Evergrace is everything I want out of the medium of video games.

Is this game "good" in a traditional sense? Obviously not. The game's tumultuous development from PS1 to PS2 resulted in the game's scope being both cut back, while awkwardly lurching onto new hardware. This game feels like a strange in-between of a 5th and 6th generation more than any Dreamcast release. The plot is borderline incomprehensible, with key elements of the plot being inaccessible to western players due to a translation error with the bestiary. There are sections of the game that drag on for entirely way too long. There's an eclectic collection of stats that are incrementally increased through random drops from specific enemies, and even then, you won't notice a ton of difference. Combat is slow and lurching. Instant death from the environment is a constant. This game isn't polished in the least bit.

You'll never play anything like it though. Not even the sequel. I got this game at launch, and it's stuck with me throughout my adolescence as this alien, haunting action RPG.

Noriko Meguro's character designs and art direction are in full display here. I love how each of the game's disparate cast are instantly recognizable, even translated in game as clunky as they were. The world design is phenomenal. The skies have this pale, sick green color to it. The "trees" are bare spikes that have more in common with nuclear waste disposal barriers than foliage. There aren't any stock enemy designs in the game, the closest thing to "recognizable" is a boss halfway through one of the routes that looks like a demon. It feels like all the best parts of Morrowind's art direction, without ever feeling the comfort of a more mundane space. The entire game feels like you're in this hostile, foreign land and any respite you manage to get is something you carved out.

Kota Hoshino's soundtrack supersedes the game's own popularity at this point. The in game tracks differ from the original compositions, but not in a way that detracts from the overall experience (if anything, having a more subdued version of Buying Goods at Palmyra is a good thing). Nothing else, outside of Forever Kingdom, sounds close to this game. The highlight track for me would be Omen, the track that plays during the final cutscene/credits track. There's an assumption that this game has a very amateurish, ill fitting soundtrack (partially due to the fact that, as of the time of creating the OST, Hoshino didn't know how to read sheet music). I think the soundtrack fits the game's atmosphere perfectly, and I have a ton of respect for Hoshino for pulling off what he did.

The voice acting, at least in the english version, is terrible. It's never boring, and it instantly careens into "so bad it's good" territory. Don't play with an undub, it's part of the fun.

The large collection of equipment (that you can and HAVE to visually customize!) is admirable. Some players might have reservations with the fact that none of it is going to look like you're walking around in a traditional western suit of armor, I find that to be a selling point. Each piece of equipment also comes with abilities that have either use in combat, or exploration utility that you can only come across through experimentation. While a lot of my runs do devolve into "hit everything with the piko-piko hammer that's inexplicably the second best weapon in the game" (no prizes for guessing the first, check the dev), you are rewarded for exploiting elemental weaknesses and dressing for success.

The story requires external reading to fully understand, due to the game being the car crash that it is. That being said, fully understanding what this game's story isn't impossible and was rewarding to piece together, and unique enough to where I don't want to talk much more about it here. The main "antagonist" never shows up in the game at all and is mentioned only a few times.

All of this adds up to a game that's resonated with me since I picked up a copy back in 2001. A lot of this review just devolved into me saying "damn this game is weird" twenty different times, but I've played so many games and very few of them have such a distinct personality like Evergrace does. It's a challenging work of art to stumble through, one that requires patience. Having 100 percented the game, despite its glaring issues, it's a challenge that's rewarded me enough to call this a game I would put in my top ten. You want something different? This game will give you something different.

This game is absolutely insane. Everything and everyone is miserable, your character is a creepy invincible psycho, your party is filled with pedos and racists, nobody succeeds at anything, the music stinks, the color palette is several different shades of drab, the gameplay is mind numbing. Even though it's a bad game objectively, it was such an odd and unforgettable experience for me. I have no desire to ever play Drakengard again but I'm glad I did. Yoko Taro really came out guns blazing with this one.

So take the gameplay of Drakengard 1 and bump it up from bad to average, but also take the most interesting part of that game which was the insane story and make it boring, take all of the eccentric characters and make them standard rpg flavor with little to no personality, and you have this game here. It's bland as sand. I don't think the story is bad conceptually, it has a few good ideas, it's just really dull execution wise. When the only part of the game that got any emotional reaction out of me was seeing characters from the previous game show up and finish their own story arcs, that says a lot to me about how little I cared about anything happening in this story. I mean as a game, it's fine enough, it plays well, but as the years go on I have a feeling I'll remember very little about it, while there's no way I could forget its predecessor.

