This review contains spoilers
Ethan Winters is a sad ghost who cannot persist in any state other than abject pain and agony. He can die a million times and he will still get up to find his family. We watch as Ethan dies, we squirm, and when Ethan returns from the grave all he knows is that his family is gone. We remember every death that Ethan does not — we learn from the mistakes Ethan makes so that we can guide him to his next death somewhere else. Where failure in other videogames is understood to be a potential but not actual outcome of the game storyline, death as a projected vision, it really feels as though Ethan is the same undead body across plays, with the same undead life force animating him to find the ones he loves.
There is an element of cosmic tragedy to him: to live is to search for his family, and so to locate his family is to die. Ethan can only exist within this lack. He has an infinity of undeath at his disposal, but he can never find life. Every time we start our system pieces move and electrical currents send that message to Ethan's body that his family is missing and he must go look for them. Ethan can only find peace when there is no Ethan; when no game system resurrects him and tells him maybe this time we can make good on his promise to keep them safe. This is the logic of the game system: every objective signifies a lack, and to fulfil that objective is to kill the game. Ethan is split across Biohazard and Village, roaming the halls and woods and grounds in his maddening pursuit of the impossible, which is filling the hole created and maintained by the game.
The afterlife is rarely conceived as anything other than an extension of corporeal life. That is, the body is never left behind. From the clearly delineated stages of Dante's Inferno to those Greek tragedies that in their repetition seem so much like games, the body persists to be tortured, and the subject persists to endure their tortured body eternally. Characters throughout Village remark on Ethan's body, 'oh this is a special one', and players remark on it too, 'how do his hands withstand so much?'. The first person perspective of Biohazard and Village do not remove the avatar but locate it entirely in the expressivity of the hands. The hands suffer, the hands recoil, sending a sympathetic agony to the player's connection to Ethan — our hands. We touch Ethan through our hands, and we touch the world through Ethan's hands. The stubborn corporeality of Ethan is too much because of the environment that is touched and that touches back.
The last generation of action games worked to minimise the distance between the player and game world through the player avatar witnessing and recording their environmental percepts. The Last of Us and the Tomb Raider reboots placed a great physical and verbal emphasis on this. In these games to move to a wall is to see the hand move up and hold it, and even to comment on its texture, or the temperature of rivers, or the slipperiness of the muddy ground, or the chill in the wind. Biohazard and Village take this further in pursuit of immediate 'tactisigns', or 'a touching which is specific to the gaze'. The mise en scene is given directly to the player through the touch of the hands, and this works as an intensive sensation rather than a third person dramatic record. It is not that Ethan touches and we witness, but that we too sense the qualities of the world that arise from that interaction. Of that being there.
A list I encountered recently encourages players to think about games that smell. Village stinks. The objects and environments glow with intensive dust and decay that the player frantically encounters just to absorb. It is a big game, but it is filled with properties eager to penetrate the player's ears and nose and tongue through the hands. Where Biohazard worked in the tradition of strange puzzles, or preset holes waiting to be filled by the player, Village pushes back against the satisfactions given by a pliable environment. Our hands touch the environment, study its objects, but they are cut and bruised and mauled by what they find there. It sets a more cognitive engagement with the world aside for a more immediate one where we are subjected to the myriad affects of Village that come fast and come from out of nowhere. It's an easy game to finish, but a difficult game to withstand moment by moment. It does fantastic work bringing genres of horror together through a naturalistic hub model, but its approach to space and audience bewilderment is still firmly indebted to Tobe Hooper. Like Hooper's films it has a sense of physical humour that only makes it more brutal. It is linear, and brisk, but exhausting. Its artifice is vital, and etches itself in your soul.
What improves most in Village over Biohazard is the way the sudden acceleration of the final act works to minimise the player's efforts to emotionally resonant ends. Where Biohazard shifts everything along geographically and in terms of play-style, Village confronts us with the exact space we had grown used to as much as we feared it, but with all its fearful substance removed. Ultimately this place is nothing; none of it matters. There was a plan, there always was a plan, but we were never in that plan. The thing is that Ethan stinks. To return to the notion that he is undead, alive because he is dead, I am reminded of the fact that Lazarus of Bethany stunk because he had been dead four days. The afterlife can never escape the hideous physicality of life, which is pain and decay. Chris does not stink, but Ethan rises like Lazarus, putrid and deformed, to torture himself before the impossible. As he ambles forward toward his child, we know he will do it again. Forever if he has to. Ethan finds peace when there is no Ethan; when no one plays or even thinks about him. And in that black nothingness, there is death without afterlife.
There is an element of cosmic tragedy to him: to live is to search for his family, and so to locate his family is to die. Ethan can only exist within this lack. He has an infinity of undeath at his disposal, but he can never find life. Every time we start our system pieces move and electrical currents send that message to Ethan's body that his family is missing and he must go look for them. Ethan can only find peace when there is no Ethan; when no game system resurrects him and tells him maybe this time we can make good on his promise to keep them safe. This is the logic of the game system: every objective signifies a lack, and to fulfil that objective is to kill the game. Ethan is split across Biohazard and Village, roaming the halls and woods and grounds in his maddening pursuit of the impossible, which is filling the hole created and maintained by the game.
The afterlife is rarely conceived as anything other than an extension of corporeal life. That is, the body is never left behind. From the clearly delineated stages of Dante's Inferno to those Greek tragedies that in their repetition seem so much like games, the body persists to be tortured, and the subject persists to endure their tortured body eternally. Characters throughout Village remark on Ethan's body, 'oh this is a special one', and players remark on it too, 'how do his hands withstand so much?'. The first person perspective of Biohazard and Village do not remove the avatar but locate it entirely in the expressivity of the hands. The hands suffer, the hands recoil, sending a sympathetic agony to the player's connection to Ethan — our hands. We touch Ethan through our hands, and we touch the world through Ethan's hands. The stubborn corporeality of Ethan is too much because of the environment that is touched and that touches back.
The last generation of action games worked to minimise the distance between the player and game world through the player avatar witnessing and recording their environmental percepts. The Last of Us and the Tomb Raider reboots placed a great physical and verbal emphasis on this. In these games to move to a wall is to see the hand move up and hold it, and even to comment on its texture, or the temperature of rivers, or the slipperiness of the muddy ground, or the chill in the wind. Biohazard and Village take this further in pursuit of immediate 'tactisigns', or 'a touching which is specific to the gaze'. The mise en scene is given directly to the player through the touch of the hands, and this works as an intensive sensation rather than a third person dramatic record. It is not that Ethan touches and we witness, but that we too sense the qualities of the world that arise from that interaction. Of that being there.
A list I encountered recently encourages players to think about games that smell. Village stinks. The objects and environments glow with intensive dust and decay that the player frantically encounters just to absorb. It is a big game, but it is filled with properties eager to penetrate the player's ears and nose and tongue through the hands. Where Biohazard worked in the tradition of strange puzzles, or preset holes waiting to be filled by the player, Village pushes back against the satisfactions given by a pliable environment. Our hands touch the environment, study its objects, but they are cut and bruised and mauled by what they find there. It sets a more cognitive engagement with the world aside for a more immediate one where we are subjected to the myriad affects of Village that come fast and come from out of nowhere. It's an easy game to finish, but a difficult game to withstand moment by moment. It does fantastic work bringing genres of horror together through a naturalistic hub model, but its approach to space and audience bewilderment is still firmly indebted to Tobe Hooper. Like Hooper's films it has a sense of physical humour that only makes it more brutal. It is linear, and brisk, but exhausting. Its artifice is vital, and etches itself in your soul.
What improves most in Village over Biohazard is the way the sudden acceleration of the final act works to minimise the player's efforts to emotionally resonant ends. Where Biohazard shifts everything along geographically and in terms of play-style, Village confronts us with the exact space we had grown used to as much as we feared it, but with all its fearful substance removed. Ultimately this place is nothing; none of it matters. There was a plan, there always was a plan, but we were never in that plan. The thing is that Ethan stinks. To return to the notion that he is undead, alive because he is dead, I am reminded of the fact that Lazarus of Bethany stunk because he had been dead four days. The afterlife can never escape the hideous physicality of life, which is pain and decay. Chris does not stink, but Ethan rises like Lazarus, putrid and deformed, to torture himself before the impossible. As he ambles forward toward his child, we know he will do it again. Forever if he has to. Ethan finds peace when there is no Ethan; when no one plays or even thinks about him. And in that black nothingness, there is death without afterlife.
