meearmph
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Limited Run Games following up Plumbers Don't Wear Ties with the sort of shit that makes you the focal point of a week-long discourse on furry twitter
Max Payne 3
2012
"You need to replay Max Payne 3" gotta be in my top ten intrusive thoughts I've acted on, right up there with "fill your whole entire fridge with cans of NOS."
Unlike my fridge full of NOS, the compulsion to revisit this game wasn't as sudden as waking in the middle of the night, drenched in a cold sweat and driven by chemical dependency, though I suppose the fact we both nurse our problems rather than confront them does make Max somewhat relatable (well, that and the baldness.) Rather, Max Payne 3 has ended up in front of my face several times over the past few weeks by pure happenstance, with the untimely passing of James McCaffrey acting as the catalyst to sit down and start it up for the first time since 2012.
McCaffrey's performance is of course outstanding, effortlessly selling you on an older, even more broken version of Max from the second he sets foot in his clean new apartment. Monologuing about the need to move on and start fresh with a few cracks at the expense of his weight and the poor choices that have led him to Brazil. The scene devolves pretty quickly as Max sets aside unpacking and decorating for drinking, stumbling, and self-pity.
The strobing effects, neon after-images, and punctuation of key words and phrases cutting through the cacophony of visual noise places the player right into the middle of Max's delirium, and while I'm sure some people were upset that Rockstar pushed away from the film noir design of the previous games, I am 100% into this sort of Man on Fire "tape roll" editing style, and I think it's used to great effect, keeping the player spinning in Max's fucked up headspace.
Despite how fundamentally broken Max is as a person, there was some real risk in inadvertently casting him as the "white savior," but I think this trope is pretty effectively subverted. Max is notoriously bad at saving anybody, and in fact makes most situations substantially worse by simply being there, drunk on the job and armed to the teeth. He is unwilling or perhaps unable (again, due to his inebriation) to understand any language that's not New Jersey English, frequently resulting in misunderstandings and botched attempts at negotiations, resulting in the loss of human life. I don't see how Max hopes to save anyone when he intentionally blows up an organ farming operation without making sure anyone got out, or by shooting up an entire airport, later revealed to be avoidable had he simply taken a ride offered to him to go directly to the bad guy's private hanger. As he puts it, "I'm a dumb move kind of guy." Sure, he gets the bad guy in the end, but when the game is popping accolades for killing 1000 enemies, you have to wonder if the math shakes out.
The shootout in the favela, which occurs about halfway through the game, feels heavily borrowed from Elite Squad. There are a couple notable moments during this sequence that are lifted from the movie, but one thing Max Payne 3 lacks over Elite Squad is that element of humanization, particularly for those in the favela. There's plenty of lip paid to the class divide and the animosity the rich have for the poor, and vice versa, but the fast pace of the story and action doesn't really provide time to peel back those layers and examine them. That's not what Max Payne 3 is about, it's more action than drama, and to do so would also mean providing subtitles and having Max not go "huh, what?" and immediately shoot dodge into a wall, so Rockstar probably made the right call there, too.
On the more mechanical end of things, Max Payne 3 carries over enough systems from the previous two games to feel authentic to the Max Payne experience and is otherwise just a very refined third person cover-shooter. A bit punishing, but in a way that feels satisfying. The action never dries out, and there's some really great set pieces, especially during the climax in the airport, which includes one of my favorite needle drops in games. At this point it feels trite to say a game feels like playing a movie, but Max Payne 3's action is paced in this very specific way that makes it feel like possibly the best translation of an action movie into interactive media I've come across.
Remedy has announced remakes of the first two Max Payne games, and I've been told there's plenty of allusions to the character in Alan Wake 2, potentially setting up something more. I haven't played that game and my friends have been careful to avoid spoilers until I do, so I really only know the vague points, like Sam Lake's character being voiced by McCaffrey. I'm curious where they go from here, though at the same time I don't want to speculate, as it feels a bit too callous to do so in the wake of McCaffrey's passing. Perhaps the best answer is to not do anything at all. Max Payne 3 is an excellent final chapter to Max's story and maybe my favorite entry in the series.
Unlike my fridge full of NOS, the compulsion to revisit this game wasn't as sudden as waking in the middle of the night, drenched in a cold sweat and driven by chemical dependency, though I suppose the fact we both nurse our problems rather than confront them does make Max somewhat relatable (well, that and the baldness.) Rather, Max Payne 3 has ended up in front of my face several times over the past few weeks by pure happenstance, with the untimely passing of James McCaffrey acting as the catalyst to sit down and start it up for the first time since 2012.
McCaffrey's performance is of course outstanding, effortlessly selling you on an older, even more broken version of Max from the second he sets foot in his clean new apartment. Monologuing about the need to move on and start fresh with a few cracks at the expense of his weight and the poor choices that have led him to Brazil. The scene devolves pretty quickly as Max sets aside unpacking and decorating for drinking, stumbling, and self-pity.
The strobing effects, neon after-images, and punctuation of key words and phrases cutting through the cacophony of visual noise places the player right into the middle of Max's delirium, and while I'm sure some people were upset that Rockstar pushed away from the film noir design of the previous games, I am 100% into this sort of Man on Fire "tape roll" editing style, and I think it's used to great effect, keeping the player spinning in Max's fucked up headspace.
Despite how fundamentally broken Max is as a person, there was some real risk in inadvertently casting him as the "white savior," but I think this trope is pretty effectively subverted. Max is notoriously bad at saving anybody, and in fact makes most situations substantially worse by simply being there, drunk on the job and armed to the teeth. He is unwilling or perhaps unable (again, due to his inebriation) to understand any language that's not New Jersey English, frequently resulting in misunderstandings and botched attempts at negotiations, resulting in the loss of human life. I don't see how Max hopes to save anyone when he intentionally blows up an organ farming operation without making sure anyone got out, or by shooting up an entire airport, later revealed to be avoidable had he simply taken a ride offered to him to go directly to the bad guy's private hanger. As he puts it, "I'm a dumb move kind of guy." Sure, he gets the bad guy in the end, but when the game is popping accolades for killing 1000 enemies, you have to wonder if the math shakes out.
The shootout in the favela, which occurs about halfway through the game, feels heavily borrowed from Elite Squad. There are a couple notable moments during this sequence that are lifted from the movie, but one thing Max Payne 3 lacks over Elite Squad is that element of humanization, particularly for those in the favela. There's plenty of lip paid to the class divide and the animosity the rich have for the poor, and vice versa, but the fast pace of the story and action doesn't really provide time to peel back those layers and examine them. That's not what Max Payne 3 is about, it's more action than drama, and to do so would also mean providing subtitles and having Max not go "huh, what?" and immediately shoot dodge into a wall, so Rockstar probably made the right call there, too.
On the more mechanical end of things, Max Payne 3 carries over enough systems from the previous two games to feel authentic to the Max Payne experience and is otherwise just a very refined third person cover-shooter. A bit punishing, but in a way that feels satisfying. The action never dries out, and there's some really great set pieces, especially during the climax in the airport, which includes one of my favorite needle drops in games. At this point it feels trite to say a game feels like playing a movie, but Max Payne 3's action is paced in this very specific way that makes it feel like possibly the best translation of an action movie into interactive media I've come across.
Remedy has announced remakes of the first two Max Payne games, and I've been told there's plenty of allusions to the character in Alan Wake 2, potentially setting up something more. I haven't played that game and my friends have been careful to avoid spoilers until I do, so I really only know the vague points, like Sam Lake's character being voiced by McCaffrey. I'm curious where they go from here, though at the same time I don't want to speculate, as it feels a bit too callous to do so in the wake of McCaffrey's passing. Perhaps the best answer is to not do anything at all. Max Payne 3 is an excellent final chapter to Max's story and maybe my favorite entry in the series.
God of War Ragnarök
2022
We all wear masks... metaphorically speaking, Mr. Kratos.
Don't know why I got it in my head that God of War (2018) was the first in a trilogy. Everything's a trilogy nowadays, and every Sony first party title is a narrative action game. I know everyone is sick of it, the people crave Ape Escape, I crave Ape Escape, but having now finished the God of War Duology, I really wouldn't mind another one of these.
I won't dive in too deep on the story, but Ragnarok provides satisfying payoff to basically every plot hook introduced in the previous game and brings everyone's character arcs full circle for a conclusion that feels very earned. I think. Look, I was screwed up on medication and wracked by insomnia before a invasive medical procedure when I played most of God of War, I don't remember much of it. Baldur was there, Mimir's head was smacking off the side of Kratos' ass, Freya was real mad about her failson trying to kill her... I got the broad strokes!
Thor and Odin (played by Richard Schiff, who is mashing every scene between his molars) are perfect contrasts to Kratos and Atreus, both in terms of personal growth and their station in the story. Atreus wants to learn more about himself and the giants but seeks to defy their prophecy to protect the ones he loves, whereas Odin is consumed by a self-centered desire for knowledge and has blinded himself to the cost. Kratos realizes he's been running from who he was, but confronts his past and grows, while Thor feels powerless in the face of his own nature and habitually succumbs to his own anger and self-loathing. The rest of the supporting cast is given plenty of reason to kick old man Odin's door down and beat his ass, too.
Surt's also here, he's gonna cast Agidyne or some shit.
Combat picks up more quickly than the last game, you don't have to wait until halfway through to get the Blades of Chaos, and you eventually get a new weapon that makes use of the draupnir ring in some creative ways. Gameplay is divided between Kratos and Atreus, and I tend to worry anytime one of these games puts me in control of a side character that their gameplay just won't feel as good. Initially, Atreus is tedium manifest, but he really grew on me, and by the end of the game I think I actually prefer his combat over Kratos'.
New weapons and abilities are metered out in a way that keeps the game feeling fresh, but chapters struggle a bit more with pacing and often overstay their welcome. Every chapter has at least one room too many of a particular gimmick, puzzle, or combat encounter, resulting in about 20-30 minutes of your playtime feeling padded out. This is more a problem in the first half of the game, but even some late game chapters still drag on a bit. There are also a lot of side missions, and I eventually had to accept that I wasn't going to do everything, because then I'd only tire of Ragnarok and end up liking it less. I wouldn't even say this is a quantity over quality issue as all of it is still good, there's also just too much of it, and some of your time across Ragnarok's realms could've been better divided.
I wonder if we'll ever get to see Atreus at that age where he's stealing beer out of the garage refrigerator and taking the Blades of Chaos behind Kratos' back and accidentally causing an obscene amount of property damage. Even if we don't, I'm fairly confident in saying Ragnarok is the best game in the series. I've never played any of the other games besides the 2018 one but like, c'mon. It's got Surt!
Addendum: I almost gave this a 4/5 because of its pacing issues, but then started thinking about how Heimdall is basically just Weyoun from Deep Space 9 and that's deserving of a half star at the very least. Now if you'll excuse me, Mimir and I are gonna head to the holosuite in Svartalfheim and pretend to be old WWII British fighter pilots.
Don't know why I got it in my head that God of War (2018) was the first in a trilogy. Everything's a trilogy nowadays, and every Sony first party title is a narrative action game. I know everyone is sick of it, the people crave Ape Escape, I crave Ape Escape, but having now finished the God of War Duology, I really wouldn't mind another one of these.
I won't dive in too deep on the story, but Ragnarok provides satisfying payoff to basically every plot hook introduced in the previous game and brings everyone's character arcs full circle for a conclusion that feels very earned. I think. Look, I was screwed up on medication and wracked by insomnia before a invasive medical procedure when I played most of God of War, I don't remember much of it. Baldur was there, Mimir's head was smacking off the side of Kratos' ass, Freya was real mad about her failson trying to kill her... I got the broad strokes!
Thor and Odin (played by Richard Schiff, who is mashing every scene between his molars) are perfect contrasts to Kratos and Atreus, both in terms of personal growth and their station in the story. Atreus wants to learn more about himself and the giants but seeks to defy their prophecy to protect the ones he loves, whereas Odin is consumed by a self-centered desire for knowledge and has blinded himself to the cost. Kratos realizes he's been running from who he was, but confronts his past and grows, while Thor feels powerless in the face of his own nature and habitually succumbs to his own anger and self-loathing. The rest of the supporting cast is given plenty of reason to kick old man Odin's door down and beat his ass, too.
Surt's also here, he's gonna cast Agidyne or some shit.
Combat picks up more quickly than the last game, you don't have to wait until halfway through to get the Blades of Chaos, and you eventually get a new weapon that makes use of the draupnir ring in some creative ways. Gameplay is divided between Kratos and Atreus, and I tend to worry anytime one of these games puts me in control of a side character that their gameplay just won't feel as good. Initially, Atreus is tedium manifest, but he really grew on me, and by the end of the game I think I actually prefer his combat over Kratos'.
New weapons and abilities are metered out in a way that keeps the game feeling fresh, but chapters struggle a bit more with pacing and often overstay their welcome. Every chapter has at least one room too many of a particular gimmick, puzzle, or combat encounter, resulting in about 20-30 minutes of your playtime feeling padded out. This is more a problem in the first half of the game, but even some late game chapters still drag on a bit. There are also a lot of side missions, and I eventually had to accept that I wasn't going to do everything, because then I'd only tire of Ragnarok and end up liking it less. I wouldn't even say this is a quantity over quality issue as all of it is still good, there's also just too much of it, and some of your time across Ragnarok's realms could've been better divided.
I wonder if we'll ever get to see Atreus at that age where he's stealing beer out of the garage refrigerator and taking the Blades of Chaos behind Kratos' back and accidentally causing an obscene amount of property damage. Even if we don't, I'm fairly confident in saying Ragnarok is the best game in the series. I've never played any of the other games besides the 2018 one but like, c'mon. It's got Surt!
Addendum: I almost gave this a 4/5 because of its pacing issues, but then started thinking about how Heimdall is basically just Weyoun from Deep Space 9 and that's deserving of a half star at the very least. Now if you'll excuse me, Mimir and I are gonna head to the holosuite in Svartalfheim and pretend to be old WWII British fighter pilots.
just watch family guy
Out of basically nowhere this has handily become both (1) one of my favorite Mother-inspired indie RPGs and (2) one of my favorite "Save The World"-y JRPGs probably ever?
I mean, granted--I am a gay furry who tends to play and like a lot of these games (for reference, Mother 3, Undertale, and Omori are all in my top 10 lol), I am pretty much the exact target demographic here, but still, wow.
Insanely polished, amazing art direction and music, and some really heartfelt writing that's strong enough to both be sweet AND super emotionally real and poignant at the same time (reminded me a lot of Chicory, which is also one of my favorites). The battle mechanics here are pretty great too--tons of synergies to experiment with and options to try, which is something most other Mother-inspired indies tend to not really put any focus into. You can get a little OP by the end but that's a small nitpick to have when you can just run past enemies for a little while if you're feeling a bit too powerful.