(Shelved mostly because I have one more thing to do that I'm putting on the back-burner for now)

Remember how insane Octo Expansion was for how it changed the formula of singleplayer in a refreshing, interesting, and fun way? Side Order gives me so many memories of what Octo Expansion felt like when I played it for the first time. It remixes the formula of Splatoon singleplayer in a really interesting and (relative to Splatoon’s IP) innovative way for the franchise.

I’m genuinely shocked how well Splatoon translates into a roguelite. Gameplay feels natural and snappy, and while of course there’s a big luck aspect to Side Order, the game rarely feels unfair. Honestly I can’t tell if it’s my skill or a flaw of the game, but Side Order could feel pretty easy at times with how much you’re given to work with. But even when the game would feel easy, it was so fun to PLAY. Side Order takes great advantage of the mechanics of Splatoon as well as remixing the gear building aspects of base game in an interesting way.

The story and characterization of Pearl, Marina, Acht and even Agent 8 is heartwarming and well-done. Octo Expansion and the story and worldbuilding from it are referenced a lot, which makes the absurd virtual world of Side Order feel surprisingly grounded. Side Order is also filled with the same charm that permeates all of Splatoon, taking itself seriously without being afraid to let characters (well, Pearl) be goofy.

Side Order hits, and it does what it aims to do very well. While certainly not my favorite roguelite, Side Order turns a game I love in Splatoon into something different and fresh, yet just as fun, if not more fun, than past singleplayer campaigns. Highly recommend if you enjoy base Splatoon to try out the DLC.

I thought I had this game figured out before I even played it. Harvest Green Moon: Friends from a Ghost Town. Self-cultivation via land cultivation. “The only thing that’s actually still growing is capitalism.” (Necro)pastoral mono no aware. The expectation that you’ll know the exact moment when you have to trigger the ending, even if you still kind of want more, or still want to linger so badly, because Turnfollow. In the end, it’s all these things, anyway, and it offers much to essay about one or all these angles.

But no, after another run with it, I think the angle that’s illuminating new things for me, the one that’s turning my initial approval for it into something closer to affection, is the angle that frames this game as a game that wants to explore desire. About desire clarifying itself, contradicting itself, configuring and being reconfigured, settling in, being settled, being satisfied, yet also being stirred to uneasiness, often by itself, being relinquished finally. Most of all it’s a game about desire being unfurled from material considerations, poured out of specifically-shaped receptacles, allowed to insist and to persist and to chance upon an individual more ethereally.
Because yes, your initial goal and your ultimate goal are the same: you want to earn enough scrip so you can buy a ticket to the moon. And yes, this game only has one ending, and it involves you accomplishing that goal. But be that as it may, you’re not really going to spend much of your playtime with this goal in mind. Rather, you’ll be spending much of your playtime being a member of a peculiar community: being served meals by a cook who wants no compensation of any kind, hanging out with a kid who introduced themselves by saying they don’t trust farmers, falling in love with someone who was so sure that she was going to leave, and that she was going to leave soon. Yet she’s still here. And the time she has outside of work is usually spent with you.

Putting it like that, it sounds like the game is making you consider the possibility of staying, that the moon isn’t the only place for you, that where you currently are might even be the better option. It even externalizes this through the characters. Carol remarks that you’ve become a great fit for the community. Marshall is observed as being worried about what will happen to you in the future. Pony practically begs you to stay, even as she tries to obscure it in distantiating language. All this, even as they anticipate your future departure. It was inevitable, of course, for me to weigh this heavily on my mind. Do I stay or do I go? Do I convince Pony to go with me if I do go (I eventually find out that wasn’t even an option)? It was already emotional for me to pass by the area where the Moon Elevator was located on a rainy evening. To do nothing and just take that moment in as both the music and the rain swelled, to let the game run until it transported me back to my room. It became all the more wistful as this town started to become more like a home.

