psychbomb
BACKER
2022
An immensely, immensely cynical attempt at putting Overwatch back into the hype cycle by calling an arbitrary patch Overwatch 2 has at last concluded with the only remaining selling point — the long-promised PvE content — being cancelled. There is now significantly less of a reason for this to even be called a sequel, and it was already a tenuous prospect from the outset.
Overwatch was a game that started out middling and got progressively worse over the years. Overwatch 2 picks up from the lowest point Overwatch ever fell to and drives itself deeper into the ground than previously thought possible. The enforcement of stale metas, content droughts, heavier microtransactions, season passes, a community as welcoming as an acid bath, the fact that this is developed and produced by one of the most blatantly evil companies in video games; all of these have been exceedingly well-documented and complained about for years up until this point. Even then, staring down every single flaw that this game had, there were still players holding out for the hope that they'd get to have a single player/co-op campaign as the advertisements had promised.
It won't be coming.
Years of allegedly active development have resulted in nothing but thin air. Contrary to Blizzard's most famous bit of vaporware, Starcraft Ghost, you could actually buy this one before it got a number stapled to the end of the title. Anyone who picked this up in the hopes of getting what was promised later down the line will not be getting the product that they were told they'd get. You could say that these people were foolish for buying the mere promise of something to come later, and I would agree. I can also, however, clown the fuck out of Blizzard for fumbling what by all rights should have been one of the biggest IPs in gaming today and creating something whose legacy is going to be little more than the endless Blender porn animations of its cast.
Buckle down for the retrospectives and video essays that are going to start flooding in about this to try to explain why Overwatch failed as hard as it did. I imagine you're going to start seeing a lot of takes from a lot of people all speculating on what the exact, singular reason was, be it Blizzard's floundering reputation, or the death of the pro scene, or the moneymen deciding that more and more corners needed to be cut.
Allow me to share my theory, though: every story of "why you stopped playing Overwatch" is always the same, and it's never because someone decided they'd had enough fun and hung it up while their opinion was still high. This game is seemingly designed to make people flame out. Someone on your team fucks up hard enough, or you fuck up hard enough, or an enemy player pulls out some unbalanced trick that'll be patched in a week, and you rage and you quit and you never pick it up again. Overwatch is a game with no unity between players, with no community, because Blizzard has devolved into a company which tailors all of its experiences towards glory-seeking leaderboard watchers and nobody else. It's never enough to succeed, to win; you have to dominate, to be the absolute best, to be the first in the world to ever do it.
Look at the way that World of Warcraft has warped itself over the years from being an open and free journey into rote and optimized mechanical rotations, with bosses and dungeons literally designed under the assumption that you'll be playing with plug-ins that tell you exactly where to stand and what button to press at a given time. Overwatch followed a similar trajectory as its life went on, though perhaps made even worse by the fact that they were made compulsory; can't have too many tanks on one team, that's not allowed. Can't have more than one person playing a specific character, that's busted. Can't have a team without tanks or healers, so you're forced to play one if nobody else will. It's one of the worst and most obvious implementations of a forced meta I've ever seen in a game, and it's all in service of a competitive scene that no longer exists for pub players who think they're going to be scouted anyway.
If you're playing with friends and want to try an off-meta strategy, you are literally forbidden by the game's mechanics from drifting too far away from an intended vision of what your team comp ought to look like. God help you if you're in a public lobby and you decide to pick anything other than the highest winrate, highest complexity, most glorious and flashy characters that are available to you. You will be flamed into either submission or a shouting match if anyone on your team becomes suspicious that you aren't playing optimally. Everything has to be optimal. It's all about optimization. And why shouldn't that be what the players expect? It's the idea that Blizzard forces on them. Of course they're going to be toxic shitheads who cry and shout and scream when they perceive the game not being played perfectly.
They learned it by watching you.
Overwatch was a game that started out middling and got progressively worse over the years. Overwatch 2 picks up from the lowest point Overwatch ever fell to and drives itself deeper into the ground than previously thought possible. The enforcement of stale metas, content droughts, heavier microtransactions, season passes, a community as welcoming as an acid bath, the fact that this is developed and produced by one of the most blatantly evil companies in video games; all of these have been exceedingly well-documented and complained about for years up until this point. Even then, staring down every single flaw that this game had, there were still players holding out for the hope that they'd get to have a single player/co-op campaign as the advertisements had promised.
It won't be coming.
Years of allegedly active development have resulted in nothing but thin air. Contrary to Blizzard's most famous bit of vaporware, Starcraft Ghost, you could actually buy this one before it got a number stapled to the end of the title. Anyone who picked this up in the hopes of getting what was promised later down the line will not be getting the product that they were told they'd get. You could say that these people were foolish for buying the mere promise of something to come later, and I would agree. I can also, however, clown the fuck out of Blizzard for fumbling what by all rights should have been one of the biggest IPs in gaming today and creating something whose legacy is going to be little more than the endless Blender porn animations of its cast.
Buckle down for the retrospectives and video essays that are going to start flooding in about this to try to explain why Overwatch failed as hard as it did. I imagine you're going to start seeing a lot of takes from a lot of people all speculating on what the exact, singular reason was, be it Blizzard's floundering reputation, or the death of the pro scene, or the moneymen deciding that more and more corners needed to be cut.
Allow me to share my theory, though: every story of "why you stopped playing Overwatch" is always the same, and it's never because someone decided they'd had enough fun and hung it up while their opinion was still high. This game is seemingly designed to make people flame out. Someone on your team fucks up hard enough, or you fuck up hard enough, or an enemy player pulls out some unbalanced trick that'll be patched in a week, and you rage and you quit and you never pick it up again. Overwatch is a game with no unity between players, with no community, because Blizzard has devolved into a company which tailors all of its experiences towards glory-seeking leaderboard watchers and nobody else. It's never enough to succeed, to win; you have to dominate, to be the absolute best, to be the first in the world to ever do it.
Look at the way that World of Warcraft has warped itself over the years from being an open and free journey into rote and optimized mechanical rotations, with bosses and dungeons literally designed under the assumption that you'll be playing with plug-ins that tell you exactly where to stand and what button to press at a given time. Overwatch followed a similar trajectory as its life went on, though perhaps made even worse by the fact that they were made compulsory; can't have too many tanks on one team, that's not allowed. Can't have more than one person playing a specific character, that's busted. Can't have a team without tanks or healers, so you're forced to play one if nobody else will. It's one of the worst and most obvious implementations of a forced meta I've ever seen in a game, and it's all in service of a competitive scene that no longer exists for pub players who think they're going to be scouted anyway.
If you're playing with friends and want to try an off-meta strategy, you are literally forbidden by the game's mechanics from drifting too far away from an intended vision of what your team comp ought to look like. God help you if you're in a public lobby and you decide to pick anything other than the highest winrate, highest complexity, most glorious and flashy characters that are available to you. You will be flamed into either submission or a shouting match if anyone on your team becomes suspicious that you aren't playing optimally. Everything has to be optimal. It's all about optimization. And why shouldn't that be what the players expect? It's the idea that Blizzard forces on them. Of course they're going to be toxic shitheads who cry and shout and scream when they perceive the game not being played perfectly.
They learned it by watching you.
2024
A victim of its own success.
I'm locking this review in now, because the tides are rapidly shifting for Helldivers 2. It should be no secret that this was a surprise darling that nobody expected to blow up to the scale that it did — least of all Arrowhead. There was some early bumpiness as player counts skyrocketed into the deep hundred-thousands and threatened to crack a million, leaving the servers on life support. Unlike its live-service failbrother PAYDAY 3, Arrowhead got Helldivers 2 sorted within a little more than a week, and managed to win back some good will that had been lost in the chaos. Memes were made, TikToks were shared, everyone got in on the in-universe propaganda, and all was well. It's rare for a game to blow up this much and this rapidly, but word-of-mouth was getting around faster than the plague. Helldivers 2 is a complete runaway success, and represents a very, very big win for Arrowhead after their many years of developing games.
What's unfortunate, then, is that Arrowhead have a strong vision for what Helldivers 2 is and should be. For Arrowhead, Helldivers 2 is a game where you get out of scrapes against bugs and bots by the skin of your teeth. You use every stratagem available to you, you coordinate with your team to make sure there are no blind spots in your composition, you run away when shit gets too hot, you focus on objectives and treat the bonuses as nothing more than bonuses, you get a laugh when your friend shouts "Sweet liberty, my leg!" after you accidentally blast them to kingdom fucking come with an orbital barrage. For the broader playerbase, Helldivers 2 is a game where you play exclusively on Helldive, you only bring the Railgun and the Shield Backpack, you only stand stark still in the middle of a field shooting shit until it's all dead, you only play bug missions, and you're not interested at all in anything that doesn't directly give you medals and slips and super credits. For Arrowhead, the draw of the game is the game; for a lot of players, the draw of the game is filling out the battle pass, and the actual gameplay is just the means to that end.
The latest patch at the time of writing has nerfed the Railgun, which has single-handedly sent the widest parts of the community into a complete and utter Three Mile Island meltdown. It used to blow Charger legs open in two shots on Safe Mode, and now requires about four in Unsafe Mode. That's the extent of it. If that doesn't sound like a big change to you, it's because it isn't. There remain an obscene amount of options available to deal with Chargers — EATs, the Recoilless Rifle, the (buffed) Flamethrower, the Arc Thrower, the Spear, impact grenades, just shooting it in the ass with the heaviest gun you have — but none of that matters, because they want to use the Railgun. And they don't want to use it in Unsafe Mode. And they don't want to run away from Chargers. And they don't want to kite them. And they don't want to dodge the Charger and shoot it from behind. And they don't want to call down a stratagem. And they don't want to blow up its ass while it's aggro'd onto a teammate. They want to shoot them twice with the Railgun. Anything else is "unfun". Go and look at the recent Steam reviews/forum or the subreddit right now, if you're reading this shortly after I've posted it, and you'll see for yourself how everyone is proclaiming this one change to the Railgun to be the abject harbinger of the game's immediate demise.
I don't know who to blame this on, because it seems exceptionally clear that the people complaining the loudest don't seem to have any idea what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen several different posts stating that the Railgun is the only gun that deals with heavy armor, which is blatantly false; these are people trying to adhere to "what's meta" without actually understanding why the gun they're talking about is meta. This is something about live-service games in a more modern context that I cannot fucking stand: everyone is a tier whore. There hasn't been a multiplayer game that's come out in the past ten or so years that didn't have day one articles talking about how there's only one viable loadout and if you're not taking it then you're trolling, or tier list videos put together by popular YouTubers who broadly end up dictating a meta rather than reporting on it, because nobody actually questions why something is thought to be good or bad. This whole phenomenon leaked from Everquest and World of Warcraft like the green shit from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and now every game has to deal with the consequences. The secret of the ooze is that it makes everyone fucking stupid.
"A game for everyone is a game for no one", proudly states the footer of Arrowhead's website. I thought that was an interesting choice of motto, but not just because I agreed with it; Helldivers 2 certainly seemed like one of the most broad-appeal overnight success stories I've ever seen, and I wasn't certain who Arrowhead meant when they said they weren't making games "for everyone". Who was this abstracted "everyone", when everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves? With the way the discourse has been shifting, though, I think it's clear what they mean: Arrowhead has no interest in appealing to people who are playing the game the way that the loudest players complain they can't anymore. These are people who farm the exact same missions the exact same way for hours on end solely to get 100% completion in the battle pass. Why would anyone make games for them? They'd be happier with a piece of paper and some boxes they could fill in. How's that for player expression and a varied meta? You can put a check mark or an X through the box! Make sure to come back every twenty-four hours when your dailies refresh and you can do it all over again on a different piece of paper.
I've been playing on Suicide Mission at a minimum since day one (okay, maybe day three or so), and I've done a fair share of Impossible and Helldive runs, too. They are difficult. I am not surprised that they are difficult because they are the highest difficulty setting available. I have had to improvise, I have had to run away, and I have had to scramble just to barely complete an objective since the moment I started playing the game. At no point did the Railgun — even with a squad of four seasoned players who had come from the first Helldivers, where the difficulty went up to fifteen — allow you to stand your ground and slaughter bugs like a Doom wad. Anyone who attempts to seriously say that they're a Helldive player and that the Railgun nerf has killed their bug-exterminator playstyle is fucking lying. These are players who do not at all know what they're talking about, and they lie about the difficulty that they play on because they think it makes their argument more credible. These people are temporarily-embarrassed god gamers. They think that success and prestige is right there, just barely out of their grasp, if only the devs would allow them to reach it, and all the while they actually belong on the middle difficulties. There's nothing wrong with playing on 5 or 6, or even 1. Play what you enjoy. But don't pretend like you're at a level above where you are when it's obvious to the people who are that you're not. It's sad.
There's a wave rolling in, and I can see the foam at the lip of it from here. We'll have the regular YouTube videos rolling out soon — How Helldivers 2 Failed the Players, Helldivers 2: Dropping the Ball, Arrowhead Studios Gets WOKE and GOES BROKE with Helldivers 2 DISASTER — and leaving players will call themselves "Helldivers refugees" when they find something new to play that they'll hate within a month. What I certainly wish isn't coming is anything resembling an apology or a back-down from Arrowhead. They'll be under a lot of pressure to make changes, and this is the kind of backlash that most companies crumble under. It's been said that players are good at identifying problems and bad and identifying solutions, but I think that's being a bit too generous. I'd argue that the overwhelming majority of players of any game are bad at identifying problems and worse at coming up with solutions. Extremely rarely have I seen a live-service game actually follow through on fan-suggested fixes to fan-suggested problems and not had the game immediately become worse overnight. I hope that they're able to remember their own motto: a game for everyone is a game for no one. Helldivers 2 just got unlucky enough to be branded as a game for everyone.
Anyway, it's pretty good.
I'm locking this review in now, because the tides are rapidly shifting for Helldivers 2. It should be no secret that this was a surprise darling that nobody expected to blow up to the scale that it did — least of all Arrowhead. There was some early bumpiness as player counts skyrocketed into the deep hundred-thousands and threatened to crack a million, leaving the servers on life support. Unlike its live-service failbrother PAYDAY 3, Arrowhead got Helldivers 2 sorted within a little more than a week, and managed to win back some good will that had been lost in the chaos. Memes were made, TikToks were shared, everyone got in on the in-universe propaganda, and all was well. It's rare for a game to blow up this much and this rapidly, but word-of-mouth was getting around faster than the plague. Helldivers 2 is a complete runaway success, and represents a very, very big win for Arrowhead after their many years of developing games.
What's unfortunate, then, is that Arrowhead have a strong vision for what Helldivers 2 is and should be. For Arrowhead, Helldivers 2 is a game where you get out of scrapes against bugs and bots by the skin of your teeth. You use every stratagem available to you, you coordinate with your team to make sure there are no blind spots in your composition, you run away when shit gets too hot, you focus on objectives and treat the bonuses as nothing more than bonuses, you get a laugh when your friend shouts "Sweet liberty, my leg!" after you accidentally blast them to kingdom fucking come with an orbital barrage. For the broader playerbase, Helldivers 2 is a game where you play exclusively on Helldive, you only bring the Railgun and the Shield Backpack, you only stand stark still in the middle of a field shooting shit until it's all dead, you only play bug missions, and you're not interested at all in anything that doesn't directly give you medals and slips and super credits. For Arrowhead, the draw of the game is the game; for a lot of players, the draw of the game is filling out the battle pass, and the actual gameplay is just the means to that end.
The latest patch at the time of writing has nerfed the Railgun, which has single-handedly sent the widest parts of the community into a complete and utter Three Mile Island meltdown. It used to blow Charger legs open in two shots on Safe Mode, and now requires about four in Unsafe Mode. That's the extent of it. If that doesn't sound like a big change to you, it's because it isn't. There remain an obscene amount of options available to deal with Chargers — EATs, the Recoilless Rifle, the (buffed) Flamethrower, the Arc Thrower, the Spear, impact grenades, just shooting it in the ass with the heaviest gun you have — but none of that matters, because they want to use the Railgun. And they don't want to use it in Unsafe Mode. And they don't want to run away from Chargers. And they don't want to kite them. And they don't want to dodge the Charger and shoot it from behind. And they don't want to call down a stratagem. And they don't want to blow up its ass while it's aggro'd onto a teammate. They want to shoot them twice with the Railgun. Anything else is "unfun". Go and look at the recent Steam reviews/forum or the subreddit right now, if you're reading this shortly after I've posted it, and you'll see for yourself how everyone is proclaiming this one change to the Railgun to be the abject harbinger of the game's immediate demise.
I don't know who to blame this on, because it seems exceptionally clear that the people complaining the loudest don't seem to have any idea what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen several different posts stating that the Railgun is the only gun that deals with heavy armor, which is blatantly false; these are people trying to adhere to "what's meta" without actually understanding why the gun they're talking about is meta. This is something about live-service games in a more modern context that I cannot fucking stand: everyone is a tier whore. There hasn't been a multiplayer game that's come out in the past ten or so years that didn't have day one articles talking about how there's only one viable loadout and if you're not taking it then you're trolling, or tier list videos put together by popular YouTubers who broadly end up dictating a meta rather than reporting on it, because nobody actually questions why something is thought to be good or bad. This whole phenomenon leaked from Everquest and World of Warcraft like the green shit from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and now every game has to deal with the consequences. The secret of the ooze is that it makes everyone fucking stupid.
"A game for everyone is a game for no one", proudly states the footer of Arrowhead's website. I thought that was an interesting choice of motto, but not just because I agreed with it; Helldivers 2 certainly seemed like one of the most broad-appeal overnight success stories I've ever seen, and I wasn't certain who Arrowhead meant when they said they weren't making games "for everyone". Who was this abstracted "everyone", when everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves? With the way the discourse has been shifting, though, I think it's clear what they mean: Arrowhead has no interest in appealing to people who are playing the game the way that the loudest players complain they can't anymore. These are people who farm the exact same missions the exact same way for hours on end solely to get 100% completion in the battle pass. Why would anyone make games for them? They'd be happier with a piece of paper and some boxes they could fill in. How's that for player expression and a varied meta? You can put a check mark or an X through the box! Make sure to come back every twenty-four hours when your dailies refresh and you can do it all over again on a different piece of paper.
I've been playing on Suicide Mission at a minimum since day one (okay, maybe day three or so), and I've done a fair share of Impossible and Helldive runs, too. They are difficult. I am not surprised that they are difficult because they are the highest difficulty setting available. I have had to improvise, I have had to run away, and I have had to scramble just to barely complete an objective since the moment I started playing the game. At no point did the Railgun — even with a squad of four seasoned players who had come from the first Helldivers, where the difficulty went up to fifteen — allow you to stand your ground and slaughter bugs like a Doom wad. Anyone who attempts to seriously say that they're a Helldive player and that the Railgun nerf has killed their bug-exterminator playstyle is fucking lying. These are players who do not at all know what they're talking about, and they lie about the difficulty that they play on because they think it makes their argument more credible. These people are temporarily-embarrassed god gamers. They think that success and prestige is right there, just barely out of their grasp, if only the devs would allow them to reach it, and all the while they actually belong on the middle difficulties. There's nothing wrong with playing on 5 or 6, or even 1. Play what you enjoy. But don't pretend like you're at a level above where you are when it's obvious to the people who are that you're not. It's sad.
