How the hell do you start a review about Stranger of Paradise?

I'll admit that statement alone makes the game worth playing for those of you still on the fence. It's just one of those games that you need to experience to understand. But seriously, where do you begin?

How about a few launching points:

1) The incredibly busy and convoluted souls-like gameplay?
2) The shockingly dated graphics that scream Unreal 3 game circa 2007?
3) The somehow awful game performance, that can't maintain 60 FPS even on a PS5?
4) The wacked-out-of-its-mind plot graced upon us by one Kazushige Nojima?
5) The surreal characters, voice acting, and presentation?
6) Or the fact that this entire package is supposed to function as the prequel to THE Final Fantasy--a game that has hardly any real plot or world to call its own?

There's as many disparate threads here as there are gameplay systems. I had never played a Nioh game before--I always figured it was just a slight morph of Dark Souls, but I was somehow dead wrong and right on the mark at the same time. For those of you entirely out of the know like I was, let me summarize the flow chart during a typical boss fight in SoP:

1) Use both left and right on the D-Pad to activate the 'aggressive' mode on your two party members.
2) Move in towards the boss and start putting on the heat with some regular attacks.
3) When it comes time for them to attack you, figure out how we're going to not die. Which means you need to decide between:
3.1) Blocking, which will make you take some damage but is usually safe...Unless
3.1.1) The boss performs a command grab, in which case you're fucked. Or...
3.1.2) The attack is unblockable. More on that later.
3.1.3) If you are able to start a block right before the hit strikes, you actually parry the attack instead.
3.2) Dodging/Rolling, which is not nearly as viable in this game (on most jobs) because you don't get a good amount of I-Frames to actually move out of the way of most attacks safely. Avoid this move unless you're a risk taker or absolutely in a pinch with no other options.
3.3) Soul Shield, which allows you to use a special 'poise' meter to absorb a hit from the boss.
3.3.1) If it's a magical ability with a blue background you end up 'stealing' a copy of it that ability that you can then cast back upon the boss unless...
3.3.2) It's a certain type of magical ability with a red background, which is not absorbable, you're gonna get fucked.
3.3.3) Keep in mind that the meter also goes down with every single hit you absorb, and requires time to recharge. If the meter is depleted then you become stunned and are unable to take actions for several seconds. However you have some options here because...
3.3.3.1) you have two different jobs selected at any given time which means that you're able to swap between the two on the fly--each of which has their own separate soul shield meters that can recharge separate from each other.
4) Alright now that you've considered all of that in the 100 millisecond window you've had before the boss hits you, you now have a few options before you:
4.1) If you did some damage beforehand and also did some soul shielding, you probably have some special meter built up, which means that you can:
4.1.1) Perform one of several special combos that you have to pre-define in a customization menu
4.1.2) Perform one of several special job abilities like Chakra magic or Jump.
5) Oh shit I forgot to turn back on my party's 'aggressive mode' once their meters depleted, shit I need to reach over to the D-Pad to do that again...
6) Wait what HP am I at? Did my special meter get depleted or do I have some left I can use? Oh shit I forgot I still had some stolen magic that I can cast back at the bo...
6) Oh fuck they're about to slap me in the face which way should I....
7) And....I'm dead.

Got all that? In reality there's some hyperbole going on here, but the rough feeling is true: There's a lot of random bullshit that you need to juggle while you're in the heat of battle. Between all the different jobs, party members, combos, special abilities, and block/dodge/parry/soul-shield/magic-reflect/stagger/heal options that you have before you, the game very quickly walks a dangerous path towards being too busy for its own good. Sure there were classes, stats, and weapons to juggle in a game like Dark Souls, but the core gameplay loop always felt very clean and compact.

Speaking of classes, lets talk about jobs for a moment, shall we? Certainly a souls-like hack-n-slash following the pedigree of the original class-based Final Fantasy would be remiss if it didn't have jobs, right? Right. Well, if you didn't already think there were enough cooks in the kitchen, we've now got enough to feed a whole army. There's 27 jobs, each with unique gimmicks, abilities, and entire skill trees that need to be leveled through. Some might view this as a great way to encourage replayability, but it often leads to a confused mess of unbalanced and unfun game design.

All of that is to say, the job system makes it incredibly easy to crack this game wide open. By the 30% mark, I had already discovered a combination of mechanical interactions that broke the game in two. Lets see what my actual SoP flowchart looked like as a Lancer/Dragoon:

1) Use both left and right on the D-Pad to activate the 'aggressive' mode on your two party members. They'll tank the boss aggro.
2) Stand at a safe distance and throw spears at the boss using the lancer ability.
3) If I'm somehow out of special meter before the boss is at 50% HP, I'll wait until my teammates are back in 'aggressive' mode and get a few safe hits in while they tank aggro
4) Back off and start throwing spears again
5) If the boss aggro is ever drawn to me, wait until he gets close and use the Dragoon's Jump ability to hop the fuck across the battlefield to safety. Begin throwing spears again.
6) The boss dies before they've even laid a finger on me.

I've only done one playthrough of the game, but I'm certain that there's dozens of simple one-track strategies that players can use to breeze through the game. Obviously it's unfair to judge a title simply on the broken strats you can create, but the path of least resistance in a game can't be as plain and boring as it is here. I had a feeling from the start that the inclusion of party members as well as 27 different jobs was a recipe for broken mechanics. After all, you can only stack so many gimmicks onto a soulslike before the whole system topples under its own weight.

But enough about the gameplay. Everyone was driven here by the hilarious E3 trailer that focused on the story, so what about that? Well, I'm not going to mediate long on it here...but it is just as laugh-out-loud funny and absurd as you'd imagine. Frankly it's a reminder that Nojima really should have thrown in the towel on RPG writing after VII and became a writer for wacked-out-of-its-mind games like this instead. He would have been an incredible Platinum Games writer in another life.

But despite all of the bad things I've said...goddamn it I still like this game a hell of a lot. It's busted and dumb, but it still manages to be a fun experience beyond all of that. Everything is faulted so clearly that even a Kingdom Hearts player could see the cruft, but let's be honest--nobody's here for the emotional, epic, and lifechanging game of the year. They're here to see one man punch the everliving fuck out of CHAOS. And in that regard, the game delivers in spades.



There are many theories that posit camp is a combination of bad qualities and time. The Phantom Menace might have pissed off Lightsaber clutching Star Wars fans back in '99, but now we can all just sit back and laugh at the whole affair. It's so far removed from our current life that we can admire its goofy qualities from the cheap seats. In that same sense, Stranger of Paradise performed an incredible magic trick. The game managed to package up of that same powerful sense of camp even before it released. It was as if the game just warped to us from the year 2007--in every sense of the concept. But that's not where the real magic was. SoP packaged up all that absurd camp without the smallest shred of irony behind it. Everyone involved with the project believed in it. Nojima and Nomura genuinely considered it a great way to pay homage to the game that eventually gave them careers. That nightmare "fantasy" JRPG that barely functioned and featured UFOs, giant mechs, time-travel schemes, and T-Rexes abound.

And you know what? In that sense, this game is a really great homage to the original Final Fantasy. Not in the actual content of the game, but the absurdity of it all. It's dumb, simple, busted, and hardly capable of keeping consistent with anything it sets out to do. Of course FF-creator Hironobu Sakaguchi would refine the series and eventually strike gold with Hiroyuki Ito and Yoshinori Kitase on FFV, VI, and (with a young Nomura and Nojima) on FFVII. Perhaps the passing of the torch between these two generations isn't as crazy as I initially thought.

I suppose the difference is Sakaguchi quit designing/writing FF after IX in 2000--13 years following his creation of the franchise. Ito and Kitase wouldn't be too far behind him. By contrast, Nojima and Nomura have been chief creative forces behind the FF series since 1997 with FFVII, a career now spanning 25 years. Maybe they also mentally checked out after around the 13 year mark, eternally stuck in the 2007-2010 era. I think Stranger of Paradise is living proof of that fact. But hey, now that new faces like Yoshi P. dominate the industry with FFXIV, and now that Nojima/Nomura are nostalgia-tripping on their FFVII remake, perhaps Stranger of Paradise represents that last waltz for the late 2000s era--a fascinating time capsule filled with a lot of stupid shit that many of us yearn for because it reminds us of the final epoch before the modern internet turned our world (gaming and otherwise) into a nightmarish hyper-aware, hyper-social, live-service, microtransaction filled hellscape. So, despite all the clear flaws, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is still a unique and charming trip that harkens back to simpler times--a game worth playing in 2022.

A game that punches so far above its (8-bit movie tie-in) weight class that it's insane.

To say Sweet Home is an interesting game would be the undersell of the century. To say it's one of the best games on the NES wouldn't be doing much better. It's nothing short of a historical revelation for the 8-bit era--and gaming as a whole. The game's permadeath, party, combat, exploration, and inventory systems--combined with the numerous world puzzles and interactions--makes for one of the most intricate games of its decade.

There are so many unique (and sometimes literal) pitfalls that await careless players--all of which had me on edge my entire playthrough. How you:
Structure your party,
Meter out your insanely limited health items,
Plan out inventory spacing,
Utilize spirit powers,
Use items during battle,
and how you explore the mansion (in constant fear of the worst) plays a large role in your experience, as well as how many of your poor party members will make it out alive.

I had always heard Sweet Home was a large influence to the eventual survival horror genre, but I think that was a bit of a lie. Sweet Home wasn't an influence to the genre, it is the genre. Resident Evil didn't take influence from Sweet Home, it practically remade it--and I mean that in the best way possible. Moreover, it's very clear that the game also played a large role in what would later become the Metroidvania genre. While the combat certainly doesn't reflect it, the exploration mechanics will no doubt feel very familiar for fans of the genre.

Not only does Sweet Home manage to outclass virtually all of its Famicom contemporaries (yes, even you Metroid), it manages to do it with an awesome air of atmosphere--one befitting a haunted mansion. The audio and visuals can be unnerving (for an 8-bit title), and the presentation will often raise your blood pressure. Every time I saw that damn door opening animation I sat in fear of what would be beyond it--a lesson clearly learned in Resident Evil's equally fantastic presentation.

The narrative is also home to some very discomforting moments and visuals--child corpses and visions of children being burnt alive, along with the rest of the stories that haunt the Mamiya family. Diary entries and graffiti messages (sound familiar?) strewn through the mansion further the game's air of dread. Most of all, the gameplay mechanics get married with narrative beats in the most intelligent ways. The game presents an insanely compelling set piece as its final boss--requiring you to help a grieving and vengeful mother come to terms with her own death and the loss of her child instead of just bludgeoning her over the head.
Think about it. If this were done today, critics would be all over it. And somehow, Capcom was pulling this off in fucking 1989.

Certainly the game is not without issues--some puzzles suffer from a bit of the trademark Famicom cryptic-ness and backtracking can become a pain if you've forgotten the location of key items you dropped...but those are incredibly small oversights considering just what Sweet Home managed to accomplish in 1989. Between its narrative presentation, atmosphere, immersive gameplay systems, and how all of it brilliantly intertwines, it's safe to say that we're still playing catch-up with Sweet Home to this very day.

P.S. I wasn't thinking about it while playing, but I think it's safe to say that Sweet Home is the (or at least one of the) best licensed/movie tie-in games of all time. Can you think of better ones?

The Super Mario 64 of 3D JRPGs, the Ultimate Role Playing Game, and the actual greatest sendoff to the 'original' Final Fantasy.

The Super Mario 64 of 3D JRPGs
Final Fantasy XII was a sharp left turn compared to the path the Final Fantasy series had been descending towards since VII. The series had always alternated between gameplay (odd) and narrative heavy (even) games, but with VII this trend was thrown out the window. Following the game's runaway success, VIII would double down with more blockbuster set pieces, pacing, and forgiving mechanics. IX and X would follow a similar non-expressive system of party mechanics, with X being so streamlined that it even did away with mechanics from the original Final Fantasy on NES.

By contrast, XII decides to push every dial to 11. There's 17 unique weapon types--with numerous different methods of damage calculation. There's a shit ton of unique accessories that have distinct gameplay effects, there's double the spells that there were in X , and even a new ability set called Technicks that allow you to do a bunch of new crazy things (attacking based on system clock time, telekinetic abilities, throwing out random spells for free, etc). Each character can be completely customized as you like--allowing you to create hundreds upon hundreds of unique strategies. These systems were only bolstered by re-releases of the game adding the job system back into the mix, further allowing unique player expression and improving upon the license board system.

Beyond what your character does, XII made massive changes to everything around you. The worlds are now fully 3D and explorable--with random battles being replaced with organically appearing enemies. That 3D space is now also crucial to battles: aggro, AOE, spell range, and other mechanics need to be understood with respect to the spaces you fight in. Enemies are also smarter and more varied than ever--often being capable of wiping you in one careful move. Many bosses also have complex AI scripts that allow them to react to every aspect of battle--leading to boss AI often more complex than even the superbosses found in previous games.

In order to actually make yourself useful in these complex situations, the developers created the Gambits system--which let you 'program' your party members with AI commands that they automatically perform based on the context of battle. Many players originally complained this system allows the game to 'play itself,' but this is only true at a very shallow level. Players who challenge the game at maximum speed will often find themselves overwhelmed without relying on gambits. Moreover, Gambits allow players to focus on decisions that actually matter in complex battles--instead of just spamming X to perform basic attacks against low-level grunts. This allows for players to perform more complex strategies and enables developers to craft more intricate battles. The totality of Gambits allows for the most complex, challenging, and rewarding battles I've ever fought in an RPG while streamlining all of the trivial actions that turn RPGs into tedious chores.

But most importantly, the world of XII is arguably the greatest the franchise (and perhaps the genre) has ever seen. Ivalice is as large, diverse, and interconnected as it's ever been. The side quests are numerous and varied--often offering the greatest challenges and rewards in the game. The hunt quests are a fantastic vehicle for some of the best fights in any RPG I've ever played. There are also countless rewards and experiences the player can find just by exploring. Virtually every area you visit is chock filled with extra content you can discover/battle/loot if you revisit later in the game. The amount of times I've accidentally stumbled into a secret dungeon-within-a-dungeon, an insanely good boss fight, or a killer piece of treasure is probably higher in XII than the rest of the franchise combined.

Speaking of dungeons, that's another point worth going over. VII started killing off the proper RPG dungeon--often opting to replace them with shorter and less challenging set pieces. This worked well enough in VII, as the game was primarily an enjoyable rollercoaster ride. However, I find that the turn against proper dungeons ultimately hurt the series--further streamlining gameplay to the point of tedium. From VII to X I never felt any real sense of challenge from the game, mainly because the games were far more interested in preserving a sense of streamlined narrative cohesion than focused gameplay experience.

XII instead opted to make the dungeon the star of the show. By pure size, there's more dungeon than the last four games combined. Many of them aren't static either--growing as the player revisits during story/quest progression. Several full dungeons are entirely optional--sometimes having additional secret areas within the optional dungeon! They often have Zelda-esque puzzles and deadly traps that can even wipe your party if you're not being careful. This return to dungeon-oriented design allows the player to engage with gameplay mechanics more often and in far more depth than VII through X allowed for. I should say I think it's possible to have a good RPG without dungeons, but you need your set pieces and narrative to really sell the game. That's arguably a more fickle task and a large reason why I think VIII and X ultimately fail.

Through all this, the developers of XII struck a delicate balance that has very rarely been seen in gaming. To condense the points above:

1) The player mechanics are rich, complex, and expressive
2) The enemies are smart and often brutal
3) The quests/content are plentiful and rewarding
4) The world is massive and fleshed out

It sounds simple. Hell, it's what virtually all open-world RPG games strive for. But in my opinion very few--and I mean very few games have ever pulled this combination off. And I would say none have been as successful as XII has. It's a system that feeds into itself--meaning that if any aspect of the chain is bad, it sours the whole experience. Consider the cycle like this:

1) If the player mechanics aren't complex and expressive then...
2) You can't have enemies that are actually smart and brutal. Which means that...
3) The quests and content in your game feel more like chores, which means...
4) Your world feels empty and shallow--chock full of lifeless filler content meaning...
5) You won't give out quests featuring...
6) Complex enemies that...
7) Reward players with new expressive items that...
8) Empower the player for...
9) Later complex enemies found in...
10) Good quests in the...
X-2) Fleshed out world

If anything goes wrong here, the whole thing goes wrong. But somehow, XII manages to pull it off. I think the main reason it succeeds so well is through its commitment to its own mechanics. Some side quests are like other Final Fantasy games--little story beats that make you do some 'chores' in order to get a simple reward. That's fine for a simple lark, but the real meat of XII comes from the hunts and espers you can discover throughout the world--these aren't excuses for chores, they're excuses to have massive boss fights that challenge you in ways the main narrative can't. They're not an extension of the game--they are the game.

It once again sounds obvious, but think about it. How often do side quests devolve into you walking around and doing some MMO-esque nonsense that doesn't really fit in with the parts of the game that you feel shine? How many times do you feel like those side quests were side quests for a reason? Certainly there are exceptions, but I'm sure you feel that way about plenty of games. XII joins the club of the few games that are designed to empower side content, instead of having side content that hinders the main content.

And if one thing is clear about XII, is how damn influential it was on every major 3D JRPG going forward. Many JRPGs opted to keep the traditional 2D structure when they transitioned to 3D, but through Final Fantasy XII I see a bold and complete vision of what a true 3D JRPG should be--and I think it's the first game to properly nail that vision. For that, I view XII in the same light as a title like Super Mario 64 or Super Metroid. There were certainly games before it that attempted to define a genre, but this game is without a doubt the complete and total blueprint for the genre going forward--even influencing many games beyond its own genre.


The Ultimate Roleplaying Game
On the surface level, XII features all of the trappings Matsuno fans have come to love from previous titles like Tactics: a large cast of characters, widespread (geo)politicking, convoluted interpersonal relationships, grim wars, cruel gods, and even crueler men. And from the get go, XII throws you headfirst into a international conflict featuring lots of faces, titles, and countries--familiar territory for dedicated fans. But it doesn't take long for the game to hit the brakes on the usual trappings and focus more on character stories; suddenly we're spending hours with Vaan exploring Rabanastre as he goes about his street-rat exploits instead of fighting wars. It may seem to blend together smoothly, but something became clear after finishing XII: the game doesn't really have one clean style, it has two different narrative modes.

Mode A is Matsuno as you remember it: A convoluted political narrative filled with exaggerated portrayals of hatred, war, and betrayal contrasted against a protagonist's loss of innocence in a cruel world beyond their control. It's basically Kurosawa's Ran mixed with the darker fantasy elements of Berserk.
Mode B is Star Wars. An upbeat tale featuring charming cast of characters who have to overcome their their differences in order to take down the uncategorically evil empire that rules over them.

To sum it up (without spoilers), XII eventually leans closer to Star Wars than Matsuno's usual can o' worms. There are certainly hints of his trademark dark brew, but they ultimately get drowned out in a cup of sweet Star Wars flavored blue milk™ meant to give you an uplifting feeling when you leave the theater.

Is that a bad thing? In a word: kinda. It doesn't ruin the narrative--I still think it's still a great story overall. However, it certainly simplifies it. There are moments where we see characters struggling with genuinely challenging moral quandaries, personal revelations, and past traumas...but these moments generally get resolved cleanly in order to lay the groundwork for more Star Wars moments.
But I think it's important to remember that Star Wars isn't bad. The characters are charming and memorable, the world is engaging, and the set pieces are usually entertaining. I feel the same way about XII. At the same time though...Star Wars is still just Star Wars. It doesn't stick with me like more emotionally demanding and narratively ambitious films often do. It's likeable and entertaining...But it's not something that would ever be my favorite--the kind of art that sticks with me. The kind of art that requires contemplation and reflection. The kind of art that touches me on a deeper level--in the same way that VI or Tactics do.

But you know what? That's fine. There's still a lot of great moments, memorable characters, and incredible locations that mark XII as one of the better stories in Final Fantasy, and in AAA gaming as a whole--a great blockbuster film with some darker thematic undercurrents. But what about XII's characters?

Well...despite all the hate given to him, Vaan was never meant to be perceived as the main protagonist of the narrative. His arc is simple: he's a dumb and emotional teen that's just trying to figure their shit out. Contrasted with the rest of the cast, Vaan works as an understandable anchor grounding us while the narrative grows in scope. Instead of quickly becoming a generic JRPG teenage badass who saves the world, he spends most of the game growing into a regular young adult--slowly becoming the 'hero' he saw in people like Balthier and Basch.

If anything, the game is better viewed as three separate narratives that combine to form our total ensemble. Each narrative features a main protagonist and a supporting character that looks like so:

1) Ashe & Basch: Ashe must quest to save the world, battle the gods, and reclaim her place as the rightful ruler of Dalmasca. Basch needs to find himself by supporting Ashe and avenging based on his own past as a protector of Dalmasca.
2) Balthier & Fran: Balthier must settle things with his father, which has consequences for the whole world, while also coming to terms with who he is. Fran works to support him.
3) Vaan & Penelo: Vaan works to better understand himself as he tries to grow into the man he saw in his older brother. Penelo works to support him.

This is a very simplified view of the narrative, but the broad strokes are correct. Ashe's story ultimately involves the fate of the world, Balthier's stakes are lesser but still important, while Vaan is simply trying to grow as a person. The intertwining of these narratives is also key. Balthier sees the mistakes of his father in Ashe, which leads to interesting moments between them. Basch's noble character traits often run counter to Balthier's own cynical personality. All the adults serve as role models for Vaan and Penelo, while the two kids also manage to find ways to 'cut through' the complex matters at hand and and serve as an anchor for the adults as their problems grow.

You might be seeing an issue though. Why are Fran and Penelo just written off as "works to support him?" Well...it's because that's essentially their purpose. Fran has a slight character moment with her return to her home village, but ultimately functions like Chewbacca in Star Wars--a reliable wingman for our charming pirate. Meanwhile Penelo has very little going on in her own story. She...wants to be a dancer...I guess? These characters ultimately work as plot devices to get us from A to B and occasionally give us a vehicle to bounce more important character moments off of. Should they have been more fleshed out? Absolutely. It's one of the failings of XII's narrative that they weren't. However, they are not poorly written characters by any stretch of the imagination, they mainly exist in character purgatory. But even if XII's narrative is more 'good' than perfect, it is undeniably interesting for a different reason.

The alternation between story and mechanics-focused FF games died with VII, which set the series down the path towards story/character heavy, mechanically light games. This phenomenon (combined with the aesthetics and narrative driven by the Nomura/Nojima creative partnership), would lead us to the modern JRPG we all picture today. It's the kind of RPG that leads many players to ask "how is this even an RPG?" And in some ways, they've got a point. After all, Cloud/Squall/Tidus aren't characters I can really customize. I can't create my own role in these games, I have to follow a clearly defined character! For the Japanese audience however, the meaning of roleplay had been shifting since Final Fantasy II. It was moving away from that old-fashioned D&D ideal and towards a new direction: allowing the player to "roleplay" as that well-defined character.

When you play Skyrim, you get the chance to craft a unique character that is defined primarily by your actions and build. The actual dragonborn you play as is, without you, a totally blank canvas. By contrast, when you play Final Fantasy VII, you get the chance to step into the shoes of "Cloud Strife," you get to experience the world through Cloud--including all his hopes/dreams/baggage. You don't get to choose much, but you can experience a lot by immersing yourself into his role. In that sense, the JRPG and the WRPG operated off of the same vague concept--immersion--but sought to achieve it in very different ways. WRPGs emphasized complex character expression and D&D-esque mechanics, while JRPGs streamlined those systems in order to provide an immediate and gripping narrative.

There are certainly advantages to both ends of the spectrum, but I would argue that no game has found a perfect middle ground like XII has. It features all of the complex and expressive systems/mechanics that would make a D&D fan giddy while also giving the player a set of heavily defined characters and a static story to immerse themselves into. It is, in a hyperbolic sense, the "ultimate" role playing game: marrying both ends of the spectrum into one clean and polished package. Of course, not everyone wants their peanut butter and jelly combined, but players who enjoy both game styles can find a lot to love in XII. It's the most 'balanced' combination of the two genres within Final Fantasy and one of the greatest in all of gaming.


