rukashii
192 Reviews liked by rukashii
It almost feels silly to call anything else an RPG now that this exists. It's a perfect culmination of the idea of injecting stats and rolls and modifiers into a game that actually lets you play a role, to define who this amnesiac man is and how he relates to the world he inhabits.
And what a world: broken and tragicomic, Revachol comes off at first glance as a bitter satire written by a disillusioned leftist. But the deeper you dive, the more it opens up into something haunting and beautiful in its own right, with even a faint glimmer of hope hidden among the ruins. No people is truly broken, argues Disco Elysium, while they still have hearts to care for one another and arms to link against their oppressors.
And what a world: broken and tragicomic, Revachol comes off at first glance as a bitter satire written by a disillusioned leftist. But the deeper you dive, the more it opens up into something haunting and beautiful in its own right, with even a faint glimmer of hope hidden among the ruins. No people is truly broken, argues Disco Elysium, while they still have hearts to care for one another and arms to link against their oppressors.
Oh, he's just like me!
Content warning for discussions of substance abuse and suicidal ideation.
I've been putting off writing this review for a while, because I think this is one of the most beautiful pieces of art ever created. More than any film, more than any song, and certainly more than any other video game. We all have some piece of media that feels wholly personal to us — if you haven't found yours yet, you will eventually — and Disco Elysium is mine. Nothing else has made me feel so seen, so understood; it's a very, very powerful feeling when you discover that you're not as alone as you thought you were. This is review #100, so fuck it. Let's do this.
My closest personal friends know about my struggles with alcoholism. Some of them are on Backloggd, but most of them aren’t, so this is going to be the first time a lot of you who only know me from here are going to hear about this. Some of the roughest years of my life kicked off in 2016. I’d grown up in an abusive household (surely a story for another time), and 2016 was the year that I turned 18. I worked as much as I could, neglected school as much as I was able to, moved out, and never looked back. It fucking sucked. It sucked slightly less than staying at home and having to deal with my father getting shitfaced and threatening to kill me every night, but it sucked.
In Canada, the legal drinking age is 19. We’ve got access to the stuff two years earlier than you Americans do. What that meant for me, with my big beard and sunken eyes and deep voice, was that nobody at the local liquor stores had been carding me since the eleventh grade. The laws have changed since then, and everyone now has to present ID regardless of how old they look — I had a fake in case they asked, anyway — but no cashier ever looked twice at me. So I had easy, consistent access to alcohol, and I gradually gained a dependence on the stuff. Well, I say “gradually”, but it was pretty fast. No pipeline for me, of having a drink before dinner turning into a couple, then a couple more; I drank as much as I could because it made me feel stupid, and then it made me fall asleep, and that was a pattern that felt better than dealing with my shriveling bank account and my constant desire to curl up and quietly die.
One day, probably about a year or two later — I know a lot of people mark the exact day they decided to start being sober, but I was going through my life in a complete fucking blur — I realized that I needed to either stop drinking, or it would kill me. I don’t know what triggered that thought, but I didn’t really care. I’d die, so what? Yeah, the thought was scary, but my life was shit. It’d be like getting upset over losing a quarter in the couch cushions. Oh, well.
Then, another thought hit me: you’re turning into your father.
That one got me.
Spite is a powerful motivator.
Disco Elysium came to me at a time where I was starting to settle into a sober groove. No more drinking, even though I still wanted it. If you’ve never dealt with substance abuse like that, imagine a big plate of your favorite food, constantly in front of you, and you’re not allowed to take a bite. Everyone else is always talking about how delicious it is, and how much they love it, and then they get weird when you try explaining that you can’t have any. People start talking about you behind your back, about how you’re “the guy who says he can’t have any”. Other people will actively bait you into trying some. They’ll tease you, call you a pussy, mock you for your boundaries. It’s shit. It’s fucking shit and it never goes away. I digress.
With time, it gets a little easier. You recognize the kinds of things that’ll set you off, that’ll make you want it. You learn to avoid them, you learn to cope with them. You make little deals with yourself, like how I swapped from booze to weed; the world’s no fun to take on completely sober, is my rationale. It’s the leaf or the sauce, and one of them is a whole lot fucking worse for me than the other.
The detective is in a very similar boat. He’s a man so subsumed by his addictions that he’s lost every part of him that isn’t defined by the substances he takes. His memory of who he is, what he believes, who he loves; it’s all gone, washed away beneath a tide of liquor and pills and powders and research chemicals. Ostensibly, the goal of the game is to solve a murder, but the real mystery is in uncovering who the detective is — was, perhaps — before he drowned every part of himself in drugs. If there’s nothing that can be remembered, it must be uncovered. If there’s nothing to be uncovered, it must be invented. Harry DuBois, Raphael Ambrosius Costeau, Tequila Sunset, the Icebreaker; who is he, really? Some of these? All of them? None?
As you play, the detective is constantly challenged to give in to his vices. It’s easy to take drugs. Beneficial, even! But everything in Revachol can be the catalyst for change, much as it can all be an excuse to keep things going as they are. The detective can begin the long, slow, arduous road to sobriety, doubtlessly inspired by his partner and friend Kim Kitsuragi.
Kim is one of the best characters ever written. He is everything the detective is not. He can control his urges. He’s got himself in order. What he sees in the detective does not impress him…initially. The detective, for all of his faults, has kept one thing true about himself; he is a damn good detective. Kim sees this. He latches onto it, and doesn’t let go. In the darkest times, in the hardest times, he reminds the detective that he is a damn good detective. The detective needs someone like Kim to ground him, and Kim needs someone like the detective to bring the case to a close. Getting Kim to trust you might be the greatest sense of achievement you will ever feel in a game. To be a constant fuck-up who eventually stops fucking up is a triumph, and Disco Elysium captures the feeling perfectly.
It’s no secret that Robert Kurvitz, the lead writer of the game, has struggled with substance abuse in the past. He once mentioned in an interview that he believed everyone else on the development team had, too. This is the kind of story that can only be written at this level of depth and nuance by people who truly understand what it’s like to find themselves at rock bottom and claw their way back up. It’s masterful. I’ve shed a lot of tears over Disco Elysium, and I know there are going to be a whole lot more to come.
I’m about five years dry, I think. My sense of time is all fucked up. It’s gotten easier to stay away, but not much.
Disco Elysium is still my favorite game.
Pirate it. ZA/UM got stolen from its creators by Estonian businessmen.
Content warning for discussions of substance abuse and suicidal ideation.
I've been putting off writing this review for a while, because I think this is one of the most beautiful pieces of art ever created. More than any film, more than any song, and certainly more than any other video game. We all have some piece of media that feels wholly personal to us — if you haven't found yours yet, you will eventually — and Disco Elysium is mine. Nothing else has made me feel so seen, so understood; it's a very, very powerful feeling when you discover that you're not as alone as you thought you were. This is review #100, so fuck it. Let's do this.
My closest personal friends know about my struggles with alcoholism. Some of them are on Backloggd, but most of them aren’t, so this is going to be the first time a lot of you who only know me from here are going to hear about this. Some of the roughest years of my life kicked off in 2016. I’d grown up in an abusive household (surely a story for another time), and 2016 was the year that I turned 18. I worked as much as I could, neglected school as much as I was able to, moved out, and never looked back. It fucking sucked. It sucked slightly less than staying at home and having to deal with my father getting shitfaced and threatening to kill me every night, but it sucked.
In Canada, the legal drinking age is 19. We’ve got access to the stuff two years earlier than you Americans do. What that meant for me, with my big beard and sunken eyes and deep voice, was that nobody at the local liquor stores had been carding me since the eleventh grade. The laws have changed since then, and everyone now has to present ID regardless of how old they look — I had a fake in case they asked, anyway — but no cashier ever looked twice at me. So I had easy, consistent access to alcohol, and I gradually gained a dependence on the stuff. Well, I say “gradually”, but it was pretty fast. No pipeline for me, of having a drink before dinner turning into a couple, then a couple more; I drank as much as I could because it made me feel stupid, and then it made me fall asleep, and that was a pattern that felt better than dealing with my shriveling bank account and my constant desire to curl up and quietly die.
One day, probably about a year or two later — I know a lot of people mark the exact day they decided to start being sober, but I was going through my life in a complete fucking blur — I realized that I needed to either stop drinking, or it would kill me. I don’t know what triggered that thought, but I didn’t really care. I’d die, so what? Yeah, the thought was scary, but my life was shit. It’d be like getting upset over losing a quarter in the couch cushions. Oh, well.