There's a wave rolling in, and I can see the foam at the lip of it from here. We'll have the regular YouTube videos rolling out soon — How Helldivers 2 Failed the Players, Helldivers 2: Dropping the Ball, Arrowhead Studios Gets WOKE and GOES BROKE with Helldivers 2 DISASTER — and leaving players will call themselves "Helldivers refugees" when they find something new to play that they'll hate within a month. What I certainly wish isn't coming is anything resembling an apology or a back-down from Arrowhead. They'll be under a lot of pressure to make changes, and this is the kind of backlash that most companies crumble under. It's been said that players are good at identifying problems and bad and identifying solutions, but I think that's being a bit too generous. I'd argue that the overwhelming majority of players of any game are bad at identifying problems and worse at coming up with solutions. Extremely rarely have I seen a live-service game actually follow through on fan-suggested fixes to fan-suggested problems and not had the game immediately become worse overnight. I hope that they're able to remember their own motto: a game for everyone is a game for no one. Helldivers 2 just got unlucky enough to be branded as a game for everyone.
Anyway, it's pretty good.
2010
Quite possibly (and quite likely to be) one of the funniest video games ever released. David Cage is like the Ed Wood of the video game industry, but only if Ed Wood had zero charm, a legacy that’s seen as a joke rather than an inspiration, and a fandom of incredibly strange sycophants who have tricked themselves into thinking any of his stories would be able to hack it on daytime television.
Heavy Rain is an experience, and one that you legitimately owe it to yourself to play. This isn’t because it’s good, but rather because it’s atrocious. Games critics were over the moon for this back in 2010. People were desperate to totally own Roger Ebert for saying video games couldn’t be art, so they latched onto shit like this. It’s a poorly-acted, poorly-scripted, poorly-thought out mess. It's like a living guide on how not to make a game. It’s incredible. Get some friends together and make a stream night or two out of it.
Ethan Mars can have both of his children murdered and then be propositioned for sex by his new love interest while kneeling atop their graves. He then walks to his car and kills himself. This is supposed to be sad and not actually the most hilarious thing you’ve ever seen in your entire life.
Heavy Rain is an experience, and one that you legitimately owe it to yourself to play. This isn’t because it’s good, but rather because it’s atrocious. Games critics were over the moon for this back in 2010. People were desperate to totally own Roger Ebert for saying video games couldn’t be art, so they latched onto shit like this. It’s a poorly-acted, poorly-scripted, poorly-thought out mess. It's like a living guide on how not to make a game. It’s incredible. Get some friends together and make a stream night or two out of it.
Ethan Mars can have both of his children murdered and then be propositioned for sex by his new love interest while kneeling atop their graves. He then walks to his car and kills himself. This is supposed to be sad and not actually the most hilarious thing you’ve ever seen in your entire life.
Seventeen years ago, Nintendo released New Super Mario Bros., and they fucking meant it when they said “new”.
The company may as well have struck crude oil for the sheer amount of money that they printed after its release; thirty million copies sold served as the clearest sign they were ever going to get that this was the way the series needed to be from here on out. A decade and a half later, and almost literally every single 2D Mario game we’ve gotten since has been a member of the New sub-franchise — New Super Mario Bros. Wii, New Super Mario Bros. 2, there was even a New Super Luigi U. You can argue that Super Mario Maker breaks the pattern, but I’d argue back that dropping a glorified level editor and telling the players to design the games themselves doesn’t count for much. Besides, Mario Maker is still a lateral step at best; it’s playing the same hits as before, just rolling four previously-released games together to be swapped around as needed. The New Super Mario Bros. mode, funnily enough, turned out to have the most advanced movement tech, meaning that the most serious players and level designers effectively found themselves with yet another New game fairly early into Mario Maker’s lifespan.
Nintendo’s modus operandi seemed to be that if you somehow weren’t sick of New Super Mario Bros. yet, then they’d make sure that you would be. Every subsequent game seemed to scrape a couple of extra flakes of wood off of the bottom of the barrel, desperate to find something else they could extract from this fucking sub-series. New Super Luigi U was a download-only level pack for New Super Mario Bros. U that starred exclusively Luigi, because at least that was different enough from starring Mario to warrant its own game; New Super Mario Bros. 2 put an obscene emphasis on the act of collecting coins, which is almost universally the least exciting part of any Mario game. The 3D entries — Galaxy, 3D World, Odyssey — seemed to be the place where Nintendo was still experimenting and innovating what Mario could be, while the 2D games quietly shuffled along in rote stagnancy for two decades like retirees towards death. There was no zest, nothing fresh, just an endless series of “bah-bah”s and maybe one or two new power-ups every couple years so you didn’t start thinking that you spent sixty dollars for the exact same game again (you did).
Super Mario Bros. Wonder gives 2D Mario a personality again, and it’s a complete triumph for that fact alone.
How truly great it is to play a game like this without any positive expectations, and instead come away with full confidence that it’s some of the best that Mario has ever been. Of course, maybe that’s not saying much — 2D Mario has been almost exclusively New Super Mario Bros. for about half of the entire franchise’s lifetime now — but Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros. 3 are often hailed as the best platformers ever made, so anything that can stand next to them is doing something very right. If I’m being completely honest, I think it clears both of them easily. Call it recency bias, but it’s been a long, long time since I’ve been this impressed by anything Nintendo’s put out.
The game managed to get all the way through prototyping without a deadline, and it unquestionably shows. Wonder has a whole box full of toys that it's eager to show the player, and it almost never lingers on any of them; the majority of level gimmicks here get used just a single time and never again, while the most common returning gimmicks really only appear maybe three times before vanishing forever. All of them feel about as realized as they could be; while it may sound a bit like the game is just throwing out everything in the hope of something sticking, most of these concepts are really only fun for one or two levels, and it wouldn't be wise to try making a full game out of them.
It revels in being strange. As strange as Mario is ever going to be allowed to be, at least. It took me a little bit to make a decision on whether I thought the talking flowers were charming or annoying, but I eventually ended up liking them; as the game goes on, they get progressively more and more unhinged, dropping the "you did such a good job" schtick to just start saying strange shit. One level is filled with green goo that you need to swim through to progress, and the flowers won't stop talking about how much they want to eat it. When you get the wonder seed, turn into a goo ball, and then pass by one of the flowers, he audibly licks you and then says how delicious you are. I think about that flower a lot. What a little fucking freak he was.
The badge system serves mostly to trivialize an already easy game, giving the player the option to get extra mid-air jumps, or a free rescue from a bottomless pit, or adding exclamation point blocks everywhere that cover basically every hazard you could ever possibly deal with in a given stage. It definitely feels designed more to provide an experience than a challenge, and I think that's fine. I would love to see a level pack for this that ramps up the difficulty so I'm not constantly walking around with 99 lives and 999 flower coins, but I'm probably not the target audience for this anyway. Mario is for kids, after all. We've gotta wean them off of this before we start hitting them with the Celeste C-sides. Regardless, though, the badges mostly offer some unique ways to engage with these levels, and there are tons of secret paths in every single one that you can only access by snooping around off the top of the screen or behind brick-covered passageways. There's a shocking amount to explore here, which is extra surprising considering how inherently linear a 2D sidescrolling stage is going to be.
I had an absurd amount of fun with Wonder, and the ten or so hours it took me to breeze through it just melted away without me even noticing. Fingers crossed that this completely buries New Super Mario Bros. from here on out. If this is the way that Nintendo is going to be developing 2D Mario games, then I'm absolutely going to be here for it.
I have to be careful about asking for more like this, though. Nintendo might spend the next twenty years making nothing but Super Mario Bros. Wonder sequels.
The company may as well have struck crude oil for the sheer amount of money that they printed after its release; thirty million copies sold served as the clearest sign they were ever going to get that this was the way the series needed to be from here on out. A decade and a half later, and almost literally every single 2D Mario game we’ve gotten since has been a member of the New sub-franchise — New Super Mario Bros. Wii, New Super Mario Bros. 2, there was even a New Super Luigi U. You can argue that Super Mario Maker breaks the pattern, but I’d argue back that dropping a glorified level editor and telling the players to design the games themselves doesn’t count for much. Besides, Mario Maker is still a lateral step at best; it’s playing the same hits as before, just rolling four previously-released games together to be swapped around as needed. The New Super Mario Bros. mode, funnily enough, turned out to have the most advanced movement tech, meaning that the most serious players and level designers effectively found themselves with yet another New game fairly early into Mario Maker’s lifespan.
Nintendo’s modus operandi seemed to be that if you somehow weren’t sick of New Super Mario Bros. yet, then they’d make sure that you would be. Every subsequent game seemed to scrape a couple of extra flakes of wood off of the bottom of the barrel, desperate to find something else they could extract from this fucking sub-series. New Super Luigi U was a download-only level pack for New Super Mario Bros. U that starred exclusively Luigi, because at least that was different enough from starring Mario to warrant its own game; New Super Mario Bros. 2 put an obscene emphasis on the act of collecting coins, which is almost universally the least exciting part of any Mario game. The 3D entries — Galaxy, 3D World, Odyssey — seemed to be the place where Nintendo was still experimenting and innovating what Mario could be, while the 2D games quietly shuffled along in rote stagnancy for two decades like retirees towards death. There was no zest, nothing fresh, just an endless series of “bah-bah”s and maybe one or two new power-ups every couple years so you didn’t start thinking that you spent sixty dollars for the exact same game again (you did).
Super Mario Bros. Wonder gives 2D Mario a personality again, and it’s a complete triumph for that fact alone.
How truly great it is to play a game like this without any positive expectations, and instead come away with full confidence that it’s some of the best that Mario has ever been. Of course, maybe that’s not saying much — 2D Mario has been almost exclusively New Super Mario Bros. for about half of the entire franchise’s lifetime now — but Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros. 3 are often hailed as the best platformers ever made, so anything that can stand next to them is doing something very right. If I’m being completely honest, I think it clears both of them easily. Call it recency bias, but it’s been a long, long time since I’ve been this impressed by anything Nintendo’s put out.
The game managed to get all the way through prototyping without a deadline, and it unquestionably shows. Wonder has a whole box full of toys that it's eager to show the player, and it almost never lingers on any of them; the majority of level gimmicks here get used just a single time and never again, while the most common returning gimmicks really only appear maybe three times before vanishing forever. All of them feel about as realized as they could be; while it may sound a bit like the game is just throwing out everything in the hope of something sticking, most of these concepts are really only fun for one or two levels, and it wouldn't be wise to try making a full game out of them.
It revels in being strange. As strange as Mario is ever going to be allowed to be, at least. It took me a little bit to make a decision on whether I thought the talking flowers were charming or annoying, but I eventually ended up liking them; as the game goes on, they get progressively more and more unhinged, dropping the "you did such a good job" schtick to just start saying strange shit. One level is filled with green goo that you need to swim through to progress, and the flowers won't stop talking about how much they want to eat it. When you get the wonder seed, turn into a goo ball, and then pass by one of the flowers, he audibly licks you and then says how delicious you are. I think about that flower a lot. What a little fucking freak he was.
The badge system serves mostly to trivialize an already easy game, giving the player the option to get extra mid-air jumps, or a free rescue from a bottomless pit, or adding exclamation point blocks everywhere that cover basically every hazard you could ever possibly deal with in a given stage. It definitely feels designed more to provide an experience than a challenge, and I think that's fine. I would love to see a level pack for this that ramps up the difficulty so I'm not constantly walking around with 99 lives and 999 flower coins, but I'm probably not the target audience for this anyway. Mario is for kids, after all. We've gotta wean them off of this before we start hitting them with the Celeste C-sides. Regardless, though, the badges mostly offer some unique ways to engage with these levels, and there are tons of secret paths in every single one that you can only access by snooping around off the top of the screen or behind brick-covered passageways. There's a shocking amount to explore here, which is extra surprising considering how inherently linear a 2D sidescrolling stage is going to be.
I had an absurd amount of fun with Wonder, and the ten or so hours it took me to breeze through it just melted away without me even noticing. Fingers crossed that this completely buries New Super Mario Bros. from here on out. If this is the way that Nintendo is going to be developing 2D Mario games, then I'm absolutely going to be here for it.
I have to be careful about asking for more like this, though. Nintendo might spend the next twenty years making nothing but Super Mario Bros. Wonder sequels.
2019
I hate that I don't like this game. I wish I did. For the first thirty or so hours, I did. But then I finished it, and I thought about it, and I realized that I don't like Persona 5. Some things here are excellent, and some things here are atrocious, and they all blend together into something that's only ever able to peak at the heights of "okay".
The writing is my biggest problem, with the way the game handles its characters being the strongest flaw. The trauma these people face is treated as a punchline at their expense far too often. It's not an uncommon opinion that Ann gets it the worst of the lot; she's a survivor of sexual assault at the hands of a powerful teacher, and the game constantly takes time out to make her own party members leer at her and make her uncomfortable. Yusuke's "nude model" scene is talked about a lot, but it really isn't that bad, especially compared to later instances — one scene forces her and every other woman in the party into swimsuits to seduce a keycard out of some old rich lecher, and it's played as a joke until the guy grabs Ann, threatens her, and then turns into a big shadow monster who you kill and take the keycard from regardless, making the whole seduction plan pointless. Ryuji and Joker will try to stare up her skirt when she lays down on a couch, gawk at her thighs when she gets caught in the rain, and peer down her top when she's fanning herself in the desert. Ryuji may just be a dumbass who Ann can easily rebuke, but Joker is the leader of the group, and unquestionably holds power over her and the other Phantom Thieves. He doesn't treat any of the other characters this way, and he keeps doing it in cutscenes that you have no control over. Regardless of how the player treats Ann, your character won't stop creeping on her as soon as you give up control. It's weird. It's really fucking weird. Speaking of Ryuji, it's just as tasteless to have a character who was physically abused by that same teacher to the point of broken bones and ostracization be the butt of so many jokes where the punchline is him getting the shit kicked out of him. He's rewarded for both getting the track team back together in his confidant route and for saving every single member of the Phantom Thieves from a sinking ship with the exact same thing: the people he's going out of his way to protect punching him senseless until he's left in a crumpled, bruised, moaning heap on the ground. Ha ha. It's also implied in a scene that comes completely out of nowhere that he gets molested by two gay men in Shinjuku. All of this is played for laughs. It should be obvious to anyone reading this or playing the game for themselves that none of this is funny. It's fucking horrific. It's made worse that someone (or several someones) on the ATLUS writing team think that any of this is funny. I've heard that the localization team begged to be allowed to make script changes to address these issues, and were refused; whether or not this is true, the script that's here is the one that we've got, and the few changes made don't fix these core problems with the writing.
I'm still kind of confused to see all of the "I hate JRPGs!" crowd (your Dunkeys, your Yahtzee Croshaws) circle the wagons around this game and talk about how Persona 5 broke the mold. Mechanically, it's Pokemon. There's nothing wrong with Pokemon. Pokemon can be fun. But the core combat loop is "fish for the enemy's weakness, use the element that they're weak to, win the encounter". It's every single-player Pokemon game. Sometimes, if the fight goes long enough, you can cast a debuff, or maybe even a party-wide buff if you're really feeling brave. Bosses and mini-bosses are completely immune to status effects like shock or sleep, so any foe that you can't kill on the first turn of combat boils down to a DPS race where you either have enough damage and healing to outlast them, or you don't. This is in stark contrast to other entries in the Shin Megami Tensei series where bosses can have mechanically interesting gimmicks or one-off skillsets with unholy good synergies, rather than just being walls of health and damage; the closest thing you get to a boss that challenges your conception of the mechanics in Persona 5 are Okumura and his waves of robots that need to be killed within one turn of each other, which are in a fight so ridiculously easy to brute force by just having enough AOE damage that it barely even qualifies as a challenge. Futaba's later support skills make the game completely trivial, with her Ultimate Support constantly being cast to full heal, buff, and revive every member of the party. I tried to kill myself on a boss by enabling rush mode and walking away, and it still took six and a half minutes before Joker actually went down and I got kicked to the death screen. The guns — while certainly a unique addition — are borderline useless in most encounters, serving only as a middling damage dump (or as a status applier, which only works on trash enemies that are more easily killed by hitting their weak element anyway) and are utterly outclassed by Persona elemental skills. Many Personas can even deal Gun-type damage, giving you almost no reason to ever use the actual guns.
I've seen it said that this game hates women. My gut instinct thinks that's an exaggeration, but it's unquestionable that the writing handles them like shit. Every female confidant in this game leads as smoothly as a car crash into a sexual relationship, with four (!!!) of them being adults pursuing our underage protagonist. There's not a single woman in this game that you can just be friends with without needing to turn down their advances or dodge making your own, first. The men, conversely, do not have this problem, as the only gay men in this game are the sexual predators who assault Ryuji. Lala Escargot, the owner of the Crossroads bar, is the only character who is both a) not a walking punchline and b) queer. The game never actually confirms if she's a drag queen or if she's transgender, but she's at the very least gender non-conforming. That's it. Nobody else. I realize that this may come off as me pounding my fists on the table and demanding token representation, but the way that the female confidants are treated is already token. Every single woman in Joker's life desires him sexually, because this is a shounen harem game masquerading as a serious adult thriller that explores serious adult themes. It's juvenile. The game likes to talk big about rebellion and putting down the system, man, but it's remarkably intolerant of anyone whose inclusion in any mainstream anime would attract death threats for being "too woke". The writing in Persona 5 doesn't put down the system, it is the system. It should not come as a surprise that a series that's based the past three games around the trappings of Jungian psychology is this achingly stupid when it comes to how it handles social issues.
It is endlessly frustrating that ATLUS has accrued as much money and prestige as they have — Joker got into fucking Smash Bros. — and this is still the best that they can do with all of it. Outright bad writing and middling RPG mechanics that feel like they've hardly evolved since 2006. What's left? The UI and the music? Both are great, but there's not a chance they can carry a game that insists on being this long. What missed potential. It's a shame I waited this long to get a chance to play it. I wish I hadn't bothered.
The writing is my biggest problem, with the way the game handles its characters being the strongest flaw. The trauma these people face is treated as a punchline at their expense far too often. It's not an uncommon opinion that Ann gets it the worst of the lot; she's a survivor of sexual assault at the hands of a powerful teacher, and the game constantly takes time out to make her own party members leer at her and make her uncomfortable. Yusuke's "nude model" scene is talked about a lot, but it really isn't that bad, especially compared to later instances — one scene forces her and every other woman in the party into swimsuits to seduce a keycard out of some old rich lecher, and it's played as a joke until the guy grabs Ann, threatens her, and then turns into a big shadow monster who you kill and take the keycard from regardless, making the whole seduction plan pointless. Ryuji and Joker will try to stare up her skirt when she lays down on a couch, gawk at her thighs when she gets caught in the rain, and peer down her top when she's fanning herself in the desert. Ryuji may just be a dumbass who Ann can easily rebuke, but Joker is the leader of the group, and unquestionably holds power over her and the other Phantom Thieves. He doesn't treat any of the other characters this way, and he keeps doing it in cutscenes that you have no control over. Regardless of how the player treats Ann, your character won't stop creeping on her as soon as you give up control. It's weird. It's really fucking weird. Speaking of Ryuji, it's just as tasteless to have a character who was physically abused by that same teacher to the point of broken bones and ostracization be the butt of so many jokes where the punchline is him getting the shit kicked out of him. He's rewarded for both getting the track team back together in his confidant route and for saving every single member of the Phantom Thieves from a sinking ship with the exact same thing: the people he's going out of his way to protect punching him senseless until he's left in a crumpled, bruised, moaning heap on the ground. Ha ha. It's also implied in a scene that comes completely out of nowhere that he gets molested by two gay men in Shinjuku. All of this is played for laughs. It should be obvious to anyone reading this or playing the game for themselves that none of this is funny. It's fucking horrific. It's made worse that someone (or several someones) on the ATLUS writing team think that any of this is funny. I've heard that the localization team begged to be allowed to make script changes to address these issues, and were refused; whether or not this is true, the script that's here is the one that we've got, and the few changes made don't fix these core problems with the writing.