THE Final Fantasy?
Final Fantasy XII stands as an oddity within the franchise. Not quite old or new, not quite popular or hated, and not quite bland or stylized, etc. etc. For many, it's probably a game they've never played or knew much about--myself included. Owing to it's late-bloomer PS2 release (Gears of War and the Wii would release weeks later) as well as its lack of then-codified anime (read: Nojima, Nomura, and Kitase) aesthetics.

Instead, we were left with a game handled primarily by three creatives:
1) Hiroyuki Ito--the man behind (nearly) all of FF's battle systems and (co-)director of VI and IX.
2) Yasumi Matsuno--the mind behind the world of Ivalice and the games within it (Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, etc).
3) Akitoshi Kawazu--the man behind the (often experimental and brutal) SaGa franchise

Matsuno would leave the project before completion (while Kawazu would join in), but these three minds would end up driving the most ambitious Final Fantasy game in history. To quote one developer: "It is a game where we overdid everything." And overdid they did...Final Fantasy XII was awarded the distinction of "longest game development period" by Guinness for its five year production cycle--a factoidal relic that seems charming by modern development standards. But the team were shooting for the impossible even at the start of development. They wanted to:

1) Kill the random encounter and transition to real 3D spaces where spacial awareness factored into combat
2) Have up to four party members that could all be micro-managed in real time (even allowing for multiplayer support!)
3) Create a massive, dense, and interconnected world filled to the brim with optional content
4) Eolve the (then still controversial) job system and allow for trillions of ways to customize characters/party compositions
5) Design a system of "AI" commands that allowed players to 'program' party members to act automatically when they weren't controlling them directly.

And many, many other features. Some of these were just too ambitious (multiplayer), while others were shot down by corporate (job system) for being 'too complex' for their target demographic. If the PlayStation-era FF games had streamlined and anime-ified the RPG for a blockbuster market--creating the modern JRPG--then XII was looking to take a bold sharp left turn...and it wouldn't take long for problems to arise.

XII started development around 2000, with the leading staff being hand picked by FF creator Hironobu Sakaguchi himself. While other teams were off creating IX, X, XI, and a (godforsaken) movie, the remaining staff (primarily from Tactics) were the odd ones out. Ito and Kawazu were dedicated fans of the 'classics' of the RPG genre--Wizardry, Ultima, as well as the granddaddy Dungeons and Dragons--which were falling stars of the RPG genre by the late 90s. And while Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX streamlined much of the genre's gameplay conventions, Matsuno worked with Ito to expand V's complex Job system for Tactics. Kawazu would also be in his own lab during the PS1/PS2 era--cooking up mechanics in his SaGa series that still polarize many to this day.

By the time of Final Fantasy X's release, the series had become so monumental and streamlined that it appealed to an incredibly wide audience of players. X reverted back to a turn based system, removed most inventory customization (that had already been receding since the SNES era), and mitigated the magic system to just a few basic elements and spells. Gameplay was certainly still there...But many players were hooked by the world, characters, and stories that X offered--with gameplay being icing on top of the cake.

Moreover, the massive success of X and VII led to the creation of the unthinkable: Final Fantasy X-2 and The Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. For the first time ever, these stand-alone fantasies were no longer final. That's right, the newly merged Square Enix was making corporate decisions that would now be an EA/Activision punchline: Games needed to come out quicker, be simple and accessible, and cash-in on known brand names or trends. Gone were the days of mainline FF games with the occasional oddity like Tactics and tons of unique experimental IP (Parasite Eve, Xenogears, Vagrant Story, etc). Now we could expect a FFVII mobile game, an edgy FFVII third person shooter, a SICK FFVII anime movie, a wacky Charlie's Angels FFX spin-off, and a fucking Disney/Final Fantasy crossover universe.

Final Fantasy XII was caught in the crossfire of this corporate revolution. By 2004 the man who had created FF and handpicked the leaders for this project had quit Square Enix--taking a decent chunk of staff with him--while corporate motives had shifted so radically that it made the aims of XII seem all but obsolete by 2006 when it finally limped onto store shelves. Infighting between the XII team and other sections of Square eventually lead to the worst: the writer/director of the project, Yasumi Matsuno quit Square in 2005--owning to 'health concerns.' He would never work directly at the company again. Kawazu joined the project and helped XII release the following year--now as a relic of a bygone era in Square (and RPG) history.

XII's mechanics were dense, novel, and expressive. The world was unique--defined by Arabian, Turkish, and Indian influences. The cast was also distinct--featuring an ensemble that eschewed many conventions presented in VII/VIII/IX/X. The game even featured (arguably) the only female lead beyond VI. Everything about it was a sharp left turn from the previous few FF games...and it was a (relative) disaster for Square. Turns out, this philosophy is a terrible idea for corporate success. Games need to be predictable in order to be reliably successful. And so, we got X-2, we got a slew of VII sequels/spinoffs/films/remakes, we got three Final Fantasy XIII games (and a spin-off later rebranded as XV), hell...we even got a direct sequel to Final Fantasy XII!

And while I would love to sit here and purely blame corporate decisions, I know there's more to it. Fans were also upset with XII upon release. Those fans were, for the first time ever, questioning whether or not XII was "really" a Final Fantasy game. This line of thinking, more than anything else, is what finally buried Final Fantasy six feet under.

Game critic Tim Rogers once shared an anecdote from XII's release in Japan that perfectly symbolizes this phenomenon. When the first fan who purchased XII got to speak to the head of Square Enix at a publicity event, he only had one thing to say:

"Please remake Final Fantasy VII."

Through the runaway success of Final Fantasy VII, Sakaguchi and co. had inadvertently cultivated a fanbase that wasn't interested in what they wanted out of Final Fantasy as its creators. Fans were interested in a few key ideas presented by Nojima and Nomura (visually and narratively) and some basic gameplay concepts. They wanted those ideas to play on repeat until the end of time...and so they did. By 2006, there was no place for the design philosophies that dictated the original Final Fantasy games. It was a brave new world: one that we're still living in.

When the dust settled, XII would barely outsell X-2. XIII would later cement the Nomura-fication of the (single-player) Final Fantasy series. Moreover, the creators of XII started to fade into the background of the new Square Enix monolith. Ito would be booted out of the director's seat for nearly 15 years. Matsuno wouldn't work at Square Enix again--besides some occasional contractor work. Kawazu bounced around project to project as "executive producer" until the release of SaGa: Scarlet Grace over a decade after XII's release--the only game he's designed since. Many other staff who embodied that sense of Final Fantasy would also leave to join Sakaguchi at Mistwalker or pursue other ventures. In many ways, Final Fantasy XII was the true last hurrah to the original series--one that would go out with a whimper, and not a bang.

People point to IX as this sort of 'swan song' for the "original" Final Fantasy--and in some surface-level respects, this is true. The game eschewed the anime-styling of its surrounding titles in favor of a simple childlike fantasy charm. This didn't just set it apart from VII/VIII/X however, it also set it apart from most of the Final Fantasy games we also perceive as 'classic.' Those classic games have very little in common with each other, beyond some vague themes and surface-level symbolism. Outside of simple referential images and direct name-dropping, there's not much that IX does to actually tie together a cohesive sense of Final Fantasy--because there arguably wasn't one to begin with.

At least...that's what I thought until I played XII. I realized now what Final Fantasy was really all about. It wasn't about those surface level qualities--crystals, chocobo, moogles, lifestreams, light and darkness, etc. etc. It was about taking a team of passionate people and letting them work their asses off on a new, distinct, and creative vision within the realm of the RPG. The stories could be anything, the worlds could be anything, the mechanics could (and should!) change on a dime. Nothing was sacred ground as long as you were doing something new and interesting. In a world where nearly every other franchise was obsessed with direct sequels and safe spinoffs, FF was one of the few remaining juggernauts that you could always count on to switch it up...and in that sense, XII shines. It shines as the final light that marked the transition from Square to Square Enix. The first in a long line of corporate gaming mergers that still rattles our world to this day.

The Anti-Smash Bros.
Dissidia Final Fantasy was actually the first game I ever pre-ordered. Why? I don't know, man. Why does a nine year old do anything? All I do remember is that I played the ever-living fuck out of it. And I will admit, going back into it now...I was actually kind of excited. Certainly nostalgia would blind me somewhat, but the game is pretty fondly remembered overall. But damn was I in for a surprise.

Disclaimer: I'm not your average fighting game player. I've played most fighting games, and I generally understand how they work, but I'm nowhere near an expert on the topic. I'm the kind of guy who enjoys going a few rounds...until I start getting my shit kicked in by random people online. I don't really care to learn tier-lists, memorize frame-data, or to spend hours labbing in training mode. I'm just there for a bit of fun.

So here I was thinking Dissidia would fill that niche like Smash Bros can. Sure, Smash might not be oriented around the usual competitive fighting game tenets, but it prioritizes streamlined fun and is usually a crowd pleaser. Unfortunately, I forgot this game also carried a SQUARE ENIX logo on the box.

Role Playing Fighting Game: A Match Made in Hell
So I'll begin where most people would: Dissidia's story mode. The formatting and presentation is as over-designed as anything else SE puts out--featuring needless 'level' design, optional fights, special treasures (that require replays to obtain) and long-winded Kingdom Hearts-style cutscenes every forty-five seconds.

But the real sin about story mode isn't the presentation, it's the real content of it. The character customization is one of the worst ideas I've seen in a fighting game, period. Requiring players to pick and choose only a handful of attacks is an awful idea. Imaging if you were playing Street Fighter and had to pick between a low kick or an anti-air--it's awful. Moreover, the decision to gate even basic abilities behind levels and character restraints is somehow an even worse idea. Would you rather be able to use a projectile or fucking block? Pick your poison.

As a consequence, characters feel incredibly limited and one-note. They essentially have 2 attacks and maybe the ability to dodge if you're lucky. It doesn't empower player decisions, but instead requires them to boil down each fight into a spam-fest of their hyper-limited moveset. This comes off as one of the laziest design choices I've ever seen. The game might have been on the PSP, but even goddamn Tekken 6 got a release on the console--they weren't held back by the hardware here.

Limited moveset aside, the RPG system also allows the developers to lazily design the story mode as well. Enemies don't have to be particularly smart--they never are. Instead, enemies just need to be higher level than you. They can have the same level 1 AI, but now it takes 100 hits for you to kill them...and 3 hits for them to kill you. It's comedically unfair and boils away what little goodwill I had for the game's story mode. It's anti-fun and spits in the face of both competitive and party fighting games.

Beyond that, Dissidia has all the other bloat that an RPG has--with none of the benefits. Now you need to equip your fighter with weapons, armor, accessories, summons, etc. You've got a store that you need to buy and sell stuff from. You have trading mechanics so you can trade X for Y so you can get +1 STR on your character's stats. In a game that's ultimately supposed to be about fighting people for fun, Dissidia misses the forest for the trees by shoving in all of its needless RPG bullshit that offers little in the way of reward.

What's in a match?
At their rawest level, all fighting games boil down to rock-paper-scissors. Knowing when to commit to a hit, low-block, parry, anti-air, etc. can make all the difference in the match. This isn't a bad thing though: all genres can be boiled down to essential 'games' that we play. However, a good fighting game will dress up this raw gameplay with loads of interesting mechanics, stylish visuals, and satisfying animations. Dissidia not only fails to capture any of this, but it somehow embarrasses itself by presenting this raw gameplay as a genuine mechanic.

The launch mechanic transforms Dissidia into literal rock-paper-scissors, requiring players to 'guess' either X or Y to dodge the next attack. If you launch someone and they guess correctly, then they're now able to put you in the hot seat instead. This is, perhaps, the worst fighting game mechanic I have ever seen. There's no reason to ever make use of it--since it puts you at a 50% chance risk of getting blown up without having any way to stop it. It completely ruins several characters as viable fighters and turns much of the game into just pressing X or Y while slow animations play out.

On top of that, the game's two different attack types (the aforementioned X and Y) are a terrible and poorly implemented idea. Making 50% of your attack options do effectively 0 damage (since bravery can easily be lost) is just another way Dissidia sucks away the fun from fighting games. Moreover, the stark variation of attack styles (ranging on a spectrum from slow and hard magic to quick melee combat) means that the game would never have a chance to be even remotely balanced.

And don't get me wrong--I don't mind it if a fighting game isn't perfectly balanced. Hell, look at Third Strike. That game is as fun as hell and half of the roster is total trash. What matters though, is that there are several interesting and satisfying options to please a wide variety of players. In Dissidia, we're instead left with numerous playstyles that are essentially non-viable.

The game's animations are so slow and sluggish that the ability to genuinely combo is rare--and therefore prized. Any character that can actually land a bravery attack and follow through with an HP hit is immediately the best character in the game--because so many others can't. Why would I play as Terra when all she does is spam projectiles that are easily dodged? Why would I play as Tidus when his combat mainly focuses on launching people and playing rock-paper-sicssors? You can see where the logic's going here.

To make matters worse, the lack of clear combat design means that fighting is very difficult because there's zero consistency. You're never quite sure how far Terra's projectiles fly compared to Onion Knight. You're not sure what kind of projectile it is either: straight? homing? delayed? teleportation based? The same applies to regular attacks. Are they aerial or ground based? How high/far to they go? How many strikes does it have? Does it have armor or will attacks cancel the animation? The constant guessing game leads to a slew of missed attacks, surprise hits, and general confusion in what should be a easy to pick-up-and-play experience.

Ultimately, Dissidia matches boil down to spamming aerial dodges and waiting for EX power-ups until you can land one EX hit on your opponent to finish the match. If you get lucky you might be able to abuse the godawful AI and terrible stage design to land an extra hit or two, but it might not matter if they're 10 levels above you anyways. It's slow, it's tedious, it's unfair, and most importantly it's fucking lame. And if there's one thing a fighting game should never be, it's lame.

Dissidia: RE:coded
And I didn't even mention the godawful story this thing has. Of course, the idea of a Final Fantasy fighting game with a story was always going to be dumb. These games have nothing in common and it was always going to be weird to have Tidus standing next to the non-character Warrior of Light from the original Final Fantasy. At best, it just needed to not be Kingdom Hearts...unfortunately that was asking too much.

Obviously I'm not looking for high-art here, it's a fighting game story. I'm just looking to be entertained and see some cool shit. But let's be honest: this is post-Nomura takeover of Final Fantasy, it was never going to be cool. Instead, we're left with characters awkwardly standing around and slowing expositing about the three things that all Kingdom Hearts characters talk about: friendship, dreams, and hearts.

It might sound like I'm taking the piss here, but it's hyper-surreal to see characters that I've known from other games be so radically re-written here to fit the generic Kingdom Hearts mold that many now associate with them. Some I'm used to (Cloud), while others were frankly offensive. Terra's transformation in particular is fucking awful. From one of the leading voices in Final Fantasy VI to a helpless girl that relies on a literal child to protect her (keep in mind she's older than most of the other fighters on the cast) is nothing short of absurd. It certainly doesn't help that she's the only female protagonist here either.

Much like the gameplay of Dissidia, every character gets boiled down into their worst possible form in order to facilitate this bore of a narrative aimed at five-year-olds. Like I said before, fighting games don't need to be high-concept, they just need to be sick-as-shit, and sick-as-shit this narrative ain't.


Super Smash this shit out of my fucking face
In Smash Bros. we have a fighting game that managed to defy all regular conventions and find a new captive audience. It's fast, graceful, intuitive, and deceptively simple. In Dissidia we have a fighting game that also managed to defy all regular conventions, but it only found an audience of Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts die-hards that would swallow a Tidus-themed cyanide pill. It's incredibly slow, clunky, bloated, and shockingly shallow despite it all.

It's lame, it's a mess, and most importantly: it's anti-fun. My only solace is that I don't have to worry about this genre of game ever taking off like Smash Bros. did. These types of godawful uninspired arena fighting games can be and only will be made based on Anime franchises. Franchises who's fans are so obsessed that they'd buy anything--including these disasters.

A game so complex in thematic scope and so metered in both pacing and presentation that it can only be described as one of gaming's greatest narrative achievements.

No matter how you try to slice it, Pentiment is a lot of things in one artistic package. It's enough that I'm not even going to attempt to scratch away at it's thematic or narrative content here in any meaningful way. However, I do want to point out that Pentiment manages to accomplish a lot without many of the tools that the other greats of game writing do. Titles like Disco Elysium elevated the medium through tons of modern and post-modern technique, which is no easy feat...but it does make it immediately stylish and consumable to fanbases into art games and 'intelligent' criticism of hip topics such as capitalism. And I'd be lying if I wasn't one of those people who did (and still do) sing its praises as one of the greatest pieces of modern fiction and the crown jewel of games writing.

But what makes Pentiment so special is that it manages to meet that same herculean bar of narrative quality while shooting an incredibly straight and structured arrow. Instead of relying on many flashier stylistic tricks, it makes use of incredibly nuanced pacing, masterful repetition, and a heavy emphasis on causality over time, which all masterfully compliment the game's brilliant mechanical design.

Pentiment is a masterful work of art that allows players to truly get into the shoes of its characters and their world--an accomplishment made all the more impressive considering the historic and literal distance between the fictional Tassing and where I write this review. Unlike many games, it doesn't hyper fixate on extolling clear themes that 'define' it, and frankly, I think many players without a critical eye might view the title as not having any themes beyond something vague about "God and art."

Instead, Pentiment weaves a truly organic world with understandable characters and a compelling narrative. It allows us to get a better picture of the human condition that defined the Late Middle Ages while also letting us be skeptical of whether we truly understand anything beyond the memories, choices, and emotions we take away from the experience.

All in all, Pentiment is the spitting image of artistic nuance that I wish our industry and medium had more of. It sits alongside a very small pool of games that truly treat its players as adults without any reservations. Although I've just completed the game and have only begun to digest its thematic content, it will be staying with me for a very long time--which to me is the highest honor any work of art can achieve.

Visual excellence fails to save poor execution shackled to a shallow and stagnant genre

I'll admit I had reservations about Playdead (Limbo, Inside) founder Dino Patti's new title Somerville from the start. But to be fair to Somerville, I've never enjoyed the cinematic platformer genre that Patti has been bound to his entire career as producer...but more on that later. It's more crucial to credit Somerville's actual (first time) writer and director, Chris Olsen, for the mess we have here.

Olsen, a CG animator turned director, has clearly mastered their own sense of visual aesthetic and direction--and I commend them for that. If nothing else, Somerville is (from a visual perspective) an incredibly well directed game. The lighting, shot composition, and color choices are par excellence for the entire experience. You really do get the feeling that Olsen spent years crafting the world of Somerville in his own head--using his years of artistic experience to fortify his ideas. Viewing this game on a large 4K TV was a nothing short of a visual treat that I wish more games could offer me without resorting to AAA level photorealism in titles like The Last of Us, Part II. In this sense, Olsen has totally nailed one of the most crucial aspects of the cinematic platformer, which earns Somerville some points.

Another World (Visual Art and Game)

Unfortunately for Olsen, games still have to be played...which is where Somerville quickly falls apart. For every strength I praised above, it often leads to one of the game's hapless weaknesses. Take for instance the shot composition. Somerville often features gorgeous wide shots that allow players to enjoy the scope of large environments. Unfortunately, you'll also often have to solve puzzles or perform tasks in these same shots, where it quickly becomes difficult to easily see where items or other interactive materials are. I frequently got stumped during puzzles not because I couldn't solve some logical question, but because I couldn't even see what I was supposed to be interacting with.

Beyond that, Somerville falls prey to the same core issue that plagues virtually every single cinematic platformer: they are cinematic to a fault. So many crucial game elements are ignored to preserve their cinematic quality. As a consequence, puzzles are vague, movement is awkward, and the narrative is minimalistic to avoid distracting text boxes or protracted voice acting. To many fans of the game, these drawbacks don't seem like much of a dealbreaker in light of just how fantastic the game looks. But let me ask you: if your game has unfun movement, confusing puzzle interactions, and barebones narrative...then what the hell is left in your puzzle platformer with heavy story emphasis? The answer, as we know it, is purely visuals and sound design.

Flashback (Close Encounters with [Bad] Minimal Narratives)

To be fair, minimalistic narratives aren't bad in their own right. However, Somerville misunderstands its own approach. Despite keeping a very lightweight narrative, it attempts heavy emotional twists in its 11th hour that fail to resonate because the game's story is so minimalistic. It's impossible to really understand or care about our characters because we spend so little time with them and have so little invested in their struggles. Naturally, the only trick the game has left is to boil down these struggles into one dimensional symbols like 'family' that can be cheaply resonated with despite lacking any meaningful elaboration on the topics at hand.

Even with the basic narrative theming Somerville has going for it, the game manages to blow it. Although the aliens approach is banal for cinematic platformers (Another World, Oddworld, Flashback, Heart of Darkness, etc.), many felt it fresh for the gaming environment of 2022. And even I'll admit, Somerville's opening--a casual countryside family hangout interrupted by alien invasion--is a great start to the game. McPherson Tape shenanigans aside though, Somerville spends most of its second act (a sizeable chunk of playtime) in an abandoned underground mine--bereft of any meaningful alien influence. Instead, players are left with repetitive environments and tedious puzzles that feel like filler to pad time between the more interesting first and third act.

Blackthorne (Christ, Hurry Up!)

Beyond narrative, the gameplay choices in Somerville are also often egregious. The player's movement speed is often swapped without any input from the player in order to suit the cinematic quality of the scene. As a consequence, you'll often go from a full sprint to a molasses pace without any understanding as to why. Although arbitrarily altering player control is bad as it is, the game will often fail to even be consistent in its own logic. Sometimes you'll be sprinting during a random no-stress puzzle and practically crawling while your life is on the line. No matter the situation, the lack of control is frustrating and textbook "how not to design movement" in a game centered around movement.

The puzzles also suffer from the same complaints you'll see strewn about most reviews. They often land either in 'braindead easy,' 'how was I supposed to even see that thing?' or the 'this is the stupidest shit I've ever seen' categories. Unfortunately, the puzzle sweet spot for cinematic platformers is, at least in my opinion, practically impossible to achieve by design--so Somerville is arguably no worse than other games, but it's certainly also no better either.

Heart of Darkness (Is There Anything Left For Cinematic Platforming?)

So what do I even mean by 'impossible' by design? And why do I have so many problems with this genre to begin with? Well for starters, beyond the raw innovations to platforming and pioneered by Jordan Mechner with Prince of Persia and narrative presentation by Éric Chahi with Another World, I'd say the cinematic platformer has failed to develop any new consistent ideas. As a consequence, the games are left to rely on their aesthetic values--to a fault. As graphics have progressed, the visual flairs that defined early cinematic platformers have been rendered irrelevant, which means that the games have had no choice but to lean in even harder on aesthetics.

As a consequence, we have titles obsessed with their hyper-minimal narratives and shallow gameplay all in the service of looking cinematic. Unfortunately directors like Olsen fail to understand that the incessant pursuit of cinematic immersion almost always comes at the cost of gameplay immersion. In order for the visual designer to preserve their high quality cinematography, players will be left fumbling around the screen spamming *X on every object they can (or can't) see in hopes it's that 'one thing' they need for their puzzle. In order for the designer to not remind you* that you're playing a game, players will redo the same life-or-death encounter twenty times while trying to guess what the hell they're supposed to do to survive. And, in order for a director to mimic their favorite movies, all good ludonarrative conventions are ignored in favor of twisting the player's arm to care about characters who they spend less time with than certain youtube ads.

I think, all in all, I despise the modern cinematic platformer more than almost any other genre (outside of inherently exploitive ones like gacha) because cinematic platformers are ashamed to be video games. They sacrifice crucial foundational gameplay decisions all in the pursuit of cheap artistic vanity. Early titles like Prince of Persia had the benefit of being technological showcases and (for the time) a breath of fresh air. But Limbo, and the horde of knockoffs it spawned have done nothing but encourage the creation of titles that make you press right on your thumbstick while being fed some of the most trite narratives you've ever seen--even if they look great while doing it.

Ironically enough, despite the genre (and Somerville's) aims, the cinematic platformer is like the cinematic equivalent of pointing a static camera at a stageplay: the story and acting might be great, but any movie director would tell you it's nothing but a waste of a film.

A new entry in the wave of Disco Elysium-likes expands on gameplay ideas but pairs back on (ludo)narrative engagement.

Oh, what a mess Harry Du Bois has made.