And yet, as felt as this aspect was for me, much of my fascination with Before the Green Moon isn’t even here exactly, in this idea that it’s making you choose between two places. Instead, it’s in the idea that it’s problematizing what a place even is. It’s a game that’s interested in the liminal: a ghost town that grows life for the moon, abandoned yet needed, place and placelessness, a community where a member is both stranger and friend, living to work and working to live, scrip for today and scrip for the future, permanence and lastingness, something out of nothing, everything despite nothing, what is now and what is awaiting, even if they might end up being one and the same. The characters are conditioned by this, of course. Maria considers this a perfect place for her, though she sometimes wishes she could travel. In one of her key scenes, she shares that she came from an island that no longer exists. You ask her if leaving was the right choice, and she simply answers she doesn’t know. Int, meanwhile, seems to always be informed by where he ought to be. He is working on this thing because it will bring him there, he is heeding the words of his Granny because she will bring him there. Yet later on, without any real climactic event that you can pinpoint and say, “Yes, this is where everything changed for him,” he says something like, “I’m a different person now. Are you a different person too?” These people are currently living lives here, and the game never declares if they’re the lives they should be living or if they had lives they didn’t get to live, only that these are their lives now, and while their pasts may point to something that was lost or something that was foundational, what is here is what is the now and the currently happening.

The whole game behaves this way. It hints at current experiences textured by what was, but it's not clutching onto the past, instead sets it aside so that what will be can be in a community like this. Even the things that are really just there to mechanically convenience the player seem to be pointing towards something. You have a dwelling, but you can sleep anywhere where there’s a bench and no one will chastise you for it. There are shelves in places where you don’t expect them, and you can use them for storage. Who set them up? To whom do they belong now? To no one and to everyone, of course. This is a country without a flag.

The game only has one ending, and it involves you going to the moon. Yet despite that knowledge, it seems to invite you to stay instead. Why is it doing that? And why doesn't it just make it easier for me by framing it as a binary choice, where I can just choose the Moon ending or the Town one? Is it making me ask what it is that I really want, making me examine what it is that makes something important to me? Is it making me purify my intentions, by making me question if there is something postponing for, if staying for a bit longer is even postponement? Is that why there’s this otherworldly moon lore that the game refuses to elaborate upon but nonetheless drip feeds you with, at one point shoves in your face? Does that have a thread I can follow to a tangible end? Does a formalized tangibility even matter at all, or is it enough if all this is just presenting a metagaming angle, one that allows me to write an ending for myself, and which can feel as equally realized as the only real, which is to say official, ending? I still don’t know. Maybe I can’t know. Maybe both the game and I knew from the start that it was not for me to be able to know. It’s disconcerting in its uncertainty yet I’m driven to wonder. That’s desire, baby.

Full disclosure, I'm currently compelled to come back to this and problematize it some more. My initial ability to consider it was tainted by the fact that I found its narrative style obnoxious (still do lol), and so after my first full playthrough I dropped it. Not because I thought it sucked, but because I needed the time away from it to mull over the things it's saying and doing in a more objective way, and during that time I found that those things were at least worth exploring again in a replay. I've since completed two more playthroughs, the second played on mute and the third played as-is, and while I think there's still some stuff I've yet to put together and there's some other stuff I've put together that I want to demolish so I can reassemble them in new ways, I think what I've currently processed is enough to log this version of it.

Since I've already brought it up, let's start with the narrative style. First of all, it's so annoying. Like really. I know I already brought that up but I had to make sure it was mentioned in the review proper, and now that it has been I can let it go. It's just a personal quibble, no biggie, we can move on. Second, I've settled on the narrative style being both additive and diminishing, though to the game's credit more of the former. The metatextual slant really does much in fleshing out the principal characters involved and the voice acting does much to concretize the player's shifting impressions on the story as it also continues to twist and turn. That the Narrator and the multiple voices can't help wrestle with you and with one another when you do so much as inspect a thought is a well-considered take on challenging authorial agencies and vying for narrative participation/control, even if I think it ultimately doesn't go far enough with it. In a word, it readies you, such that you can better gauge what might change if you pick up the blade again, if you ignore it this time, if you slay the princess again, if you save her this time. The diminishing parts stem from the fact that this kind of approach can overly tell even when it just means to show, and that's exactly what happened here at times. I feel like there's always an inherent unsaid conversation between the player and the player character and between the player and the game when choice-making is involved, and I feel that that conversation was often superseded by how Slay the Princess's chattiness either anticipated your interpretations, or outright did them for you (why would you do that?!). For as imaginative as the game was in reacting to your choices and crystallizing them into truly wonderful routes, it was sometimes equally as hasty in signposting what they might be about or how they might be perceived. Even when it tried to be cute, tried to play coy, tried to obscure itself in meta, it couldn't help but wear its explicating heart on its sleeve. The best routes weren't immune from this. Even Thorn couldn't help but wink at you on what the vines might have signified. Even Moment of Clarity couldn't help but nudge you towards what's beneath the larger story's mask. That's to say nothing of the charming but rather one-note peckings of the Narrator.