I'm still kind of confused to see all of the "I hate JRPGs!" crowd (your Dunkeys, your Yahtzee Croshaws) circle the wagons around this game and talk about how Persona 5 broke the mold. Mechanically, it's Pokemon. There's nothing wrong with Pokemon. Pokemon can be fun. But the core combat loop is "fish for the enemy's weakness, use the element that they're weak to, win the encounter". It's every single-player Pokemon game. Sometimes, if the fight goes long enough, you can cast a debuff, or maybe even a party-wide buff if you're really feeling brave. Bosses and mini-bosses are completely immune to status effects like shock or sleep, so any foe that you can't kill on the first turn of combat boils down to a DPS race where you either have enough damage and healing to outlast them, or you don't. This is in stark contrast to other entries in the Shin Megami Tensei series where bosses can have mechanically interesting gimmicks or one-off skillsets with unholy good synergies, rather than just being walls of health and damage; the closest thing you get to a boss that challenges your conception of the mechanics in Persona 5 are Okumura and his waves of robots that need to be killed within one turn of each other, which are in a fight so ridiculously easy to brute force by just having enough AOE damage that it barely even qualifies as a challenge. Futaba's later support skills make the game completely trivial, with her Ultimate Support constantly being cast to full heal, buff, and revive every member of the party. I tried to kill myself on a boss by enabling rush mode and walking away, and it still took six and a half minutes before Joker actually went down and I got kicked to the death screen. The guns — while certainly a unique addition — are borderline useless in most encounters, serving only as a middling damage dump (or as a status applier, which only works on trash enemies that are more easily killed by hitting their weak element anyway) and are utterly outclassed by Persona elemental skills. Many Personas can even deal Gun-type damage, giving you almost no reason to ever use the actual guns.
I've seen it said that this game hates women. My gut instinct thinks that's an exaggeration, but it's unquestionable that the writing handles them like shit. Every female confidant in this game leads as smoothly as a car crash into a sexual relationship, with four (!!!) of them being adults pursuing our underage protagonist. There's not a single woman in this game that you can just be friends with without needing to turn down their advances or dodge making your own, first. The men, conversely, do not have this problem, as the only gay men in this game are the sexual predators who assault Ryuji. Lala Escargot, the owner of the Crossroads bar, is the only character who is both a) not a walking punchline and b) queer. The game never actually confirms if she's a drag queen or if she's transgender, but she's at the very least gender non-conforming. That's it. Nobody else. I realize that this may come off as me pounding my fists on the table and demanding token representation, but the way that the female confidants are treated is already token. Every single woman in Joker's life desires him sexually, because this is a shounen harem game masquerading as a serious adult thriller that explores serious adult themes. It's juvenile. The game likes to talk big about rebellion and putting down the system, man, but it's remarkably intolerant of anyone whose inclusion in any mainstream anime would attract death threats for being "too woke". The writing in Persona 5 doesn't put down the system, it is the system. It should not come as a surprise that a series that's based the past three games around the trappings of Jungian psychology is this achingly stupid when it comes to how it handles social issues.
It is endlessly frustrating that ATLUS has accrued as much money and prestige as they have — Joker got into fucking Smash Bros. — and this is still the best that they can do with all of it. Outright bad writing and middling RPG mechanics that feel like they've hardly evolved since 2006. What's left? The UI and the music? Both are great, but there's not a chance they can carry a game that insists on being this long. What missed potential. It's a shame I waited this long to get a chance to play it. I wish I hadn't bothered.
You ever see something that only exists because some suit thought it would net them a promotion?
The stink of "internal pitch released to the public" is one that this game will never manage to wash off of itself, because that is what this so obviously is. This was designed, top to bottom, for the sole purpose of being used in a business proposal to trick some old guys into investing. AI is hot right now, peaking in its usual fad cycles — gamer president memes aren't going to be around for much longer, but they're everywhere right now —and the Square Enix business department have taken the Web3 bait. NFTs, crypto, the blockchain, and now with a re-imagining of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, we're getting into the GPT-esque AI text parser sector. What's unfortunate for the Square Enix Web3 diehards is that their ideas fucking blow and their execution is somehow even worse than their concepts.
The idea of augmenting your traditional text parser with AI may sound interesting. It isn't. Square Enix claims that the point of this move is to limit the classic guess-the-verb problems that arise in primitive text adventure games by allowing the computer to take broader guesses at what the user is trying to say; in effect, putting the challenge of "what am I supposed to do" on the program, rather than the player. The reason why this doesn't work at all is because it's ironically harder to grok what the game is willing to accept as an input when you don't have a predefined list of which verbs work and which ones don't. LOOK and USE and TAKE are primitive, but they're also intuitive. Having a conversation with your AI partner to facilitate going to a location while they hem and haw and chide you for wasting time is frustrating, not convenient.
The game told me very early on that the victim's nephew had a motive and lived down by the port, at Nagisa Apartments. The most rudimentary of text parsers should be able to link "Kobe Port" and "Nagisa Apartments" as being interchangeable should the user wish to go there; with AI, this ought to be trivial. I wanted to go check the place out to see if there was any evidence in the area. Here's what happened:
>Go to Kobe port.
"Maybe we should focus on the task at hand?"
>Let's go to Kobe Port.
"Hmm..."
>Go to the port.
"Maybe we should focus on the task at hand?"
>Go Kobe Port.
"Maybe we should focus on the task at hand?"
>Let's go to Nagisa Apartments.
"I always forget exactly where that place is. It's somewhere near the port, though. Let's head there first and get our bearings."
Emphasis mine. So the writers understand that the port and Nagisa Apartments are linked, but the game logic fails to make the connection. Awesome. Really impressive showcase of your new technology.
Also, the LOOK command has been rendered completely useless. You're now expected to hold the right control button, making all of the UI elements disappear in order to inspect the background CGs for details. If this sounds like a terrible change, it is. Trying to LOOK around Toshi's apartment just made my partner say that the building was quiet. Inspecting the background CG revealed a phone, which I then examined through the text parser. Also in the CG was a piece of paper tucked beneath the phone. I tried to look at it, but the game was confused. It didn't seem to know if there was a piece of paper, or a note, or a letter, or a notepad, or anything of the sort beneath the phone. It just kept "Hmm..."-ing me. I don't know if this was an inconsequential background element that was painted in by an artist without being considered interactive in the game logic, or if it was a critical piece of evidence that I wasn't allowed to pick up because I wasn't using the correct terminology. If I could have LOOKed around the room for a written description of what was there, the game might have been willing to tell me which word corresponded to that piece of paper. But it didn't, so I didn't get to examine it. (EDIT: After some asking around, the piece of paper was actually a core piece of evidence. The game specifically wanted the term "memo".)
I don't know what about this is meant to be "AI". My partner acts like his brain is seeping out of his ears unless I prompt him with the exact line the game is expecting me to say. It's artificial, sure, but this is far from intelligent. And the game is ten fucking gigabytes! They must have packed the entire model into this thing, and it barely functions! Honestly, this feels like a shoddy Flash-based text adventure more than it does a modern AI tech demo. Something this badly put together wouldn't have flown back when Zork was new; in 2023, this is unacceptable.
One more Square Enix failure for the pile. How many more does the company have left in them before they're forced to fold?
The stink of "internal pitch released to the public" is one that this game will never manage to wash off of itself, because that is what this so obviously is. This was designed, top to bottom, for the sole purpose of being used in a business proposal to trick some old guys into investing. AI is hot right now, peaking in its usual fad cycles — gamer president memes aren't going to be around for much longer, but they're everywhere right now —and the Square Enix business department have taken the Web3 bait. NFTs, crypto, the blockchain, and now with a re-imagining of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, we're getting into the GPT-esque AI text parser sector. What's unfortunate for the Square Enix Web3 diehards is that their ideas fucking blow and their execution is somehow even worse than their concepts.
The idea of augmenting your traditional text parser with AI may sound interesting. It isn't. Square Enix claims that the point of this move is to limit the classic guess-the-verb problems that arise in primitive text adventure games by allowing the computer to take broader guesses at what the user is trying to say; in effect, putting the challenge of "what am I supposed to do" on the program, rather than the player. The reason why this doesn't work at all is because it's ironically harder to grok what the game is willing to accept as an input when you don't have a predefined list of which verbs work and which ones don't. LOOK and USE and TAKE are primitive, but they're also intuitive. Having a conversation with your AI partner to facilitate going to a location while they hem and haw and chide you for wasting time is frustrating, not convenient.
The game told me very early on that the victim's nephew had a motive and lived down by the port, at Nagisa Apartments. The most rudimentary of text parsers should be able to link "Kobe Port" and "Nagisa Apartments" as being interchangeable should the user wish to go there; with AI, this ought to be trivial. I wanted to go check the place out to see if there was any evidence in the area. Here's what happened:
>Go to Kobe port.
"Maybe we should focus on the task at hand?"
>Let's go to Kobe Port.
"Hmm..."
>Go to the port.
"Maybe we should focus on the task at hand?"
>Go Kobe Port.
"Maybe we should focus on the task at hand?"
>Let's go to Nagisa Apartments.
"I always forget exactly where that place is. It's somewhere near the port, though. Let's head there first and get our bearings."
Emphasis mine. So the writers understand that the port and Nagisa Apartments are linked, but the game logic fails to make the connection. Awesome. Really impressive showcase of your new technology.
Also, the LOOK command has been rendered completely useless. You're now expected to hold the right control button, making all of the UI elements disappear in order to inspect the background CGs for details. If this sounds like a terrible change, it is. Trying to LOOK around Toshi's apartment just made my partner say that the building was quiet. Inspecting the background CG revealed a phone, which I then examined through the text parser. Also in the CG was a piece of paper tucked beneath the phone. I tried to look at it, but the game was confused. It didn't seem to know if there was a piece of paper, or a note, or a letter, or a notepad, or anything of the sort beneath the phone. It just kept "Hmm..."-ing me. I don't know if this was an inconsequential background element that was painted in by an artist without being considered interactive in the game logic, or if it was a critical piece of evidence that I wasn't allowed to pick up because I wasn't using the correct terminology. If I could have LOOKed around the room for a written description of what was there, the game might have been willing to tell me which word corresponded to that piece of paper. But it didn't, so I didn't get to examine it. (EDIT: After some asking around, the piece of paper was actually a core piece of evidence. The game specifically wanted the term "memo".)
I don't know what about this is meant to be "AI". My partner acts like his brain is seeping out of his ears unless I prompt him with the exact line the game is expecting me to say. It's artificial, sure, but this is far from intelligent. And the game is ten fucking gigabytes! They must have packed the entire model into this thing, and it barely functions! Honestly, this feels like a shoddy Flash-based text adventure more than it does a modern AI tech demo. Something this badly put together wouldn't have flown back when Zork was new; in 2023, this is unacceptable.
One more Square Enix failure for the pile. How many more does the company have left in them before they're forced to fold?
Nintendo drags the Zelda formula kicking and screaming into 2008-era open world design to create something that's mostly okay and mostly empty.
I'll open by saying that I have zero love nor nostalgia for Zelda as a franchise, nor do I hold Nintendo in any high esteem. The general consensus for decades was that Ocarina of Time was the single greatest game ever made; I played it and wasn't especially impressed. Two and half decades later, and history is repeating itself; Breath of the Wild has now been accepted to be the single greatest game ever made, and I'm again not especially impressed. It's not that I can't see what people enjoy in these titles, but more that I don't see how anyone believes any of this to be unique. Everything that's here has been done before and better in games two decades this one's senior, and adding meal prep and pretty graphics doesn't change the fact you could describe this as "Assassin's Creed with Half-Life 2 physics puzzles" and barely even be wrong.
I've heard from a few people with positive opinions on this that the main draw and appeal is the exploration, and that wandering around in search of new things is fun. In this, I disagree. The game is incredibly open in the literal, physical sense; there are a lot of big, green, empty fields with literally nothing in them. You can sprint for two straight minutes down a dirt path and see nothing, find nothing. I intentionally went off the beaten path several times in my twenty-hour playthrough, and I only ever found three Korok seeds. I never even met the broccoli man who lets you cash them in for inventory upgrades. Why bother trekking around when there's so little to actually see, and so little to do? A tiny tile with a ruined building on it every three miles doesn't make for an interesting overworld. It's so sparse, seemingly in service of just being capital-B Big. The world is so Big! The map is so Big! You can climb up a hill and then go back down again, what fun! Your reward for exploring this empty world is that you get to be in the empty world for longer. I imagine the people who love wandering through the map are actually enjoying the Shadow of the Colossus movement and climbing mechanics more than anything pertaining to the actual map that's here. Moving Link around feels good and smooth, but I think people who are in love with the traversal would be just as happy running through gm_Flatgrass as they are with the entire Kingdom of Hyrule. Hell, the greater density of the former might even be better.
If you're lucky, you might stumble into a Moblin camp every couple of minutes, but these act as annoyances more than anything else. Whatever items you'll get from defeating them are almost always strictly worse than whatever you walked up to them with, and the gear durability system means that you'll walk out worse for wear than if you hadn't bothered. I really don't mind the weapons breaking anywhere near as much as most of the detractors seem to, but that's because the game is so ridiculously easy that I was never in danger of running out of equipment. My weapons were always overflowing, I always had shields, I always had bows and arrows, I always had two pages of cooked meals that would heal me to full and stuff me with bonus yellow hearts. Thunderblight Ganon was the only thing that ever posed even the slightest challenge, and that's because he was capable of blasting through one-shot protection and his ragdoll kept flying out of the boss arena whenever I downed him. Bosses are the only forms of combat that you can't just walk around, which means that the optimal strategy is to ignore every camp or roaming enemy you see and save up your best weapons to wail on the Ganon forms. When the best play is to run past everything, ignore repairs/upgrades, and sprint to the bosses who die way too quickly to high-tier gear, you have created a world that is not fun to explore; you've created a world where there's a lot of fucking empty space between the glowing marker where the boss is and the indicator of where you are currently.
So much of this feels like a complete and utter waste of time. You can't cook food in bulk, meaning that in the early game when you're making nothing but three-apple meals, you have to do them one at a time. You can carry hundreds of resources at once, and something like eighty cooked meals, so it's going to take a lot of time to stock up on your functionally infinite healing for no good reason. Selling and buying items from shops is just as slow, traversing over flat plains with nothing to do is boring, and tons of the shrines have timed puzzles with sliding platforms and rolling balls that move at a glacial pace to ensure that players on the clunky-ass gamepad have more than enough time to react. What broke me was the fact that you're gated from pulling the Master Sword until you have an arbitrary number of hearts; after clearing out all four of the Divine Beasts and about 30 shrines, the game told me that I needed to go do at least another 24 shrines and dump all of my Spirit Orbs into HP if I wanted the sword. I decided that I had spent way too much time getting here to be turned away and told to grind for a single weapon, so I went straight to Hyrule Castle to end the game. Some friends of mine who were watching me play admonished me for "rushing" through it, which is a sentiment that I imagine many who disagree with this review are going to share. "Only" twenty hours, "only" thirty shrines, "only" three Korok seeds. The irony of a game that's celebrated for allowing you to play however you want apparently having a correct way to play it shouldn't be lost on you.
For as much as the developer foresight of allowing you to solve puzzles unconventionally gets celebrated, there were far too many instances where it felt like I was outsmarting the game and it couldn't keep up. I prepped for Fireblight Ganon by coming in with an ice rod, and it just didn't work on him in the fight because the game hadn't accounted for it; ice arrows still worked just fine, so it's not like this was intentional. Metal weapons and shields will get struck by lightning, but you can't pile them up onto a conductive switch to complete a circuit; switches that need to be weighed down can be weighed down with any random garbage in your inventory, so I don't know why this wasn't accounted for also. One puzzle in the Goron Divine Beast required me to block off jets of fire with a physics object, so I used a ball and crouched under the fire; it wasn't the correct physics object, so the game pushed me back against gravity and walled me off even though there was more than enough space to get through. The Zora Divine Beast that requires the Zora armor to get to features a sequence where you need to get to the tip of its trunk, and the trunk is spraying water down onto you; for some reason, this doesn't count as a waterfall. In any other game, this would all be fine, but Breath of the Wild's proudly-touted unconventionality is in actuality only limited to a scant few shrines where the solutions are so simple that there's hardly any urgency to break them. I feel the exact same way that I did when I played Ocarina and fire arrows couldn't burn down walls but Din's Fire could, except this came out two decades later and has no excuse.
I'm left without much to like. The combat is serviceable, but mashy and easily broken; the difficulty in the puzzles and the combat doesn't really exist because this is a game intended to be beaten by children; there's little intrinsic reason to explore, and I didn't get enough enjoyment out of the process to do it for its own sake; all of your abilities are unlocked in the first couple hours, leaving virtually no feeling of progression outside of numbers arbitrarily going up or down depending on the random loot you find; the story is the exact same that it's always been, which is to say completely mediocre and nothing more. It's a very pretty game, with a very pretty soundscape. Conceptually, I like the idea of delivering on Todd Howard's promises of being able to climb any mountain that you can see. I can see the appeal, but I can't think of a reason why anyone would consider this to be the greatest thing ever made — barring the idea that they simply don't play many games, nor have they really experienced a lot of media. This is all very unique for Nintendo, so if you only play what they put out, you're probably going to be blown away. If you've seen much of anything else, you'll probably only manage to be slightly more impressed than I am.
With the fact that what was hailed on release as being a breath of fresh air for the Zelda franchise has now been confirmed to be the model that the series will follow going forward, I'm left to wonder how long it's going to take people to get as sick of it as I already am. Tears of the Kingdom seems to be going as strong as this did at its peak, but I can't imagine that the momentum is going to last until the time Nintendo drops the third entry six years from now.
I'll open by saying that I have zero love nor nostalgia for Zelda as a franchise, nor do I hold Nintendo in any high esteem. The general consensus for decades was that Ocarina of Time was the single greatest game ever made; I played it and wasn't especially impressed. Two and half decades later, and history is repeating itself; Breath of the Wild has now been accepted to be the single greatest game ever made, and I'm again not especially impressed. It's not that I can't see what people enjoy in these titles, but more that I don't see how anyone believes any of this to be unique. Everything that's here has been done before and better in games two decades this one's senior, and adding meal prep and pretty graphics doesn't change the fact you could describe this as "Assassin's Creed with Half-Life 2 physics puzzles" and barely even be wrong.
I've heard from a few people with positive opinions on this that the main draw and appeal is the exploration, and that wandering around in search of new things is fun. In this, I disagree. The game is incredibly open in the literal, physical sense; there are a lot of big, green, empty fields with literally nothing in them. You can sprint for two straight minutes down a dirt path and see nothing, find nothing. I intentionally went off the beaten path several times in my twenty-hour playthrough, and I only ever found three Korok seeds. I never even met the broccoli man who lets you cash them in for inventory upgrades. Why bother trekking around when there's so little to actually see, and so little to do? A tiny tile with a ruined building on it every three miles doesn't make for an interesting overworld. It's so sparse, seemingly in service of just being capital-B Big. The world is so Big! The map is so Big! You can climb up a hill and then go back down again, what fun! Your reward for exploring this empty world is that you get to be in the empty world for longer. I imagine the people who love wandering through the map are actually enjoying the Shadow of the Colossus movement and climbing mechanics more than anything pertaining to the actual map that's here. Moving Link around feels good and smooth, but I think people who are in love with the traversal would be just as happy running through gm_Flatgrass as they are with the entire Kingdom of Hyrule. Hell, the greater density of the former might even be better.
