Guilty of the unfathomable evil of making Strider Hiryu less cunty, so I’m not crazy on this one, but I do think it’s worth putting a spotlight on a metroidvania this lean. Strider 2014 occupies a weird in-between space between schema by having the bones of Strider 2 (blisteringly fast arcade score attack action), and being a metroidvania (wallhug like a dopey trout picking up Fisher-Price blocks to place into shaped slots) and it straddles the line…………. decently well?? Has an incredibly scant 4 hours completion time accomplished through carving story progression in a linear track across the world map, reminiscent of Metroid Fusion if anything. It keeps up the momentum surprisingly well and it’s complemented by Strider’s fast and responsive freewheeling toolset. The main issue for me is that Strider 2014 is surprisingly averse to any form of vertical progression, so the open world aspect feels like a bloated afterthought. It doesn’t help that the ratio of secrets/pickups being actual upgrades is completely overshadowed by how many of them are fucking unlockable secret missions, intel and concept art. Puts its best foot forward with a great opening hour; the rooftop-hopping set design is gorgeous and dynamic before it turns into sewer & techno corridor mulch, simple-to-counter enemies so your charge is rarely halted. As the difficulty ramps up it becomes less of a sleek and stylish action game and more of an exercise in frustration as the screen is littered with knockback bullets and colour-coded shielded enemies that take a steadily increasing number of hits to kill. This all culminates into a ridiculously grating final act that feels like a complete misread on what makes Strider halfway compelling. You can tell Shadow Complex was a key reference point and maybe it farcking shouldn’t have been. All this being said this is my favourite Strider game lol.

I played both prior Dragon Age games in a binge that has stopped dead in its tracks due to this game.

smug 2009 atheists should be punched in the face before they're allowed to write narratives that centrally explore themes of faith, because they cannot fucking approach the topic with any empathy and it massively defangs their critique. DAI being from the perspective of a literal inquisition but having no coherent ideology behind it and not actually being founded in any religion is so craven, they deny themselves the ability to meaningfully critique these structures by never stepping inside them and this profound inability to even try to understand the religious mindset and its decisionmaking while simultaneously making it a large narrative component is continually the worst part of dragon age as a series. truly baffling that they play into it harder and harder with each successive game

if this first act was you being like an anti-rift militia and trying to manage the complexity of operating on both sides of a border that was hotly contested within most people's lifetimes, and as you pick up steam you eventually discover records of the ancient inquisition and take up its mantle that could be, like, a story! but no, instead the cool-down section after the obligatory stupid action setpiece tutorial has you immediately fucking start the inquisition, which is insane, that feels like an end of act 1 thing where the world opens up. as a result there's no weight to it, it doesn't make sense and doesn't fit any coherent expectation of what an inquisition is, and it muddles the shit out of everything from the start.

this is an agnostic-atheistic politics-free inquisition with no authorization by any political or religious athority performed in the style of a syncretized cult from a millennium ago, which makes about as much sense as disgruntled knights during the hundred years' war converting to zoroastrarianism because their lords aren't doing shit to help their countrymen. except zoroastrarianism still has a coherent ideology and set of strictures behind it.

there's no sense of place to Haven by the time you leave it behind for the hinterlands, the only way you'd know where it's at is by implication of the world map and if you recall loghain's descriptions of war with orlais back in origins. the town has no history, has no culture, has no attachment to the player past a bunch of MMO questgivers and menus. awakening does so much more with so much less of import within minutes of its opening action sequence and its aftermath.

cullen leads your troops and queen anora handpicked the quartermaster to help with the inquisition, despite the inquisition having been founded approx. 30 seconds before you visit, how the hell do the orlesian politicians not see the massive amount of fereldans who were teleported into the inquisition's ranks as they operate directly on the state border and perform extrajudicial killings of templars and not see that as an insanely partisan threat to their security? how are they STILL doing the "both sides bad" thing for their stupid fucking templar/mage conflict? how do they manage to have you fight both groups in the same encounter but not actually design encounters around these multiple enemy types, they just spawn in a wave of templars then a wave of mages? why did the time to decompress not give me any fucking time at all to meet the cast and get to know how they tick? i still have no reason to give a shit about solas other than his deeply unnerving design

bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, and it makes me wish i'd never given these games a shot. no game in this series ever approaches its potential and they are all fundamentally compromised products. dragon age origins has constant bleeding chunks of its world be stitched back, gangrenous, via abhorrent 2009 DLC practices. dragon age 2 is completely unfinished, a vastly superior game when you skip all combat with the press of a button. and inquisition reeks of the same shit i see in every other frostbite-era bioware game: two years of prototyping and engine dev that led nowhere, followed by 18 months of crunch where nothing comes out in any sort of way that people are proud of. i fucking hate this company dude

Dehydrated Osman, I fear, I regret 2 say 😔. Could be that playing it on default diff didn't push me hard enough to want to learn the mechanics more intimately but I would rather save that energy for a game isn't so bizarrely lethargic despite suggesting bombast in its sets and encounter design. Lots of vertical variety going on here but it's all of little consequence when you can walk through it like a spider's web. The Harumaru illustrations adorning the story sequences are an abso joy though, it's insane how bleeding-edge her work on this game continues being after a whole 25 years. The inspiring stuff whole careers are nourished by.

it's a well-made game but it's weird that this is the one that picked up all the hype. if we're being completely honest there's nothing here that's going to set the world on fire, but its systems - the ones that are here, anyway - work together in ways that many comparable games (early access resource-managing city builders) simply don't.

