a rather mid end to a rather mid expansion. Pretty much has everything par for the course; bland city courses from tour, safe impossible-to-mess-up picks like daisy circuit and rainbow road wii, a ho-hum original track, and a good track done incredibly dirty (DK mountain did not deserve what it got). Surprisingly the most interesting course was the SNES bowser castle 3 remake, they added tons of neat little new things to make it a fun course to go through.

(why the hell did they skip GCN rainbow road that ones my favorite goddamnit)

that time kazuma kaneko + shoji meguro summoned a whorling liminal space that tricked jrpg fans into enjoying meat + potatoes (teleporters + pitfalls) dungeon crawling. same shit your grampa plinked away at on his apple II a century ago, same shit your grandkids will plink away at on their apple II a century from now in their neofeudal bunkers

and much like your relatives, I love that shit; I love a big ass maze with a million dead ends, and if it ain't broke don't fix it, lest we end up with whatever the fuck those P3 + P4 dungeons were

at its best and most confident it understands the simple things — things like teleporters originally being designed to thwart manual graphing; that automap needs to be accounted for with appropriately disorienting, discordant layouts and structures; and that imbuing a sense of doomed futility is non-negotiable. there's a desire here to smother, obstruct and impede; a love of mazes that reveals its hand in slow motion, peaking with twinned monstrosities — the labyrinth of amala, and the tower of kagutsuchi — that crank the pressure inch by excruciating inch

complimenting it is the arrival of press turn serving as an antidote to blobber slugfests and the sedentary JRPG-isms that descended from them — the dynamic action economy shifting combat from sludgy attrition to a revolving door of lightning round encounters closer to puzzles than math problems. it's no surprise that many of the bosses took up hallowed positions in the genre pantheon, nor that the sinewy party building was so lauded — few games in the genre that succeeded it would be so mechanically accomplished, to say nothing about those that came prior

all of this is further defined by an aesthetic sensibility befitting a "vortex world"; a collage of textures, words, images, sounds, and ideas — from solipsism to darwinism to occult esoterica — delivered in broad, painterly strokes, flickering past rapidly in service of potency and immediacy above all else

the sensation is one of extraordinary emptiness, intentional and otherwise; nihilism born from its themes as much as the capricious relationship it has with them. a fugue state drive through half-conjured nouns and adjectives that recede at the slightest touch; worlds, people, and ideologies just fuel for ephemeral spectacle

nocturne feels like it's trapped in amber: a static image of a bygone era for megaten, atlus, and the medium as a whole, still shadowed by fables and folklore about its difficulty, opaqueness, and bizarre allure. newcomers still looking over their shoulder for matador and finding themselves lost under waves and waves of dead ends and instant kills, further prolonging its mythic qualities

far from perfect in any sense of the word, it persists nonetheless as an object with no clear analogue. atlus will assuredly try and fail to replicate its appeal until heat death of the universe, but it's telling that even they can't quite pin down what happened here, why, or how — and who could really blame them?

brief thoughts on the remaster:

can't say I'm happy about the JRPG Paypig Tax or the crusty ultra compressed 128kbps OST, but it seems few people are mentioning the one inclusion that makes the remaster worthwhile: the option to play the original pre-maniax version of nocturne — previously unreleased outside of japan

while most won't be interested in seeing the game in what's widely understood to be an unfinished state — no fiends, no labyrinth, no dante raidou, or True Demon Ending — it's exciting to have the option to return to the game at its most rudimentary and see how the differences affect an experience long since overwritten by a slew of rereleases and additional material that recontextualize many of its design decisions

unfortunately, it's only present on the PC version, but credit where credit's due: atlus didn't fuck something up for once, and that's a miracle. I'd still rather eat gravel than pay full price for this thing, but it's a big, quiet win nonetheless from the least likely of places

"worst guy you know" etc.