(de)mythologisation of the West at its most self-aware — looks, feels, and plays all vibrant and 3D Space Invaders-y (gangly bodies running at you, flashing things flying at you) as an arcade game so as to avoid in every way possible competing with Red Dead (which itself snuck in while Call of Juarez was attempting modern-day war on drugs type westerns instead). You know the world dies as soon as you leave the level, but such is the nature of a story as a series of discrete events, and such is the nature of a memory which is fallible and constantly alluded to in its fallibility (a conversation between the narrator and his audience manipulates the landscape surreally or just calls bullshit). I would love to say that it's more important than it is satisfying to play, but time so far has not been kind to Call of Juarez: Gunslinger either. I'm sure it'll be featured in post-Western histories somewhere down the track and it'll deserve its place there. For now, who knows. That's the problem with concept-driven work, I suppose.
2010
Returning many years later because at the time I thought it might be a masterpiece for its incredible sadness as a thing in its own right, and for its advancements within Rockstar games' linear history (if this is indeed 'GTA with horsies'). GTA IV pared back the 'scope' of San Andreas which was frankly too big for its own good (according to its detractors), shooting instead for a world which was living, breathing, and, crucially, inhabited (where SA was 3-4 cities surrounded by hills and (both intentional and unintentional) ghost towns). Red Dead proved you could have it both ways — when playing it feels lonesome it's thematically lonesome (rather than forgotten by devs) — there's enough variety in the environment that everything feels significant, and if that's not enough then the NPCs and animals found in the wild acknowledge the player's presence, whether through fear or violence.
My issue with it then was that everything post-Fort Mercer disappeared in a haze and then it was over. I've tried to pay attention to it this time in order to account for lost time, and what happens is that after Fort Mercer, Red Dead actually does become something like Grand Theft auto: Horsies. The landscape becomes secondary to the action or to advancing the plot, and all is lost in a blur of cutscenes, quirky NPCs, fighty-bits, and however much John Marston protests "I'll only help you if you advance the plot for me," (thus contextualising the fighty-bits) decentralised activity making for a sort of action-game lobotomy. This becomes incredibly obvious having 'completed' Mexico, riding (if, as you should, one refuses to fast-travel) through those war-torn deserts to the familiarly barren Rio Bravo/Cholla Springs, and stopping for a second in the prairie of Hennigan's Stead where the formative bits of Red Dead played out: in a silent introduction our hero is coerced into enacting a revenge that he does not believe in, where we think he will show off his ability to enact said revenge but is instead overpowered in spite of his stoic-cowboy verbalising, where he then wakes up in a shack on some prairie thanks entirely to the kindness of strangers, removes himself from his bed, and shoots rabbits and shit in the thickened and tender time of the prairie.
The body is a tomb and the body is vulnerable — in spite of the metaphysically astounding skies (the way different types of light effectively re-paint the entire world as it occurs in real life: from the harsh sun of midday where the game plays prickly, to the diffused magic hour where one moves slower) and weather (the storms with the power of a JMW Turner), Marston walks down the stairs one at a time. If I could write for shit I would write 100 pages on John Marston walking down the stairs one at a time and what this means experientially for the player, but these non-sentences will have to suffice: because the character is 'trapped' in this situation (depersonalised revenge on those who mean something, personally) and the player is trapped with him (as him?), the tragedy is gut-wrenchingly fatalistic. The body is a tomb, the revenge is hollow, the fights are both confusing and dissatisfying (almost Peckinpah-esque), and the videogame medium has been used for this anti-western in a way that is distinct to the videogame medium — it's embodiment as punishment. The painterly dimensions and cross-media references (Rockstar's pop culture regurgitation and the fact that most 'westerns' we admire are samurai films re-tooled as examinations of the values and tropes of the western previous) are worthy of critical discussion and admiration, but the way the game plays as a game (kinaesthetically) is where the ineluctable art lies. Even when one was not flying in GTA there was a forward momentum and impression that the body could transcend the world-as-prop. The best one can do in Red Dead is shoot birds from the sky, to bring what is up there down here with us. Whether one agrees that the landscape is the protagonist or not, it is sublime in the Schopenhauerian sense (i.e. not just beautiful skies) — it reminds again and again that the player is trapped in it, that it cannot sustain her, and that it will outlive her.
This cosmic insignificance is acknowledged and worked with in the early game, killing rabbits, herding cattle, and attempting to use in-game markers rather than the inexplicable horse GPS. As a build-up to a doomed stand-off, the game is perfect. One could certainly account for the blur of violence, narrative sub-plots, and ends-driven travel that begins at the 33% mark by pointing out that the further the character returns to his 'old ways', the less he gives a shit about his sublime insignificance, shooting rabbits, ascending/descending the stairs step by step, etc, and the more he welcomes the psychosis of ends-driven ultraviolence. But three things in particular stand in opposition to this: the fact that the player is 'welcomed' to Mexico with a forced on-the-rails twitch-game massacre (in stark contrast to the game earlier asking the player to consider every life they might take), the late game where Marston receives his payment (and the prairie-like 'every little thing matters' nature of the early game returns with it), and the ending (whose tragedy/fatalism/etc is reinforced or even resurrected by the return of the aforementioned prairie-style gameplay).
Red Dead Redemption is bookended by folk tragedy and low-key non-heroics brought about by a body that cannot help but react to every single rock, tree, patch of grass, drop of rain, sunset, staircase. What happens in the middle is one of the downsides to creating something expensive when success is measured by financial returns, and the way to guarantee said returns is to imagine the dumbest possible audience. There's enough to argue the case that Red Dead is one of the more thoughtful, fatalistic masterpieces of the medium, but the concessions it makes to fulfil its obligations to an imagined audience who want GTA: Horsies are difficult to ignore.
My issue with it then was that everything post-Fort Mercer disappeared in a haze and then it was over. I've tried to pay attention to it this time in order to account for lost time, and what happens is that after Fort Mercer, Red Dead actually does become something like Grand Theft auto: Horsies. The landscape becomes secondary to the action or to advancing the plot, and all is lost in a blur of cutscenes, quirky NPCs, fighty-bits, and however much John Marston protests "I'll only help you if you advance the plot for me," (thus contextualising the fighty-bits) decentralised activity making for a sort of action-game lobotomy. This becomes incredibly obvious having 'completed' Mexico, riding (if, as you should, one refuses to fast-travel) through those war-torn deserts to the familiarly barren Rio Bravo/Cholla Springs, and stopping for a second in the prairie of Hennigan's Stead where the formative bits of Red Dead played out: in a silent introduction our hero is coerced into enacting a revenge that he does not believe in, where we think he will show off his ability to enact said revenge but is instead overpowered in spite of his stoic-cowboy verbalising, where he then wakes up in a shack on some prairie thanks entirely to the kindness of strangers, removes himself from his bed, and shoots rabbits and shit in the thickened and tender time of the prairie.
The body is a tomb and the body is vulnerable — in spite of the metaphysically astounding skies (the way different types of light effectively re-paint the entire world as it occurs in real life: from the harsh sun of midday where the game plays prickly, to the diffused magic hour where one moves slower) and weather (the storms with the power of a JMW Turner), Marston walks down the stairs one at a time. If I could write for shit I would write 100 pages on John Marston walking down the stairs one at a time and what this means experientially for the player, but these non-sentences will have to suffice: because the character is 'trapped' in this situation (depersonalised revenge on those who mean something, personally) and the player is trapped with him (as him?), the tragedy is gut-wrenchingly fatalistic. The body is a tomb, the revenge is hollow, the fights are both confusing and dissatisfying (almost Peckinpah-esque), and the videogame medium has been used for this anti-western in a way that is distinct to the videogame medium — it's embodiment as punishment. The painterly dimensions and cross-media references (Rockstar's pop culture regurgitation and the fact that most 'westerns' we admire are samurai films re-tooled as examinations of the values and tropes of the western previous) are worthy of critical discussion and admiration, but the way the game plays as a game (kinaesthetically) is where the ineluctable art lies. Even when one was not flying in GTA there was a forward momentum and impression that the body could transcend the world-as-prop. The best one can do in Red Dead is shoot birds from the sky, to bring what is up there down here with us. Whether one agrees that the landscape is the protagonist or not, it is sublime in the Schopenhauerian sense (i.e. not just beautiful skies) — it reminds again and again that the player is trapped in it, that it cannot sustain her, and that it will outlive her.
This cosmic insignificance is acknowledged and worked with in the early game, killing rabbits, herding cattle, and attempting to use in-game markers rather than the inexplicable horse GPS. As a build-up to a doomed stand-off, the game is perfect. One could certainly account for the blur of violence, narrative sub-plots, and ends-driven travel that begins at the 33% mark by pointing out that the further the character returns to his 'old ways', the less he gives a shit about his sublime insignificance, shooting rabbits, ascending/descending the stairs step by step, etc, and the more he welcomes the psychosis of ends-driven ultraviolence. But three things in particular stand in opposition to this: the fact that the player is 'welcomed' to Mexico with a forced on-the-rails twitch-game massacre (in stark contrast to the game earlier asking the player to consider every life they might take), the late game where Marston receives his payment (and the prairie-like 'every little thing matters' nature of the early game returns with it), and the ending (whose tragedy/fatalism/etc is reinforced or even resurrected by the return of the aforementioned prairie-style gameplay).