Pretty much a hands-down recommendation for anyone even remotely interested. If you play a lot of Mother-inspired indies and/or are queer and/or a furry, you really owe it to yourself to give this one a go.
(Also, do the side content, it's just as good as the main questline is.)
I mean, granted--I am a gay furry who tends to play and like a lot of these games (for reference, Mother 3, Undertale, and Omori are all in my top 10 lol), I am pretty much the exact target demographic here, but still, wow.
Insanely polished, amazing art direction and music, and some really heartfelt writing that's strong enough to both be sweet AND super emotionally real and poignant at the same time (reminded me a lot of Chicory, which is also one of my favorites). The battle mechanics here are pretty great too--tons of synergies to experiment with and options to try, which is something most other Mother-inspired indies tend to not really put any focus into. You can get a little OP by the end but that's a small nitpick to have when you can just run past enemies for a little while if you're feeling a bit too powerful.
Pretty much a hands-down recommendation for anyone even remotely interested. If you play a lot of Mother-inspired indies and/or are queer and/or a furry, you really owe it to yourself to give this one a go.
(Also, do the side content, it's just as good as the main questline is.)
Gachi-Natsu
2022
its that time of the year where im gonna talk about gay porn games once again so im gonna put the usual disclaimer
ALERT THIS IS A GAY PORN GAME ! which means I will be talking about my private time experiences with the material and the licentious content of this game that might hurt your over religious conservative puritan homophobic beliefs or maybe you just dont want to read about what turns me on and I don't fucking care you've been advised
so now youre probably gonna wonder why this fucking game got a 4 stars when it is basically just glorified porn CGs made into a game but when i tell you this is some of the best fapping material ive ever found till today
usually i rate games considering staff like general quality art direction how much i enjoyed it and lemme tell you i did fucking enjoy this one to hell and back
lets address the story at first because this is genuinely the most stupid trope ive ever seen in a while but still the most erotic one too so im not gonna complain about it basically the main character is a (virgin) high schooler who is trying to get to college but he sucks so bad at studying that his parents decide to hire a personal tutor to help him prepare for the exams so at one point this tutor comes home and hes a hunk horny beefy muscular guy with the sex drive of a bull and a lot of innuendos in his arsenal
i guess the general idea is that ryota should study some months trying to study for these entrance exams but it happens that for a series of events atsushi ends up sucking ryotas dick and from that points onward these two will be spending a lot of time doing sex sex sex sex sex sex
while i definitely dont think this is the most incredible story in a porn game its also to be said that i didnt expect to find a new shakespeare in the making i was literally here to beat my junk whenever i felt like it so honestly the overall storybeats were just a good excuse that segues into a sex scene so whatever truth be told this trope of the big beefy coach fucking you is kind of a dream of mine so lets get it the thing is that the coach actually takes it up his ass so thats what happens sometimes in real life
during the backdrop of this incredible incipit theres gonna be a lot of weird fucking in here like doing some outdoor illegal trivelling doing it in the forests of the beach from the top from the bottom side to side literally this guys would fuck in any position and any place whatsoever
the ending is also commendable to make the character arcs come to an end and actually make a sense of everything that happened so far
gotta say that the characters are actually pretty stellar ok actually ryota is just a timid guy that sometimes actually gets into an aggressive domtop that fucks atsushi until his mind goes blank and honestly i wish i was in his place i gotta say BUT atsushi is honestly so fucking charming hes super funny makes a damn good partner to the virginal protagonist and since hes the only voiced character of the 2 it actually brings the hunk even more to life with all its charm and personality
that segues to one of the reason why this game is rated so high the voice acting in this game is honestly the BEST ive ever listened to in all the VAed porn games ive played not only during the porn scenes which was honestly also a reason why this game actually made me cum in like 1 minute and a half but as i said it adds a lot to the character as a whole and i genuinely ended up enjoying atsushi a lot here sure i could not get enough of him gasping for air moaning in my ears and begging for dick but thats another story
its a shame that ryota isnt voice acted because it wouldve actually the interactions and sex scenes 100% better but just the inclusion of atsushi in here made it pretty clear this was gonna be such an incredible experience what the actual fuck
while i definitely think this is honestly the big part of the game and the sexual situations are super hot im still a bit sad that the actual localization is honestly shit it looks like some AI made translations that actually doesnt know how figures of speech works and somehow create some of the funniest scripts ive ever seen in a while honestly i beg of you to actually play this game just for the translation if youre not interested in gay sex its a fucking blast so whatever even though its super unprofessional and clearly didnt have any proof tester its just a weird feeling to be horny and reading these funny ass exchanges like do you want me to masturbate or laugh my ass off be real
all this actually culminates in the finest part of the game which is the art direction i swear to fucking god these CGs are so high quality at some point i was actually wondering how do people even manage to draw something like this like (as someone who draws this is pretty frustrating dont @ me) but as much as i love this art style maybe they couldve actually made those dicks a little smaller like i do understand the charm of big dicks in porn media but that thing is a tree log what the actual fuck UGHHHHH i dont ,,, unhhhhhhh wow
no actually i was rethinking my statement from before theres some honestly some incredibly funny pieces of dialogue please never make a professional script ever i love it like this
so all in all for a game that actually plays like a visual novel (and rightfully so because you actually will need to play this with only one end mind you oh also the UI is pretty janky to what does a man need to actually have an orgams this is so sad) i enjoyed it too damn much and when i say this i mean that my dick really enjoyed this all throughout theres some goofy stuff theres some sexy stuff theres a lot and a lot and a lot of sex and this actually makes for a damn good game maybe this is not the most rightful 4 stars ive ever given to a game but it sure as hell was religiously consumed by me just because of my creampie kink and humiliation kink and a lot more kinks more on that on my BDSM test
i genuinely never came so much for a game i literally would boot the same scenes over and over again until i actually had to make an effort to get to the next scene because THATS how fucking good these scenes are and if youre the target demographic of the game (gay sad and alone) this is definitely a must read and can actually give you a lot of play time if you know what i mean just skip the parts where atsushi stars infodumping a lot of sociocultural stuff nobody needs to see the culture we only need the dirty sex
yet again making a fool of myself on this site as always
ALERT THIS IS A GAY PORN GAME ! which means I will be talking about my private time experiences with the material and the licentious content of this game that might hurt your over religious conservative puritan homophobic beliefs or maybe you just dont want to read about what turns me on and I don't fucking care you've been advised
so now youre probably gonna wonder why this fucking game got a 4 stars when it is basically just glorified porn CGs made into a game but when i tell you this is some of the best fapping material ive ever found till today
usually i rate games considering staff like general quality art direction how much i enjoyed it and lemme tell you i did fucking enjoy this one to hell and back
lets address the story at first because this is genuinely the most stupid trope ive ever seen in a while but still the most erotic one too so im not gonna complain about it basically the main character is a (virgin) high schooler who is trying to get to college but he sucks so bad at studying that his parents decide to hire a personal tutor to help him prepare for the exams so at one point this tutor comes home and hes a hunk horny beefy muscular guy with the sex drive of a bull and a lot of innuendos in his arsenal
i guess the general idea is that ryota should study some months trying to study for these entrance exams but it happens that for a series of events atsushi ends up sucking ryotas dick and from that points onward these two will be spending a lot of time doing sex sex sex sex sex sex
while i definitely dont think this is the most incredible story in a porn game its also to be said that i didnt expect to find a new shakespeare in the making i was literally here to beat my junk whenever i felt like it so honestly the overall storybeats were just a good excuse that segues into a sex scene so whatever truth be told this trope of the big beefy coach fucking you is kind of a dream of mine so lets get it the thing is that the coach actually takes it up his ass so thats what happens sometimes in real life
during the backdrop of this incredible incipit theres gonna be a lot of weird fucking in here like doing some outdoor illegal trivelling doing it in the forests of the beach from the top from the bottom side to side literally this guys would fuck in any position and any place whatsoever
the ending is also commendable to make the character arcs come to an end and actually make a sense of everything that happened so far
gotta say that the characters are actually pretty stellar ok actually ryota is just a timid guy that sometimes actually gets into an aggressive domtop that fucks atsushi until his mind goes blank and honestly i wish i was in his place i gotta say BUT atsushi is honestly so fucking charming hes super funny makes a damn good partner to the virginal protagonist and since hes the only voiced character of the 2 it actually brings the hunk even more to life with all its charm and personality
that segues to one of the reason why this game is rated so high the voice acting in this game is honestly the BEST ive ever listened to in all the VAed porn games ive played not only during the porn scenes which was honestly also a reason why this game actually made me cum in like 1 minute and a half but as i said it adds a lot to the character as a whole and i genuinely ended up enjoying atsushi a lot here sure i could not get enough of him gasping for air moaning in my ears and begging for dick but thats another story
its a shame that ryota isnt voice acted because it wouldve actually the interactions and sex scenes 100% better but just the inclusion of atsushi in here made it pretty clear this was gonna be such an incredible experience what the actual fuck
while i definitely think this is honestly the big part of the game and the sexual situations are super hot im still a bit sad that the actual localization is honestly shit it looks like some AI made translations that actually doesnt know how figures of speech works and somehow create some of the funniest scripts ive ever seen in a while honestly i beg of you to actually play this game just for the translation if youre not interested in gay sex its a fucking blast so whatever even though its super unprofessional and clearly didnt have any proof tester its just a weird feeling to be horny and reading these funny ass exchanges like do you want me to masturbate or laugh my ass off be real
all this actually culminates in the finest part of the game which is the art direction i swear to fucking god these CGs are so high quality at some point i was actually wondering how do people even manage to draw something like this like (as someone who draws this is pretty frustrating dont @ me) but as much as i love this art style maybe they couldve actually made those dicks a little smaller like i do understand the charm of big dicks in porn media but that thing is a tree log what the actual fuck UGHHHHH i dont ,,, unhhhhhhh wow
no actually i was rethinking my statement from before theres some honestly some incredibly funny pieces of dialogue please never make a professional script ever i love it like this
so all in all for a game that actually plays like a visual novel (and rightfully so because you actually will need to play this with only one end mind you oh also the UI is pretty janky to what does a man need to actually have an orgams this is so sad) i enjoyed it too damn much and when i say this i mean that my dick really enjoyed this all throughout theres some goofy stuff theres some sexy stuff theres a lot and a lot and a lot of sex and this actually makes for a damn good game maybe this is not the most rightful 4 stars ive ever given to a game but it sure as hell was religiously consumed by me just because of my creampie kink and humiliation kink and a lot more kinks more on that on my BDSM test
i genuinely never came so much for a game i literally would boot the same scenes over and over again until i actually had to make an effort to get to the next scene because THATS how fucking good these scenes are and if youre the target demographic of the game (gay sad and alone) this is definitely a must read and can actually give you a lot of play time if you know what i mean just skip the parts where atsushi stars infodumping a lot of sociocultural stuff nobody needs to see the culture we only need the dirty sex
yet again making a fool of myself on this site as always
Elden Ring
2022
The ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls.
The top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren - the secret name. This corresponds to the director, who directs the game of your life from conception to death. The secret name is the title of your game. When you died, that's where Ren came in.
The second soul off the sinking ship is Sekem - energy, power, and light. The director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.
Number three is Khu, the guardian angel, depicted as flying away across a full moon. A bird with luminous wings and head of light. The sort of thing you might see on a screen in a video game from your Xbox. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defence - but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go back to heaven for another vessel. The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead.
Number four is Ba, the heart - often treacherous. This is a hawk's body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down like Samson by a perfidious Ba.
Number five is Ka - the double. Most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the Western Sands.
Number six is Khaibit, the shadow memory. Your whole past conditioning from this and other lives.
𓂀
In the autumn of 2011, I got my first ‘real’ job, leaving behind the hell of zero-hour retail and office temp work to become an IT repairman at a big library. Finally, I could provide myself with food, clothing, shelter and, most importantly, video games. I loved problem-solving, working with tools and being on the computer so much already, and now had a professional outlet for all of those things that I enjoyed. It was the best job I’d ever had, but there was one weird snag - the librarians really didn’t like the cleaning and repair staff.
I’m not sure what makes librarians think that alphabetising Anne Rice novels is a more noble profession than networking 500 computers together or replacing tungsten filaments in industrial lighting systems, but nonetheless, they felt justified in keeping the workies out of every kitchen and staff lounge in the building. Mugs, coffee grounds, tea bags, milk, plates and microwaves were all kept in locked cupboards that only “academic” staff could access. Fresh out of retail hell, I just accepted this as a natural law of the universe (of course I was unworthy of a plastic cup for some water!), but in retrospect, it was a little fucked up. My “non-academic” colleagues responded to this in kind by hiding kettles, instant coffee and tin cups in electrical cupboards and storerooms, an essential act of survival misconstrued as spiteful by the microwave-havers. Without anywhere to store fridges in a stock cupboard, there was no milk to be had. Black tea or black coffee were our only options at break-time in the library.
This is how I learned to love black coffee. I had been a white-and-sugars type guy until this point in my personal hot-drink history, treating coffee more as a vehicle for warm milk then an experience in and about itself. Thirsty as hell from running around physically installing Microsoft Excel patches on computers still running Windows 98 in 2011, I had no choice but to forgo my preference for milk and just get used to gulping hot acidic bean water day in, day out when I needed to restore my hit-points. At first I didn’t enjoy it all, but like everything else in life, cultivating patience of habit can allow you to accept and adapt to almost any situation you find yourself in. 11 years later, I now drink nothing but black coffee. I could, probably, somehow - like those wine wankers you see in movies - even tell you the difference between different blends of the hot acid gloop that is burning my insides. Such is my passion for #coffee.
In the autumn of 2011, something else happened. A video game called Dark Souls launched on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, to some degree of fanfare that is still up for debate to this day. Video game historians like to mythologise the rise of the Souls series, and often claim Dark Souls launched to very little acclaim - but from my own historical perspective, I contest this claim. My memory leads me to believe the contrary - that Dark Souls had an exciting buzz about it right out of the gate - for game-fans and game-readers, at least. I was mostly a Halo and Street Fighter IV player at the time, and even I’d felt the urge to buy it on opening week. For some reason... I can’t remember why... That was over a decade ago. An age past. I don’t remember my motivation for every video game I’ve ever bought.
Friends of mine who’d foolishly bought PlayStation 3s to play Metal Gear Solid 4 derisively informed me that Dark Souls was the sequel to Demon’s Souls: their painful memories told mine that Demon’s Souls was a “stupid” and “unfair” game that treated its players with contempt and that I should consider getting Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 instead because this one was gonna have all-new ways for 12-year-olds to militarily abuse me through the internet. I wasn’t the type of person to listen to my friends, though - I preferred to listen to anonymous message board posters and professional video game journalists. With one of my first paycheques as a fully-fledged computer janitor, I purchased a Cafe AeroPress coffee maker and a copy of Dark Souls.
