any other game’s ever made me realise how divorced what I want out of games seems to be from the wider populace. So much of this is 1:1 aligned with my tastes that the only thing that feels potentially missing’s the relative lack of electric guitars, but even then I’d be a liar if I told you that Misshapen Eye, the dullahan’s theme, the griffin’s new track, the post-game’s somber piano keys or the true ending’s credits song among others haven’t gotten stuck in my head at some stage anyway or didn’t perfectly complement the action through dynamically changing. It manages this despite clearly not caring about what you or I or anyone else thinks or wants from it. It’s developed a will and conviction all of its own. It’s Dragon’s Dogma, too.

Resident Evil 6 es la máxima expresión de todo lo que esta franquicia es. Mas allá de tener algunos pequeños errores (como apuntar demasiado a lo bombastico o las motivaciones de Simmons) es, probablemente, uno de los Third-Person Shooter mas completo de la historia, siendo una de las evoluciones mas naturales de lo presentado en RE 4. Esto se ve complementado con ocho personajes jugables (nueve si se cuenta a Carla en el Mercenarios) con diferentes armas y estilos que estan en cuatro campañas con diferentes enfoques (Leon con un estilo mas "Clasico", Chris con Accion a lo Gears Of War, Jake posee una mezcla de los dos y Ada con enfoque en el sigilo y Puzzles). Todo esto llega a su mayor punto con el excelente modo Cooperativo y el mejor Mercenarios de la saga.

É um pouco chocante pra mim abrir essa página do backloggd e ler algumas coisas sobre Dragon's Dogma. É muito colocar-a-mão-no-queixo-e-fechar-os-olhos-em-desaprovação da minha parte, mas vocês precisam entender: eu amo esse jogo como um filho.

Quando se fala de Dragon's Dogma, é comum que se fale com asteriscos, poréns e ressalvas. É comum que se comente a ambição que o jogo tinha em contraste com o que ele foi. Eu consigo entender esse receio, consigo ver razão nas palavras, mas cada vez mais me encontro pensando em como todas essas coisas parecem trabalhar para engrandecer a obra final.

É absolutamente maravilhoso que o jogo não te conte sobre todos os sistemas que acontecem por detrás dos panos. Tem amor por trás dessa decisão. O resultado pode até surpreender, mas é inegavelmente resultado das suas ações.

Você tomou cuidado ao redor desse NPC? Você se dedicou a resolver os problemas particulares dessa pessoa? Um dragão ameaçava a existência da vida no ducado e você ainda tirou tempo pra resgatar essa vendedora trambiqueira e levá-la em segurança até um lugar seguro. Você não sacou seu arco ao redor dela para que ela não se sentisse intimidada ou ameaçada. Cuidado e dedicação é uma forma de demonstrar amor. Seu beloved foi o Feste? Bom... você certamente se dedicou de alguma forma pra isso. Colha sua recompensa, aproveite a cena, amar é bom demais.

Você comprou a casa de um capitalista infeliz em prol de deixar que a família que morava lá de aluguel continuasse a morar? Perfeito. Tenho certeza que foi a melhor decisão. No fim, acidentes acontecem, ninguém pode prever terremotos. Não é culpa sua.

Gransys é toda polvilhada de momentos assim. Suas ações tem repercussões óbvias, imediatas, e consequências mais difíceis de prever, tal como a vida. Raramente as suas decisões não são pintadas em tons de cinza, raramente os desfechos são completamente justos.

E é nessas arestas ásperas, nesses momentos onde algo foi esquecido e deixado pra trás em definitivo, nessa tradução entre o que o jogo tinha ambição de ser e no que ele foi de fato, é que se encontra a joia bruta que é Dragon's Dogma. Suas imperfeições trabalham ativamente para tornar esse jogo ainda mais interessante de se desbravar, se descobrir e se compreender. E na dedicação de lapidar a sua história em Gransys, Dragon's Dogma brilha ainda mais. Não como um mero adorno, feito por outro para quem quiser usar. Mas como o seu trabalho, impresso nesse mundo. Único.