i'm still a sucker for historicity and small-scale operations in this kind of game so i love how this has been tailored around small populations (even in the battles), forcing you to be really deliberate with how you place buildings and allocate your workforce. i wish there were more interesting decisions in how you negotiate with the terrain beyond just "place food buildings in green zone", but that's not really part of the vision for this version of the game, not in the way i'm imagining. there are teasers of features to come, though, that i think could push this towards being an actual standout among its genre. implementing "smell" and similar environmental factors that limit the placement of your buildings could easily make up for a map that is (gorgeous! but) perhaps too generous to the player in this build.

i don't want to make it sound like the game completely lacks challenge. natural resources and population are already fairly important to play around, since you're probably stretching your workforce fairly thin before you even bother with the combat. it's possible to cook up the cushiest possible starting scenario and still burn through your starting allowance of seasonable weather and minted currency in such a way that leaves you in a rut: unable to construct at a reasonable rate, unable to trade, unable to fully staff the buildings to keep your existing industries going. the selection of buildings in the game are also fairly customizable (for a game this far from release), allowing players to expand or modify buildings to push their production, consumption, and efficiency in different directions as needed.

in short - if you read nothing else - i'm not really wowed by this yet, but with a start this strong i'm expecting that to change by the time it makes its full release. it really needs some more features that create some friction for the player beyond resource management, because right now that's where most of the game lies. it's a promising beginning, but i hope the dev isn't going to allow themself to be bullied into changing their plans for the game based on impatient early access feedback. trust the vision.

We were young, and we were still learning. Coming into our own, yet still not quite there.

The second generation was much like some of us who had experienced the series from the beginning as bright eyed and optimistic children. Maturing, finding our footing in life, and trying to figure things out for what we really wanted out of our future. Do we continue onward with our current path and continue developing our skill? Are we seeking to make a career of said skill? Those drawings bearing a similar crudeness to generation one sprites that we etched on the back of our tests, those little characters that you made from your own two hands and the ocean of your imagination. They would need to be refined, perhaps to the point you would be sick of seeing them again through the months and months of practice. We struck gold on something we were good at, but were we ready to make this our life? How do we get ready for life? Would we even make it to that path we dreamed of?

For us, this was the sequel. A sequel to childhood, and the path to maturity.

If we were to get ready for life, we would need to learn how to maintain a schedule and utilize a form of communication to keep in touch with our contacts. Through our little battery-powered clock in our cartridges, we kept track of the time of day in order to search for different friends on different paths. We would remember what day it was, so we could participate in a bug catching contest and try to find that Scyther. If we couldn't get up in the morning early enough to catch a Ledyba, what good were we in participating in life? It was at this point we were starting to get into the thick of things, we weren't children anymore, but teenagers who aspired to be more like adults. We were excited of all that upcoming opportunity that would only be granted to us with age, and with that age in due time came responsibility and expectations to provide. Life would soon not be all about fun anymore.

It was soon time to grow up, and perhaps move away from home to master our craft elsewhere...

It's hard however to leave behind everything that you grew up with. We traveled to Johto to learn how to better ourselves, perhaps like the bike shop owner who got unlucky on their new shop placement in Goldenrod, but for us it wasn't truly home. We would long for our old pals, our old hangout spots, and our favorite order from our childhood fast food place. We desired a return trip home to Kanto, so we can say hello to everybody one last time before we begin our life's career. Home however, wasn't quite the same as we had remembered. Forests were chopped down, caves were cleared out, and Lavender Town's place of remembrance had been converted into a radio tower. Kanto has changed, or has it matured like us? Resources have been plundered for practical use over the thoughts of those who had lived there, and spirituality has been pushed to the side in the name of technological advancement. Have we lost our way, or is this what is to be expected of us in the future?

When I finally climb this mountain and end this visit home, what will await me at it's peak?

The last lingering strand of childhood I had left made manifest, the past me armed with the very first friends I had made on this adventure. If I must let go of the past, I must defeat the longing memories of what once was. Even if I were victorious, will the memories finally rest or will they continue pursuing me? With the destruction of the past, we make way for the future. This is the way. This is the way we grow up. We no longer have room for trifling matters such as our childhood friends, memories, or the places we once held dear. It's time to make way for adulthood and to only go forward without ever looking back. Home is no longer home, it's no longer even a memory for us, it was thrown back into the toybox where it belonged. With this we continue our adventure elsewhere, and we leave everything behind. It was a fad, and it's time to bury those McDonalds toys and trading cards in a box or sell them off in a yard sale.

It was never to be the same again, for we have both grown up. Us now simple mature adults, and them a fully-realized juggernaut of a franchise with no end in sight. We've defeated our childhood, there was no reason to keep going with this series obviously geared towards what we had grown out of. We could take a peek once in a while to check on them when they make the television, but we would do so with a look over our shoulder to try and maintain our mask of adulthood and maturity. It was time to only watch mature programming, and play mature games while doing other such mature things, like swearing while our parents weren't around. This is what is expected of us now, it's time to leave it behind to the next generation who will grow with the next set of games, whom may also leave once they have grown past it....with another generation to follow.....and the cycle repeats....

My time was over, much like Kanto and the Game Boy, but despite what life and middle school demanded of me, I would never be too far away.