... And I hated it. As my friends had prophesied, Dark Souls was relentlessly unfair. Enemies came back to life and stabbed me in the back; pathways crumbled and sent me tumbling to my doom; evil knights shrugged off my attacks and responded in kind with bigger and badder swords of their own. The infamous curse status - an affliction that permanently halves your health and prevents you from becoming human - was my final straw. I recognised the gauntlet that was being laid before me in the Undead Depths and chose to reject the challenge. I found solace in the darkness of my coffee maker and put the game away forever.
A few months later, while trying to avoid studying for the most important exams of my life, I picked the game up again. I had decided that wading around damp dark sewers as a cursed little half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit was less daunting than preparing for my final exams before my adulthood-proper. I persevered, #coffee in one hand and a Wiki in the other, learning the ins and outs of the game’s mechanics in far greater depth than any of the Relational Database Management Systems textbooks on my study desk. I would rather prepare to die than prepare to pass.
Like many rookie Dark Souls players, parrying was my Everest - though perhaps over-emphasised by the playerbase as an essential skill for completing the game, it was certainly a far more important mechanic back then than that it is today. I spent many hours in the Undead Parish practicing my defence; learning the intricacies and timings of the mechanic and its follow-ups with my undead knight partners until the synapses solidified and I could pull a parry out of my reflexes without much mental effort. It was the key I needed to unlock my progress through the game, and I proudly rode my parrying prowess to the Kiln of the First Flame, linking the fire in ignorance of an unintended side-effect this new reflex had developed in me in the new ages to come.
Years later, I got the chance to play the now-infamous Dark Souls 2 demo at a video game expo and felt compelled to put my parry skills to the test once more. Despite the fact a coked-out Bandai Namco Games employee was offering free t-shirts to anyone who could beat the Mirror Knight in their allotted 15-minute slot, I persevered in the starting area until I could get my timings down once more. After a few whiffs and some off-colour comments from our jaw-clicking host, I finally managed to bat back a shadowy blade. It was at that moment that I discovered that Dark Souls 2 had a brand new feature - the parries smelt and tasted of black coffee. Despite all the gamer sweat and farts and poorly-ventilated electronics in my environment, I could sense coffee inside my brain. Hours of parry practice while sipping black coffee in my bedroom had built a permanent association between parrying and coffee in my mind. A soul memory.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of soul memory, even if you know it by another name (Mikhail Bakhtin calls it the chronotope, for instance). The taste of spaghetti bolognese reminds you of a good day at your friend’s house in 2002. The fresh scent of factory plastic that emanates from a new video game takes you back to the summer holiday when your mum finally bought you Timesplitters 2 despite it being rated a 15+. Perhaps a particularly bad hangover from a night of drinking rum and coke has forever ruined the taste of Pepsi for you. Petrol makes you think about the forest, for some reason you don’t remember. And so on. You’ve all seen Ratatouille, I guess. I don’t need to labour at this point.
Soul memory is the currency of the sequel and the franchise, and in our current era, soul memory is undergoing hyperinflation - Star Wars: The Force Awakens; Spider-Man: No Way Home; Ghostbusters: Afterlife - filmmakers are eagerly trying to collect soul memories so they can take them to the bureau de change and cash out in dollars. You might baulk at this suggestion that the scent of your grandmother’s baked potatoes can be commodified, but I think there’s ample evidence to suggest that no link in your mind is safe from capital’s claws.
Video games are perhaps the most egregious traders of soul memory. Video games, even the best ones, are standing tall on the shoulders upon shoulders of prior moments in space-time - real and imagined - all the way back down to Donkey Kong. Re-releases and remakes and remasters and retro collections are nostalgia-primers for experiences you might not even have been alive for - we all love Pac-Man, even though we may not have met him in an 80s arcade hall; you and I replicated those experiences instead with a movie) or a PlayStation 3 Arcade Archive or a Pac-Man music video on MTV; phenomena best exemplified by the teenagers I saw on Twitter who are collecting Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles promotional Happy Meal toys from 1993 to bring their souls closer to their blue-haired messiah. By letting you collect and play your figurative Rainbow Roads again and again and again in generation after generation after generation of product, video games explore the loss of a childhood place, and our attempts to recreate it.
And so what if the place that we are in the midst of is different from the physical space that we currently inhabit? What if the things we yearn for are located elsewhere, in another place or a falsely-remembered past, and all we now carry within us is an image of this place. We may remember only elements or impressions of it: there may be certain objects, sounds, a level, a character, special moves, cutscenes, or online battles; all of which come out in a manner that we cannot control or understand. Yet any of these elements or impressions make us feel at home in a way that we cannot find in the physical space where we are now stuck. Being displaced and yet capable of remembering the particularity of place: it is the state of being dislocated yet able to discern what it is that locates us. We have a great yearning, but we often cannot fulfil it with anything but memories from our soul.
In my review of Halo Infinite at the end of last year, I suggested the possibility that game developers are attempting to harness soul memory in new and exciting ways, the limits between your imagination and theirs almost fully removed in this gilded age of RTX and NGX and Speed Tree and shader-caching and other computer stuff I don’t understand; the world expanding ever-wider as we slot in more and more chips, spreading the channels between CPU and memory (both silicon and cerebellum) ever-wider. The end-state, no doubt, is a game that never ends, expanding outwards like our universe, all contained in the heart of an eternally-burning electric star on the platter of your hard drive. But how do you fuel a world-game of such approaching-infinite size? With the dependable financial and artistic mainstays of gaming, of course - the memory of/reverie in/nostalgia for/ known experiences, known systems, known self. Which makes Halo - a DirectX-based comfort food of the 18-35 crowd - an ideal candidate for colonisation via constant computer creation.
With Halo Infinite, it’s hard to gauge the intentionality of the author (and the multi-billion dollar corporation employing the author). By all accounts, Infinite was a scrap-piece, a million shattered pieces of contractor work and discarded concepts fused into a Holiday Product - something that, at least initially, presents itself as a never-ending ring-world: Zeta Halo could not be more apt as a setting for the beyond-open world template that’s come into vogue this generation (see also: Microsoft’s other tentpole, Forza Horizon). But was this product forged with any purpose greater than a shareholder deadline, a gilded-gold ring that can’t sustain itself beyond a financial quarter (never mind an eternal age!)? Fields upon fields of the same retrofuturistic alien base and knowing remarks about crunch and copy-pasted environments from your maiden,Cortana Weapon, imply that Halo Infinite was an illusion produced by profit - a defective ring-world, nothing more; but there are, at the very least, implications that game developers know what they create. In this new Halo instalment, Master Chief, regretting his transition out of cryostasis, is the only character in the game who opposes the rebuilding of the Halo installations. Too bad, John - you’re going for another last-minute warthog ride to the sounds of early-2000s progressive hard rock.
Does Halo Infinite sound familiar? Well, you might have played Dark Souls 3 and its downloadable follow-up: The Ringed City. Hidetaka Miyazaki's Souls series homecoming may have been hailed as a "return to form" for the franchise after the polarising reception to Dark Souls 2, but this oft-quoted games-journalist soundbite has a double-edge to it - namely, that it quite literally returned Dark Souls to its original form, repurposing locations, bosses, and emotional beats from the games that came before it. Lothric isn't a million lightyears away from Zeta Halo - it forges a similarly flimsy ring of questionable geography and architecture, a Dark Souls Disneyland built from item and character references that no longer mean anything beyond commercialised self-sabotage, names and item descriptions appearing only for the purposes of cynical, cyclical continuity with its predecessors. The game knew what it was creating with itself in its Bandai-Namco-hued orange-yellow wasteland - an idea perhaps best exemplified in the Abyss Watchers, a gang of frenzied Artorias fanboys from the Firelink Shrine who serve no literary purpose beyond infighting among themselves about the ways Artorias of the Abyss was like, really, really cool. (For some reason, I am now recalling the fact my PlayStation 4 copy of Dark Souls 3 came with a mail-order slip for a £344.99 statue of Artorias from the Bandai-Namco Official European Store...) These references without continuity, these connections without purpose... all they do is ring a Pavlovian spirit bell of soul memory in your brain for a fleeting moment. Nothing more. And Dark Souls 3 didn't just know this - it made it a central tenet of its thematics, even building its last-ever DLC around the concept of painting a forever-world made of the Dark Soul itself. Known experiences, known systems, known self, known forever. Consuming the Gods without question, like Gael, until the coming Age of Dark.
[[LAUNCH DEADLINE REACHED - BACKLOGGD SHAREHOLDERS ARE DEMANDING A Q2 LAUNCH OF THIS REVIEW ]]
// TODO: placeholder for another 9 paragraphs discussing the cyclical ages of fire depicted in the Dark Souls trilogy here and how the idea can be metatextually applied to the development cycles of each Souls game and their growing commercial impact vs. receding artistic impact. This part will be included in a post-launch patch to this review at an undetermined date. Hopefully never.
In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths are the truths of the “Noble Ones”: those who are deemed “spiritually worthy". These truths are:
- Dukkha (suffering, incapable of satisfying, painful) is an innate characteristic of existence in the realm of samsara, the world-cycle of death and rebirth we all live through. Existence is pain, to some degree.
- Samudaya (origin, arising, combination; 'cause'): together with dukkha arises taṇhā ("craving, desire or attachment, lit. "thirst”). While tanha is traditionally interpreted in western languages as the 'cause' of dukkha, tanha can also be seen as the factor tying us to dukkha, or as a response to dukkha, trying to escape it; a suffering often understood to be a combination of a consumptive desire for fleeting things, destructive hatefulness, and ignorance of the world as it truly is.
- Nirodha (cessation, ending, confinement) dukkha can be ended or contained by the renouncement or letting go of this taṇhā; the confinement of tanha releases the excessive bind of dukkha; the end of suffering. We are finite flawed creatures with only two ways out: either cyclical death, or transcendence through enlightenment.
- Magga (the path, the Noble Eightfold Path) is the path leading to the confinement of tanha and dukkha. The next path in the teachings; Buddhism’s sequel, post-launch DLC or content update.
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Elden Ring is an action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. The game was directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki and made in collaboration with fantasy novelist George R. R. Martin, who provided material for the game's setting. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on February 25, 2022.
Elden Ring is presented through a third-person perspective, with players freely roaming its interactive open world. Gameplay elements include combat featuring several types of weapons and magic spells, horseback riding, summons, and crafting. Elden Ring received critical acclaim, with praise for its open-world gameplay, fantasy setting, and evolution of the Souls formula. The game sold 12 million copies within three weeks of its release.
Elden Ring is From Software's first game of a new decade that follows an Age of Dark.
The exciting thing about a long voyage like Elden Ring is that it can inhabit so many spaces and times within your life, entwining its soul memories with your own in so many more ways than just an association between coffee and parrying. Due to its epic scale, brutal difficulty and my desire to travel through it as un-aided as possible, it took me four months to beat the game. Looking back from the now, the distance from February until May feels, as it often does in modern times, like a lifetime and a moment. Nothing and everything happened within the standard cycles of my life. I got up and went to work every day, playing through Elden Ring in spare moments and evenings. A war broke out while I was playing Elden Ring. I finished all six seasons of The Sopranos and four seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the time period I existed within while attempting to beat Elden Ring for the first time, and I noted that Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleed for the PlayStation 2 plays surprisingly similarly to Elden Ring. I went abroad for the first time in over two years, often thinking about Elden Ring while looking at the cathedrals and sweeping vistas of Barcelona. I saw a bunch of my friends in person for the first time in years while playing Elden Ring, and we discussed what builds were cool and which characters were cool. When I started Elden Ring, social distancing and facemasks were still mandatory in many places; when I finished Elden Ring, they were not.
So how do these new memories of mine intermingle with those presented in Elden Ring? Does Hoarfrost Stomp taste like marzipan? Is the Altus Plateau a portal to the golden fields of childhood freedom? Have I come to understand Godfrey as a Tony Soprano-like patriarchal figure in relation to Godrick's AJ? Perhaps nothing as crass or immediately interdependent as that. Has playing Elden Ring while existing in 2022 caused me to draw personal and societal parallels between my different lives? I'm tempted to say yes. I'm tempted to take apart Elden Ring's Elden Ring piece-by-piece and point at its golden roots and talk about the scarlet rot and the human ashes that drown the golden skyscrapers of Leyendell and all the ways in which this tale of souls and swords can be applied to someone who travels in the world of our present. But I'd be here even longer than I already am, hanging onto the dying embers of a rambling essay that has gone on too long. In a sense, choosing what aspect of Elden Ring to unpack and explore is exactly how the game makes you feel when you're contemplating which path to take at a crossroads in the Lands Between - whether to explore a cave, a castle, a peninsula, a continent, a realm, a galaxy, an age, a concept of the afterlife turned into a video game level. Naturally, you have to let go of possibility and walk down a single path in order to move forward.
This painful push and pull between potential possibility and your (perhaps pre-determined) path is what makes Elden Ring so compelling. Of course games like Breath of the Wild have already explored this concept of 'go-anywhere', but not in an artistic sense that exists beyond the controller and the things that are happening literally on the screen. In Breath of the Wild, going up a hill will get you into a fight with a bird and you will do a puzzle and you will get a cool sword and you will have a lot of fun - but experiences begin to entwine and overlap, memories becoming overwritten and jumbled in endless plains of rolling green and goblin. Memories require delineation if they are to be stored within containers of consciousness, and in Elden Ring, going up a hill can turn into a 20-hour odyssey through the ashes of time to explore an all-out conquest that was once fought over the very nature of Godhood, where you will meet and contemplate primordial, psychological and philosophical concepts in the form of a dude with a wolf head who reads Berserk. Or maybe you will explore the entirety of a lost kingdom on the edge of the afterlife's cosmos and wonder why it exists or even existed at all, all while the ghost of a forgotten world-serpent caves your skull in. And you will get a cool sword and you will have a lot of fun and those unique, memorable moments will bond with a greater space and time in your head.
Exploration of space beyond the time is a fundamental element of Elden Ring and the Elden Ring. From Software understand that space-time extends with video games, through video games, in video games - that old cliche of a gamer living a thousand lives. In much the same way that it can be confusing to refer to Elden Ring as both a video game product and a concept within the world of Elden Ring itself (it is amusing to note how difficult it is to get the wiki page for the Elden Ring on the Elden Ring Wiki), so too can it be confusing to separate memory and space-time as they exist within and outwith ourselves, our Golden Orders of subjective fact and fiction; moments and how we place ourselves inside them, the near-infinite subjectivity of experience that so often causes people to argue with each other over matters that are ultimately our inner order of perception and recollection. Was Radahn right? Was Malenia right? Sound off in the comments below.
For a long time, one of my most-visited YouTube videos was this performance of Dragon Quest V’s music by the NHK Symphony Orchestra. The music is a fantastic soundtrack to a comments section full of positive nostalgia in a foreign language. Google Translate doesn’t get the full meaning across, but you can feel all that’s being said despite the barriers between people on opposite sides of the internet's round table. This is the comment that always stands out to me when I scroll down:
“This was a game of my dad’s era, but it makes me nostalgic for that time all the same.”