I certainly don't need to explain to you just how much of a lightning-in-a-bottle effect Disco Elysium has had on the gaming industry. Still, it's crazy to see just how many new releases have not just taken influence from Disco Elysium, but have even just built their own Disco Elysium. Seriously, it's getting to the point where we're going to need to give them a name. Shall we keep with gaming tradition and coin a term like Discolike? Or should we take a page from the book of musical genre and start calling these Second Wave CRPGs? Or perhaps we can go all the way and start calling them IRPGs (Intelligent Role-playing Games)? Maybe the developers of Citizen Sleeper will appreciate that as much as Aphex Twin does.

You've Come a Long Way, Monopoly

But to give Citizen Sleeper credit, it does offer significant divergence from Disco Elysium despite maintaining that distinct Discolike structure. Gameplay wise, it's still concerned with integrating tabletop game mechanics into a modern video game. However, Citizen Sleeper looks less towards the conventional tabletop game (D&D) and more towards games you literally play upon your tabletop: board games.

That's right, instead of opting to deepen the mechanics found in its influences, Citizen Sleeper instead chooses to widen its berth of influences, a goal I think it accomplished rather well. The game is broken up into daily 'cycles' (think turns) where you are allocated a set of pre-rolled dice that you can use to complete actions. Each action can have a positive, neutral, or negative outcome based on the value of the dice used as well as your character's stats (chosen and upgraded by you). The inclusion of the dice is one of the more interesting design choices I've seen this year, and I think it's handled rather well. Although there is still an element of random luck (non optimal dice still have a chance of failure), it allows players to consider actions and better weigh their choices and resources before committing to a decision. Despite that, the game still retains that element of RNG that all us thrillseekers crave.

On top of the die economy, Citizen Sleeper also makes heavy use of resource management through metrics of energy, condition, cryo (currency), and items. Between all of these systems, players will have plenty to chew on and consider as they optimize dice usage and which actions they should undertake at what time. Before long, the game really opens up with dozens of different tasks, quests, and characters that you can progress at any time. On top of that, the 'cycle' system introduces an addictive mechanical loop a la Civilization's legendary "one more turn..." mantra. I often found my self wondering just how much more I could squeeze out the next cycle--even if that meant skipping lunch.

Narratives in the Harsh Vacuum of Space

All that being said, I do wish the game went further with these developments. Although some crucial actions are possible to fail (either by wasting time or with bad dice rolls), many actions really don't have much weight behind them. I really wish the game was more willing to make me commit to actions and really weight the pros and cons of every cycle--something I very rarely did. Perhaps pursuing certain characters/quests would more often cut off other questlines or change how characters perceive me narratively. Moreover, quests really needed more deadlines and dangers that make me heavily consider how I'm spending my time. Now don't get me wrong, there was some of that, but not nearly enough to make it feel as substantial as I was hoping.

On top of that, many quests feel so disconnected and isolated that it really kills the illusion of Citizen Sleeper's holistic world. Massive events can happen in game and many characters will just have nothing to say about it. For example, I accidentally missed a questline until the tail end of the game, but everything about it was still treating me like I had just started playing 20 minutes ago--which no doubt felt very awkward for a game so focused on narrative immersion. Nearly every quest exists in a vacuum--certainly a consequence of it's indie development status, but a shame nonetheless.

What's in Disco, Anyways?

Going even further into narrative immersion, Citizen Sleeper unfortunately devolves lessons learned in Disco Elysium as well. Despite being very similar on the face of it, the game basically removes all meaningful gameplay interactions from the narrative presentation. You're still able to make conversation choices, but you will never have any true repercussions in mechanics--which is a shame. Considering the resource heavy nature of the game, I would love to see choices boost your energy, kill your condition, win you money, or maybe gain you items...just anything to get me more engaged into my actual character choices. Instead, you're mainly rewarded with a slightly different block of text.

Oh yeah, how is that block of text anyways? Well...it's....alright. Of course, the biggest problem with the Discolike is that virtually no games would match the nuanced literary qualities of their inspiration. This is doubly important considering what percent of the game is spent reading walls of text. That being said, Citizen Sleeper is not an awful endeavor either--and is probably something you could enjoy if you easily get immersed into simple sci-fi settings. However, I will admit I was often bored by the game's prose, themes, world, and characters. Nothing was ever poorly written, but it wasn't particularly engaging either. But hey, I'm a pretty harsh critic. If you're not that critical, or are already biased towards sci-fi, then you'll probably have a good enough time here--just don't expect anything revelatory.

All that being said, Citizen Sleeper is an enjoyable short experience and another impressive title from writer/director Gareth Damian Martin. It's far from reaching the perfection it strives for, but it offers enough interesting ideas in its five to ten hour runtime to keep anyone who likes Discolikes (yeah I'm sticking with that until someone makes something better, sue me) engaged. The biggest lesson to be learned here is that Discolikes really need a clean unification of narrative decisions and gameplay mechanics to really shine--ideally with a narrative that punches above the crowd. Even still, as long as they have unique premises and diverge enough in gameplay ideas, then you're still going to scratch that itch.

Somehow both too chaotic and simplistic for its own good, Final Fantasy XIII stands a definitive sign of its time and a harbinger of our current one.

For many, saying Final Fantasy XIII means saying 'failure' in the same breath. Even fans of the game will speak as if they're playing defense against some nebulous sense of disdain. Growing up, I only heard overwhelming derision when the game was mentioned. It seems that no matter who you are, you understand that XIII has a cloud of darkness looming over it. But why?

Evolution / Devolution
Well, it won't take long after pressing start to see for yourself. First, you'll be assaulted with barrage of proper nouns within moments of just loading in. Talk of Pulse, Purges, PSICOM, Focuses, Cocoon, L'cie, Fal'cie, etc. will disorient you to the point of indifference before you even learn anyone's name. But we'll get back to the story later. If this wasn't enough to set your alarms off, the combat encounters you're thrown into moments later should set you to DEFCON 1 instantly.

To start, Final Fantasy XIII has boldly opted to remove control of party members--meaning you'll be controlling one character and one character only. Consequentially, if that character dies, you'll be getting a game over...even if the other characters are alive and are capable of reviving you.
This decision alone spells ruin for even the most well intentioned of RPGs. Taking away options and methods for character expression should only be done when something else becomes complex enough to justify streamlining. Not to even mention how dangerous it is to leave players at the mercy of party AI. Anyone who's played similar games (Persona 3, etc.) can probably recall at least a few horror stories of negligent healers, absentminded mages, or unresponsive tanks that can still make their blood boil. God knows I can.

But hey, if we're only controlling one character then certainly the game has plenty of fresh rewarding mechanics to throw at us...right? Funny. Nearly every aspect of the game's battle systems have been dumbed down to new impressive lows. The usual RPG stats have been boiled down to merely two unique values (Strength and Magic). Mana no longer exists. Equipment is back to a simple weapon/accessory duality. And finally, proper levels/XP have been excised from the game entirely...just to name a few changes. Beyond player control, nearly every other avenue for unique expression has been reduced or removed entirely--offering the player mere mechanical scraps to work with.

Naturally, 'jobs' in the traditional FF sense are also dead in the water. Instead, players can take on one of six different 'roles,' although only three are available on a character by default. These rolls simplify RPGs to their most basic essence: attack, magic, tank, heal, buff, and debuff. Since you only have three party members, it's a given that you're able to switch roles during battle. However, since this is still Final Fantasy XIII, you can't quite switch roles on command. Instead, you must enter a special menu, create a limited list of pre-made role setups (paradigms) for your entire party. Then, during battle, you can access these paradigms and choose one on demand. In essence, these paradigms rob players of creating unique builds or strategies for battle--pigeonholing them into one of the six cliché and simplistic character roles.

What's in a Battle? / Why do we Battle?
So why do we even need six classes? Well, to be honest, we don't. For 98% of encounters you won't even think about using the tank, buff, and debuff classes. Most battles are simple enough and go by so quickly that you won't have to do anything beyond slap opponents into submission--something the game actively encourages. You heard me right: Final Fantasy now rewards players for finishing battles as fast as possible--meaning you're incentivized to essentially 'speedrun' every battle for the best reward. This change might sound interesting on the face of it. Giving every fight its own small meta-challenge could be good for keeping up player engagement. But unfortunately, the game's implementation of the concept, as well as how it ties into other mechanics, starts more fires than it puts out.

For one, it creates a positive feedback loop that I can only describe as brutally unfun and counterintuitive: Players who are already ahead get rewarded and put even further ahead of the curve. While players who are behind get pushed even further back unless they go out of their way to grind. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of dynamic difficulty Left 4 Dead AI Director-type balance in jRPGs. Final Fantasy VIII already tried, and failed, to implement such a system. But the exact design of it in XIII shows, in essence, everything I hate about the bog-standard JRPG...or at least the image of JRPGs that most players have. It discourages experimentation, unique play, and plain-old dicking around in order to demand a consistent, bland, and efficient performance from players. And if you're not keeping on the up-and-up...well, then get grinding for all the rewards you didn't get! It has the appearance of a unique challenge, but in reality it's a cheap stat check. One that rewards players only if they've got enough damage to make quick work of enemies. After all, we've established there are virtually zero mechanical avenues for creatively taking down your foes.

This is all made even worse by the new Stagger mechanic that has regretfully become a mainstay of Final Fantasy games since. In essence, you now barely damage enemies unless you fill a separate stagger meter first. The meter slowly boosts your damage and eventually reaches a (temporary) fever pitch once you fill it. However it'll deplete back to zero after you fill it or if you fail to fill it to max while it slowly drains. Basically, you need to fill the meter and then do as much damage as possible within the timeframe before the meter depletes. You can do damage outside of the meter, but considering that you're able to get up to 999% damage with a stagger, it's going to be a necessity in all but the easiest of fights.

So then, how do we build chain? Keeping in line with everything above, you build them in the most boring, limiting, and boilerplate way possible. When it comes to damage output there's only two real options: Commando, who slaps enemies with strength attacks, and Ravager, who damages foes using magic spells. Since your party has three spaces it might sound like you have room to experiment...but somehow, even here the developers have forced you down one path the entire game.

For you see, these two classes affect the all-important chain meter in entirely different ways. Commandos will add very little to the chain meter with each attack, but they slow the meter's degeneration. Ravagers, on the other hand, will add a large amount of meter per spell, but will rapidly degenerate the meter. This might sound like game design 101--making players weigh the costs of different party organizations--but in practice it actually kills what little player freedom is left. The meter's design means that most enemies require you have both commando and ravager in the party at all times when you're trying to build stagger. Presuming we're not using tanks, buffers, or debuffers in our party since we're fighting simple battles, let's consider our possible party lineups:

Commando, Commando, Commando: This lineup is functionally worthless, as commandos don't build stagger meters in any substantial way. Unless the enemies have tiny amounts of HP (making the meter useless), consider this lineup a non-starter.
Commando, Commando, Ravager: Throwing a ravager in the mix means you can start to meaningfully build meter, which is good. On the other hand, there's not really any purpose in having two commandos. One is good enough to stop the meter from resetting. This setup is usable, but horribly inefficient most of the time.
Commando, Ravager, Ravager: Keeping two ravagers means that you can build meters quickly, making good use of a commando to keep the meter from resetting. This is the lineup you'll probably be using for 99% of the game if you want to make quick work of enemies. As long as foes require stagger to fight quickly, you'll have very little choice but to use this when on the offense.
Ravager, Ravager, Ravager: This lineup is great if you can reasonably build a full meter in one full turn. However, if you can't then the chain meter will basically reset instantly, as there's no commando to keep it from disintegrating faster and faster with every spell cast. This is an incredibly situational lineup that only makes sense if you either already popped a chain meter--meaning you just need to focus on damage output--or if you're in the situation outlined above.

Throw in a medic, or two into the mix and you've got yourself the party configurations you'll be looking at 99% of the game:

Ravager, Ravager, Commando - The ol' reliable (50%)
Ravager, Commando, Medic - Boring but safe (20%)
Ravager, Ravager, Ravager - Fast nukes, limited uses (15%)
Commando, Medic, Medic - Survive and keep stagger going (5%)
Ravager, Medic, Medic - Survive and nuke (5%)
Medic, Medic, Medic - SURVIVE (5%)

As for the other classes...they only become meaningful during boss battles or other 'large' fights that make up a miniscule amount of the game's runtime. Even then the playbook is braindead simple:

1) Start battle with buff (Synergist) and debuff (Saboteur) classes
2) Once buffs/debuffs have been applied, switch to regular fight lineups
3) If damaged, throw out a healer
4) If buffs/debuffs run out, GOTO 1

The tank (Sentinel) can also be thrown in whenever a tank is needed, but to be honest I barely ever used the class on account of its niche applications in a game this simple. After all, why have someone tank when a medic heals for better HP throughput?

This might sound like a lot to take in, but it's paper-thin to stretch out over a forty-plus hour experience. This tedium is compounded by the fact that several of these mechanics aren't even introduced until you're already hours into the game!

To summarize party mechanics: they're simpler than they've ever been (beyond games without any meaningful choices like Final Fantasy IV). Developer attempts to 'balance' party structure only lead to further reductions in options. This means every player is essentially forced to play the same boring lineups to cope with the game's barebone mechanics. Even considering the meager class lineup, half are highly situational and will only get thrown out for a cheap hat trick during boss battles or other high profile fights.

I have seen some praise the party system (and paradigm shifting) as a highlight of the game--allowing players to gracefully 'context switch' between several party styles on the fly. But labeling these mechanics as 'good' is completely missing the forest for the trees. The choices the paradigm system gives you--to be offensive, defensive, or some mix--are the basic macro choices all RPGs allow you to make. During battles, you will have to choose when to heal, attack, buff, tank, debuff, etc. The only reason it feels more 'clean' in Final Fantasy XIII is because they have taken away every single micro choice you can make. They've left you with only the macro choice of 'be a healer' or 'be fighter' without any of the finer nuances that make an RPG interesting or rewarding. To be clear, Final Fantasy XIII offers nothing new to the genre of RPGs. It only mechanically takes away what even NES games had already given us 25 years prior.

But the real coup de grâce that seals XIII's fate as one of the worst triple-A JRPGs ever made is the game's Auto-battle feature. As you can imagine, auto-battle picks a (near) optimal set of actions based on battle context. In many games this would sound silly, but with how comically limited XIII's mechanics are, auto-battle tends to do a good job. In fact, auto-battle is too good at its job. So good that there are rarely instances where the player needs to do anything but use auto-battle. The worst part is that auto-battle is the first menu option in combat--meaning the developers expect you to rely on it more than your own decision making! Combine this with the fact that paradigms are so simplistic, and the game quickly devolves into a tiresome combination of switching between a few basic paradigms and pressing X.

And boy, do I mean it. I genuinely spent more time looking away from XIII then looking at it--even during boss fights. The game was able to practically play itself, only requiring me to step in whenever I needed to shift paradigms to heal/buff. It's astounding that the game designers considered this acceptable for a triple-A console game--especially one meant to be their company's flagship title. To be honest, it barely holds up as a mobile game--an ecosystem where XIII's barebone mechanics feel more at home.

And sure, players who really wish to fight the tide can opt out of auto-battling, but you must remember the holy mantra of good game design--something that XIII and its fans have forgotten:

The path of least resistance must not be dull.

The 'World' of Final Fantasy XIII / The Light at the End of the Tunnel is a Train
But the dirty details of battle aren't where this story ends...hell this section isn't even where the literal story begins. Instead, we need to talk about the all-important vehicle for the gameplay and story in an RPG: the world. And believe me, if there's one place Final Fantasy XIII absolutely screwed the pooch, it would be here.

As anyone who lived through the early 2010s knows, Final Fantasy XIII has the exploratory depth of an elevator shaft. Instead of continuing Final Fantasy's tradition of building a complete open world--a trend which had also been gaining steam outside of RPGs--XIII opts for a collection of straight corridors that persist for (practically) the entire game.

I'm sure we've all heard the jokes about how XIII is just a 'tutorial' for 40 hours straight...but that feeling doesn't truly set in until you actually sit down to absorb those forty hours and see just how empty XIII really is. It seriously is just a collection of straight hallways peppered with lazily placed enemy encounters and banal 'branching paths' for treasure collection...for forty fucking hours. It's a completely on-rails experience that comes closer to a train ride through a barren desert than a Six Flags rollercoaster. There's no towns, there's no backtracking, there's no interesting optional areas, there's nothing. It's like one of those rhetorical games people create for the sake of argument. Imagine, if you will, an RPG devoid of all charming content--left with nothing but barebone stats, mundane enemies, and an endless corridor to "progress" down. Would RPG fans still stomach this if it had some cool character designs, fancy graphics, and a 'banger' soundtrack? Thankfully (or perhaps horrifically), you don't need to imagine any of this--Square actually made it.

Of course, fans will remind naysayers that the game eventually 'opens up' when players arrive in Gran Pulse near the 30ish hour mark. This claim is total horseshit. Much like the Calm Lands in Final Fantasy X, Gran Pulse is merely a single large, flat, and dull field that the player is allowed to dredge through before being thrown right back down the generic hallways encompassing the rest of the game. The game purports to 'come alive' in Gran Pulse, but this is only realized through half-baked XII-ian monster hunts that only happen during this one portion of the game. That's right, you finally get access to some piss-poor side content in XIII after about thirty hours of playtime. These hunts, essentially being the only optional content in the game, boil down to the exact same boring fights as the regular story--except now requiring you to walk around a big empty field to fight. It feels like the team realized too late into development that they had a total mess of a world and desperately tried to shove in anything to mix things up. Unfortunate for them, Gran Pulse is the spitting image of 'too little, too late' in terms of world and game design. Any would-be designers ought to take note: this is how not to design a world.

Upon release, the director (and the game's fans) rebuked criticism of XIII's world design with assertions that the game's hyper-linearity was actually a 'breath of fresh air' considering the (still) ever-expanding market of shoddy open world games. Now don't get me wrong, I despise generic triple-A open world games more than anyone else I know. Hell, I spend too much time considering how much better 99% of games would be if they were more linear. But in the case of Final Fantasy, Toriyama has managed to miss the point entirely. More than virtually any series out there, Final Fantasy had staked its claim on delivering players not just a game, but a genuinely unique world with every entry. Players want to live and breathe these places--and they derive a lot of enjoyment from exploring every dungeon, town, and weird spot on their own terms. Previous games were certainly focused on a story--but anyone who's played Final Fantasy I-IX can certainly recall fond memories of 'dicking around' somewhere in the world outside of the mandated story beats. Even Final Fantasy X (as incompetent and maligned as it was) tried to give you a 'sense' of an open world by letting you return to previous portions of the game--going as far to hide the occasional item/quest there. Sure it was 90% filler trash, and it still suffered the 'hallway' problem that XIII faces, but there was clearly an attempt to appeal to the core sensibilities of the genre, no matter how half-assed they were.

Growth / Harm
So the combat and world of XIII are shot to hell, but what about the final ludic pillar of RPGs: progression?

I'll let you guess.

But what's wrong with it and why did it end up that way? First, a short reminder of relevant history:

The traditional level system that defined golden age JRPGs was getting long in the tooth as the 90s came to a close. And so, many started to experiment. Final Fantasy VIII featured a leveling system that actually made the game harder as you progressed while Chrono Cross gated progression behind narrative encounters to discourage grinding. Of course, all of this stands in the shadow of the almighty sphere grid system from Final Fantasy X. Instead of conventional leveling, X gave you points to spend on a large grid where each node represented a stat boost or ability. The grid sounds great in theory but was awful in execution. In the most generous of readings, the grid was a skill-tree par excellence. But in reality it was yet another lazy way that X stretched out its runtime: transforming the streamlined process of leveling into a manual action that you suffered through--for all 828 nodes on each character's grid. Don't get me wrong, the freedom to customize your character is a good thing...but the sphere grid was a hyper-linear and progress-gated mess that forced you to spend more time menuing through UI and watching animations instead of strategizing or enjoying the actual gameplay. Despite a positive fan reception, the sphere grid disappeared in X-2 and was naturally absent in XII as well. But if XIII has somehow been a diluted X knockoff up to now…then it should be no surprise whose notes it was copying for a progression system.

Characters are given a significantly reduced 'grid' for each role they have. And although the general principle is still the same, the streamlined implementation means players will unlock dozens of nodes per role instead of hundreds. In some ways, this is a clear upgrade over X's system. I have to spend far less time thumbing around the UI and watching +1 STR nodes get slowly placed on the grid, meaning every node completed feels at least more meaningful than before...even if they are now mainly just +20 STR nodes instead. However, the new system has managed to make the whole upgrade process even more linear than before. Although the original sphere grid was primarily a straight shot with the occasional branching path (and constant level gates), there were a few items that allowed you to teleport around the grid in novel ways. It certainly didn't redeem the system, but it allowed for some remotely interesting options if you felt like going through the hassle. Instead, XIII's grid is a straight shot with the occasional node or two branched off. The distinction might not seem like much, but simply inspecting both grids should show you how much of a difference it makes. Even if the sphere grid was poorly executed, I could still understand the rough appeal, as well as some of the interesting ideas hidden underneath a layer of garbage. XIII's system, by contrast, is so streamlined it begs the question of why it even exists in the first place. Why take me out of the action and make me navigate menus and press buttons just to get the same garbage I would have gotten through a traditional level up screen?

The answer, funny enough, lies in XIII's most notable quality.

The Magic of Meters / The Malice of Mechanics
You might have noticed a trend in how I describe XIII's mechanics and what makes them bad: namely devolved systems, useless numbers, and filler content. But there is a greater element that ties everything together into a cohesive (and for some, attractive) whole: tactility.

Now forgive me for making up stupid terms midway through my review of a half-star game--but if you've read this far I presume you're willing to hear me out on the stupidest shit I could possibly say, so bear with me. Tactility--or "ludic" tactility if you want to appeal to the would-be academics out there--obviously exists in every game. After all, you need to interact with the game for it to qualify as a game in the first place. But games with a great sense of tactility make players feel the game in ways that go above and beyond. Having smooth animations, top-notch camera work, and synergistic gameplay is a good start, but it's just the entry point for having great tactility. I believe putting XIII under a microscope starts to reveal its significant connection to the concept. Let's consider some of the things it does different from its forerunners.

XIII isn't content with simply killing enemies--watching their HP slowly deplete during battle. Now, we must invent new meters that increase as we hit foes, watching numbers go up until we reach that holy 999% STAGGER! euphoria--allowing us a moment of condensed excitement and chaos before we return to the dull mundanity of battle, where we have to earn that moment of bliss all over again. The meter, the unique player/enemy animations, and the ludicrously high damage values make the stagger system the new method of doing damage in FFXII--and the new method for feeling it too.

XIII also isn't satisfied with simple level progression systems either. Merely earning stat upgrades slowly and automatically is boring and outdated. Now we need skill 'trees' that require our attention and physical input--forcing us to hold buttons, navigate UIs, and watch 'upgrade' animations as we see our characters ostensibly get the same rewards as in the old system--with roughly the same linearity too. The only notable difference is the number attached to those stats: now Lightning ends the game with a thousand strength instead of a hundred. Players are forced to interact with the game in ways they never did in the past--and are arguably 'rewarded' in new ways as well. Think about it--you never saw Squall get two-thousand strength no matter how many hours you spent wrestling with the junction system of FFVIII, meanwhile I can get Hope to double that with just the press of a button.

Battles can't be framed within a greater challenge anymore either. Gone are the days of utilizing resource management and dungeon design as another way to engage players in longform content. Now we need each battle to feature micro tasks that reward us every thirty seconds with a giant FIVE STARS reward. It doesn't matter that items are worthless and we auto-heal between fights for free. It doesn't matter that we're rewarded by actively speeding through the challenge--mindlessly spamming the auto-attack command instead of engaging battles on a more thoughtful level. Because... I mean come on, we gotta get them stars!

These distinctions of tactility might seem superfluous to you, but they genuinely matter to a lot of people. How many times have you written off a game as a pointless 'number go up' experience bereft of anything but hollow dopamine hits? I'm not going to name any names, but I'm sure you have your own list. But you need to understand that there's a chance a game you love is on my list and vice-versa. Moreover, the games that have the worst reputation for these sensibilities are often the ones that make billions of dollars from millions of passionate fans. Even if I'm willing to write a critical diatribe (and you're willing to read it), there's always going to be way more people who don't care about any of this shit--they just want that sweet five-star 'hit.'

