Call me Vee....Captain Vee.....

It's been about thirty years give or take since I had encountered that ghastly damn fiddler crab. I trudged and shuffled my way through hill tops, chemical plants, casinos, and even oil spills to find all those sparkly gemstones competing in those half pipe challenges. The challenges themselves were quite a treat back in those days. They're a tad fumbly bumbly visiting them now, and the bombs are quite dastardly placed. I wouldn't expect any less from that egg-ish bastard, but that crab took everything from me. My time, my money, my gems, as well as my leg. That crabominable nincompoop took it off when I tried to jump on him, I don't know how he hit me, but he did. Underhanded he was, that's why as of this paragraph I have gone off on my expedition to track down that bloody wanker. I'm gonna get him back for what he did, I will have my revenge...

Been about a weeks worth of travel on the range, we stopped at the casino as a resting stop after my fox companion nearly got tetanus from a Grounder jumping out of the wall in those ruins earlier. Crafty bunch they are, constantly talking about buckets of chicken for some reason too. After I lost all of my rings diving headfirst into an oversized slot machine, we continued onward through the caves dodging those damn lightning bugs. We were getting closer though, closer to his habitat. I could smell the fumes of discarded fossil fuel, past this ocean, we will be within his lair. It's a shame no one has yet to do something about all this oil, I wonder if it's the seahorses keeping the cleaning crews at bay...their cheesy poof spitball can knock an echidna on their arse.

After a couple hours we finally made it, the fabled Metropolis Zone, often mistakenly known as "Genocide City" by some goers. Sounds like something owned by a blonde arms dealing supervillain living in a Nimitz-class supercarrier. My foxy companion was nearly knocked off the lug nut elevator that we were using by an exploding starfish, that's how I knew we were even closer. The music was awfully catchy for such a dangerous area, no idea where it was coming from. I can only assume that crab was behind it. We searched high and low for what seemed like hours.......perhaps even days....but then, it happened. I spotted him. Perched up on the ledge like he was last time, the crustaceous criminal.

Shellcracker. Shellcracker.....

There's no mistaking it, I could never forget such a smarmy little fucker. You could get an entire team of astrophysicists and mathematicians to construct a diagram of when and how this damn crab's hitboxes function, but they still wouldn't be able to figure it out. Baffled beyond recognition at the thievery of which this arthropod operates, science couldn't possibly understand it. I couldn't either, but I had to get it. My revenge. I cannot allow him to continue his antics, who knows how many countless others he has stolen from. How many lives ruined. All by this fiddling fiddler's debauchery and scandalous behavior. I ushered my kitsune cohort to hand me my spear...and I could see Shellcracker's eyes narrow, he knew it was me....I have come for him....only one will leave this area alive. The hunt is on....

My heart was racing, the adrenaline was pumping, the memories of our last encounter rushed back to haunt me. I took my trusty spear and clutched it in my dominant hand, I readied my aim at my arch nemesis. Shellcracker did nothing but sneer at me in confidence, his gigantic claw was ready to lunge at me any second now. I was at a disadvantage, but I was determined, determined to crack his shell. We glared at each other for eons, waiting for one of us to make the first move. Birds flew out of the trees that had somehow grown in this factory, and I suddenly saw his pincer rush toward me. My life flashed before my eyes, and I jumped skywards out of the way for my dear life. In the air, it felt like time had frozen. I could see him below me, now was my chance. I threw my damned spear as hard as I could, straight for his mug. I couldn't even see straight, after only a second I heard a loud "POOF" afterwards. After landing, I took a quick glance back at the enemy, a thick cloud of smoke where he once was. It was done, my revenge is complete. Shellcracker....has been cracked.....

After the smoke cleared however, a rabbit hobbled out of the wreckage of what was once a sinister shellfish. They looked at me for a few seconds, with an odd look that unsettled me. They seemed thankful, thankful that I had defeated them... something I was unprepared for. The rabbit ran off without a care, leaving me there with an almost empty feel. I got my revenge...a selfish act for sure, one that I knew made me no better than the crab, but... was it truly as selfish as that shellfish? I wonder how I would've felt if I had not seen that rabbit afterwards. I took a ponder to this during our return trip home. Riding the gondola down the skies of Hill Top, I remembered all those moments from our last adventure. The journey through the Chemical Plant outracing that vile blue jelly, exploring those aquatic ruins nearly getting my face taken off by an arrow... it's quite odd. My eyes became heavy as I stared off into the sunset, tears were felt running down my cheeks as I looked again at my new keepsake that was his claw. I spoke to him.