Red Dead Redemption is bookended by folk tragedy and low-key non-heroics brought about by a body that cannot help but react to every single rock, tree, patch of grass, drop of rain, sunset, staircase. What happens in the middle is one of the downsides to creating something expensive when success is measured by financial returns, and the way to guarantee said returns is to imagine the dumbest possible audience. There's enough to argue the case that Red Dead is one of the more thoughtful, fatalistic masterpieces of the medium, but the concessions it makes to fulfil its obligations to an imagined audience who want GTA: Horsies are difficult to ignore.
2016
Before delivering on any of its digital impressionist vistas, Firewatch throws us into a black screen where we get to choose how we fail our loved one. We can only fail them, however hard we try, and that is our introduction to the game. It's a brief section, but it sets player expectations for narrative decision making in Firewatch, and demonstrates how even the smallest piece of player agency can make for something emotively charged when done well. As with Telltale's The Walking Dead it's not about mechanical branches, but about the player participating in the drama, providing the human angle to the game's events. As blockbuster games become more elaborate with the way they deal with cause and effect, indie games isolate moments of reflection, forcing the player to consider their own values as they work through what's happening on screen. Kentucky Route Zero does this with free association such that the player begins unconsciously drawing out their own fears and anxieties, but in Firewatch we simply participate in constructing Henry's bullshit. He's doing the wrong thing, reasonably or unreasonably, and when called out he's unlikely to tell the truth, because he himself has lost his mooring. Whatever we say is the right thing, because anything we could say would be wrong.
Firewatch has received widespread praise for its visual style, and for good reason. Where similarly expressive works such as Inside and Shelter are so commanding in their style that the player can only act in accordance with their logic, Firewatch holds back for an openness that makes it feel conventionally navigable. Its colour palettes draw on the jarring experiments of Proteus but its forms and textures are staunchly mimetic, and its pastel finish draws it back into stylisation compared to contemporary The Witness. This last point is critical, as the diffused colours and light effects make the game feel like an echo; like it's happening in past tense. Whatever narrative reason frames the game, there is a wistful quality to Firewatch that brings with it a knowing melancholy that this is all a fabricated memory. Even when outside influences threaten this rose-tinted utopia, when the developers employ cinematic ellipsis to have the world of Firewatch step down in favour of character-centric drama, the player feels it calling back through time. The parallel here to Henry is obvious, as he clearly needs to get back to the responsibilities of his life outside of Firewatch, but as the mysteries of the game grow more pronounced and even dictate our engagement in the dream-environment, the player's affective link to it is broken in favour of someone else's enacted drama. Prince Avalanche, another work in the wake of the Yellowstone fires of 1988, better handled this temporal unease, allowing the viewer to wander around Alvin and Lance's narrative instead of being chained to it. The story in Firewatch is good in the sense that it's well paced and often frightening, but a stronger work would have been made if it had been pushed into the background, allowing us to become one with the environment, and with loss itself.
There is the sense that Campo Santo are well aware of this, and opt for a balance between the much derided 'walking simulator' and a more obvious narrative compulsion to satisfy all potential parties. Rather than feeling lost, we come to watch someone else being lost, and the most compelling embodiment of isolation (the environment) becomes the stage for dialogue-driven storytelling about precisely this. I'd opt for an inverse balance of narratological and ludic components (in order to enhance the emotional significance of both), but can't begrudge how well the developer goes in the opposite direction. The dialogue is perfect, the performances uniformly tender when tender counts and guarded when it doesn't, the map circular enough for linear storytelling. The story is a con, the conclusion invariably a betrayal, but where the game's scripted 'moments' and role-plays subside are the small instances of individual panic and satisfaction that the player takes with them into the day, the week, the month. I can't wait to see what Campo Santo will do without feeling the need to compromise.
Firewatch has received widespread praise for its visual style, and for good reason. Where similarly expressive works such as Inside and Shelter are so commanding in their style that the player can only act in accordance with their logic, Firewatch holds back for an openness that makes it feel conventionally navigable. Its colour palettes draw on the jarring experiments of Proteus but its forms and textures are staunchly mimetic, and its pastel finish draws it back into stylisation compared to contemporary The Witness. This last point is critical, as the diffused colours and light effects make the game feel like an echo; like it's happening in past tense. Whatever narrative reason frames the game, there is a wistful quality to Firewatch that brings with it a knowing melancholy that this is all a fabricated memory. Even when outside influences threaten this rose-tinted utopia, when the developers employ cinematic ellipsis to have the world of Firewatch step down in favour of character-centric drama, the player feels it calling back through time. The parallel here to Henry is obvious, as he clearly needs to get back to the responsibilities of his life outside of Firewatch, but as the mysteries of the game grow more pronounced and even dictate our engagement in the dream-environment, the player's affective link to it is broken in favour of someone else's enacted drama. Prince Avalanche, another work in the wake of the Yellowstone fires of 1988, better handled this temporal unease, allowing the viewer to wander around Alvin and Lance's narrative instead of being chained to it. The story in Firewatch is good in the sense that it's well paced and often frightening, but a stronger work would have been made if it had been pushed into the background, allowing us to become one with the environment, and with loss itself.
There is the sense that Campo Santo are well aware of this, and opt for a balance between the much derided 'walking simulator' and a more obvious narrative compulsion to satisfy all potential parties. Rather than feeling lost, we come to watch someone else being lost, and the most compelling embodiment of isolation (the environment) becomes the stage for dialogue-driven storytelling about precisely this. I'd opt for an inverse balance of narratological and ludic components (in order to enhance the emotional significance of both), but can't begrudge how well the developer goes in the opposite direction. The dialogue is perfect, the performances uniformly tender when tender counts and guarded when it doesn't, the map circular enough for linear storytelling. The story is a con, the conclusion invariably a betrayal, but where the game's scripted 'moments' and role-plays subside are the small instances of individual panic and satisfaction that the player takes with them into the day, the week, the month. I can't wait to see what Campo Santo will do without feeling the need to compromise.
2016
Being a series that never repeats a character or world, the enduring conflict in the Final Fantasy series is between technological determinism and artistic vision. Its arguably finest moment, Final Fantasy VII, resolves the two seamlessly: a game of unheralded beauty and scope that could have only been made with the affordances of the CD ROM over cartridges. The question of whether the game was made for the PlayStation, or whether the platform gave the developers the tools they needed for uninhibited creative expression can be argued either way, although it seems obvious that both are the case. For the past two decades however the picture has been one of negotiation: what in the mid nineties seemed like expressive opportunity quickly revealed itself as a contract for tech fetish show-reels, the game as an advertisement for the platform. This has put the series in a strange position where it has had to both embody and warn against the popular narrative of graphical (mimetic) progress leading to better art. Across the post-VII titles we see a variety of ways to use spectacle to artistic ends, to deny spectacle for artistic emphasis, to reconstitute notions of beauty and playability. The series' last moment of optimism was Final Fantasy X, a consciously next gen looking game that above all attempted to tell its most moving story yet. It succeeded, but beneath this was a subversive meta-commentary on stimulation; tech determinism and numbing blockbusters; resistance as affection; radicals salvaging and repurposing the tools jettisoned in the name of progress.
This decade's entry, and the would-be platform advertisement (as VII and X before) Final Fantasy XIII was met with scorn from players and critics alike for delivering on impressive cut-scenes but falling short as a game and a dramatic work. Although it seemed at the time upsetting that a once unimpeachable series could suddenly be faulted, this failure highlighted a widespread public rejection of tech determinism in favour of something more sophisticated. Game aesthetics after all are not surface textures alone but the way the game moves, the way the player feels grounded or groundless in its environments, the rules of the game (what can and can't be done), confrontations in and around the game's embedded narrative, and the way these things flow into one another. It is with this in mind that we come to Final Fantasy XV: the most joyously bizarre and infuriating big profile game released this lifetime. It's a heavily reflexive work, but unlike X it lays out and explores its themes with a startling clarity activated by free-form play. Where others in the series might force the player through tens of hours of storytelling before opening up as a reward, XV reverses the formula such that it begins as an 'open world' and it is up to the player to decide when to move things along in a dramatically meaningful way. Every day then is the sum of what the player explored, of the hangouts with the central friend group, of the pictures taken for the memories. The time of the open world is actually time-less, variable in weather events, but effectively a kind of influence-free dreamstate from which we choose to or not to, awaken.