I only beat Dragon Quest V in 2019, but I feel this same nostalgia, these same memories, this same realisation of a video game world as a portal through soul memory. I beat the iOS port of the DS port of the original Super Famicom version while sitting on the toilet at work, but my shared DQV reality with that kid, and his father before him, who played the game on different hardware in a different space in a different time, allows me to understand them. We saved the world and that adventure will stay with us all for a lifetime. Bur this feeling isn't anything unique - throw a dart at the board of YouTube's video game soundtracks and you'll find this phenomenon replicated for pretty much every video game ever made. Queen Rennala stands in a Grand Library and offers you endless rebirth.
The beauty of Elden Ring's length, scale and scope is that it's also capable of playing with this concept of chronotope from within. Whereas Dark Souls 3 relied on imagery and ideology from previous entries to invoke soul memory with (intentionally) cheap referentiality, Elden Ring instead chooses to loop over itself many times over in order to play new games with your mind. There are many ways in which the game achieves this, and if you've ever griped about "reused content", you probably know the kind of thing I mean - fortresses reappearing in different states of decay and ruin; enemies returning again and again as if pursuing you through the Lands Between; the souls of wolves and trees and tree-avatars haunt the earth; the same dungeons and dragons in different locations, sometimes appearing as battlefields of the present, sometimes appearing as sites of historical importance - Great War memorials on a school field trip. The game even deigns to reference the wider From Software cosmology (I am using every word in my vocabulary to avoid typing the term "Soulsborne"), but interestingly chooses to place a lot of these capricious callbacks in dank, dirty, decaying swamps - they are deemed to be hollow, undead references. In a sense, it's a game so vast that it's able to create nostalgia for itself.
For me, the most interesting way the game exemplifies soul memory is in its boss battles. In our realm, the bosses of Elden Ring are something of a contentious topic - out of some 150+ battles that put grand old names above life-bars, only five in the whole game are wholly unique. "How could the developers be so lazy as to do this?!" is the rallying cry of the passionate masses who are seemingly unwilling to afford From Software any artistic agency or intentionality of design. In a series/franchise/whateverthisis like the Souls games, isn't the whole point that you're prepared to die, over and over again, in the same battles, just like the demigods that you seek to surpass? You're in battle against spiritual and physical elements of the universe itself! The Fallingstar Beast appears twice in the game, but you didn't fight him twice, did you? I'm willing to wager you fought him five times, ten times, twenty times, maybe many times more. Why delineate by encounters in space when you can just as easily use time? Was each death and rebirth just "reused content", or was it an intentional part of an experience that the game's developers wanted you to live through? The game's named after a big old circle, for crying out loud!
This isn't an attempt by me to reframe the reuse of content as a purely artistic choice - of course it was done to gild the game's vast size and ensure every crevice of the world map had some experience of some form for the player, but practical compromises made within the constraints of development can be moulded, with appropriate care, into art. We can challenge From's tendency to rework frameworks, but aren't they trapped in their own never-ending cycle by capital, working to the drumbeat of 100 million sales? You may rankle when yet another boss pulls off the iconic Scarlet Aeonia (itself a reference/homage/repetition of a Magic the Gathering card ), but it's all in aid of your personal character development and the development of the game's characters and their relationships in the Lands Between. While I certainly wouldn't call any of my many, many, many battles with Malenia and her acolytes art in and of themselves, my memories of these multi-faceted repetitions tie back to an essential theme of the Souls series - overcoming the greatest boss of all: yourself.
It would be trite of me to spend a ton of time telling everyone about a universal human experience and how it applies to a series of video games that have sold enough copies to make them almost universal gamer experiences, so instead I'll just share a soul memory of Elden Ring that I think embodies this value of repetition and self-mastery. The Subterranean Shunning-Grounds (the names in this game rock lol) is essentially the final dungeon of the game, a terrible theme park of sewer content that long-time fans of these games will immediately recognise - pipes, poison, basilisks, curses, rats, little fucked up gargoyle dudes. It's essentially all the most annoying things about playing a Souls game in a single package, ramped up to 11 by twisted virtue of the fact this is the final area in a 100-hour game that stands at the end of a path of six other 100-hour games with similarly wicked ideas. 11 years after giving up on Dark Souls, I was once again a half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit. Indeed, it is a punishingly difficult experience to be a half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit - even with a high-defense build, certain enemies can take you out in a hit or two. And if they aren't capable of taking you out in a hit or two, they have almost certainly been carefully positioned next to a giant pit that can take you out in a single hit. It's an infuriating area, yet entirely optional. You don't have to do it to yourself, but at this point, it just feels right that you should pursue whatever nebulous reward that the Shunning-Grounds harbour. And what is the final test at the end of this dungeon? A dragon? An army of the undead? Another cosmic deity? No! It's a jumping puzzle in a tomb of skeletons and corpses piled to the ceiling - an incredibly tricky test of wits that combines your physical dexterity with an eye for problem-solving. It took me dozens of tries to master, and memories of the hallways leading from the bonfire to the puzzle chamber have now been seared into my mind. A video game challenge that made me scream out in pain for the first time in years... Fuck that bullshit!!! And at the end of it all, what is your reward for completing this task? No runes or swords or armor. Just a spell called Inescapable Frenzy, an incantation that sends the minds of humans towards madness. Let it never be said that From Software do not have a sense of humour! No wonder some players choose to enter into a covenant with Chaos a few moments later...
"try jumping" is a message you see a lot in Elden Ring. One of the oldest pranks in the Souls fan playbook, it's a nasty little trick that encourages the freshly chosen undead to leap from high places with promise of some unknowable reward. Inevitably, it always leads to one thing - a painful, costly death. Why do players take the time to encourage people they'll never meet to commit suicide, and why do so many people mark these messages as helpful to others? Probably for the same unknowable reason that people tell each other to kill themselves via other mediums of the internet. Ugly as "try jumping" may be, it has always fit comfortably with the artistic notions of Dark Souls as an analog for the neverending battle against depression and misery, the difficulty that comes with suppressing one's urge to die, to give up, to leave it all behind. One of Elden Ring's first concessions to new players is to finally explain this meta-mechanic - if you fall for the very first "try jumping" message that the game places before you, you end up in a tutorial area. Hopefully you won't make the same mistake twice now. From Software know that the Internet-at-large is one of the most lethal enemies their games have to offer, and I fought against that wicked foe by making a point of putting down some "no jumping ahead" messages while on my journey.
The online component of these games has always existed, but has never really been explicitly acknowledged within the game-world beyond a few experimental instances like The Ringed City's Spear of the Church. As the ostensible herald of a new age Elden Ring takes the first steps toward acknowledging ours, supplementing a mechanism with a metaphor. To avoid beating around the bush - I think the Roundtable Hold is the Internet. A realm inaccessible by horse nor foot, where the people of the world meet up to sell shit, trade stories, gossip and fuck around, all under an oath of no physical contact. Per Varre's comment, the Roundtable is "a place for has-beens trying to look important but unable or unwilling to actually take any action". Sound familiar? There is a place in Leyndell Royal Capital that looks exactly like the Roundtable Hold, but no one is there - the Hold is, in effect, a virtual, imagined space; a simulation in parallel existence to reality. It's a trick that From has pulled before, but characters and their occupation of parallel space-times with differing persona spells out that this is, in some classic weird-ass cosmic FromSoft way, a digiverse within a digiverse.
Ensha, Dung Eater and D are the most vivid exemplars of this idea. Three masked edge, lords who spend their time in the Roundtable acting aloof and cool and above it all; their corporeal forms lashing out with hatred against women in the meatspace of the Lands Between, giving away their Inner Order to pursue violence against Malenia, Fia and - in the Loathsome Dung Eater's case - every woman and child in the known universe. (See also: Gideon/Seluvis and their relationship to the class-conscious Nepheli Loux: Gideon as a gatekeeper who encourages you to overcome your Maidenless status and venerate yourself in the eyes of the Roundtable's men ("the road of champions"); Seluvis as a PUA who tries to involve you in a date-rape scheme.) In the case of D, the game implies the existence of a "twin brother" - an alternate persona - who behaves differently depending on the space-time he inhabits. We see him in reality, unreality and Nokron's post-reality afterlife, behaving more aggressively in each plane until he loses bravado when faced with with the bare-faced truth of inescapable Death itself. The player has the option of giving him back his mask and suit of armour, which ultimately leads to a violent death for "that bitch" Fia, a woman who recognises men possessing a warmth that has nowhere to go. In the case of the Dung Eater, whose mortal form is trapped within the aforementioned ur-Souls palace of the Shunning-Grounds, the connection to our ugly internet personalities is a little more explicit, a seeming admission by From Software of all the ugliness that arises from building one's personality around a nexus of digital souls and swords. If From are shackled on some level to this medium of expression, the least they have done here is develop some self-awareness and critique. At the game's climax, the Roundtable burns out, telling us more or less everything we need to know about the developer's feelings on the Web Between Worlds that we inhabit and the paths we choose to walk in each realm of spirit. Will this Roundtable fall to the mortal ashes of Leydendell too, or is there potential for All to achieve Magga, the enlightened transcendence of Buddhist teaching?
The natural follow-on from this topic is an exploration of the golden Grace, the "maidenless" concept and its real-world implications, but I feel the paragraph above demonstrates why it's unwise to provoke red phantoms in the hold through discussion of certain topics and experiences. Elden Ring is a game where not every path should be taken, and, as I already said like three times before (lol), the same holds true of a review; I'm not sure I have the experience or incantations necessary to step into that toxic swamp, lest I provoke an invasion. Instead, I choose to focus on the light that casts this darkness: Friendship. The golden light of the summon sign is the natural enemy of the blood-red invader, and Elden Ring makes this relationship more explicit than its predecessors by mandating that human invaders can only go after parties of two or more players - the eternal war between the "git gud" and the "git help" is now more aggressive than ever before. By changing the mechanics of the franchise's online component, From Software have peppered their latest instalment with challenges to the sensibilities of try-hard players that remind me most of Sakurai's implementation of the anti-competitive tripping mechanic in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While I think the omnipotent anger and cultural overpowerment of the "git gud" crowd is perhaps overstated by the fans at large, it's an unfortunate signifier of their ever-presence that after seven of these games I still get second thoughts about asking for help when I need it.
The kindness of strangers is an enduring motif of Elden Ring, a natural tonic to the toxic anger that permeates every environment you journey across. Melina, the thematic emodiment of this kindness, turns your experience and soul memory into strength, a companion who appears to those at risk of stoking personal flames of frenzy as a guide who leads you towards the Erdtree and the Elden Ring. I don't think it's a coincidence that the game gets inordinately tougher to handle by yourself in the wake of her ultimate sacrifice; investments in endgame Rune Levels feel less substantial, less meaningful, than those conversions of experience made while travelling with Melina at RL100 and below. (The Ranni questline, with its literal idolation of a young girl as a peculiar doll the player can contemplate in silence by the fire, dovetails nicely with Melina's death and serves as an interesting pair of endgame decisions the player can take, further compounded by the Roundtable stuff discussed above) The final stretch of the game demands, almost explicitly, that the player look beyond themselves and extend a hand of need to those around them in much the same way one should following a deeply personal loss.
If you did not touch a summon sign or ring a spirit bell or read a fan-wiki after Leyendell, know that I know you are a liar and a punk and you will be judged far more harshly by my council than the guys who spent six hours outside Maliketh trying to bring in a sorcerer called Pigf#cker or whatever other desperate means they chose to undertake in order to realise their ambitions. Everyone needed help to finish Elden Ring; everyone needed help to stave off the Frenzied Flame that the Elden Ring's Golden Order was trying to stoke from within you on your personal path to enlightenment. Fought the Godskin Duo by yourself, did you bro? Well, the Godskin Apostle didn't. He brought in someone to help him. Are you really that stupid? The legend of Let Me Solo Her didn't develop from the tremendous feat of beating Malenia solo - was this noble pothead the first person to ever beat her by himself? Of course not. The legend developed as a veneration of kindness, a manifestation of will and memory and dreams of ambitions, a symbol of those Tarnished who offer their help to those who need it most: Let Me Solo Her is our idealised savior, a breakup bro for the maidenless, a hero who will help you fight your hardest battles and overcome your most painful soul memories. Stay isolated and lost in your past, or find your friends on the path and start living your life.
Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.
Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really.
How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that.
How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty.
And yet it all seems limitless.
So what of soul memory, the idea I spent so long talking about at the start of this review? Well, that's another thing that's beautiful about Elden Ring - I'm not done playing it yet. Much in the same way I wasn't done playing Dark Souls after I'd put down the pad, Elden Ring has manifested itself in my everyday life and my relationships with the souls and space-time and coffee granules around me. It's difficult to write a conclusive conclusion for an Elden Ring review because it doesn't feel like the game is over yet. I fought the Elden Beast, I saw an ending, I saw the credits, but evidently I can't stop thinking about the game and the ideas and memories and experience it imbued me with. I'm walking on an invisible path in a consecrated snowfield of boundless white, trying to find my noble truth and inner order and greater will by constantly making sense of everything I've seen, heard and felt through, with and in my lives lived, tilting at windmills in the gardens of madness within this life and beyond. You are too. Let's face it together.
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The seventh soul is Sekhu. The remains.
The top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren - the secret name. This corresponds to the director, who directs the game of your life from conception to death. The secret name is the title of your game. When you died, that's where Ren came in.
The second soul off the sinking ship is Sekem - energy, power, and light. The director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.
Number three is Khu, the guardian angel, depicted as flying away across a full moon. A bird with luminous wings and head of light. The sort of thing you might see on a screen in a video game from your Xbox. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defence - but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go back to heaven for another vessel. The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead.
Number four is Ba, the heart - often treacherous. This is a hawk's body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down like Samson by a perfidious Ba.
Number five is Ka - the double. Most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the Western Sands.
Number six is Khaibit, the shadow memory. Your whole past conditioning from this and other lives.
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In the autumn of 2011, I got my first ‘real’ job, leaving behind the hell of zero-hour retail and office temp work to become an IT repairman at a big library. Finally, I could provide myself with food, clothing, shelter and, most importantly, video games. I loved problem-solving, working with tools and being on the computer so much already, and now had a professional outlet for all of those things that I enjoyed. It was the best job I’d ever had, but there was one weird snag - the librarians really didn’t like the cleaning and repair staff.