Very glad I took a chance on this. Really loved it. I don't get to replay games as much as I'd like, especially when they're big new AAAA releases - but I realised right near the end of this that since I'd replayed every mission before completing it (sometimes multiple times) I'd essentially played this twice already. Just goes to show, you should always make your repetitive tedium optional, folks!

So yeah, it got its hooks in me completely. I even got into the customizing. And I'm eager to see how the alternate story branches go. A great game! I played a whole new game on my Playstation 5 and I loved it! How often do you get to say THAT?

Subnautica won't work for everyone. I think this is the one game that stresses how important having a certain niche as an audience is. Tiresome, tedious survival busywork and backtracking turn into nightmarish romps through the alien and the unknown as you plunge deeper into the abyss... but this relies on something, doesn't it? If someone playing Subnautica doesn't have thalassophobia (and it's not like it's marketed as a horror game) all they'll get is an extremely straightforward relaxed game with basically no real challenge to it. Hours I spent fighting against myself to go deeper into one of the richest video game ecosystems ever made just to find out what happened and get resources I needed to actually escape this planet would be meaningless without a pre-existing sense of horror, because Subnautica isn't hard. Even the funny face eels aren't programmed to wreck your shit, they're programmed to stalk and ambush at the most vulnerable moment. Perfectly serviceable and commendable AI as far as making a convincing alien creature that echolocates prey, and it's genius for creating an unending sense of pure terror without letting you get used to the games tricks, but that just goes back to the start, doesn't it? Subnautica, a game about diving into an alien ocean that doesn't market itself as horror, is a game I can only describe as "extremely fucking good" to people who really, really, really don't want to dive into an alien ocean.

This isn't addressing late-game issues like grinding, some poor storytelling choices and the actual instability of the game which all do come to actually bite it in the ass later on, especially when getting the resources for the biggest step of the journey involves going into safe, boring zones where my thalassophobia was quenched by how routine it became. In spite of all this negativity however, it's worth stating that I think if you're someone as scared shitless of both the sea and scary space things as I am, I think you could get endless worth out of Subnautica. It stands as one of the most interesting and memorable games I've ever played, where, to progress through extremely solid exploration infused with your bog-standard survival game elements, I'd have to regularly fight my fears and cartoonishly gulp as I found my way into new territory, daring not to look down. The dread and atmosphere of Subnautica is unmatched, but your enjoyment will lay squarely on if you think the premise is interesting, and if it scares you. I'm never going back to the ecological dead zone ever again personally.

Looking at the characters and listening to them talk filled me with so much bile that I couldn't play to the second map. This could be Thracia 2, Kaga could swear on his collection of erotic male-male age gap literature that this makes the game design in every other TRPG look like Wargroove, and I would not pick it back up. Anyone equating this to Conquest because they both have good gameplay and bad writing should be forced to spend eight hours a week at an art museum until they show some flickering of aesthetic sensibility. It's not even horny.

Very happy that this is strongly an AC game spiritually and not just “robot souls”, but I don’t think that’s stopped people from projecting the conceptual framework of souls onto it. It’s undeniable that the last 10 years of fromsoft games has had significant influence on this, not just the healing and lock-on and chapter-ending bosses but more generally the animations and level design and art direction, at the same time it’s also been frustrating to see people treat so many game design decisions that are characteristically Armored Core or at least conscious modernisations of it as being solely extensions of Elden Ring. Fromsoft has been making punishing games long before Demon’s Souls was even a twinkle in Miyazaki’s eye and that was originally much more to do with how it cohesively fits with the bleak atmosphere that their games try to evoke rather than any notion that “this is what the hardcore gamerz want”. Souls fans hypostatized this into the “hard but fair” slogan and we’ve ended up in a situation where so many people mistakenly think fromsoft’s games are hard just for the sake of being hard (which is partly the fault of marketing and party the fault of DS2 and partly the fault of the fans), but even then I feel Armored Core has always had a very different “fight bullshit with bullshit” approach to difficulty that’s often more puzzle-like than a mere test of execution or reactions, and the reception to this title more than any makes the difference clear as swathes of soulsheads struggle to make the transition or simply assume that they're struggling "because it's meant to be hard" rather than their build being bad.