Then, another thought hit me: you’re turning into your father.
That one got me.
Spite is a powerful motivator.
Disco Elysium came to me at a time where I was starting to settle into a sober groove. No more drinking, even though I still wanted it. If you’ve never dealt with substance abuse like that, imagine a big plate of your favorite food, constantly in front of you, and you’re not allowed to take a bite. Everyone else is always talking about how delicious it is, and how much they love it, and then they get weird when you try explaining that you can’t have any. People start talking about you behind your back, about how you’re “the guy who says he can’t have any”. Other people will actively bait you into trying some. They’ll tease you, call you a pussy, mock you for your boundaries. It’s shit. It’s fucking shit and it never goes away. I digress.
With time, it gets a little easier. You recognize the kinds of things that’ll set you off, that’ll make you want it. You learn to avoid them, you learn to cope with them. You make little deals with yourself, like how I swapped from booze to weed; the world’s no fun to take on completely sober, is my rationale. It’s the leaf or the sauce, and one of them is a whole lot fucking worse for me than the other.
The detective is in a very similar boat. He’s a man so subsumed by his addictions that he’s lost every part of him that isn’t defined by the substances he takes. His memory of who he is, what he believes, who he loves; it’s all gone, washed away beneath a tide of liquor and pills and powders and research chemicals. Ostensibly, the goal of the game is to solve a murder, but the real mystery is in uncovering who the detective is — was, perhaps — before he drowned every part of himself in drugs. If there’s nothing that can be remembered, it must be uncovered. If there’s nothing to be uncovered, it must be invented. Harry DuBois, Raphael Ambrosius Costeau, Tequila Sunset, the Icebreaker; who is he, really? Some of these? All of them? None?
As you play, the detective is constantly challenged to give in to his vices. It’s easy to take drugs. Beneficial, even! But everything in Revachol can be the catalyst for change, much as it can all be an excuse to keep things going as they are. The detective can begin the long, slow, arduous road to sobriety, doubtlessly inspired by his partner and friend Kim Kitsuragi.
Kim is one of the best characters ever written. He is everything the detective is not. He can control his urges. He’s got himself in order. What he sees in the detective does not impress him…initially. The detective, for all of his faults, has kept one thing true about himself; he is a damn good detective. Kim sees this. He latches onto it, and doesn’t let go. In the darkest times, in the hardest times, he reminds the detective that he is a damn good detective. The detective needs someone like Kim to ground him, and Kim needs someone like the detective to bring the case to a close. Getting Kim to trust you might be the greatest sense of achievement you will ever feel in a game. To be a constant fuck-up who eventually stops fucking up is a triumph, and Disco Elysium captures the feeling perfectly.
It’s no secret that Robert Kurvitz, the lead writer of the game, has struggled with substance abuse in the past. He once mentioned in an interview that he believed everyone else on the development team had, too. This is the kind of story that can only be written at this level of depth and nuance by people who truly understand what it’s like to find themselves at rock bottom and claw their way back up. It’s masterful. I’ve shed a lot of tears over Disco Elysium, and I know there are going to be a whole lot more to come.
I’m about five years dry, I think. My sense of time is all fucked up. It’s gotten easier to stay away, but not much.
Disco Elysium is still my favorite game.
Pirate it. ZA/UM got stolen from its creators by Estonian businessmen.
YOU -- "But what if humanity keeps letting us down?"
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "Nobody said that fulfilling the proletariat's historic role would be easy. It demands great faith with no promise of tangible reward. But that doesn't mean we can simply give up."
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "I guess you can say we believe it *because* it's impossible. It's our way of saying we refuse to accept that the world has to remain... like this..."
---
A 2 week old fetid corpse hangs from a tree, a ghastly sight; a human life reduced to a macabre piñata for small children to pelt stones at in a twisted idea of entertainment. The children themselves, a hopped-up junkie and a nameless orphan respectively, both the result of a broken system that has unequivocally failed them. The district of Martinaise, pockmarked by the remnants of revolutionary war, abandoned by the world at large, it and its people subject to the pissing contests of petty government officials to see who is lumped with the task of looking after the place, the site of a months-long, on-the-brink-of-warfare labor dispute that's about to boil over with the lynching of a PMC soldier who was meant to "defuse" the situation. All of this, left to the hands of a suicidal, vice-riddled husk of a cop who can barely get his necktie down from the ceiling fan without potentially going into cardiac arrest. Disco Elysium is an undeniably depressing experience that isn't afraid to cover the messy spectrum of humanity, from insane race-realist phrenologists to meth-addled children to every kind of ghoulish bureaucrat under the sun. The district of Martinaise, as fictional as it is, is a place I've seen before, reflected in the streets, reflected in the people, reflected in the system; an undeniably full-faced look at the horrors faced by those below, and the resulting apathy expressed by those above.
---
SUGGESTION -- Brother, you should put me in front of a firing squad. I have no words for how I failed you.
---
Every aspect of Disco Elysium reflects its overall theme of "failure". Martinaise itself has been failed by the institutions meant to help it, abandoned by the powers that be, who only intervene when it looks like anyone is trying to enact change. NPCs can reminisce on days gone by, of the tragedies in their past, or of their cynical rebuke of the future. The various schools of political thought you can adopt and their representatives are mercilessly picked apart, from the Communists too entrenched in theory to take notice of the suffering around them, to the frankly pathetic fascists who use their prejudiced beliefs to shield themselves from their own flaws. Our protagonist is constantly haunted by his past and even starts the game recovering from his own self-destructive ways, and on a gameplay level, the way that our intrepid detective can fumble the bag in nearly every way imaginable and still be allowed to make progress in investigations and sidequests is commendable. Failure is so integral, so vital to Disco Elysium that it's not only an aspect deeply ingrained in its story, but also its very gameplay.
---
VOLITION [Easy: Success] -- No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it's still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You're still alive.
---
And yet, despite this cloying cynicism and acknowledgement of the ugliness of reality, Disco Elysium is magical because of the fact that it ultimately believes that there is a world worth fighting for in the end. It would be incredibly easy to be defeatist in the face of such constant, institutional and societal failure we are presented with in Revachol, to be ceaselessly apathetic in the face of your own overwhelming shortcomings, to fall back into the comfort of old vices instead of facing our problems head on. Still, Disco Elysium has that fire inside of it, an untapped hatred for fence-sitting, for passivity in the face of oppression and valuing the status quo over any meaningful change. Roll up your sleeves and fight for a better future.
---
RHETORIC -- "You've built it before, they've built it before. Hasn't really worked out yet, but neither has love -- should we just stop building love, too?"
---
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "In dark times, should the stars also go out?"
---
RHETORIC -- "Say one of these fascist or communist things or fuck off."
---
Disco Elysium believes in the people. It believes in humanity, no matter how messy our supposed paragons are, or how flawed our beliefs and values can be, or how cyclical we can be in the face of it all. In a city plagued by an inability to move on, Disco Elysium says that there is always a possibility of change. If two broke Communists and a junkie wino can defy the very laws of physics in a slummy apartment, no matter how briefly, with the power of their faith and co-operation; imagine what we could do as a group. As a city. As a species.
Disco Elysium says that the cup is half full. Even if we won't see the own fruits of our labor in our lifetimes, it still looks you in the eyes and says:
"The only promise it offers is that the future can be better than the past, if we're willing to work and fight and die for it," a conviction belted out by the youths of tomorrow.
"Un jour je serai de retour près de toi", written in bright burning letters across a market square.
"TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE/ONLY IN THE NEXT WORLD--FOR NEW PEOPLE/IT IS TOO LATE FOR US," painted on the side of an eight-story tenement.
"Disco Inferno...," a lone voice belted out through a boombox's speakers across a frost-bitten sea.
---
MANKIND, BE VIGILANT; WE LOVED YOU
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "Nobody said that fulfilling the proletariat's historic role would be easy. It demands great faith with no promise of tangible reward. But that doesn't mean we can simply give up."
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "I guess you can say we believe it *because* it's impossible. It's our way of saying we refuse to accept that the world has to remain... like this..."