It wouldn't be so bad if the agency which informed the obviousness shifted as the story shifted, if it was performing or was going to perform something else other than be obvious or reiterative. But it never quite does that. While some routes hint at, or even outright reveal, that there is something larger at play here, they never really factor in the mechanical participation of where the story might go. You can get something like Thorn or the Wild very early in your run, and I'd argue that you shouldn't be able to. They feel too climactic and should therefore be exclusively found in the late game. Getting them early paints a prematurely clear picture of what story the game is telling, something that I found frustrating because you really can't do anything with that knowledge. Instead, you'll be forced to do subsequent routes that will most likely regurgitate the same themes and the same sentiments but won't express them as eloquently.

I get why you couldn't be too influential of course. Slay the Princess does outline its reasons for that. But I don't know. As sensible as the reasoning was, I also found it to be impositional. The carving of more perspectives is engaging because there is an excitement to seeing what kind of princess you'll be entangled with next, but from the panoramic view they never really coalesce into a satisfying whole. They're barely in dialogue with each other outside of the yin-yang "bound to each other's fates" thing that the game continually prompts but never really deepens. The love story never feels momentous as a result. Even the denouement gets hampered. Rather than an elegant synthesis of everything the game wanted to explore, it is instead just an elegant extended cut of what your very first loop might have already expressed, of what your second one definitely did. In Slay the Princess, everything is deferral. And then it just ends.

I don't mean to be too harsh on this game. No other game this year made me want to teeter more on its narrative and conceptual edges. It's just that, the more I did that, the less I was rewarded. It is a very professionally-presented game. The reactivity to player choice is outstanding. The sheer amount of illustrations is kind of insane and I love looking at the game. The routes are imaginative and I'd even say that they're genuinely poetic. But they really only worked for me in isolation, as haiku, as self-contained musings on the game's ideas and themes. When they became vignettes to a larger picture that couldn't quite hold up is when the game lost me. It became a collection of short stories that were less resonantly echoing of each other and more repetitively echoing of what another had just said.

As I've mentioned, I do intend to explore this game further. I'll definitely be there for the Pristine Cut. But as of now, I find that it is a game that was not successful in paying off the things it set up. On the other hand, it is sublime in the moment-to-moment. It is to me, then, to quote Louise Gluck, a game that "makes no forms but twisted forms": Always gesturing but not always gestural. Eloquent but not necessarily evocative. Some most exquisite features of a quite inexquisite corpse. I suppose I have to take the bad with the good, then. That's what it means to love.

To say that the movement in Pseudoregalia does all the heavy lifting would be at least slightly disingenuous, but it cannot be downplayed how smooth and expressive the traversal is. The depth at play here is one thing; there's so many advanced techniques and interesting ways to progress through rooms that one could get it in their head that they're sequence breaking. Hell, they might be.

But what really solidifies this as a must-play - the true testament to how wonderfully designed this package is - is how much the rooms and map compliment said movement.

Pseudoregalia expects the player to explore, but more than that it expects the player to invent. Once all the abilities are unlocked, there's no need to take intended paths through its interconnected areas. Players forge their own paths by chaining wall-kicks, canceling ground pounds and maybe even learning how busted side-flips are. Nothing feels out of reach, and everything feels within the realm of possibility when it comes to level layouts.

This game isn't perfect. There's no map system (it's coming in an update), the game is relatively short, and aside from two specific encounters combat isn't particularly engaging. Sore spots, for sure. One could even make the argument that the low polygon count and low resolution textures make the game a bit bland looking, though I'd counter that with it being part of the N64-inspired charm. It truly doesn't matter anyway. To say these blemishes take away from the joy of playing... That's more than slightly disingenuous.

This game is a masterfully tight and well-crafted experience. It's a blast to control and a joy to discover. Absolutely worth the play whether or not you're planning on jacking off to the goat lady.