I hate feeling like I’m wading into “discourse” but rattling off “bad difficulty curve” as if it’s some objectively bad thing is exactly the kind of abstract “good game design rules 101” thinking that I hate about so much game critique - acting like there’s a universally correct standard of difficulty instead of trying to concretely reflect on the wider context of the thing in front of you. One of the things I like about Armored Core is how it is principally about difficulty spikes, how it attempts to weave together incredibly easy morbid power-fantasy missions where you effortlessly stomp on people who don’t really deserve it and incredibly memorable walls like Nine-ball or White Glint or Balteus who kick you back to the drawing board and force you to engage with the customization without much regard for how predictably-structured or player-friendly the outcome is. This isn’t to say that disliking this blend or any of the boss design here isn’t valid, in a very general sense the flow is not traditionally Armored Core so I understand why oldheads would be turned off by that, nor is it to say it’s “good because it’s different”, it’s good because it works within the uniquely unconventional gameplay texture of this series, in spirit if not literally. If every game had a perfectly smooth difficulty curve, they would all be homogenous and sterile, and one of the things I love about fromsoft is how they’ve always been willing to flaunt such rules in pursuit of more holistically sublime experiences: Common game design dictates that Demon’s Souls’ final boss should have been the epic showdown against King Allant, not a mercy-kill against a defenceless blob, common narrative design dictates that Armored Core’s stories should be conveyed in appealing ways instead of frigid corporate Zoom calls - but I think both are better and more unique and interesting for ignoring such refrains.

This is all to say that Armored Core will alienate people. It’s a game that will be defined by its reception, by the clash between its uncompromising vision of excessive stat spreadsheets, difficulty walls and corporate bleakness against the expectant fans eager to experience Miyazaki’s new game with the souls series as their standard of quality. If anything, I think the cautionary attempts to inject some souls tropes into the affair have actually backfired: Chapter 1 starts incredibly slowly so new fans can be eased into things, but this mostly just creates a poor first impression and bores experienced players while also slowing down NG+ runs. There’s healing now, but the existence of checkpoints means that souls fans expecting something estus-adjacent will be disappointed, and the checkpoints themselves mostly (from what I’ve seen) trick new players into trying to brute force bosses instead of backing off to try a new build, which is admittedly discouraged by the mission structure requiring you to re-do the whole level leading up to the boss if you want to back out to buy new parts, despite the mid-level assembly option. There’s a lock-on now, and there has been an attempt to balance it, but it still mostly serves to make the game less unique and feel less like AC.

All that being said, there’s a lot to love here: Boosting around in your AC is more smooth and responsive than it’s ever been (though not as wild as 4A), so many of the new weapons here are unbelievably satisfying to use, the animations are gorgeously well done and the sound effects are top notch. While I wished to explore them a bit more, some of the environments are stunningly intricate and grand. The charming arena descriptions are back, Balteus’ theme slaps so hard, Rusty feels like AC’s version of Pixy from AC, Cel 240 reminded me of the final boss from Panzer Dragoon Zwei (though this is probably the only boss I would consider outright overtuned in its second phase), and I love how explicitly this game picks up on the thread of augmented humans from older games, I especially love making absolute freakshow mechs and giving them pretentious names and some of the new options here like the tetrapod legs are really unique.

Still need to delve deeper into NG+ and beyond, but I’ve been pretty damn satisfied with this. It’s certainly not without flaws but I think there’s just so much potential in this new style of AC that I can’t help but want it to succeed, and I would love to see it iterated upon and see some of those confused fusions between souls and AC ironed out and working properly. I think 4A might still be my favourite AC overall but this is definitely a promising revival for the series.

If Rusty has a million fans, I am one of them
If Rusty has five fans, I am one of them
If Rusty has 1 fan, that one is me
If Rusty has no fans, I am no longer alive
If the world is against Rusty, I am against the entire world 🗣️🔥