I’m not sure what makes librarians think that alphabetising Anne Rice novels is a more noble profession than networking 500 computers together or replacing tungsten filaments in industrial lighting systems, but nonetheless, they felt justified in keeping the workies out of every kitchen and staff lounge in the building. Mugs, coffee grounds, tea bags, milk, plates and microwaves were all kept in locked cupboards that only “academic” staff could access. Fresh out of retail hell, I just accepted this as a natural law of the universe (of course I was unworthy of a plastic cup for some water!), but in retrospect, it was a little fucked up. My “non-academic” colleagues responded to this in kind by hiding kettles, instant coffee and tin cups in electrical cupboards and storerooms, an essential act of survival misconstrued as spiteful by the microwave-havers. Without anywhere to store fridges in a stock cupboard, there was no milk to be had. Black tea or black coffee were our only options at break-time in the library.
This is how I learned to love black coffee. I had been a white-and-sugars type guy until this point in my personal hot-drink history, treating coffee more as a vehicle for warm milk then an experience in and about itself. Thirsty as hell from running around physically installing Microsoft Excel patches on computers still running Windows 98 in 2011, I had no choice but to forgo my preference for milk and just get used to gulping hot acidic bean water day in, day out when I needed to restore my hit-points. At first I didn’t enjoy it all, but like everything else in life, cultivating patience of habit can allow you to accept and adapt to almost any situation you find yourself in. 11 years later, I now drink nothing but black coffee. I could, probably, somehow - like those wine wankers you see in movies - even tell you the difference between different blends of the hot acid gloop that is burning my insides. Such is my passion for #coffee.
In the autumn of 2011, something else happened. A video game called Dark Souls launched on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, to some degree of fanfare that is still up for debate to this day. Video game historians like to mythologise the rise of the Souls series, and often claim Dark Souls launched to very little acclaim - but from my own historical perspective, I contest this claim. My memory leads me to believe the contrary - that Dark Souls had an exciting buzz about it right out of the gate - for game-fans and game-readers, at least. I was mostly a Halo and Street Fighter IV player at the time, and even I’d felt the urge to buy it on opening week. For some reason... I can’t remember why... That was over a decade ago. An age past. I don’t remember my motivation for every video game I’ve ever bought.
Friends of mine who’d foolishly bought PlayStation 3s to play Metal Gear Solid 4 derisively informed me that Dark Souls was the sequel to Demon’s Souls: their painful memories told mine that Demon’s Souls was a “stupid” and “unfair” game that treated its players with contempt and that I should consider getting Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 instead because this one was gonna have all-new ways for 12-year-olds to militarily abuse me through the internet. I wasn’t the type of person to listen to my friends, though - I preferred to listen to anonymous message board posters and professional video game journalists. With one of my first paycheques as a fully-fledged computer janitor, I purchased a Cafe AeroPress coffee maker and a copy of Dark Souls.
... And I hated it. As my friends had prophesied, Dark Souls was relentlessly unfair. Enemies came back to life and stabbed me in the back; pathways crumbled and sent me tumbling to my doom; evil knights shrugged off my attacks and responded in kind with bigger and badder swords of their own. The infamous curse status - an affliction that permanently halves your health and prevents you from becoming human - was my final straw. I recognised the gauntlet that was being laid before me in the Undead Depths and chose to reject the challenge. I found solace in the darkness of my coffee maker and put the game away forever.
A few months later, while trying to avoid studying for the most important exams of my life, I picked the game up again. I had decided that wading around damp dark sewers as a cursed little half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit was less daunting than preparing for my final exams before my adulthood-proper. I persevered, #coffee in one hand and a Wiki in the other, learning the ins and outs of the game’s mechanics in far greater depth than any of the Relational Database Management Systems textbooks on my study desk. I would rather prepare to die than prepare to pass.
Like many rookie Dark Souls players, parrying was my Everest - though perhaps over-emphasised by the playerbase as an essential skill for completing the game, it was certainly a far more important mechanic back then than that it is today. I spent many hours in the Undead Parish practicing my defence; learning the intricacies and timings of the mechanic and its follow-ups with my undead knight partners until the synapses solidified and I could pull a parry out of my reflexes without much mental effort. It was the key I needed to unlock my progress through the game, and I proudly rode my parrying prowess to the Kiln of the First Flame, linking the fire in ignorance of an unintended side-effect this new reflex had developed in me in the new ages to come.
Years later, I got the chance to play the now-infamous Dark Souls 2 demo at a video game expo and felt compelled to put my parry skills to the test once more. Despite the fact a coked-out Bandai Namco Games employee was offering free t-shirts to anyone who could beat the Mirror Knight in their allotted 15-minute slot, I persevered in the starting area until I could get my timings down once more. After a few whiffs and some off-colour comments from our jaw-clicking host, I finally managed to bat back a shadowy blade. It was at that moment that I discovered that Dark Souls 2 had a brand new feature - the parries smelt and tasted of black coffee. Despite all the gamer sweat and farts and poorly-ventilated electronics in my environment, I could sense coffee inside my brain. Hours of parry practice while sipping black coffee in my bedroom had built a permanent association between parrying and coffee in my mind. A soul memory.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of soul memory, even if you know it by another name (Mikhail Bakhtin calls it the chronotope, for instance). The taste of spaghetti bolognese reminds you of a good day at your friend’s house in 2002. The fresh scent of factory plastic that emanates from a new video game takes you back to the summer holiday when your mum finally bought you Timesplitters 2 despite it being rated a 15+. Perhaps a particularly bad hangover from a night of drinking rum and coke has forever ruined the taste of Pepsi for you. Petrol makes you think about the forest, for some reason you don’t remember. And so on. You’ve all seen Ratatouille, I guess. I don’t need to labour at this point.
Soul memory is the currency of the sequel and the franchise, and in our current era, soul memory is undergoing hyperinflation - Star Wars: The Force Awakens; Spider-Man: No Way Home; Ghostbusters: Afterlife - filmmakers are eagerly trying to collect soul memories so they can take them to the bureau de change and cash out in dollars. You might baulk at this suggestion that the scent of your grandmother’s baked potatoes can be commodified, but I think there’s ample evidence to suggest that no link in your mind is safe from capital’s claws.
Video games are perhaps the most egregious traders of soul memory. Video games, even the best ones, are standing tall on the shoulders upon shoulders of prior moments in space-time - real and imagined - all the way back down to Donkey Kong. Re-releases and remakes and remasters and retro collections are nostalgia-primers for experiences you might not even have been alive for - we all love Pac-Man, even though we may not have met him in an 80s arcade hall; you and I replicated those experiences instead with a movie) or a PlayStation 3 Arcade Archive or a Pac-Man music video on MTV; phenomena best exemplified by the teenagers I saw on Twitter who are collecting Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles promotional Happy Meal toys from 1993 to bring their souls closer to their blue-haired messiah. By letting you collect and play your figurative Rainbow Roads again and again and again in generation after generation after generation of product, video games explore the loss of a childhood place, and our attempts to recreate it.
And so what if the place that we are in the midst of is different from the physical space that we currently inhabit? What if the things we yearn for are located elsewhere, in another place or a falsely-remembered past, and all we now carry within us is an image of this place. We may remember only elements or impressions of it: there may be certain objects, sounds, a level, a character, special moves, cutscenes, or online battles; all of which come out in a manner that we cannot control or understand. Yet any of these elements or impressions make us feel at home in a way that we cannot find in the physical space where we are now stuck. Being displaced and yet capable of remembering the particularity of place: it is the state of being dislocated yet able to discern what it is that locates us. We have a great yearning, but we often cannot fulfil it with anything but memories from our soul.
In my review of Halo Infinite at the end of last year, I suggested the possibility that game developers are attempting to harness soul memory in new and exciting ways, the limits between your imagination and theirs almost fully removed in this gilded age of RTX and NGX and Speed Tree and shader-caching and other computer stuff I don’t understand; the world expanding ever-wider as we slot in more and more chips, spreading the channels between CPU and memory (both silicon and cerebellum) ever-wider. The end-state, no doubt, is a game that never ends, expanding outwards like our universe, all contained in the heart of an eternally-burning electric star on the platter of your hard drive. But how do you fuel a world-game of such approaching-infinite size? With the dependable financial and artistic mainstays of gaming, of course - the memory of/reverie in/nostalgia for/ known experiences, known systems, known self. Which makes Halo - a DirectX-based comfort food of the 18-35 crowd - an ideal candidate for colonisation via constant computer creation.
With Halo Infinite, it’s hard to gauge the intentionality of the author (and the multi-billion dollar corporation employing the author). By all accounts, Infinite was a scrap-piece, a million shattered pieces of contractor work and discarded concepts fused into a Holiday Product - something that, at least initially, presents itself as a never-ending ring-world: Zeta Halo could not be more apt as a setting for the beyond-open world template that’s come into vogue this generation (see also: Microsoft’s other tentpole, Forza Horizon). But was this product forged with any purpose greater than a shareholder deadline, a gilded-gold ring that can’t sustain itself beyond a financial quarter (never mind an eternal age!)? Fields upon fields of the same retrofuturistic alien base and knowing remarks about crunch and copy-pasted environments from your maiden,
Does Halo Infinite sound familiar? Well, you might have played Dark Souls 3 and its downloadable follow-up: The Ringed City. Hidetaka Miyazaki's Souls series homecoming may have been hailed as a "return to form" for the franchise after the polarising reception to Dark Souls 2, but this oft-quoted games-journalist soundbite has a double-edge to it - namely, that it quite literally returned Dark Souls to its original form, repurposing locations, bosses, and emotional beats from the games that came before it. Lothric isn't a million lightyears away from Zeta Halo - it forges a similarly flimsy ring of questionable geography and architecture, a Dark Souls Disneyland built from item and character references that no longer mean anything beyond commercialised self-sabotage, names and item descriptions appearing only for the purposes of cynical, cyclical continuity with its predecessors. The game knew what it was creating with itself in its Bandai-Namco-hued orange-yellow wasteland - an idea perhaps best exemplified in the Abyss Watchers, a gang of frenzied Artorias fanboys from the Firelink Shrine who serve no literary purpose beyond infighting among themselves about the ways Artorias of the Abyss was like, really, really cool. (For some reason, I am now recalling the fact my PlayStation 4 copy of Dark Souls 3 came with a mail-order slip for a £344.99 statue of Artorias from the Bandai-Namco Official European Store...) These references without continuity, these connections without purpose... all they do is ring a Pavlovian spirit bell of soul memory in your brain for a fleeting moment. Nothing more. And Dark Souls 3 didn't just know this - it made it a central tenet of its thematics, even building its last-ever DLC around the concept of painting a forever-world made of the Dark Soul itself. Known experiences, known systems, known self, known forever. Consuming the Gods without question, like Gael, until the coming Age of Dark.
[[LAUNCH DEADLINE REACHED - BACKLOGGD SHAREHOLDERS ARE DEMANDING A Q2 LAUNCH OF THIS REVIEW ]]
// TODO: placeholder for another 9 paragraphs discussing the cyclical ages of fire depicted in the Dark Souls trilogy here and how the idea can be metatextually applied to the development cycles of each Souls game and their growing commercial impact vs. receding artistic impact. This part will be included in a post-launch patch to this review at an undetermined date. Hopefully never.
In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths are the truths of the “Noble Ones”: those who are deemed “spiritually worthy". These truths are:
- Dukkha (suffering, incapable of satisfying, painful) is an innate characteristic of existence in the realm of samsara, the world-cycle of death and rebirth we all live through. Existence is pain, to some degree.
- Samudaya (origin, arising, combination; 'cause'): together with dukkha arises taṇhā ("craving, desire or attachment, lit. "thirst”). While tanha is traditionally interpreted in western languages as the 'cause' of dukkha, tanha can also be seen as the factor tying us to dukkha, or as a response to dukkha, trying to escape it; a suffering often understood to be a combination of a consumptive desire for fleeting things, destructive hatefulness, and ignorance of the world as it truly is.
- Nirodha (cessation, ending, confinement) dukkha can be ended or contained by the renouncement or letting go of this taṇhā; the confinement of tanha releases the excessive bind of dukkha; the end of suffering. We are finite flawed creatures with only two ways out: either cyclical death, or transcendence through enlightenment.
- Magga (the path, the Noble Eightfold Path) is the path leading to the confinement of tanha and dukkha. The next path in the teachings; Buddhism’s sequel, post-launch DLC or content update.
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Elden Ring is an action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. The game was directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki and made in collaboration with fantasy novelist George R. R. Martin, who provided material for the game's setting. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on February 25, 2022.
Elden Ring is presented through a third-person perspective, with players freely roaming its interactive open world. Gameplay elements include combat featuring several types of weapons and magic spells, horseback riding, summons, and crafting. Elden Ring received critical acclaim, with praise for its open-world gameplay, fantasy setting, and evolution of the Souls formula. The game sold 12 million copies within three weeks of its release.
Elden Ring is From Software's first game of a new decade that follows an Age of Dark.
The exciting thing about a long voyage like Elden Ring is that it can inhabit so many spaces and times within your life, entwining its soul memories with your own in so many more ways than just an association between coffee and parrying. Due to its epic scale, brutal difficulty and my desire to travel through it as un-aided as possible, it took me four months to beat the game. Looking back from the now, the distance from February until May feels, as it often does in modern times, like a lifetime and a moment. Nothing and everything happened within the standard cycles of my life. I got up and went to work every day, playing through Elden Ring in spare moments and evenings. A war broke out while I was playing Elden Ring. I finished all six seasons of The Sopranos and four seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the time period I existed within while attempting to beat Elden Ring for the first time, and I noted that Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleed for the PlayStation 2 plays surprisingly similarly to Elden Ring. I went abroad for the first time in over two years, often thinking about Elden Ring while looking at the cathedrals and sweeping vistas of Barcelona. I saw a bunch of my friends in person for the first time in years while playing Elden Ring, and we discussed what builds were cool and which characters were cool. When I started Elden Ring, social distancing and facemasks were still mandatory in many places; when I finished Elden Ring, they were not.
So how do these new memories of mine intermingle with those presented in Elden Ring? Does Hoarfrost Stomp taste like marzipan? Is the Altus Plateau a portal to the golden fields of childhood freedom? Have I come to understand Godfrey as a Tony Soprano-like patriarchal figure in relation to Godrick's AJ? Perhaps nothing as crass or immediately interdependent as that. Has playing Elden Ring while existing in 2022 caused me to draw personal and societal parallels between my different lives? I'm tempted to say yes. I'm tempted to take apart Elden Ring's Elden Ring piece-by-piece and point at its golden roots and talk about the scarlet rot and the human ashes that drown the golden skyscrapers of Leyendell and all the ways in which this tale of souls and swords can be applied to someone who travels in the world of our present. But I'd be here even longer than I already am, hanging onto the dying embers of a rambling essay that has gone on too long. In a sense, choosing what aspect of Elden Ring to unpack and explore is exactly how the game makes you feel when you're contemplating which path to take at a crossroads in the Lands Between - whether to explore a cave, a castle, a peninsula, a continent, a realm, a galaxy, an age, a concept of the afterlife turned into a video game level. Naturally, you have to let go of possibility and walk down a single path in order to move forward.