---
A 2 week old fetid corpse hangs from a tree, a ghastly sight; a human life reduced to a macabre piñata for small children to pelt stones at in a twisted idea of entertainment. The children themselves, a hopped-up junkie and a nameless orphan respectively, both the result of a broken system that has unequivocally failed them. The district of Martinaise, pockmarked by the remnants of revolutionary war, abandoned by the world at large, it and its people subject to the pissing contests of petty government officials to see who is lumped with the task of looking after the place, the site of a months-long, on-the-brink-of-warfare labor dispute that's about to boil over with the lynching of a PMC soldier who was meant to "defuse" the situation. All of this, left to the hands of a suicidal, vice-riddled husk of a cop who can barely get his necktie down from the ceiling fan without potentially going into cardiac arrest. Disco Elysium is an undeniably depressing experience that isn't afraid to cover the messy spectrum of humanity, from insane race-realist phrenologists to meth-addled children to every kind of ghoulish bureaucrat under the sun. The district of Martinaise, as fictional as it is, is a place I've seen before, reflected in the streets, reflected in the people, reflected in the system; an undeniably full-faced look at the horrors faced by those below, and the resulting apathy expressed by those above.
---
SUGGESTION -- Brother, you should put me in front of a firing squad. I have no words for how I failed you.
---
Every aspect of Disco Elysium reflects its overall theme of "failure". Martinaise itself has been failed by the institutions meant to help it, abandoned by the powers that be, who only intervene when it looks like anyone is trying to enact change. NPCs can reminisce on days gone by, of the tragedies in their past, or of their cynical rebuke of the future. The various schools of political thought you can adopt and their representatives are mercilessly picked apart, from the Communists too entrenched in theory to take notice of the suffering around them, to the frankly pathetic fascists who use their prejudiced beliefs to shield themselves from their own flaws. Our protagonist is constantly haunted by his past and even starts the game recovering from his own self-destructive ways, and on a gameplay level, the way that our intrepid detective can fumble the bag in nearly every way imaginable and still be allowed to make progress in investigations and sidequests is commendable. Failure is so integral, so vital to Disco Elysium that it's not only an aspect deeply ingrained in its story, but also its very gameplay.
---
VOLITION [Easy: Success] -- No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it's still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You're still alive.
---
And yet, despite this cloying cynicism and acknowledgement of the ugliness of reality, Disco Elysium is magical because of the fact that it ultimately believes that there is a world worth fighting for in the end. It would be incredibly easy to be defeatist in the face of such constant, institutional and societal failure we are presented with in Revachol, to be ceaselessly apathetic in the face of your own overwhelming shortcomings, to fall back into the comfort of old vices instead of facing our problems head on. Still, Disco Elysium has that fire inside of it, an untapped hatred for fence-sitting, for passivity in the face of oppression and valuing the status quo over any meaningful change. Roll up your sleeves and fight for a better future.
---
RHETORIC -- "You've built it before, they've built it before. Hasn't really worked out yet, but neither has love -- should we just stop building love, too?"
---
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "In dark times, should the stars also go out?"
---
RHETORIC -- "Say one of these fascist or communist things or fuck off."
---
Disco Elysium believes in the people. It believes in humanity, no matter how messy our supposed paragons are, or how flawed our beliefs and values can be, or how cyclical we can be in the face of it all. In a city plagued by an inability to move on, Disco Elysium says that there is always a possibility of change. If two broke Communists and a junkie wino can defy the very laws of physics in a slummy apartment, no matter how briefly, with the power of their faith and co-operation; imagine what we could do as a group. As a city. As a species.
Disco Elysium says that the cup is half full. Even if we won't see the own fruits of our labor in our lifetimes, it still looks you in the eyes and says:
"The only promise it offers is that the future can be better than the past, if we're willing to work and fight and die for it," a conviction belted out by the youths of tomorrow.
"Un jour je serai de retour près de toi", written in bright burning letters across a market square.
"TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE/ONLY IN THE NEXT WORLD--FOR NEW PEOPLE/IT IS TOO LATE FOR US," painted on the side of an eight-story tenement.
"Disco Inferno...," a lone voice belted out through a boombox's speakers across a frost-bitten sea.
---
MANKIND, BE VIGILANT; WE LOVED YOU
you're a good man, kim kitsuragi
life would be more simple if i have my own poochy
Cold Steel I is a game that almost doesn't feel like Trails. It's 3D now, the MC is more anime than all the others (the entire female cast wants him + Persona dating social links), a vast majority of the plot is episodic city exploration that bloats the narrative more than the previous games ever did. But the high points, especially the last part, redeem it.
The music is great (an obvious statement about a Trails game, but noteworthy nonetheless), the combat system is a step up from Crossbell's, and it just feels fun to play, with even its duller moments being pretty comfy. It doesn't have Sky's comfortable and homely vibe, it doesn't have Sky 3rd's level of themes and character writing, it doesn't have Crossbell's consistency and high points overall writing wise, but it does have one thing that it crushes the previous games in — the rule of cool.
Rean (as of this game) is no Kevin, but his struggles are quite compelling, and more importantly, he has a katana, which is the coolest weapon a Trails MC has had yet. He is a cool swordsman. And Cold Steel is very cool when it wants to be. The last act some real hype moments that rarely work for me in videogames, and they were done creatively. I immediately booted up the beginning of CS2 because I just couldn't wait.
Despite at times looking like an obvious lower budget JRPG (why replace 2D character portraits with 3D models..? it took some time to get used to), and having a worse (IMO) art style than Crossbell, CS1 definitely has a nice visual style. Despite being the first 3D Trails game, once you get used to how it looks, it's really nice seeing environments that would have been previously seen from a 2.5D, top-down view in their full glory.
Overall, it's a heavily flawed, inconsistent, almost messy (you could even say it sucks sometimes) game, but when it hits, it's very exciting, and leaves you wanting more. I can't wait to see more of this journey.
The music is great (an obvious statement about a Trails game, but noteworthy nonetheless), the combat system is a step up from Crossbell's, and it just feels fun to play, with even its duller moments being pretty comfy. It doesn't have Sky's comfortable and homely vibe, it doesn't have Sky 3rd's level of themes and character writing, it doesn't have Crossbell's consistency and high points overall writing wise, but it does have one thing that it crushes the previous games in — the rule of cool.
Rean (as of this game) is no Kevin, but his struggles are quite compelling, and more importantly, he has a katana, which is the coolest weapon a Trails MC has had yet. He is a cool swordsman. And Cold Steel is very cool when it wants to be. The last act some real hype moments that rarely work for me in videogames, and they were done creatively. I immediately booted up the beginning of CS2 because I just couldn't wait.
Despite at times looking like an obvious lower budget JRPG (why replace 2D character portraits with 3D models..? it took some time to get used to), and having a worse (IMO) art style than Crossbell, CS1 definitely has a nice visual style. Despite being the first 3D Trails game, once you get used to how it looks, it's really nice seeing environments that would have been previously seen from a 2.5D, top-down view in their full glory.
Overall, it's a heavily flawed, inconsistent, almost messy (you could even say it sucks sometimes) game, but when it hits, it's very exciting, and leaves you wanting more. I can't wait to see more of this journey.
All difficulties. All weapons. 999 hours.
This is the best co-op shooter on the market.
Playing on the two highest difficulties with minimum AP and a maxed out arsenal is fan-fucking-tastic.
Just be sure to bring your own soundtrack.
(Absolutely do not drown out the NPC dialogue though, it's a necessary part of the experience.)
This is the best co-op shooter on the market.
Playing on the two highest difficulties with minimum AP and a maxed out arsenal is fan-fucking-tastic.
Just be sure to bring your own soundtrack.
(Absolutely do not drown out the NPC dialogue though, it's a necessary part of the experience.)
Sometimes I foolishly forget the perfect video game has been by my side for years.
Final Fantasy VII Remake project has absolutely no right working as well as it does, and Rebirth doubles down on what made Remake work -- and occasionally what really brought it down, with more unsavory additions to spare. But don't get the wrong idea, in Rebirth's extravangance and conceptually superfluous presentation exists the most actualized and engrossing take on the events of Final Fantasy VII's post-Midgar disc one that one could possibly even imagine, and I'm saying this as somebody whose love for the original is ironclad and unbreakable: Rebirth is probably going to end up being my favorite way to experience the moments tucked away in what was once a maybe 7 to 12 hour-ish section of a 25 hour long game -- with the 7 to 12 hour section now being close to 50 or 60 hours on average I'd imagine. That is to say, I've come to terms with a lot of the liberties Square has taken with the narrative and characterization and presentation, everything really; what made the original special to me, and most likely to many others as well, can't be perfectly replicated anyways, so I really do mean it when I say that the end result given here is bordering on a "best case scenario" for an adaptation of this vast a scope.