I am home, I always have been.

what exactly is "friction"? the backloggd community frequently evokes this term to describe a wide array of moments and mechanics, yet without any sort of ontological basis to unify disparate uses of the term. I don't seek to define any axioms regarding the term, but I would like to take the opportunity of my completion of freedom unite's arduous village questline to ruminate on the uses of friction as an intentional and unintentional design technique. let's first establish friction at a high level:

Friction consists of gameplay elements that oppose player progression or elongate time spent on it.

this is a nice open-ended definition that gives us plenty of room to explore. possibly the most basic example of this is movement: the physical limitation of your avatar being unable to exist at all coordinates at once or being able to instantly teleport to any coordinate is within itself an act of friction. this spans a wide range of mechanics; consider tetris, where at high speeds the frame count behind a single lateral movement of the falling piece becomes a limitation against being able to place a given piece at the desired location before the piece lands, or games with areas that change the kinematics of a player's movement to become slower or faster than their base speed. for a walking simulator, the act of movement is the primary element separating their narratives and environments from less frictional genres such as interactive fiction and visual novels. of course, this above classification isn't necessarily useful for discussion given how wide-ranging it is, so I'll present a taxonomy to cover the most common types.

Immersive friction consists of frictional gameplay elements that seek to heighten the sense of existence in the game's environment.

a good example of the above would be plant growth mechanics, where seed items are planted and then can be harvested after a given amount of in-game time. while this poses a time restraint on the player in terms of obtaining the items, few would object to such a feature given that it simulates crop cultivation in reality. unless the player has no exposure to agriculture, they will be able to make a connection from reality to the in-game environment and integrate the mechanic into their understanding of how the world operates. this doesn't necessarily have to consist of elements that correspond to our reality, as I would suggest it also encompasses elements that exist to introduce the player to the particular quirks or "unrealistic" elements of the in-game world.

Oppositional friction consists of frictional gameplay elements that seek to heighten difficulty.

this design methodology is the reason that many of us find many 8-bit games unbearable; games that lean on oppositional friction too heavily can suffer from serious artificial difficulty. otherwise this is pretty bread-and-butter design fundamentals in order to present a proper challenge to players. damage balancing, enemy counts, time limits, and cooldown timers (among others) all fall under this umbrella, and often these values are the first to be tweaked in post-game updates in order to dial in the exact amount of challenge players need.

Unintentional friction consists of frictional gameplay elements resulting from oversights in the development process.

bugs, glitches, and their ilk all fall into this category. the shining example of this in my head is the sonic adventure duology: both of these games would likely be far better tolerated by the gaming community at large (who already are relatively forgiving of these games' failings) if they simply weren't riddled with countless collision issues, screwy camera sections, and physics goofs. of course, it's not always easy to tell whether a given mechanic falls into this category or one of the others given that specific design intentions are not always known. it's also certainly true that "unintentional smoothness" or something similar exists in many games, where development oversights actively reduce friction in other areas.

every game has frictional elements that fall into each of these categories, and identifying them within freedom unite (which I'll hereby refer to as mhfu) is easy. monster hunter games have retained a loyal fanbase that appreciates the dense internal logic of the series's world, all of which relies on immersive friction. weapons become dull with repeated use and must be frequently sharpened, materials must be gathered by hand or farmed over time, certain monster materials come from breaking or severing specific parts of the monster, and powerful items must be combined by hand. while understanding the intricacies will never come easily to a new player, the games do provide ample resources to those willing to learn, and the difficulty is balanced in such a way that new players won't have to leverage every mechanic in order to succeed during the early hours of the game.

mhfu is not a truly standalone product, as it is not only the culimination of the first two generations of monster hunter and an expansion of monster hunter freedom 2, but it is also at some level a retooled port of the ps2 title monster hunter 2 dos (or mh2). that game pushes the envelope on immersion past the first generation of entries by heavily expanding the single-player village scenario and introducing a cycle of seasons that solidified the game's setting. day and night alternate and change the map layouts, huntable monsters vary based on time of year, and the overall progression befits that of a living area that grew with the player day by day. players need to plan for seasons in advance; for example, beehives with vital honey deposits dry up in the cold seasons, forcing players to either stockpile in advance or lie low until the season passes over. every material carved or received post-hunt must fit in your limited pouch, and items in your box only stack to the point that they would in your regular inventory. all of this was carefully considered by the developers in order to create an enticing hunter/gatherer simulation that pushed difficult decision-making and world knowledge onto the player (for more information I highly recommend this rather lengthy retrospective of the game).

mhfu rolls back many of these changes in favor of streamlining the hunting experience. virtually all the mechanics I've listed above are absent: there is no seasonal system, day/night features are now simply part of the quest instead of cycling, item box space is nigh unlimited, and quest rewards teleport directly to your box. I want to stress that changing these isn't inherently a problem (something that the above video struggles to articulate). the monhun portable devs had decided to center the boss fight aspect of the series rather than the survival mechanics, and given the boost that mhfu gave the franchise, it seems like they successfully identified what enticed most players to begin with.

however, this absence of immersive friction seriously wounds the believability of the world. mhfu lacks the undergirding framework that made mh2 so interesting as a simulation of hunter-gathering lifestyle, and without that structure the cracks in the foundation begin to show. monsters here are endless scores of polygonal marionettes to be plopped into one of the many areas on a whim. they frequently walk in place, awkwardly jitter between moves, and refuse to interact with other monsters in their vicinity. stripped of the ecological backgrounds underpinning their mh2 appearances, these monsters can do nothing except serve as punching bags for the player to idly and repeatedly kill. later games would substitute back in more immersive elements that make these fights feel more dynamic and alive: the exhaustion system in the third generation slows down the monster and makes them feel as if they are legitimately expending energy battling you, and the fourth generation adds a significant amount of environmental interaction with the focus on verticality. mhfu sits at an awkward crossroads where it streamlines the mechanics to the point of killing some of the charm while simultaneously not possessing any innovations that make up for the lack of immersion.