This painful push and pull between potential possibility and your (perhaps pre-determined) path is what makes Elden Ring so compelling. Of course games like Breath of the Wild have already explored this concept of 'go-anywhere', but not in an artistic sense that exists beyond the controller and the things that are happening literally on the screen. In Breath of the Wild, going up a hill will get you into a fight with a bird and you will do a puzzle and you will get a cool sword and you will have a lot of fun - but experiences begin to entwine and overlap, memories becoming overwritten and jumbled in endless plains of rolling green and goblin. Memories require delineation if they are to be stored within containers of consciousness, and in Elden Ring, going up a hill can turn into a 20-hour odyssey through the ashes of time to explore an all-out conquest that was once fought over the very nature of Godhood, where you will meet and contemplate primordial, psychological and philosophical concepts in the form of a dude with a wolf head who reads Berserk. Or maybe you will explore the entirety of a lost kingdom on the edge of the afterlife's cosmos and wonder why it exists or even existed at all, all while the ghost of a forgotten world-serpent caves your skull in. And you will get a cool sword and you will have a lot of fun and those unique, memorable moments will bond with a greater space and time in your head.
Exploration of space beyond the time is a fundamental element of Elden Ring and the Elden Ring. From Software understand that space-time extends with video games, through video games, in video games - that old cliche of a gamer living a thousand lives. In much the same way that it can be confusing to refer to Elden Ring as both a video game product and a concept within the world of Elden Ring itself (it is amusing to note how difficult it is to get the wiki page for the Elden Ring on the Elden Ring Wiki), so too can it be confusing to separate memory and space-time as they exist within and outwith ourselves, our Golden Orders of subjective fact and fiction; moments and how we place ourselves inside them, the near-infinite subjectivity of experience that so often causes people to argue with each other over matters that are ultimately our inner order of perception and recollection. Was Radahn right? Was Malenia right? Sound off in the comments below.
For a long time, one of my most-visited YouTube videos was this performance of Dragon Quest V’s music by the NHK Symphony Orchestra. The music is a fantastic soundtrack to a comments section full of positive nostalgia in a foreign language. Google Translate doesn’t get the full meaning across, but you can feel all that’s being said despite the barriers between people on opposite sides of the internet's round table. This is the comment that always stands out to me when I scroll down:
“This was a game of my dad’s era, but it makes me nostalgic for that time all the same.”
I only beat Dragon Quest V in 2019, but I feel this same nostalgia, these same memories, this same realisation of a video game world as a portal through soul memory. I beat the iOS port of the DS port of the original Super Famicom version while sitting on the toilet at work, but my shared DQV reality with that kid, and his father before him, who played the game on different hardware in a different space in a different time, allows me to understand them. We saved the world and that adventure will stay with us all for a lifetime. Bur this feeling isn't anything unique - throw a dart at the board of YouTube's video game soundtracks and you'll find this phenomenon replicated for pretty much every video game ever made. Queen Rennala stands in a Grand Library and offers you endless rebirth.
The beauty of Elden Ring's length, scale and scope is that it's also capable of playing with this concept of chronotope from within. Whereas Dark Souls 3 relied on imagery and ideology from previous entries to invoke soul memory with (intentionally) cheap referentiality, Elden Ring instead chooses to loop over itself many times over in order to play new games with your mind. There are many ways in which the game achieves this, and if you've ever griped about "reused content", you probably know the kind of thing I mean - fortresses reappearing in different states of decay and ruin; enemies returning again and again as if pursuing you through the Lands Between; the souls of wolves and trees and tree-avatars haunt the earth; the same dungeons and dragons in different locations, sometimes appearing as battlefields of the present, sometimes appearing as sites of historical importance - Great War memorials on a school field trip. The game even deigns to reference the wider From Software cosmology (I am using every word in my vocabulary to avoid typing the term "Soulsborne"), but interestingly chooses to place a lot of these capricious callbacks in dank, dirty, decaying swamps - they are deemed to be hollow, undead references. In a sense, it's a game so vast that it's able to create nostalgia for itself.
For me, the most interesting way the game exemplifies soul memory is in its boss battles. In our realm, the bosses of Elden Ring are something of a contentious topic - out of some 150+ battles that put grand old names above life-bars, only five in the whole game are wholly unique. "How could the developers be so lazy as to do this?!" is the rallying cry of the passionate masses who are seemingly unwilling to afford From Software any artistic agency or intentionality of design. In a series/franchise/whateverthisis like the Souls games, isn't the whole point that you're prepared to die, over and over again, in the same battles, just like the demigods that you seek to surpass? You're in battle against spiritual and physical elements of the universe itself! The Fallingstar Beast appears twice in the game, but you didn't fight him twice, did you? I'm willing to wager you fought him five times, ten times, twenty times, maybe many times more. Why delineate by encounters in space when you can just as easily use time? Was each death and rebirth just "reused content", or was it an intentional part of an experience that the game's developers wanted you to live through? The game's named after a big old circle, for crying out loud!
This isn't an attempt by me to reframe the reuse of content as a purely artistic choice - of course it was done to gild the game's vast size and ensure every crevice of the world map had some experience of some form for the player, but practical compromises made within the constraints of development can be moulded, with appropriate care, into art. We can challenge From's tendency to rework frameworks, but aren't they trapped in their own never-ending cycle by capital, working to the drumbeat of 100 million sales? You may rankle when yet another boss pulls off the iconic Scarlet Aeonia (itself a reference/homage/repetition of a Magic the Gathering card ), but it's all in aid of your personal character development and the development of the game's characters and their relationships in the Lands Between. While I certainly wouldn't call any of my many, many, many battles with Malenia and her acolytes art in and of themselves, my memories of these multi-faceted repetitions tie back to an essential theme of the Souls series - overcoming the greatest boss of all: yourself.
It would be trite of me to spend a ton of time telling everyone about a universal human experience and how it applies to a series of video games that have sold enough copies to make them almost universal gamer experiences, so instead I'll just share a soul memory of Elden Ring that I think embodies this value of repetition and self-mastery. The Subterranean Shunning-Grounds (the names in this game rock lol) is essentially the final dungeon of the game, a terrible theme park of sewer content that long-time fans of these games will immediately recognise - pipes, poison, basilisks, curses, rats, little fucked up gargoyle dudes. It's essentially all the most annoying things about playing a Souls game in a single package, ramped up to 11 by twisted virtue of the fact this is the final area in a 100-hour game that stands at the end of a path of six other 100-hour games with similarly wicked ideas. 11 years after giving up on Dark Souls, I was once again a half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit. Indeed, it is a punishingly difficult experience to be a half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit - even with a high-defense build, certain enemies can take you out in a hit or two. And if they aren't capable of taking you out in a hit or two, they have almost certainly been carefully positioned next to a giant pit that can take you out in a single hit. It's an infuriating area, yet entirely optional. You don't have to do it to yourself, but at this point, it just feels right that you should pursue whatever nebulous reward that the Shunning-Grounds harbour. And what is the final test at the end of this dungeon? A dragon? An army of the undead? Another cosmic deity? No! It's a jumping puzzle in a tomb of skeletons and corpses piled to the ceiling - an incredibly tricky test of wits that combines your physical dexterity with an eye for problem-solving. It took me dozens of tries to master, and memories of the hallways leading from the bonfire to the puzzle chamber have now been seared into my mind. A video game challenge that made me scream out in pain for the first time in years... Fuck that bullshit!!! And at the end of it all, what is your reward for completing this task? No runes or swords or armor. Just a spell called Inescapable Frenzy, an incantation that sends the minds of humans towards madness. Let it never be said that From Software do not have a sense of humour! No wonder some players choose to enter into a covenant with Chaos a few moments later...
"try jumping" is a message you see a lot in Elden Ring. One of the oldest pranks in the Souls fan playbook, it's a nasty little trick that encourages the freshly chosen undead to leap from high places with promise of some unknowable reward. Inevitably, it always leads to one thing - a painful, costly death. Why do players take the time to encourage people they'll never meet to commit suicide, and why do so many people mark these messages as helpful to others? Probably for the same unknowable reason that people tell each other to kill themselves via other mediums of the internet. Ugly as "try jumping" may be, it has always fit comfortably with the artistic notions of Dark Souls as an analog for the neverending battle against depression and misery, the difficulty that comes with suppressing one's urge to die, to give up, to leave it all behind. One of Elden Ring's first concessions to new players is to finally explain this meta-mechanic - if you fall for the very first "try jumping" message that the game places before you, you end up in a tutorial area. Hopefully you won't make the same mistake twice now. From Software know that the Internet-at-large is one of the most lethal enemies their games have to offer, and I fought against that wicked foe by making a point of putting down some "no jumping ahead" messages while on my journey.
The online component of these games has always existed, but has never really been explicitly acknowledged within the game-world beyond a few experimental instances like The Ringed City's Spear of the Church. As the ostensible herald of a new age Elden Ring takes the first steps toward acknowledging ours, supplementing a mechanism with a metaphor. To avoid beating around the bush - I think the Roundtable Hold is the Internet. A realm inaccessible by horse nor foot, where the people of the world meet up to sell shit, trade stories, gossip and fuck around, all under an oath of no physical contact. Per Varre's comment, the Roundtable is "a place for has-beens trying to look important but unable or unwilling to actually take any action". Sound familiar? There is a place in Leyndell Royal Capital that looks exactly like the Roundtable Hold, but no one is there - the Hold is, in effect, a virtual, imagined space; a simulation in parallel existence to reality. It's a trick that From has pulled before, but characters and their occupation of parallel space-times with differing persona spells out that this is, in some classic weird-ass cosmic FromSoft way, a digiverse within a digiverse.
Ensha, Dung Eater and D are the most vivid exemplars of this idea. Three masked edge, lords who spend their time in the Roundtable acting aloof and cool and above it all; their corporeal forms lashing out with hatred against women in the meatspace of the Lands Between, giving away their Inner Order to pursue violence against Malenia, Fia and - in the Loathsome Dung Eater's case - every woman and child in the known universe. (See also: Gideon/Seluvis and their relationship to the class-conscious Nepheli Loux: Gideon as a gatekeeper who encourages you to overcome your Maidenless status and venerate yourself in the eyes of the Roundtable's men ("the road of champions"); Seluvis as a PUA who tries to involve you in a date-rape scheme.) In the case of D, the game implies the existence of a "twin brother" - an alternate persona - who behaves differently depending on the space-time he inhabits. We see him in reality, unreality and Nokron's post-reality afterlife, behaving more aggressively in each plane until he loses bravado when faced with with the bare-faced truth of inescapable Death itself. The player has the option of giving him back his mask and suit of armour, which ultimately leads to a violent death for "that bitch" Fia, a woman who recognises men possessing a warmth that has nowhere to go. In the case of the Dung Eater, whose mortal form is trapped within the aforementioned ur-Souls palace of the Shunning-Grounds, the connection to our ugly internet personalities is a little more explicit, a seeming admission by From Software of all the ugliness that arises from building one's personality around a nexus of digital souls and swords. If From are shackled on some level to this medium of expression, the least they have done here is develop some self-awareness and critique. At the game's climax, the Roundtable burns out, telling us more or less everything we need to know about the developer's feelings on the Web Between Worlds that we inhabit and the paths we choose to walk in each realm of spirit. Will this Roundtable fall to the mortal ashes of Leydendell too, or is there potential for All to achieve Magga, the enlightened transcendence of Buddhist teaching?
The natural follow-on from this topic is an exploration of the golden Grace, the "maidenless" concept and its real-world implications, but I feel the paragraph above demonstrates why it's unwise to provoke red phantoms in the hold through discussion of certain topics and experiences. Elden Ring is a game where not every path should be taken, and, as I already said like three times before (lol), the same holds true of a review; I'm not sure I have the experience or incantations necessary to step into that toxic swamp, lest I provoke an invasion. Instead, I choose to focus on the light that casts this darkness: Friendship. The golden light of the summon sign is the natural enemy of the blood-red invader, and Elden Ring makes this relationship more explicit than its predecessors by mandating that human invaders can only go after parties of two or more players - the eternal war between the "git gud" and the "git help" is now more aggressive than ever before. By changing the mechanics of the franchise's online component, From Software have peppered their latest instalment with challenges to the sensibilities of try-hard players that remind me most of Sakurai's implementation of the anti-competitive tripping mechanic in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While I think the omnipotent anger and cultural overpowerment of the "git gud" crowd is perhaps overstated by the fans at large, it's an unfortunate signifier of their ever-presence that after seven of these games I still get second thoughts about asking for help when I need it.
The kindness of strangers is an enduring motif of Elden Ring, a natural tonic to the toxic anger that permeates every environment you journey across. Melina, the thematic emodiment of this kindness, turns your experience and soul memory into strength, a companion who appears to those at risk of stoking personal flames of frenzy as a guide who leads you towards the Erdtree and the Elden Ring. I don't think it's a coincidence that the game gets inordinately tougher to handle by yourself in the wake of her ultimate sacrifice; investments in endgame Rune Levels feel less substantial, less meaningful, than those conversions of experience made while travelling with Melina at RL100 and below. (The Ranni questline, with its literal idolation of a young girl as a peculiar doll the player can contemplate in silence by the fire, dovetails nicely with Melina's death and serves as an interesting pair of endgame decisions the player can take, further compounded by the Roundtable stuff discussed above) The final stretch of the game demands, almost explicitly, that the player look beyond themselves and extend a hand of need to those around them in much the same way one should following a deeply personal loss.
If you did not touch a summon sign or ring a spirit bell or read a fan-wiki after Leyendell, know that I know you are a liar and a punk and you will be judged far more harshly by my council than the guys who spent six hours outside Maliketh trying to bring in a sorcerer called Pigf#cker or whatever other desperate means they chose to undertake in order to realise their ambitions. Everyone needed help to finish Elden Ring; everyone needed help to stave off the Frenzied Flame that the Elden Ring's Golden Order was trying to stoke from within you on your personal path to enlightenment. Fought the Godskin Duo by yourself, did you bro? Well, the Godskin Apostle didn't. He brought in someone to help him. Are you really that stupid? The legend of Let Me Solo Her didn't develop from the tremendous feat of beating Malenia solo - was this noble pothead the first person to ever beat her by himself? Of course not. The legend developed as a veneration of kindness, a manifestation of will and memory and dreams of ambitions, a symbol of those Tarnished who offer their help to those who need it most: Let Me Solo Her is our idealised savior, a breakup bro for the maidenless, a hero who will help you fight your hardest battles and overcome your most painful soul memories. Stay isolated and lost in your past, or find your friends on the path and start living your life.
Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.
Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really.
How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that.
How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty.
And yet it all seems limitless.