Much like Remake, characters that were once tableaus feel alive and truly connected as a group in a way the original just didn't have the ability to convey, just on an even more detailed and broader scale. And once again don't take that the wrong way, they're tableaus that I cherish dearly -- Final Fantasy VII's cast is my absolute favorite across like, all media -- but they're expanded upon so meaningfully: Tifa's self-destructive people-pleasing, Aerith's down to earth and fun attitude, Barret being the leftist extremist father figure we all know and love, Red XIII's deep loyalty, Yuffie's obnoxious little sister energy, Cait Sith's inopportune joviality, Cid's weird uncle vibes, and Vincent being the resident goth kid that has issues with authority. And their relationships with one other: Aerith's deep friendships with Tifa and Red XIII, Barret's new found friendships with Yuffie and Red XIII, and even the basic and immediate kinship many of them feel towards one other is more detailed and vibrant. I don't know man, I just love all these fuckin' guys, I constantly had the stupidest fucking grin on my face while playing this game it was honestly kinda cringe. Even side characters have so much more going on with them, certain characters that were previously throwaway will often give one a sense that there's something deeper going on with them as they continue to try to exist in this broken world, even the ones that are more comic relief than pathos-invoking.
The plot can often feel clumsy, but I'd say it's a lot more cohesive than the original's, pretty significantly too, the original occasionally feeling aimless and as it tried to find a reason to send you to the next exciting setpiece; even as somebody who replays the game often I find myself being confused which event flag I need to trigger next. And really the original Final Fantasy VII can be best-described as like, a bunch of Final Fantasy VI opera scenes strung together, and Rebirth leans into that so hard that I could see it being way too much for some people. If Final Fantasy XVI was way too dry for many, myself included, I could genuinely see Rebirth being perceived as excessively "wet" for others. Though, as a side note, when playing Final Fantasy XVI I'd often find myself unintentionally dozing off, whereas with Rebirth I actually had enormous trouble sleeping, both in finding a place I wanted to stop playing and the mild insomnia the excitement of getting to play the game again induced in my four day-ish long binge (which, I haven't done in a long fucking time without needing to take significant breaks, which happened quite often with Final Fantasy XVI, and as an adult in her 30s I think that's saying a lot).
On the topic of CBU1 styling super fucking hard on CBU3, god damn the combat in Rebirth is exactly what I wanted it to be, probably my favorite combat in general, from like, any video game? Like, it's not mechanically the deepest action game I've ever played, but it does expand upon Remake's systems in a meaningful way without upending what made those systems work in the first place. Final Fantasy has been focused on telling the player what any given character is about through how they play since like, FF4, and Rebirth's execution of that philosophy doesn't miss at all. Tifa is more fun than ever with an extensive aerial toolkit, I fucking love that she can juggle enemies and it kinda became my go to strategy at a certain point, which like Tifa was the blueprint for young Theia so I'm so glad they did her so good in this game both on a gameplay and narrative level. Red XIII I have to say feels a little bit busted!! I'm bad at playing as him, and he still seems really fucking useful even with unskilled play. Cait Sith I'm still trying to wrap my head around, but I wouldn't have it any other way than making Cait Sith a confusing mess to properly utilize. I wish Vincent was playable, one of like 10 or so boys in media that I actually care about, but I kinda understand why he isn't when he shows up so late that it was probably better to just focus on polishing the rest of the cast than implementing what's probably going to be a pretty unique kit on top of everything else going on.
There's a particular level involving Cait Sith that I'm pretty sure is gonna become like the third or fourth most contentious thing about the game, but I fucking loved it in a really fucked up Banjo-Tooieian way and nobody can take that away from me. The thing I can see becoming the second most contentious aspect about the game, what I thought would be the primary contention until I got to the ending (which I'll get to in a bit, and without spoiling anything, but if you don't want to know literally anything just be forewarned), is the open world game design elements. The best way to describe it is probably Xenoblade with some pointless Ubisoft shit, but it's not really as bad as it sounds, and much of it is entirely optional only providing secondary or tertiary benefits to character progression. As a "modern" interpretation of the original's wide, open, and mostly empty fields populated by sets of random enemy tables, I think it's probably a fair enough way to go about things. The life springs and towers I wasn't so much a fan of, like why do the towers play the BotW theme But At Home when you activate them, but the summon temple thingies felt a lot more meaningful than just picking up a materia off the ground, like how it usually worked in the original (seriously who was dropping all those bahamut variants and just leaving them there). The map designs themselves I did enjoy though, even if the Cosmo Canyon and Gongaga regions can be a little tedious at times, I honestly prefer having to mentally map out the geographical logic of an open world than the modern trend of empty fields with little identity and often no reason to engage with a game's environments and systems.
That said, the more linear "dungeon" levels are kinda mostly the same deal, but they did an even better job at making them feel like real places you're exploring this time 'round, as opposed to the modified FF13 hallway dealie in Remake. They're still largely linear, but the best way to explain why I think they work better is how the Final Fantasy standby of forked paths with option A being progression and option B being a treasure chest is more heavily obscured; I actually got a little bit lost in a couple of levels!!! Though sometimes that was the result of perhaps poor tutorialization of a level's specific gimmick or progress not being visually distinct enough, which like god damn the graphics are so fucking good in this game that it's almost hard to see anything unless I walked up to my TV (maybe I just need to invest in a larger screen for my old lady eyes but whateverrr), it's no wonder that there are several areas where the Uncharted climbing walls have the RE4R yellow paint on them. I know people are gonna slam the game for shit like that, which is like, yeah I can kinda get it, personally would've preferred more non-diegetic signaling over things that make me have annoying CinemaSin-esque intrusive thoughts about "who is painting all this shit out here in the middle of nowhere".
And you know, it's not gonna be the most discussed thing in the end, as uninspired as Rebirth's "structural quirks" may feel now, they'll probly become innocuous given enough time; that's just how these thing typically go. I wanna say the same will happen for the game's ending which... yeah. Not gonna say much here, but if you find yourself frustrated by it, I'd say give yourself some space and rewatch it on YouTube or something. It's a lot to take in, and I found it a lot more impactful after I had gotten some sleep and finally digested what was being shown to me. I don't think it was all exactly what I wanted it to be, far from it maybe, but there's something to be said about the way the entirety of Rebirth takes special moments dear to us and recontextualizes them into new special moments, sometimes even more special.
And a bit of a tangent, but I loathe the critic scores for this game. Not so much because they're necessarily wrong for enjoying the game, but because I'm starting to strongly believe that art, and especially interactive art, can't really be quantified on such simple terms, especially when people tend to have such viscerally opposed reactions to their experiences with any given work. What does a 10/10 even mean? On a personal level I could almost understand, but detached from the context of that personal experience how can we consider any piece of media to be in some arbitrary upper percentile of perfection? I guess I'm saying this because I know with scores like that people are going to come at this game with a certain set of expectations, but despite it being one of the most gorgeous and polished Final Fantasy titles that CBU1 has brought out in recent years, it's a deeply uneven experience. You will be frustrated, maybe you'll even get annoyed at the many side quests that suck ass and are total shit!!! Or something, maybe you'll hate the combat even if it's exactly what my brain has always wanted FF7's combat to be. But I guess like, when you look at a piece of art in its totality as opposed to a given qualification of Good or Bad, it's easier to just appreciate things as they are. Or even fucking hate them for what they are! People on this website tend to tear the shit out of really popular games and who's to say they're wrong for looking past consensus into a deeper inner truth, which you know, even if that comes from a place of unfounded contrarianism, good for them, man. Fuck video games!!
I hope it doesn't come off like I'm waffling or anything, I just really love this game, and I feel like the things I hated about it only made me love it more in a really fucked up way. I think playing Drakengard 3 for the first time a year ago gave me brain damage or something. Also like, on a final note, let me get more on brand here: there's some premier fucking queerbaiting going on here, and if that ain't more accurate to the actual single lesbian in her early 30s experience than any other AAA video game that has some fake ass porn-afflicted interpretation of sapphic romance where flesh puppets say sweet nothings at each other after completing a single questline or whatever the fuck, than I don't know what is. Anyways, sorry I had to make it gay in the end, but truly that is what the Final Fantasy VII was about all along: twinks with swords and bisexual women who can suplex kaijus. Which, you know, being able to do the latter is what's going to be main determinant if part 3 is good or not, so the ball's in your court now Square...