"Thank you for the memories, old chum."

"Uhhh, single's life is great, Roxy. I can play whatever I want... Today I money-matched Melty Blood in the bathroom!"

"The one down the hall."

"Yeah! Another great thing, you get your own light gun game. Uhhh, I shoot at Wild Dog, do you?"

"I play PlayStation Vita games in bed with my wife."

"...Oh. Yeah..."

Short version: If you adopt a stray cat it'll come and sit on the headmaster's desk.

Long version:

This game is not unique in having the player create a character, it is not unique in letting them click on students and read their thoughts, it is not unique in asking you to balance said students' happiness and their grades and the school's budget.

What makes Let's School unique is that its elements come together to create a traditional management sim that frequently has the texture of a life sim, working off its systems in place of a script - a game in which you'll hand-craft a curriculum for each class, period by period, and then sit back and watch as your students go cloudgazing at recess, develop crushes and try to sneak video games into the classroom - apologies to Janet Lewis, who has had her GBA personally confiscated by me on four separate occasions. I am simply too powerful, and you are not.

In playing the game it's easy to see that its developers have genuine admiration for a child's earnestness and enthusiasm, as the game is chock-full of little things for the kids and faculty to do that make your school feel lived-in. These are undoubtedly nice features that add flavor to the game, but more importantly they turn the consequences of any managerial decisions into something more real than just lines on a spreadsheet and a stick figure with a frowny face above their head. In theory, this shouldn't be too uncommon for the genre. In practice, though, Let's School ends up way at the top of the pack by leaning wholeheartedly into its theme. It is unmistakably a game about being the headmaster of a school, about crafting organizational charts, arranging field trips, training staff, balancing budgets, and building a facility that (hopefully) ensures your students are cared-for and comfortable enough to be kids instead of little machines that pay tuition and fill out Scantrons. Perhaps talking about things this way makes me sound like a blowhard, but I emphasize the illusion of NPC interiority because this is the game, this is why you buy Let's School over something like Two Point Campus. Its specialty lies in building your attachment to those kids to the point where - when it comes time to start spending that tuition money - you stop thinking about that "Satisfaction" value like a min-maxer and start thinking like a teacher.

----

Please stop bringing frogs into the classroom.

There seems to be a prevailing expectation that as games evolved, they also became exponentially more approachable. Higher budgets resulted in smoother graphics and fewer bugs. More complex controls (adding left/right triggers, then adding one/two joysticks, then dabbling with motion inputs, etc) gave players a firmer grasp over their characters. AI became more predictable as their algorithms became more intricate to capture a wider range of responses. In a sense, as the technology expanded, the resulting products seemingly became more streamlined to better suit the player’s needs while more thoroughly capturing a developer’s vision.

Team Ico has never been about following tradition, however. If anything, the evolution of their titles embodies the regression of player control, choosing to instead utilize technological advancements not just to refine its premise via "design by subtraction" as chump has pointed out, but to deliver an entirely new experience altogether. Ico was a classic tale of boy meets girl; the girl had to be freed from her cage and pulled around the castle, as the boy protected her against everything in her way to prevent her demise. Shadow of the Colossus, however, was a story concerned with the struggle over control. The lone wanderer, in his quest to revive Mono, hunts down various several-story colossi capable of swatting him about like a fly. In the resulting desperate dance of death, he at first struggles to climb their hulking figures, hanging on for dear life until he discovers their weak points and stabs the colossi while they helplessly flail about. In other words, it's a game about trying to regain any semblance of control until you realize after the fact that the only shadow left was the literal shadow cast by Wander over their fallen corpse.

The Last Guardian then, can be thought of as the natural evolution of Team Ico titles, in that it melds previous design sensibilities and thrives off of disempowering the player throughout its entirety. Trico, the player’s companion and a cross between cat and bird, is essentially the analog to Wander’s horse in Shadow of the Colossus, Agro. Fumito Ueda designed Agro as a companion rather than just a vehicle, and had his team develop specific movement algorithms that would allow Agro to steer herself without the player’s explicit control, forcing players to put their trust in their steed during certain fights emphasizing bow aiming. Ueda and his new team at GenDesign iterated upon this idea, explicitly creating environments where the player was forced to rely upon Trico’s actions to progress and thus establish dependency between the boy and his companion.