So what of soul memory, the idea I spent so long talking about at the start of this review? Well, that's another thing that's beautiful about Elden Ring - I'm not done playing it yet. Much in the same way I wasn't done playing Dark Souls after I'd put down the pad, Elden Ring has manifested itself in my everyday life and my relationships with the souls and space-time and coffee granules around me. It's difficult to write a conclusive conclusion for an Elden Ring review because it doesn't feel like the game is over yet. I fought the Elden Beast, I saw an ending, I saw the credits, but evidently I can't stop thinking about the game and the ideas and memories and experience it imbued me with. I'm walking on an invisible path in a consecrated snowfield of boundless white, trying to find my noble truth and inner order and greater will by constantly making sense of everything I've seen, heard and felt through, with and in my lives lived, tilting at windmills in the gardens of madness within this life and beyond. You are too. Let's face it together.
𓂀
The seventh soul is Sekhu. The remains.
Sonic Dream Team
2023
I really enjoyed it!!! Really surprised how much fun I was having.
The worlds were fun and really well designed. It was really fluid to control and chain boosts and homing attacks to go zoomin. Turning can be a bit awkward when boosting, and a stomp would've been a nice addition to controllers. It has some of my usual SEGA Hardlight problems like ugly renders and cheaper looking UI, but I really enjoyed this one. It's a memorable experience for me : )
The worlds were fun and really well designed. It was really fluid to control and chain boosts and homing attacks to go zoomin. Turning can be a bit awkward when boosting, and a stomp would've been a nice addition to controllers. It has some of my usual SEGA Hardlight problems like ugly renders and cheaper looking UI, but I really enjoyed this one. It's a memorable experience for me : )
I really should've saved my Tex Avery joke for this one, because Shantae and the Pirate's Curse is at least twice as thirsty as the previous game. That's really what sequels are all about, one-upping everything its predecessor did. It's about finding any excuse to put your characters in bikinis or have their clothes get shredded up because that's... that's just for daddy.....
Joking aside, Shantae and the Pirate's Curse does a pretty good job of building off of Risky's Revenge, a game I mostly found fine though limited in scope and fairly barebones for a search-action. Pirate's Curse is comparatively more involved yet still undemanding, perfect for people who want to get into the genre and still feel engaged. Gone are Shantae's genie powers, which were stripped from her by Risky in the previous game, negating the slow dancing/transformation mechanic and swapping it out for collectable pirate-themed items. I found these to be overall more fun than Shantae's transformations, and not needing to wind each of them up before using them helps a ton with maintaining the flow of gameplay.
Dungeons play very similarly to Risky's Revenge, though they are more aesthetically distinct. The overworld, however, is far more realized than it was in the last game, featuring some great character interactions and excellent level design. Some of the islands you visit could be considered dungeons in their own right, and by spending a more significant amount of time above ground, it makes getting into a dungeon feel more like an event. The story is also given more room to play out here, and it actually feels like characters are moving around and doing stuff, whereas the world in Risky's Revenge felt mostly static as Shantae zipped between dungeons. Teaming her up with Risky is a lot of fun too, it's great seeing how Shantae's softness rubs off on her, but I am a sucker for a good villain-turned-hero arc.
I do think Pirate's Curse could've done a bit more in some areas, like with the mutating tinkerbats, which are very similar mechanically to the Metroids you hunt in Metroid 2. Unlike Metroid, however, you'll only fight one type of tinkerbat. They don't evolve over the course of the game or become more challenging, and I think that was a missed opportunity. The final dungeon is also needlessly brutal, with a lot of sequences that involve precise timing and a bit too much trial and error for my taste.
I still had a great time with this one and I can certainly see why people say it's the best Shantae game, but that's also a little upsetting because I still see room for improvement here. A Shantae game that has the same level of exploration and depth as a proper Metroid could be great, and I think there's something to the idea of Shantae transforming and gaining new abilities even if that system could be smoother in practice. Hopefully the following two games give me exactly what I'm looking for, which is more girls in bikinis, and they're uh... they're covered in oil, yeeeeah... yeah that's just for daddy ,....
Joking aside, Shantae and the Pirate's Curse does a pretty good job of building off of Risky's Revenge, a game I mostly found fine though limited in scope and fairly barebones for a search-action. Pirate's Curse is comparatively more involved yet still undemanding, perfect for people who want to get into the genre and still feel engaged. Gone are Shantae's genie powers, which were stripped from her by Risky in the previous game, negating the slow dancing/transformation mechanic and swapping it out for collectable pirate-themed items. I found these to be overall more fun than Shantae's transformations, and not needing to wind each of them up before using them helps a ton with maintaining the flow of gameplay.
Dungeons play very similarly to Risky's Revenge, though they are more aesthetically distinct. The overworld, however, is far more realized than it was in the last game, featuring some great character interactions and excellent level design. Some of the islands you visit could be considered dungeons in their own right, and by spending a more significant amount of time above ground, it makes getting into a dungeon feel more like an event. The story is also given more room to play out here, and it actually feels like characters are moving around and doing stuff, whereas the world in Risky's Revenge felt mostly static as Shantae zipped between dungeons. Teaming her up with Risky is a lot of fun too, it's great seeing how Shantae's softness rubs off on her, but I am a sucker for a good villain-turned-hero arc.
I do think Pirate's Curse could've done a bit more in some areas, like with the mutating tinkerbats, which are very similar mechanically to the Metroids you hunt in Metroid 2. Unlike Metroid, however, you'll only fight one type of tinkerbat. They don't evolve over the course of the game or become more challenging, and I think that was a missed opportunity. The final dungeon is also needlessly brutal, with a lot of sequences that involve precise timing and a bit too much trial and error for my taste.
I still had a great time with this one and I can certainly see why people say it's the best Shantae game, but that's also a little upsetting because I still see room for improvement here. A Shantae game that has the same level of exploration and depth as a proper Metroid could be great, and I think there's something to the idea of Shantae transforming and gaining new abilities even if that system could be smoother in practice. Hopefully the following two games give me exactly what I'm looking for, which is more girls in bikinis, and they're uh... they're covered in oil, yeeeeah... yeah that's just for daddy ,....
Skyward Sword on Wii was already one of my favorite games of all time. I now have no reason to ever touch it again.
Skyward Sword HD took a game that I loved despite its flaws and fixed everything I had an issue with. I've already done a lengthy review on the original game, so instead of repeating all of that, here are my impressions from the 39 hours I spent completing this remaster.
- Ghirahim is still my favorite Zelda villain. He's so deliciously camp.
- "Romance in the Air" might be the most beautiful bit of music in any Zelda game ever: https://youtu.be/T6x5bEr_UUU
- The resolution and buttery-smooth framerate take this game to a new level. I know Breath of the Wild 2 is gonna chug just like its predecessor, but it would be a TREAT to have all Zelda games in 60fps from now on.
- I still adore these motion controls. For whatever reason, they just click for me. Wish I could have 1:1 sword controls in every Zelda game, just like this one!
- The side characters are so good here. Meaningful, memorable interactions with NPCs make this such a fun world to be in.
- These are still some of my favorite Zelda dungeons, especially the ones in Lanayru.
- I really like returning to areas multiple times with different stuff going on. Seeing things change in an area is one of my favorite things in games, it makes the world feel more alive.
- I adore the Silent Realm challenges! A little bit of survival-horror in a Zelda game works really well. I recommend going for the difficult tears first just in case you get caught though, no need to ruin your whole run by saving the ones surrounded by floaty ghosts for last.
- Timeshift Stones are so rad.
- I liked the Demise fight much more this time than I did in 2011, but that might just be because I knew what to expect.
- I replayed BotW right before this, and that game really lacks an ending. In contrast, SS's ending is solid, probably right behind OoT.
- Fi is great, and it's much easier to appreciate her with the now toned-down number of interruptions.
- Bring back Scrapper!!
- My only real complaint is that I wish there were even more side quests, but if a game just makes me wish I could keep playing for longer, that's hardly a negative!
That was kind of word vomit, but I think that about covers everything. I love this game!
Skyward Sword HD took a game that I loved despite its flaws and fixed everything I had an issue with. I've already done a lengthy review on the original game, so instead of repeating all of that, here are my impressions from the 39 hours I spent completing this remaster.
- Ghirahim is still my favorite Zelda villain. He's so deliciously camp.
- "Romance in the Air" might be the most beautiful bit of music in any Zelda game ever: https://youtu.be/T6x5bEr_UUU
- The resolution and buttery-smooth framerate take this game to a new level. I know Breath of the Wild 2 is gonna chug just like its predecessor, but it would be a TREAT to have all Zelda games in 60fps from now on.
- I still adore these motion controls. For whatever reason, they just click for me. Wish I could have 1:1 sword controls in every Zelda game, just like this one!
- The side characters are so good here. Meaningful, memorable interactions with NPCs make this such a fun world to be in.
- These are still some of my favorite Zelda dungeons, especially the ones in Lanayru.
- I really like returning to areas multiple times with different stuff going on. Seeing things change in an area is one of my favorite things in games, it makes the world feel more alive.
- I adore the Silent Realm challenges! A little bit of survival-horror in a Zelda game works really well. I recommend going for the difficult tears first just in case you get caught though, no need to ruin your whole run by saving the ones surrounded by floaty ghosts for last.
- Timeshift Stones are so rad.
- I liked the Demise fight much more this time than I did in 2011, but that might just be because I knew what to expect.
- I replayed BotW right before this, and that game really lacks an ending. In contrast, SS's ending is solid, probably right behind OoT.
- Fi is great, and it's much easier to appreciate her with the now toned-down number of interruptions.
- Bring back Scrapper!!
- My only real complaint is that I wish there were even more side quests, but if a game just makes me wish I could keep playing for longer, that's hardly a negative!
That was kind of word vomit, but I think that about covers everything. I love this game!
I am not same man I was 12 yakuza games ago
Batman has always been my superhero of choice. I'm pretty sure my mom still has pictures of me absorbing the 1960's show six inches from the damn screen, my eyes like thin sheets separating the Batusi from my brain. This hyper-fixation on Adam West's rippling physique resulted in me developing a very narrow taste in superheroes. Burt Ward's dog food is the only brand I'll feed my pup, that show still has me all fucked up!
One of the few Marvel heroes to break through and leave some sort of impression on me is Spider-Man, which is great because nobody seems interested in making good Batman games anymore. Rocksteady has been engaging in self-sabotage for almost a decade, but at least I can count on Insomniac to put out a good game, even if it maybe trends a bit too close to the previous Spider-Man and it's (better) expansion, Miles Morales. I wasn't on Backloggd dot com when I played them, so I never had a chance to share my thoughts. In short: they're both very good, quite possibly the best Spider-Man games to have been released up to that point.
The first 60% of Spider-Man 2 plays it incredibly safe. It's more of the same, albeit with fewer gadgets and less superfluous challenges scattered throughout New York. Although you now have two Spider-Men you can freely swap between - assuming this doesn't crash the game, which happened to me frequently - Spider-Man 2 feels much more focused than the previous entry. I think Insomniac learned a lot of good lessons from Miles Morales, which similarly trimmed a lot of fat and was far better paced and more manageable for it. There's also a whole lot less time spent paling around with the cops. In fact, they're practically non-existent now, unless you count the ghost of Jefferson Davis haunting the halls of his son's mind.
Things really pick up in the later half, however. The Symbiote suit comes with several new powers for Peter which helps refresh his gameplay, and the story picks up and veers into some very goofy territory that results in some really fun set pieces and battles. My only complaint here is that Venom spends a little too much time as a slobbering rage monster and that Tony Todd is severely under-utilized. Also, you know, heavily basing everything off existing stories and then not crediting those authors is kind of a dirty move. Sorry Donny Cates, all your ideas have been syphoned out of your head and are no longer yours... Just like Riddler's Box from the hit movie Batman Forever! Ohh... Batman...
Traversal is also as good as it's ever been, and I think this was already a strong point of the first game. The inclusion of a wingsuit initially feels as though it might trivialize navigation, but once you understand how it can be used to build or maintain momentum, you can chain it into swings and start doing some really crazy acrobatics. It's also useful for bridging the river that separates the two islands or maneuvering over open spaces like the park and suburbs of Queens, which means no more awkwardly swinging through trees. Everything just feels a lot more fluid.
Side content is more of a mixed bag for me. The Emily-May Foundation quest is dull and is mostly used to support a core plot thread about Peter and Harry's startup. It's a little more believable when Peter is actually helping with the Foundation than simply paying lip to it, but tepid shooting sequences and clunky gene splicing minigames aren't my idea of fun. I am also generally not a fan of the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man missions, most of which I found to be trite in their efforts to tug on your heart strings. The Internet absolutely lost it over Finding Grandpa, but I could not get past Gramps' put-on frail old man voice which sounded about as good as something I'd do as a joke. Perhaps I'm a heartless monster for not getting misty-eyed about it, I ate some of the Burt Ward dog food and it might've done something chemically to my brain.
That said, the mission with Howard's pigeons is a highlight and was actually emotionally moving, and none of the side quests are so abundant or tedious as to be annoying. I was able to platinum this game without it ever feeling inconvenient to do so which is a marked improvement over the first Spider-Man.
Much like the gameplay, the overarching plot of Spider-Man 2 struggles to get going and only really picks up in the second half of the game. Maybe it's because I don't recognize any of these people anymore, but I had a really hard time getting invested in the interpersonal drama of Peter, Harry, and Mary Jane, which the game sinks a considerable amount of time into slowly developing. Some of that is to do with Scott Porter's performance as Harry, which makes the character sound a bit too phoney. He's very chipper, really leans into this "yeah, we're going to save the world! Let's go, team!" attitude that doesn't feel genuine. My friend Larry Davis also pointed out that he looks a lot like Matt Johnson from Nirvana the Band the Show and I can't purge this from my mind, so I need to pass the curse onto all of you. A lot of what Harry's arc is building up to does pay off in the end, but it's hard to unpack all of that without getting into spoilers. Spoiler is a character from Batman, she later becomes Robin and then a corpse.
Mary Jane is at least given more to do, although her atrocious stealth sequences are back, and I don't know who the hell asked for more of them. She's got a stun gun now, but these missions are still so tedious. Just the shallowest take on stealth you could possibly imagine, but even sneaking around as the Spider-Men feels like it has regressed and is nowhere near as enjoyable as it was in the last two games. At least Miles can turn invisible, which speeds things up, and I don't think any of these sections have automatic fail states if you're caught, so nothing's stopping you from getting into a brawl.
Speaking of Miles, I think I prefer his side of the story and find him a far more interesting character than Peter. This has been the case for me since Miles Morales, and I really liked seeing how his character, relationships, and powers evolved in this game. His struggle for revenge against Martin Li threatens to pull him into places just as dark as where Peter goes when dressed in the Symbiote, and this pent-up aggression is explored in more compelling ways. I also think Insomniac has done a better job of embodying what it means to be a "friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" in MIles, whereas Peter is a bit more absorbed in his own world. The story does play with the idea of Peter possibly passing the torch onto Miles, and if the third game embraces that more fully by making him the lead, that'd be alright by me.