Its curious approach to time and time-keeping is explored through the friction between storytelling and gameplay, and as such simply running around forces us to examine notions of entertainment, time-wasting, escapism, and responsibility. The game's master-stroke is that it all registers emotionally as well as thematically. What is immediately apparent is that its broad narrative takes place at a distance: where we typically expect spectacular cut-scenes to establish worlds, relationships, and stakes, Final Fantasy XV begins with silent stares and disappointed glances. The game starts when we walk out of the story at hand, and there we remain on the perimeter, with the nobodies. When macro context is required, we receive short flashbacks or fragments of action happening from afar. We might be curious, but Noctis has decided that these things do not matter because they are not directly impacting him and his endless summer. We remember back to those disappointed glances and realise that to the standards of everyone outside of our friend group (those engaged in what looks like a conventional RPG), we are failures.
Critics have pointed out that the bland repetition of sidequests in the game makes it feel as grindy as an MMO, and indeed this sense of uselessness is not helped by the anti-spectacle of the way that we receive the central narrative. This is all by design; we are both supposed to enjoy and not enjoy fucking around aimlessly. The combat builds on the gravity-defying kinetics of Kingdom Hearts to the point that it is difficult to tell whether you are terrible or super good at the game. For those who struggle with spontaneous chaos, there is the option to slow things down and change it into a more conventional turn-based RPG. One does get the feeling however that we're supposed to run into everything in real-time, sloppily, crashing into existence, and realising a bit too late that we need to pack our shit and run for the hills. Nobody is forcing us to do these additional pointless things. The central game can be completed in a matter of hours, but there's so much to do that means so very little! Where else do we get to hear the four friends talking shit? Where else do we get to launch into frantic combat half by accident only to come across spine-tingling vistas which we then photograph and review over a beer in the evening? Director Hajime Tabata knows that it is all meaningless, but the game is for those who find profundity in aimlessness-
Oh, the alcoholic afternoons
When we sat in your rooms
They meant more to me
Than any, than any living thing on earth
As we play through the batshit fights and race the sunshine to the lakeside campground, we come across people who all make a point of asking Isn't there something else you should be doing?. Early in the game this feels like the bland pre-programmed dialogue that so often comes in an open world with too many NPCS for meaningful scripting, but before long it registers in two ways. First, we feel guilty that we're not moving things forward and accepting responsibility as the game's 'hero', and second, an expiry date is put on this utopia- we become acutely aware that this is a fragile state that must necessarily come to an end. Like that last summer between finishing high school and deciding what's next, before people grow up and change and move to different cities, XV is full of pointless diversions, ecstatic highs, and a bitter feeling that the sun is setting on an endless summer. We feel the tipping point coming at about Chapter 9 and from there it's a free-fall into adult responsibility, mortality, and the dissolution of friendship. Tabata allows us to travel between this new dramatically active present and the useless past, but he does this in a strange and moving way- where in the present people are maimed and friends become enemies, in the past everything is still sun-drenched and golden- an eternity of youth and forever-friendships. I openly admit to welling up multiple times at the goodwill and happiness of the game's nostalgic utopia, as the present by contrast becomes so cold and unforgiving.
What is so unexpected is that we anticipate a hero's journey from Noctis, but the game is made jagged by its bold subversions. Noctis must learn what he can to make things better, but also to understand the implications of his shirking. He'll be the first to tell you that he will never be the hero the world needs, but it's more complicated than just walking away and letting someone else take over. The game is sympathetic to the teenage myopia of why should I? I never asked for this- like Donnie Darko's self-martyrdom, his ultimate expression of selflessness must come through a selfish framework. And like Donnie Darko there's a kind of empathy involved therein. We receive flashes of his betrothed, Lunafreya, but neither party seem interested in ever meeting. Luna has fully embraced her role as healer and oracle, orchestrating the events of Final Fantasy XV as its sole hero, the one person who genuinely cares about, and can positively influence how things will go. She deserves better, or different, but she's stuck with this, and whatever Noctis deserves, he's not up to what must follow. It's difficult to account for why Noctis and not Luna is the one we follow, although we can argue that Noctis is defined by the qualities he lacks compared to a) Lunafreya, and b) his friends who form a composite hero. We fuck around as Noctis, able to get by through the efforts made by others, and the realisation we come to is not unlike that of K in Blade Runner 2049. Final Fantasy XV is not the game we get to play; it's everything that we miss.
Tonally Final Fantasy XV strikes a perfect balance between knowing and spontaneous weirdness, which means that it frequently pushes itself into the domain of Deadly Premonition-esque uncanny horror. At its most pointed it uses this unease to take a stab at big budget games mimicking the surfaces of the physical world without considering how they'll appear in the context of an animation, and this otherwise underscores the cognitive dissonance involved in playing games whose narrative beats are out of sync with the way we play them. We'll receive bad news, witness something frightening, or just shit talk about frogs, and before we know it we're stumbling off into images of stunning grace and elegance. An ongoing issue with open world games is whether developers can make them feel alive, as emptiness makes for ghost towns and hyperactivity makes for claustrophobia, but Final Fantasy XV has a mixture of regional sameness and atmospheric dynamics that mean its landforms never stop exciting, especially when viewed from the motorways that have us gliding through the sublime. Towns and cities are brought to life with immense detail and have us stumbling through at night like drunks, not realising that we've been here already. Travelling at night means we're perpetually in need of a place to crash and restock, which means that settlements rarely feel redundant or deserted.
As a conventional narrative work it is unfulfilling by nature, because the onus is on the player to discover what matters and what doesn't on the narrative periphery. The real narrative is the memories made and reflected on at the end of every day through Prompto's viewfinder. When things come together they do so with a processional sadness that feels like a splash of cold water to the face. Even with closure, the game actively denies the player catharsis. The work concerns itself with ennui, responsibility, and the passage of time, and it liberates itself from the expensive demonstration of these themes by having the player work through them instead. As I have said, the Final Fantasy series has frustratedly been arguing for a complicated game aesthetics for over two decades, from its position as the leader of shiny new surfaces. In many ways the consciously retrograde Final Fantasy IX predicted (and encouraged) the rise in indie games as a response to regurgitative AAA titles, and Final Fantasy XII demonstrated the series' ambitions: an artistic digital patina; an emphasis on flow, freedom, and experimentation; a ground-view, decentralised view of a greater narrative.
A more truthful, more constructive view of the series is not one of self-contained masterpieces, but as a network of ideas about play, about storytelling, about art, which as time goes on increasingly learn from and challenge one another, resulting in works both disastrously and wonderfully broken. The series has always been progressive, even when it's retrograde, and sound even when it's scrappy. Final Fantasy XV is a perfect disaster, and an indication that rather than playing it safe, these things are only going to get stranger in pursuit of new highs and impossible resolutions.
This decade's entry, and the would-be platform advertisement (as VII and X before) Final Fantasy XIII was met with scorn from players and critics alike for delivering on impressive cut-scenes but falling short as a game and a dramatic work. Although it seemed at the time upsetting that a once unimpeachable series could suddenly be faulted, this failure highlighted a widespread public rejection of tech determinism in favour of something more sophisticated. Game aesthetics after all are not surface textures alone but the way the game moves, the way the player feels grounded or groundless in its environments, the rules of the game (what can and can't be done), confrontations in and around the game's embedded narrative, and the way these things flow into one another. It is with this in mind that we come to Final Fantasy XV: the most joyously bizarre and infuriating big profile game released this lifetime. It's a heavily reflexive work, but unlike X it lays out and explores its themes with a startling clarity activated by free-form play. Where others in the series might force the player through tens of hours of storytelling before opening up as a reward, XV reverses the formula such that it begins as an 'open world' and it is up to the player to decide when to move things along in a dramatically meaningful way. Every day then is the sum of what the player explored, of the hangouts with the central friend group, of the pictures taken for the memories. The time of the open world is actually time-less, variable in weather events, but effectively a kind of influence-free dreamstate from which we choose to or not to, awaken.
Its curious approach to time and time-keeping is explored through the friction between storytelling and gameplay, and as such simply running around forces us to examine notions of entertainment, time-wasting, escapism, and responsibility. The game's master-stroke is that it all registers emotionally as well as thematically. What is immediately apparent is that its broad narrative takes place at a distance: where we typically expect spectacular cut-scenes to establish worlds, relationships, and stakes, Final Fantasy XV begins with silent stares and disappointed glances. The game starts when we walk out of the story at hand, and there we remain on the perimeter, with the nobodies. When macro context is required, we receive short flashbacks or fragments of action happening from afar. We might be curious, but Noctis has decided that these things do not matter because they are not directly impacting him and his endless summer. We remember back to those disappointed glances and realise that to the standards of everyone outside of our friend group (those engaged in what looks like a conventional RPG), we are failures.