simultaneously as the immersive friction is dialed back, the oppositional friction stings ever greater. the hitboxes are one of the most infamous examples from this entry (and prior ones); virtually every monster has an attack with a disjointed hitbox or a frame one activation that seriously strains depth perception and reaction time, especially for players new to the game. with the artifice of progression already so apparent here, these questionable design decisions scan more as cruel tricks to increase playtime and encourage reliance on multiplayer. the game seems as if it were self-aware, less truly a hunting game and more a endless boss rush that relies on compulsion to drive playtime. in response, the player begins to push back, bending the game even further away from a microcosm of elevated reality. why not just spam flash bombs if every monster can be repeatedly blinded by them? why bother exploring all the different quests when I can just look up key quests online? what's the point of fighting two monsters at once when I can wait for minutes on end in a different area waiting for them to split up? at this point the game begins to lose sight of the thrill of the hunt at all, and for every pound of pain it dishes out it receives a karmic retribution threatening its ability to convince me that its conceit has any basis to it at all.

so while its many weak points have been rectified in later entries and it performed incredibly well when released, from a design perspective I see mhfu as a cautionary tale in many ways. friction is not just a blunt weapon but a nuanced tool that requires care to truly apply properly. to that end: simply removing elements of friction from a game does not necessarily have a net positive effect on a game. removing key elements of immersive friction can in turn kill a player's desire to exist within the world the game creates. removing some elements of immersive friction may be for the best, but it may be equally or more pertinent to target elements of oppositional friction instead, especially if the goal is to streamline gameplay. finally, there are other ways to include immersive elements that are not necessarily frictional. including these can retain essential depth even when frictional elements are absent. I intend that none of these conclusions are dogmatic, but merely that they are my examinations of how this game feels slight compared to others in its series.

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gonna be upfront here: I didn't really finish the village quests. once I got to 9 star quests I did a quick tally of how many wyverns I had defeated and the number was probably around 60 or so, which is way under the 100 threshold you need to unlock the silverlos/goldian key quests. no way in hell I was going to needlessly grind when I already had 80+ hours and was desperately tired of this game, so I went ahead and set a goal to defeat rajang and call it quits. honest to god I was surprised I got that on the second try given how much of a pain it is... when enraged he could easily knock out 75% of my life bar if I got hit with the beam or some of his other attacks, especially since I was still using LR gravios armor (heavily upgraded of course).

nekoht's quests in general are probably the most abysmal key quest choices I've seen in the series up to now. for one: great forest is barely ever featured even though it's supposed to be the new map for the entry. it's a solid map but given that I've literally fought no one other than hypnocatrice and narga there I don't have super strong opinions on it either way. meanwhile you're pushed into a bunch of the shitty first gen maps... I read a gamefaqs thread stating that first gen desert is far superior to its dunes remake in fourth gen and I am perplexed about how anyone can hold that opinion. another place where the lack of other immersive friction fails: here is a map with two gigantic flat areas that I never get to explore organically at all and where I can be knocked into the adjacent areas off of virtually any border with no indication of where said border falls. the white monoblos fight here walled me for a bit and it was so infuriating. the basarios fight is bizarre since it takes place in old swamp and basarios literally never leaves a single area... the khezu fight is fine, even though having to run back and forth between the two separate cave areas isn't particularly fun. the double hypnocatrice refight is pointless (what a boring addition) and the rest of the 8 star rank keys are sort of here-or-there, just more hunt-a-thons.

except for yian garuga... what the fuck were they thinking. supposedly this Elegy of a Lone Wolf quest features the souped up scarred garuga variant and it hits like a truck with a cushy hp boost as well. I legitimately timed out on this fight using gunlance much to my absolute bafflement. my bit of hammer practice from mhgu recently came in handy here however, as I grinded out a nice iron hammer for HR and proceeded to crush the poor bird's skull in a truly cathartic 25 minute blast. this is truly the mhfu dichotomy: you feel like absolute shit when you do poorly and an absolute god when everything's going in your favor. just a year after starting my true monhun journey I finally felt like I accomplished one of the major elements of being a strong player, which is actually being able to switch weapons to counter a specific monster rather than leaning on a single weapon type for everything. it felt like such a natural fit too, as I was sussing out the safest quarter-turns to get fully charged standing shots on, nailing rolls through certain attacks, and watching my positioning to ensure I couldn't be caught by frame one moves at any point. that's some fucking monster hunter. same with the rajang fight; he's total bullshit but then it just clicks and suddenly I'm side-hopping through his punches and exploiting his janky beam hitbox.

that nargacuga fight is the most telling of where the series was destined to go from this game on. narga might be using tigrex's skeleton (I think anyway) but its moveset is completely its own. it moves with grace, braces itself for attacks, and features unique windups for virtually everything in its arsenal. I've fought narga dozens of times in p3rd when grinding for his endgame weapon, so I never expected this fight to be tough, but it really did put into relief how clunky many of the other monsters are. the move pool for 1st gen monsters is absolutely barren; expect to see virtually every wyvern have a tail whip, a hip check, a basic bite, and a turn-around swipe, all with virtually identical animations. some of the skeleton reuses are particularly glaring as well, like what are the differences between diablos and monoblos really? is it just that diablos jumps further from the ground when reemerging and also has more hp? it's pretty cleared why they've phased sone of these out in more recent years... it's an absolute crime that gigginox hasn't replaced khezu though, that fight is miles more interesting.

really it comes down to how much information you have going in. I already knew the controls from p3rd so I wasn't too thrown off by not having little context icons to let me know how to gather in certain spots or climb ledges. I started farming armor and power seeds from day 1 as a cash crop, and I ended up having to extensively use them not only for demondrugs/armorskins but also to consume on their own; who knew that they give +10 to a stat and stack with your drugs? in many of the other games I could coast without really preparing for each monster, but here it's an absolute necessity. flash bombs for everyone, sonic bombs for diablos, tainted meat for tigrex, etc. etc. I needed to spare no expense just to get by here. without all that prior knowledge it would've been curtains for me with this game a lot faster I think, and I would absolutely not recommend this game at all to those who haven't played any of the other pre 5th-gen games at least. I'm soloing G4 stuff in mhgu without thinking twice and then getting my ass handed to me by high rank village in this game. rough.