And is there anything inherently wrong with that? Are players chasing a shallow sense of happiness under false pretenses? Are we all just rats in cages waiting for the next drop? I'll leave the thought as an exercise for you...but I don't really think so. Sure, there are systems that definitely abuse these aspects of human nature. (loot boxes will be regulated eventually...right?) But at the end of the day, we're all just looking for our own kind of 'hit' when we play games. So who's to say when the line is crossed between 'good fun' and 'societal ill' anyways?

But even if I don't hate the people who enjoy those experiences, their games are still shit in my book--and Final Fantasy XIII is nothing if not the granddaddy of them all. When I said the game's mechanics barely held up for even a mobile game, that was also a backhanded compliment of sorts. Because to be fair, XIII predates much of the mobile game boom--especially in the RPG/gacha genres--but manages to encapsulate a lot of the tactile sensibilities that dominate those multi-billion juggernauts to this day. Sure, it's a lot more awkward and incomplete compared to new shiny gacha games...but the core was still there waiting to be seized on.

Speaking to friends who do enjoy those experiences, many of them also enjoy XIII for much the same: it's a game where they can 'turn off their brain' and see some satisfying animations and big numbers go flying across the screen. In this sense, I suppose the developers of XIII should be commended. They achieved high levels of unique tactility--perhaps even pioneering a set of historic trends...trends that it would never meaningfully profit from. In other words, XIII crawled so that Gacha could run. Bravo Toriyama.

The Maximization of Fun / The Minification of Games
But if these newer gacha games get all the praise (and money), then why didn't XIII? The timing of the game's release and the contemporary market expectations paint us a clearer picture.

For one, XIII released in an era where there was still a clear distinction between the console, portable, and nascent mobile gaming markets. You're probably old enough to remember the nuances of these segregations, but their importance and influence on gaming culture, design, and history will be lost on future generations as we march towards greater market homogenization. You knew that if a game released on both the GameCube and the Gameboy Advance, they weren't actually going to be the same game. If you're on the older side (the GBA is old enough to drink!), you can probably even imagine what that GBA version of that game looks like compared to the home console original. Consequently, early smartphone adopters can remember exactly why Metal Gear Touch was no Peace Walker either. These days, a port usually just means downscaled graphics, 'Cloud Edition,' or just no port at all--even to markets as lucrative as the Switch. But back in the 2000s, entire industries were established to custom fit games for the habits and peculiarities of these individual markets.

It was only a matter of time before these ecosystems started cannibalizing each other's best elements, but Final Fantasy XIII released in an era far before this great merge. It's hard to say when this convergence really cemented itself, but it's certain that the release of the Switch blurred the line between home console and portable systems for good. Now it's all too common to find home console classics on iOS or gacha sensibilities in sixty dollar console games. The hyper-competitive nature of the mobile ecosystem has conditioned developers to fixate more on squeezing every drop of mechanical and temporal efficiency out of their game loops--aiming for very high levels of addictive tactility in the process. In the best case, it means that games are streamlined and have several layers of mechanical satisfaction. But in the worst (and I'd argue, average) case, it means games over-simplify and under-develop all in the name of 'bite-sized' rewards that amount to less than the sum of their parts.

You don't need to look at iPhone games to see what I mean. It seems that nearly every other property (Halo, Elden Ring (Soulsborne), God of War, etc.) has either transitioned to, or refined the same open world RPG designs to further exploit these sensibilities.Breath of the Wild dropped traditional dungeons in favor of tiny shrines--downplaying complexity and atmosphere in the name of approachability and instant gratification. Mario reverted back to Super Mario 64's design conventions in Odyssey to encourage a faster reward loop. The short 'runs' of Roguelikes have helped them explode in popularity in recent years. And finally, Final Fantasy XIII dropped nearly every good RPG convention in pursuit of maximizing shallow metrics of player satisfaction.

I made an offhand comment earlier about the treasures you can 'find' in the world, as well as the 'branches' in the upgrade tree, and when you think about it, they both tie into this philosophy in the same way. You're not actually meant to be exploring the world--there's fucking nothing to explore. But the designers have decided that rewarding you as if you actually did explore the world would be good enough. The same applies to upgrade paths. There aren't any actual meaningful decisions to be made. But by branching off a path, the designers expect you to feel like you made a decision. After all, you didn't actually have to get that +5 STR

Is this good design? Hell no. But it definitely seems to work for many people out there. To me, these systems violate the first law of game design: they don't challenge you in any meaningful way--they merely ask for your time. You can keep heading straight to advance the game…or you can waste a minute taking a dead-end branching path to get some shitty items. You can just keep using the regular upgrade path, or you can waste X points to get a 'branched' upgrade. If you dig deep enough, these feelings start to crop up in the battle systems too. So many fights don't actually require you to use your brain at all--they can just be braved using the auto-battle system. And yet, these battles will sometimes take upwards of five or even ten minutes of just hammering the auto-battle button. You might be thinking that I'm just "playing the game wrong," but each battle has a fucking par time and I'd often come minutes under par--getting rewarded with five stars even when playing like this. Don't be confused: this is how they want you to play. In lieu of any good design choices, Final Fantasy XIII opts instead to manipulate the easiest resource it can--your real life.

There's certainly a conversation to be had on how these trends have negatively affected the industry--maximizing short term rewards at the expense of longform content--but it is undeniable that modern players have grown accustomed to these systems. Based on sales data and critical reception, it's very easy to argue that they even adore them...But when XIII released, players were totally blindsided. They were, in essence, paying sixty dollars for a mobile game with very nice graphics. Perhaps they weren't looking for the mind boggling complexity of XII, but it's very clear in retrospect that the simplifications found in X were as far as fans were willing to stomach.

However, I don't think XIII would have the same disastrous reception if it were released today. In fact, it's easy to see a lot of XIII's DNA in a newer, far more successful relative--Final Fantasy VIII: Remake. Although there are certainly significant differences between the two, Remake shares strikingly similar upgrade systems, stagger mechanics, world design, and pacing. Playing XIII with fresh eyes in 2022, all I could see in it were the quirks I found in Remake. Which begs the question: are fans of Remake hypocritical for hating XIII? I'll leave that as an exercise to you...but I don't have to worry about that question--I fucking hate them both. One common thing I hate about both of them is their abysmal narratives, so let's finally rip the band-aid off and get to it.

Characters Drawn Together / Narrative Drawn Apart
I'm sure you're probably expecting me to tear this game's narrative to sheds, but I won't be spending that much time on it. To be blunt, it's just as bad as you're expecting it to be--frankly probably even worse than that. The dialogue is on par with Watanabe's Kingdom Hearts offerings and there's enough laugh-out-loud content to rival the worst schock out there. A special shout out here to Lightning's "worst birthday ever" and Snow's sick new hot rod.

Still, I'll take some time to point out the story's most egregious errors, but a point-by-point dissection is no more useful here than on Beyond: Two Souls or Mortal Kombat 4--it's so obviously bad that pointing it out is like explaining that the sky is blue. If you disagree...well I can't feasibly convince you otherwise: you genuinely think the sky is purple. Go pop on Kingdom Hearts and ride to Mickey's Dick Smasher world with Donald and Goofy instead of arguing with me. Still, if you've hate-read this far, feel free to send your death threats to my inbox.

Beyond the usual Nomura/Nojima/Watanabe shenanigans that plague XIII' (ultra-juvenile characters, excessive proper noun usage, convoluted plot devices, etc.), the game falls prey to the same flaw found in every Nojima-led Final Fantasy: inconsistent character arcs. One of Final Fantasy VI/VII's claims to fame was its quality arcs. VI might not have literally written the book on JRPG character arcs and pacing, but it certainly solidified conventions--all while featuring some of the genre's highest highs. Funny enough, the narrative framework I'm referring to is incredibly simple, deceptively so considering how many high-profile games still screw it up.

The first half of the game should focus on setting up intriguing characters, their personal challenges, and the interesting relationship dynamics between them. The second half of the game should fully resolve each character's distinct struggle--ideally with a unique, memorable, and emotional set-piece to back it up. VII refined this strategy in many ways. Iconic characters like Barret, Cid, and Red XIII underwent significant character growth and maturation as the narrative progressed--each getting their own classic set piece to boot (the showdown with Dyne, The First Man in Space, and XIII's quest to discover his origins, respectively). On top of this, it's important that following the arc's conclusion, the character changes in some clear way. You want to see new outlooks on life, new relationship dynamics, and even new entire personality traits that signify genuine character growth.

However, the fully Nojima-led VIII took a very different approach. Although there was still a cast of characters, nearly all focus was given to one or two of them over all else. Squall certainly has a complete and satisfying arc...but it came at the cost of everyone else. The other characters arcs range from half developed (Irvine's struggle to pull the trigger), barely started (Quistis' imposter syndrome), or non-existent (Zell certainly is a cool guy). Some characters have things happen to them (Selphie's school getting blown up), but--as we'll see in XIII--being bummed out for a moment doesn't constitute an actual character arc...especially if the character doesn't change in any meaningful way.

X would feature near identical problems. Characters may be strong personalities, but they're ultimately lacking in meaningful development outside of Tidus and maybe Yuna (if you squint). My favorite example being how Wakka's horrible racism is just never resolved. He starts the game as a racist, is racist, and then rides off into the sunset without any clear indication of regret or remorse. All he does is change the target of his racism from Al Bhed to Guado once he learns he is 100% justified in doing so. Oops.
Other characters like hot goth mommy (currently blanking on her name for obvious reasons) are only around for a combination of gameplay purposes (someone has to start off as a spellcaster!) and aesthetic values (once again: hot goth mommy).

You find these same issues persist in XIII, only far worse. For one, the (marketed) protagonist is probably the most unlikeable character of the bunch. She starts off hostile to the point of comedic absurdity ("Worst. Birthday. Ever.") and ends the game only ever-so-slightly less bitter. Meanwhile side characters are just as shallow as in previous Nojima-led games, but with far less personality between them. Snow is no substitute for Wakka, and Sazh is certainly no Irvine either. Characters with a greater sense of subtlety only work if you have the narrative depth to match, which is sorely lacking in XIII. If they were going to blow it, the least they could have done was give us memorable and zany characters a-la VIII and X. Instead we get black middle aged dad (lamer Barret) and some lady from…down under.

Oddly enough, Nojima and Watanabe find their greatest strength in the exact same character type they did the last two times: the young, conflicted boy who's forced to come-of-age. That's right, it's Hope that ends up having the most complete arc in XIII, much to my surprise. He basically spends the early game being a ten year old version of the Joker--but he ends up getting a series of notable moments (with lots of other characters)! Over time he slowly grows into the most mature member of the party. Characters like Lightning and Snow play off of Hope's journey to maturation...but it's very clear by the time Hope meets his dad that he might as well be the star of the show. And I'll admit it, by the end of the game I genuinely was invested in his story! Perhaps it was because of just how dire the rest of the narrative was, but XIII will need to take its W's where it can get them. One decent character arc out of several means we're at least batting at an VIII average (sorry Tidus).

The rest of the characters turn out just as you'd expect. Some have singular moments of intrigue before devolving back into the exact same character (shout out to Sazh's maligned suicide attempt), while others might as well not have an arc (sorry Fang).

I think it's clear by now how to have a conventionally 'good' character-driven RPG narrative:

1) Set up a series of interesting characters and their struggles in the first act of the game
2) Allow these arcs to develop through memorable set pieces while the party struggles to defeat their enemies in the second act
3) Complete each arc with its own set piece and let each character signify their growth in some clear new trait
4) Give our now-developed characters a satisfying sense of maturation and unification as they band together to defeat a common enemy

Reflecting on this checklist also makes it clear why the second half of this game is such a nightmarish slog. First, what little character arc content there is gets shat out mainly in the first half of the game. Two, there is no good 'common enemy' for the party (and the player) to band against.

That's right, one of the most essential parts of a great RPG is practically absent here: a great antagonist. It's true that many previous Final Fantasy games failed to develop a proper villain...but there's a reason why VI/VII have garnered their acclaim over the rest of the series. Even weaker titles like X or II managed to develop their own iconic bad guy while others at least created a memorable fake-out antagonist (VIII, IV). Instead, XIII finds our characters vaguely gesturing at entire nation-states as their enemy for most of the game. When we finally meet our proper antagonist--the fucking Pope--we know just as much about him as you know about your second cousin.

Not only is it hilarious that XIII's primary villain rips directly from X's side plot--where you also basically fight the pope--but it makes it even more clear how much more trite XIII is by comparison...and Jesus Christ is that saying something. As bad as X was, its attack on organized religion made sense--the game's entire world and story were centered around religion. We spend enough time digesting the religion in order to understand why it posed a real threat to our party and the world as a whole. Beyond that, X found some basic ways to invest players in the fight emotionally--as Tidus' romantic ambitions get tangled up with Seymour's plans to marry Yuna.

The combination of these two factors--screwed character arcs and failed antagonist development--cause the game to devolve from 'fun but entertaining mess' to 'all out nightmare.' It becomes more aimless and underdeveloped than any other Final Fantasy game so far--a very impressive feat considering its place in the series. This becomes all the more harrowing in retrospect--knowing that I still have two more games in this franchise ahead of me. Wait...Why the hell did XIII of all games become a franchise anyways?

Fabula Nova Crystallis: The Birth of a Franchise / Fabula Nova Crystallis: The Death of Final Fantasy
It's easy to forget now, but there was a time where XIII was proudly tied to the "next evolution" of Final Fantasy as a franchise. If you were tapped into media cycles around 2006, you probably remember the announcement of Fabula Nova Crystallis: a new shared universe that would tie together Final Fantasy games going forward. Now I'm sure I don't need to tell you how bad of an idea this was. But clearly some people (especially those who worked at fucking Square Enix) needed to hear this…so let's review, shall we? For one, an enduring appeal--hell, the brand identity--for Final Fantasy was its lack of continuity. It was a brilliant choice that made the series evergreen and allowed newcomers to hop in whenever they liked--a crucial appeal for a genre as unappetizing as JRPGs.

Even if the Crystallis games were only tangentially related by lore, it was always going to be a bad decision to market them as a franchise. Yasumi Matsuno pulled similar tricks with the Ivalice games, but there was never any shared marketing to make this clear to players. It's clear that Matsuno's world wasn't really planned as a corporate gimmick--it just happened as he created more games. Hence the odd inclusion of the non-Final Fantasy game Vagrant Story into to the world. It certainly helps that the connections between games were even smaller than in Crystallis. Tactics and XII technically took place in the same location, but if you weren't reading the greater subtext of that relationship then it genuinely had zero effect on the plot.

Instead, Crystallis comes off more like a greedy plan inspired by pure profit motive. The newly merged Square Enix clearly viewed the fresh design of every Final Fantasy as more of a liability than a boon. Why spend years crafting new worlds, art styles, characters, and story lines when you could pump out quick asset flips for the same profit? This isn't even a theorical question--Final Fantasy X-2 was essentially a shortened asset flip of X that sold nearly as well as Final Fantasy XII, a game that had a massive scale, huge budget, and a 5+ year development cycle. It was clear that attaching new titles to pre-established brands was the safer (and far more boring) financial bet--and so we saw the godawful Compilation of Final Fantasy VII as well as Fabula Nova Crystallis.

Of course, the problem with this strategy is that you need to have an already successful game to build your franchise off of. In the case of VII, I can understand where they were coming from--even if every spin-off they made was an unmitigated disaster. People would still buy them because Cloud and Sephiroth were on the tin. Crystallis, by contrast, reads like one of those classic New Coke disasters you learn about in business school. They genuinely thought they could sell a franchise with literally zero cultural capital beyond an attachment to Final Fantasy and Nomura/Nojima's names on the box. There's a reason why later titles like XV changed their name in a desperate attempt to minimize attachment to the trash-fire that was XIII.

The true Crystallis tragedy is the toll it took on the franchise as a whole. I mean, think about it: XIII and the Crystallis universe was announced in 2006 and we're still awaiting the release of the first mainline game to escape its influence. Even XIV originally started off being powered by the same Crystal Tools that ran XIII--a major selling point at the time. Considering single player games, that means we've been stuck in the extended-world of XIII for…about 17 years now. That's the time gap between the birth of Final Fantasy to fucking Final Fantasy X-2. If XII hadn't been delayed for so long it would also be included in this period. That means we've basically existed in two 'eras' for all of Final Fantasy's existence: The 'Classic' era (I-XII) and the 'Crystallis' era (XIII-XV). Now tell me, which era do you honestly think was better for gaming history/culture/design? Which era do you think produced the most iconic moments, heartfelt stories, and genuine honest-to-god fun?

There's a larger industry trend to consider here--but it's impossible not to see Final Fantasy as one of the flagbearers of this cursed ecosystem. Bloated development cycles, convoluted-yet-shallow narratives, and gameplay systems that fail to rival even NES games. All of these sacrifices in the name of graphical fidelity and a greater sense of 'cinematic realism.' I find it hard to take these cinematic qualities seriously, although I'm sure that's no surprise to you. It's not just because XIII is filled with dialogue that wouldn't pass in a two-star movie…but also because you're dropped back into the same generic hallway filled with mindless battles right after each awful cutscene ends. Perhaps we'd never go back to the Final Fantasy VI era of cracking out an entire masterpiece in twelve months…but certainly there is a far better middle ground to be found here. One that allows developers to approach lower-budget, smaller titles that encourage the creation of unique new IP instead of rehashing an already bloated franchise's worst traits. Frankly, the Final Fantasy franchise would be better served with another mainline title that featured such a development cycle.

The Fabula Nova Crystallis franchise makes clear that priorities had finally shifted within Square Enix. First, there was a need for each Final Fantasy entry to build a franchise--one that could run on its own. Spin-off games, marketable plushies, movie tie-ins, you name it. Second, the game needed to be an insane graphical showcase. Sure, the Playstation era games were graphically focused--but they were made with easily achievable pre-rendered graphics. All you needed was budget to afford the SGI machines and you were good to go. Creating the same spectacle with real-time rendering would be exponentially harder on all levels. We'd need to spend years building our own engines and tools to guarantee that the game looked years ahead of the competition. As a consequence, it didn't matter if we limited our game's world to endless corridors or removed core series functionality. We need our games to wow audiences with ultra-high-rez character models and hair physics. And finally third came…the game. That part didn't really matter as much. As long as characters are cool enough (and look good enough), then we could implement even the most laughable of combat systems and players would still part with their sixty dollars…and so…Final Fantasy XIII.

Vision / Indifference
In closing, I think I can express my hatred for XIII in one word: non-commitment. It's frankly hard to see a genuine sense of passion or thoughtful direction anywhere in XIII. Core aspects of Final Fantasy's appeal--like cities and towns--were cut from the game not because Toriyama wanted to make a statement…but because the graphical fidelity made them infeasible to optimize. Entire systems were removed or reduced too. Not because Toriyama wanted to make some bold statement about minimalist philosophy, but because they didn't know what to do with those systems. Just compare XIII to Hiroyuki Ito's Dungeon Encounters and tell me with a straight face XIII is anywhere near as committed to its design.

If you consider how to fix the game's shortcomings you'll quickly realize the core problem: fixing issues would require the game to commit to an idea. They would have to add on systems, mechanics, and design concepts. And if there's one thing that's clear--it's that Toriyama and Co. would rather die than do that.

Think about it…the world doesn't require you to explore it, the mechanics don't require you to learn/consider them, and the gameplay doesn't even require you to play it. Nearly every aspect of XIII has dumbed itself down to the point of insignificance. The game is fundamentally lacking in any true vision--be it from a unified team or from a singular director. And it sadly begs the question: why even have a game at all?

Just months before XIII's release, Toriyama was quoted saying:

"Even at a late stage of development, we did not agree on key elements of the game, which stemmed from the lack of a cohesive vision, the lack of finalized specs, and the remaining problems with communication between departments."

This chronic mismanagement--brought upon us from the top down--seems to be the exact reason XIII came to us as the disaster it was. It was designed as a franchise-starter first and a graphical showcase second--made by people who didn't even want to make a Final Fantasy game in the first place. It's a game that insists upon itself. One created because it had to exist for financial reasons, not because it particularly wanted to.

And so, I hate Final Fantasy XIII. It stands for nearly every single illness in this industry. I hate its hyper-corporate origins, maligned cinematic fixations, aggressively shallow skinner-box gameplay mechanics, and ultimate lack of artistic vision. These issues highlight many of the problems that still plague the industry…and in that sense, XIII is a pioneer--an avant-garde masterpiece. A true titan of the medium. Unfortunately, it didn't come to us as the vanguard of the future, but as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
I pray that we may one day escape the shadow it has cast upon us all.

A Ship of Theseus held together by shallow references to greener pastures-- Tunic serves as a reminder that form towers over function in the eyes of many.

Tunic, I've found, serves as a sort of Rorschach test.

You probably discovered it like I did, at one of the many directs that every company seems to throw these days. There are enough out there that it makes my head spin: Sony State of Play, Nintendo Direct, Xbox Developer Direct, Summer Games Fest, Capcom Showcase, Ubisoft Forward, Annapurna Interactive Showcase, Limited Run Games Showcase, Tribeca Games Showcase, EA Play, Devolver Direct, and of course, the titan above them all: the almighty Wholesome direct.
I'm being cheeky rattling off every single one, but consider this for a moment: do you remember where you first saw Tunic? It popped up at a lot of these directs--hell it's probably popped up more than any other game ever has. And considering its seemingly endless promotion followed by immediate success both critically (just having won a DICE award at the time of writing) as well as commercially, it's easy to see Tunic as one of the newest flagbearers for the indie games movement.

But back to the Rorschach test. When you saw one of those thirty direct trailers, what did you think? Did it seem cool? Cute? Atmospheric? Challenging? Or…god forbid…comfy? Your instant reaction to Tunic says a lot about you…But I'll leave that thought as an exercise for you. Well, you and some other loquacious (now that's a billion-dollar word) reviewer. One that'll cite 18th century Irish philosophers and end the rantreview by calling you a pervert for enjoying the game or something. I won't know your secrets, but I'll tell you mine: I thought Tunic looked like derivative trite that masked its shortcomings behind a cheap veneer of cute nostalgia.

And so, at least for this review, I've become that guy.
You know the one.
The guy who dislikes the games you love. The dude unwilling to hear your game out on any level, even on its greatest strengths. They'll boil down everything you adore about a game into saying something like "it's just Dark Souls meets Earthbound." Don't you just hate that pedantic bastard? I know I do.

Overworld
So take heart. I'll give Tunic some credit before we begin the fireworks. The game looks nice--at least at a surface level. The music is fine in a vacuum (but even then, it hardly carries a sense of adventure). And beyond that…I suppose the game is all-around functional. I didn't fall through any floors, nor did the game actively try to murder me in real life--which is a plus. Finji and director Andrew Shouldice haven't congratulated my playthrough by mailing me a pipe bomb…although God help me if they ever manage to read this review. In total, you aren't getting scammed out of your money if you buy Tunic, but I'm sure you already knew that.
I recognize that it's a very low bar I’m setting here...but if you asked me if there was anything I actually liked about Tunic…then the answer would be a definitive No. There's really only things that I so deeply hate.

But still, much like how Halo and Manhunt share the same 'M' rating, I wouldn't say that Tunic deserves as much ire as say, Bioshock Infinite or Final Fantasy XIII do. After all, you can only hate a bad indie game so much. It's not like tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of overworked manhours were wasted here. There's nothing insidious or despicable here from a commercial standpoint. One guy started this project wanting to make his dream a reality--and after several hard years (plus the assistance of a small publisher) he (well, by this point, they) made the dream come true. And that's fine and all, good for them. But there are still many things that I find Tunic stands for in the greater context of the gaming--particularly indie gaming--ecosystem we live in. Both on the side of those who create, as well as those consume and critique…and I guess also the bastards who put on 'directs' too. I might not take issue with the director of the game (please don't mail me a pipe bomb), but the rest of this, I will take issue with.

To start, we should probably deal with the elephant in the room: originality.

It's a given that art shouldn’t have to strive towards pure innovation. Everything we create was inspired by someone else's work. And even before there were artists to take inspiration from, our ancestors merely imitated the natural world around them. Sure, there are those special works that do change the game, but you and I understand the gaussian nature of art: if everything was "special," nothing would be.