Critics have pointed out that the bland repetition of sidequests in the game makes it feel as grindy as an MMO, and indeed this sense of uselessness is not helped by the anti-spectacle of the way that we receive the central narrative. This is all by design; we are both supposed to enjoy and not enjoy fucking around aimlessly. The combat builds on the gravity-defying kinetics of Kingdom Hearts to the point that it is difficult to tell whether you are terrible or super good at the game. For those who struggle with spontaneous chaos, there is the option to slow things down and change it into a more conventional turn-based RPG. One does get the feeling however that we're supposed to run into everything in real-time, sloppily, crashing into existence, and realising a bit too late that we need to pack our shit and run for the hills. Nobody is forcing us to do these additional pointless things. The central game can be completed in a matter of hours, but there's so much to do that means so very little! Where else do we get to hear the four friends talking shit? Where else do we get to launch into frantic combat half by accident only to come across spine-tingling vistas which we then photograph and review over a beer in the evening? Director Hajime Tabata knows that it is all meaningless, but the game is for those who find profundity in aimlessness-
Oh, the alcoholic afternoons
When we sat in your rooms
They meant more to me
Than any, than any living thing on earth
As we play through the batshit fights and race the sunshine to the lakeside campground, we come across people who all make a point of asking Isn't there something else you should be doing?. Early in the game this feels like the bland pre-programmed dialogue that so often comes in an open world with too many NPCS for meaningful scripting, but before long it registers in two ways. First, we feel guilty that we're not moving things forward and accepting responsibility as the game's 'hero', and second, an expiry date is put on this utopia- we become acutely aware that this is a fragile state that must necessarily come to an end. Like that last summer between finishing high school and deciding what's next, before people grow up and change and move to different cities, XV is full of pointless diversions, ecstatic highs, and a bitter feeling that the sun is setting on an endless summer. We feel the tipping point coming at about Chapter 9 and from there it's a free-fall into adult responsibility, mortality, and the dissolution of friendship. Tabata allows us to travel between this new dramatically active present and the useless past, but he does this in a strange and moving way- where in the present people are maimed and friends become enemies, in the past everything is still sun-drenched and golden- an eternity of youth and forever-friendships. I openly admit to welling up multiple times at the goodwill and happiness of the game's nostalgic utopia, as the present by contrast becomes so cold and unforgiving.
What is so unexpected is that we anticipate a hero's journey from Noctis, but the game is made jagged by its bold subversions. Noctis must learn what he can to make things better, but also to understand the implications of his shirking. He'll be the first to tell you that he will never be the hero the world needs, but it's more complicated than just walking away and letting someone else take over. The game is sympathetic to the teenage myopia of why should I? I never asked for this- like Donnie Darko's self-martyrdom, his ultimate expression of selflessness must come through a selfish framework. And like Donnie Darko there's a kind of empathy involved therein. We receive flashes of his betrothed, Lunafreya, but neither party seem interested in ever meeting. Luna has fully embraced her role as healer and oracle, orchestrating the events of Final Fantasy XV as its sole hero, the one person who genuinely cares about, and can positively influence how things will go. She deserves better, or different, but she's stuck with this, and whatever Noctis deserves, he's not up to what must follow. It's difficult to account for why Noctis and not Luna is the one we follow, although we can argue that Noctis is defined by the qualities he lacks compared to a) Lunafreya, and b) his friends who form a composite hero. We fuck around as Noctis, able to get by through the efforts made by others, and the realisation we come to is not unlike that of K in Blade Runner 2049. Final Fantasy XV is not the game we get to play; it's everything that we miss.
Tonally Final Fantasy XV strikes a perfect balance between knowing and spontaneous weirdness, which means that it frequently pushes itself into the domain of Deadly Premonition-esque uncanny horror. At its most pointed it uses this unease to take a stab at big budget games mimicking the surfaces of the physical world without considering how they'll appear in the context of an animation, and this otherwise underscores the cognitive dissonance involved in playing games whose narrative beats are out of sync with the way we play them. We'll receive bad news, witness something frightening, or just shit talk about frogs, and before we know it we're stumbling off into images of stunning grace and elegance. An ongoing issue with open world games is whether developers can make them feel alive, as emptiness makes for ghost towns and hyperactivity makes for claustrophobia, but Final Fantasy XV has a mixture of regional sameness and atmospheric dynamics that mean its landforms never stop exciting, especially when viewed from the motorways that have us gliding through the sublime. Towns and cities are brought to life with immense detail and have us stumbling through at night like drunks, not realising that we've been here already. Travelling at night means we're perpetually in need of a place to crash and restock, which means that settlements rarely feel redundant or deserted.
As a conventional narrative work it is unfulfilling by nature, because the onus is on the player to discover what matters and what doesn't on the narrative periphery. The real narrative is the memories made and reflected on at the end of every day through Prompto's viewfinder. When things come together they do so with a processional sadness that feels like a splash of cold water to the face. Even with closure, the game actively denies the player catharsis. The work concerns itself with ennui, responsibility, and the passage of time, and it liberates itself from the expensive demonstration of these themes by having the player work through them instead. As I have said, the Final Fantasy series has frustratedly been arguing for a complicated game aesthetics for over two decades, from its position as the leader of shiny new surfaces. In many ways the consciously retrograde Final Fantasy IX predicted (and encouraged) the rise in indie games as a response to regurgitative AAA titles, and Final Fantasy XII demonstrated the series' ambitions: an artistic digital patina; an emphasis on flow, freedom, and experimentation; a ground-view, decentralised view of a greater narrative.
A more truthful, more constructive view of the series is not one of self-contained masterpieces, but as a network of ideas about play, about storytelling, about art, which as time goes on increasingly learn from and challenge one another, resulting in works both disastrously and wonderfully broken. The series has always been progressive, even when it's retrograde, and sound even when it's scrappy. Final Fantasy XV is a perfect disaster, and an indication that rather than playing it safe, these things are only going to get stranger in pursuit of new highs and impossible resolutions.
1999
Intermittently torturous, always detached, and Shenmue only improves in this regard two decades on. It is often cited as the open world urtext, but where Shenmue works in alienation the games it influenced put the player-character at the centre of the universe. In the Grand Theft Auto series the player moves in a reckless, fluid way, in stark contrast to the rigid and wandering NPCs — every frame explodes into being through our freedom, of movement, of decision, of infinite variety and eternal recurrence, and yet we are never allowed access to the patterns or behaviours of those around us. The very absence of an 'talk' button along with the sheer number of people spawned across the game environment has us intuitively accept that the world is that which we do — we are its God, its conductor. With Shenmue however, Ryo's body moves in this blocky, unwieldy way, and must fit into the whims and schedules of those around him. The game's day-night cycle seems to actively close rather than open opportunities, such as in cases where we are tasked with waiting tens of hours to meet certain people at certain times of day, and all Ryo's options for time-killing actively feel like time-killing (in the sense of time we know we will never get back) — throwing darts, visiting noodle houses, patting cats, watching the trees. There is no way to accelerate time's passing, and the only way to endure it is to actively make the time to enjoy the small things, which is to say reframing the story as the distraction and not the other way around. Still, as Zen as this all sounds, however beautiful the sunsets and poignant the broken swing by the stairs, Shenmue makes it so the player never feels as though they belong in it.
Every day begins and ends at the Hazuki Residence, in a curious disciplinary move that has us clumsily navigate a house that never becomes a home, waiting as Ryo puts on or takes off his shoes, before venturing into a world that similarly never opens up to him. The anonymous faces in Grand Theft Auto are props until they're activated by player action, reflecting the scale of cause and effect, but in Shenmue we are always trying to act according to the dominating logic of the world, making the people in it both obstacles that are necessary to progress the game, and ever-present reminders of our not belonging. If we see an 'interact' prompt appear near a stranger, Ryo is just as likely to receive some valuable information as he is to be, in the most polite way possible, called a creep and asked to leave. He can't jump or skip or even run through a door. He checks over his shoulder to make sure he's alone before exercising in the park. When Ryo sees someone else is using the stairs, he will wait until they get to the top before he even begins is ascent, one gets the sense out of discomfort rather than politeness. They have their routines and we don't have ours. This doesn't make us free, it makes us perpetually alone. An old woman asks Ryo for directions and says she'll wait at the park to hear from him. If the player forgets, the old woman can never be found again. How long did she wait? Did she find the place on her own? Is she okay? It's always like this, he's impossible, nobody knows who he is and neither does he. Even those who know Ryo's name expect something of him that he's failing to embody, and this sense of quiet failure permeates Shenmue in both the way the world is painted and the way it plays.