one day I'd love to flex my assembly knowledge and maybe make an easy-type hack for this game, which seems potentially feasible given that FUComplete exists. my ideas:
+base value of 50 defense. this is what mh3u did, and it would hopefully dull the edge on some of the truly insane attack values in this game.
+dung bombs actually scaring off monsters. this works on khezu, so it may be possible to either expand this check for all monsters or hook in the code for it into other monster AI routines, wouldn't be easy though. would really make double monster quests far more bearable
+felyne chef auto-cooking. just always give me 50/50 please, stop making me look at the wiki for the various recipes
+high rank village harvest tours. what the hell were they thinking leaving these out??

anyway back to mhgu... I'm an agnaktor x set grind away from getting to enjoy that kickass ahtal-ka fight. I'll come back to this and do multiplayer sometime, I'm sure I'll get an itch eventually and hunstermonter is still very active. maybe then I'll finish off village... which btw I already fought akantor a bunch in p3rd so it's not like I'm missing that fight completely, and I skipped HR shen gaoren because that fight is easily the most boring siege I've ever played.

another quick note: sony rules so much for making their handheld save data easy to access and move. originally started this on my dad's vita, moved the save to ppsspp, then back to vita, then to my psp, then back to ppsspp. playing this with claw on psp actually feels pretty viable but it was starting to give me some arm pain so I decided to call it quits on real hardware. it looks so gorgeous on that screen though...

A quick aside;- Spent the past few weeks on a bit of an PS3 emulation kick, knocking out a few stragglers from the gen 8 library that always managed to elude me. One of the games I tried out was the 2012 SSX reboot nobody really likes - god knows why I chose to start my foray into this series with that entry, it was just kind of there I guess. It was alright! Hard to really fault what appears to be a rock solid racing foundation w/ incredible feedback & thrills. I managed to get surprisingly close to the end of the game before my motivation careened off a couloir with the insistence of an awful statistical equipment store, gimmick missions like the oxygen tank, glider, solar power & rear-view cameras. If only EA made no less than three games beforehand where this memetic & metric excess is absent!!

Anyway SSX 3 is fucking sick. Nothing short of a landmark achievement for this game to accomplish as much as it does way back in 2003, all the while fully maintaining this feeling of modernity that makes it absolutely breezy to pick up blindly in current year. Snowboarding controls iterated on to a mirror shine, mechanically dense & full of freedom of expression in how you can approach the shockingly sprawling slopes that spread their tendrils through a track like a spaghetti bowl. Repeated heats thru race courses would have patchnotes I swear, the more I familiarised myself with their layout the more they’d pull the rug out from under me to reveal new avenues and secret paths. I love the blisteringly fast risk reward & fuckup cascade that can happen when your antic hubris meets its match & your teeth meet the grind rail. I fully expected this to just control like a breezy Tony Hawk clone or something, but it's so bespoke to itself & intensely demanding in a way that I adored losing myself to the mastery of.

Perhaps unshocking, but it’s also striking to me how much better this game looks over the next-gen reboot lol. Feels as though the art designers had no say in the way SSX 2012 looked, rendering the majority of its slopes a very grey textureless mush that only came across as too scared to introduce visually interesting locales like the audience’s eyes would just burst like blueberries under the tropical sun or something. SSX 3’s mountain is lined up like a daisy chain of unique vignettes with key visual identities and senses of purpose in the macro. I adore how the lighting and skybox would change subtly as you progress down the mountain, so when you do the ultimate no loading screen downhill jam through every track you’ve familiarised yourself with it feels like such a perfect odyssey. Unlockable Adam Warren art is rly great, particularly adore the concept art of the courses themselves and how franco belgian they look lol. Eventually I’ll play Tricky and enter the heated internal angel & devil inside of me debate between which of these two entries I prefer. I DEEPLY want these games to be added to that Noclip.website so I can see how these tracks curl in on themselves.

When a friend first asked me how I would describe Final Fantasy II, I was about half way through the game, and had just met Leila. I didn’t really know how to describe it, it was something I couldn’t compare to anything I’d played before. It led me through the story like an early JRPG but with early WRPG mechanics. It was bizarre and completely threw me off from what I learned in FFI. So much of what I learned from the first game didn’t matter at all now, and what it was trying to teach me seemed almost alien. So of course, my natural response to my friend was a wary, “Have you ever played… Morrowind?”

Final Fantasy II is nothing like Morrowind. Well, it has its similarities, as comparing any game from the same genre to each other would, I guess. I came into Final Fantasy II having only the original Final Fantasy to compare it to… eh, within the Final Fantasy series at least, as I have played a handful of 3rd-gen RPGs before it. Maybe it’s why I ended up thinking of FFII so positively compared to others. Maybe that’s a negative, but I like to think of it as a positive. It keeps me thinking of FFII in the bubble it originally released to, but unfortunately that also lacks me being able to compare it to much else.

One thing I should warn before diving fully into the review is that I did play the game in Japanese, so some of the names for things might be spelled differently from my own personal transliteration vs other later official English translations (wait his name was Josef and not Joseph this whole time?!). The Famicom version I believe is also missing quite a few additions that future versions had added later on, including ones added even a couple years later in the Famicom dual-release of both FFI + FFII.