So every game can be boiled down to "Skyrim with guns." But good art--the stuff worth going out of your way for--still needs something special about it. There has to be something to separate it from its artistic realtives, even if it ultimately fails to escape its influences.

And it's here that the Rorschach test kicks in again.

Clearly this isn't a hang-up for many people--developers and players alike. How many Castlevania, Mega Man, Dark Souls, Animal Crossing, and yes, Zelda-likes have you seen next to Tunic at these online events? Were you excited for that new quirky Earthbound inspired RPG with a dark edge? That wasn't a rhetorical question: were you? Because if so…that's fine. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Stop reading this review and go play Tunic, you'd probably enjoy it. And that's a good thing. You should enjoy more things--provided you aren't getting anyone killed in the process.

But for those of you who are like me--scratching their heads at why someone would want to play a worse version of an extant classic--then you probably also see Tunic as one of the most desperate indie games of the lot. Everything about it--from a surface (and therefore marketable) level--was custom-fit to make you think of better games. For Christ sake just think about the title of the game. Take a look at its box art, it's on this very same webpage right now! I haven't seen an indie game this transparent since the developers of Oddity flat-out named their project Mother 4. It's clear as day that Shouldice wants you to think of Zelda when you buy his game--so I'll be thinking about that while I review it too.

Once you actually see the game in motion, you'd very quickly understand Tunic's other major design pillar: Dark Souls. Not even just in terms of combat--parries, dodge rolls and all that--but instead also in terms of narrative design, world building, and holistic gameplay design too. Hell, if it were just knocking off the dodge rolls, then I'd only charge it with the misdemeanor of ripping off Bastion. But merely taking minor inspiration isn't quite Tunic's style. We are stripping the walls down to the copper here.

Hints on How to Destroy Creativity
So yes, Tunic is in essence Dark Souls meets Zelda, with some other obvious influences thrown in as well. You might think this combination is sensible--both are fantasy/action-adventure games after all--but closer scrutinization reveals fatal problems when merging the two.

First and foremost is a sense of tone. Dark Souls and Zelda might belong to the same genre when you squint, but they are polar opposites in holistic presentation. Sure, graphics and art style are one obvious comparison, but we can go further than that. Zelda games are often beloved for their quirky and memorable NPC cast while Souls games are mainly (and intentionally) devoid of life beyond a scant few characters. There's certainly been a few NPCs that have managed to gain traction--you can probably guess the one in particular I'm thinking about, but you're mainly playing a Souls game to experience the lack of community, not the presence of it. Compare that to iconic Zelda titles like Wind Waker or Majora's Mask and you'll start to see the point here. Even Breath of the Wild, which clearly takes after Souls games, still has a metric ton of NPCs and character interactions that drive a clean narrative.

Tunic is taking from Dark Souls here wholesale--meaning we're dead-on-arrival when it comes to building a real sense of the 'world' or the characters that occupy it. Locations are primarily empty and filled with text we can't understand (well, without a lot of elbow grease, but we'll get to that later). If you're lucky you might also find an NPC... who you also can't understand.

The entire world of Tunic feels incredibly sparse and dull as a consequence. It certainly doesn't help that it's lacking in the depth of lore that keeps a Souls game interesting and, more importantly atmospheric. I don't feel like I'm trawling through the solemn ruins of a civilization fallen from grace--piecing together the forgotten past like an archeologist wandering onto Troy. Instead, I feel like I'm wandering through a legion of half-empty rooms fit for nothing but tedious dodge rolling.

The game also fails to capture any true sense of 'adventure' that most beloved Zelda games have. Without any characters or clearly understood stakes to drive us, there's no real motivation for most of the game's runtime. Are we saving the world? Saving 'the princess?' Protecting our friends? Finding ourselves? There's just nothing. What little drive we do get comes too little and too late--a decision that feels more like rubbing salt in the wound than anything else. Even the original The Legend of Zelda gave us a text crawl and a plot insert in the manual to prep players for (what was at the time) a grand adventure. Tunic instead opts to backload everything way past the point of initial interest…all in the name of preserving its godawful manual…A manual that we'll get to in due time.

The Legend of Zelda ABCs
But now that I've described in world of Tunic in concept, how does it actually feel when you're roaming through it? Frankly, it's yet another chaotic mess. The game manages to combine the worst of Zelda's ideas with some of the most uninspired and underbaked indie isometric game design principles I've ever seen. It's genuinely nothing short of stunning. I have to commend the developer for making the world feel so miniscule yet such a chore to navigate at the same time. A feat that's doubly impressive when you consider just how small Tunic's world is.

The game is, of course, displayed with a 3/4th isometric perspective. This is a design choice with a long list of well-understood strengths and weaknesses--the style has been around nearly as long as the entire industry has. And yet…it feels like Shouldice failed to take any of that into consideration when designing Tunic.

The game aspires for the best of 2D Zelda's world design--the Link to the Past and Link's Awakening type of world. But its isometric qualities, combined with some head-scratching design choices, create a chaotic world that quickly becomes a pain to explore. If you want a basic overview of what I mean, pull up the Tunic overworld and compare it to the overworld from Link's Awakening while I talk.

Beyond the immediate difference in size, one thing that should catch your eye is just how vertical Tunic is compared to Zelda. And sure, you can certainly get much higher in Zelda…but when you think about the ratio between flat ground and elevations shifts, Tunic has it beat tenfold. Combine this with the fact that many paths are dead ends, and you get some of the most frustrating world traversal I've ever seen. You often find yourself walking from dead-end to dead end, or staring at the path you'd like to go down, only barred by the slightest difference in elevation you can't reconcile. It's completely lacking in all the finer nuances that makes exploration in a Zelda game feel so natural. Once again made impressive considering how tiny Tunic's world actually is--even compared to a Game Boy title from 1993.

You eventually receive a hookshot-esque ability to aid in world traversal, but that's only really a band-aid for the problem. For one, it doesn't magically reconcile the frustration you feel when you don't have the hookshot. For another, it doesn't fix the harsh truth: flat Tunic's overworld is dull at best--usually featuring only a few uninspired enemies to fight and basic structures to explore. It's not something you're going to be remembering like your first time in Hyrule.

And so, we once again return to the conceptual problems of cribbing the world of a Souls game without actually matching any of its interesting qualities. There's nothing to do, no one to see, no interesting places to visit, and no stakes to be had through exploration. The world is merely a vehicle to perform middling dodge-roll Bastion combat and solve "puzzles"--something you and I are going to have to tackle here in a second. Simply put, there is no adventure here, only frustration and boredom. An extra demerit for a soundtrack that is fine, but ultimately uninspired indie-game fanfare--ill-fitting for inspiring player wanderlust.

Basic Wisdom
But if there's one thing that any fan of Tunic will never fail to bring up, it's the game's oh-so-inspired puzzles and game manual. For many, this seems to be the game, or at least all they're willing to actually talk about from it. But it's here, maybe more than anywhere else, is where that Rorschach test comes in. More specifically, how each and every one of us interprets the concept of a puzzle as well as what we value in terms of interactive 'challenge.' So let's get down to brass tacks, shall we?

Tunic's puzzles are, in two words: purposefully obtuse. Which might make you scratch your head if you haven't played the game. Why would a developer want their puzzles to be perceived as obtuse? Isn't that usually seen as a negative trait? To understand, you have to go back to the root of Tunic's design philosophy: it mindlessly mimics what it thinks are the 'best' traits from other games. People love the classics--or, more realistically, pay lip-service to actually loving them--and everyone says hose games are Nintendo Hard, right? So if everyone loves Zelda, and Zelda is apparently obtuse, then we need to be obtuse too! Right? Well obviously Shouldice was wise enough to know that wouldn't quite fly in 2022. So once again, things were altered to fit the Tunic mold: for the worse yet again.

Tunic's puzzles are obtuse in ways that attempt to mimic the supposed 'spirit' of retro games, while giving you affordances to ensure you can feasibly solve them better than a kid in 1989 stuck with a copy of Simon's Quest. What sort of affordances you might ask? Well, mainly just a copy of Nintendo Power. Or to be more specific, the shittiest issue of Nintendo Power ever produced.

Players can collect 'pages' of the game's own instruction manual while exploring the world, (in theory) building up their knowledge of the game's mechanics and world as they adventure. But, as usual, Tunic shits the bed with the same mindless design quirks as before. For one, the manual isn't actually written in English (or your language of choice)…well at least not always written in English. It's written in English when it feels like it. Otherwise, it's written with the same cryptic language the NPCs and world signage use. And when I say 'otherwise,' I mean most of the fucking time.

So you're given this manual, that's apparently trying to mimic the feeling of cracking open a new Nintendo Power back in 1988, and you can't even read the damn thing.

Why? Because Tunic can't help itself.

You ever play one of those shitty indie horror games? I'm not going to name any names, but you know the ones. They're usually inspired by Creepypasta, found-footage cinema, and more recently Analog Horror. Consequently, much like their often amateur influences, these games can't help but pack in 'spooky' moments even when they don't make any goddamn sense. They're more focused on getting a cheap jump out of you than they are in designing a coherent (and frankly, engaging) world. Just think about all the Analog Horror videos out there. How many of them ruin what might be an otherwise interesting premise with some of the stupidest attempts to scare you with spooky text and freaky faces every five seconds? Even when those moments totally kill the mood, tone, or general pacing that would have greatly benefited their project? They just can't help themselves.

And in that same spirit, Tunic can't help itself either. It decided that it needs to pay homage to retro games ('pay homage' having more quotes around it than an antisemitic rant on 4chan) in every way possible. And it its mindless and desperate pursuit of this goal, all coherent design considerations get caught in the crossfire. So fuck it, the manual is apparently a bilingual disaster moonlighting as Schrodinger's instruction manual.

Have you considered the philosophical considerations here? The manual is…inside the game? When I pause the game, I see myself playing the game through a CRT? Why are there handle scribbled notes in the manual sometimes? Are we doing some postmodern meta-narrative play here? If so, why? What are we trying to say? Or better yet, what does all of this meaningfully give me as a consumer of this art? Well don't you worry buddy. I'm sure I sound like a broken record by now…but luckily for you, Shouldice seemingly failed consider any of this shit, so I guess you really don't have to either.

But I think you know the real answer as much as I do. It's the same 'why' used as a means for all of these godawful ends: nostalgia. Or to be more accurate (and to paraphrase James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem fame): "Borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties." It's meant to make you feel 'warm and fuzzy' inside. To give you some bastardized sense of wonder from your childhood. And for that, I truly hate Tunic. It's bereft of any real or admirable qualities. Its only real aim is to imitate and remind us of other, better things. It truly has nothing to say with its own merits, on any level.

And you gotta understand, I agree this would sound nitty-picky as fuck if not for the fact that the entire fucking point of the game is the goddamn manual. Without it, we only have yet more uninspired indie slop that lies somewhere on the Bermuda Tringle between Bastion, Zelda, and Dark Souls. So we're going to have to scrutinize the game for these elements--god knows the combat design offers nothing worth mentioning. So anyways, back to the actual puzzles.

When I said 'purposefully obtuse' earlier, I didn't just mean that you'd require a game manual to solve puzzles--although you will need the manual to solve the most important puzzles in the game. I also meant it in the sense that Tunic's puzzles will challenge critical players in ways they probably haven't been challenged in for a long time. Not because the puzzles are particularly difficult. I mean, the notion of a puzzle's 'difficulty' is incredibly vague and abstract to begin with. But instead, I mean that these puzzles will challenge you because they'll make you consider why we even have game puzzles in the first place.

Think about that for a second. Genuinely. Why do we even have puzzles in games? How come I have to figure out which wall to bomb in a Zelda dungeon? What torch to light? What lever to pull? What exactly am I getting out of these experiences--both from the perspective of recreational play and critical engagement? There's no correct answer to this question--it's for all of us to decide. But I think it's important to consider your own reasons why, and how games like Tunic (do or don't) fail to live up to those expectations.

For some, the fun is in the art of the puzzle itself. It doesn't really matter the context--the how or why of the thing. All that matters is how much you have to wrestle with the bastard to suss out the answer. For these kinds of people, the joy of the puzzle is all about the thrill of the hunt. You probably aren't one of these kinds of people--but you definitely know at least a few folks like this. The kinds of people who do complex logic puzzles, crosswords, riddles, and whatever else on a daily basis. The kind of person who'd probably also annoy you with those puzzles on a daily basis too (sorry Joel, but I know you ain't readin' this shit anyways). Sometimes this kind of person grows up to be a good mathematician or scientist--and that's cool. We all oughta respect that desire and pursuit for the unknowns of human knowledge.

But I don't fit into that category, despite my background in mathematics, language, and computer science--all fields fraught with these sorts of people. At least, I don't fit into that background when it comes to how I value games. Let me explain why.

I find that puzzles are often the weakest part of any game I play. And no, it's not because I get my ass kicked by them…although sometimes I do get my ass kicked by them. It's because nearly all puzzles are, by definition, built upon layers and layers of arbitrary societal constructs and very fuzzy logic. Puzzles are made by humans, for humans. Which means that many of them will have lots of local cultural and societal values inherently encoded into them.

How to Make an Adventure Map!

You ever heard of Nuclear Semiotics? Now there's a real interesting puzzle if there ever was one. If you're not aware, I'll clue you in real quick. Sorry to turn into the guy I was just describing above, but this'll all make sense in a moment.

So we've got all this nuclear waste that we've been making over the last century. Obviously that stuff isn't going anywhere anytime soon--and we're probably going to keep making more of it too. You obviously know nuclear stuff is extremely deadly…but how did you know that? Are there any actual innate traits of nuclear waste that tell you that it's deadly? No, there aren't. You only know it's going to kill you because someone else told you that. So let's say its eight thousand years from now: everything you know and love is gone--all the language, culture, beliefs, and (most importantly) scientific knowledge…gone. Some blokes go digging where they shouldn't and end up stumbling upon nuclear waste. How do we, the great people of 2023--kickin' back at home and playing Tunic--leave behind messages to warn people waaaaaaaaaaaaay into the future to stay the hell away from nuclear waste and not get everyone killed?

It might sound like a simple problem to you, but it's actually a damn hard one. You could give some simple answers like using 'basic symbols' and 'universal warning signs' to deter people, but what the hell is universal or basic? We can't even begin to predict what culture is going to be like thousands of years from now. Want to use a symbol of a skull? There are already cultures that associate skulls with positive concepts. A nuclear radiation symbol? We made that shit up in the 40s--it has no clear or inherent meaning baked into it. For all intents and purposes, the people of the far-flung future might as well be total aliens to us. And when you sit down and try to actually tackle this problem, you realize how difficult it is to get across just about anything without a clear sense of shared culture that bind together meaning.

So let me tie this back to video game puzzles. Think about that one puzzle you fucking hate. You know the one. The one that kept you going for hours. The one that pissed you off so much that you wouldn't even look it up. That bastard was challenging you--and you were not about to back down. Maybe after hours of trying every possible solution, every possible option, you finally get it…at long last. Maybe you overlooked some now obvious part of the puzzle, or maybe it really was just total horseshit.

But consider this: even if that puzzle was totally unfair to you, was it really bullshit for everyone else? Even for the person who designed it? Obviously the answer is "no." That puzzle made perfect sense to someone else. I bet if you had a friend in the room watching you struggle, they probably figured the damn thing out in ten seconds. Hell, you've probably been in that seat before too. Puzzles are a part of our collective culture. They only start to make sense when you can intuit how the designer might be thinking. You have to be on the same wavelength. Obviously we're never synced up with perfectly, but there's enough overlap to make everything work, even if it means there's a lot of jank in the process. But without shared culture, almost all puzzles begin to fall apart. Remember: even logic itself is an arbitrary human construct--one bound by cultural and societal understandings. Remember: numbers ain't even real. Only the most brilliant of puzzle games (Tetris, Portal) can come close to escaping these issues--because they rely on basic human intuition (geometric and physical, in this case).

So consider the nightmare scenario: a game where every single puzzle was one of those puzzles for you, and only you. Your buddy beat the game in six hours while it takes you sixty. Let's call this game Kings Quest. You can probably take one or two of those types of puzzles in a game--even if it greatly detracts from your enjoyment--but do you think you could really stomach a whole game's worth? How would you even review it? Would you just spend the entire write-up saying the puzzles were 'unfair' or 'arbitrary?' What will you have to say when KingsQuestLover77 leaves a snide comment implying you're a 'fucking moron?'

I'm making a worst case scenario here to illustrate my point, but let's also consider the opposite case too. Imagine, if you will, the Perfect Puzzle. Capital P and all. What exactly does that puzzle look like to you? Maybe you can't picture the actual puzzle itself, but we can flatten the question down into a lower dimension to make things easier: What does the difficulty curve of the Perfect Puzzle look like to you? How long would it take you to solve it? How much would you have to struggle to make it feel worth it? What parts of your intelligence is that puzzle challenging? What's your reward for solving the puzzle?

It's not hard to understand why I'm so critical of puzzle design when you think about these conceptual launching points. Puzzles are a minefield with infinite pitfalls. A real philosophic nightmare. You might be starting to wonder how I manage to stomach any games focused on puzzles. I mean, I've given plenty of Zelda games the five-star rating--how does that make any sense? And more importantly, why do those games get a pass while Tunic gets the unhinged review? I think the answer is pretty simple. Zelda games (and the like) don't actually have 'real' puzzles--they just make us think we're solving puzzles.

Zelda is--obviously--an adventure game series set in a fantastical world. That distinct sense of grand fantasy and adventure helped Zelda stand out from the crowd back in the day. You could probably say the same thing about similar successful competitors like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy too. Jumping around as Mario or doing sick flips in Excitebike was cool, but it was undeniable that audiences would want something deeper. Something more…immersive. Games are an expression of play, after all--and it would only be a matter of time before role playing took off in the (home console) video gaming space too. But Zelda, of course, was different. While DQ and FF had you fumbling through turn-based battles and RPG stat screens to enact a sense of heroic combat, Zelda immersed you directly into the fights. It certainly wasn't revolutionary in this regard--it stood on the shoulders of greats like Tower of Druaga and Hydlide--but it presented the action role-playing game with a level of ease, polish, and immersion that we hadn't seen up to that point.

In other words, Zelda took something that was inaccessible to us--being a bold adventurer braving uncharted territory--and allowed the average joe to really pretend they were one. It's easy to understand that we're not actually kicking ass when we press a single button to engage in life-or-death combat (although goddamn it, it can really feel like it sometimes). But it's perhaps a little less obvious to understand how Zelda has crafted dungeon puzzles to elicit the same response from us. Instead of requiring any true problem solving--like we'd consider a good riddle or puzzle would--Zelda (and its derivatives) only ask you to go down a (very short) list of possible answers for any given problem. Take Ocarina of Time for an example. When confronted with a problem, the answer is always going involve one of a few things:

1) Bombing a wall
2) Lighting a torch
3) Hitting an object
4) Pressing a switch
5) Moving a block/object
6) Killing an enemy

With this very short list, we've probably cracked 90% of the puzzles you'd find in any Zelda game. If you expand the list to ten possibilities (to include a few of the funkier edge cases) we'd probably get nearly every puzzle in every game in the entire franchise.

Obviously all puzzles in a computer game exist within a bounded set of possible answers--(real) computers aren't infinite after all. But Zelda has successfully maintained decades of broad appeal (critically and commercially) by basically removing the critical thinking element from the equation. Just as you press a single button to slay your foes, you don't actually find ingenious solutions to puzzles--you're just role playing as a guy who does.

And so, Zelda pulls off an impressive hat trick--It makes you feel smart for solving puzzles, but in reality, you were performing a very shallow knowledge check. A knowledge check so simple that even a small child could figure it all out. This might be exactly why you aren't into Zelda…but wouldn't you agree that's the beauty of the series? It's a franchise that just about anyone could enjoy. It solves the philosophical quandaries I laid out by essentially side-stepping the question entirely. They aren't really puzzles--or at least not really good puzzles. They just require you to learn a simple design language--one that's so intuitive that just about anyone could become fluent within hours. Kids and casuals and get on board easily, perhaps finding a moderate challenge, while hardcore players can enjoy the simple and smooth satisfaction of blastin' through puzzles like you're some kind of gamer Einstein.

My distinction between Zelda puzzles and a 'good puzzle' might still seem fuzzy to you. Let me try and elaborate with another point. A 'good' puzzle wouldn't be something everyone could solve…right? If a puzzle had a success rate of near 100%, then we'd all probably find it too trivial to enjoy. A good puzzle is non-trivial--meaning that plenty of people are gonna get stumped in the process. Let's say for the sake of argument that…I don't know…the puzzle has a solve rate of 40%. This would be all well and good in real life--but what about in games?

Think about it for a second.

Imagine you're back in the time period Tunic wishes it were found in. Maybe you're too broke to afford a copy of this month's Nintendo Power and you don't have any friends at school who bought the same wack-ass Zelda knock-off you did. No one is going to help you when that almighty 40% filter makes you call uncle. So what do you do? You either drop the game entirely or suffer until you brute force a solution--maybe coming to hate the game in the process. This is, by most game designers' account, a failure of a puzzle. Now imagine a game that's filled with 'em. Suddenly, you're back to the nightmare scenario I laid out just a few minutes ago. When you get stumped by a puzzle in game…that's it, game over.

When you chew on this thought for a second, it doesn't take long for something to become obvious: Non-trivial puzzles--which must contain 'good' puzzles as a subset--are a self-destructive aspect of any genre of video game.

Consider this: which genre was the poster boy for 'real' puzzles? There's only one good answer: the point-and-click/adventure game. If you're somehow reading this review fifteen years from now, I wouldn't blame you for missing the answer. You probably haven't played any games in the genre. Why? Well, because as the legendary Old Man Murray (later known as the writing duo behind Portal) pointed out in their 2000 writeup Death of Adventure Games, the adventure game genre "committed suicide" about twenty years before my time of writing. How? By endlessly aspiring to greater heights of puzzle complexity--pissing off nearly everyone in the process.

This isn't to say that games can't be bereft of conventional puzzles--but they often have to take a clear back-seat to other elements that strongly draw gamers in. The short lived point-and-click game revival of the 2010s was carried on the back of recognizable properties (Walking Dead, Back to the Future, Fables, Minecraft) and a heavy emphasis on narrative--not puzzle-based qualities. Sure, Gabriel Knight certainly had a narrative…but I think I know why most people were playing Walking Dead instead. Even then, it only took a few years before this entire ecosystem also collapsed in on itself. It seems at this point that the only games completely able to escape this black hole are the Ace Attorney, and Danganronpa series. But once again I'd argue these games are being carried entirely by a vivid cast of characters and memorable narratives, not their puzzles. Forget sex--fandoms sell, baby.

It's clear then that I'm saying Tunic doesn't follow that Zelda formula, right? Right. Instead, understanding its puzzles requires us to confront the final third of Tunic's influence brew. Its secret sauce, if you will: Fez.

Go North Young Man!
Man, remember Fez? It's been over a decade since that game took the industry by storm. And when I say 'by storm' I mean like a goddamn hurricane. It feels silly looking back on it now, but you'd swear Phil Fish's short and tyrannical reign on the throne of indie gamedom was going to blow away everything not welded to the foundations. Of course, Fish's antics--combined with the toll that Fez took on him--would lead to his self-exile. But it's wild to think about just what sort of state the gaming world (and the internet at large) was in back then. Considering the heinous shit we've seen from other 'old man indie' luminaries like Notch (Supernazi) and Johnathan Blow (Antivaxxer) in recent years, it even makes me nostalgic for the time when the most controversial thing to come out of an indie dev's mouth was "suck my dick."

But anyways…Fez. Do you like Fez? I really don't. Well, to be fair, I haven't played it since launch--and I wasn't even a teenager then--so who knows what the hell I'd think about it today. But outside of a charming art style (one teetering on the edge of fatigue in a 2012 indie game era), I really didn't take away much from the game. But no matter who you are--a Fez enjoyer or not--I can guarantee you'd agree that Tunic is no Fez. Much like the other two key pieces of this puzzle, Tunic barely manages a pale imitation of Fez. On average, Tunic's idea of exploration and puzzle solving is to just have you walk behind objects that obscure your vision (thanks to the isometric perspective) and…whabam! You found a thing! Sometimes it even breaks its own rule--randomly rotating the camera when you get to an arbitrary location to reveal a bunch of hidden stuff where you couldn't see it. It doesn't really make sense in isolation--considering you have no meaningful control of the camera anywhere else in the game. But when you consider the Fez angle, it starts to make a lot more sense: the game is half-assedly biting Fez just like it half-assedly bites Zelda and Dark Souls.