If you're lucky, you might stumble into a Moblin camp every couple of minutes, but these act as annoyances more than anything else. Whatever items you'll get from defeating them are almost always strictly worse than whatever you walked up to them with, and the gear durability system means that you'll walk out worse for wear than if you hadn't bothered. I really don't mind the weapons breaking anywhere near as much as most of the detractors seem to, but that's because the game is so ridiculously easy that I was never in danger of running out of equipment. My weapons were always overflowing, I always had shields, I always had bows and arrows, I always had two pages of cooked meals that would heal me to full and stuff me with bonus yellow hearts. Thunderblight Ganon was the only thing that ever posed even the slightest challenge, and that's because he was capable of blasting through one-shot protection and his ragdoll kept flying out of the boss arena whenever I downed him. Bosses are the only forms of combat that you can't just walk around, which means that the optimal strategy is to ignore every camp or roaming enemy you see and save up your best weapons to wail on the Ganon forms. When the best play is to run past everything, ignore repairs/upgrades, and sprint to the bosses who die way too quickly to high-tier gear, you have created a world that is not fun to explore; you've created a world where there's a lot of fucking empty space between the glowing marker where the boss is and the indicator of where you are currently.
So much of this feels like a complete and utter waste of time. You can't cook food in bulk, meaning that in the early game when you're making nothing but three-apple meals, you have to do them one at a time. You can carry hundreds of resources at once, and something like eighty cooked meals, so it's going to take a lot of time to stock up on your functionally infinite healing for no good reason. Selling and buying items from shops is just as slow, traversing over flat plains with nothing to do is boring, and tons of the shrines have timed puzzles with sliding platforms and rolling balls that move at a glacial pace to ensure that players on the clunky-ass gamepad have more than enough time to react. What broke me was the fact that you're gated from pulling the Master Sword until you have an arbitrary number of hearts; after clearing out all four of the Divine Beasts and about 30 shrines, the game told me that I needed to go do at least another 24 shrines and dump all of my Spirit Orbs into HP if I wanted the sword. I decided that I had spent way too much time getting here to be turned away and told to grind for a single weapon, so I went straight to Hyrule Castle to end the game. Some friends of mine who were watching me play admonished me for "rushing" through it, which is a sentiment that I imagine many who disagree with this review are going to share. "Only" twenty hours, "only" thirty shrines, "only" three Korok seeds. The irony of a game that's celebrated for allowing you to play however you want apparently having a correct way to play it shouldn't be lost on you.
For as much as the developer foresight of allowing you to solve puzzles unconventionally gets celebrated, there were far too many instances where it felt like I was outsmarting the game and it couldn't keep up. I prepped for Fireblight Ganon by coming in with an ice rod, and it just didn't work on him in the fight because the game hadn't accounted for it; ice arrows still worked just fine, so it's not like this was intentional. Metal weapons and shields will get struck by lightning, but you can't pile them up onto a conductive switch to complete a circuit; switches that need to be weighed down can be weighed down with any random garbage in your inventory, so I don't know why this wasn't accounted for also. One puzzle in the Goron Divine Beast required me to block off jets of fire with a physics object, so I used a ball and crouched under the fire; it wasn't the correct physics object, so the game pushed me back against gravity and walled me off even though there was more than enough space to get through. The Zora Divine Beast that requires the Zora armor to get to features a sequence where you need to get to the tip of its trunk, and the trunk is spraying water down onto you; for some reason, this doesn't count as a waterfall. In any other game, this would all be fine, but Breath of the Wild's proudly-touted unconventionality is in actuality only limited to a scant few shrines where the solutions are so simple that there's hardly any urgency to break them. I feel the exact same way that I did when I played Ocarina and fire arrows couldn't burn down walls but Din's Fire could, except this came out two decades later and has no excuse.
I'm left without much to like. The combat is serviceable, but mashy and easily broken; the difficulty in the puzzles and the combat doesn't really exist because this is a game intended to be beaten by children; there's little intrinsic reason to explore, and I didn't get enough enjoyment out of the process to do it for its own sake; all of your abilities are unlocked in the first couple hours, leaving virtually no feeling of progression outside of numbers arbitrarily going up or down depending on the random loot you find; the story is the exact same that it's always been, which is to say completely mediocre and nothing more. It's a very pretty game, with a very pretty soundscape. Conceptually, I like the idea of delivering on Todd Howard's promises of being able to climb any mountain that you can see. I can see the appeal, but I can't think of a reason why anyone would consider this to be the greatest thing ever made — barring the idea that they simply don't play many games, nor have they really experienced a lot of media. This is all very unique for Nintendo, so if you only play what they put out, you're probably going to be blown away. If you've seen much of anything else, you'll probably only manage to be slightly more impressed than I am.
With the fact that what was hailed on release as being a breath of fresh air for the Zelda franchise has now been confirmed to be the model that the series will follow going forward, I'm left to wonder how long it's going to take people to get as sick of it as I already am. Tears of the Kingdom seems to be going as strong as this did at its peak, but I can't imagine that the momentum is going to last until the time Nintendo drops the third entry six years from now.
2022
Cocomelon for people with Newgrounds accounts.
2002
Huh?
Way back when I was still in the target audience for Kingdom Hearts, I thought Kingdom Hearts was the stupidest thing I had ever seen. This wasn't because I was some supreme arbiter of taste at the age of eight — my favorite game at the time was Shadow the Hedgehog, if you need further clarification — but it was an initial conception that never really left me. While a lot of the media that I had dismissed as a child tended to seem a lot more favorable once I grew up and started developing a taste of my own, I've always thought of Kingdom Hearts as being this woefully lame and eternally bad series that was beloved only by children and Disney adults who had played it as children. Grown adults who liked it only did so because they'd never reached an understanding of the idea that something you liked as a kid doesn't need to be something you still like as an adult. But that's an unfair assumption. After all, there are a lot of people I respect who have said that there's something about this game that got to them. Elements that they loved, gameplay they adored, story beats that brought them to tears. There's something about Kingdom Hearts that has managed to hook people, and, as I said in my 2023 year-end list, we owe it to ourselves to get out of our comfort zones and play things we'd never otherwise think to play if we ever want to take ourselves seriously. If I continued to dismiss Kingdom Hearts out of hand because I decided that it looked stupid twenty years ago, then I'm no better now than I was when I was in the third grade. It's only fair — only right — that I investigate it for myself.
I hate Kingdom Hearts.
Either I'm just unable to see the mastery hidden behind Kingdom Hearts that everyone else is, or I'm the only sane man in the madhouse. It hardly matters which one is the actual truth, because the outcome is the same: a lot of people like Kingdom Hearts, the ones that don't like it don't seem to despise it, and I can't fucking stand it. I'm the odd man out.
This camera is atrocious. Controlling it with the L2 and R2 buttons is bad enough when we live in a world where the right stick is purely just a second D-pad, but the lock-on acts as more of a gentle suggestion. It simultaneously has very little interest in actually tracking enemies that move off-screen while also swinging around so violently that it's difficult to keep track of where anything is. Enemies seem to wait until they're off-screen to attack, which certainly makes sense for them, but is incredibly frustrating when you eat a fireball to the back of the head that you literally could not see coming nor tech even if you did. The camera is also a physical object that can't pass through terrain, which means that it's constantly smashing against walls and giving you completely worthless angles the second you enter a hallway that's just a bit too tight. It does everything wrong.
I also found the combat to be a complete mash-fest, largely just focused on getting directly in front of an enemy's face and spamming the attack button as fast as I humanly could. Hopping into the air for a moment before spamming the attack button seemed to make Sora hit things faster, so that wound up becoming a core part of the rotation. Not helping matters is how obscenely delayed most of Sora's kit actually is, with a dishonorable mention going specifically to his jump; there's what feels like a half-second of delay before he actually becomes airborne after you hit the button, which is bad in combat sections and unforgivable in the parts where you need to platform. There's a jump over a couple of mushrooms in the Alice in Wonderland world long before you get the high jump or the glide, and combined with the terrible camera was probably the single most difficult challenge in the entire game. I nearly burst a blood vessel when I found out that your partners have collision and can push you off of edges if you aren't careful. In some areas, this only means needing to hop back up to where you just were. In others, it means needing to transition through several different loading zones as you slowly climb your way back up.
It is a very pretty game, though, both graphically and sonically. Certainly moreso the former than the latter; this might have the single worst rendition of Night on Bald Mountain I will ever hear in my life. It's not hard to look at this and be impressed, especially in the original areas; the final set piece is an absolute treat, with you fighting waves of Heartless in a pitch-black room and only being able to tell where they are by the glow of their eyes. There are a lot of visual elements here that I know get expanded upon in Kingdom Hearts 2, and I think it was pretty smart of the team to keep going further down that path.
For as much shit as people talk about the narrative, I thought it was far and away the strongest thing Kingdom Hearts had going for it. Not the bulk of it, though; the overwhelming majority of the game is spent traipsing through abridged recaps of Disney movies, primarily the more middling ones that the Walt Disney Company presumably weren't all that protective of. Like, Hercules isn't a good film just because you and I and everyone else want Meg to look at us like we're living pieces of trash. Even still, Kingdom Hearts breezes right through a significant amount of plot beats, largely resulting in more of a Disney-World-tour sensation rather than one of occupying an actual world. You're going through the theme park version of these different films and getting the Cliff's Notes of just enough plot to give you an idea of what you're meant to be doing. Characters in the Disney worlds act less like characters and more as mascots. They're wildly flat and underdeveloped caricatures. No, the interesting parts of the Kingdom Hearts narrative are the parts that are wholly original to it.
I actually really like the story that Riku and Sora have got going on here, with Kairi mostly taking a backseat until the final couple hours of the game. People have spoken a lot about some of the gay subtext, and I think it's largely difficult to miss — Riku offering a fruit to Sora with the prompt that sharing it will bind their two souls together for eternity may as well have been delivered while he was on one knee — while still being pretty interesting. Sora is probably the worst fucking friend ever. I get that he thinks of Riku as more of a rival than a buddy, but he only responds to Riku openly lamenting how inadequate and lonely he feels with either literal silence or general disinterest. It's hardly a surprise that he ends up falling to the darkness when he's gotten rebuked at literally every single turn, all the while being manipulated further into thinking he has no other choice. It's neat, and it comes to a nice close when Riku manages to break free of Ansem's control and his own insecurities to help Sora close the door to Kingdom Hearts. Regrettably, he is also forced to share the conclusion of his arc with fucking Mickey Mouse.
Kingdom Hearts has an interesting story running through it, but, again, it's constantly being silenced by the game interrupting itself to say "holy shit, you're in Aladdin world". I don't fucking care about Aladdin. I've seen Aladdin. Aladdin is a fine movie that's significantly more interesting and better written as a movie, and not as this shitty pastiche with Dan Castellaneta doing Homer voice while trying to fill Robin Williams's shoes. God, so many of these actors just aren't doing a good job. It's kind of impressive that the child actors fucking crush it, and not even by comparison; Haley Joel Osment just kills it. Billy Zane's Ansem is pretty solid, as is Mandy Moore's Aerith. The rest I'm ambivalent about, or actively hostile towards. Brian Blessed sounds fucking terrible in this.
I did have a moment while I was playing Kingdom Hearts, right near the end when I was climbing back up to the top of Hollow Bastion. I had the realization that my keyblade looked like a flower. I was mostly just equipping whatever had the best stats, and it just happened to be that the Divine Rose gave me exactly what I needed. It very suddenly occurred to me, at that moment, that I never would have been using it if I had played this when I was a kid. Flowers are for girls, after all. Even if it meant equipping a strictly worse weapon that didn't do what I wanted it to do — one that actively harmed my build, even — I wouldn't have equipped the flower keyblade.
I was a bit of a fruity kid growing up. I wanted to wear nail polish, I liked watching a lot of shows for girls, I didn't really feel the revulsion that a lot of other people seemed to feel at doing things that weren't "for" their gender. Of course, it all kind of ended up making sense once I realized I liked dudes, but it was a pretty strange feeling to have while growing up when I wasn't really allowed to correctly guess the reasoning behind it. My dad made every effort to beat all of that out of me. To mold me into a Man. I think I gravitated more to a lot of these hyper-edgy pieces of media like Shadow the Hedgehog and whatever garbage aired on Spike TV in the hopes that it would impress him. Obviously, this was more than a little misguided. He would have been a lot happier had I picked up a football helmet and a drill and a cigar and acted like what people thought men were supposed to be in the 1950s, but I figured it was worth trying. It wasn't. When you're not allowed to be the person you are, you tend to do a pretty bad job of acting like the person you're expected to be. The flower keyblade was for girls, and that meant the flower keyblade was justification to be punished if I used it. Today, I equipped the flower keyblade and used it all the way until the end.
There's a part of me I lost a long time ago that's made it impossible for me to like Kingdom Hearts.
I don't know if it was a childhood whimsy that allowed me to see the good in anything, or if it was a childish naivety that allowed me to see anything as good.
Way back when I was still in the target audience for Kingdom Hearts, I thought Kingdom Hearts was the stupidest thing I had ever seen. This wasn't because I was some supreme arbiter of taste at the age of eight — my favorite game at the time was Shadow the Hedgehog, if you need further clarification — but it was an initial conception that never really left me. While a lot of the media that I had dismissed as a child tended to seem a lot more favorable once I grew up and started developing a taste of my own, I've always thought of Kingdom Hearts as being this woefully lame and eternally bad series that was beloved only by children and Disney adults who had played it as children. Grown adults who liked it only did so because they'd never reached an understanding of the idea that something you liked as a kid doesn't need to be something you still like as an adult. But that's an unfair assumption. After all, there are a lot of people I respect who have said that there's something about this game that got to them. Elements that they loved, gameplay they adored, story beats that brought them to tears. There's something about Kingdom Hearts that has managed to hook people, and, as I said in my 2023 year-end list, we owe it to ourselves to get out of our comfort zones and play things we'd never otherwise think to play if we ever want to take ourselves seriously. If I continued to dismiss Kingdom Hearts out of hand because I decided that it looked stupid twenty years ago, then I'm no better now than I was when I was in the third grade. It's only fair — only right — that I investigate it for myself.
I hate Kingdom Hearts.
Either I'm just unable to see the mastery hidden behind Kingdom Hearts that everyone else is, or I'm the only sane man in the madhouse. It hardly matters which one is the actual truth, because the outcome is the same: a lot of people like Kingdom Hearts, the ones that don't like it don't seem to despise it, and I can't fucking stand it. I'm the odd man out.
This camera is atrocious. Controlling it with the L2 and R2 buttons is bad enough when we live in a world where the right stick is purely just a second D-pad, but the lock-on acts as more of a gentle suggestion. It simultaneously has very little interest in actually tracking enemies that move off-screen while also swinging around so violently that it's difficult to keep track of where anything is. Enemies seem to wait until they're off-screen to attack, which certainly makes sense for them, but is incredibly frustrating when you eat a fireball to the back of the head that you literally could not see coming nor tech even if you did. The camera is also a physical object that can't pass through terrain, which means that it's constantly smashing against walls and giving you completely worthless angles the second you enter a hallway that's just a bit too tight. It does everything wrong.
I also found the combat to be a complete mash-fest, largely just focused on getting directly in front of an enemy's face and spamming the attack button as fast as I humanly could. Hopping into the air for a moment before spamming the attack button seemed to make Sora hit things faster, so that wound up becoming a core part of the rotation. Not helping matters is how obscenely delayed most of Sora's kit actually is, with a dishonorable mention going specifically to his jump; there's what feels like a half-second of delay before he actually becomes airborne after you hit the button, which is bad in combat sections and unforgivable in the parts where you need to platform. There's a jump over a couple of mushrooms in the Alice in Wonderland world long before you get the high jump or the glide, and combined with the terrible camera was probably the single most difficult challenge in the entire game. I nearly burst a blood vessel when I found out that your partners have collision and can push you off of edges if you aren't careful. In some areas, this only means needing to hop back up to where you just were. In others, it means needing to transition through several different loading zones as you slowly climb your way back up.
It is a very pretty game, though, both graphically and sonically. Certainly moreso the former than the latter; this might have the single worst rendition of Night on Bald Mountain I will ever hear in my life. It's not hard to look at this and be impressed, especially in the original areas; the final set piece is an absolute treat, with you fighting waves of Heartless in a pitch-black room and only being able to tell where they are by the glow of their eyes. There are a lot of visual elements here that I know get expanded upon in Kingdom Hearts 2, and I think it was pretty smart of the team to keep going further down that path.
For as much shit as people talk about the narrative, I thought it was far and away the strongest thing Kingdom Hearts had going for it. Not the bulk of it, though; the overwhelming majority of the game is spent traipsing through abridged recaps of Disney movies, primarily the more middling ones that the Walt Disney Company presumably weren't all that protective of. Like, Hercules isn't a good film just because you and I and everyone else want Meg to look at us like we're living pieces of trash. Even still, Kingdom Hearts breezes right through a significant amount of plot beats, largely resulting in more of a Disney-World-tour sensation rather than one of occupying an actual world. You're going through the theme park version of these different films and getting the Cliff's Notes of just enough plot to give you an idea of what you're meant to be doing. Characters in the Disney worlds act less like characters and more as mascots. They're wildly flat and underdeveloped caricatures. No, the interesting parts of the Kingdom Hearts narrative are the parts that are wholly original to it.
I actually really like the story that Riku and Sora have got going on here, with Kairi mostly taking a backseat until the final couple hours of the game. People have spoken a lot about some of the gay subtext, and I think it's largely difficult to miss — Riku offering a fruit to Sora with the prompt that sharing it will bind their two souls together for eternity may as well have been delivered while he was on one knee — while still being pretty interesting. Sora is probably the worst fucking friend ever. I get that he thinks of Riku as more of a rival than a buddy, but he only responds to Riku openly lamenting how inadequate and lonely he feels with either literal silence or general disinterest. It's hardly a surprise that he ends up falling to the darkness when he's gotten rebuked at literally every single turn, all the while being manipulated further into thinking he has no other choice. It's neat, and it comes to a nice close when Riku manages to break free of Ansem's control and his own insecurities to help Sora close the door to Kingdom Hearts. Regrettably, he is also forced to share the conclusion of his arc with fucking Mickey Mouse.
Kingdom Hearts has an interesting story running through it, but, again, it's constantly being silenced by the game interrupting itself to say "holy shit, you're in Aladdin world". I don't fucking care about Aladdin. I've seen Aladdin. Aladdin is a fine movie that's significantly more interesting and better written as a movie, and not as this shitty pastiche with Dan Castellaneta doing Homer voice while trying to fill Robin Williams's shoes. God, so many of these actors just aren't doing a good job. It's kind of impressive that the child actors fucking crush it, and not even by comparison; Haley Joel Osment just kills it. Billy Zane's Ansem is pretty solid, as is Mandy Moore's Aerith. The rest I'm ambivalent about, or actively hostile towards. Brian Blessed sounds fucking terrible in this.