Interactions with friends and family remain at the level of surface courtesies, veiling a great sadness and isolation that hints at impossible rifts between each and every person. Nobody knows Ryo — he's always falling just short of being what others think they know of him, and on an entirely different course from what's expected in the long run. And looking to him for answers leads to an even more penetrating sense of absence, a passive neglect of others and a dead eyed embrace of tangible actions and information pathways where the insignificant is given significance, and significant actions are always underpinned by the mundane. He confronts gang members like a kid buying a toy, and he buys toys like he's finally found meaning in this world. The central ambiguity in Shenmue, and what makes it so affecting, is whether this suffocating sense of loneliness is inherent to the world or just Ryo, who as the game's protagonist paints the way it appears to us. Is there a difference? When he is showed great generosity by Fuku-San, Ryo's unreadable face casts a cold negation of the gesture, making the other person seem comically, embarrassingly over-expressive. But it's Ryo who is embarrassing — his straightforward detective questioning, gullibility, and tonedeaf approach to human interaction make his journey less a myopic descent into obsession than a sort of hobby or project, a convenient opportunity for something to do. At one stage Nozomi asks Ryu about school, and we realise all this free time he has is the result of shirking a role that could give him some structure; some direction. In every sense he is out of sync: like Kyle MacLachlan's character in Blue Velvet no matter how successfully he works through the underbelly of his town he's only ever met with bemusement and confusion by the people he finds there. He can't be here, but he can't go back either. Once again the mechanic of Ryo's return to the Hazuki Residence reinforces every morning and every evening that there is no home for him. Shenmue is affecting because it forces us to play through, to physically enact this discomfort, while reading around Ryo that it is he who is the stranger.
The strangest and most subtly moving decision made is that the game's final act begins with Ryo taking on a job at the dock, driving forklifts. Where Ryo's physically cumbersome body spent weeks running around Dobuita, mangling interactions and finding ways to kill time, Ryo's dock work finally gives him purpose, a routine, and targets to meet. Throughout the rest of the game it is impossible to know whether one is making progress or floundering, but the dock work gives instant feedback in the form of quotas and bonus cheques reflecting efforts made. The forklifts also control with a fluidity uncommon in the rest of the game and reach speeds he can't on foot. Lunch breaks begin at the same time every day with a shot of Ryo sitting with his colleagues and eating; he could almost belong here. And because we're not waiting for time to pass but rather trying to do things in time, the way the skies change during the afternoon shift can at the docks be appreciated for how beautiful they are. Time becomes valuable, and as it passes it fills the scene with warmth before it leaves. Despite the routinised action or perhaps because of it, it is clear there will never be another day exactly like this one. One afternoon Ryo sees Nozomi at the docks taking photos and there is this confronting atmosphere because Ryo for the first time sees himself in the face of someone who recognises what he's doing — not for what his family represents or what anyone thinks he should be doing, but for what he is doing as he works at the dock. This is followed by a strange and beautiful sequence where Ryo's and Nozomi's photograph is taken twice, and Ryo must pick one to take away. One makes it appear as though they are lovers, the other, total strangers, and clearly the truth is somewhere in between. This moment of self-presentation to someone who matters is immediately turned into a fiction, or perhaps memorialised as a future that can never be between two people, one who doesn't know who she is but knows what she wants, the other a blank surface reflecting back everything indeterminate, everything unsure, everything anxious about the one unfortunate enough to look. He is in short a negation.
As the year wraps up, the uncaring faces increase in volume, and many of the familiar ones say they're going away. Ryo's neighbourhood, already a quietly lonely place, comes to feel like a ghost town of dead end interactions and suspended time — a place simultaneously too big and too small to sustain life. Ryo's dispassionate movement through Yokosuka is curious, because he is not the one feeling these things. Everything to him is information, and if that information leads abroad, so be it. He doesn't care one way or another, but we do. That Yokosuka is framed as a place that is already dead and in the process of being remembered must then belong to somebody else, someone who is remembering the story as Ryo tells it. Indeed as others try to reach out for him it becomes clear that it is not the town that is the ghost, but Ryo, that figure once present and well liked but who died one day and now glides through with blank eyes, forever out of time and place.
Without the language of Chinese cinema the story is simplistic and weird, but its grandiose animated dreams and talks of fate cut an effective threshold between the exhaustingly quotidian world of Shenmue and its mythic aspirations. Its textures are uniformly dingy and wet looking but this adds to Ryo's sense of claustrophobia, and the alienating temporality of the game that insists we shouldn't be here. Indeed the construction of the New Yokosuka Movie Theatre that will never be finished, and dig site and Sakuragaoka suggest the world will keep moving once we leave but can't start until that happens. The ability to talk to people who will only offer 'Sorry I don't feel like talking' leads to disappointment before its themes of isolation become clear. The animations haven't aged well but the offbeat rhythms of the game work its visuals into an uncanny space both otherworldly and uncomfortably familiar. It's also occasionally gorgeous by any standards: in one scene on a motorbike Yu Suzuki manages an extended reference to Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels and, short a bloom effect to mimic that director's blurry expressionism, simply layers brake light colours across the screen. I'll admit I lost my breath for a full minute: the absence of a bleeding light for a strange, rigid, suspended rendering of abstract human emotion might be the game in a single wonderful image.
Every day begins and ends at the Hazuki Residence, in a curious disciplinary move that has us clumsily navigate a house that never becomes a home, waiting as Ryo puts on or takes off his shoes, before venturing into a world that similarly never opens up to him. The anonymous faces in Grand Theft Auto are props until they're activated by player action, reflecting the scale of cause and effect, but in Shenmue we are always trying to act according to the dominating logic of the world, making the people in it both obstacles that are necessary to progress the game, and ever-present reminders of our not belonging. If we see an 'interact' prompt appear near a stranger, Ryo is just as likely to receive some valuable information as he is to be, in the most polite way possible, called a creep and asked to leave. He can't jump or skip or even run through a door. He checks over his shoulder to make sure he's alone before exercising in the park. When Ryo sees someone else is using the stairs, he will wait until they get to the top before he even begins is ascent, one gets the sense out of discomfort rather than politeness. They have their routines and we don't have ours. This doesn't make us free, it makes us perpetually alone. An old woman asks Ryo for directions and says she'll wait at the park to hear from him. If the player forgets, the old woman can never be found again. How long did she wait? Did she find the place on her own? Is she okay? It's always like this, he's impossible, nobody knows who he is and neither does he. Even those who know Ryo's name expect something of him that he's failing to embody, and this sense of quiet failure permeates Shenmue in both the way the world is painted and the way it plays.
Interactions with friends and family remain at the level of surface courtesies, veiling a great sadness and isolation that hints at impossible rifts between each and every person. Nobody knows Ryo — he's always falling just short of being what others think they know of him, and on an entirely different course from what's expected in the long run. And looking to him for answers leads to an even more penetrating sense of absence, a passive neglect of others and a dead eyed embrace of tangible actions and information pathways where the insignificant is given significance, and significant actions are always underpinned by the mundane. He confronts gang members like a kid buying a toy, and he buys toys like he's finally found meaning in this world. The central ambiguity in Shenmue, and what makes it so affecting, is whether this suffocating sense of loneliness is inherent to the world or just Ryo, who as the game's protagonist paints the way it appears to us. Is there a difference? When he is showed great generosity by Fuku-San, Ryo's unreadable face casts a cold negation of the gesture, making the other person seem comically, embarrassingly over-expressive. But it's Ryo who is embarrassing — his straightforward detective questioning, gullibility, and tonedeaf approach to human interaction make his journey less a myopic descent into obsession than a sort of hobby or project, a convenient opportunity for something to do. At one stage Nozomi asks Ryu about school, and we realise all this free time he has is the result of shirking a role that could give him some structure; some direction. In every sense he is out of sync: like Kyle MacLachlan's character in Blue Velvet no matter how successfully he works through the underbelly of his town he's only ever met with bemusement and confusion by the people he finds there. He can't be here, but he can't go back either. Once again the mechanic of Ryo's return to the Hazuki Residence reinforces every morning and every evening that there is no home for him. Shenmue is affecting because it forces us to play through, to physically enact this discomfort, while reading around Ryo that it is he who is the stranger.
The strangest and most subtly moving decision made is that the game's final act begins with Ryo taking on a job at the dock, driving forklifts. Where Ryo's physically cumbersome body spent weeks running around Dobuita, mangling interactions and finding ways to kill time, Ryo's dock work finally gives him purpose, a routine, and targets to meet. Throughout the rest of the game it is impossible to know whether one is making progress or floundering, but the dock work gives instant feedback in the form of quotas and bonus cheques reflecting efforts made. The forklifts also control with a fluidity uncommon in the rest of the game and reach speeds he can't on foot. Lunch breaks begin at the same time every day with a shot of Ryo sitting with his colleagues and eating; he could almost belong here. And because we're not waiting for time to pass but rather trying to do things in time, the way the skies change during the afternoon shift can at the docks be appreciated for how beautiful they are. Time becomes valuable, and as it passes it fills the scene with warmth before it leaves. Despite the routinised action or perhaps because of it, it is clear there will never be another day exactly like this one. One afternoon Ryo sees Nozomi at the docks taking photos and there is this confronting atmosphere because Ryo for the first time sees himself in the face of someone who recognises what he's doing — not for what his family represents or what anyone thinks he should be doing, but for what he is doing as he works at the dock. This is followed by a strange and beautiful sequence where Ryo's and Nozomi's photograph is taken twice, and Ryo must pick one to take away. One makes it appear as though they are lovers, the other, total strangers, and clearly the truth is somewhere in between. This moment of self-presentation to someone who matters is immediately turned into a fiction, or perhaps memorialised as a future that can never be between two people, one who doesn't know who she is but knows what she wants, the other a blank surface reflecting back everything indeterminate, everything unsure, everything anxious about the one unfortunate enough to look. He is in short a negation.