Much like Remake, characters that were once tableaus feel alive and truly connected as a group in a way the original just didn't have the ability to convey, just on an even more detailed and broader scale. And once again don't take that the wrong way, they're tableaus that I cherish dearly -- Final Fantasy VII's cast is my absolute favorite across like, all media -- but they're expanded upon so meaningfully: Tifa's self-destructive people-pleasing, Aerith's down to earth and fun attitude, Barret being the leftist extremist father figure we all know and love, Red XIII's deep loyalty, Yuffie's obnoxious little sister energy, Cait Sith's inopportune joviality, Cid's weird uncle vibes, and Vincent being the resident goth kid that has issues with authority. And their relationships with one other: Aerith's deep friendships with Tifa and Red XIII, Barret's new found friendships with Yuffie and Red XIII, and even the basic and immediate kinship many of them feel towards one other is more detailed and vibrant. I don't know man, I just love all these fuckin' guys, I constantly had the stupidest fucking grin on my face while playing this game it was honestly kinda cringe. Even side characters have so much more going on with them, certain characters that were previously throwaway will often give one a sense that there's something deeper going on with them as they continue to try to exist in this broken world, even the ones that are more comic relief than pathos-invoking.
The plot can often feel clumsy, but I'd say it's a lot more cohesive than the original's, pretty significantly too, the original occasionally feeling aimless and as it tried to find a reason to send you to the next exciting setpiece; even as somebody who replays the game often I find myself being confused which event flag I need to trigger next. And really the original Final Fantasy VII can be best-described as like, a bunch of Final Fantasy VI opera scenes strung together, and Rebirth leans into that so hard that I could see it being way too much for some people. If Final Fantasy XVI was way too dry for many, myself included, I could genuinely see Rebirth being perceived as excessively "wet" for others. Though, as a side note, when playing Final Fantasy XVI I'd often find myself unintentionally dozing off, whereas with Rebirth I actually had enormous trouble sleeping, both in finding a place I wanted to stop playing and the mild insomnia the excitement of getting to play the game again induced in my four day-ish long binge (which, I haven't done in a long fucking time without needing to take significant breaks, which happened quite often with Final Fantasy XVI, and as an adult in her 30s I think that's saying a lot).
On the topic of CBU1 styling super fucking hard on CBU3, god damn the combat in Rebirth is exactly what I wanted it to be, probably my favorite combat in general, from like, any video game? Like, it's not mechanically the deepest action game I've ever played, but it does expand upon Remake's systems in a meaningful way without upending what made those systems work in the first place. Final Fantasy has been focused on telling the player what any given character is about through how they play since like, FF4, and Rebirth's execution of that philosophy doesn't miss at all. Tifa is more fun than ever with an extensive aerial toolkit, I fucking love that she can juggle enemies and it kinda became my go to strategy at a certain point, which like Tifa was the blueprint for young Theia so I'm so glad they did her so good in this game both on a gameplay and narrative level. Red XIII I have to say feels a little bit busted!! I'm bad at playing as him, and he still seems really fucking useful even with unskilled play. Cait Sith I'm still trying to wrap my head around, but I wouldn't have it any other way than making Cait Sith a confusing mess to properly utilize. I wish Vincent was playable, one of like 10 or so boys in media that I actually care about, but I kinda understand why he isn't when he shows up so late that it was probably better to just focus on polishing the rest of the cast than implementing what's probably going to be a pretty unique kit on top of everything else going on.
There's a particular level involving Cait Sith that I'm pretty sure is gonna become like the third or fourth most contentious thing about the game, but I fucking loved it in a really fucked up Banjo-Tooieian way and nobody can take that away from me. The thing I can see becoming the second most contentious aspect about the game, what I thought would be the primary contention until I got to the ending (which I'll get to in a bit, and without spoiling anything, but if you don't want to know literally anything just be forewarned), is the open world game design elements. The best way to describe it is probably Xenoblade with some pointless Ubisoft shit, but it's not really as bad as it sounds, and much of it is entirely optional only providing secondary or tertiary benefits to character progression. As a "modern" interpretation of the original's wide, open, and mostly empty fields populated by sets of random enemy tables, I think it's probably a fair enough way to go about things. The life springs and towers I wasn't so much a fan of, like why do the towers play the BotW theme But At Home when you activate them, but the summon temple thingies felt a lot more meaningful than just picking up a materia off the ground, like how it usually worked in the original (seriously who was dropping all those bahamut variants and just leaving them there). The map designs themselves I did enjoy though, even if the Cosmo Canyon and Gongaga regions can be a little tedious at times, I honestly prefer having to mentally map out the geographical logic of an open world than the modern trend of empty fields with little identity and often no reason to engage with a game's environments and systems.
That said, the more linear "dungeon" levels are kinda mostly the same deal, but they did an even better job at making them feel like real places you're exploring this time 'round, as opposed to the modified FF13 hallway dealie in Remake. They're still largely linear, but the best way to explain why I think they work better is how the Final Fantasy standby of forked paths with option A being progression and option B being a treasure chest is more heavily obscured; I actually got a little bit lost in a couple of levels!!! Though sometimes that was the result of perhaps poor tutorialization of a level's specific gimmick or progress not being visually distinct enough, which like god damn the graphics are so fucking good in this game that it's almost hard to see anything unless I walked up to my TV (maybe I just need to invest in a larger screen for my old lady eyes but whateverrr), it's no wonder that there are several areas where the Uncharted climbing walls have the RE4R yellow paint on them. I know people are gonna slam the game for shit like that, which is like, yeah I can kinda get it, personally would've preferred more non-diegetic signaling over things that make me have annoying CinemaSin-esque intrusive thoughts about "who is painting all this shit out here in the middle of nowhere".
And you know, it's not gonna be the most discussed thing in the end, as uninspired as Rebirth's "structural quirks" may feel now, they'll probly become innocuous given enough time; that's just how these thing typically go. I wanna say the same will happen for the game's ending which... yeah. Not gonna say much here, but if you find yourself frustrated by it, I'd say give yourself some space and rewatch it on YouTube or something. It's a lot to take in, and I found it a lot more impactful after I had gotten some sleep and finally digested what was being shown to me. I don't think it was all exactly what I wanted it to be, far from it maybe, but there's something to be said about the way the entirety of Rebirth takes special moments dear to us and recontextualizes them into new special moments, sometimes even more special.
And a bit of a tangent, but I loathe the critic scores for this game. Not so much because they're necessarily wrong for enjoying the game, but because I'm starting to strongly believe that art, and especially interactive art, can't really be quantified on such simple terms, especially when people tend to have such viscerally opposed reactions to their experiences with any given work. What does a 10/10 even mean? On a personal level I could almost understand, but detached from the context of that personal experience how can we consider any piece of media to be in some arbitrary upper percentile of perfection? I guess I'm saying this because I know with scores like that people are going to come at this game with a certain set of expectations, but despite it being one of the most gorgeous and polished Final Fantasy titles that CBU1 has brought out in recent years, it's a deeply uneven experience. You will be frustrated, maybe you'll even get annoyed at the many side quests that suck ass and are total shit!!! Or something, maybe you'll hate the combat even if it's exactly what my brain has always wanted FF7's combat to be. But I guess like, when you look at a piece of art in its totality as opposed to a given qualification of Good or Bad, it's easier to just appreciate things as they are. Or even fucking hate them for what they are! People on this website tend to tear the shit out of really popular games and who's to say they're wrong for looking past consensus into a deeper inner truth, which you know, even if that comes from a place of unfounded contrarianism, good for them, man. Fuck video games!!
I hope it doesn't come off like I'm waffling or anything, I just really love this game, and I feel like the things I hated about it only made me love it more in a really fucked up way. I think playing Drakengard 3 for the first time a year ago gave me brain damage or something. Also like, on a final note, let me get more on brand here: there's some premier fucking queerbaiting going on here, and if that ain't more accurate to the actual single lesbian in her early 30s experience than any other AAA video game that has some fake ass porn-afflicted interpretation of sapphic romance where flesh puppets say sweet nothings at each other after completing a single questline or whatever the fuck, than I don't know what is. Anyways, sorry I had to make it gay in the end, but truly that is what the Final Fantasy VII was about all along: twinks with swords and bisexual women who can suplex kaijus. Which, you know, being able to do the latter is what's going to be main determinant if part 3 is good or not, so the ball's in your court now Square...