I have a soft spot for works of art that make the medium crumble under the weight of the artist's ambition. This game is, to me, the greatest example of that in the history of gaming as a whole. Simply put, 1998 was not ready for Xenogears. The same year that Metal Gear Solid came out and revolutionized storytelling in video games, you have the release of perhaps one of the most complex video game stories ever told. Did you know that this game was the first time that English localizers worked directly with Square? The complexity of the science, philosophy, and religion mentioned in Xenogears cannot be overstated; JRPGs using mythological buzzwords to name things is a familiar tale, but the depth at which Xenogears uses and engages with these things is something that still hasn't been matched today. Disc 2 is perhaps the most well known thing about this game: "Xenogears shot too close to the sun and had to become a visual novel to meet deadlines" is something many people hear and then shortly thereafter decide that they don't want to get in the car if they know it's going to crash. This is understandable, but I think in a way even Disc 2 is beautiful, if not for its content. You can feel how hard the team was trying, see all the areas in which they still went the extra mile and see the scattered pieces of what could've been if the team had more time. It also adds more appreciation, and melancholy, to the amount of effort put in Disc 1. I swear, you walk into a room in any area of this game and it feels lived in. There'll be a unique arrangement of items, furniture, etc. that helps the room stand out from other areas in the game. This level of atmosphere and attention to detail is something that can only be produced if the team loves their work.

Of course, the elephant in the room is Takahashi and the Xeno Series as a whole. I don't think there are very many people who play Xenogears without having already played, or at least heard of, the Xenoblade series. In a way, having played these games adds yet another layer onto the Xenogears experience, because you can see all of the different ideas Takahashi has and how the ones that weren't able to be executed very well were used again when he had another chance. Some of the parallels between things in this games and things in the Blade series, and the way they differ from and build off of each other, are almost more meaningful than the individual content of either game. I'd say that Xenogears is required reading for anyone who considers themselves a major fan of the series, "clunkiness" be damned.

I don't necessarily see myself playing the game again, because it really is clear that the story held priority over the gameplay in this case. But either way, this game is extremely special and is something that anyone with even the slightest interest should play.

Gameplay wise the game suffers from the full PS1 RPG jank package: Shit combat, shit dungeons, and being terribly sluggish in all aspects of design. Best played with cheats and some sort of turbo mode.

Where the game shines is definitely in its narrative, delivering a unique and incredibly ambitious story that mishmashes philosophy, psychology and religion in a dense and complex sci-fi package that gives plenty to think about. This ambition however can also be considered its greatest narrative flaw: Xenogears is clearly chock-full of "things I find cool!" by Takahashi, lifting cues, plot points and inspiration from plenty other mecha anime and similars, leading to a bloated cast that at times often feel like they are just there to deliver a cool scene and never do anything else for the rest of the game. A more focused cast and character writing would've definitely improved the overall package, as I feel like the game would've definitely benefitted from spending less time on side adventures in Disc 1 and instead spaced the writing regarding main duo Fei and Elly more evenly across the game, as, while they are strong and interesting characters, the meat of their characters is almost entirely relegated to the already infamous Disc 2.

Still, god damn you can't help but respect this game's ambition. Shot for the stars and landed on the moon, but in a time where even now-legendary entries like the PS1 FF entries rooted themselves firmly in the Earth, Xenogears sure as hell is a work deserving of respect. The team set out to deliver an age-spanning sci-fi epic about humanity living under the yoke of its own societal and personal constructions; and while realistic development constraints and, let's face it, the immaturity of the dev team as writers and game designers made the end result a fairly janky game, it definitely deserves to stand as one of the greats of the genre.

God damn that final dungeon sucks though, jesus christ.

so much of it starts at the communal living room tv; ours was given to us by a roommate's estranged ex and promptly forgotten, and in some karmic retribution for never returning it we must hit the power button at least five times just to get it to finally boot. when not in the grips of hours of youtube -- we affectionally call it tooba, or scron, or other nonsense conjured in a weed-fueled haze -- there's always games splashed across the screen. sometimes it's gamepass oddities, sometimes it's whatever yawning ps4 epic I'm trudging through, but often it's a rhythm game. everyone I live with is caught up in some sort of rhythm game grind, whether it's ddr, iidx, taiko, or, of course, project diva. we all rotate through our selection, cheer each other on when someone ranks high, and discuss our strategies from song to song. without pd and how it captivated us I don't think we'd have this amazing shared hobby in the same way we do now!