Of course those are just the trivial puzzles--not the real star of the show. For beating this game…really beating it, is going to require a lot more out of you. Much like Fez, Tunic turns to proper puzzles and bona fide code deciphering in its final hours. And here, we return to the problem of the proper puzzle. Many of Tunic's greatest brain-busters are puzzles for the sake of puzzles--not puzzles for the sake of gameplay. Most of them require you to recognize cyphers described both within the game's manual and within the game's world--making you connect the dots between the two in order to solve a given riddle. It might sound interesting, but it usually just adds up to recognizing that a door, material, or wall has a geometric pattern on it. Then you stand by the pattern, input that same pattern on your d-pad (a-la an old-fashioned a cheat code) and…puzzle solved. It might sound trivial, but it's often not--requiring you to hyper scrutinize details of the world in order to infer the patterns required for solving the puzzle.

And don't get me wrong, if you're a fan of real puzzles then you'll probably get a kick out of this--much like you probably would with Fez and a handful of other games. But I still think there's a catch, even if you actually are one of those people. I'm almost certain you'll find the puzzles ultimately lacking compared to ones you'd find outside of video games. Frankly the fact that it is a video game is what holds them back. Not to say that a game couldn't achieve those pure and spectacular puzzle 'highs' that you desire--but it probably wouldn't have nearly enough mass appeal to get the game made in the first place. Games ultimately have to water themselves down in order to see any real release. After all, if the puzzles don't have a high solve rate, then people will probably hate 'em. I know I probably will.

But at some point Tunic's puzzles start to teeter on absurd for the rest of us. I'm out here scrutinizing the patterns of flowers on the ground--furiously mashing inputs into my d-pad trying to guess exactly what the hell the game wants out of me. And the whole time I'm thinking…

"All of this is in service of what, exactly?" Why am I trying to decipher nearly every object in the game for arbitrary patterns that may or may not exist? What am I actually getting out of this?"

It's not making me feel more like an adventurer exploring some mysterious dungeon, nor is it making me feel particularly smart either. It's a puzzle for the sake of the puzzle--and I'm just not into that, nor do I think most other people are either.

This all culminates with perhaps the most ridiculous puzzle I've ever encountered in a game--the final puzzle needed to unlock Tunic's 'true ending'. In essence, it requires you to examine every single page of the manual for a symbol that looks like an arrow sign (or some other indication of directionality). After discovering all one hundred of these symbols, you need to stand before a door and input all one-hundred directions in a row, perfectly. That might not sound that bad to you…but when you're sitting there, trying to actually input the answer…it really sells the absurdity of it all. It'll start to make you go insane if you're not careful.

I'm the kind of guy who gets mixed up if I have to pull a specific digit out of a string of ten numbers. Imagine trying to make sure you didn't misinput direction number fucking 74 out of 100. Moreover, imagine accidentally writing down the wrong direction for only one of the fucking hundred you need input. It's nothing short of pure madness.

Seriously, it's the kind of puzzle that'll bring your faith in gaming to its knees. You'll wonder what you're doing there. You'll wonder why you're struggling through all of this. You'll wonder what the gain is. And I don't just mean some sort of superfluous in-game reward--you'll start questioning what the hell you're doing manipulating a plastic toy when you've only got so many seconds left on this fleeting earth. And for that, I'm almost impressed in Tunic's ability to induce a gamer existential crisis like it was David Lynch's Rabbits.

Bravo.

And so, it's here that Tunic fails more than in any other design category. The puzzles are either too trivial or too arbitrary--with both ends of the spectrum being a shittier version of Fez. More importantly, none of the puzzle solving is really being done in the name of the game--it's being done for the sake of the puzzle. Of course, most players--including many fellow reviewers on this same page--will never have to reconcile with any of this. They either played the base game (without attempting to get the proper ending) or simply looked up solutions with a walkthrough. I've certainly used my fair share of walkthroughs before--sometimes it'd be a fool's errand not to--but you have to ask yourself something here. If I'm not playing Tunic for these puzzles--the entire purpose of the game's manual, it's central gimmick--then what the hell am I here for? The boring and uninspired world? The hyper-derivative and banal combat? The cute fox? In every sense, Tunic has failed me.

The Magic and the Mystery
But to simply fail would only get you so much ire--at least from me. There are plenty of failures that won't illicit my backloggd version of the Ninety-Five Theses. Tunic goes one step further. There's something deep in there--something that reviles me beyond its collection of underthought influences. It's really the entire framing of the thing that sends me over the edge.

Tunic isn't just another indie game--although it is also just another indie game. Tunic is really a twisted ode to retro gaming, childhood wanderlust, and nostalgia.

And I say 'twisted' because Tunic doesn't operate with the premises underlining the real retro games it seeks to emulate. It's instead based on the underinformed perception the general public has of those games. And when I say general public, I don't just mean your mom and pop. It seems this category has grown to encompass people within the gaming industry that I hoped would know better--professional critics. Hell, based on the response on this page, it looks like it also includes much of the enthusiast community as well.

A common selling point I've seen thrown around is how Tunic brilliantly interweaves its manual into the game--something we tackled in the previous section. But another point of praise I've seen rewarded is how it so authentically captures the magical feeling of being a child playing an NES game like Zelda. It 'understands' the retro gaming condition and masterfully interweaves it into the game's world and puzzle design. Tunic, in a sense, becomes retro gaming. Or perhaps it even goes beyond retro gaming and becomes a towering love letter to the 'magic' of gaming.

This line of thinking makes a sort of sense. But it falls apart when you scrutinize it for more than five seconds. Let's try to consider for a second where this supposed 'difficulty' came from--that dreaded Nintendo Hard.

Console game designers were primarily coming directly from the arcade industry--and the veterans among them came from the electromechanical amusement industry, a group preceding video gaming itself. It comes as no surprise then that arcades absorbed the concept of difficulty curves from their big brother electromechanical games. Specifically, EM games taught video gaming about the art of the quarter-muncher. No good carnival game lasts more than a few minutes--and neither would Pac-Man if you weren't particularly good at it.

The very early days of console gaming saw mainly arcade ports, but designers would start to overhaul their design language as they realized the virtues inherent to home gaming. This great transition would be a time of reckoning for many--as game designers were unsure of what was 'too hard' or 'too cryptic' considering the sharp change of venue. After all, if you were essentially being given infinite 'free play' access at home (once you bought the damn thing at the local Sears), so how much difficulty was really too much? It was a venerable wild west--one that would rise and fall roughly during the height of the Famicom's success. Or--to be more American-centric--during the introduction of the NES to innocent, unsuspecting American children.

One thing was certain though--a lot of games from this period were total junk. There really wasn't much in the way of 'baseline' quality for many consumers (and designers), so just about anything went. It wasn't just the fault of publishers like LJN or Konami's shell company Ultra Games either. Nintendo's own games sometimes wouldn't make the cut for international release. So if even developers like Tezuka were going insane, then who would stick their neck out for the little guy? It ended up being the marketing and PR department's job to smooth over these rough spots. And so, publications like Nintendo Power (or the now-infamous Nintendo Power Line) were created, mythical figures like Howard Philips and Gail Tilden were immortalized, and game manuals were fastidiously designed to support kids and provide the last line of defense from angry parents demanding refunds.

But you gotta remember that these games--the types that James Rolfe and co. would later immortalize--were really more the exception than the rule. If you don't believe me, go check any list of the best-selling NES games and how many games you find associated with this mythos. Hell, the king of them all--Simon's Quest--couldn't even crack the top 75 best-selling NES games. The reality is unfortunately a lot less interesting: you'll find five Excitebikes or Kung-Fus for every Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. More importantly, you'll see fifteen Ice Hockeys for every Zelda. The world of 'retro game' that Tunic invents--and that players swear to remember--didn't really exist as a cohesive ecosystem in the first place. Games outside of Zelda that get associated with the 'magic and mystery' of fantasy lore--Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, etc.--basically sold next to nothing in the states. Dragon Quest, (or Dragon Warrior as it was retitled in the US) did so poorly that Nintendo of America had to start randomly shipping copies to kids for free in hopes that they would get hooked on it. I'm sure you can guess how well that strategy worked.

But you know what? Maybe that's being a little too nitpicky of me. Zelda did exist, after all. It's one of the ten best-selling NES games too--despite getting it's ass whooped by Duck Hunt and being given a run for its money by the likes of Dr. Mario. So why don't we narrow down the lens of scrutiny to just Zelda then? Tunic is just a few slight visual changes away from being charged with copyright infringement anyways, so let's pit the two against each other in the ring.

If you're still reading, it won't surprise you to hear that Tunic also fails to reasonably emulate the Zelda experience in any notable way. If you want to get a better idea of what I mean, pull up the Legend of Zelda game manual and the Tunic manual too.

There appears to be a lot of similarities from a surface level--both manuals start off with a plot overview, basic controls, and some general mechanics. But, if you're old enough to have enjoyed game manuals you'll probably recognize that's nothing particularly unique to Zelda or even adventure gaming.

Things start to get interesting in the later portions of the manual. In the case of Zelda, a lot of time is spent painstakingly explaining nearly every aspect of the game in clear prose--the overworld, dungeons, enemies, items, interactions, etc. It might seem like overkill now, but you gotta remember: this was a different time. It was a time where customers might have never touched a video game before slapping down $49.99 on yours (that's nearly one hundred and forty big ones today!!). You kind of had to pour over each facet of the game in meticulous detail. And so, Zelda clues you in on every single enemy--what they are, what they do, and how they're gonna fuck you up. Not to mention info on how every single item works in clear English. There is no mystery here, it's damn near encyclopedic.

But of course, items and enemies are only one part of the equation. The exploration is where it's at anyways, right? Well, yes and no. In truth, Zelda does what every other adventure contemporary did in this era. Fearing a negative response from novice and confused gamers, the Zelda manual just straight up tells you exactly where to go and what to do for a sizable chunk of the game's content. The locations of the first two dungeons are spelled out for you perfectly--as well as complete maps of those dungeons: locations of items, enemies, and all. The overworld map is nearly filled out in its entirety. It even shows you the location of about half the dungeons and almost every other location of interest.

Of course that isn't the whole game--it's perhaps 70% of a game guide--but I think the difference is clear. Zelda is about immersing yourself in the role of a hero on a grand adventure. The series has continuously updated and expanded every facet of itself--just compare Zelda to Ocarina to Breath of the Wild--but it's always been oriented around that core idea. Everything Zelda does is in service of that idea. And don't get me wrong. Man, does it often stumble to reach those great heights. Be it the tedium found in Wind Waker's sailing or in being forced into Link's boot wardrobe every five seconds in Ocarina's infamous Water Temple. But despite all the hangups, I've never once felt that Zelda has deviated from that noble goal. From the characters, to the worlds, to the dungeons, to the combat, to the puzzles--Zelda has only found meaningful competition through its clunkier, nerdier western cousin The Elder Scrolls.

And yet, with Tunic, I feel none of that. I only feel an insistence on a meta-awareness of gaming itself. A juvenile postmodern framing. A smokescreen that tries to distract from the game's clear shortcomings.

But here's the rub…what really gets me:

Tunic's referential nature only serves to position criticisms of the game--narrative or mechanical--as a feature of retro gaming itself.

It's not that the story is underbaked, or that the world is non-existent, or that the combat is tedious, or that the puzzles are trite--it's actually just a reference to a different video game! Of course, don't ask Shouldice, Finji, or their lawyers what those specific references actually are…but I think you get the idea.

It's actually pretty crazy when you think about it. Not only were these adventure games not even that representative of retro games as a whole--Tunic fails to even represent the few adventure games it claims made up the era. Hell, more than that: what it takes from those few games are the worst elements of those games and the surface-level aesthetics that bind them together. It's as if Shouldice saw the infamous Tornado puzzle in Simon's Quest or Link's roleplay of Moses in The Legend of Zelda and confused his 'how (not) to make a good game' notebooks.

But now that I've laid all this down, lets return to my original question: why do we even have puzzles in games? Based on what I've said, I think the answer for Zelda is clear--it's to deepen the fantasy/adventure role-playing experience. You could argue that Tunic is also using puzzles to perform a sort of role play though--the nostalgic role-playing experience.

That's right. If games like Zelda and Dark Souls are all about stepping into the shoes of an adventurer exploring a grand world, Tunic is about stepping into the shoes of a child exploring games like Zelda or Dark Souls for the first time.

That's kinda fucked, innit? It's culture eating itself--the worst elements of lazy postmodern art. It's metanarrative without anything substantial to say or any real emotions to explore. It just wants to abuse the monkey part of your brain that reminds you of your childhood--or at least the good parts of it. I don't know about you, but I hate that shit. What would you rather be: Link, rippin through Hyrule and kickin' ass? Or a child failing to input a one-hundred fucking string cheat code just to see an ending about how your fox mommy loves you? I'll take the here-and-now over the cheap nostalgia any day.

As full-time mob boss and part-time gamer Tony Soprano once said:

"'Remember when?' is the lowest form of conversation."

Bet you weren't expecting to see a fucking Sopranos quote in the middle of a Tunic review, were ya?

Underworld
Beyond being trite, Tunic manages to bring down retro gaming too. It reifies a rich and complex history into a few minor points that read more like slights than praises. It also fundamentally misunderstands what makes the classics classic: the intelligent use of abstraction, the immediacy of gameplay, the mechanical focus, the player/avatar cohesion/immersion, and the constant desire to break boundaries.

A great game is like any other great piece of art--it comes with no reservations. It doesn't matter that Metropolis is a near hundred years old black and white silent film, or that Ferdowsi wrote Shahnameh a thousand years ago--good art is good art is good art.

Contemporary media can often give us tunnel vision. There's a reason historians like to wait for their subjects to be 'good and dead' for analysis. But underneath all of the pomp and circumstance is a set of mechanical, thematic, aesthetic, and narrative ideas. Doesn't matter if you're dodging a big ape throwing barrels or clawing your way through Seattle on a crafting-based-stealth-action-open-world-narrative-heavy-third-person-over-the-shoulder-shooter revenge quest in Ultra-8K 144FPS glory. One is Donkey Kong and one is Space Invaders with many…many coats of paint thrown on top.

Don't get me wrong, that isn't meant as a dig towards modern games (although there's a billion other reasons to slight The Last of Us: Part II). There's still plenty of new games that I would call high points --albeit found more-often-than-not in the indie scene. I'm more slighting the notion of a 'retro game' in itself. It's a notion that I think most people--casual, hardcore, and professional--have bought into hook, line, and sinker. A notion that often boils down many great pieces of art as 'old, plain, and simple.' The type of game Nintendo throws in for free with your online subscription. The ones you'll load up and play for five minutes before going back to whatever rouge-like-open-world-gatcha-survivors-asynchronous-battle-royale-souls-like-idle-dad-based-narrative-as-a-service game you're into at the moment.

And so, Tunic becomes a Rorschach test one last time:

When you look at 'retro games,' what do you see?

When you look at 'modern games,' what do you see?




I want to make it clear that I'm not complaining about the state of things. That's just as pointless as Scorsese (or whoever's done it this week) complaining that Marvel movies aren't 'real' cinema or whatever. I understand that some people are gonna care about the good shit--regardless of its provenance--and some people are only gonna care about what they can buy at Gamestop. That's fine.

My problem is when games like Tunic come along, and actively misrepresent gaming. When they boil it down and present a reality that never truly existed. Or when uncritical professional voices champion that misrepresentation on the written record and inadvertently canonize it. It's a trend I've been seeing a lot in new metacontextual media. Final Fantasy VII: Remake and Half Life: Alyx literally re-write their canon in real time too--shifting public perception of those original games as they go. It's a damn shame for a medium as young and historically misunderstood as our own.

But it's a cycle most people are more than willing to play into. After all, you were there also--watching one of those shitty directs just like I was. I hope you're looking forward to the next uninspired Zelda and Dark Souls 'retro-throwback' that'll have nothing to offer you but some shallow aesthetic pandering and puzzles ripped from the 'MENSA Exam Prep' workbooks.

I also hope the critics out there have just as much fun writing and talking about those games as I presume you and I do reading and listening to them.

Actually side-note: do you really read professional game reviews? Or do you just scan the metacritic page? I'm actually curious who reads these full IGN etc. reviews anymore. These days I feel like I'm more inclined to see what random strangers have to say here than from gaming's fourth estate.

But hell, who am I to talk? I'm doing this shit for free. I just pray in twenty-five years we aren't getting "retro throwback" games based around the indie game golden age that Tunic is proud to be a part of.

But if we've learned anything today, it's that gaming history is more 'doomed to repeat itself' than it is to actually understand itself. So, I'll do my best Laura Palmer impression in the meantime:

I'll see you again in 25 years.

Great, but ultimately lacking: Signalis is the model indie game. And believe me, that is both a blessing and a curse.

Like any good indie game, Signalis is niche. The survival horror genre it calls home is now long dead--killed by its own god-king, Resident Evil. Although 'killed' might be the wrong word--'evolved' is probably a better choice. But it's hard to deny that games like Signalis are a rare sight in 2023. If there's one place--and only one place--where we'd see an honest-to-god survival horror game now, it would be in the indie sphere. And if you're a huge fan of the classics like I am, then that's a good thing.

...Is something my lizard brain wants to say...but my critical side starts to take over. When I first saw Signalis I knew I could immediately write it off as:

"Resident Evil + Silent Hill with a retro sci-fi anime aesthetic."

I say 'write off' because watching a line-up of indie game announcements is like seeing them get procedurally generated in real time. And unfortunately, "Silent Hill," "anime," "retro," and "sci-fi" are some of the most common marbles that get pulled from the "let's make an indie game" bag. More importantly--now that I've actually played the game--I can confirm I wasn't wrong to pigeonhole the Signalis like that.

And don't get me wrong, Signalis is a good game. A very good game. Hell, for a team of two people, it's an honest-to-God miracle that it turned out this good. But unfortunately for Signalis, the flaws are all the more clear when you get this close to greatness.


The House that Evil Built
The first thing you could slight Signalis for is its total lack of originality. And believe me, when I say 'lack of originality,' I mean there's not a single unique bone in the game's body.

But that's not really a bad thing...right?

Right. I'd say it's not a massive issue.

The problem isn't that Signalis is a hodgepodge of a some basic visual, gameplay, narrative, and atmospheric ideas. The problem is that Signalis isn't really better than any of its influences. And if the parts aren't performing up-to-snuff, then I regret to inform you that the whole isn't really pulling its weight either. But let's shelve this point for now--we should talk about some gameplay first.

Signalis' hollistic gameplay experience is...well I mean it'sResident Evil meets the more puzzle-heavy focus of Silent Hill. If you've played those games then you know what to expect. If you haven't played 'em--and you for some reason want my opinion on them--you'll have to wait for my Halloween review series (that'll get delayed until March). But the games are, in a word, excellent. Perhaps not perfect games (Resident Evil would be rendered obsolete by its Gamecube REmake), but they're absolutely iconic and deserve a playthrough from anyone serious about understanding gaming history. Unfortunately though, Signalis' fails to improve upon the now decades-old survival horror formula and even manages to throw some new problems in the mix.

If you love survival horror as much as I do, then you probably know exactly what I did when I booted Signalis up. Max difficulty (or the max allowed on first playthrough), tank controls turned way the fuck ON, and every single quality-of-life feature disabled. The damn genre ain't called survival comfort...I want the game to hurt me plenty.

Unfortunately, it doesn't take long to see how the Signalis fails hardcore survival horror fans. The game is made like most niche indie game titles are--with the expectation that you've already cut your teeth on all the classics. Because, dear god...the designers certainly have. Nearly every room in Signalis is filled with brutal (and sometimes admittedly clever) chokepoints, insane enemy placements, and ultra-tight turns that are custom-designed to fuck up your day. Obviously the RE games had their tough spots--sometimes turning the dial to eleven is exactly what good horror needs--but it was nowhere near this insane.

Seriously, I went back and reviewed a good half hour of Resident Evil gameplay to make sure I wasn't crazy. And thankfully, if there's one thing I can still remember, it's how RE plays.

Within an hour, Signalis is throwing you shit harder than nearly anything Resident Evil offered--at least in terms of area design. Moreover, Signalis makes a crucial change that basically kills the tank controls for anyone but the most ultra-hardcore of super players. In Resident Evil (and its clones), most enemies would only damage you if they made an active effort to hurt you. The zombie bastards might shamble all over the mansion, but they didn't bite unless they made for a real lunge at you. This was--in all likelihood--a way to tip the scales back in the players favor. After all, players would be wrestling with confusing tank controls for their entire playthrough. Signalis, on the other hand, gives enemies the accursed touch of death--meaning a simple bump into an enemy, no matter how slight, equals damage. And believe me, on hardcore difficulties that means you're always just three bumps away from certain death.

Don't get me wrong, I love my survival horror games to be tough. But this? This was just unfun. There are just so many brutal enemy placements and crazy small bottlenecks that transformed the tank controls from the ultimate way to 'enter the survival horror' into the most unfortunate way to 'experience the tedium and boredom' of running through the same areas over and over again after dying for the umpteenth time.

These issues are only compounded by the game's peculiar camera perspective. I'm sure you know that most of the survival horror classics feature the iconic 'fixed camera perspective'--something that heightens the genre's atmospheric and 'cinematic' qualities. Signalis, on the other hand, decides to have a go at a tilted top-down perspective. It's not inherently a bad thing…although it definitely diminishes the game's ability to build a true sense of world like the classics did.

The real problem arises from how tank controls interact with this novel perspective--particularly when your character model is blocked by objects in the foreground. Tank controls are relative to your current position--meaning you can't figure out where the fuck you're going if you don't know which way you're currently facing. This sounds like a minor gripe, but it's a complete nightmare when a sizeable chunk of the game's rooms are filled to the brim with occluding objects and 'what-the-fuck-am-I-looking-at' levels of darkness.

Combine all of this with the game's most terrifying revelation--that the final boss is a bullet-hell challenge--and you have a recipe for a complete tank-control meltdown. I know I can't harp too much on an optional feature, but I'm frustrated they'd taunt players with a mechanic that's core to the survival horror genre…only to implement it in the shallowest way possible.

Needless to say, I decided to switch off tank controls within the first few hours of my playthrough. After all, why suffer? Especially for something as trivial as an optional control type.

I did keep the rest of the difficulty options cranked; although at this point it was perhaps for vanity's sake. The switch made everything far easier--the aforementioned bottlenecks-of-doom were suddenly turning into walks in the park. But tank controls aside, there were still massive design blunders to wrestle with.

Enemies in Signalis will often 'patrol' a room a-la Metal Gear Solid guards. To spice things up, they'll keep moving even when you exit the room--meaning you'll never know exactly where they'll be when you enter again. Unfortunately, someone decided to allow enemies to patrol right in front of doorways. This might not seem awful at first glance, but there's another element at play here. You have to go through a baked animation every time you enter a room. Meaning you're relinquishing control until the animation completes. You and I might not be game-design geniuses, but I'll let you imagine how this one plays out.

It didn't happen often…but I can't express how frustrating it is to walk into a room and suddenly take massive damage before I have the chance to even move my character. It's a cruel joke: underthought game design at its worst. I work my ass off just to survive with ultra-limited healing items, and this is what I get?

Don't get me wrong, survival horror games are supposed to crank the heat up--sometimes way past comfortable and even sometimes past fair just to spice things up. But this was absolutely a step too far, and another reminder that other design choices (damage-on-touch) were just not working out.

I'll save you the rest of the boring itemized list and just say that Signalis is filled with similar micro-issues that add up to some missed potential. To be clear, it's nothing game-breaking. Not even anything that makes the experience really that bad, but it undeniably misses the mark--even when it had plenty of classics to directly learn from.


The King in Yellow
So the gameplay is slightly subpar to the classics…but that doesn't tell the whole story. After all, survival horror is just as defined by atmosphere and narrative as it is by gameplay--often moreso. And in this sense, Signalis performs pretty damn well…albeit with similar failings that hold it back from excellence.