While the game can be thought of as an inversion of Ico in this sense, its design influence upon The Last Guardian should not go overlooked, particularly in how the game captures Ico’s physicality. Ico’s key strength was establishing a sense of presence through minimalist puzzles that lacked overly gamey elements, namely in how Ico interacted with his surroundings. Players are subtly guided into climbing chains, pulling levers, sitting on stone sofas to save, and most importantly, holding down R1 to hold Yorda by the hand around the castle and pull her out of danger whenever captured. The Last Guardian innovates upon this by combining several of the traversable elements and the companion into one. To better navigate the vast ruins, the boy must guide Trico and utilize their tall body of climbable feathers in order to scale heights, while occasionally dragging around their large tail and dangling it over ledges to safely climb down. Most importantly, you get to pet Trico whenever you feel like it to comfort your friend in both their happiest and most emotionally taxing moments. In both Ico and The Last Guardian, the player’s constant contact with both the environment and their companion keeps them firmly rooted within its constructed sense of reality by regularly reminding them of their companion’s physical presence.

This physicality would not be as significant without the lessons learned from Shadow of the Colossus however, not just regarding AI behavior but also specifically in how it adapts the game’s sense of scale. Trico is large, and the boy is small. As mentioned previously, Trico can utilize their size to lean against walls and give the boy a step up, but they can also utilize their weight to hold down large chains and swipe away at imposing bodies of armor. Meanwhile, the boy is much more agile and can fit into otherwise inaccessible small spaces by Trico, squeezing through narrow tunnels and gaps in metal gates to pull switches and let his partner through. This obvious difference in size creates consistent room for contrast, not just in how the two characters differ in terms of functionality but also in terms of their scale when measured against the traversed liminal spaces of the ruins, constantly transforming from immense empty rooms to constrained and suffocating tunnels and corridors.

What is particularly interesting is not just The Last Guardian’s disempowerment or sense of scale, but rather what it manages to achieve with said elements and the resulting contrast to establish interdependency between the two characters and solidify their relationship. The combat, an almost complete inverse of Ico’s combat, is the most obvious example. Rather than defending Yorda by whacking shadow enemies with a stick, the roles have been reversed, in that the player must rely upon Trico to guard against scores of possessed armor as to avoid getting kidnapped himself. Even so, the game plays around with this idea of vulnerability, shifting the onus of responsibility about as the boy often finds himself in positions where he must actively support or protect Trico, such as disposing of glass eyes that scare his friend or scrambling to pull a nearby switch to lower a bridge and give Trico room to climb up to safety. The game is even willing to occasionally break its own rules to demonstrate how this sense of caring evolves past its defined guidelines. In almost any other game, this mechanical inconsistency would be regarded as a flaw, but it is this sense of doubt that creates room for the relationship to build from in the first place, and is perhaps the game’s most understated strength.

This is not to say that The Last Guardian was bereft of limitations regarding the execution of its ambitious scope. The most pressing challenge that Ueda and his team faced was how to balance its constructed sense of reality with regards to player expectations; that is, it had to find meaningful ways to commit to its vision of establishing the relationship between the boy and Trico while also acknowledging and appeasing players that would otherwise get lost or frustrated. Perhaps the most obvious downgrade from Ico is the presence of constant button prompts appearing on-screen to alert the players on how to better control the boy and instruct Trico; while the frequency of the prompts lessens over time, it is a slight disappointment that the game doesn’t simply force the players to experiment with inputs and commands as a more subtle and trusting substitute. This downfall however, is an anomaly amongst The Last Guardian’s other shortcomings, as it manages to successfully disguise many of its other concessions and limitations. There’s a classic “escape from the collapsing structure” sequence where all you do is hold forward and jump, but the game gets away with it because the player is used to being framed as a helpless participant. There’s occasional voice-over dialogue hints whenever the player has been stuck for a while in the same area, but it feels far less intrusive than Dormin’s repeated and booming hints in Shadow of the Colossus because the game has already established itself as a retrospective re-telling from the now grown boy’s point of view. Trico doesn’t respond immediately to the boy’s commands when being told where to go, but it makes sense that they wouldn’t function like clockwork and would need time to spot and process the situation from their own point of view, so the lag in response feels justified. It doesn’t matter that certain isolated elements of the game would crumble under scrutiny. What matters is that the situational context to allow players to suspend their disbelief is almost always present; in other words, the illusion holds up.