back when I moved in, I had reached the end of my megamix grind and figured the new house wouldn't exactly be amenable to daily sessions. I'm already an atypical vocaloid fan: I never listened to any of the music back when it was most popular in my middle school years and I never ran in any social circles with fans of miku. I was already knee-deep in snobby rym elitism by the time I hit high school and I looked down on vocaloids as a gimmick; a fad corresponding with the rise of social media and video upload sites and not worth my time. it wasn't until I discovered the sega ties that I become interested at all, and my girlfriend's long adoration of the games from the import days on psp pushed me over the edge into full-on fandom. it hit at the perfect time after a year of reevaluating my music taste during lockdown and reinvigorating my desire for musical exploration and eclecticism, and I couldn't help but fall in love with the musical virtuosity of the numerous pseudonymous producers who shared their hobby with the world.

but I certainly didn't expect for my roommates to be as passionate, and after a few early sessions on the aforementioned living room tv I could tell it wasn't going to last. those watching would compliment my skill, but after a couple songs I could tell I was killing the vibe, and besides, you can't really hold a conversation while playing a rhythm game! so I shelved the game indefinitely and moved onto different games. yakuza was the complete opposite at the time: the cutscenes were engaging and easy to understand and the gameplay favored a leisurely pace where I could easily chat or leave in the middle of as session. project diva faded into the back of my mind.

after a couple months however, the fire was reignited. we began weekly jaunts to our local barcade to throw down on an ancient DDR Extreme cabinet; struggling to hear the backbeat over the rickety pinball machines and an unfortunately loud guitar hero 3 setup. the itch followed us home, and soon enough my roommates were inquiring about that "colorful game with the japanese girl" that I used to play. I shook off my rust and began playing again, pleased at how months of inactivity had given me a fresh perspective on the game. my roommates began dipping their toes in as well. much of this is due to project diva being one of the absolute best arcade rhythm games for controller play. many other games simply don't hit the same on a pad, whereas project diva's psp origins gave its arcade counterpart a leg up on transferring home. whereas the cabinet plays a bit like pop'n music with added holds and slides, the home ports incentivize smart left/right hand independence for complex note patterns as well as holding down buttons on one hand while playing the melody with the other. few other rhythm games can attest to such a smooth conversion to console play.

initial interest quickly ballooned into full-on fanaticism. my roommates were listening to the songs during their daily commutes and passing the controller back and forth for hours after work. they were sussing out songs I had never even heard of and introducing me to new favorites I continue to play up to now, in no small part thanks to my roommate purchasing future tone. though I have dozens of hours in pdft, I've actually never owned my own copy... I currently play my girlfriend's copy thanks to her having my ps4 as her "primary" console, and my first time getting to really sink my teeth into it was on my roommate's ps4. he quickly got me out of the comfort zone I was in and had me exploring all the songs unique to pdft's home port, and I would often come home to our subwoofer blaring and him grinding out songs on the couch. pdft encompasses nearly every song ever released for the arcade game when DLC is counted (this also includes the megamix exclusives), and moving outside the curated pdmm list reveals some interesting tidbits about the game's history. early charts from before the future tone overhaul are much rougher and often have more linear visual patterns, revealing a lack of confidence in the concept on the part of developers. higher-level songs are also subject to some blatantly confusing note spam that seems built to obfuscate the patterns rather; see saihate on extreme for instance. thankfully many of these songs received revision charts listed as "extra extreme", and some of the best charts in the game lie here. with added slides and more intuitive and interesting visual patterns, many of the older songs shine.

eventually our enthusiasm died down, and we moved on to different games. once I had a chance to do free play on the cabinet at magfest, it felt underwhelming returning to the pad and the limitations it imposes, and now that I have a iidx ps2 controller at my disposal my daily grind has shifted (as of this week I can finally do 7s!!). no matter what else we play, we'll always come back to diva once in a while just to remind ourselves of the fun we had. my roommate's girlfriend had just moved in with us when we began playing in earnest, and she herself has become truly infatuated with miku. during a difficult period in her life she took to therapeutically playing the game and embracing the nuanced mixture of joy and despair layered throughout the many tracks. their room is now adorned with miku figurines of all types, and she's gone as far as to get a mini arcade controller for the switch so she can grind between trips to our local round 1! it's a connection that I would not have imagined us having, and getting to introduce her to the older console games has been a blast too.