Anyone who claims The Beginner's Guide not to be a game has never played a game.

They may have watched a playthrough unfold before their eyes, one whose inputs coincidentally came from the same brain watching it. But they didn't play it. Because in order to understand The Beginner's Guide as something other than a game, one has to go through the same process as someone who can't see essays as literature: games are, for these people, either fun-generating machines or vessels for Narratives, which in turn have Messages, but never a language unto itself.

When The Beginner's Guide meditates on game design conventions, axioms and the interplay between intent, message, execution, apprehension and interpretation -- and does so through layers of that same interplay -- it generates meaning not because of what it says, but because of what it does. The fact that the experience is guided by a voice is orthogonal to the fact that you have to play it to get anything out of it -- that is, to use the many syntaxes the game establishes to navigate the world, the stories and the mechanics. Only then, The Beginner's Guide becomes a conversation, not a guided tour.

Every instruction is a negotiation when you're playing a game, even if you end up following it. The mediator of the negotiation is not Coda or the narrator, but your own curiosity about these characters and what they have built.

i've been thinking about my relationship with art, and my thoughts at the moment are that what i want in a piece is to feel something. it's not only about being entertaining, it's about catharsis. it's about feeling extremely happy or deeply miserable. it's about having the teeth grinding, the foot tapping, the head scratched. it's about going insane over the details. i want to feel alive. maybe it's a sick thought. maybe i should just live my own life, but i can guarantee, i've been living my own life a lot! much more than i would like to, sometimes.

all the games i've finished this year so far (very few) were a good time, some of them were amazing, really thought-provoking like anodyne 2, but none of them hit me like a truck. until GOD HAND.

GOD HAND makes you feel extremely happy, deeply miserable, with your teeth grinding, your foot tapping, your head scratching... pretty much at the same time! it's commonly known as a very difficult game and it's not an impossible one, but it does require you full commitment. starting with learning the controls: when action games were about swords and guns, with fast-paced movement, GOD HAND was about throwing punches while moving in tank controls. it's all about positioning, a 1v1 it's already a difficult task, but a 2v1? a 4v1? does not help when your crowd control movements are slow as hell! but don't be confused: GOD HAND is not a slow game! actually, if you can't keep up, you will pretty much ended up cooked lol, you have to adapt to the rhythm of the fight. it's all about learning and once you learn, it's about going wild.

and it's not a flashy game. you throw punches. real punches. punches that hit, than you can feel when it hits. GOD HAND it's a dudes rock game but every single dude is rocking on you (in a not-homosexual-way (unfortunately)), and you got rock on them instead. GOD HAND it's a videogame that loves action games. it's a videogame that recognizes the masculine archetypes about the action genre in overall media and at the same time it honors it and it also makes fun of it. GOD HAND is very "manly"! i mean, having blackjack and poker and dogs races as a way to make money makes me think that shinji mikami and the team are either the funniest guys ever or the most heteronormative of all time! and it's very funny either way.

what really matters is that GOD HAND is a videogame that made me feel everything, and in a year that is definitely NOT being my year, with a lot of work and study and personal problems as well, making me sometimes lost my interest in my favorite hobby, it reminds me how great videogames can be and how i can always just punch a son of a bitch when it needs to. you better watch out mf!!!