I’m still learning more about the game to this day. There are so many little details that I wouldn’t have spotted upon a first playthrough, and it’s an absolute joy finally getting to gush upon spotting them in replays. Of course it makes sense that you can’t just issue specific commands to Trico at the very start as a sequence-break despite not being taught by the game; after all, Trico hasn’t had time to observe you and mimic your actions to carry out such commands. Of course the hostile creatures that look exactly like your friend behave similarly; how can you then use your preconceived knowledge of their physiology to aid your friend in a fight against their copycat? I also can’t help but appreciate how GenDesign condensed so much learning within its introduction; in the first ten minutes alone, you’re hinted on how to later deal with the bodies of armor (the magical runes that appear before waking up are the exact same as the runes that appear when grabbed, and are dispelled in the same manner of furiously mashing buttons), you get to figure out how Trico’s eyes change colors depending upon whether they’re mesmerized or hostile, and it quickly establishes the premise of building up trust with a very wary creature that’s more than likely to misunderstand or ignore you at first. Combine all of these nuances with the game’s ability to destabilize and diversify playthroughs via Trico’s innate curiosity and semi-unpredictable instincts, and you get a game that becomes easier to appreciate the more the player familiarizes themselves with its inner workings.

I think a lot of criticism for The Last Guardian ultimately comes down to less of what we perceive the game is and more of what we perceive the game isn’t. It’s not a fully player-controlled puzzle-platforming game like Ico, it’s not a puzzle-combat game with spectacle like Shadow of the Colossus, and it’s certainly not a classic companion escort-quest game where you can just order Trico around like a robot and expect automatic results every time. Instead of focusing on the progression of more complex controls and puzzles, The Last Guardian is focused on the progression of a seemingly more complex relationship. I’m not going to pretend that everyone will get something out of this game, as it definitely requires a good deal of patience and player investment to meet the game halfway. It’s certainly more difficult to appreciate given its lack of influence unlike Ico or its lack of exhilarating boss encounters unlike Shadow of the Colossus. That said, it’s this element of danger in its ability to commit to its vision while alienating impatient players that makes it such a compelling title once it finally clicks. Many before me have pointed out how powerful the bond between the player and Trico felt upon learning from others that improperly caring for Trico results in your companion stubbornly ignoring the player’s commands; after all, volume swells cannot exist without contrast to provide room for growth. Perhaps this is why at the end of the day, I find myself transfixed by every word that Fumito Ueda has to offer. In an era where developers feel overly concerned with the best and brightest, he doesn’t seem concerned about what video games mean so much as what video games are. I can only hope that someday, he and GenDesign will return to bring us a new title that captures our imagination as thoroughly as many of his works already have for me.

It is easy to be dismissive. Be it art, people, food, events, the rapid, continual pace of consumption necessitates the compartmentalisation and categorisation of happenings. One can be dismissive in the positive and in the negative. The complex emotions elicited through our lives fade as quickly as they arise. Perhaps it is a consequence of language, an inability to express the phenomenon of experience. A meal's interplay of tantalising nostalgic aroma and comforting warmth in the belly is, for most of our lives, recalled as good - if it is remembered at all. A film is so bad it's good, some self-fulfilling label that sets expectations and ebbs the need for analysis of artistic merit and failure. A book is well-written. Your ex is a bitch. Last Christmas was good.

In the new hyperactive mode, wherein consumption happens largely for the sake of consumption, categorisation happens more readily, more aggressively, less critically. A director is washed. Your favourite is 🐐-ed. Films are kino or coal. Aesthetics are reduced to haphazard strictures, art pinned as frutiger aero, frasurbane, girlypunk neo-Y2K vectorheart nu-brute. Games are flavour of the month, kusoge, kamige, kiige, bakage, normiecore. Bring something up, and everyone has an opinion, a rote repetition of regurgitated refuse. Exhibit passion for that outside the zeitgeist, and be lambasted. Convey discontent with the beloved, be accused of poor media literacy. Are we even partaking of that which we parade around, or are we playing an elaborate game of telephone?