a few weekends ago my girlfriend informed me that pdft actually has master courses similar to iidx's kyu/dan system; I was completely shocked by this. I sat down and handily took out the 9.5* course (an unexpected full combo on envy catwalk had me feeling rather smug even given my lackluster performance on po pi po and saihate), and I gave my best shot at the 10* course too, though I'll likely never be able to clear intense voice on pad despite my best efforts. being able to even tackle these courses felt like a monument to how much effort I've put into learning these games over the last year, and a sense of finality hung over me as I worked through the courses. it gave me a second to reflect on my history with this game and how it gave me so many experiences I never would have experienced otherwise. I've never had another game connect me to the people I share space with in quite the same way, to the point where we have miku fridge magnets and stickers as decorations around our townhouse. I'm eagerly awaiting having a project diva cabinet in my city soon (within the next month... jubeat too!), but I know a few months from now I'll be drawn back into the fold on my ps4, perhaps I'll actually pick up the dlc and work on some of those harder charts I've never been able to try, maybe I'll finally get requiem for the phantasm exex since I always eat shit when I try it at the arcade, or try gothic and loneliness exex for the first time... so much still left to explore! this game truly does not stop, and soon enough I'll have to roll out the concert yet again and pump those tracks through our halls, even if just for a night.

the appeal of a convention stems from the yawning tide of people who embody it; a mass of the like-minded enveloping a space, to the extent that one could never meet or know every one at once. the homogeneity would not be pleasant if it permeated our entire lives, but to momentarily enter a crowd knowing that each person among it could understand your drive and passion is invigorating. when I come to these I tend to roam solo, poking my head into every room I find and silently people-watching from the sidelines. I greet friends of course, and I may strike up a conversation in line waiting for a cabinet, but I find my immersion into the atmosphere alone provides a mental balm before even socializing comes into play.

every year going to magfest I plan new ways to make the experience more comfortable: a well-rounded diet, planned breaks, and more consistent sleeping arrangements. this time my new innovation was a fanny pack, replacing the cumbersome backpack of previous trips with something less intrusive and throwing my misplaced sense of embarrassment at wearing one out the window. with this came a swap from my switch to the smaller form factor of my 3ds. I've come to really lean into my 3ds as of late, bringing it to long waits at the barber or when lazing around at a friend's house. at some point I realized that all my downtime wasted on scrolling twitter could be funneled into a marginally more meaningful hobby by using my 3ds instead. besides, the console is becoming a bit retro! recently a young child saw me with one and asked their mother about the strange two-screened phone I was holding, begging to peer over my shoulder while I played dragon quest.

bringing the 3ds to magfest also gave me the opportunity to try to shore up my puzzles on streetpass, which I had neglected for quite some time. the entire idea behind streetpass - every person's 3ds signalling out in an attempt for two to pass each other and exchange information - was an outgrowth of nintendo's attempts to turn the handhelds into tools for positive social reinforcement, originating at least as far back as the nascent pokemon exchanges on the original game boy. it turned the 3ds into something that continually engaged with the world while you did, giving you brief glimpses into the lives of those around you while you traveled. the most basic of these was puzzle swap, less of a game and more of a mass exercise in collecting pieces of various puzzles distributed by nintendo through occasional content updates. some pieces you could roll for using "play coins" collected while walking with the 3ds in your pocket, but some were exclusively gained through trading with others, and in general the most consistent way to locate certain pieces was by trading with as wide of a group of people as possible. of course, this collaborative effort operated best in a world of mass public transit and high population density, traits missing from the suburban american experience. my regular streetpass contacts were ones at my high school, and the minimal outside interaction led to an eventual disinterest in churning through the same puzzle collections day after day. the eventual death of the 3ds only cemented the end of my streetpassing days.

even just from waiting in the eye-watering badge pickup line at the con, snaked switchback style across an expo room before leaking out from one side of the building to the other, I had already matched with at least 10 people, showering me with new pieces and puzzles I had never gotten a chance to download. a feature past my time called "bonus chance" had kicked in, giving me many pieces from each individual I streetpassed instead of just one like the old days and letting me mop up my collection way quicker than I had anticipated. every break I took during the con seemed to have at least a couple more people trickle into my waiting queue, and by the end of the con I had collected every trade-only piece with less than 100 to go overall. there were people walking around with all of the pieces, people walking around with just a few, some who had scarcely updated their streetpass since the mid '10s, and others who seemed to have gotten in on the tail-end of the whole phenomenon, with lots of pieces for the last few puzzles and barely any for the early ones. for a weekend, this social game that had withered away over five years prior got the chance to bloom again.