On Friday, January 5th, I got a ping in a discord server consisted of one friend group about an impromptu Fortnite get-together. Since I admittedly regained an interest in playing it, and because said friend server has yet to really do much for several months, I decided to take the opportunity to see how the game has transformed and evolved over the years. Installed the dreaded EGS launcher, got marginally but not totally surprised by the increased file size, and proceeded to log back into my account from years prior. After all, it's only gonna be just for a few days, and then I’m off to uninstall it...
...but things didn't pan out that way. What has happened instead, was a transformation into becoming an Epic Fortnite Gamer. A near 3-week foray, money spent on the Battle Pass and both Gambit and Rouge skins, and grinding my way towards unlocking Peter Griffin's page, all while accumulating levels, Ranked medals, and other knick-knacks along the way. Life really does come at ya fast when you least expect it!
To go more in-depth into my prior experience: I'm very much someone who first played Fornite's at-the-time new Battle Royale format, played a couple of matches - both with my completely separate and no longer in touch friend group and solo - and thought it was kinda neat but really lacking in staying power. I'm uncertain if I was also one of many that thought it was simply gonna be a fad that'll fade away, since this was nearly 7 years ago now, but it matters naught since it's still here, and about as popular as it was since then. There's no need to cover much of what it's about, cause even if you never played it, you certainly know of it and the appeal, so I'm just gonna make this a thorough dumping ground of my thoughts as someone who finally came back to the bus.
Firstly, and more importantly, I'm glad that Zero Build is a mode that can be opted into. Now, I'm not besmirching the mechanic in its holistic entity, but I will admit one of the reasons I fell off pretty quickly originally was because of the gap between people who can build (especially PC players), and people who can't (especially console players). You can be a quickshot all you want, but as long as the other guy can spontaneously build a Jenga tower or a Minecraft fortress to recuperate quickly, your choices are to either eat shit, continue to pester them, or just give up and bolt out entirely. These types of encounters, to me, are fine in doses - the risk-reward allure is just balanced enough that it isn't entirely irritating, and the satisfaction method is incredible! That, however, begins to dissolve into ruin when it occurs ad nauseum, tying itself into state of the loop, and altogether just demotivates my ass since the most I can do is a stairway to heaven and maybe a few walls despite my flicks of the mouse and sensitivity zones. Even with the practice mentality, there's also the fact that, again, it's been 7 years - if you've played any sort of multiplayer shooter in mind, you'd know that there's a good chance that any sort of tech people know about, will inject and hone their craft to it to days on end, and I've seen plenty opponents do some shit that simultaneously leaves me fascinated and discontented. So, just having a mode where there's little frills to that, is appreciated, even if I do tap back into the regular option every now and then.
The other thing is that there's like... actual POIs and side activities now. I recall these being a thing in 2017, but it was a lot more minimalistic and very much in the vein of "we needed something to have players distract themselves and play the game with". Solid enough base, but combine that with the haphazard loop I had before, it again just made the dull grind even more prevalent. That nagging aspect is still present, but it's way easier to tolerate and avoid now. Vehicles, more movement options when doing on-foot roaming, an entourage group to pick off and reap rewards from to better your gamestate, and just the overall map layout is way, way more satisfying to convey and poke around than ever, even if I'm not entirely sure how prior seasons were like. Hell, this also obfuscates the other big critique that was going on at the time, which was how spacious people could become. Rarely has the thought of "man this is kinda boring" occur now since everything feels more fulfilling to explore and do, especially using grapple blades atop various points and just ZOOOOOOOOMING to where I need to go, or just ramming bogeys and guffawing at how high they get launched, or doing dopey motorbike tricks across hilltops. It's neat! It's exciting! It just about upends most of the issues I had to begin with!
I really don't have much else to like, add at this point, aside from some qualms:
- The bots here are on the opposite spectrum end of TF2's Bot Crisis; instead of being hammered down by some flagrant creations stopping any sort of enjoyment I can muster, there's more of an awe factor over how braindead they can be. I'm not quite sure how the system itself operates, but while I know and understand they're a necessity to fill up empty spaces, that becomes highly questionable when I see these guys fuck up easy picks, do some bizarre pathfinding and routine interactions, and somehow overcompensate within a quarter at most of the 100-player pool. This is the least egregious of the three ire I'm covering, but even then it's just... confounding. Not sure what's going on here!
- Aside from BR, there's now Lego Fortnite, Rocket Racing, and Festival. I only used LF briefly cause of an XP exploit, but I did at least put actual time into RR and Festival, and I'm thoroughly unimpressed with both. The former's a really dull and barebones arcade racer that couldn't even compete with some of the more straightforward affairs during the 5th Console Gen Boom, and well, Cold_Comfort goes over the woes of Festival even if I'm not that harsh about it. One could say these can be ignored since the main aspect is BR, but since they're easily visible upon the main bar of the lobby, I feel like it's fair game to expect these to be in a commendable quality - especially since Epic Games have been making big talk about user-generated content and have seemingly been in a stronger push in competing with Roblox.
- Since this is an ongoing season, solidifying and boxing the current meta state is tricky. What I can say for now though is that, with the feel of everything being good on a base level, there's a clear power imbalance. There's absolutely no reason to pick up the Hammer Pump variant of the shotgun, since Frenzy Auto has a strictly higher DPS and can easily mulch people by comparison; same goes for the Enforcer AR, being pitifully outclassed in speed and output by the Nemesis and especially Striker variants; I don't have any major beef with the Lock-On Pistol, due to its four-charge shots contains a slight buffer between each piece + all while leaving the player vulnerable should they be careless (especially to someone who Knows What They're Doing)... but the availability of this is perplexes me. I've gone entire games without either my downed foes or myself finding it, meanwhile I can simply trip across Ballistic Shields, a weapon that sounds about as good as it does while also not being nearly as OP as it sounds or others postulate, despite that being in a higher rarity color. Weird little quirks like that making the fights distinct but also just sort of headscratching as to where they could go. Also, maybe an Issue Of Skill, but I’ve seen instances of a bullet from my sniper shots clearly hitting its mark, but then somehow never registering?
I actually can’t recall the last time a multiplayer game had its pull on me quite like this, perhaps Among Us which had faced similar views. May keep this on for the time being until I actually do procure the Griffin or maybe Solid Snake since he’s close to being unleashed upon the world. I’m not sure where and how this chapter will go next, but if nothing else, it at least pulled me back in after years of inquisitive glances and intrigue. It is also carrying one of the most important mantles of any piece of fiction: having multiple patient zeros that will cajole someone into becoming a furry. Truly, this is a blessed time!
...but things didn't pan out that way. What has happened instead, was a transformation into becoming an Epic Fortnite Gamer. A near 3-week foray, money spent on the Battle Pass and both Gambit and Rouge skins, and grinding my way towards unlocking Peter Griffin's page, all while accumulating levels, Ranked medals, and other knick-knacks along the way. Life really does come at ya fast when you least expect it!
To go more in-depth into my prior experience: I'm very much someone who first played Fornite's at-the-time new Battle Royale format, played a couple of matches - both with my completely separate and no longer in touch friend group and solo - and thought it was kinda neat but really lacking in staying power. I'm uncertain if I was also one of many that thought it was simply gonna be a fad that'll fade away, since this was nearly 7 years ago now, but it matters naught since it's still here, and about as popular as it was since then. There's no need to cover much of what it's about, cause even if you never played it, you certainly know of it and the appeal, so I'm just gonna make this a thorough dumping ground of my thoughts as someone who finally came back to the bus.
Firstly, and more importantly, I'm glad that Zero Build is a mode that can be opted into. Now, I'm not besmirching the mechanic in its holistic entity, but I will admit one of the reasons I fell off pretty quickly originally was because of the gap between people who can build (especially PC players), and people who can't (especially console players). You can be a quickshot all you want, but as long as the other guy can spontaneously build a Jenga tower or a Minecraft fortress to recuperate quickly, your choices are to either eat shit, continue to pester them, or just give up and bolt out entirely. These types of encounters, to me, are fine in doses - the risk-reward allure is just balanced enough that it isn't entirely irritating, and the satisfaction method is incredible! That, however, begins to dissolve into ruin when it occurs ad nauseum, tying itself into state of the loop, and altogether just demotivates my ass since the most I can do is a stairway to heaven and maybe a few walls despite my flicks of the mouse and sensitivity zones. Even with the practice mentality, there's also the fact that, again, it's been 7 years - if you've played any sort of multiplayer shooter in mind, you'd know that there's a good chance that any sort of tech people know about, will inject and hone their craft to it to days on end, and I've seen plenty opponents do some shit that simultaneously leaves me fascinated and discontented. So, just having a mode where there's little frills to that, is appreciated, even if I do tap back into the regular option every now and then.