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From first glance, I could immediately tell that Final Fantasy II had improved drastically from its predecessor. The creators were able to expand A LOT on what they made with the original. Just to list a few:

• You’re now able to fully go into buildings and walk around. You can even see little Firion sleeping in the inn!
• There's a crazy amount of new magic you can learn (which you see early on thanks to Ming Wu).
• You can now see your character’s negative status effects play as a funny symbol on top of them in battle (black glasses for blind, green swirls for poison, they literally turn into a rock when hit with the stone status!). It looks great and makes it easier for players to remember what exactly the current status of their party is just at a glance.
• The character designs are more varied and more detailed, even if Firion is just the fighter sprite from the first game. With Maria, we can now see our first true playable female character in the series, rather than the assumed fully-male cast of the first (or at least that’s how the English guidebook describes the cast which uh, infamously got quite a few things wrong about the game, so take that as you will LOL). You meet a very colorful cast of characters right at the start as well, with a good amount having fairly unique designs (Ming Wu is my favorite)!
• Lastly, the thing I noticed and was so happy to see was that you can now save whenever you want. Well, whenever you’re on the overworld map. But, still! It’s a button that’s always on your menu screen. You don’t have to bank on having a hotel or cottage in your pocket so you can save before a dungeon, which can make expeditions infinitely less frustrating.

The story of FFII is surprisingly engaging for a 3rd-gen game, with it starting out with a 5 minute long interactive cutscene kinda thing. Watching it, you quickly learn that you now have a set story with characters that have a set destiny. You can name them and train them to be whatever you want, but no matter what, the story has a path it will always take with characters you can’t always predict. Oh boy, how you can not predict. About 2/3rds of the temporary party members who join you end up dying! Even NPCs you don’t interact with too often end up dying! But hey, the story does focus around war, and what’s war without loss. Though more realistically, I imagine they killed off a majority of your short-term party members as a way to cycle through different characters and show the player different builds they themselves could evolve on. My favorite non-player characters that I met along the way were Paul the Ninja, and Sid and his son, who offer a shuttle with their flying boat not unlike the one from the first game… hey wait, why does Sid have his clearly underaged son in a bar? Oh well, it works for the story. Just try not to think about it!

There’s little things I can nitpick though, of course. I absolutely hate the new map. I understand this map is WAY bigger than the last, and the illusion of the globe allows them to fit more with less, but holy shit its soooo slow - and if I just want to check what direction I want to go to reach a dungeon, I have to slowlyyyyyyy wait for the globe to turnnn and inchhhh and oooo we’re almost there, baby!!!! Well, this shouldn’t be a problem, right? Final Fantasy I, Dragon Quest, Legend of Zelda are all games that provide a full map for you in the manual to glance at, so there must be one in this manual- nope. Okay, what about the guidebook? You know, the thing you spend extra money on to hold your hand and show you how to get through the whole game- nope. There’s no maps at all actually, even for the dungeons! Remember how Final Fantasy I had big maps for the player to scan through for everything, all within the manual packaged with the game? Well, Final Fantasy II says “Fuck you, why don’t you figure out,” as they hand you Slowpoke Rodriguez’s favorite class globe.

The manual and guidebook at least are very useful in including every little detail about the new leveling system, and also informing the player on what all the new magic does. A stupid complaint, but skimming through this lovely mapless guidebook, I was excited to see Chocobos appear, which are like giant chickens your player can ride on! Unfortunately, I never ran into them once throughout the entire game. They seemed cute, and the book says you can find them in a specific forest if you wander, but I never found one, even when purposefully looking for them. Oh well, maybe I was just unlucky!

Wait, that’s it? Those are the only complaints? It seems like FFII should smell like roses in comparison to FFI after all that, shouldn’t it? Well, it does…! It does, except for one very small, very tiny detail…

GAMEPLAY AND RPG MECHANICS

FFII doesn’t level in the way that Dragon Quest or even the original Final Fantasy do. In fact, the closest comparison I can personally make to a game that I’ve played that came out before FFII is regular tabletop DND. When you want to level up, you have to focus on a specific skill or trait. It’s not as simple as leveling up your magic to improve your magic; you have to focus on what exactly you want to level up in your magic. Did you want your magic attack to be stronger? Then focus on using the specific spell you want to be stronger, as the more you use it the more it levels up. Did you need more MP? Then use more magic to get more magic! Using magic in general also helps level up your magic strength… but specifically your intelligence or spirit which correlate to your black and white magic respectively. See where I got the Morrowind comparison? It’s a lot, but as you can see with my magic example, a lot of it relies on each other, so if you play naturally, you should still level up naturally like you would in FF1.

That would be all fine and dandy, except you don’t level up the way the creators intended. I don’t know whose idea it was to go against the golden rule for JRPGs since Dragon Quest: Allow players to level up quickly with the game requiring more points to level up the further they play. For example, to get to level 2 in… let’s say using a sword, maybe you need to use it 10 times before it reaches level 2. After that, then you need to use it 20 times to reach level 3, and so far so forth. FFII doesn’t do that, and I think that’s where its biggest flaw shows. It requires you to use whatever it is you want 100 times each time you want to level it up, all from the start. It’s awful, to put it lightly. The great thing to remember is all the Final Fantasys on the Famicom are insanely broken! As a result, I quickly found out that you can input a move on a party member and quickly cancel it and do it again. It only takes one move but it still counts the first use, essentially doubling the points I get from it. Do this 50 times, and you just leveled yourself up in one battle. Though of course, it’s just that one thing you leveled up, whether that be a magic skill, your attack, defense, HP, MP, or whatever else you focused on. It unfortunately also can mess with the leveling a crazy amount as well. Ugh, just think! This would be significantly less of a problem if they just followed the guide of leveling-up starting fast only to slow it down the further you go. They did it in FFI, so they must have found an issue to force the mandatory 100 points for FFII… On top of that all, the same issues with magic in FFI still exist in FFII, with a nice chunk of spells being completely broken and not working the way they intended. Most infamously it affects Ultima, a spell intended to be the most powerful in the entire game. The only way to figure out what works and what doesn’t is through trial and error- how horrendous! Thankfully, we live in the future, so I was able to quickly find a guide online that lets modern players know what magic to not waste their time on.