Even Burger King Orientation CD-i Training cannot escape unharmed. A wave of ironic praise and genuine befuddlement at why this exists, why it is revisited. One must be seeking attention for having such a quirky thing on their profile. It is impossible that it is enjoyed on a deeper level, as a response to a wider fascination, as a dive into historical (non-)import. The new hyperactive mode intentionally seeks signifiers which mark the self as interesting. An intentional facade which begs it won't be scrutinised.

But just because you have constructed this mask does not mean we all wear it. And perhaps I am being dismissive of your own thoughts. The truth of the matter is you don't care what I think, or why I feel a certain way. And to be fair, I feel the same animosity towards you. We are strangers at the conflux of comparison of preference.

I am filled with a genuine glee when I 'play' Burger King Orientation CD-i Training, but maybe it is best I keep the reasons to myself, as with so much else.

After all, you care not for what I think, so what is the difference if those thoughts are no longer laid bare.

a triumph for scenario design aficionados. hour after hour of slices of the real world perfectly aligned into a playground of roving militants and hapless civilians. rarely does a game ever make its missions feel properly explorable while keeping it taut and linear at the same time, and yet deus ex routinely weaves both together. for every point A to point B underground lair with traps laid out in sequence there is a completely open venue, such as the suffocating catacombs and their dimly lit hallways giving way to the Champs-Élysées avenue of paris, with a bakery to pilfer contraband drugs from, a hostel with full bar access, and an arms dealer's loaded apartment, all off the beaten path from your main objective. military bases and science labs retain the layout you'd expect had you ever toured one, and you'll find that locker rooms, rows of cubicles, and break rooms feature just as prominently in the dungeon crawling as warehouses with guards patrolling or tightly wound mazes of laser tripwires and turrets. the authenticity and legibility of these areas comes first, and yet more often than not the designers still manage to weave in appropriate challenges without violating each location's fidelity in the process.

and really, dungeon crawling is the name of the game here, more or less. at least half of the game takes place in some sort of complex with a destination and a set of non-linear gates along the way, all of which serve as hinge points for the player to choose which resources to expend. the "immsim" label comes from just how many resources have all gotten slammed together in your control: lockpicks and "multitools" for bypassing security, ammo for many different varieties of firearms, bio-energy for utilizing your augmented abilities, and a slew of consumable items meant for tanking bullets, running past enemies undetected, or breathing under water for long periods of time. at its most taut, the game generally puts some sort of barrier up in your way and then a way around it, with the direct option being something like combat or picking a lock and the indirect option being finding a vent or waterway to circumvent the barrier. with enough of these situations back to back, the game hopes that you'll avoid sticking to one gameplay style in order to preserve your resources in that area for later when they seem more necessary; you can't crack every door with lockpicks, so you'll probably have to get your hands dirty or crawl on your belly here and there if you want to keep your picks for when the alternative is, say, running through a irradiated area. the nice part of this is that it truly does work: I explored, snuck around, and fought off enemies all in equal measure throughout the game through entirely organic response to each of the situations. the downside is by endgame the resource economy has completely turned in your favor assuming you've been rotating all of your options, making decisions on resource expenditure past a certain point much more about cleaning out your inventory rather than rationing.

when the game is firing on all cylinders, you'll get something like bunker III from the aforementioned catacombs. the area is two large rooms with a camera and turret tracking you at the back of the first room right in front of a cell full of hostages, multiple floors connected by stairs with archways for cover in the second room, and a back hallway swarming with rocket-strapped operatives where the camera/turret controls and a key to the next reside; a waterway additionally connects the front of the first room with the back of the second room. here you have actual tradeoffs to deal with: just grabbing the key and skipping the whole area by going through the waterway works, but the coverage in the back hallway can be intense depending on the AI's behavior, and your direct path to the key is blocked by strategically placed crates as soon as you leave the waterway. gunning for the security controls instead is feasible, and you can leverage the fact that hacking computers (sometimes?) pauses enemies for a bit to quickly run out, disable everything, and hop back in the waterway. you could also sneak in from the front and use an augmentation that hides you from cameras to avoid triggering the turret, and if you rescue the hostages with lockpicks instead of locating the cell key and leave the area early, you'll get the next area's key from their camp leader anyway. when the game constructs situations like these, they not only make the discrete tradeoffs impactful on the flow of a given level, they also weave it into the actual second-to-second movement, stealth, and combat as well.

