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The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD
Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VII
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
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Pokémon Ultra Sun

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I want to like this game, but I am, as of right now, going to shelve it for now.

Where to start….i just do not like the Dark Souls/From Software design influence that has come into vogue. I just do not enjoy that level of unforgiveness in games. And this game has it in a few different ways. First and most obvious, the EMMIs. The feel of traversal in Metroid Dread was is really good, but forcing me to deal with these one-touch-and-your-dead enemies just grates, especially as the game goes on and the late game EMMIs have more enhanced abilities. I like exploring the spaces and learning how to navigate them, but the EMMIs change that dynamic and make it more tense. Dreadful, if you will. Which is definitely the intention here, but I just tired of it.

Second, even on Rookie mode, it feels like bosses hit for a ton, making the learning and progression through boss fights more frustrating for me than fun. And Rookie mode was specifically added to make the game easier. It just doesn’t go far enough for me.

Third, I know sequence breaking is a thing you can do here, but unless you know what you’re doing, I feel pretty lead around. I think the intent of the design was to loop you around areas, funneling you to the next thing, while showing you where to progress once you got the next milestone and its associated power. Metroid games, especially my favorite Metroid Fusion, do that in some form, but I don’t know about Dread. I think my nerves get frayed dealing with the first two points that it’s hard to enjoy the in-between parts, which do showcase the excellent controls.

It's a special kind of brilliance that Nintendo has. They took a game that was already beloved as both evolution and revolution, Breath of the Wild, and upped the ante. And they did with the same casual abandon that makes sense a Mario game. You know all those mechanics from Breath of the Wild (not weapon durability, that's still here, and I still like it. Stay mad.) they just ditched them. Just like that. Gone.

And what did they replace them with? Oh, just a physics engine that lets you build simple machines or oversized death contraptions that you pilot. Oh, and the ability to reverse time for an object so you can exploit puzzles with repetitive motion or simple lob a rock some enemy tossed at you like an angry, but otherwise untroubled god. Oh, and your weapons, shields, and arrows can now be fused to almost EVERY object in your inventory. Oh, and you know how in Breath of the Wild you climbed everything? Well in this game you don't sully yourself with climbing, you teleport from the bottom of almost any obstacle to the top of that obstacle. It's like a cheat code.

Oh, and while they were at it they went and added two tiers (get it - Tiers of the Kingdom) to the already impressively large map. Want to cruise the sky above the map? Go for it. Want to plumb some depths? There are so many depths, get in there.

It's just remarkable what Nintendo achieved here. I somehow have the tools to be more engaged, more creative, and more free. It is as if they discovered a 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith that granted them the ability make go from climbing trees to sailing the skies in our very own airplanes, glued together with whatever our imagination told us the game would let us do. And it all runs on the Nintendo Switch. Let that sink in for a bit.

I felt while playing this that it was a game that only exists because Nintendo seems to steadfastly only want to make games that have new, interesting things for the player to do. They keep succeeding in that, and here, they reached heights that I only thought couldn't be reached. That is until I look at what was around me and in my inventory, and got playing.

Where to begin with Xenogears? How does someone organize their thoughts on a game that drops an anime cutscene on you, raising a whole bunch of questions (What does "You shall be as gods" mean? Who is that purple haired lady?) that it doesn't answer for dozens of hours? And just who is Fei, the protagonist who is also the author of the stereotypical destruction of the starting village?

Kind of like Xenogears, I won't be answering those questions here for spoiler reasons, though the game does get around to satisfying those questions. What I will say is that this is an incredibly ambitious game and story, and it is amazing to reflect on the fact that this was attempted at all, let alone in 1998.

If you enjoy any of Tetsuya Takahashi's work (and that of his wife, Soraya Saga, who co-wrote this and worked on some of the Xenosaga games with him) this is worth checking out. I can't take credit for this idea, but in listening to a book club podcast about Xenogears, someone quoted a filmmaker who said that every director is constantly trying to remake one movie. I feel this to be true with Takahashi, as many of the ideas and themes found here in Xenogears are present in later games he has worked on, all under a "Xeno-" brand in Xenosaga and Xenoblade Chronicles. Jungian and Freudian Psychology, Gnosticism, Jewish Mysticism, Dogmatic religions. All are themes here and elsewhere in his work.

If you give this game a try, and I encourage anyone interested to absolutely do so, like I said above is it highly ambitious, while also being flawed in many ways. Bear in mind that this was also Takahashi's first game, and that the translation was apparently a nightmare to complete.