This is the biggest turn-off of Final Fantasy II to players, and I don’t blame them. I especially don’t blame players who had to try and figure out everything without the manual guiding them through this incredibly involved leveling system. I found the manual and guidebook for FFII on Internet Archive, and even with that by my side I constantly had to look at it over and over to remember what exactly I had to do to level-up myself up. Eventually, I just wrote and drew a shitty guide just for myself so I could more easily memorize it. In the end, I got there! Then I had to read and memorize all the new magic spells! Oh, well. As someone who loves journaling and taking notes, I really didn’t mind it, but of course I can understand how unbearable it could be for someone who doesn’t like it. It reminded me, again, of tabletop gaming and how when I play that with friends, I often fill a whole booklet with my little notes. Maybe I was used to it? Maybe I just felt it immersed me better into the story, and helped me feel more understanding of how the gameplay meshed with the narrative. In the end, it helped me gain a bit of an emotional attachment to it all; characters and game mechanics alike.

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Well, how would I compare it to my friend now, after finishing it? I’ve been told the Romancing Saga series takes heavy inspiration from it mechanically, and by the time I finished I could see the Star Wars parallels loud and clear. Obviously, it has its Wizardry, Ultima, and Dragon Quest influences… What didn’t back then? But how would I describe FF2?

It’s broken, it’s unreliable, it’s confusing. But it’s also rewarding, emotional, and easy to get wrapped into. It tried crazy things for both the time and platform it released on, but it found its people, and its people found it.

Final Fantasy II is like Final Fantasy II. You wanna know what THAT means? Well, play it and you’ll find out!

4/5

I really do hate feeling that I’m undervaluing effort. If anything, I should probably have just played a fantranslation of the original Live A Live, so that I could feel a little more as though this game’s web of genre anthologism was particularly formally impressive or functionally experimental. It’s a little personally embarrassing how much slack I’m willing to give older gens for breaking their spines over ambitious systems I take for granted nowadays, and narratives I’d find quaint in anything released now. I want to lay blame on Octopath’o’vision more than anything.
Live A Live’s cool, I won’t deny - the individual cinematic reverence to which each of these chapters are framed, the unique ways their characters express themselves thru bespoke mechanics like Pogo’s rudimentary crafting & hunting, Shifu’s already capped level & disciple training, Akira’s overworld psi abilities… I just don’t think there’s enough meat on any of this game’s bones for me to feel strongly either way about any of the stories, let alone for the final act to even feel self-justified that its cast have the capability to act as convincing anti-hate thesis statements - and not simply an extension of what Live A Live always does; falling back to the motions of genre.
Playing through Square’s library has made me feel incredibly assured in their ambitions and creativity, kindling much of what I find so mysterious and evocative about the JRPG genre. Games that spin themselves wildly into their own neuroses and bloom into an orchard of mechanics and character dynamics we’re today still only barely reaching similar heights of. To me. Live A Live feels like a demo disk or something of that mission statement, glimpses into their process but, too brief for hooks to really set in.

"Character action" has never done it for me. I feel the floaty combos and distant cameras really dampen the impact of combat. I'm so glad that we live in the timeline where instead of representing the future of the Resident Evil series, Devil May Cry became its own franchise. Resident Evil 4 was a game that Capcom attempted to make several times, before begging Mikami to come back to the director's seat, and even he scrapped a couple of false starts before he settled on the game he ought to be making. The change in camera was the big thing that players talked about, but it was the shift in focus and tone that really made Resi 4 so beloved by its biggest fans. Mikami had gained skill, establishing multiple complementary mechanics and tying that to a campaign, but he was also more confident in his own sense of humour and whimsy. Resi 4 was a game with a real sense of personality, but it was compromised by the pressures of the surrounding franchise, the publisher and the fanbase. For his next game, he'd disregard all these aspects and make it entirely for himself.

When I first played God Hand, it took about five seconds before I knew I loved it. It's very much built on the back of Resi 4, but makes no apologies for its eccentricities. It takes the weight and impact of Resident Evil 4's shotgun and puts that behind each punch. Resi 4 utilised the sensibilities of modern games just enough to adopt a mostly useless camera manipulation system to the right analogue stick, but God Hand foregoes those conventions entirely, tethering it to your critical dodge system. God Hand doesn't care about any other game. It's fully confident in what it's doing.

God Hand's vibe is a very divisive thing, and not something you can choose to opt out of, but a truly cultured mind will undoubtedly side with it. Its sense of humour comes from a very specific place. It's a deep affection for Fist of the North Star and low-budget 70s kung fu films, but there's so much fondness for late-80s and early-90s action games, too. It loves the ridiculous, digitised voice clips from Altered Beast and Final Fight. The greatest joy is when you encounter an absurd, one-off, late-game disco miniboss, and he hits you with the same audio clips as the standard grunts from Level 1. This is a game full of explosive barrels and giant fruit. Shinji Mikami started production on Resident Evil 4 trying to fulfil the obligation to make his scariest game ever, and by the end, he got so bored with that direction that he created a giant stone robot Salazar that chased you through brick walls. God Hand was the logical next step for him.