The other thing is that there's like... actual POIs and side activities now. I recall these being a thing in 2017, but it was a lot more minimalistic and very much in the vein of "we needed something to have players distract themselves and play the game with". Solid enough base, but combine that with the haphazard loop I had before, it again just made the dull grind even more prevalent. That nagging aspect is still present, but it's way easier to tolerate and avoid now. Vehicles, more movement options when doing on-foot roaming, an entourage group to pick off and reap rewards from to better your gamestate, and just the overall map layout is way, way more satisfying to convey and poke around than ever, even if I'm not entirely sure how prior seasons were like. Hell, this also obfuscates the other big critique that was going on at the time, which was how spacious people could become. Rarely has the thought of "man this is kinda boring" occur now since everything feels more fulfilling to explore and do, especially using grapple blades atop various points and just ZOOOOOOOOMING to where I need to go, or just ramming bogeys and guffawing at how high they get launched, or doing dopey motorbike tricks across hilltops. It's neat! It's exciting! It just about upends most of the issues I had to begin with!
I really don't have much else to like, add at this point, aside from some qualms:
- The bots here are on the opposite spectrum end of TF2's Bot Crisis; instead of being hammered down by some flagrant creations stopping any sort of enjoyment I can muster, there's more of an awe factor over how braindead they can be. I'm not quite sure how the system itself operates, but while I know and understand they're a necessity to fill up empty spaces, that becomes highly questionable when I see these guys fuck up easy picks, do some bizarre pathfinding and routine interactions, and somehow overcompensate within a quarter at most of the 100-player pool. This is the least egregious of the three ire I'm covering, but even then it's just... confounding. Not sure what's going on here!
- Aside from BR, there's now Lego Fortnite, Rocket Racing, and Festival. I only used LF briefly cause of an XP exploit, but I did at least put actual time into RR and Festival, and I'm thoroughly unimpressed with both. The former's a really dull and barebones arcade racer that couldn't even compete with some of the more straightforward affairs during the 5th Console Gen Boom, and well, Cold_Comfort goes over the woes of Festival even if I'm not that harsh about it. One could say these can be ignored since the main aspect is BR, but since they're easily visible upon the main bar of the lobby, I feel like it's fair game to expect these to be in a commendable quality - especially since Epic Games have been making big talk about user-generated content and have seemingly been in a stronger push in competing with Roblox.
- Since this is an ongoing season, solidifying and boxing the current meta state is tricky. What I can say for now though is that, with the feel of everything being good on a base level, there's a clear power imbalance. There's absolutely no reason to pick up the Hammer Pump variant of the shotgun, since Frenzy Auto has a strictly higher DPS and can easily mulch people by comparison; same goes for the Enforcer AR, being pitifully outclassed in speed and output by the Nemesis and especially Striker variants; I don't have any major beef with the Lock-On Pistol, due to its four-charge shots contains a slight buffer between each piece + all while leaving the player vulnerable should they be careless (especially to someone who Knows What They're Doing)... but the availability of this is perplexes me. I've gone entire games without either my downed foes or myself finding it, meanwhile I can simply trip across Ballistic Shields, a weapon that sounds about as good as it does while also not being nearly as OP as it sounds or others postulate, despite that being in a higher rarity color. Weird little quirks like that making the fights distinct but also just sort of headscratching as to where they could go. Also, maybe an Issue Of Skill, but I’ve seen instances of a bullet from my sniper shots clearly hitting its mark, but then somehow never registering?
I actually can’t recall the last time a multiplayer game had its pull on me quite like this, perhaps Among Us which had faced similar views. May keep this on for the time being until I actually do procure the Griffin or maybe Solid Snake since he’s close to being unleashed upon the world. I’m not sure where and how this chapter will go next, but if nothing else, it at least pulled me back in after years of inquisitive glances and intrigue. It is also carrying one of the most important mantles of any piece of fiction: having multiple patient zeros that will cajole someone into becoming a furry. Truly, this is a blessed time!
Firstly I'm openly reflecting upon this game so that people know that if you care about LGBT aubiographical trauma games (ie. No One Can Ever Know, Madotsuki's Closet, etc.) this is a very significant one to get to. My guess is that if you follow LGBT people, including me, youre going to see this on a lot of 'end of year' lists.
Now one thing I want to point out that is interesting is that due to how emotionally affecting this is, most people have gone on to speak about how it made them cry or reflect their own experiences. Even from people on here actually known for usually writing more erudite reflections. This speak to the power of its performance, but I'll be the one to highlight how.
Once you run the game on browser it blows up to fill your whole browser windows as large as possible, regals you the controls and then allows you to walk. Then, once you move to the edge of the screen 2 things happen:
Would you like to see trigger warnings? (Yes, No)
And then the first line of self narration from Ann: "The problem with talking about this is: I don't know how people will react"
One of the narrative vulnerabilities that segments this from other games of this type is that it will absolutely ask you as a player to think about your intentions in play. Pretty immediately, Ann covers both the fact that sex-work is often lionized and that this is fine by trans people as a narrative of independency. And also that, not simply just the 'text' but the main autobiographical narrator does NOT want this game to be used as a weapon to scold sex workers. What makes this great is that she effectively pulls this off without resorting to second person phrasing saying 'you might think' etc.
Ann is deeply unjudgemental in a general sense but also correctly figures out through her own internalizations that she doesn't really know yet who is reading that, that who could be anybody.
Ann as a character is very timid, flat, and introspective allowing for her lines to travel to the player directly and without flourish. Lines flow out of Ann completely naturalistically like "I couldn't really hear anything" rather than trying to describe it in some detail or another. This enhances the fact that its utilizing the smaller text box design of game boy games. Comprehension and clarity never become an issue during play.
The story is about how Sugaring made Ann less connected to her sense of self-worth and identity as a woman, which may explain why her avatar is a ghost rather than any attempt at depicting herself as a trans woman who just came out recently. It works as another fracture to remind the player that this is just a representation of the events reinterpreted by an older developer who views it as trauma.
Even outside of that the visual design and compositions are absolutely masterful. For example you end up seeing her crush sally from every angle in 2D space during close up scenes, when you move from walking to full on portraits. All of them are gorgeous but here's 2 examples from early on. Even for people who may not personally get much from the story itself, the mastery of the art design is to die for, especially if you're a fan of Game Boy Color games.
I'll join everyone else quickly on the more personal reflection here I admit this part is a bit TMI so skip it if you don't care:
I have always personally had a unstable relationship with the prospect of sex work, due to my own economic conditions and general dysphoria I haven't even felt close enough to the state I want to be in in order to really consider it. Hell the best camera I have for online sex work is a web camera that had its hinge broken off because a friend smacked a fly. So I have actually engaged in and desired the idea of sex work as somewhat of a liberatory function, mostly for online because I always saw irl stuff as both much more seedy and much more anxiety inducing. The matter of fact is I'm a bit of an agoraphobe in general because I can't control how im seen, not just a fear of transphobia but a functionally Weirder fear that I might be only beautiful from a specific angle and the fact I dont have a camera that shows people that angle makes me miserable. As such I tend to also imbue sex work with this mystic sensibility that anybody doing that probably feels visually just perfect, a 2nd order jealousy and dysphoria justified. To a large degree I think this is probably just my own brainrot due to dysphoria, but the reason I'm giving so much depth on this set of cognitive interactions and desires is that while Ann is not critical against embellishing sex work outright, she does show that its not all fun and games for Sally and that Sally feels sort of like she needs to put up a 'sociopathic' identity in order to detach. Even if you are stunning and beautiful, and even if you can utilize it to get independence through others. The fact of the matter is a large part of the game is about being desired yet trying not to let yourself 'know' the other person too much.