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 might be the best in the series, if only marginally so, but it has left me excited to see where Insomniac goes with the third and presumably final entry. Even if it ends up just being more of the same, that still means we'd be getting a great game. Or they could fuck it all up, give Spider-Man the Spider-Mobile and force you into a ton of shitty tank battles with it under Green Goblin's city-wide fart cloud.
One of the few Marvel heroes to break through and leave some sort of impression on me is Spider-Man, which is great because nobody seems interested in making good Batman games anymore. Rocksteady has been engaging in self-sabotage for almost a decade, but at least I can count on Insomniac to put out a good game, even if it maybe trends a bit too close to the previous Spider-Man and it's (better) expansion, Miles Morales. I wasn't on Backloggd dot com when I played them, so I never had a chance to share my thoughts. In short: they're both very good, quite possibly the best Spider-Man games to have been released up to that point.
The first 60% of Spider-Man 2 plays it incredibly safe. It's more of the same, albeit with fewer gadgets and less superfluous challenges scattered throughout New York. Although you now have two Spider-Men you can freely swap between - assuming this doesn't crash the game, which happened to me frequently - Spider-Man 2 feels much more focused than the previous entry. I think Insomniac learned a lot of good lessons from Miles Morales, which similarly trimmed a lot of fat and was far better paced and more manageable for it. There's also a whole lot less time spent paling around with the cops. In fact, they're practically non-existent now, unless you count the ghost of Jefferson Davis haunting the halls of his son's mind.
Things really pick up in the later half, however. The Symbiote suit comes with several new powers for Peter which helps refresh his gameplay, and the story picks up and veers into some very goofy territory that results in some really fun set pieces and battles. My only complaint here is that Venom spends a little too much time as a slobbering rage monster and that Tony Todd is severely under-utilized. Also, you know, heavily basing everything off existing stories and then not crediting those authors is kind of a dirty move. Sorry Donny Cates, all your ideas have been syphoned out of your head and are no longer yours... Just like Riddler's Box from the hit movie Batman Forever! Ohh... Batman...
Traversal is also as good as it's ever been, and I think this was already a strong point of the first game. The inclusion of a wingsuit initially feels as though it might trivialize navigation, but once you understand how it can be used to build or maintain momentum, you can chain it into swings and start doing some really crazy acrobatics. It's also useful for bridging the river that separates the two islands or maneuvering over open spaces like the park and suburbs of Queens, which means no more awkwardly swinging through trees. Everything just feels a lot more fluid.
Side content is more of a mixed bag for me. The Emily-May Foundation quest is dull and is mostly used to support a core plot thread about Peter and Harry's startup. It's a little more believable when Peter is actually helping with the Foundation than simply paying lip to it, but tepid shooting sequences and clunky gene splicing minigames aren't my idea of fun. I am also generally not a fan of the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man missions, most of which I found to be trite in their efforts to tug on your heart strings. The Internet absolutely lost it over Finding Grandpa, but I could not get past Gramps' put-on frail old man voice which sounded about as good as something I'd do as a joke. Perhaps I'm a heartless monster for not getting misty-eyed about it, I ate some of the Burt Ward dog food and it might've done something chemically to my brain.
That said, the mission with Howard's pigeons is a highlight and was actually emotionally moving, and none of the side quests are so abundant or tedious as to be annoying. I was able to platinum this game without it ever feeling inconvenient to do so which is a marked improvement over the first Spider-Man.
Much like the gameplay, the overarching plot of Spider-Man 2 struggles to get going and only really picks up in the second half of the game. Maybe it's because I don't recognize any of these people anymore, but I had a really hard time getting invested in the interpersonal drama of Peter, Harry, and Mary Jane, which the game sinks a considerable amount of time into slowly developing. Some of that is to do with Scott Porter's performance as Harry, which makes the character sound a bit too phoney. He's very chipper, really leans into this "yeah, we're going to save the world! Let's go, team!" attitude that doesn't feel genuine. My friend Larry Davis also pointed out that he looks a lot like Matt Johnson from Nirvana the Band the Show and I can't purge this from my mind, so I need to pass the curse onto all of you. A lot of what Harry's arc is building up to does pay off in the end, but it's hard to unpack all of that without getting into spoilers. Spoiler is a character from Batman, she later becomes Robin and then a corpse.
Mary Jane is at least given more to do, although her atrocious stealth sequences are back, and I don't know who the hell asked for more of them. She's got a stun gun now, but these missions are still so tedious. Just the shallowest take on stealth you could possibly imagine, but even sneaking around as the Spider-Men feels like it has regressed and is nowhere near as enjoyable as it was in the last two games. At least Miles can turn invisible, which speeds things up, and I don't think any of these sections have automatic fail states if you're caught, so nothing's stopping you from getting into a brawl.
Speaking of Miles, I think I prefer his side of the story and find him a far more interesting character than Peter. This has been the case for me since Miles Morales, and I really liked seeing how his character, relationships, and powers evolved in this game. His struggle for revenge against Martin Li threatens to pull him into places just as dark as where Peter goes when dressed in the Symbiote, and this pent-up aggression is explored in more compelling ways. I also think Insomniac has done a better job of embodying what it means to be a "friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" in MIles, whereas Peter is a bit more absorbed in his own world. The story does play with the idea of Peter possibly passing the torch onto Miles, and if the third game embraces that more fully by making him the lead, that'd be alright by me.
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 might be the best in the series, if only marginally so, but it has left me excited to see where Insomniac goes with the third and presumably final entry. Even if it ends up just being more of the same, that still means we'd be getting a great game. Or they could fuck it all up, give Spider-Man the Spider-Mobile and force you into a ton of shitty tank battles with it under Green Goblin's city-wide fart cloud.
Let's go back to my place, we'll put on some Koji Kondo and drop Wonder Seeds.
I'm not sure which is a greater triumph: the fact that Nintendo put out a good 2D Mario game for the first time since World released in 1990, or that they've finally started to release worthwhile hardware in the Switch's twilight years. Pikmin 4 and Mario Wonder have both swooped in during the 11th hour to justify buying this thing back in 2017. Better late than never, I suppose.
I ran through Mario World not more than a month before picking up Wonder, and while I wouldn't say Wonder topples it as my favorite 2D entry in the series, it does come awfully close. Platforming feels incredibly tight, every character has the right amount of weight and momentum, and levels are thoughtfully designed around unique gimmicks to keep the game feeling fresh every step of the way. I was also not expecting the Wonder Seeds to come with as much variety as they do. Not only do they heavily alter a significant portion of each course, but Wonder is pretty good about making them unique to the courses they appear in, even in the rare instances where certain ideas and mechanics are reused. My personal favorite comes pretty early with the Piranha Plant Parade.
There are a number of smaller courses that lack Wonder sequences, like badge challenges and Wiggler Races, but they never feel lacking for it. I could do without the "search party" levels, though. I'm not sure who thought it was a good idea to design stages where you have to habitually jump around looking for hidden blocks like you're playing The Lost Levels, but I wound up pulling a guide open for these just to expedite the process. If Nintendo removed these and retooled a couple of the secret world stages (the one where you have to bounce on bubbles to navigate your way over a pit as a Goomba is heinous), then this might be a perfect 5/5 for me.
Wonder almost earns that half star back with its roster of playable characters. Of course, you've got Mario, Luigi, Peach, and (THREE!!) Toad(s), but they finally put Daisy in one of these games and I'm ecstatic about that. She's my favorite Mario character, which I know might be a weird thing to say considering most characters in these games have little personality past saying "wowie zowie" (big Zappa-heads, these guys) and their own name like a Pokemon. I just get this weird energy from Daisy. Peach will spend all afternoon baking you a cake, but Daisy will just drive to Kroger in her Ford Taurus that hasn't had an oil change in six months and buy you a sheet cake, start eating it in the car, then mash the two ends of the cake back together and crudely smooth over the icing to hide what she's done. I "fuck with that," or whatever the hell it is you kids say.
Unfortunately, the Yoshis (and Nabbit) are lackluster as they can't make use of power-ups. In the past, I've lamented the fact that I like Yoshi but he's never the star of good games, so it's disappointing that he and his multi-colored brethren have these arbitrarily imposed gameplay limitations in Wonder. Don't really care about Nabbit, far as I'm concerned there should be a wonder sequence where he's placed in a hydraulic press.
Mario Wonder is pretty much a must-have for the Switch and one of the best games released all year, and I think it's safe to say it breaks into my top five entries in the series. High praise from someone who ordinarily needs very little reason to dunk on Nintendo and drag them through the mud, but even I've got to admit they've put out something wonderful here.
I'm not sure which is a greater triumph: the fact that Nintendo put out a good 2D Mario game for the first time since World released in 1990, or that they've finally started to release worthwhile hardware in the Switch's twilight years. Pikmin 4 and Mario Wonder have both swooped in during the 11th hour to justify buying this thing back in 2017. Better late than never, I suppose.
I ran through Mario World not more than a month before picking up Wonder, and while I wouldn't say Wonder topples it as my favorite 2D entry in the series, it does come awfully close. Platforming feels incredibly tight, every character has the right amount of weight and momentum, and levels are thoughtfully designed around unique gimmicks to keep the game feeling fresh every step of the way. I was also not expecting the Wonder Seeds to come with as much variety as they do. Not only do they heavily alter a significant portion of each course, but Wonder is pretty good about making them unique to the courses they appear in, even in the rare instances where certain ideas and mechanics are reused. My personal favorite comes pretty early with the Piranha Plant Parade.
There are a number of smaller courses that lack Wonder sequences, like badge challenges and Wiggler Races, but they never feel lacking for it. I could do without the "search party" levels, though. I'm not sure who thought it was a good idea to design stages where you have to habitually jump around looking for hidden blocks like you're playing The Lost Levels, but I wound up pulling a guide open for these just to expedite the process. If Nintendo removed these and retooled a couple of the secret world stages (the one where you have to bounce on bubbles to navigate your way over a pit as a Goomba is heinous), then this might be a perfect 5/5 for me.
Wonder almost earns that half star back with its roster of playable characters. Of course, you've got Mario, Luigi, Peach, and (THREE!!) Toad(s), but they finally put Daisy in one of these games and I'm ecstatic about that. She's my favorite Mario character, which I know might be a weird thing to say considering most characters in these games have little personality past saying "wowie zowie" (big Zappa-heads, these guys) and their own name like a Pokemon. I just get this weird energy from Daisy. Peach will spend all afternoon baking you a cake, but Daisy will just drive to Kroger in her Ford Taurus that hasn't had an oil change in six months and buy you a sheet cake, start eating it in the car, then mash the two ends of the cake back together and crudely smooth over the icing to hide what she's done. I "fuck with that," or whatever the hell it is you kids say.
Unfortunately, the Yoshis (and Nabbit) are lackluster as they can't make use of power-ups. In the past, I've lamented the fact that I like Yoshi but he's never the star of good games, so it's disappointing that he and his multi-colored brethren have these arbitrarily imposed gameplay limitations in Wonder. Don't really care about Nabbit, far as I'm concerned there should be a wonder sequence where he's placed in a hydraulic press.
Mario Wonder is pretty much a must-have for the Switch and one of the best games released all year, and I think it's safe to say it breaks into my top five entries in the series. High praise from someone who ordinarily needs very little reason to dunk on Nintendo and drag them through the mud, but even I've got to admit they've put out something wonderful here.
Terranigma
1995
So if you're not a fan of the words PEAK FICTION, GOAT, RAW, FIRE, click off of the video, because those are gonna come up like 50 times in here man. I can't help it, the weights are off, on some Rock Lee stuff, the weights are off.
Terranigma
1995
Rebuilding life
I find it difficult to describe Terranigma to someone that has no idea what the premise of the title is about. It definitely feels like Quintet's culimination of efforts after Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia. In an era where SNES JRPGs are considered the absolute peak of the genre, Terranigma earns its place there with some of the best.
The story is great as it shows the duality of how the light side and dark side came to be. In stories where characters develop, the world also truly develops with you as well. This is what makes the games special in my eyes. Life itself progressing based on your actions. Ark wasn't the greatest of people in the beginning of his story, he starts by having to apologize for things he did before and even when you try to help people, the game won't let you initially. The narrative starts slow but it builds up in scope the more the world itself builds back up too.
Traversal through the world and defending yourself is pretty simple to a benefit and a fault. I think the combat is simple but it also feels extremely fluid, each attack gives you a specific benefit over a specific type of enemy and gives you a bit to go over. The magic system is not the greatest but it does an okay job. Leveling up is never a problem and overall dungeon design is overall good here. A bit of backtracking but it doesn't really dilute the experience too much. I wish the combat had a bit more to it, another type of weapon maybe but it works well and the game doesn't overstay its welcome.
The sprite work for the game is great as Ark not only feels fluid but looks fluid too in his animations. Seeing all of the creative designs including the modern stuff is great. The soundtrack is great to boot with some somber and some emotional pieces that are hard not to have an emotional response to. Elle's theme just does that and hearing the overworld theme for the first time after a bit to signal the adventure was truly beginning.
A great action JRPG that feels extremely solid in a variety of places. I was a bit bored with the combat and backtracking after a bit but I think that's really the most personal worst parts about the game for me. Everything this game offers is unique and something a fan of JRPGs should definitely play at least once.
I find it difficult to describe Terranigma to someone that has no idea what the premise of the title is about. It definitely feels like Quintet's culimination of efforts after Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia. In an era where SNES JRPGs are considered the absolute peak of the genre, Terranigma earns its place there with some of the best.
The story is great as it shows the duality of how the light side and dark side came to be. In stories where characters develop, the world also truly develops with you as well. This is what makes the games special in my eyes. Life itself progressing based on your actions. Ark wasn't the greatest of people in the beginning of his story, he starts by having to apologize for things he did before and even when you try to help people, the game won't let you initially. The narrative starts slow but it builds up in scope the more the world itself builds back up too.
Traversal through the world and defending yourself is pretty simple to a benefit and a fault. I think the combat is simple but it also feels extremely fluid, each attack gives you a specific benefit over a specific type of enemy and gives you a bit to go over. The magic system is not the greatest but it does an okay job. Leveling up is never a problem and overall dungeon design is overall good here. A bit of backtracking but it doesn't really dilute the experience too much. I wish the combat had a bit more to it, another type of weapon maybe but it works well and the game doesn't overstay its welcome.
The sprite work for the game is great as Ark not only feels fluid but looks fluid too in his animations. Seeing all of the creative designs including the modern stuff is great. The soundtrack is great to boot with some somber and some emotional pieces that are hard not to have an emotional response to. Elle's theme just does that and hearing the overworld theme for the first time after a bit to signal the adventure was truly beginning.
A great action JRPG that feels extremely solid in a variety of places. I was a bit bored with the combat and backtracking after a bit but I think that's really the most personal worst parts about the game for me. Everything this game offers is unique and something a fan of JRPGs should definitely play at least once.