As the year wraps up, the uncaring faces increase in volume, and many of the familiar ones say they're going away. Ryo's neighbourhood, already a quietly lonely place, comes to feel like a ghost town of dead end interactions and suspended time — a place simultaneously too big and too small to sustain life. Ryo's dispassionate movement through Yokosuka is curious, because he is not the one feeling these things. Everything to him is information, and if that information leads abroad, so be it. He doesn't care one way or another, but we do. That Yokosuka is framed as a place that is already dead and in the process of being remembered must then belong to somebody else, someone who is remembering the story as Ryo tells it. Indeed as others try to reach out for him it becomes clear that it is not the town that is the ghost, but Ryo, that figure once present and well liked but who died one day and now glides through with blank eyes, forever out of time and place.
Without the language of Chinese cinema the story is simplistic and weird, but its grandiose animated dreams and talks of fate cut an effective threshold between the exhaustingly quotidian world of Shenmue and its mythic aspirations. Its textures are uniformly dingy and wet looking but this adds to Ryo's sense of claustrophobia, and the alienating temporality of the game that insists we shouldn't be here. Indeed the construction of the New Yokosuka Movie Theatre that will never be finished, and dig site and Sakuragaoka suggest the world will keep moving once we leave but can't start until that happens. The ability to talk to people who will only offer 'Sorry I don't feel like talking' leads to disappointment before its themes of isolation become clear. The animations haven't aged well but the offbeat rhythms of the game work its visuals into an uncanny space both otherworldly and uncomfortably familiar. It's also occasionally gorgeous by any standards: in one scene on a motorbike Yu Suzuki manages an extended reference to Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels and, short a bloom effect to mimic that director's blurry expressionism, simply layers brake light colours across the screen. I'll admit I lost my breath for a full minute: the absence of a bleeding light for a strange, rigid, suspended rendering of abstract human emotion might be the game in a single wonderful image.
1999
What the junction system introduces in customisability, it performs in sacrilege to the idea of characters progressing toward mastery. Having to 'draw' spells makes every individual just the sum of what is available to them on the threshold of an action; a compound or assemblage that comes into being moment-by-moment. Nobody is innately anything, they're all just ordinary. I can understand why this upsets some, not because it is a bad system in itself, but because the game is already so cold and strange. The human proportions given to the character models, and then the way they're rendered in sharp fragments, makes it all feel strangely distanced. The cutscenes as well work less to pull us into the world and impress us (as other Final Fantasy titles do), and more to establish that there is something already going on with these people, something we have to work to catch up on. The most compelling animations set the tone, with emphasis given to either moments of intimacy like holding hands or dancing, or just settling on the yearning across the cast's faces. There is something inscrutable about the closeups, but then looking itself is the action in the style of Sirkian melodrama. The emotion isn't given to us directly, instead we're left with a solemn affect that's basically classical; read across bodies and faces; gestural, but always restrained. It is well known that Erik Satie's three Gymnopédies appear across countless JRPGs throughout the 1990s, and here Nobuo Uematsu resists quotation to instead mine the composition's distinctive warm melancholy. Like a sunshower on a Sunday afternoon. The pre-rendered backgrounds blend familiar architecture with the speculative, which keeps it grounded in an ambiguous temporal and geographic register. Final Fantasy VIII is a high school soap opera and messed up science fiction thing with wormholes, amnesia, and a very literal interpretation of Marx's "annihilation of time by space", all in this gloriously austere package. Less broken than kind of aloof, and to me at least a genre masterpiece.
2004
I stopped playing with Cataclysm, so I guess this is for the vanilla. I care less about the fact of WoW's place in gaming history than about the qualities that made it so appealing to so many gamers and non-gamers alike in the first place. It's a rare case of more involved and accessible playstyles coexisting, and where a huge scale is carefully filled with details orienting players to an acute sense of place. Every location has its own distinct look and feel, but they're also organised such that you can see how one unfolds into the other. The skies change, or the design of rocks and trees, or a subtle transformation occurs in the colour palette, or the texture of the paths. Changes in the continent's climates and geologic features cause the design styles to mutate and hybridise, leading naturally to the kaleidoscopic heterogeneity of port cities. It feels lived-in, believable, because the settlements seem to have emerged to suit the landscape and not vice versa.
Blizzard's clumsily physical character and building designs encompass WoW's topography, which exploits a dynamic vertical axis with quick descents into craters and forests, and dizzying mountaintops overlooking desert stretches and floodplains. The thrill of discovery is just endless, and this is helped by the rather reserved achievement system and unobtrusive maps. Other games of this scale load these things with achievements and filled-in mini-maps such that watching the HUD takes precedence over the experience of physical traversal. WoW is all traversal, all cliffs and boulders and things to scale and jump off for no reason other than to do it. It doesn't really tell you much, but it makes not knowing intrinsically enjoyable, and a perfectly viable way of existing in the game. Happening across the zeppelin in Tirisfal Glades, totally by accident, and realising with a rush just how big this thing is on arriving at Orgrimmar is a feeling I won't forget. I had spent weeks just wandering around those undead forests, taking in every hill and lake and cabin, and now here the horizons rolled out to the infinite, with people spilling everywhere across the glowing yet formidable desert landscape.
Blizzard's clumsily physical character and building designs encompass WoW's topography, which exploits a dynamic vertical axis with quick descents into craters and forests, and dizzying mountaintops overlooking desert stretches and floodplains. The thrill of discovery is just endless, and this is helped by the rather reserved achievement system and unobtrusive maps. Other games of this scale load these things with achievements and filled-in mini-maps such that watching the HUD takes precedence over the experience of physical traversal. WoW is all traversal, all cliffs and boulders and things to scale and jump off for no reason other than to do it. It doesn't really tell you much, but it makes not knowing intrinsically enjoyable, and a perfectly viable way of existing in the game. Happening across the zeppelin in Tirisfal Glades, totally by accident, and realising with a rush just how big this thing is on arriving at Orgrimmar is a feeling I won't forget. I had spent weeks just wandering around those undead forests, taking in every hill and lake and cabin, and now here the horizons rolled out to the infinite, with people spilling everywhere across the glowing yet formidable desert landscape.
The various landforms of Miami are interconnected with bridges that arch dramatically over the waterways, bringing about a ropey spatialisation in contrast to Grand Theft Auto III's boxed in claustrophobia. Driving around in Vice City you will never be glued to the road for too long because soon you will be flying. There's a kick to be had in noticing people go by in boats beneath you, because it reveals a cross section of the game-space where different surfaces follow different paths and call for different types of action. Vice City's horizons are all densely knotted with distraction, with other possibilities. The glistening ocean and waterways are a gelatinous mass that pulls turquoise ripples across the ocean floor more swimming pool than anything else, which all adds to the game's garish charm. In the spirit of 1980s excess everything in nature comes filtered through its artificial counterpart: every sunset and palm tree. Vice City is celebrated by fans for having every texture and action derived from an imploded database of 80s pop signifiers that's denser than dense, and happy to be that way. It also, maybe inadvertently, captures the ambiguous place of an artefact like Scarface in pop culture, in that it is presented here as both 'badass' and a work of seedy exploitation. To quote Waikay on this, however, "it is Scarface without de Palma, Pacino, and pathos". Not that the game needs to say anything Shakespearean necessarily, but beyond the reference it's just kind of empty.
And blank pastiche is the issue here. I don't see the point in distinguishing between form and content because any artist will tell you that expression is always negotiated between tools and ideas; moreso where the player/audience is involved. Focusing solely on game systems ignores the way we make sense of them sensorially in play, and likewise an account of only narrative beats and visuals precludes the way these things are actualised in-game. And so with Vice City there is a hypersaturated audiovisual style that nevertheless feels both naked and abrasive. Where every other Rockstar game has the player avatar firmly rooted to the ground beneath their feet (even to the detriment of responsiveness in later titles), Tommy's movements jerk in sharp directions and seems to flicker away just short of the game surfaces. I can understand this sense of irritation adding to its coked up atmosphere, but Tommy's twitchy body along with the game's more lightweight driving physics creates a distance between the player and texture of the world that just seems like a waste. It is always unfun to play, or, the pleasure is less in feeling your way through the game-space than in actively connecting your actions to the game's audiovisual signifiers. Sure, you get a chainsaw, but where is the weight of it? Where is the gravity of the scene it's referencing, or otherwise the pull of the machine itself? It doesn't help that the missions put more of an emphasis on combat than its predecessor but that its lock on and run system is even more scrappy. It's more stylised and grisly, but its flimsiness has it oscillate between agitation and frustration.