On a larger point this is not the only occupational ability given this degree of fixation as a liberation tool in Transfemme spaces. The Blackpaper by Nyx Land is a now slightly dated manifesto that makes a dramatic argument that Transwomen and coding are intertwined, using a quite conspiratorial logic via connecting the word UNIX to biblical references. Seeing this as a 'high IQ' form of liberation, a lot of trans women also imbue coding with this sort of liberatory function, and I feel I should stress that it's actually mostly harmless. While the Blackpaper is weird it imbues a lot of transwomen with a faith and narrative to move on. The reality is just that just as Ann shows an inability to endure to the standards of her field the other reality is that even though its a coping mechanism, we shouldn't actually expect queer people to individually 'be' good at something. For one, it takes a lot of time to get to where you want to be anyway, being a good coder or a good sex worker is not that much different a skill than, say, being good at makeup. In the same way its not ok to push transwomen to be better at makeup or tell them they haven't tried hard enough so to does it reflect here. On top of that for non-transfemme people the sentiments we are good at Hoi4, Fighting Games, Coding, Game Development, are all culturally accurate on a large level but still stereotypes. I'm not good at any of this stuff and a result can mean that people often ignore what I am good at or want to be good at. There are a lot of people out there that fail to meet any of these abilities and are seen as unexceptional, the irony is that Ann or more to the fact the author, Taylor, is 'good at Game Design' (or maybe more art design) but that's not core to the narrative at all. She just wants to exist and this happened a decade ago. So when trans people (of any gender) tell you they just want to exist in peace this is more what we mean! We shouldn't have to find a skill that makes us separated from transphobia, wherein the leisure time to improve in these lionized skills is usually dramatically truncated in comparison to a cis person anyway. The desire to 'overcome' is inherent in anybody looking to escape the chains of capitalist exploitation but we are creatures first, not workers. And as such the narrative of overcoming implies by its own design that others didn't overcome, and until we listen to what they are saying and help them, things aren't going to get better.
Anyway, I straight up don't trust anybody who gave this a 1 out of 10, and I'm summarily blocking all those fuckers in advance. A natural memoir about transphobia and trauma and you give it a 1? Get the fuck out of here with that. A 3-5/10 I can understand, but a 1 is just showing transphobic ass in a way that's 'subtle' enough not to get reported. If you're reading this and you did that, fuck you, I don't want anything to do with you. Scumfuck bastard.
Edit: Franz mentioned to me that these people have a history of doing this. I knew I was onto something. Keep an eye out on these dudes..
Now one thing I want to point out that is interesting is that due to how emotionally affecting this is, most people have gone on to speak about how it made them cry or reflect their own experiences. Even from people on here actually known for usually writing more erudite reflections. This speak to the power of its performance, but I'll be the one to highlight how.
Once you run the game on browser it blows up to fill your whole browser windows as large as possible, regals you the controls and then allows you to walk. Then, once you move to the edge of the screen 2 things happen:
Would you like to see trigger warnings? (Yes, No)
And then the first line of self narration from Ann: "The problem with talking about this is: I don't know how people will react"
One of the narrative vulnerabilities that segments this from other games of this type is that it will absolutely ask you as a player to think about your intentions in play. Pretty immediately, Ann covers both the fact that sex-work is often lionized and that this is fine by trans people as a narrative of independency. And also that, not simply just the 'text' but the main autobiographical narrator does NOT want this game to be used as a weapon to scold sex workers. What makes this great is that she effectively pulls this off without resorting to second person phrasing saying 'you might think' etc.
Ann is deeply unjudgemental in a general sense but also correctly figures out through her own internalizations that she doesn't really know yet who is reading that, that who could be anybody.
Ann as a character is very timid, flat, and introspective allowing for her lines to travel to the player directly and without flourish. Lines flow out of Ann completely naturalistically like "I couldn't really hear anything" rather than trying to describe it in some detail or another. This enhances the fact that its utilizing the smaller text box design of game boy games. Comprehension and clarity never become an issue during play.
The story is about how Sugaring made Ann less connected to her sense of self-worth and identity as a woman, which may explain why her avatar is a ghost rather than any attempt at depicting herself as a trans woman who just came out recently. It works as another fracture to remind the player that this is just a representation of the events reinterpreted by an older developer who views it as trauma.
Even outside of that the visual design and compositions are absolutely masterful. For example you end up seeing her crush sally from every angle in 2D space during close up scenes, when you move from walking to full on portraits. All of them are gorgeous but here's 2 examples from early on. Even for people who may not personally get much from the story itself, the mastery of the art design is to die for, especially if you're a fan of Game Boy Color games.
I'll join everyone else quickly on the more personal reflection here I admit this part is a bit TMI so skip it if you don't care:
I have always personally had a unstable relationship with the prospect of sex work, due to my own economic conditions and general dysphoria I haven't even felt close enough to the state I want to be in in order to really consider it. Hell the best camera I have for online sex work is a web camera that had its hinge broken off because a friend smacked a fly. So I have actually engaged in and desired the idea of sex work as somewhat of a liberatory function, mostly for online because I always saw irl stuff as both much more seedy and much more anxiety inducing. The matter of fact is I'm a bit of an agoraphobe in general because I can't control how im seen, not just a fear of transphobia but a functionally Weirder fear that I might be only beautiful from a specific angle and the fact I dont have a camera that shows people that angle makes me miserable. As such I tend to also imbue sex work with this mystic sensibility that anybody doing that probably feels visually just perfect, a 2nd order jealousy and dysphoria justified. To a large degree I think this is probably just my own brainrot due to dysphoria, but the reason I'm giving so much depth on this set of cognitive interactions and desires is that while Ann is not critical against embellishing sex work outright, she does show that its not all fun and games for Sally and that Sally feels sort of like she needs to put up a 'sociopathic' identity in order to detach. Even if you are stunning and beautiful, and even if you can utilize it to get independence through others. The fact of the matter is a large part of the game is about being desired yet trying not to let yourself 'know' the other person too much.
On a larger point this is not the only occupational ability given this degree of fixation as a liberation tool in Transfemme spaces. The Blackpaper by Nyx Land is a now slightly dated manifesto that makes a dramatic argument that Transwomen and coding are intertwined, using a quite conspiratorial logic via connecting the word UNIX to biblical references. Seeing this as a 'high IQ' form of liberation, a lot of trans women also imbue coding with this sort of liberatory function, and I feel I should stress that it's actually mostly harmless. While the Blackpaper is weird it imbues a lot of transwomen with a faith and narrative to move on. The reality is just that just as Ann shows an inability to endure to the standards of her field the other reality is that even though its a coping mechanism, we shouldn't actually expect queer people to individually 'be' good at something. For one, it takes a lot of time to get to where you want to be anyway, being a good coder or a good sex worker is not that much different a skill than, say, being good at makeup. In the same way its not ok to push transwomen to be better at makeup or tell them they haven't tried hard enough so to does it reflect here. On top of that for non-transfemme people the sentiments we are good at Hoi4, Fighting Games, Coding, Game Development, are all culturally accurate on a large level but still stereotypes. I'm not good at any of this stuff and a result can mean that people often ignore what I am good at or want to be good at. There are a lot of people out there that fail to meet any of these abilities and are seen as unexceptional, the irony is that Ann or more to the fact the author, Taylor, is 'good at Game Design' (or maybe more art design) but that's not core to the narrative at all. She just wants to exist and this happened a decade ago. So when trans people (of any gender) tell you they just want to exist in peace this is more what we mean! We shouldn't have to find a skill that makes us separated from transphobia, wherein the leisure time to improve in these lionized skills is usually dramatically truncated in comparison to a cis person anyway. The desire to 'overcome' is inherent in anybody looking to escape the chains of capitalist exploitation but we are creatures first, not workers. And as such the narrative of overcoming implies by its own design that others didn't overcome, and until we listen to what they are saying and help them, things aren't going to get better.
Anyway, I straight up don't trust anybody who gave this a 1 out of 10, and I'm summarily blocking all those fuckers in advance. A natural memoir about transphobia and trauma and you give it a 1? Get the fuck out of here with that. A 3-5/10 I can understand, but a 1 is just showing transphobic ass in a way that's 'subtle' enough not to get reported. If you're reading this and you did that, fuck you, I don't want anything to do with you. Scumfuck bastard.
Edit: Franz mentioned to me that these people have a history of doing this. I knew I was onto something. Keep an eye out on these dudes..
Crouch walking is worth playing the game at like 20fps.
Surprisingly a very good way to play MGS3 which plays way better than it has any right to. Really handy if you don't have easy access to the HD collection or a PS2.
Yes,performance isn't the best but i think it's still pretty playable on a small screen.Not to mention the great 3D effect and gameplay improvements.I played this on a New model and controls didn't took to long to get used to,but i can imagine how horrible can it be on an original model.Overall,this is a pretty decent way to experince MGS3,especially on a New model
an amazing experience that draws you right in. When snake got his eye shot out by a bullet, the bullet actually came right out of the screen and hit me in real life. Great use of the 3ds technology