There's a focus to God Hand's ambitions that implies Clover really knew what they had with it. A few ridiculous bosses and minigames notwithstanding, the levels are typically fairly boxy and nondescript. All the attention is on the distribution of enemies and items. It's spectacularly un-fancy. Flat ground and big brick walls that disappear when the camera gets too close to them. It doesn't care. The fighting feels great, and we're having a great time with all these stupid baddies. Fuck everything else.

Your moveset is fully customisable. Between levels, you're given the opportunity to buy new moves, and apply them to your controls, either as specials tethered to a specific button combination, or even as part of the standard combo you get while mashing the square button. It offers players real versatility as they figure out their preferred playstyles, and what works for them, while trying something less intuitive can open you up to new approaches. There are quick kicks and punches that overwhelm opponents, heavy-damage moves that take longer to pull off, guard breaks, and long-range attacks that can help with crowd control. There are certain moves and dodges that are highly exploitable, and risk breaking the game's balance. Clover are aware of this though, and whenever they found a strategy that made the game boring, they made sure to penalise you for using it by boosting the difficulty massively whenever you try it.

That's the big feature. The difficulty. God Hand starts out really hard, and when the game registers that you've dodged too many attacks or landed too many successive hits, it gets harder. This was a secret system in Resi 4, but in God Hand, it's part of your on-screen HUD, always letting you know when you've raised or lowered a difficulty level. Enemies hit harder, health pick-ups drop less frequently, and attacks become harder to land. The game's constantly drawing you to the edge of your abilities, and if you die, you have to try the entire section again from the start. It never feels too dispiriting, though. You retain all cash you've picked up after you died, and you feel encouraged by a drop in difficulty. If you do well enough on your next attempt, it won't take long before the difficulty gets back to where it was. There's also some fun surprises for those who get good enough to maintain a Level 3 or Level Die streak for long enough, with some special enemy spawns and stuff. You feel rewarded for getting good, but never patronised or pandered to. Your reward is a game that felt as thrilling as it did when you first tried it.

It's the little eccentricities in God Hand's design that I really admire. Pick up a barrel and Gene will instantly shift his direction to the nearest enemy, eliminating any extraneous aiming bullshit, and pushing your attention towards the opportunity for some cheap long-distance damage. If an item spawns, it remains there until you pick it up, giving you the opportunity to save it for when you really need it, even if the backtracking route becomes a little ridiculous. Since the camera is so stubbornly committed to viewing Gene's back, they've implemented a radar system to keep track of surrounding enemies, and it makes little sense in the context of the scenario, but the game doesn't care about that stuff. It's another thing that makes the fights against gorillas and rock stars more fun, so run with it. Between each section of the game, you're given the opportunity to save, or warp to a kind of mid-game hub world, with a shop, training area and casino, which you can use to unlock better moves and upgrades when you need them most. You can gain money by taking the honest route and chipping away at its toughest challenges, or take the less honourable route with slot machines and gambling on poison chihuahua races. It's blunt, utilitarian, and it's entirely complementary to the way God Hand feels to play.

It's the consistency in tone and intention that completes the package. God Hand knows what it is, and how it feels, and it never betrays that. It doesn't obsess over lore or characters, but it really has fun in introducing new baddies and scenarios to put you in. And I really like its taste. I like that all the big bosses meet up at a secret hell table to exchange barbs between levels. I like the fight on an enormous Venetian gondola. I like the dumb, weird, repetitive soundtrack. The developers are world-class talents, and they just wanted to make a dumb, stupid, fun game.

I probably ought to give the soundtrack a little more credit. This is from Masafumi Takada, out on loan from Grasshopper Manufacture before he became a real gun for hire, working on Vanquish, Kid Icarus: Uprising, Danganronpa and Smash Bros Ultimate. He's great at elaborate, high-energy compositions, but his work on God Hand is some of his dumbest stuff. It's great. The constant Miami 5-0 surf rock, the warbling Elvis boss fight music, and the Flight of the Bumblebee guitar for the fight against a giant fly. He's having the time of his life on this one, fully liberated from the pressures to convey a consistent tone or atmosphere. It's stunning work, and he makes the correct call every time he has to write a new piece of BGM for God Hand.

Shinij Mikami is a bit of an enigma, and his work on Resident Evil has unfortunately typecast him as a horror director, but he's never expressed a real affinity for the genre. He was put into that position under an obligation to Ghouls 'n Ghosts' Tokuro Fujiwara, and the game he ended up making was full of corny heroes and giant snakes. The subject matter was a shock to audiences in the mid-nineties, but in reality, it wasn't that far removed from his work on SNES Aladdin. By my estimation, God Hand's the closest we've come to seeing the real Mikami through his work. He's made Resident Evil 4, and he wants to leave that behind him, but EA and ZeniMax kept dragging him back to his biggest hit.

God Hand feels like the only point in history God Hand could have happened, and it's pretty wild that it did in the first place. I mean, it makes sense that once you hand Capcom the Resi 4 Gold Master disc, they'll let you do whatever you want, but they were so rattled by the result that they fired all of their key talent and started making calls to Canada to produce Dead Rising 2. Confidence in Japanese development was at an all-time low after 2006, and the PS3 and Xbox 360 resulted in some of the most embarrassing entries in many legacy franchises. The PlayStation was born out of a SNES project, and that ethos was what drove the first decade of Sony Computer Entertainment. Afterwards, a new game proposal would not be greenlit without referencing the design of the latest Grand Theft Auto. The Konami, Namco, Square and Capcom that we have today don't reflect who they were in the nineties and early 2000s. To me, God Hand feels like the final page of that chapter. But, man, what a fucking statement to close out on.