I did have a moment while I was playing Kingdom Hearts, right near the end when I was climbing back up to the top of Hollow Bastion. I had the realization that my keyblade looked like a flower. I was mostly just equipping whatever had the best stats, and it just happened to be that the Divine Rose gave me exactly what I needed. It very suddenly occurred to me, at that moment, that I never would have been using it if I had played this when I was a kid. Flowers are for girls, after all. Even if it meant equipping a strictly worse weapon that didn't do what I wanted it to do — one that actively harmed my build, even — I wouldn't have equipped the flower keyblade.
I was a bit of a fruity kid growing up. I wanted to wear nail polish, I liked watching a lot of shows for girls, I didn't really feel the revulsion that a lot of other people seemed to feel at doing things that weren't "for" their gender. Of course, it all kind of ended up making sense once I realized I liked dudes, but it was a pretty strange feeling to have while growing up when I wasn't really allowed to correctly guess the reasoning behind it. My dad made every effort to beat all of that out of me. To mold me into a Man. I think I gravitated more to a lot of these hyper-edgy pieces of media like Shadow the Hedgehog and whatever garbage aired on Spike TV in the hopes that it would impress him. Obviously, this was more than a little misguided. He would have been a lot happier had I picked up a football helmet and a drill and a cigar and acted like what people thought men were supposed to be in the 1950s, but I figured it was worth trying. It wasn't. When you're not allowed to be the person you are, you tend to do a pretty bad job of acting like the person you're expected to be. The flower keyblade was for girls, and that meant the flower keyblade was justification to be punished if I used it. Today, I equipped the flower keyblade and used it all the way until the end.
There's a part of me I lost a long time ago that's made it impossible for me to like Kingdom Hearts.
I don't know if it was a childhood whimsy that allowed me to see the good in anything, or if it was a childish naivety that allowed me to see anything as good.
2023
The student becomes the master overnight.
Lies of P is a game that came completely out of nowhere, left no impression on me beyond "why would someone make a dark, moody game about Pinocchio", and then managed to completely eclipse every expectation I had. I got back on Game Pass for Starfield and PAYDAY 3, and decided to give this a crack solely as a might-as-well-try-it; not only is this the better of those, it's one of the finest games I've ever played. I mean this honestly and heretically: it is better than all three mainline entries of the Dark Souls series.
Yes, Lies of P is derivative. No, this does not detract from its quality. The obsession with "newness", both as an inherent virtue and as something all creators ought to strive for, is an ideal forced to take root almost exclusively at the behest of European bourgeois Romantics all looking to (ironically enough) copy what Rousseau was telling them to do in the 1700s. Art as a whole has spent centuries upon centuries cribbing from other pieces to put itself together, and it's a fairly recent development that doing shit that someone else did but in your own way is seen as a failure of the artist. I, personally, do not care about this in the slightest. If you do, I would ask only that you examine why you believe this to be so; do you have a legitimate grievance against derivative works for any reason other than because others have told you that they're some synonym for "bad"?
Round8 Studio has come almost completely out of nowhere to deliver something that's immensely fun to play, narratively engaging, and utterly gorgeous in just about every area you can find yourself in. Any developer that can come out swinging this hard and connect with just about every blow deserves to be celebrated. There's a lot to talk about, and certainly a lot of it is in regards to the way that people are talking about it. I'll get my core thesis out of the way, first:
If you like Dark Souls, you'll probably like this game.
If you've made liking Dark Souls into a defining personality trait of yours, you're going to fucking hate this game.
Lies of P rides a fine line of being distinct, but not different. The overlap between FromSoft's PS3-and-onward output is broad, borrowing bits and pieces and rearranging them around; something similar to Sekiro parries, something similar to a Bloodborne dodge, something similar to the Dark Souls 3 enemy ambushes. But Lies of P is distinct enough in its execution of these elements that long-time Souls players will unilaterally be chin-checked when they try bringing over their muscle memory from these other titles.
Perfect guards are a guard, not a parry, and tapping the block button Sekiro-style will make you eat a hit. The dodge offers fast, generous invincibility, but it's never as safe as the one in Bloodborne is; enemies using their big red attacks will cut through your i-frames by design, encouraging you to either parry or move well out of the way. Enemies will usually come in ones and be very obvious, but many will hide just out of sight in the hopes of clipping players who haven't yet been trained to look around before charging past a blind corner. The game is uncompromising in demanding the player to meet it on its terms, rather than copying wholesale from the games that obviously inspired it and allowing the skills you learned there to completely carry over.
If you try playing this exactly like every other FromSoft Souls game you've played up to this point, you will lose, and hard. If you can not (or will not) adapt, you will probably get filtered out by the Archbishop and start publicly wondering why anyone likes this game.
There's a very strange — and frankly, it feels borderline dishonest — set of complaints I've seen where people are just outright wrong about the way the game functions, and they then use their incorrect assumptions as a base from which to knock on the game. I've seen complaints that large weapons aren't viable because you don't get poise/super armor on heavy attacks; this is blatantly untrue, and charge attacks with heavy weapons will regularly blow straight through an enemy hit. People say the dodge is unreliable, but it really isn't; if you're getting caught, you're either messing up a (fairly generous) timing or you're getting hit by red fury attacks, which the game clearly tells you cannot be rolled through. People say it's an aesthetic rip-off of Bloodborne, and this really only applies to a couple of the eldritch enemies; Parisian streets, circus theming, and fantastical automatons lend to a pretty distinct visual identity from any of the other heavy-hitters in the genre.
People say the voice acting is bad, but most of the cast is made up of established, talented stage and screen actors returning from other games like Elden Ring and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, where their performances were lauded; they sound borderline identical to what they've done since just last year, so what makes it acceptable there, and laughable here? People say the translation is bad, but I only noticed a single grammar mistake and typo in my entire playthrough, and they were both buried in the flavor text of a gesture; the rest of the writing offered some evocative lines that managed to bounce between introspective, beautiful, and the coolest fucking thing I've ever read in my life. Where are these complaints coming from? Did we play the same game? It makes no sense. I'm losing my mind trying to figure out how anyone even came to most of these conclusions. It really feels like the most vocal naysayers only played enough of Lies of P to come up with a few surface observations and then made up the rest wholesale.
None of this is to imply that the game is without fault, because it isn't. Boss runs are still present in all of their vestigial glory, consistently adding a mandatory and boring twenty seconds before you can retry a failed boss attempt. Elite enemies — especially in the late game — are often such massive damage sponges that it's a complete waste of time and resources to actually bother fighting the ones that respawn. The breakpoint at which an enemy gets staggered is a hidden value, so you're always just hoping that the next perfect guard will be enough to trip it; we've already got visible enemy health bars here, so I can't see why we don't get enemy stamina bars, too. (Stranger of Paradise continues to be the most mechanically-complete game in this sub-genre.)
For these faults, though, there are at least as many quality-of-life changes that I'm astounded haven't been adopted elsewhere already. Emptying your pulse cells (your refillable healing item) allows you the opportunity to get one back for free if you can dish out enough damage. Theoretically, as long as you can keep up both your offense and defense, you have access to unlimited healing. It's such a natural extension of the Rally system, where you can heal chip damage by hitting foes; Bloodborne's implementation of blood vials looks completely misguided next to this. If you have enough Ergo to level up, the number in the top right corner of the screen will turn blue, no longer requiring you to manually check if you've got enough at a save point. When a side quest updates, the warp screen will let you know that something has happened, and where to start looking for the NPC that it happened to.
It's a challenging game, but it really isn't that hard. I do agree with the general consensus that it would be nice if the perfect guards could be granted a few extra frames of leniency. I managed to start hitting them fairly consistently around halfway through the game, but it's going to be a large hurdle that'll shoo off a lot of players who don't like such tight timings. Tuning it just a little bit would help to make it feel a bit more fair without completely compromising on the difficulty. Everything else, I feel, is pretty strongly balanced in the player's favor; I got through just about every boss in the game without summoning specters and without spending consumables, but they were all there for me if I really needed them. I'd like to go back and play through it again, knowing what I know now, and really lean into the item usage. It's not like you won't wind up with a surplus, considering how easy everything is to farm.
I understand that Bloodborne is something of a sacred cow, especially on this website — it's currently two of the top five highest-ranked games — so anything that seems like it's trying to encroach on its territory is going to be met with hostility before all else. I understand. It's a special game for a lot of people. That said, I'd suggest going into Lies of P with an open mind and a willingness to engage with the game on its own terms; you might manage to find it as impressive of a work as I do.
Quartz is stored in the P-Organ.
Lies of P is a game that came completely out of nowhere, left no impression on me beyond "why would someone make a dark, moody game about Pinocchio", and then managed to completely eclipse every expectation I had. I got back on Game Pass for Starfield and PAYDAY 3, and decided to give this a crack solely as a might-as-well-try-it; not only is this the better of those, it's one of the finest games I've ever played. I mean this honestly and heretically: it is better than all three mainline entries of the Dark Souls series.
Yes, Lies of P is derivative. No, this does not detract from its quality. The obsession with "newness", both as an inherent virtue and as something all creators ought to strive for, is an ideal forced to take root almost exclusively at the behest of European bourgeois Romantics all looking to (ironically enough) copy what Rousseau was telling them to do in the 1700s. Art as a whole has spent centuries upon centuries cribbing from other pieces to put itself together, and it's a fairly recent development that doing shit that someone else did but in your own way is seen as a failure of the artist. I, personally, do not care about this in the slightest. If you do, I would ask only that you examine why you believe this to be so; do you have a legitimate grievance against derivative works for any reason other than because others have told you that they're some synonym for "bad"?
Round8 Studio has come almost completely out of nowhere to deliver something that's immensely fun to play, narratively engaging, and utterly gorgeous in just about every area you can find yourself in. Any developer that can come out swinging this hard and connect with just about every blow deserves to be celebrated. There's a lot to talk about, and certainly a lot of it is in regards to the way that people are talking about it. I'll get my core thesis out of the way, first:
If you like Dark Souls, you'll probably like this game.
If you've made liking Dark Souls into a defining personality trait of yours, you're going to fucking hate this game.
Lies of P rides a fine line of being distinct, but not different. The overlap between FromSoft's PS3-and-onward output is broad, borrowing bits and pieces and rearranging them around; something similar to Sekiro parries, something similar to a Bloodborne dodge, something similar to the Dark Souls 3 enemy ambushes. But Lies of P is distinct enough in its execution of these elements that long-time Souls players will unilaterally be chin-checked when they try bringing over their muscle memory from these other titles.
Perfect guards are a guard, not a parry, and tapping the block button Sekiro-style will make you eat a hit. The dodge offers fast, generous invincibility, but it's never as safe as the one in Bloodborne is; enemies using their big red attacks will cut through your i-frames by design, encouraging you to either parry or move well out of the way. Enemies will usually come in ones and be very obvious, but many will hide just out of sight in the hopes of clipping players who haven't yet been trained to look around before charging past a blind corner. The game is uncompromising in demanding the player to meet it on its terms, rather than copying wholesale from the games that obviously inspired it and allowing the skills you learned there to completely carry over.
If you try playing this exactly like every other FromSoft Souls game you've played up to this point, you will lose, and hard. If you can not (or will not) adapt, you will probably get filtered out by the Archbishop and start publicly wondering why anyone likes this game.
There's a very strange — and frankly, it feels borderline dishonest — set of complaints I've seen where people are just outright wrong about the way the game functions, and they then use their incorrect assumptions as a base from which to knock on the game. I've seen complaints that large weapons aren't viable because you don't get poise/super armor on heavy attacks; this is blatantly untrue, and charge attacks with heavy weapons will regularly blow straight through an enemy hit. People say the dodge is unreliable, but it really isn't; if you're getting caught, you're either messing up a (fairly generous) timing or you're getting hit by red fury attacks, which the game clearly tells you cannot be rolled through. People say it's an aesthetic rip-off of Bloodborne, and this really only applies to a couple of the eldritch enemies; Parisian streets, circus theming, and fantastical automatons lend to a pretty distinct visual identity from any of the other heavy-hitters in the genre.
People say the voice acting is bad, but most of the cast is made up of established, talented stage and screen actors returning from other games like Elden Ring and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, where their performances were lauded; they sound borderline identical to what they've done since just last year, so what makes it acceptable there, and laughable here? People say the translation is bad, but I only noticed a single grammar mistake and typo in my entire playthrough, and they were both buried in the flavor text of a gesture; the rest of the writing offered some evocative lines that managed to bounce between introspective, beautiful, and the coolest fucking thing I've ever read in my life. Where are these complaints coming from? Did we play the same game? It makes no sense. I'm losing my mind trying to figure out how anyone even came to most of these conclusions. It really feels like the most vocal naysayers only played enough of Lies of P to come up with a few surface observations and then made up the rest wholesale.
None of this is to imply that the game is without fault, because it isn't. Boss runs are still present in all of their vestigial glory, consistently adding a mandatory and boring twenty seconds before you can retry a failed boss attempt. Elite enemies — especially in the late game — are often such massive damage sponges that it's a complete waste of time and resources to actually bother fighting the ones that respawn. The breakpoint at which an enemy gets staggered is a hidden value, so you're always just hoping that the next perfect guard will be enough to trip it; we've already got visible enemy health bars here, so I can't see why we don't get enemy stamina bars, too. (Stranger of Paradise continues to be the most mechanically-complete game in this sub-genre.)
For these faults, though, there are at least as many quality-of-life changes that I'm astounded haven't been adopted elsewhere already. Emptying your pulse cells (your refillable healing item) allows you the opportunity to get one back for free if you can dish out enough damage. Theoretically, as long as you can keep up both your offense and defense, you have access to unlimited healing. It's such a natural extension of the Rally system, where you can heal chip damage by hitting foes; Bloodborne's implementation of blood vials looks completely misguided next to this. If you have enough Ergo to level up, the number in the top right corner of the screen will turn blue, no longer requiring you to manually check if you've got enough at a save point. When a side quest updates, the warp screen will let you know that something has happened, and where to start looking for the NPC that it happened to.
It's a challenging game, but it really isn't that hard. I do agree with the general consensus that it would be nice if the perfect guards could be granted a few extra frames of leniency. I managed to start hitting them fairly consistently around halfway through the game, but it's going to be a large hurdle that'll shoo off a lot of players who don't like such tight timings. Tuning it just a little bit would help to make it feel a bit more fair without completely compromising on the difficulty. Everything else, I feel, is pretty strongly balanced in the player's favor; I got through just about every boss in the game without summoning specters and without spending consumables, but they were all there for me if I really needed them. I'd like to go back and play through it again, knowing what I know now, and really lean into the item usage. It's not like you won't wind up with a surplus, considering how easy everything is to farm.
I understand that Bloodborne is something of a sacred cow, especially on this website — it's currently two of the top five highest-ranked games — so anything that seems like it's trying to encroach on its territory is going to be met with hostility before all else. I understand. It's a special game for a lot of people. That said, I'd suggest going into Lies of P with an open mind and a willingness to engage with the game on its own terms; you might manage to find it as impressive of a work as I do.
Quartz is stored in the P-Organ.
Dead dove, do not eat.
I’d like to believe that I’ve been living in my own personal Silent Hill the last few years. It would explain a lot, really. Konami has done a wonderful job of threading puppet strings through the arteries of Silent Hill and making the corpse dance, turning it into all manner of pachislot machines and skateboard decks, but they seem like they’re really trying to bring the franchise back this time. No more minor entries. We’re handing out the license and making some real goddamned Games this time. We’ve got a Ryukishi07 Silent Hill on the way, something we don't know much about called Townfall, and Bloober Team are even sticking their dirty, dirty fingers in the pie with a Silent Hill 2 remake. Silent Hill is finally back. But those are all coming later. We’re getting the first taste of the revitalized Silent Hill now, and it’s here in the form of Silent Hill: Ascension. Get hyped. This is the first marker being driven into fresh, virginal earth. This is Silent Hill from here on out.
This is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
Genuinely, I mean that. I want to be funnier about it, but I can’t. It’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played. I wish I could say that I’ve played anything worse than this, but I haven’t. It is the worst fucking thing I have ever played in my stupid goddamned life. Sorry. Every time I try typing something else, my brain just shuts itself off and my fingers move on the keyboard of their own volition to produce the phrase “this is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life”. This is the first cognitohazard ever put to market.
IGDB was trying to protect me from writing about this any further. I appreciate them doing that, now. When I first made a page for Silent Hill: Ascension, they rejected it on the grounds of this “not being a game”. Naturally, I kicked my feet and made a fuss about it in the email appeals — we’ve got RPG Maker and Polybius and Spell Checker and Calculator on here, and I know those definitely fucking aren’t games — and the admin staff eventually relented. But they were only trying to help, I think. I should have just accepted their ruling and let this slip into the ether. Now we’ve got a Backloggd page for it, which means that now I have to think about this again, and it’s still the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
This is the kind of bad that’s hard to explain without experiencing it yourself. It’s like childbirth, or the smell of rotting meat. You don’t want anyone else to have to deal with it, but how could they know what it’s like without going through it? You can show them the season pass being sold for $22.99, you can show them the “It’s Trauma!” sticker, you can show them the wholly unmoderated chat bar where you can’t say “Playboy Carti” but you can say the n-word, but none of that is the same as experiencing it. They’re visible symptoms of the disease running through Silent Hill: Ascension’s blood, but the pain of another doesn’t exist unless you feel it yourself. It’s ethereal. I’ve got a sore on my lip right now, but you don’t feel it, do you? You understand that it hurts, and you can empathize with that, but it doesn’t actually exist to you. If I stopped talking about it, you’d assume I was fine, and nothing would change for you. Meanwhile, I’m still over here suffering through this shit, and it’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
The game is streamed live every night at 9 PM EST, and you can show up to vote on what’s going to happen to the characters. The choices themselves are very clearly labelled with the outcomes; you’ve got Salvation, Suffering, and Damnation choices, helpfully color-coded as blue, white, and red respectively, just so you can still know which one is the “good” choice and which one is “bad” in the event that you forgot how to read. Mass Effect's Paragon, Neutral, and Renegade system lives on, strong and proud. This, of course, means that every single fucking choice made thus far has been heavily in favor of Salvation, because it’s clearly the good option. If you don’t like that, you can vote for something else. In an especially impressive bit of social commentary, however, the only votes that matter come from those rich and stupid enough to buy them.
To vote, you need to wager a set amount of Influence Points, or IP. I haven’t found a way to cast a vote for anything less than 200 IP, so either that’s the minimum spend needed to vote, or the UI is just so badly designed that I can’t fucking find the free vote option. You can buy IP in one of three differently-priced bundles, each one more expensive than the last; one of the IP packs is about twenty-five bucks for 26,400 IP, and the second decision of the game is currently for "Salvation" by roughly twenty-five million points. If you really want a choice to go a certain way, then you had better get to spending. By my math, you’ll be out a little over $23,650 if you decide that you’re going to stick it to those Salvation voters. Of course, with the audience shrinking every night after they see how fucking stupid this whole thing is, it’ll only get easier and easier to sway the vote with less money invested. If you’re as much of a moron as I am and you decide to stick around past your first watch just to see where this goes, then you’ll have a decent opportunity to roleplay as a real government lobbyist soon enough.