Atmosphere is a very fickle beast. I think you'd agree that the best atmospheres are indescribable, right? It doesn't help that the lines between 'mediocre' and 'incredible' are usually separated by a few arbitrary and hyper-specific aspects. Hell, trying to review any atmosphere is nearly as tricky as making them. Music, photography, and film already have it bad enough--and you don't even get to interact with those mediums! So good luck trying to make an effective atmosphere when players are actually in control. You just know they're gonna get fed up with puzzles, accidentally clip into walls, and die forty times before clearing the area…so how the hell are you supposed to make an ambience that keeps them hooked? Give 'em an hour and they'll start looking beyond the game's aesthetics and see just its mechanics instead.

I'm not even gonna try and explain the 'good' and 'bad' with any specific examples. Like I said, 'atmosphere' is just too tricky to pin down. At least, too tricky to pin down without turning this into a 3 hour read. So I'll just leave the point as an exercise for you. You have your own survival horror favorites…right?

During its best moments, Signalis actually manages to nail those atmospheric highs--which is no small feat for an indie game. The cutscenes really shine in particular. The choices in editing, cinematography, music, and pacing feel genuinely directed and inspired. At least more directed inspired than the average triple-A game that actually tries to claim a 'cinematic' heritage. There are certain shots, moments, atmospheric slices, and vibes that I'll definitely be holding onto several years from now--and what more could you want from a game?

Well, I want a game to not ruin its own atmosphere with a desperate amount of failed scare attempts.

You get treated with industrial noise louder than a gun every time you approach an enemy in Signalis. And man. Have you played a Resident Evil game? You're gonna be approaching a lot of fucking enemies before the credits roll. To add insult to injury--you'll mainly be hearing the same song over and over again--a choice so completely baffling that it nearly destroys any sense of atmosphere the game was going for. It begs the question: why? What did rose-engine hope to accomplish beyond setting up some cheap, simple scares? Even the scares fade away quick--you're gonna be hearing this shit two thousand times before the game is over after all. It's shocking that design like this made it past the basic playtesting phase.

Welcome to Horror 101: don't fatigue the audience.

But even the aforementioned good moments are, truth be told, not entirely of Signalis' own creation.

They are, quite literally, inspired.

Of course, all art takes influence from other work--we all take influence from our environment every day. But Signalis goes a step further. Several crucial shots, environments, and scenes are essentially beat-for-beat remakes (or rip-offs, if you're a harsh critic) of classic moments in already great media. Shots from Evangelion (particularly The End of Evangelion), Ghost in the Shell, and Bakemonogatari get recreated one-for-one while other iconic elements from these series get very clearly folded into the mix. Especially the Monogatari series' trademark frenetic editing style [THIS SPACE IS LEFT INTENTIONALLY BLANK] and the distinct scenery from Evangelion's final moments.

And while references and homages are not inherently bad…I still detract some points from the score here. After all, I don't think any of these moments--that I often thought were Signalis' best offerings--were any better than the original scenes they were aping. Hell, half of the time it just made me want to go back and watch the original instead, which is a danger when you try to make such clear allusions. Signalis does well, but that's largely because it manages to stand on the shoulders of very large giants without completely blowing it. Not a very difficult, impressive, or interesting task.

But beyond the very clear pulls, there's plenty of other media you could read into the game's story and general vibe. Since we're already doing a popular art potpourri (did I mention the use of The Shining carpet?) I feel pretty at-home comparing Signalis' plot structure to David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. The similarities are pretty clear even at a surface level: the impossible-to-resolve narrative ambiguities, notions of dualism, the general dreamlike presentation, the thematic focus on love, desire, and identity, and the two sets of female lovers who may or may not be exactly the same people strewn across different versions of 'reality.' Well, 'reality' with a lot more air quotes than that. But anyways, making the comparison to Lynch makes it obvious in other ways why I think Signalis ultimately misses the mark.

I've made it clear that the game loves references, but unfortunately it doesn't stop at basic visual nods. Much of the story is directly pulled from/heavily relies on other works of art--namely Chamber's short story collection The King in Yellow and Böcklin's Isle of the Dead painting set. These two works appear frequently throughout the game's runtime, primarily serving as obvious signposting for thematic ideas. And, if I'm being honest, it doesn't work at all. The frequent references feel like a cheap way to impart thematic weight and gravitas without doing much of the work. Why is the King of Yellow here? Well, because the writers wanted you to feel the same way that the King in Yellow makes you feel. Why are we quoting Lovecraft? Because we're going for his vibe. Why are we constantly looking at the Isle of the Dead's many variations? Because…well that would be a spoiler. But let's say it [if you read the rest of this sentence you release me from all liability in your spoiler-free experience] involves doing something over and over again involving…death.

But--you might be wondering--what if I haven't actually read The King in Yellow? Or what if I don't know (or give two flying fucks) about The Isle of the Dead? Well…then you can go pound sand, I guess. You'll just be seeing some (admittedly cool) paintings and a neat book cover over and over again, but that's about it. You can certainly read whatever you'd like into these symbols--art's subjective after all --but I don't really find value in these works being here. Not on a thematic level, and definitely not on a metacontextual level either. They're without a doubt the most awkward plot feature the game has to offer.

And don't get me wrong, Signalis wouldn't be the first surrealist piece to be based on an existing piece of art. Lynch's Blue Velvet involves the song of the same name, while Mulholland Drive is practically one street over from Sunset Boulevard. Similar surrealist icons like Haruki Murakami don't pull punches when Norwegian Wood is about the Beatles song and After Dark similarly involves Five Spot After Dark. But I think the real difference is the use of these references. These two (among many others) seek to elevate and extend the feelings, themes, and ideas presented by their referenced work. Blue Velvet doesn't seek explanation or thematic resemblance through its source material. It's looking to take emotions from that artwork and convolve it with the darker and complex themes of abuse and sexual deviancy it uniquely presents. Signalis, by comparison, uses these art pieces to offload the hard work of thematic development to something they don’t' have to write. If you want answers, I guess you're gonna have to look up what The Isle of the Dead is. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Moreover, Signalis--like any other surrealist art missing the mark--is pretty devoid of truly memorable objects/places/moments that are distinctly surreal. Being 'weird' is one thing: it's trivial to make up shit that don't make any sense. Most bad writers do that every day. The truly surreal, in my book, presents things that speak to you on a subconscious level. They provide content that doesn't make 'logical sense'…but it compels you. It compels you through something deeper--something you understand but just can't explain. It's the kinda stuff that hits different. The shit that'll stick with you forever.

They're the sorts of themes, emotions, and experiences you couldn't possibly get in regular, non-surreal media. The examples--even just through Lynch--are plentiful and obvious: The Red Room from Twin Peaks, the 'room above a convenience store' and the ring from Fire Walk With Me, the blue key and box from Mulholland Drive, every-other-fucking scene in Inland Empire, etc. etc. Beyond objects, just about anything can be made compelling when framed the right way. Be it phrases like 'fire walk with me' or just the mundane act of walking into the alley behind a Denny's…anything can be transformed into the most horrific shit you'll ever experience--provided the author knows what they're doing.

Signalis is missing these types of beats and feelings to a painful degree. That's not a massive strike against the game…but it is a shame that they couldn't reach greater heights when they had such a good foundation to work off of. I guess filling the game with End of Eva iconography will suffice…

And to be clear, I don't think you really need to pick Lynch/Murakami to do this. Considering how much else is ripped from famous stuff, the creators might have been pulling from different sources. I'm only using Lynch and Murakami because they're famous and there's a decent chance you've encountered them already. I don't think I'm getting 'cool guy cred' by name dropping a more obscure guy who does the same shit. And if you actually haven't encountered Lynch or Murakami...then put down the damn controller! Experience something that isn't a video game every once in a while! If a Doom WAD can convince TikTok kids to read fucking House of Leaves…then let this be the review that gets you to watch Mulholland Drive and read Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World!

As for the actual meat of Signalis' narrative…it's pretty good--especially for a medium as devoid of good narratives as gaming is. The lore is…serviceable, the characters are interesting enough, and the pacing designed to keep your intrigue. It's not going to reinvent the wheel, nor is it the best exploration of these ideas. But it mainly flows with grace and manages to stick the landing pretty well--provided you can handle ambiguity and incoherence in your narratives.

I will admit though: it is very funny to see hundreds of articles, video essays, and comments get themselves worked up over Signalis' lack of conventional narrative cohesion. Contradictory and unresolved plots have been around for a very long time--and are just as valid a way to tell a story as any other. So learn to just enjoy the ride and forget about the logic. Does your life make any more sense?


Das Model
All in all, Signalis is a model indie game: It's a passion project born of a very small and dedicated team. It seeks to explore genres that have long been forgotten by the mainstream. It tries more experimental approaches that you won't find in huge commercial products. And it manages to do it all with a good art style, charming presentation, and great gameplay. A very reasonable $20 ask, and an awesome way to kill a weekend.

But I think there's also a darker side to being the 'model' indie game. A side so dark that it might even make it into an horror game like Signalis! It's clearly based on (or ripping off) several already great games. It has very little to offer in terms of new ideas that expand upon those masterpieces. It doesn't surpass, or even meet those classic in almost every way. It somehow manages to screw up things the 'originals' got right in the first place. Its writing is incredibly uneven and can't help but shove in distracting meta-references to other art. Its presentation is tied to incredibly played out niches. And…most importantly…It rarely seems to understand what made the games it imitates 'masterpieces' in the first place.

So what do you think?

I'm the kind of guy that would rather just replay Resident Evil than play a worse version of it. But Signalis manages enough developed ideas to justify its own existence. And let's not forget just how insane it is that primarily two people developed it. I know my ass isn't doing that--and I know yours ain't either. It's just a shame the game couldn't punch above the 'great for 2022 indie games' weightclass and into the 'great for the decade' or 'great for the genre' ones instead. But such is the nature of the 'model' indie game--they aren't seeking greatness, they're seeking the familiar.

Here's hoping that rose-engine's sophomore effort escapes the model.

In 1910 Russel and Whitehead published their revolutionary Principia Mathematica--in which they formalized the foundations of mathematics and laid the groundwork for modern science. In it, they take nearly three-hundred and sixty pages to rigorously prove one of the most crucial facts in all of history:

1 + 1 = 2

A observation they describe as "ocassionally useful."

This might seem like an incomprehensively difficult and, frankly, absurd task. But I think it would be far easier to write all two-thousand pages of Principia Mathematica than it would be to explain exactly why Final Fantasy Type-0 is a fucking travesty of a game.

After all, how exactly do you prove that "1 + 1 = 2?"

(REVIEW IN PROGRESS. Playtime: 5ish hours)
This Review will be put into chronological order when finished. Until then, you can enjoy it like it's some dogshit postmodern novel.

PART II

Isn't This Where...We Came In?
Anime bars are actually cooler than I thought. Less 'creepy guys ogling Idlemaster characters' and more 'regular people singing their hearts out to early 2000s anime OPs.' A bartender came up to me at one point with a plush of Papyrus from Undertale and told me it was her 'favorite character in anything ever.' I mentioned I vaguely knew (read: shared the same forum with) Toby Fox back when he went by Radiation on starmen.net (half-jokingly slaving away on a fan project called Underground), and she proceeded to lose her goddamn mind. Good times.

Less good was what awaited me back at my lab today. My aforementioned lab-mate decided to purchase XVI in both physical and digital formats.

Why? I've got no damn clue.

He then decided to wipe the physical copy of the game in favor of the digital version.

Why? I've got no damn clue.

Having pieced all this absurdity together, I proceed to discover that my disc save is incompatible with the digital version?

Why? I've got no damn clue.

I've certainly got a bone to pick with my lab-mate, but he at least lets me play XVI for free. Why the hell can't Square Enix let me transfer saves between game versions? Who am I kidding. This is the same company that still shills Web3 horseshit (regretfully still very popular amongst clueless businessmen in Japan) and tries to hock godawful AI projects so bad that even a clueless dunce like me could do better. You know the why just as well as I do.

And so--with a grimace on my face--I was forced to replay the exact same chunk of XVI I wrote on last time. And yes…I've somehow dug up more to say. So let's begin, shall we?

The Way Back
Let's really think hard about XVI's opening for a minute.

Any artist that's worth their salt will work their ass off to produce a striking opening and ending to their art piece--something I alluded to previously. Sometimes their attempts backfire and come off as incredibly hokey (Isn't this where…we came in?). But if it works, you'll be itching to rewind the tape just as its finishing. Be it music, movies, novels, etc…you know which ones get you going.

XVI certainly tries to open with bombast, but within seconds you can see most of the game's misgivings. We opt for a highly cinematic, 'epic' fight between two giant monsters. The music is massive, the direction frenetic, and the visual are chock-full of massive explosions and wreckage being strewn about every which way. And yet…there's something off about the whole thing.

The problem? The gameplay. That's right: you're not just watching a cutscene play out…you're "a part of the action." The UI prompts you to press buttons to shoot projectiles or dodge. Auto lock-on means you'll only have to worry about these two things. To make it even simpler, the enemy doesn't like to hit often--and moves very slowly when he does--meaning you'll spend 95% of the fight mindlessly spamming triangle (or holding it, as I realized this time around) and watching…well you're not actually watching anything happen. The fireballs you shoot careen towards the other monster, sure, but they don't actually seem to do anything. Neither do the monster's attacks if they actually manage to hit you.

Not only is this presentation very hackneyed (I feel like a child being forced to participate in an episode of Dora the Explorer), it's not very well presented either. Obviously you can't make this opening hard. If you could die, then you'd probably get pissed and immediately lose all interest in the game--I get that. But you also just can't make it as boring and banal as XVI does. You're essentially just forced to sit there and mash a button for a minute while you have no actual agency over the events on screen.

That disconnect--the lack of meaningful agency--is a textbook example of why increased interaction is not always the answer. If you can't think of anything genuinely interesting to do, then it sometimes is just better to roll the cutscene instead of forcing a disengaging interactive chore upon the user. By making it gameplay, you lose affordances that regular cutscenes offer: better pacing, more daring camerawork, unpredictable moments, etc.

And don't get me wrong, I don't think that every opener like this is doomed to fail. As much as I fucking hate Nier: Automata, I have to admit it nails its opening perfectly. It's very interactive, narrative-heavy, bombastic, and just genuinely fun to experience. I'd say its easily the best part of the game (Yoko Taro needs time to ruin things). You can do it right…this just ain't the way.

But I'll stop my bitching here. We're quickly, whisked in medias res to another moment in time anyways.

Where Am I?
Unfortunately though, my pain didn't stop with the opener. Despite the many skippable cutscenes (thank Christ), you'll still be treated to a litany of unskippable 'prestige tours' (a term coined by Tim Rogers when describing the drawn out, narrative/atmosphere focused walking segments of The Last of Us) and sluggish tutorials.

The prestige tour is something I've never really understood. I think it's made some good sense in a few places--early innovators like Half Life/Half Life 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2007, I fucking hate that I have to specify this) have some very memorable moments wrapped up in unskippable, in-game narrative/exploratory segments. But they're undeniably a very fickle beast. If you don't have anything meaningful or interesting to say (or show), then there's very little reason to waste time by forcing me to interact with the plot. Many people even complain about the classics these days--and I don't think that's unfair. When I Half Life in 2023, I wanna bunnyhop like a madman and shoot aliens--not wait (read: bunnyhop) around a tram for ten minutes.

And yet, it feels like every triple-A game following The Last of Us is contractually obligated to be stuffed with these wasteful little moments. Certainly some of the blame goes to the last console generation's obsession with 'seamless' loading. Which meant our asses would move awkwardly through tiny little crevices very, very, slowly while characters desperately tried to entertain us with shallow 'quippy' banter. XVI even manages to pull this one, much to my chagrin. You could argue this is in the service of immersion, but I disagree. I alluded to it earlier, but I feel like I need to etch it in stone:

Giving the player control does not guarantee an immersive experience.

Immersion is achieved by consistently keeping a player engaged with what's on screen--cutscenes included. I mean, you've been immersed by a good movie before, right? You've certainly been immersed into games that weren't 100% interactive too, yeah? Good pacing, atmosphere, narrative progression, game mechanics, and direction are what immerse us--not the physical act of holding the controller. If you're a designer, you're gonna have to actually work for that immersion.

I feel like it's necessary to etch in some corollaries in next to this fact too:

The greatest threat to immersion is forcing a question into the player's mind: Why am I doing this?
A well-designed cutscene immerses a player better than a middling interactive segment.

The best prestige tours are the ones I'm not actively thinking about--Modern Warfare's iconic Shock and Awe, Uncharted 2's peaceful Where Am I?, and Half Life 2's unforgettable Point Insertion stand as some of the greatest examples of how to actually do a prestige tour. Hell, even the opening to The Last of Us stands as a good example (and I fucking hate that game). I'm sure you could think of some more yourself.

Unfortunate for XVI (and to be fair, most of modern triple-A gaming), we're stuck with some banal walking and talking while very little of interest happens. The designers even included item drops every few feet along our path--adding further insult to injury and reminding me of our status as Skinnerian rats in a cage. A few rocks fall and endanger our characters…but we've known these guys and the world they occupy for literal seconds, we have no reason to care about their wellbeing or anything else happening on screen. Their dry dialogue certainly ain't helping my attachment neither.

The Bog
But once again, we're quickly whisked even further back in time--to our protagonist's childhood. And here, we perhaps make the most fatal "how not to open a game" mistake in history: prolonged and ill-fitting tutorials.

Games have struggled with tutorials since their inception. Early games either forwent tutorials entirely or crammed them on the margins of the arcade machine. Gaming's ancestors might have had simple enough gameplay to mask their lack of instruction, but things were already starting to look rough by the Famicom era. It may have taken some time, but by the turn of the century it was clear: games had become complex enough to demand detailed and explicit instruction.

But when we tackle tutorials we have to return to our previous problem: immersion. After all, I'm playing a game, not reading a textbook. Most players don't want to learn shit--they just wanna have fun. So there's bonus points to be had if we can get educated without even realizing it. It's a gaming concept so good that we're trying to incorporate it into actual education too.

The loadstar is without a doubt Super Mario Bros.'s World 1-1, although it certainly wouldn't be the first or last game to nail the seamless tutorial. I can once again give Nier: Automata credit for smoothly transitioning from its shump controls into traditional hack-and-slash combat without breaking a sweat. That's right: even some modern games get away with telling you jack shit. Controllers only have a few buttons anyway, right? If you press every one, you'll probably figure it out eventually. Even well tutorialized games have tons of hidden mechanics, so it's not like explicit tutorials are always necessary at the end of the day.

You don't even need tutorials to be seamless either. Some games manage explicit tutorials while charming and entertaining the player. Hi-Fi Rush serves as the most recent example. The humorous intercuts to Chai's egotistical 'rockstar' visions build a great sense of character and world. But there are also plenty of others you can probably think of too. Like I said, immersion isn't just about 'seamless' control of the character. Sometimes creating a cohesive sense of mood or tone--even if you have to do cutaways--is a more effective idea.

And while I do think we can strike a fair balance between 'seamless' and 'cryptic,' XVI strikes that balance very poorly. Not only are we subjected to a litany of tutorials that hard stop the game--forcing you to read paragraphs of text before you continue--it often does this several times in a row. If this didn't kill the pace enough, the general presentation of these tutorials are also very eye-rolling. We're back in Clive's childhood--forced into training against his mentor who's…teaching him how to swing a sword…even though he's the sworn protector of the most important person in the dutchy. It definitely suffers from that awkward 'this is a video game' cheese--after all Clive is supposedly a talented youth, yet he's being told how to dodge an attack for the first time in his life. But it also manages to be presented in the most generic fashion humanly possible. This is, without a doubt, the most painful and boring way to tutorialize your game--design autopilot, if you will--so points off for that.

I don't think the developers needed to drag players through ten tutorials on just how to hit and roll in battle--a simple 'sandbox' fight, where players are allowed to 'press buttons and see what happens' would have sufficed. Not only that, why not have Clive start by going out on a small scale quest to stop some local baddies instead of boring us with no-stakes training? To make it worse, we decide to double-dip on that idea anyways--forcing players on the aforementioned low-stakes tutorial quest ten minutes later. It's not enough to kill the game, obviously--we're going to be here for like forty hours, so what's twenty minutes of tutorials? But still, it's a worrying design trend--one that I expect to see dominate the later portions of this game. After all, the first hour is the most important part of a long format game. Should we have to spend it fighting our way through paragraph after paragraph of intrusive text? A designer worth their salt would have done better.

Stagger Me Deaf
But now that we've worked our way through some combat (again), I want to bring attention to something that's been really nagging me the second time around--the stagger system.

I've alluded to my issues with the combat already--primarily its simplistic execution--but it's not just the trivial qualities that have me upset. I've realized, now having to play the same sections again, that the actual mechanics of the stagger system just aren't working here.

If you know me, then you'll know how I feel about Final Fantasy XIII. And if you don't know me…then you can probably guess how I feel about it. But despite all my hatred for it, I have to give it something: it handles its stagger mechanics far better than XVI (and Remake) manage to.

It might take you awhile to actually build a proper stagger in XIII--but at least the command of multiple party members (or, being specific, the paradigms of multiple party members) allowed for some variety in how you tackled building stagger and accomplishing other objectives. Moreover, XIII's stagger meter--once filled--felt far more substantial than XVI's. You have giant numbers on screen telling you how high your damage bonus is--getting as high as 999% if you're lucky enough. And I'll admit, you do actually feel that sense of massive damage once the meter builds up. I can see the appeal for certain players. It does give you a genuine sense of 'power,' if only for a few seconds.

XVI by comparison minifies almost every aspect of the stagger system--likely in the name of extending the playtime of battles. It usually takes less time to actually enter a stagger state, but once you do, it barely feels like you're doing any extra damage at all. Don't get me wrong, I know I am--I can see that x1.10 modifier telling me that I'm technically doing slightly more damage. But my eyes gaze up at the enemy's actual health bar and I see each swing taking off the smallest sliver of their red bar. I don’t feel that sense of power at all.

Moreover, XIII's proper RPG elements (Jesus Christ I can't believe I'm saying this) mean that you still have some decision making power when enemies are staggered--even if it is rudimentary. Which spells are you going to cast? Which paradigms are you going to use to be most effective? How and when should you switch between them to maximize damage and other benefits (Launch combos, etc.)? Should you use the stagger duration to cover the team's healing or buffs instead? Etc. Etc. It's not much, but there is some logic there.

But XVI's practically non-existent RPG mechanics mean we've been stripped of nearly every choice. Potions are instant, and we're only controlling one proper human (sorry, doggy). So staggers--especially during boss fights--boil down to pressing square like a fucking madman until the enemy gets back into proper form. It's aggressively anti-fun and frankly, boring.

In games like Dark Souls, bosses might be massive, but you do get the feeling that every hit counts--both towards you and them. Unless you're horribly underleveled, every swing brings off a decent chunk of their health bar--and bosses are usually only a few swings away from being meaningfully staggered. The damage balance of these games means a player actually gets the chance to feel powerful, not just through visuals--animations and the like--but also through the game's actual mechanics. XVI (and Remake), by comparison, totally fall on their face here.

Staggers are, in a word (and forgive me for the pun-like quality here): stagnant. I don't feel the rush and excitement in staggers here that even XIII had me feeling. Instead, I'm just getting ready to hit the square button until the enemy's no longer staggered--doing an insanely minimal amount of (free and undynamic) damage the whole time. It's an even simpler minigame than XIII's that manages to do nothing beyond give the player some cheap visual thrills (the guy fell down!!!!!!) and pad the game's runtime with fights that far overstay their welcome.

And don't get me wrong, I think XIII's stagger system is still absolutely flawed at its core. But man, do I find it far more appropriate in Final Fantasy XIII than Devil May Cry.

CINEMATIC ACTION!

So, we have "cinematic prestige" presentation mixed with rudimentary combat that values visual flair and Skinner rewards over solid mechanics. The combo of these two core principles creates real awkward results.