Again the case can be made for the amped up coke logic of its embodied play combined with the dizziness of its hollow 1980s signifiers. That's obviously enough if you buy it, but I need a sense of gravity in my ultraviolent sleaze.
And blank pastiche is the issue here. I don't see the point in distinguishing between form and content because any artist will tell you that expression is always negotiated between tools and ideas; moreso where the player/audience is involved. Focusing solely on game systems ignores the way we make sense of them sensorially in play, and likewise an account of only narrative beats and visuals precludes the way these things are actualised in-game. And so with Vice City there is a hypersaturated audiovisual style that nevertheless feels both naked and abrasive. Where every other Rockstar game has the player avatar firmly rooted to the ground beneath their feet (even to the detriment of responsiveness in later titles), Tommy's movements jerk in sharp directions and seems to flicker away just short of the game surfaces. I can understand this sense of irritation adding to its coked up atmosphere, but Tommy's twitchy body along with the game's more lightweight driving physics creates a distance between the player and texture of the world that just seems like a waste. It is always unfun to play, or, the pleasure is less in feeling your way through the game-space than in actively connecting your actions to the game's audiovisual signifiers. Sure, you get a chainsaw, but where is the weight of it? Where is the gravity of the scene it's referencing, or otherwise the pull of the machine itself? It doesn't help that the missions put more of an emphasis on combat than its predecessor but that its lock on and run system is even more scrappy. It's more stylised and grisly, but its flimsiness has it oscillate between agitation and frustration.
Again the case can be made for the amped up coke logic of its embodied play combined with the dizziness of its hollow 1980s signifiers. That's obviously enough if you buy it, but I need a sense of gravity in my ultraviolent sleaze.
New fight mechanics make for a frenzied update of the first game's perhaps rigid to a fault slugging. That is until the boss fights where thought reenters the fore — sorry but Roxas is a more relentless, punishing, and decisive fight than Dark Souls' Ornstein and Smough. My issue is with the despatialisation of the game where the first so radically reduced familiar Disney worlds to clumsy sets in order to channel both the appeal and limitations of nostalgia. It was affectionate and utterly heartbreaking. The tangled levels asked the player to return, to see what they might've missed or maybe just spend more time there. Kingdom Hearts 2 is effectively a long cut scene with interactive bits. The levels are stripped of texture, Sora feels like he's gliding along the floor, and the painted corridors let us know that there is nothing here to return to after the cutscenes are over. Often we will get a cutscene that places us on a path, and there is nothing to do but walk along the path to cue another cutscene. It comes together near the end with a narrative charge that finally 'feels' like something, but really the game begins and ends in its (excellent) boss battles.
Detractors note that Dragon Quest XI is a JRPG about JRPGs which makes it very much a JRPG, which, yes? The story so fastidiously adheres to readymade fantasy that it is impossible to care about anything other than the joy of here and now, and before long the game's subversion of its own telics: the moment things 'almost come together' is but another opportunity for a tortuous route though colourful idiots and their absurdist affairs that we, the ones tasked with stopping the apocalypse, are very very much invested in. The battle system is fine, the unplatformable body that is occasionally tasked with platforming is confusing, but again the central joy in this is the sense of incoming novelty. Here the sugar rush of videogame fatigue is prevented in that, rather than lightshows, it's all Toriyama's infinite genius for character models and locations.
I am just fucking around on a grand tour of the world, and not enough games work through allowing you to fuck around. Stealth games encourage micro fucking around within clockwork environments, and Rockstar games allow you to fuck around before 'getting to work', but I have never felt as though I am achieving so much fucking around as I have playing Dragon Quest XI. The only two locations I need in fiction — games or otherwise — are beachside towns and ones further inland with hot pools and saunas. This has those AND lakes AND peninsulas with soft pink sand, which I am just like, I am getting emotional about how grateful I am. Like Final Fantasy XII, is this even a game? Games can be many things, and the ones I like or way I play them often bears little similarity to the way games are described by critics and fans. This one like that one is a game of spaces, of watching and exploring the idea of being in spaces, of considering how architecture and light patterns and proximity and colours and settings affect a sense of belonging that's both affirmative and flexible, always open to change.
I keep thinking 'Asterix x Dragon Ball' because I feel like I'm a child, when as a child every drawing or photograph you see is supercharged with a sense of aliveness that you have to rise to and imagine being in, and Dragon Quest XI feels like living inside Dragon Ball all morning only to turn to that stack of Asterix, to read it not movement by movement or word to word but most importantly image by image. It's just profoundly a lot. The way the game returns you to familiar spaces but revokes your fast travel privileges is really moving, as it forces you to pay attention to what's around you and what had become a blur. I'm personally not so big on it, but the game's call to 'break time' after the second half evidently works for others because it sends the game sprawling in so many new directions. Fair enough, it's hard to see things this good end.
I am just fucking around on a grand tour of the world, and not enough games work through allowing you to fuck around. Stealth games encourage micro fucking around within clockwork environments, and Rockstar games allow you to fuck around before 'getting to work', but I have never felt as though I am achieving so much fucking around as I have playing Dragon Quest XI. The only two locations I need in fiction — games or otherwise — are beachside towns and ones further inland with hot pools and saunas. This has those AND lakes AND peninsulas with soft pink sand, which I am just like, I am getting emotional about how grateful I am. Like Final Fantasy XII, is this even a game? Games can be many things, and the ones I like or way I play them often bears little similarity to the way games are described by critics and fans. This one like that one is a game of spaces, of watching and exploring the idea of being in spaces, of considering how architecture and light patterns and proximity and colours and settings affect a sense of belonging that's both affirmative and flexible, always open to change.
I keep thinking 'Asterix x Dragon Ball' because I feel like I'm a child, when as a child every drawing or photograph you see is supercharged with a sense of aliveness that you have to rise to and imagine being in, and Dragon Quest XI feels like living inside Dragon Ball all morning only to turn to that stack of Asterix, to read it not movement by movement or word to word but most importantly image by image. It's just profoundly a lot. The way the game returns you to familiar spaces but revokes your fast travel privileges is really moving, as it forces you to pay attention to what's around you and what had become a blur. I'm personally not so big on it, but the game's call to 'break time' after the second half evidently works for others because it sends the game sprawling in so many new directions. Fair enough, it's hard to see things this good end.
It probably sounds trivial, and I can't rule out memory being a factor in a replay two decades on (how could it not be?), but Jak has a real impressive weight to him. It's expected now, but having your fingers wrapped around the triggers and thumbs feeling through the joysticks meant a physical anchoring from the hands to the controller that was revolutionary at the time, and was echoed back with vibrations and Jak's flailing limbs and thudding landings. Decades on it's still actively enjoyable to just move around as Jak, as he's both nimble and clumsy, and so grounded to the wacky shapes and paths of the landscape. Unfortunately it's all the more obvious that most of the appeal is exhausted by the time you leave Sentinel Beach, which is the game's opening level and highpoint as a multi-layered open space that also vibrates with those stunning PS2 era colours. There's a grit and shadow that contours the three dimensional shapes but it's still dealing in palettes as bright as something from the previous generation console. After this it's an act of drawing things in, of adding snow or muck to surfaces in order to complicate Jak's fluid movement, or even introducing some of the more irritating platform puzzles from Crash. Along with the tedious vehicle stuff it's all clearly just padding, making The Precursor Legacy feel more like a next gen proof of concept for Naughty Dog than a finished game in its own right.
The most fluid kart game there is: its sense of momentum is often exhilarating, its controls are both bodily and instant, and the plasticity of the karts in conjunction with the dynamic, sweeping tracks, regularly has it rise to a sensory oblivion that's difficult to find in any medium even once.
The co-op friendly campaign is an added bonus, but it's also indicative of the generosity of the game more generally.
The co-op friendly campaign is an added bonus, but it's also indicative of the generosity of the game more generally.
Two or three moments in this I'll never forget, the rest I can't wait to. Anyone else feel this would've been better without any conventional game mechanics, and with all voiceovers instead of wonky character model reenactments? Just being in its world works.
2017
So weightless, the way you move through this. It's so responsive, so fast moving that it might very well achieve a kind of 'pure game' kinesthetic charge for some, but to me at least it doesn't go far enough (something like Just Cause series really pushes this) and is tonally incongruous with its ecological themes any way. Turn me into a robot ninja, or let me feel the rocks beneath my feet — compromising on both is just so totally gross to me.