But buying IP for real money isn’t the only way to get it. Lucky enough for the impoverished, filthy masses, you can earn IP at a massively reduced rate simply by playing minigames. You don’t get much — maybe a thousand or two per day, resetting every twenty-four hours — but it’s enough to cast a couple votes. Doing your daily and weekly quests certainly helps to boost your IP gains, and if you just felt something cold run down your back after you read the phrase “daily and weekly quests” in a Silent Hill game, don’t worry. That just means you’re still alive. Unfortunately, though, the minigames are on a set rotation; you get one puzzle and one “mindfulness” game per day, each awarding a small pittance of IP if you manage to successfully complete them.
By the way, I’m glad you’re curious about what the minigames actually are. I’m really excited to talk about them, so knowing that you’re enthusiastic to hear more really encourages me to do my best in explaining them to you. They’re the worst fucking things I’ve ever played in my stupid fucking life. Most egregious of the lot is the rhythm minigame, which doesn't require you to have any rhythm nor timing whatsoever. There's no penalty for hitting wrong notes (the game even encourages you to "just jam along" should you feel like it), every note needs to be individually clicked, and every click produces a sound from what I think is a literal Garageband guitar VST. Since there's no warning for when the notes are going to show up or leave, you have to click them all as fast as possible, resulting in a complete cacophony of instruments playing over each other if you want to guarantee a good score. Worst of all is the fact that the selection of songs is exclusively limited to Akira Yamaoka's more famous works, meaning you get to listen to some of the greatest video game music ever composed get completely butchered in one of the worst minigames you've ever played, in service of gaining points to vote on what happens next in the dumbest narrative ever written. I think if you're a killer or kidnapper or whatever in life, this is what you have to do forever after you die as punishment.
Here's a video of me getting the highest rank possible on the theme of Silent Hill. I want to stress that this is optimal play.
Anyway, this is all in service of giving you votes for the completely fucking incomprehensible story. It's hard to call it a narrative. There's some old lady who sucks, and then she dies, and her family kind of cares about it, but not really. There's a girl who gets initiated into some cult called The Foundation that seems to worship the Otherworld monsters, and she dies, and a couple people seem a little bothered by it. There's some drunk guy who really hates that the girl is dead and she's also haunting him and calling him a fuckup. The grandson of the old lady who sucked and died speaks entirely in the spooky child language that only exists in bad horror movies where he talks about how he plays pretend with "the man in the fog". I've long said that stories should strive to be more than events happening in sequence. This is more like events. They're not really happening in any given order, they're just kind of shown to the player and then quietly shuffled off so another event can happen.
At the end of the show proper is a canned animation of a character getting lost in the Otherworld, and the live viewers do QTEs that don't actually do anything. If they collectively fail, you get the message that the character "failed to endure" and they lose hope, but I don't know what losing hope actually entails. If you collectively pass, which happened for the first time during tonight's November 2nd show, the game bugs out and assumes that you failed anyway. The CEO of the company has gone out of his way to specify that the QTE sequences are for live viewers only and, as such, don't actually do anything because it wouldn't be fair to people who watch the VODs. Imagine a Jerma Dollhouse stream where the commands didn't work because it wouldn't have been fair to people who watched the whole thing on YouTube later. You're the one insisting on a livestream and you're not going to fucking use it? Why? Seriously, why? What reason does this have to be live at all?
And speaking of the CEO, Weatherby is absolutely correct that the best part of all of this is the aftershow. For whatever fucking reason, Jacob Navok feels an incredible need to come out on his shitty laptop camera (you can tell it's a laptop camera because it keeps shaking while he passionately swings his arms around) and rant about how they're definitely not scamming people. You can tell you've got a good product when the actual episode is about eight minutes long and the CEO takes half an hour in the post-show to complain about how unfair everyone is being towards one of the shittiest fucking things ever made. It's bordering on performance art.
I cannot fucking wait to watch more of this. It's the most excited I've been for a recent release in years.
I’d like to believe that I’ve been living in my own personal Silent Hill the last few years. It would explain a lot, really. Konami has done a wonderful job of threading puppet strings through the arteries of Silent Hill and making the corpse dance, turning it into all manner of pachislot machines and skateboard decks, but they seem like they’re really trying to bring the franchise back this time. No more minor entries. We’re handing out the license and making some real goddamned Games this time. We’ve got a Ryukishi07 Silent Hill on the way, something we don't know much about called Townfall, and Bloober Team are even sticking their dirty, dirty fingers in the pie with a Silent Hill 2 remake. Silent Hill is finally back. But those are all coming later. We’re getting the first taste of the revitalized Silent Hill now, and it’s here in the form of Silent Hill: Ascension. Get hyped. This is the first marker being driven into fresh, virginal earth. This is Silent Hill from here on out.
This is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
Genuinely, I mean that. I want to be funnier about it, but I can’t. It’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played. I wish I could say that I’ve played anything worse than this, but I haven’t. It is the worst fucking thing I have ever played in my stupid goddamned life. Sorry. Every time I try typing something else, my brain just shuts itself off and my fingers move on the keyboard of their own volition to produce the phrase “this is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life”. This is the first cognitohazard ever put to market.
IGDB was trying to protect me from writing about this any further. I appreciate them doing that, now. When I first made a page for Silent Hill: Ascension, they rejected it on the grounds of this “not being a game”. Naturally, I kicked my feet and made a fuss about it in the email appeals — we’ve got RPG Maker and Polybius and Spell Checker and Calculator on here, and I know those definitely fucking aren’t games — and the admin staff eventually relented. But they were only trying to help, I think. I should have just accepted their ruling and let this slip into the ether. Now we’ve got a Backloggd page for it, which means that now I have to think about this again, and it’s still the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
This is the kind of bad that’s hard to explain without experiencing it yourself. It’s like childbirth, or the smell of rotting meat. You don’t want anyone else to have to deal with it, but how could they know what it’s like without going through it? You can show them the season pass being sold for $22.99, you can show them the “It’s Trauma!” sticker, you can show them the wholly unmoderated chat bar where you can’t say “Playboy Carti” but you can say the n-word, but none of that is the same as experiencing it. They’re visible symptoms of the disease running through Silent Hill: Ascension’s blood, but the pain of another doesn’t exist unless you feel it yourself. It’s ethereal. I’ve got a sore on my lip right now, but you don’t feel it, do you? You understand that it hurts, and you can empathize with that, but it doesn’t actually exist to you. If I stopped talking about it, you’d assume I was fine, and nothing would change for you. Meanwhile, I’m still over here suffering through this shit, and it’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
The game is streamed live every night at 9 PM EST, and you can show up to vote on what’s going to happen to the characters. The choices themselves are very clearly labelled with the outcomes; you’ve got Salvation, Suffering, and Damnation choices, helpfully color-coded as blue, white, and red respectively, just so you can still know which one is the “good” choice and which one is “bad” in the event that you forgot how to read. Mass Effect's Paragon, Neutral, and Renegade system lives on, strong and proud. This, of course, means that every single fucking choice made thus far has been heavily in favor of Salvation, because it’s clearly the good option. If you don’t like that, you can vote for something else. In an especially impressive bit of social commentary, however, the only votes that matter come from those rich and stupid enough to buy them.
To vote, you need to wager a set amount of Influence Points, or IP. I haven’t found a way to cast a vote for anything less than 200 IP, so either that’s the minimum spend needed to vote, or the UI is just so badly designed that I can’t fucking find the free vote option. You can buy IP in one of three differently-priced bundles, each one more expensive than the last; one of the IP packs is about twenty-five bucks for 26,400 IP, and the second decision of the game is currently for "Salvation" by roughly twenty-five million points. If you really want a choice to go a certain way, then you had better get to spending. By my math, you’ll be out a little over $23,650 if you decide that you’re going to stick it to those Salvation voters. Of course, with the audience shrinking every night after they see how fucking stupid this whole thing is, it’ll only get easier and easier to sway the vote with less money invested. If you’re as much of a moron as I am and you decide to stick around past your first watch just to see where this goes, then you’ll have a decent opportunity to roleplay as a real government lobbyist soon enough.
But buying IP for real money isn’t the only way to get it. Lucky enough for the impoverished, filthy masses, you can earn IP at a massively reduced rate simply by playing minigames. You don’t get much — maybe a thousand or two per day, resetting every twenty-four hours — but it’s enough to cast a couple votes. Doing your daily and weekly quests certainly helps to boost your IP gains, and if you just felt something cold run down your back after you read the phrase “daily and weekly quests” in a Silent Hill game, don’t worry. That just means you’re still alive. Unfortunately, though, the minigames are on a set rotation; you get one puzzle and one “mindfulness” game per day, each awarding a small pittance of IP if you manage to successfully complete them.
By the way, I’m glad you’re curious about what the minigames actually are. I’m really excited to talk about them, so knowing that you’re enthusiastic to hear more really encourages me to do my best in explaining them to you. They’re the worst fucking things I’ve ever played in my stupid fucking life. Most egregious of the lot is the rhythm minigame, which doesn't require you to have any rhythm nor timing whatsoever. There's no penalty for hitting wrong notes (the game even encourages you to "just jam along" should you feel like it), every note needs to be individually clicked, and every click produces a sound from what I think is a literal Garageband guitar VST. Since there's no warning for when the notes are going to show up or leave, you have to click them all as fast as possible, resulting in a complete cacophony of instruments playing over each other if you want to guarantee a good score. Worst of all is the fact that the selection of songs is exclusively limited to Akira Yamaoka's more famous works, meaning you get to listen to some of the greatest video game music ever composed get completely butchered in one of the worst minigames you've ever played, in service of gaining points to vote on what happens next in the dumbest narrative ever written. I think if you're a killer or kidnapper or whatever in life, this is what you have to do forever after you die as punishment.
Here's a video of me getting the highest rank possible on the theme of Silent Hill. I want to stress that this is optimal play.
Anyway, this is all in service of giving you votes for the completely fucking incomprehensible story. It's hard to call it a narrative. There's some old lady who sucks, and then she dies, and her family kind of cares about it, but not really. There's a girl who gets initiated into some cult called The Foundation that seems to worship the Otherworld monsters, and she dies, and a couple people seem a little bothered by it. There's some drunk guy who really hates that the girl is dead and she's also haunting him and calling him a fuckup. The grandson of the old lady who sucked and died speaks entirely in the spooky child language that only exists in bad horror movies where he talks about how he plays pretend with "the man in the fog". I've long said that stories should strive to be more than events happening in sequence. This is more like events. They're not really happening in any given order, they're just kind of shown to the player and then quietly shuffled off so another event can happen.
At the end of the show proper is a canned animation of a character getting lost in the Otherworld, and the live viewers do QTEs that don't actually do anything. If they collectively fail, you get the message that the character "failed to endure" and they lose hope, but I don't know what losing hope actually entails. If you collectively pass, which happened for the first time during tonight's November 2nd show, the game bugs out and assumes that you failed anyway. The CEO of the company has gone out of his way to specify that the QTE sequences are for live viewers only and, as such, don't actually do anything because it wouldn't be fair to people who watch the VODs. Imagine a Jerma Dollhouse stream where the commands didn't work because it wouldn't have been fair to people who watched the whole thing on YouTube later. You're the one insisting on a livestream and you're not going to fucking use it? Why? Seriously, why? What reason does this have to be live at all?
And speaking of the CEO, Weatherby is absolutely correct that the best part of all of this is the aftershow. For whatever fucking reason, Jacob Navok feels an incredible need to come out on his shitty laptop camera (you can tell it's a laptop camera because it keeps shaking while he passionately swings his arms around) and rant about how they're definitely not scamming people. You can tell you've got a good product when the actual episode is about eight minutes long and the CEO takes half an hour in the post-show to complain about how unfair everyone is being towards one of the shittiest fucking things ever made. It's bordering on performance art.
I cannot fucking wait to watch more of this. It's the most excited I've been for a recent release in years.
An unintentional period piece.
Fair warning, I'm gonna be talking about the grim shit that happened during the war on terror. I'm also gonna be talking about 50 Cent's career. These two are intertwined.
I doubt there are too many people using this website who are young enough to have completely missed the meteoric rise of 50 Cent, but I'd be remiss to not make sure that everyone gets a primer. At the turn of the millennium, the golden age of gangsta rap was giving way to the bling era; what had become conventional in the late-80s to mid-90s was rapidly becoming less popular and less profitable than the revival of alternative hip hop. Of course, this didn't stop some artists from keeping their old sound in the face of new trends. Whether it was because they were stubborn, incapable of changing, or confident enough that they could keep selling exactly the way that they were, a genre shift will never be enough to completely unseat people from making what they want. 50 Cent had been making mixtapes for years, getting some notoriety from flipping the beats that other rappers had laid their voices on. He wasn't about to shift gears. 50 Cent kept his sound the same, and was rewarded handsomely: his debut album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, went 9x Platinum. The Massacre came out two years later and went 6x Platinum.
That was 2005, and it was the last time 50 Cent was relevant.
Blood on the Sand released in February of 2009.
A significant part of 50 Cent's fall is that, frankly speaking, he’s kind of a shit rapper. His style was already out by the early 2000s, and it’s only thanks to a fortuitous pick-up by Shady Records that you’ve heard of him. He’s not talentless, nor was he ever; his mixtape work prior to his studio debut is still good at its worst, and GRoDT is a solid-enough record (as much as I’ll get called an RYM backpacker for not saying it's outstanding). But 50 doesn’t really have any pen game to speak of. It’s more like crayon game. The guy writes like a fifth grader. The first bar off the first track in his debut album rhymes “off my chest” with “off my chest”. There’s another not even three minutes later where he drops the line “I'm the boss on this boat, you can call me skipper. The way I turn the money over, you should call me Flipper”. Christ. 50 Cent has a lot of friends in some really high places, but there’s a reason that Curtis couldn’t get certified in the year that Graduation went 5x Platinum; people were tired of him after less than a decade after his mainstream breakthrough. All of the Slim Shady and Obie Trice and Snoop Dogg features in the world couldn’t stem the tide that people like Kanye and Lil’ Wayne were creating, and 50’s monotone flows, GarageBand default beats, and garbage lyricism were reliquary.
But 50 Cent’s relationships are what propelled him, and they helped him build a legacy that he’s still controlling to this day. He made it big by starting feuds with virtually every other rapper he could on How to Rob, only delving deeper into his many, many beefs as he got involved deeper with Shady Records, taking up their fights as an associate. He turned getting shot for running his mouth into his armor — you become feared and respected in equal measure if the guy that puts nine bullets in you winds up dead before you do. He created a multimedia empire of television shows, of vodka, of luxury underwear, of investments in South African palladium mines.
And of video games.
Blood on the Sand originally had nothing to do with 50 Cent, and you can tell. It was meant to be a tie-in with a Jason Bourne sequel series written after the death of author Robert Ludlum, but the television show that was also set to release at the same time got cancelled before it could leave production. This left developer Swordfish Studios holding the bag; this is basically what happened with Croteam when they made Serious Sam 3. Swordfish had sunk two years of dev time into making their Covert-One game, and now they had nothing they could do with the prototypes.
Enter Vivendi Games, who order a sequel to 50 Cent: Bulletproof.
It's obvious while playing Blood on the Sand that 50 Cent was just kind of dropped into a product that already existed before he got involved. You have all of these wide, open vistas, with sparkling bloom effects casting rays of light down onto the sand-bleached stones. Dilapidated malls and bombed-out highways serve as the backdrops for stop-and-pop cover shooter segments, tearing up the surroundings with heavy machine gun fire. So much of this game visually tries to tell a story of beautiful landscapes, contrasting against the war-torn buildings and roads of this unnamed Middle Eastern country. It’s ripe for some gruff-voiced American special ops player character to glibly comment on war being hell and how the American invasion of this land is the only way to save these wayward people, mowing them down all the while.
50 Cent doesn’t give a fuck about any of that. 50 Cent just wants his fucking skull.
Blood on the Sand is honest. It's a puff piece for 50 Cent. It's a product that exists solely for the purpose of boosting his image and providing him with another brand tie-in he can point to as a marker of success. 50 Cent doesn't have any poetic musings about the nature of man or if he's the real monster for slaughtering all of these inexplicably Serbian and Slovenian goons. 50 Cent thinks this place is a shithole and he wants to go home as soon as he can get his $10 million jewel-encrusted skull back. The non-fictionalized 50 is on record saying that he loves the game because it shows him jumping out of helicopters and because his model has huge muscles.
The game attempts to answer the question of why 50 Cent is somewhere in the Middle East (the Covert-One books out at the time don't take place in the region, so there's basically zero clue which country this is meant to be) by saying that he's there to play a concert. We have to keep in mind that fiction, unlike reality, is designed from top to bottom to be experienced by an outside viewer. The in-universe justification is that he's there to make money. The real-world reasoning is because, in the year 2009, you're just kind of expected to set your game in the Middle East. They were easy "bad guys". Just because Obama was president doesn't mean shit. Just because the torture of political dissidents in Abu Ghraib was known for half a decade before this doesn't mean shit. Just because it cost untold trillions of dollars and a million lives doesn't mean shit. They — capital-T, bold-italics — did 9/11, so it's all fair game.
But this is all in service of making 50 look cool. Not of anything else. You're meant to watch him gun down five guys with a machine gun while the word MASSACRE takes up a third of the screen and and think "wow, this guy's a badass". You get Gangsta Fire slow-mo and 50 Cent bonus points to unlock music videos for killing quickly, because it makes him look cool. You have three separate helicopter boss fights because 50 Cent's son thought it would make him look cool. You listen to a rotation of background tracks that all sound the same and can only be differentiated in a firefight by whether 50 shouts "I run New York!" or "My gun go off!" at the end of the chorus. You have a dedicated taunt button that you can upgrade to make 50 shout progressively more profane things at his foes for bonus points. Because, you know, it makes him look cool. I think the target demographic for this game was 50 Cent.
Unsurprisingly, 50 Cent and the rest of the G-Unit do a fairly poor job of acting as themselves. Perhaps more surprisingly, everyone save for Lance Reddick kind of sucks in this. The final boss cycles through a Texan accent, a South African accent, a British RP accent, and at one point what sounds like a Chinese accent all in the span of a single helicopter battle. Tony Yayo just...whines all the time? Like, he doesn't do much besides complain about how much he hates being in a Middle Eastern warzone, which, y'know, valid gripe. The other members of the G-Unit are no longer on speaking terms with 50 Cent. That's not relevant to the rest of this paragraph, but I did all of this research into 50 Cent, so I had to mention it somewhere.
The story is nonsense, but it couldn't ever be anything else. 50 Cent just wants his fucking skull. Everything else is tertiary. The "love interest" crosses you, then double-crosses the villains with a story about how they're holding her family captive, and then triple-crosses 50 one final time by revealing that she has no family right at the finish line. 50 Cent quips that she's a "crazy bitch" and that's how he likes his women, and then blows her up with a rocket launcher. Your concert promoter/handler/blackmail victim inevitably turns on you — "trust no one," says the arms dealer, advice which 50 ignores three separate times before the credits roll — and just dies unceremoniously in a generic gunfight. You can blast him the moment you're out of the cutscene and get a 25,000 point bonus for doing it in under thirty seconds. This game is bordering on a work of deconstructive genius.
Blood on the Sand is funny, because Blood on the Sand is quaint. It revels in its own selfishness; the war on terror as an aesthetic to push a real guy as being tough, completely bereft of having anything to say other than "damn, 50 Cent is cool". It's almost refreshing to see something so concerned with itself that it's completely unbothered by its own implications. This is a better condemnation of the war on terror and the American culture that spawned around it than Spec Ops: The Line. Hit that big-ass ramp, Fiddy.
This is the good karma version of Rogue Warrior.