these people who I previously just saw from afar, stood next to at adjacent cabinets, or sat behind at a panel now became little figments inside my 3ds. I had always perceived the con as a regional experience, but their data now told me there were those as far as the west coast or even alaska participating, perhaps expats who had moved close by, or former residents flying back to stay with friends. little tidbits such as their most recently played game gave me insight into their tastes, and many of them had included celebratory messages of excitement for the return of the con. their collections, their smiling avatars, their flairs, their messages; it humanized these many con attendees who I often had passed by and further strengthened that bond we shared of mutual attendance. after years of using an ugly caricature of mips from sm64 as my avatar, I finally changed it to one that reflected my face. it only seemed natural to give them the same clarity they gave me.

there may not be a single video game that so perfectly encapsulates my entire personal approach to art as intimately and specifically as xenogears. as the second in what i consider a 'spiritual trilogy' of developmentally-intertwined and thematically cohesive squaresoft jrpgs including final fantasy vii (my favorite game of all time), xenogears (my other favorite game of all time) and chrono cross (one of my favorite games of all time), i feel that xenogears represents the bleeding-heart passion for nearly every specific niche in art that i'd built over my teenage years - mecha, political drama, 20th century philosophy and psychology, psychological drama and horror, religious studies and analysis, and the golden-age turn based jrpg, to name a few - combined with a tenacity and never-say-die attitude that could only belong to those crazy sumbitches that made this dream come to life, most specifically tetsuya takahashi, soraya saga, masato kato and yasunori mitsuda.

during this playthrough of xenogears (my fifth) accompanied by veteran xeno fans and wide-eyed newcomers, i had the opportunity to reflect on this game through several points of view all at once, reflect on my journey as an artist and a person, and what xenogears means to me now at this point in my life. i've lived the lives of many of xenogears' characters - i've been fei, i've been elly, i've been billy, i've been hammer, i've been ramsus - and the intricate web of connections, lies, deceptions, and relationships that are bound in xenogears' vast expanse feel closely related to me own. this is a game that breathes through me in a way virtually no others except its older sibling has.

xenogears encapsulates the purpose of discovery in the wide world of gaming more than ever now - this is a game which has essentially been deliberately pushed to the bookends of time, having the perfect works narrative constantly tweaked and redefined through the likes of xenosaga and now, loosely, xenoblade, and while its contemporary b-tier influence psx jrpgs like legend of mana, chrono cross and saga frontier continue to see re-releases and re-imaginings, xenogears stands tall all on its own merits, an amber bauble of its era. yes, it's a mess of a game, but i'd hardly change anything about it.

disc 2 is a common topic of controversy when it comes to xenogears, and i'm a vehement defender. in a period of the story where it feels as if the entire tone set up within the first major arcs has been dissolved and a hulking, ugly, hateful core rests underneath it all, disc 2 captures (albeit unintentionally, i know) a paranoid, scatterbrained approach that feels exactly as claustrophobic, distorted and maligned as i think it SHOULD. for a game in which the opening hour resolves in one of the most shocking moments in an early jrpg, the developmental segments of xenogears end up feeling trivial or sophomoric as a result, once the brush is put to the canvas and takahashi/saga's grand vision begins to take form. by early disc 2, almost every major jrpg plot point has been completed and resolved. the world is no longer ambitious and explorative. it feels cold. empty. bleak. what comes next? what happens after the story is told? with a stifled frown and heavy eyes, xenogears leads you deeper and deeper into its thematic core, the heart of its very purpose and means to exist. the game constantly guts you with the uncanny feeling of anticlimax. this is a cold dead world and yours is the path that will see it through to the end. this is a game that will challenge you to push through shortcomings and wears its blemishes and faults with pride. it knows exactly what it is, and when that miasma of dread clears and that final fucking screen appears and in bold letters it declares EXACTLY what it set out to be, a greater purpose in store that never came, you'll understand - if you're anything like me, if you and i see art similarly at all, you'll feel what i felt.

stand tall and shake the heavens.