at its worst it's the opposite: individual rooms with a guard or two and maybe a computer system or locked door stitched together by long hallways that inoculate each scenario from one another. in these sections the main appeal is exploration, either through finding nooks and crannies hidden from view or by reading the many "data cubes" with flavor text strewn around. it can still be exciting, especially earlier on when you don't have tools to detect enemies through walls and the suspense of moving around still persists. later in the game when one has more abilities at their disposal, breaking apart puzzles or barriers by jumping over them with enhanced height, moving large crates to use as stairs with enhanced strength, or shooting down doors with a mastered rifle ability can potentially make the monotony less apparent. some of the barriers don't fare quite as well due to a lackluster implementation: the hacking, for instance, is more or less free even with minimal upgrades, and for every camera you have to actually maneuver around there's at least four you'll disable without thinking just because the security terminals are easy to access. if the mission locations didn't adhere to the small details of real environments or didn't have cute little secrets in vents and lock-boxes, these issues would likely overcome the holistic experience and result in tedium.

the tiny details extend further than objects in the world as well. from early on when one of your augmented colleagues begins spontaneously complaining about getting the wrong can of soda from a vending machine, I had hoped that the scripting for the NPCs would stay high quality, and it absolutely persisted to the final moments of the game, when a civilian mechanic distraught by my actions pulled a gun on me behind my back. the tight pacing of the levels compared to a full open world experience allows for many of the individual NPCs to have unique dialogue, behavior, and even inventory when subdued. of these the most fascinating to me may have been a conversation with a chinese bartender in hong kong, who extolled the CCP's commitment to capitalist enterprise outside the purview of the new world order by emphasizing authoritarian nationalism against main character denton's idealized western democratic order. it's something you wouldn't see now in the xi jinping era and weirdly reflective of the game's almost non-ideological view of politics: people-facing organizations controlled by layers upon layers of shadowy organizations, each manipulating social behavior in a top-down way compared to the bottom-up class struggle and ideological superstructure of reality. not really a thought-provoking work unless you're particularly animated by vague gesturing towards "control" and "liberty," but at least you can tell the developers didn't take it too seriously either. there's roswell-style gray aliens running around for christ's sake.

Immaculate vibes, man!

I will always have New Leaf as my preferred Animal Crossing game, but after playing this for a bit I really respect the origins of the series. Sure, its more simple, more rough around the edges. But that makes it interesting! It may not have the endless content of New Leaf, but its got a unique feel, I respect that.

I will definitely be playing this more. I may write more detailed thoughts once I play a lot more.

Just some quick thoughts for this one, apologies if it's a little scatterbrained.

As a game this is probably the most ""content"" for your dollar that you could possibly get out of a scripted game and I'm truly blown away by how much effort it must have been to put this whole thing together. Dondoko Island is a minigame with more mechanics than 98% of the games I play each month. If that were all there is to say then I'd be giving it a 10/10 - and I understand that everything after this point is going to make me sound like an insane person to 85% of people playing this - but the truth is that this game (like Y7) is so hell-bent on being silly at all times that it often undercuts itself when it comes to dramatic tension or consistency of plot/characters - again! Genuinely, if the Ichiban games just knew how to solve their tonal issues then I'd be giving this game an extra star, if not more. Classic Yakuza goofiness works best as a break from the drama - it's less effective when the cutscene establishes a legitimate, serious threat to your loved ones and then immediately warps to your female party member decked out in a coconut bra and maracas strumming a ukulele at a guy with a beach ball for a torso.

Some things (the combat and chain attacks, Hawaii, every non-Sujimon minigame) are miles better than they were in Y7, but the game also loves to tell the same jokes over and over so things that are initially endearing (seonhee fangirling over kiryu) become extremely grating by the end. I also think Yakuza Gaiden works better as a farewell tour for Kiryu because it's not just crammed into a game about someone else in a city he's barely been to - having Kiryu reminisce can be fun at points but so many of the locations are completely arbitrary and having Kiryu go "Remember all the times Date rescued me in a helicopter?" because he walked into a cafe feels dry and artificial, not fun. I'm almost resentful that so much of the focus is placed on him in this story when his main purpose for most (not all) of it is to be a cool friend who people on the street constantly recognize. The big Kiryu checklist wavers between being interesting (reflecting on basic things Kiryu never got to enjoy because of his insane life of constant fighting) and mind-numbing (do you remember the dancing minigame in Y0? how about the fishing minigame?). Ultimately though, it's part of a larger push to make these characters feel like they have lives outside of Ichiban's adventures (Ichiban included) and it works wonders... when it works at all. Tomizawa shines particularly brightly as someone whose drink links highlight a life that's been uprooted in a way that ties into the main plot while remaining personal to him and exposing more of his character. Saeko and the other women, however, mostly get these nothingburger chats that are about Ichiban or how cool Kiryu is or how stressful it is to run a business.