-1 hour long
-only 1 gun
-1-hit melee combo
-no collectibles
-no upgrades
-fully linear
-tank controls
-max payne shootdodging
-every sound effect is bass boosted
-looks pretty
-will probably damage your square button
immaculate arcadified character action

are you using your time to properly think and talk with art? are you listening? or do you plug your ears anytime it tries to talk with you, to challenge you and make you rethink what you're engaging with?

i don't think i have any common ground with most people who like videogames, actually. but i don't think this is just videogames anymore, this is endemic in all of the arts. people stopped being listeners, started being consumers. no long a plot twist will make your heart skip a beat, now it's the author "betraying" your trust. no longer can complicated concept be presented before your public, now you're "fumbling", "overdesigning" or whatever new word people will invent to use as analytical shortcuts. like, really, you spent 90h with this game and all you could get back from it was that it has "Ubisoft-like" design because it has towers? i don't care if you gave the game 4 or 5 stars or if that was a compliment, is it that hard to think more about it? am i setting the bar too high? probably.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is not a product, it's an art piece which you converse with (that's honestly 99.9% of games too btw). hefty admission price for sure, but it does not need to cater to you at any moment. it needs to be heard, seen, felt, I think running around the grasslands felt incredible and vibrant, i love how every map changes its whole design based on the chocobos, i love how sidequests have their own little songs to them with battle music included, i love how every character gets explored a whole ton more because now they have the time to do so, I love how Tifa can be herself instead of Cloud's past, I liked every change, I think this game is probably one of the most courageous games ever made and that will ever be made and people won't appreciate it enough, but that's fine because I will.

the more i think about it, the more i think about its last hours, the more i think how they handled -that moment- the more I like it. I like this and Remake for entirely different reasons, but Rebirth made me feel things I don't think i was even aware I could feel playing a game and I don't mean crying i cry for everything and i cried super hard at several moments in this game, it's something else, which i would only dare to explain if I had spoilered this text but i don't want to do so.

like i said i think i finally realized my lack of common ground is what makes it really hard to talk about videogames outside of my circle, people who only wear "videogames are art!!" as a mantle for feeling validated, but not really treating them much differently than the hamburger they'll buy for lunch. i don't mind if you didn't like the game but i only ask for something of substance, an interesting read, at the very least a personal perspective, not internet gaming buzzwords i can see in like 60 other reviews. i just want to think and challenge myself and i feel like i'm always going into a hivemind. but i guess that's fine i get to cherish good things when i see them at least.

i just need to remind myself of this

ideologia é o privilégio do não-desespero. o tempo necessário para tomar uma decisão teórica depende da ética que advém do desapego, de certa distância, do eterno "e se". o ethos não é um sobrevivente e sim um acadêmico. a ideologia se confunde com a política pois a política depende de um movimento em massa para acontecer, então ela se vende como um fator ideológico em que existe Informação a ser Interpretada: a normalização (criação de denominador comum) da heurística, um véu comunitário sob algo que é inerentemente solitário e solipsista. o pathos é a sobrevivência, a divisão definitiva entre o que é o Ser e do que é sua Ideia, pois embora um, claro, influencie o outro, corrija o outro, esse um nunca comanda o outro. há um abismo dificilmente cruzado entre a prática e a ideia quando não existe tempo de planejamento, quando a ideia já é um resultado de outros atributos ativos de antes. a única defesa contra a ideologia é o suicídio. o barulho de tiro é mais alto do que a música. não existem perigos universais pois eles não são necessários: o mundo está sempre acabando pra alguém.

the beauty of this system is that you benefit from everything that happens. there's no such thing as a wasted spell or a battle that drained more resources than it was worth. if you get hit it benefits you, if you miss it benefits you, if you have a long drag-out battle it benefits you more than an easy battle. perfectly tuned with 0.5x everything and hp compensation off. i recommend resisting the impulse to try to optimize the game and just play it however you want, because the system will conform to your playstyle like memory foam.

the emperor is one of the coolest villains in the series. the guest character structure lets you see the possibilities of what your permanent party members could become. equipment must be chosen carefully to balance all the different stats it affects. it's easy to change anyone's build midgame, as a precursor to the formalized job system. the enemy rank system means it doesn't take long for new skills to catch up, the loot encourages weapon switching by giving you powerful weapons of types you haven't used yet, and taking advantage of elemental weaknesses makes even low-level spells powerful in the right circumstances.

just a really smart evolution of the jrpg, and a game that makes me excited to check out saga.