Fair warning, I'm gonna be talking about the grim shit that happened during the war on terror. I'm also gonna be talking about 50 Cent's career. These two are intertwined.
I doubt there are too many people using this website who are young enough to have completely missed the meteoric rise of 50 Cent, but I'd be remiss to not make sure that everyone gets a primer. At the turn of the millennium, the golden age of gangsta rap was giving way to the bling era; what had become conventional in the late-80s to mid-90s was rapidly becoming less popular and less profitable than the revival of alternative hip hop. Of course, this didn't stop some artists from keeping their old sound in the face of new trends. Whether it was because they were stubborn, incapable of changing, or confident enough that they could keep selling exactly the way that they were, a genre shift will never be enough to completely unseat people from making what they want. 50 Cent had been making mixtapes for years, getting some notoriety from flipping the beats that other rappers had laid their voices on. He wasn't about to shift gears. 50 Cent kept his sound the same, and was rewarded handsomely: his debut album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, went 9x Platinum. The Massacre came out two years later and went 6x Platinum.
That was 2005, and it was the last time 50 Cent was relevant.
Blood on the Sand released in February of 2009.
A significant part of 50 Cent's fall is that, frankly speaking, he’s kind of a shit rapper. His style was already out by the early 2000s, and it’s only thanks to a fortuitous pick-up by Shady Records that you’ve heard of him. He’s not talentless, nor was he ever; his mixtape work prior to his studio debut is still good at its worst, and GRoDT is a solid-enough record (as much as I’ll get called an RYM backpacker for not saying it's outstanding). But 50 doesn’t really have any pen game to speak of. It’s more like crayon game. The guy writes like a fifth grader. The first bar off the first track in his debut album rhymes “off my chest” with “off my chest”. There’s another not even three minutes later where he drops the line “I'm the boss on this boat, you can call me skipper. The way I turn the money over, you should call me Flipper”. Christ. 50 Cent has a lot of friends in some really high places, but there’s a reason that Curtis couldn’t get certified in the year that Graduation went 5x Platinum; people were tired of him after less than a decade after his mainstream breakthrough. All of the Slim Shady and Obie Trice and Snoop Dogg features in the world couldn’t stem the tide that people like Kanye and Lil’ Wayne were creating, and 50’s monotone flows, GarageBand default beats, and garbage lyricism were reliquary.
But 50 Cent’s relationships are what propelled him, and they helped him build a legacy that he’s still controlling to this day. He made it big by starting feuds with virtually every other rapper he could on How to Rob, only delving deeper into his many, many beefs as he got involved deeper with Shady Records, taking up their fights as an associate. He turned getting shot for running his mouth into his armor — you become feared and respected in equal measure if the guy that puts nine bullets in you winds up dead before you do. He created a multimedia empire of television shows, of vodka, of luxury underwear, of investments in South African palladium mines.
And of video games.
Blood on the Sand originally had nothing to do with 50 Cent, and you can tell. It was meant to be a tie-in with a Jason Bourne sequel series written after the death of author Robert Ludlum, but the television show that was also set to release at the same time got cancelled before it could leave production. This left developer Swordfish Studios holding the bag; this is basically what happened with Croteam when they made Serious Sam 3. Swordfish had sunk two years of dev time into making their Covert-One game, and now they had nothing they could do with the prototypes.
Enter Vivendi Games, who order a sequel to 50 Cent: Bulletproof.
It's obvious while playing Blood on the Sand that 50 Cent was just kind of dropped into a product that already existed before he got involved. You have all of these wide, open vistas, with sparkling bloom effects casting rays of light down onto the sand-bleached stones. Dilapidated malls and bombed-out highways serve as the backdrops for stop-and-pop cover shooter segments, tearing up the surroundings with heavy machine gun fire. So much of this game visually tries to tell a story of beautiful landscapes, contrasting against the war-torn buildings and roads of this unnamed Middle Eastern country. It’s ripe for some gruff-voiced American special ops player character to glibly comment on war being hell and how the American invasion of this land is the only way to save these wayward people, mowing them down all the while.
50 Cent doesn’t give a fuck about any of that. 50 Cent just wants his fucking skull.
Blood on the Sand is honest. It's a puff piece for 50 Cent. It's a product that exists solely for the purpose of boosting his image and providing him with another brand tie-in he can point to as a marker of success. 50 Cent doesn't have any poetic musings about the nature of man or if he's the real monster for slaughtering all of these inexplicably Serbian and Slovenian goons. 50 Cent thinks this place is a shithole and he wants to go home as soon as he can get his $10 million jewel-encrusted skull back. The non-fictionalized 50 is on record saying that he loves the game because it shows him jumping out of helicopters and because his model has huge muscles.
The game attempts to answer the question of why 50 Cent is somewhere in the Middle East (the Covert-One books out at the time don't take place in the region, so there's basically zero clue which country this is meant to be) by saying that he's there to play a concert. We have to keep in mind that fiction, unlike reality, is designed from top to bottom to be experienced by an outside viewer. The in-universe justification is that he's there to make money. The real-world reasoning is because, in the year 2009, you're just kind of expected to set your game in the Middle East. They were easy "bad guys". Just because Obama was president doesn't mean shit. Just because the torture of political dissidents in Abu Ghraib was known for half a decade before this doesn't mean shit. Just because it cost untold trillions of dollars and a million lives doesn't mean shit. They — capital-T, bold-italics — did 9/11, so it's all fair game.
But this is all in service of making 50 look cool. Not of anything else. You're meant to watch him gun down five guys with a machine gun while the word MASSACRE takes up a third of the screen and and think "wow, this guy's a badass". You get Gangsta Fire slow-mo and 50 Cent bonus points to unlock music videos for killing quickly, because it makes him look cool. You have three separate helicopter boss fights because 50 Cent's son thought it would make him look cool. You listen to a rotation of background tracks that all sound the same and can only be differentiated in a firefight by whether 50 shouts "I run New York!" or "My gun go off!" at the end of the chorus. You have a dedicated taunt button that you can upgrade to make 50 shout progressively more profane things at his foes for bonus points. Because, you know, it makes him look cool. I think the target demographic for this game was 50 Cent.
Unsurprisingly, 50 Cent and the rest of the G-Unit do a fairly poor job of acting as themselves. Perhaps more surprisingly, everyone save for Lance Reddick kind of sucks in this. The final boss cycles through a Texan accent, a South African accent, a British RP accent, and at one point what sounds like a Chinese accent all in the span of a single helicopter battle. Tony Yayo just...whines all the time? Like, he doesn't do much besides complain about how much he hates being in a Middle Eastern warzone, which, y'know, valid gripe. The other members of the G-Unit are no longer on speaking terms with 50 Cent. That's not relevant to the rest of this paragraph, but I did all of this research into 50 Cent, so I had to mention it somewhere.
The story is nonsense, but it couldn't ever be anything else. 50 Cent just wants his fucking skull. Everything else is tertiary. The "love interest" crosses you, then double-crosses the villains with a story about how they're holding her family captive, and then triple-crosses 50 one final time by revealing that she has no family right at the finish line. 50 Cent quips that she's a "crazy bitch" and that's how he likes his women, and then blows her up with a rocket launcher. Your concert promoter/handler/blackmail victim inevitably turns on you — "trust no one," says the arms dealer, advice which 50 ignores three separate times before the credits roll — and just dies unceremoniously in a generic gunfight. You can blast him the moment you're out of the cutscene and get a 25,000 point bonus for doing it in under thirty seconds. This game is bordering on a work of deconstructive genius.
Blood on the Sand is funny, because Blood on the Sand is quaint. It revels in its own selfishness; the war on terror as an aesthetic to push a real guy as being tough, completely bereft of having anything to say other than "damn, 50 Cent is cool". It's almost refreshing to see something so concerned with itself that it's completely unbothered by its own implications. This is a better condemnation of the war on terror and the American culture that spawned around it than Spec Ops: The Line. Hit that big-ass ramp, Fiddy.
This is the good karma version of Rogue Warrior.
2018
Inspiration comes from strange places.
For many, it's bred from obligation; the need to do something, anything, bringing with it the knowledge that there's work to be done and only one person who can do it. For many, it's spite; hatred and anger, boiling within us, screaming out that it won't be quelled unless action is taken now. For fewer, it's from a desire to grow; a willingness to open yourself and expose your weakness, to be hurt, to be vulnerable, in the name of coming out stronger. Sometimes you just see someone fucking up and being so purposefully ignorant about it that it inspires you to do things properly in their stead.
Celeste is one of the greatest games ever made.
If you asked me what drives me, I'd tell you that it's spite. This is probably not healthy for me, and I don't particularly care. If you asked Madeline what drives her, she’d tell you that she doesn’t know. This is definitely not healthy for her, and the game makes sure that both her and the player understand this. Madeline has a vague, oblique desire to be better. What this entails is climbing a mountain, and it’s left unclear how this is actually meant to help. Sure, the obvious metaphor of literally climbing a mountain is as central to the text of the game as it possibly can be, but lacking any further cause, it’s little more than an act of self-flagellation. It’s hard and punishing and maybe Madeline feels like she deserves that. Celeste is hard and punishing, and maybe you as the player feel like you deserve that. After all, if neither you nor Madeline can get good purely for its own sake, what’s the point? Why bother?
It becomes clearer to both the player and to Madeline as the game progresses that this is far more than just banging your head into a wall until you get it right. It’s the purpose of the literal moment-to-moment gameplay — walk in from the left, do some tough jumps, splat, repeat until you get it right — but the narrative undercurrent gradually erodes through the surface to reveal that this is all in service of an act of self-actualization. Madeline is desperate to prove herself, desperate to understand herself, desperate to not give in to darker desires, desperate to be able to look into a mirror and see her own face instead of a stranger’s. Her desperation carries with it the price of the ascent, and the ascent carries with it the price of her. Madeline suffers in her journey. She’s leveled, brought to all fours beneath the immovable weight of her depression, her panic attacks, her inability to understand who she is. The mountain exposes her, showcasing every part of her that she keeps hidden in every reflective surface, threatening the safety of the people she cares about, reminding her of long-dead relationships with the implication that everything happening is all her fault. It isn’t, of course, but Madeline’s struggles to reach self-actualization reflect how she believes herself to be a failure.
The gameplay and story integration here is masterful, far beyond the raw difficulty of the platforming mirroring the narrative struggles faced by our protagonist. One scene where Madeline suffers a panic attack sees Theo supporting her through it, giving her a little pop piece of meditation while she waits for it to pass; all she needs to do is imagine a feather floating up and down in time with her breathing, and you as the player are tasked with keeping the feather in focus. It isn’t too much further into the game when Madeline decides that she’s gotten over all of her fears and doubts and attempts to use the feather trick as a weapon; it fails, miserably, because she hasn’t come anywhere near achieving the self-actualization that she wants to have. She tries to rush things, to force her fears down instead of process them, to conquer herself rather than accept herself as she is. It’s only after she fails and falls that she realizes that she must accept all of the bad that comes when she understands who she is, merging every part of her into the cohesive whole that is Madeline. As a reward for the player, you get a triple jump. As silly as that might sound, given how heavy the narrative has been up to this point, it’s the evolution of gameplay and the swelling of the music that makes Madeline actually feel like she’s living up to her full potential. The climb has been a struggle for you and her, but now you both have all of the tools you need to reach the top of the mountain. Once you have that, you’re unstoppable.
The narrative of the game, for better and for worse, took on something of a new life with the later explanation that both Maddy Thorson (the lead developer and former name-provider of the studio) and Madeline are trans women. For better, Celeste has remained a tentpole of positive representation since the day it released and has provided many historically-excluded people a strong, important figure to relate to; for worse, it’s incited many of the most annoying posters to hem and haw and handwring over what they perceive to be revisionism for the sake of winning brownie points. Maddy herself has written quite openly about the subject and certainly has far more insight into the topic than any schmuck like myself can throw in, but I’ve seen first-hand the impact that this game has had on the people around me. For a lot of my friends, for a lot of people I care about and respect, Celeste is important because Celeste actually gets it. This shit is hard. It’s exhausting. It isn’t climbing a mountain or beating a hard video game, because those things have a defined end. There’s a clear beginning, and a clear conclusion, and that’s that. The struggle to live as oneself and to be open and honest with who we are is a path filled with unnecessary strife and struggle brought down upon our heads by people who don’t get it. People who refuse to get it. People who benefit from not getting it. I shouldn’t need to point at any of the many, many examples of this in the United States alone, simply because there’s gotten to be too many to keep track of. It’s everywhere, as a sickness.
“This memorial dedicated to those who perished on the climb" is one of the most powerful lines I’ve ever read, and it’s the context from outside of the game’s text that defines it. Unlike any mountain, and unlike any video game, the climb doesn’t stop. The climb started before we were born, and the climb will continue after we’ve gone. For how long we’ve all been fighting, been struggling, been warring against every push and backslide, there’s always more of a climb to take on. This shit won't stop. The obvious question, then, is why we should bother to climb at all.
Celeste’s answer is simple.
To be who you are makes it worth the climb.
For many, it's bred from obligation; the need to do something, anything, bringing with it the knowledge that there's work to be done and only one person who can do it. For many, it's spite; hatred and anger, boiling within us, screaming out that it won't be quelled unless action is taken now. For fewer, it's from a desire to grow; a willingness to open yourself and expose your weakness, to be hurt, to be vulnerable, in the name of coming out stronger. Sometimes you just see someone fucking up and being so purposefully ignorant about it that it inspires you to do things properly in their stead.
Celeste is one of the greatest games ever made.
If you asked me what drives me, I'd tell you that it's spite. This is probably not healthy for me, and I don't particularly care. If you asked Madeline what drives her, she’d tell you that she doesn’t know. This is definitely not healthy for her, and the game makes sure that both her and the player understand this. Madeline has a vague, oblique desire to be better. What this entails is climbing a mountain, and it’s left unclear how this is actually meant to help. Sure, the obvious metaphor of literally climbing a mountain is as central to the text of the game as it possibly can be, but lacking any further cause, it’s little more than an act of self-flagellation. It’s hard and punishing and maybe Madeline feels like she deserves that. Celeste is hard and punishing, and maybe you as the player feel like you deserve that. After all, if neither you nor Madeline can get good purely for its own sake, what’s the point? Why bother?
It becomes clearer to both the player and to Madeline as the game progresses that this is far more than just banging your head into a wall until you get it right. It’s the purpose of the literal moment-to-moment gameplay — walk in from the left, do some tough jumps, splat, repeat until you get it right — but the narrative undercurrent gradually erodes through the surface to reveal that this is all in service of an act of self-actualization. Madeline is desperate to prove herself, desperate to understand herself, desperate to not give in to darker desires, desperate to be able to look into a mirror and see her own face instead of a stranger’s. Her desperation carries with it the price of the ascent, and the ascent carries with it the price of her. Madeline suffers in her journey. She’s leveled, brought to all fours beneath the immovable weight of her depression, her panic attacks, her inability to understand who she is. The mountain exposes her, showcasing every part of her that she keeps hidden in every reflective surface, threatening the safety of the people she cares about, reminding her of long-dead relationships with the implication that everything happening is all her fault. It isn’t, of course, but Madeline’s struggles to reach self-actualization reflect how she believes herself to be a failure.
The gameplay and story integration here is masterful, far beyond the raw difficulty of the platforming mirroring the narrative struggles faced by our protagonist. One scene where Madeline suffers a panic attack sees Theo supporting her through it, giving her a little pop piece of meditation while she waits for it to pass; all she needs to do is imagine a feather floating up and down in time with her breathing, and you as the player are tasked with keeping the feather in focus. It isn’t too much further into the game when Madeline decides that she’s gotten over all of her fears and doubts and attempts to use the feather trick as a weapon; it fails, miserably, because she hasn’t come anywhere near achieving the self-actualization that she wants to have. She tries to rush things, to force her fears down instead of process them, to conquer herself rather than accept herself as she is. It’s only after she fails and falls that she realizes that she must accept all of the bad that comes when she understands who she is, merging every part of her into the cohesive whole that is Madeline. As a reward for the player, you get a triple jump. As silly as that might sound, given how heavy the narrative has been up to this point, it’s the evolution of gameplay and the swelling of the music that makes Madeline actually feel like she’s living up to her full potential. The climb has been a struggle for you and her, but now you both have all of the tools you need to reach the top of the mountain. Once you have that, you’re unstoppable.
The narrative of the game, for better and for worse, took on something of a new life with the later explanation that both Maddy Thorson (the lead developer and former name-provider of the studio) and Madeline are trans women. For better, Celeste has remained a tentpole of positive representation since the day it released and has provided many historically-excluded people a strong, important figure to relate to; for worse, it’s incited many of the most annoying posters to hem and haw and handwring over what they perceive to be revisionism for the sake of winning brownie points. Maddy herself has written quite openly about the subject and certainly has far more insight into the topic than any schmuck like myself can throw in, but I’ve seen first-hand the impact that this game has had on the people around me. For a lot of my friends, for a lot of people I care about and respect, Celeste is important because Celeste actually gets it. This shit is hard. It’s exhausting. It isn’t climbing a mountain or beating a hard video game, because those things have a defined end. There’s a clear beginning, and a clear conclusion, and that’s that. The struggle to live as oneself and to be open and honest with who we are is a path filled with unnecessary strife and struggle brought down upon our heads by people who don’t get it. People who refuse to get it. People who benefit from not getting it. I shouldn’t need to point at any of the many, many examples of this in the United States alone, simply because there’s gotten to be too many to keep track of. It’s everywhere, as a sickness.
“This memorial dedicated to those who perished on the climb" is one of the most powerful lines I’ve ever read, and it’s the context from outside of the game’s text that defines it. Unlike any mountain, and unlike any video game, the climb doesn’t stop. The climb started before we were born, and the climb will continue after we’ve gone. For how long we’ve all been fighting, been struggling, been warring against every push and backslide, there’s always more of a climb to take on. This shit won't stop. The obvious question, then, is why we should bother to climb at all.
Celeste’s answer is simple.
To be who you are makes it worth the climb.
2003
Content warning for discussions of misogyny, child abuse, reproductive rights, and sexual and physical assault.
Silent Hill 2 deconstructed Silent Hill. Silent Hill 3 deconstructs Silent Hill 2.
The entire ethos of Silent Hill 2 uses Silent Hill as a place of punishment. Rather than being a town filled with monsters brought forth by a cult as it was in the first game, the Silent Hill of Silent Hill 2 is a functional purgatory. It is a place where the guilty must face constructs born of their own sins, taking shape specifically to torment those who have done wrong; children are unaffected, those who can work through their guilt may survive, and those who cannot (or will not) overcome it are punished further with death.
The town in Silent Hill 3 exclusively hurts the innocent.
Heather has done nothing wrong. The worst she’s done is take up smoking, and she’s dropped the habit long before the events of game kick off. She keeps to herself, she doesn’t seem to have any vices, she isn’t promiscuous — which itself is not a bad thing to be, but it’s common knowledge that the horror genre generally doesn’t look too fondly on the libertine — and it’s hard to find something that anyone could fault her for. Why, then, has this world dictated that she must suffer?
Because Heather is a woman.
Technically speaking, she’s only a girl. She’s still just 17. But the horrific acts that men have historically committed against women — stalking, abuse, physical and sexual violence — don’t have a minimum age. A poll conducted in 2018 found that 81% of all female respondents had faced sexual harassment; roughly 27% of those women said that their first time being sexually harassed was between the ages of 13 and 17. 16% said they were as young as 11 to 13 years old. None of these cases happened because they were deserved. There was no justification. There will never be one, because there cannot be one.