The QTEs, for one, are rather surprising in 2023. Players had been voicing their dissatisfaction with QTEs for years…or so I thought. I figured that decades of rehashing Shenmue's bag of tricks would have worn people down by now. But to be fair, you could say most of triple-A gaming is still just following in Shenmue's footsteps--but we'll save that discussion for a different review…

Either way, QTEs don't really make boss fights more engaging on a mechanical level. In fact, it only emphasize just how worthless staggering is. Nine times out of ten you'll end up doing more damage with a random QTE (if you're lucky enough to get one). And that…that is very strange to me.

Not every action demands a proportional amount of reward, but I think these QTEs are the worst way to go about empowering the player. It takes genuine time (and yes, some effort) to stagger a boss. Not to mention how much strain you're gonna put on your fingers spamming attacks while they're down. So why the hell does all that time (and effort) get trounced by a single PRESS SQUARE event with an ultra-generous time window?

The answer is pretty simple: it makes for a sick visual. You get to watch some rippin' cutscenes of Clive doing rad backflips and stabbing dudes. And--don't get me wrong--that could work in the right circumstances. But I feel like the execution here is misguided at best. The visuals are sometimes cool, but they muddy up the immersion and general gameplay experience.

I think that this conflict--cinematic immersion vs interactive immersion--is ultimately XVI's greatest struggle so far. The coda of Joshua's fight with the "mysterious" fire guy is a great example too.

Just as the fight itself repeats with some minor developments, its design blunders do as well. You now have to actually aim when attacking the enemy, and there are now health bars on screen to let you know the actual "stakes" of the fight. But, despite all that, the presentation is more focused on being a cinematic 'moment' than it is on being a genuinely fun piece of game. Your attacks don't really do anything, save for knocking one pixel's worth of bar off. Meanwhile, the fight carries on for so long that your simple toolkit of 'hit and dodge' becomes insanely tedious. The awkward (and repeated) delivery of Joshua's voice lines during this segment certainly doesn't help either.

Overall, it's a really jarring experience when you sit there and think about it for a minute. And when I say "think about it," I mean…think about it like this:

You're the guy who made this. You're gonna have to show it to all the world--and your name's gonna be all over it. You're trying to craft an exciting and emotional moment; Joshua's life (as well as the entire dutchy he represents) is on the line here, and we need to convey all that excitement and pressure through a massive and epic fight between two incomprehensively large and powerful behemoths. There are pros and cons no matter how we approach this: a cutscene would allow us superior control over the visuals and pacing, but it would lower the player's sense of immersion unless we execute it perfectly. A genuine fight could increase the player's attachment to the experience, but might not sell the size and scale of the moment like we'd like to. Not even mentioning all the other issues wrapped up in interactive fights (what if the player dies and has to restart?). So, which route will you take?

Well how about we fucking blow it and take the middle path--pleasing no one and betraying both philosophies at the same time? The real centrist move.

The fight's gameplay is simple--but the fact that it is a gameplay moment requires it to be lengthy in order to have any meaning at all. So, we end up extending the duration of the fight until it wears out its 'wow' factor. We want the fight to be cinematic, so the player isn't going to have any meaningful control over the fight--the pacing is static, the camera angles are predetermined, and the structure of the scene is barely related to the player's control of it. It might as well be a CGI cutscene with some fireballs photoshopped in whenever you press a button.

AND YET, we're unable to reap any potential benefits from being a true cutscene because we're too constrained by the lousy gameplay elements. The editing and direction can't be too interesting--we still need clear shots so we can actually shoot the enemy! We also need insanely stupid looking Tekken health bars at the top of the screen (that ultimately mean nothing) and distracting UI elements that constantly remind us how to dodge and attack.

The best realization of this fatal paradox is the fight's climax. Joshua--in a very heated moment--divebombs directly into his enemy (which had just nearly killed him). He makes a massive impact, taking his foe with him. Mid way through this scene, however, the game fucking pauses to play a canned ENEMY BOSS GUY DEFEATED!!! UI animation and show you how much experience and gold you gained for "defeating" this guy.

Seriously.

It happens mid-fucking blow. It's patently absurd. The sort of "what the fuck were you thinking?" moment that I could only expect from the fine folks over at Square Enix.

This moment--hell, this entire fight could have actually worked if the director (and crew involved) put some genuine thought into maximizing the impact of the scene. Instead, they followed too many popular design trends and failed to make an impact with their noncommittal and contradictory presentation.

Blood On My Hands
But there's something even more unfortunate happening here. Even though the game sabotages gameplay moments in the name of cinematic presentation…the narrative totally fails to match its cinematic ambition.

I was replaying yet another prestige tour--the one where Joshua wakes up during an ambush--and I realized something. Joshua's like…twelve years old, right? He's young, innocent, and very conflicted about his situation. Or, at least the writers would like us to believe he's very conflicted. But in this moment, I do something that genuinely shocked me. It shocked me so much that I can't believe I missed it the first time around.

While walking through the burning keep I encounter an enemy, I press triangle and…I instantly vaporize the motherfucker. He's dead. Gone. And, oddly enough, our Joshua--our sweet little innocent Joshua--doesn't seem to give two shits. He mutters some canned line about 'stopping the bad guys' and then proceeds to go on with his day--allowing me to vaporize more baddies a few seconds later.

This is weird, right? Like…I don't want to sound like that guy from Edge who reviewed Doom and complained that you couldn't 'befriend the demons…' But…don't you think we should spend more time on this moment? Joshua, a child, just fuckin' killed a guy. Not only that, he made the dude erupt into motherfucking flames. And yet, he's not bothered. So we're not going to even give it a second of thought. Obviously not every game (or even most games) require this level of treatment. But XVI feels like it's begging for moments like these to happen. So why isn't it taking advantage of it?

There are so many missed opportunities like this staring the writers right in the face. And, believe me, I'm a fucking terrible writer. The story is (so far) filled with so many flat moments that it boggles me. Every single one of them could have been slightly altered to add depth, consequence, emotion, or really just about fucking anything to them.

But this moment--where a young Joshua (presumably) takes his first life--is the total embodiment of this problem. We set up all of the drama--with our world, presentation, and prestige tours--and yet we reap none of the rewards. It's a massive fuckup.

Beneath the Veil

But there are other contrasts and contradictions that drive even more flaws.

If there's one thing I could give the game credit for, it's for its incredible graphical fidelity. Well, I could have given the game credit, until we finally arrive at Cid's hideout. Then it quickly becomes clear that we really have two Final Fantasy XVI's lurking within this disc. There's the high-budget, graphically impressive, and 'epic' Final Fantasy XVI…and then there's the cheap, shoddy looking, and boorish Final Fantasy XVI. And yes: I'm talking about the side quests.

Obviously nearly every game has a 'problem' with side quests. They're almost always chores or filler content meant to pad a game's length to appease ravenous players. If you're lucky, your efforts might be rewarded with a good character moment or a genuine mechanical reward…but I wouldn't get your hopes up.

Yakuza, and some Witcher titles have set pretty high bars for quest design in recent years. But I'm afraid to say that most games haven't even started to play catch-up. Designing truly meaningful side quests--the ones with genuine mechanical intrigue and good rewards--is damn hard. One of Final Fantasy XII's greatest accomplishments is how it managed to pull this off with grace--namely through its incredible hunts. XVI seems to be following in XII's footsteps here (read: copying it wholesale), but I'm hesitant to be excited.

XII's hunts worked because the game's mechanics were so complex that you could design a ton of unique boss fights around them. The player had so many ways to fight that the designer also got a genuine sandbox of design possibilities--allowing them to cook up challenging enemies to counteract players. Numerous hunts in XII even have AI scripts more complicated than the super-bosses in every other Final Fantasy game. Considering XVI's shallow mechanical offerings so far, I can't imagine how its hunts could retain a fraction of XII's quality--unless gameplay developments start happening ASAP.

So, if gameplay focused side quests are out of the question, then we'll be left with narrative ones. But even then, there's a commonality between Yakuza and The Witcher that I don't see here:

Their side quests are genuinely funny and often very weird.

Not to say that XVI is going to be devoid of humor. I'd say that Cid's given me a minor chuckle or two so far. But I can't imagine it living up to the level of quality I've grown to expect from gaming's best-in-class.

Instead, I've seen some early indications that side quests were made very quickly and on the cheap. And when I say cheap, I mean cheap. Within moments of talking to your first NPC for a side quest--keep in mind: a side quest required by the narrative since it's your first one--the budget for the game seemed to plummet instantly. It devolves so quickly it almost feels like a comedy bit. Like something Arcane Kids would have pulled if they had Unreal 5 ten years ago. Everything suddenly looks really shitty--the characters, the lighting, the framing, the animation, the design of the quests themselves--everything.

A don't get me wrong, it's not like side quests in Yakuza are particularly high budget, but I think there's a distinction there. Anyone with eyes could tell you that Yakuza games aren't exactly made with the highest budgets…so they look pretty 'cheap' throughout. This isn't a problem: it gives the more devs time to experiment on novel or meaningful gameplay concepts while allowing them to get more games out the door instead of just polishing one idea for five years. The low budget means that the side quests aren't jarring because they feel like the same Yakuza game visually.

I mean, sure, the plot beats in Yakuza side quests are way wackier than the main story…but the writers intentionally use this to their advantage--creating some insanely funny and memorable moments. Its why we all love Yakuza in the first place. The narrative disconnect is intelligently used as a strength, not a weakness.

Meanwhile, side questing in XVI seems to send a clear message to the player: we put one-tenth the thought, effort, and polish into this part of the game. You can see it visually, and you can certainly see it mechanically too. I haven't gotten to play around with many quests yet--so I'm only speaking on the first few introductory ones--but its looking fucking dire already.

How dire? MMO dire.

Unless you are the strongest (and most exploited) of FFXIV or WoW whales, you should be terrified. I've basically done nothing but walk between NPCs, hand out/receive fetch quest items, and receive empty dialogue for my troubles. I haven't gotten there yet, but I expect that some KILL TWENTY GUYS!! and FIND MY SHIBBLEDIBBLE quests will be coming up any time now.

It's seriously insane. Why can't these developers hire a team of writers/designers that purely focus on side quests? Why can't these quests have some genuinely fun characters and memorable story beats? Why can't we have interesting minigame diversions or novel fight ideas? I know…they probably do have a side quest design team already--I'm no rube. But believe me--and I can say this about most triple-A games--those people ought to be fired and replaced until someone does good by us.

But we'll have to crack into those issues as we get there. Let's just say I'm sorely disappointed for now. From the get-go, I had my reservations about letting a MMO-focused team manage a conventional single player game. It sadly looks like my fears are being realized.

MMO quests may often suck, but there's at least genuine pros to be had in the genre. The real sense of evolving worlds, the epic raids, the ultra-longform narratives, the hot, hot ERP, homeownership, stock market manipulation, etc. etc. If anything, you put up with the bad quests in an MMO so you can enjoy the uniquely good parts of the genre. However, I think it's very clear that XVI has none of those good parts. Hell, it's even managed to excise what was regular for a fucking Final Fantasy game up to this now: an open world.

A Whole Wide World Ahead

Fellow partner-in-crime Final Fantasy XIII and its abusive parent Final Fantasy X also toyed around with a linear gameplay experience. But at least in X you could technically walk back and forth throughout the entire world in one seamless experience. So it was sort of an open world game--just one that existed on a one-dimensional line. XVI has excised this entirely--opting for a bland overworld map that allows you to 'fast travel' between several stages. That's right: even in the modern triple-A space…with all the budget, and with several years of active development time…we can't get a goddamn open world in Square Enix's flagship title. From a gameplay perspective, we have devolved below even the original Final Fantasy.

This isn't to say that open worlds are necessary or even a good thing--I usually fucking hate them. But the total removal of it from Final Fantasy is almost as jarring as removing it from The Elder Scrolls. But once again, we have to swallow the big pill: Final Fantasy is no longer an RPG series--it's a Devil May Cry knock-off.

But considering how awfully bloated open world games have become, I guess my thumbs can thank Square that they excised it entirely. Just imagining all the pointless 'outposts' and 'encampments' that I would have to suffer through is really making me shudder.

Still, it once again removes options and possibilities from XVI's toolbelt. If we're not going to get a real sense of adventure from an open world, we need the narrative and its set pieces to really carry us. It's too early to make any calls now, but so far I'd say it's failed to impress.

Our first outing with Cid is already making me wonder how the next twenty or so hours are going to go. The formula of 'walk five feet forward' and 'hit guys' was already starting to wear a bit thin before our inaugural quest had even ended. These maps are seriously giving beat-em-ups a run for their money in terms of linearity. The pacing was so 'start/stop' with the cutscenes that I even grew a little frustrated with the entire affair. Either let me hit guys for more than two minutes or give me a proper cutscene that allows me to put down my controller for a bit--don't oscillate between the two every five damn seconds. I'm getting Metal Gear Solid 4 flashbacks here. And dear God, I don't want to go back there.

It sounds a bit pedantic, sure, but I do think that the hack-and-slash's best offerings manage to sidestep these problems gracefully. This year's Hi-Fi Rush managed to fit in a slew of optional paths (with rewards!) platforming challenges, and charming minigames to constantly keep things fresh. Not to even mention all the content you can't even unlock until you've beaten the game! Other heavyweights in the genre also find ways to spice things up--be it through more dynamic combat encounters or other interesting diversions.

It was honestly kind of surreal--the incredibly cinematic and gorgeous qualities of the environment (in this case, a jungle) were unfortunately undercut by the revelation I was standing around mere eye candy instead of something I'd actually be playing around in. And that's even when compared to similarly gorgeous and cinematic games like The Last of Us--where item scavenging, stealth segments, and shootouts give some distinctive gameplay qualities to its environment (and remember: I fucking hate The Last of Us). XVI is really just presenting hollow hallways to walk down--admittedly very pretty ones. But I said the same thing about XIII--and you know how that went.

Patches of Light

Despite all this, I think it's about time I gave XVI some praise. After all, I don't hate the game--at least I don't hate it yet.

As I've mentioned throughout this review, the graphics--at least during mainline moments--are first-class. The environments have generally been visually interesting and our principle cast has looked fantastic. I can't say the same about the game's cinematography--but I'd levy that problem towards the industry at large too.

Beyond that, I've been very impressed with the game's localization. It's clear that the team valued the English dub over the Japanese (considering the lack of lip-sync for the JP version), and they've certainly proven their dedication to the choice. I haven't been particularly floored or impressed with XVI's characters, but I have generally enjoyed Cid and a few side characters that are peppered throughout his hideout zone. I don't think the story is incredible either, but I do think the localizers and actors have done a great job adding some life to an otherwise basic script. It's certainly a massive step up from Remake's incredibly awkward anime gasps and half-assed English dialogue. So there's some points gained here.

And finally, the game undeniably has the polish I'd expect out of a triple-A title. The UI is clean and well-designed, the game runs well and is bug-free (so far!), and the gameplay experience is smooth. Remember: most of my issues are with the game's design, so I think the hard work of everyone who slaved to implement that design is worth celebrating--even if the designers themselves aren't.

I haven't grown to hate my time with XVI yet. I'm still hoping it'll find ways to develop its core ideas and improve in the coming hours--both narratively and mechanically--but I'm not holding my breath either. Regardless of its future quality, it's already blown enough crucial things to deserve significant demerits. I'm just hoping I like the game enough to finish it without suffering…but we'll see how that goes…

A former professor of mine is on vacation in Japan, coming to visit me tomorrow. I've become a part-time tour guide of Fukuoka in all but paygrade, so I'm excited to have him--but there's a catch. He's a big fan of Remake and no doubt expects that I'm playing XVI right now. So he'll definitely be asking for my thoughts throughout the whole day…something I'm not looking forward to explaining. Considering I feel strong enough about XVI to write an entire damn manifesto (and I haven't even put ten hours in yet!), I think I'd be more comfortable talking politics with strangers back in Oklahoma. Still, maybe it'll fortify my thoughts. I hope I make it at least another ten hours before I come back with another wall of text--but only time will tell. Until then.

PART I

(REVIEW IN PROGRESS. Playtime: 2.5ish hours)
The 'King of Cool' vs The Child of Fire

I caught a 'long' movie in theaters today: The Great Escape. It was a great time; you wouldn't even feel the length, despite the intermission that bisects the movie. But if I'm being honest, Steve McQueen is so damn cool I'd watch him do just about anything for three hours.

I also played Final Fantasy XVI for the same amount of time today. Unfortunately, I did feel that length.

The game ended up at my lab by surprise--a labmate had rushed out and purchased it day one, costing him a cool ten thousand yen. My Great Escape exploit, meanwhile, cost me five hundred yen--not even enough to cover a combo meal at your favorite fast food restaurant. I think I know which of us got the better deal.

But anyways, I had a few hours to kill before my next meeting (the one I'm sitting in [and ignoring] right now as I type this), so I figured: why the hell not?

Well…two hours and some change later, and I'm very underwhelmed.

I know…I know: I'm not supposed to judge a game based on such a short playtime! After all, diehard fans of producer Yoshi P's Final Fantasy XIV will tell you that the game is a slog for the first forty or so hours before the game really starts to heat up. So what's three hours?

Well, about the length of one The Great Escape… and that's a movie with a goddamn intermission! If a game is going to hook me, it ought to have something snagging me before I see the lads escaping from Nazi Germany. But--so far--there are no Steve McQueens, Richard Attenboroughs, or James Garners here. Instead, I'm stuck with an acceptable, but ultimately unintriguing narrative and mind-numbing gameplay.

Game of Throws
If there's one white elephant we need to STAGGER several times before we kill it and move on, it’s XVI's general presentation. Final Fantasy is no stranger to darker fantasy narratives. II's pastiche of Star Wars has a fantasy village getting mowed down Alderaan style, while Tactics is up to its waste in enough betrayals, abuses, and atrocities to make a Shakespearian tragedy blush. But despite that, XVI certainly feels--at least to many fans--like a 'return to basics' for the franchise.

I phrase in quotes because any true Final Fantasy player would know that the series has had more modern (or future) oddities than not throughout the years. Be it Final Fantasy's UFOs and giant mechs, II's beat-for-beat remake of Star Wars, III's Tower of Owen, IV's Clockwork Dragon, Final Fantasy V's inclusion of air vents, or the non-fantasy legacy that most of VI-XV would create (see the literal UFOs in IX or the NYC-esque futurecity of Archadia in XII)…it's clear that Sakaguchi, Kitase, and Nojima were far more interested in science fiction than proper fantasy.

So…at long last…we finally get true fantasy, without any compromises (presuming we don't see a space mech show up at the thirty hour mark). And it's…it's…shaping up to be a shittier Game Of Thrones.

I know the comparison sounds shallow, but it's very hard to ignore the relationship between Final Fantasy games and their contemporarily popular fiction. We've been stuck in the Lightning Era of Final Fantasy for so long now (lest you forget that XV was originally a XIII spinoff) that an entire wave of genre-defining 'prestige TV' has come and gone. And in the aftermath lies Final Fantasy XVI.

It's darker, edgier, sexier, and filled-to-the-brim with characters that it's not afraid to kill off (thank you very much). All of this amounts to a presentation that…would have been pushing its expiry date in 2017. I mean, think about it… When did you last care about The Walking Dead? Impulsive sex, wonton violence, and contrived narratives aren't really doing it for me in 2023 like it was in 2013. What about you?

I think the real issue is XVI lack of a real hook. Famous entries like IV, VI, VII, and IX open with very distinct and exciting moments. Kain and Cecil's razing of Rydia's home village, the Magitek massacre of Narshe, the bombing mission, the theater performance, etc. Within an hour, I already want to know more about the game's world, our characters, and just what the hell is going on. XVI instead begins with characters watching an uninteresting battle, a slowly metered out flashback (filled with enough tutorials to make you cry), and a simple return to step one. I certainly know who Clive and Joshua are (side note: fucking awful names when you're trying to sell me on a sense of fantasy. Joshua? The bible character?) But they're not really interesting people--they serve a basic narrative function. No one is really interesting. Even our first encounter with Cid makes him out to be more of a discount Balthier than anything else.

So, up to this point, we've got a plodding narrative with no real interest…characters without any distinct traits (beyond saying 'FUCK,' dying, and havin' sex)…and a world that feels like its desperately copying XII notes (Rossaria? Dhalmekia?). Sure, the worldbuilding might get more into clerical details--we're the 'Grand Duchy' of Rosaria instead of the more generic Rozarrian Empire--but that's a smoke-and-mirrors way of selling depth.

Even the Final Fantasy games I hate (X, XIII, etc.) have more memorable openings. Perhaps because of how unintentionally hilarious they are (I'll never forget that sick nu-metal track during Blitzball), but they're memorable nonetheless. I'd much rather hang around Waka and Sazh over Cylde and his crew any day of the week.

In short: XVI's narrative is mediocre but competent so far. It might be drenched with enough generic 'prestige' tv tropes to make a man reconsider his HBO subscription, but I haven't felt secondhand embarrassment for whoever wrote this game…so there's that.

Devil May Care
It's weird to say it, but Final Fantasy is no longer an RPG series. Hell, Yakuza and Final Fantasy have apparently switched places. Strange times we live in eh?

I mean, sure, it has the most barebones 'customization' and 'stats' systems in it--but so does every other game now. At this point, Final Fantasy is as customizable as Sekiro is--and I'm sure you'll agree that's not quite the spitting image of the RPG genre. You get a few simple 'skills' you can level, and some generic 'level up!''s that'll drip feed you that Skinnerian reward for the +1 STR that you oh-so-crave. But…that's about it.

To be fair, this (d)evolution began far earlier than XVI. Type-0 carved out the format that would be improved on by hit games like FFVII: Remake. But even Remake let you control several party members with unique skills. The (minified) Materia system built a sense of (shallow) RPG immersion as well. Meanwhile XVI has left me with one guy and three boring buttons: 'hit,' 'magic,' and 'dodge.' Magic is basically there to keep stagger (read: combo) meter building while you're not directly hitting an enemy. The projectiles have no other interesting traits (so far). There's no real juggling or actual combo qualities to speak of.

The same applies for basic attacks, which for the most part amount to pressing SQUARE SQUARE SQUARE SQUARE SQUARE until either an enemy dies or you have to dodge their next attack--only to repeat the same boring "combo" of pressing the same button five times in a row.

There might be a little more to the system at this point (I have upgraded some new skills that are all very situational and serve little practical use ), but I don't need to do anything else right now. The game hasn't incentivized me in the slightest. As always, never forget the golden rule of game design:

THE PATH OF LEAST RESITANCE MUST NOT BE BORING

Enemies are very predictable, slow, and boring. Moreover, there aren't really any systems in place to encourage interesting play--a la Devil May Cry's style meter system. We're basically left with a hollow gameplay loop that rivals mediocre PS2 games. It certainly doesn't help that Hi-Fi Rush came out earlier this year…

And don't get me wrong, I'm not some ultra-hardcore DMC/Platinum gamer either. I usually can't play those games on 'hard' difficulties nor can I easily SSS++++ fights. I'm maybe a little above average, but fairly middle-of-the-road. The lack of not only design variance, but even just basic challenge has been incredibly disappointing.

It certainly doesn't help that every enemy is a total damage sponge too--a worrying trait I noticed in the game's trailers. Think about it: how many enemies do you see the player take from full health to zero in those trailers? Beyond the most basic goblins, everything takes a comical amount of damage (and several staggers) to leave any real marks. But to be fair, that's just following in the footsteps of the equally spongy Remake--a game where Cloud and his mighty buster sword need fifteen hits just to take down random dogs. My poor thumbs and wrists have dreaded every single boss fight--which amounted to pressing square until I wanted to cry.

And sure, I get it, we're only three hours into the game…but why hasn't anything interesting happened yet? Remember: we're not playing a slow-paced RPG anymore. This is a character action game in all but name. If a game in any other genre failed to hook me by this point, I'd be done. I'm only sticking through for the hope that something interesting will develop by the ten hour mark. But if you actually need that much time--and that new development isn't the coolest shit on earth--then you've totally failed as a game.

Next week I'm going to see Lawrence of Arabia--a three-and-a-half hour long film--at the same theater. Considering the movie's pedigree, I'm certain that I'll get something totally unique and unforgettable out of those three-and-a-half hours. I really don't think I'll be able to say the same about Final Fantasy XVI, and that disappoints me.

Now if you excuse me, I've gotta go to an anime bar--yes those are actually a thing--with a friend. Don't judge me: at least I'm not home alone playing Final Fantasy XVI on a Saturday night.