But they were women, and for those who are willing to commit these acts, that’s enough of a reason.
I am not myself a woman, nor have I ever identified as one. I’m hesitant to explain my feelings towards this game and the world that it reflects back against ours, because I think it’s easy to come across as a capital-M, capital-A Male Ally who props my voice above those who don’t share the luxury of having a platform like my own. There's a line that must be walked between a point of demonstrating how awful the lived experience of many women is for those who are ignorant, and a point of spouting data and surveys as though these experiences can or should be boiled down to numbers rather than the people behind them. I am an outsider looking in; none of this has happened to me. I don’t face the ever-present threats of patriarchal society in the same way that women do. I’ve never been afraid to walk home by myself. I’ve never had to think my way down a list of what might happen if I reject a guy’s advances. I’ve never been concerned that my government could strip me of my bodily autonomy.
These are not aspects of my reality, but it is the reality of many.
Silent Hill 3 is not a subtle game, nor should it be. Our introduction to Douglas has him silently following behind our protagonist, chasing her into the bathroom and forcing her to escape through an open window; many of the monsters evoke phallic, fetal, or imposing masculine symbols through their appearances; Heather carries a pocket knife for protection on her person long before she becomes aware of the Otherworld. The character of Stanley Coleman is a stalker obsessed with Heather, skulking around to follow her through the hospital and leaving notes to confess his unrequited love for her; always boiling beneath his adoration and fixation is the unspoken threat that he will hurt Heather and/or the people around her if she isn't willing to reciprocate his feelings.
Perhaps most blatant (and thus what guides people into believing that this is the only theme of the game) is the unwanted pregnancy parallel. Heather has been selected against her will to be the one who will give birth to God, constantly being told that she doesn't understand the importance of her role when she says she doesn't want to. The one person who she can rely on to respect her choice — her father, Harry — is unceremoniously killed as retribution for Heather's unwillingness to carry God to term. And the end of the story, moments before Heather is about to be killed by Alessa to stop God's birth, Heather swallows a substance that causes her to expel the fetus from her body.
Silent Hill 3 is a horror story about being a woman.
Heather is an outstanding character. Despite her running through as close to Hell as one could imagine, she refuses to succumb to her environment. She fights. She struggles. She makes jokes and glib observations about the surroundings, studying everything that she can get her hands on to figure out how to survive and push forward. She's funny, and she isn't afraid to call people out on their bullshit directly to their face.
But there's a quiet moment at the middle of the game where she's sitting in Douglas's car on the way to Silent Hill, and she tells him the story of her adoption. She tells him how much she misses her dad, and that she never got the chance to tell him how glad she was to be his daughter.
And her heart just breaks.
No game made in the twenty years since this came out has been able to replicate the sheer amount of pain and exhaustion on her face while she stares out the window and chokes back tears. It's brutal. Her pursuits of revenge and closure and freedom mean that she cannot stop, no matter how worn she is.
A character as strong as Heather needs an equally strong supporting cast, and Silent Hill 3 is no slouch in this regard, either. The game is wonderful at creating these real, multi-faceted characters who carry with them at least one fault for every virtue. Douglas is a careless, headstrong dickhead when it comes to his private investigation work, but we gradually discover that he's a warm, damaged man who wants to be a better person than he was before his son died. Vincent is a shady, narcissistic bastard who's playing all sides for his own selfish desires, but he does legitimately help Heather put a stop to the cult's activities. Claudia is a ruthless murderer, but being abused as a child caused her to adopt a martyr mentality and throw herself wholly into her religion; the bitter irony is that Claudia perpetuates the same cycles of abuse which she suffered in the the name of bringing Paradise to Earth.
There's something to be said about how the non-Otherworld environments seem so keenly tweaked to be strange and dangerous, almost as though they're places where people aren't meant to be. An employees-only hallway in an abandoned shopping mall, an empty subway station that goes five stories underground, maintenance tunnels deep beneath the city, a derelict office building, the manifestation of a nightmare you had about an amusement park; being here feels wrong. Heather — and by extension, you — are all alone in these ethereal places, wandering around in the dark and wondering if every little creak or radio crackle is a warning of something nearby intent on doing harm. In some ways, the scenes in our world are more frightening than the ones in the Otherworld; our reality has the exact same monsters, but you wouldn't know that by looking at it.
As it stands, I'm kind of shocked that this game winds up with a general reputation of being the inferior younger sibling to its big brother, Silent Hill 2. For years I'd heard nothing besides the fact that 2 was the best entry in the series — perhaps the best horror game ever made — and none of the other entries could measure up. I love Silent Hill 2. I love the themes. I love the way it looks. I love the story of Mary and James.
But I think some people love Silent Hill 2 for the reason that it's easy to delve into. Picture in your mind the average person who would be playing games like these in the early-2000s, and then ask yourself if you think they would have an easier time immediately relating more to James or to Heather. It shouldn't be hard to figure out who, and it should be even easier to figure out why.
I think Silent Hill 3 is the better of the two.
Abortion is still de jure illegal in Japan. Those seeking to terminate a pregnancy may only do so if they can demonstrate that the pregnancy would cause a sufficient health or fiscal risk, or if their pregnancy was the result of rape. Married women require written consent from their husbands before they can even be considered. In a Japanese survey conducted during the campaign of an 86,000-signature petition to put an end to mandatory spousal consent, some 13% of women reported being forced to carry a pregnancy to term against their will.
Heather Mason took the aglaophotis in her pendant to terminate God in 2003.
Emergency contraceptives wouldn’t be legalized in Japan for another eight years.
Silent Hill 2 deconstructed Silent Hill. Silent Hill 3 deconstructs Silent Hill 2.
The entire ethos of Silent Hill 2 uses Silent Hill as a place of punishment. Rather than being a town filled with monsters brought forth by a cult as it was in the first game, the Silent Hill of Silent Hill 2 is a functional purgatory. It is a place where the guilty must face constructs born of their own sins, taking shape specifically to torment those who have done wrong; children are unaffected, those who can work through their guilt may survive, and those who cannot (or will not) overcome it are punished further with death.
The town in Silent Hill 3 exclusively hurts the innocent.
Heather has done nothing wrong. The worst she’s done is take up smoking, and she’s dropped the habit long before the events of game kick off. She keeps to herself, she doesn’t seem to have any vices, she isn’t promiscuous — which itself is not a bad thing to be, but it’s common knowledge that the horror genre generally doesn’t look too fondly on the libertine — and it’s hard to find something that anyone could fault her for. Why, then, has this world dictated that she must suffer?
Because Heather is a woman.
Technically speaking, she’s only a girl. She’s still just 17. But the horrific acts that men have historically committed against women — stalking, abuse, physical and sexual violence — don’t have a minimum age. A poll conducted in 2018 found that 81% of all female respondents had faced sexual harassment; roughly 27% of those women said that their first time being sexually harassed was between the ages of 13 and 17. 16% said they were as young as 11 to 13 years old. None of these cases happened because they were deserved. There was no justification. There will never be one, because there cannot be one.
But they were women, and for those who are willing to commit these acts, that’s enough of a reason.
I am not myself a woman, nor have I ever identified as one. I’m hesitant to explain my feelings towards this game and the world that it reflects back against ours, because I think it’s easy to come across as a capital-M, capital-A Male Ally who props my voice above those who don’t share the luxury of having a platform like my own. There's a line that must be walked between a point of demonstrating how awful the lived experience of many women is for those who are ignorant, and a point of spouting data and surveys as though these experiences can or should be boiled down to numbers rather than the people behind them. I am an outsider looking in; none of this has happened to me. I don’t face the ever-present threats of patriarchal society in the same way that women do. I’ve never been afraid to walk home by myself. I’ve never had to think my way down a list of what might happen if I reject a guy’s advances. I’ve never been concerned that my government could strip me of my bodily autonomy.
These are not aspects of my reality, but it is the reality of many.
Silent Hill 3 is not a subtle game, nor should it be. Our introduction to Douglas has him silently following behind our protagonist, chasing her into the bathroom and forcing her to escape through an open window; many of the monsters evoke phallic, fetal, or imposing masculine symbols through their appearances; Heather carries a pocket knife for protection on her person long before she becomes aware of the Otherworld. The character of Stanley Coleman is a stalker obsessed with Heather, skulking around to follow her through the hospital and leaving notes to confess his unrequited love for her; always boiling beneath his adoration and fixation is the unspoken threat that he will hurt Heather and/or the people around her if she isn't willing to reciprocate his feelings.
Perhaps most blatant (and thus what guides people into believing that this is the only theme of the game) is the unwanted pregnancy parallel. Heather has been selected against her will to be the one who will give birth to God, constantly being told that she doesn't understand the importance of her role when she says she doesn't want to. The one person who she can rely on to respect her choice — her father, Harry — is unceremoniously killed as retribution for Heather's unwillingness to carry God to term. And the end of the story, moments before Heather is about to be killed by Alessa to stop God's birth, Heather swallows a substance that causes her to expel the fetus from her body.
Silent Hill 3 is a horror story about being a woman.
Heather is an outstanding character. Despite her running through as close to Hell as one could imagine, she refuses to succumb to her environment. She fights. She struggles. She makes jokes and glib observations about the surroundings, studying everything that she can get her hands on to figure out how to survive and push forward. She's funny, and she isn't afraid to call people out on their bullshit directly to their face.
But there's a quiet moment at the middle of the game where she's sitting in Douglas's car on the way to Silent Hill, and she tells him the story of her adoption. She tells him how much she misses her dad, and that she never got the chance to tell him how glad she was to be his daughter.
And her heart just breaks.
No game made in the twenty years since this came out has been able to replicate the sheer amount of pain and exhaustion on her face while she stares out the window and chokes back tears. It's brutal. Her pursuits of revenge and closure and freedom mean that she cannot stop, no matter how worn she is.
A character as strong as Heather needs an equally strong supporting cast, and Silent Hill 3 is no slouch in this regard, either. The game is wonderful at creating these real, multi-faceted characters who carry with them at least one fault for every virtue. Douglas is a careless, headstrong dickhead when it comes to his private investigation work, but we gradually discover that he's a warm, damaged man who wants to be a better person than he was before his son died. Vincent is a shady, narcissistic bastard who's playing all sides for his own selfish desires, but he does legitimately help Heather put a stop to the cult's activities. Claudia is a ruthless murderer, but being abused as a child caused her to adopt a martyr mentality and throw herself wholly into her religion; the bitter irony is that Claudia perpetuates the same cycles of abuse which she suffered in the the name of bringing Paradise to Earth.
There's something to be said about how the non-Otherworld environments seem so keenly tweaked to be strange and dangerous, almost as though they're places where people aren't meant to be. An employees-only hallway in an abandoned shopping mall, an empty subway station that goes five stories underground, maintenance tunnels deep beneath the city, a derelict office building, the manifestation of a nightmare you had about an amusement park; being here feels wrong. Heather — and by extension, you — are all alone in these ethereal places, wandering around in the dark and wondering if every little creak or radio crackle is a warning of something nearby intent on doing harm. In some ways, the scenes in our world are more frightening than the ones in the Otherworld; our reality has the exact same monsters, but you wouldn't know that by looking at it.
As it stands, I'm kind of shocked that this game winds up with a general reputation of being the inferior younger sibling to its big brother, Silent Hill 2. For years I'd heard nothing besides the fact that 2 was the best entry in the series — perhaps the best horror game ever made — and none of the other entries could measure up. I love Silent Hill 2. I love the themes. I love the way it looks. I love the story of Mary and James.
But I think some people love Silent Hill 2 for the reason that it's easy to delve into. Picture in your mind the average person who would be playing games like these in the early-2000s, and then ask yourself if you think they would have an easier time immediately relating more to James or to Heather. It shouldn't be hard to figure out who, and it should be even easier to figure out why.
I think Silent Hill 3 is the better of the two.
Abortion is still de jure illegal in Japan. Those seeking to terminate a pregnancy may only do so if they can demonstrate that the pregnancy would cause a sufficient health or fiscal risk, or if their pregnancy was the result of rape. Married women require written consent from their husbands before they can even be considered. In a Japanese survey conducted during the campaign of an 86,000-signature petition to put an end to mandatory spousal consent, some 13% of women reported being forced to carry a pregnancy to term against their will.
Heather Mason took the aglaophotis in her pendant to terminate God in 2003.
Emergency contraceptives wouldn’t be legalized in Japan for another eight years.
Fake plastic Toads.
Have you ever seen the NileBlue video where he makes the world's purest cookie? It's a pretty entertaining watch, if you haven't seen it; essentially, it's a professional home chemist sourcing some incredibly expensive lab-grade materials in order to chemically synthesize a completely refined cookie. No contaminants, no adjustments to or from the recipe, no ingredients which haven't been first sourced and validated by a chain of scientists. It costs thousands of dollars, requires a fully-stocked laboratory environment, and only ends up producing a single cookie. But, by the end of the video, it's ready. They've got a cookie. A real, honest-to-God, chocolate chip cookie. It's been made in a lab rather than in a kitchen, but it's a cookie all the same. The chemist lifts it up and takes a bite. He chews, and chews, and then grimaces, setting it back down. He says the cookie is bad, and he doesn't know what went wrong.
New Super Mario Bros. U is that cookie.
The word of the day is "sterile", because it's the only thing you could possibly call New Super Mario Bros. U. It uses heat-blasted tools fresh from the autoclave because it's horrified that it might introduce an imperfection or accidentally open a new pathway for experimentation. It's a base template released as a finished project. It's math worksheets. Nothing has been done to make it interesting, because the director has mentally checked out. The newest additions are coins that are colored green rather than gold or red or blue, and a flower power-up that lets you shoot snowballs instead of fireballs. We aren't exactly inventing the wheel, here.
It's a remarkably uninteresting game. The music is some of the worst in the series, everything looks like shitty action figures, there are essentially zero unique power-ups or gimmicks to keep the gameplay fresh. You would hope, then, that the levels would be some great pure-platforming challenges with solid designs and interesting layouts. They aren't. The overwhelming majority of the levels in this are long platforms followed by instakill pits followed by long platforms. You run in a straight line, jump over the pit, run in a straight line, jump over another pit, and repeat until the level ends. Sometimes the pit is bottomless, and other times it's filled with poison, and other times it's filled with lava. Picking up frozen enemies requires a second button press rather than just holding down the run button the way that you do for koopa shells, for some reason. There was one level that was actually interesting, where everything was shaded to look like Starry Night, and it seems to be the only level that anyone actually remembers. I suppose there's also the level near the end which suddenly requires you to use tilt controls for the first time in seven worlds, but that one's more memorable in the sense that you've never forgotten the time that you really embarrassed yourself in school.
Mario as a franchise (the 2D department, at least) was clearly in need of a shake-up long before this came out. It's a stagnant pool, filled with bacteria and fly eggs, completely unfocused. Even New Super Mario Bros. 2 at least tried to do something interesting by flooding the screen with coins. What does this have? Really, what does it have? Some boring levels and no personality? The vastly superior Super Mario Bros. Wonder shares only one game designer and two level designers from New Super Mario Bros. U out of the respective nine and twelve members of each department for Wonder. I don't want to suggest that those who worked on New Super Mario Bros. U and found themselves ultimately replaced are talentless — many of them are currently doing far better work on other, non-Mario games — but I think it's obvious that they got complacent. This game feels like the product of bored minds. Something released purely by compulsion; "the console is drowning and we need a new Mario game, so just get one out in time for Christmas!"
This is an era of Mario that I'm very glad has been left behind. Hopefully it'll remain as little more than a Super Mario Maker template for interested fans to add four games worth of tools to in order to bolster it into something actually entertaining. Aside from that, it's best that we just forget about this and move on. This should have stayed trapped in the coffin that is the Wii U instead of getting a Switch re-release. I'm certain that the resources wasted on putting it out again could have been better used literally anywhere else in the company.
Baby Yoshi fucking rules.
Have you ever seen the NileBlue video where he makes the world's purest cookie? It's a pretty entertaining watch, if you haven't seen it; essentially, it's a professional home chemist sourcing some incredibly expensive lab-grade materials in order to chemically synthesize a completely refined cookie. No contaminants, no adjustments to or from the recipe, no ingredients which haven't been first sourced and validated by a chain of scientists. It costs thousands of dollars, requires a fully-stocked laboratory environment, and only ends up producing a single cookie. But, by the end of the video, it's ready. They've got a cookie. A real, honest-to-God, chocolate chip cookie. It's been made in a lab rather than in a kitchen, but it's a cookie all the same. The chemist lifts it up and takes a bite. He chews, and chews, and then grimaces, setting it back down. He says the cookie is bad, and he doesn't know what went wrong.
New Super Mario Bros. U is that cookie.
The word of the day is "sterile", because it's the only thing you could possibly call New Super Mario Bros. U. It uses heat-blasted tools fresh from the autoclave because it's horrified that it might introduce an imperfection or accidentally open a new pathway for experimentation. It's a base template released as a finished project. It's math worksheets. Nothing has been done to make it interesting, because the director has mentally checked out. The newest additions are coins that are colored green rather than gold or red or blue, and a flower power-up that lets you shoot snowballs instead of fireballs. We aren't exactly inventing the wheel, here.
It's a remarkably uninteresting game. The music is some of the worst in the series, everything looks like shitty action figures, there are essentially zero unique power-ups or gimmicks to keep the gameplay fresh. You would hope, then, that the levels would be some great pure-platforming challenges with solid designs and interesting layouts. They aren't. The overwhelming majority of the levels in this are long platforms followed by instakill pits followed by long platforms. You run in a straight line, jump over the pit, run in a straight line, jump over another pit, and repeat until the level ends. Sometimes the pit is bottomless, and other times it's filled with poison, and other times it's filled with lava. Picking up frozen enemies requires a second button press rather than just holding down the run button the way that you do for koopa shells, for some reason. There was one level that was actually interesting, where everything was shaded to look like Starry Night, and it seems to be the only level that anyone actually remembers. I suppose there's also the level near the end which suddenly requires you to use tilt controls for the first time in seven worlds, but that one's more memorable in the sense that you've never forgotten the time that you really embarrassed yourself in school.
Mario as a franchise (the 2D department, at least) was clearly in need of a shake-up long before this came out. It's a stagnant pool, filled with bacteria and fly eggs, completely unfocused. Even New Super Mario Bros. 2 at least tried to do something interesting by flooding the screen with coins. What does this have? Really, what does it have? Some boring levels and no personality? The vastly superior Super Mario Bros. Wonder shares only one game designer and two level designers from New Super Mario Bros. U out of the respective nine and twelve members of each department for Wonder. I don't want to suggest that those who worked on New Super Mario Bros. U and found themselves ultimately replaced are talentless — many of them are currently doing far better work on other, non-Mario games — but I think it's obvious that they got complacent. This game feels like the product of bored minds. Something released purely by compulsion; "the console is drowning and we need a new Mario game, so just get one out in time for Christmas!"
This is an era of Mario that I'm very glad has been left behind. Hopefully it'll remain as little more than a Super Mario Maker template for interested fans to add four games worth of tools to in order to bolster it into something actually entertaining. Aside from that, it's best that we just forget about this and move on. This should have stayed trapped in the coffin that is the Wii U instead of getting a Switch re-release. I'm certain that the resources wasted on putting it out again could have been better used literally anywhere else in the company.
Baby Yoshi fucking rules.