Also: It needs to be better about signposting when you're about to switch protagonists. At one point it splits your group between two locations and warns you that you're going to need good gear because there's some combat coming up, but it doesn't tell you that it's going to switch you to the other group first, leading me to 75 straight minutes of fighting with a party that is severely underpowered because I read the warning and assumed I'd be fighting with the group I was currently controlling.

Also also: I'm still not a fan of the enemies they cook up in the Ichiban games. A lot of them are creative and fun and a lot of them really, truly are not - it's cool to see what attacks they assign to random day jobs, it's not funny or interesting when the fat guy in ill-fitting clothes hits you with a big hot dog or the Chinese mafioso performs acupuncture in the middle of a fight. That shit is so fucking boring, dog. Ichiban could really use a better imagination.

I realize that this might seem overly negative for the rating I've given. I enjoyed myself for the vast majority of its runtime, but so much of this just collapses in on itself for me when I give it any thought at all. I'm still in awe at the production value here - this game blows my mind in much the same way that 2D mode in Dragon Quest XI did - they simply did not need to go so hard in crafting a big video game buffet. Combat has only seen a few changes but the changes that have been made take it from something I tolerated in Y7 to something I truly enjoy (as long as I'm not underleveled). Y8 addresses so many of the concerns I had with Y7 but about once an hour I'm reminded that the Daidoji faction is transparently complete nonsense (in the same way the Florist used to be), that the Drink Links still insist on having One Big Problem that each character must solve that ends in a fight (which means each character only gets to talk about a single thing during their moments in the spotlight), that both the English and the Japanese dubs feel inappropriate for the setting at least 50% of the time. There's a lot to like about this game and for significant chunks of it - mostly while I was ignoring the story - I was considering just giving it 5 stars and calling it a day, but the more I think about it, the less appropriate that feels.

(Logged as a shoe-in for both the base Monster Hunter: World game, and the Iceborne expansion.)
Lavish & deathly exciting at practically all times - varied and expressive social MMO tissue connecting its numerous multi-layered terrariums of gorgeous arenas and silly monsties.

I do have some background with the series, with much history on Freedom Unite, and far less with the fantranslation of Portable 3rd + 3Ultimate at various points through highschool, and hit the credits of Rise. Freedom Unite came packed with FMV cutscenes that demonstrate how the monsters lived in their downtime - characterising the monsters to assure the player that they weren't merely thoughtless models with movesets to memorise, but individual links in the food chain with roles that keep the world biodiverse & strong.
It was always my favourite part of the game, and what felt like the series' missing hook to really sell me on the core conceit was in how this aspect is somewhat downplayed or unexplored.

By God's grace this was the kind of ecological focus MH:W absolutely relishes in. An interlinking tapestry of ecosystems ticking away, living & interacting in countless ways to make the New World feel so gd raw. And it's not just pageantry either, it plays into behaviours and environment interactions from traps to turf wars. So so so good to head out for a simple hunt to watch it blossom into a scrappy mess of tooth & claw, so so so good to go on aimless expedition to a zone and notice a new handful of behaviours from their endemic life. I’d not be able to sleep at night if I didn’t compliment the chefs on all of this, every monster in every zone is given so much purpose it’s inspiring.

One thing this series has always been great at is its environment design - the world of Monster Hunter is a land of plenty, and everything is blown out of proportion to match. You're eating sirloin steaks the size of your head, oyster side dishes that can feed an army. The tooth you built your hammer out of can sink a ship. Zones and skyboxes that coil across different unique biomes rich in visual stimuli, adding heaps of context for the world and how things are as they are. Pan the camera up at any point and you can assuredly see a spire of choral, ice or crystal towering over you from what appears to be a mile away. Hoarfrost Reach is gorgeous I need to live there NOW.

Moment to moment combat is of course good as hell. I love that it’s slow and weighty enough to separate it from a more typical Capcom character action affair. Even with the amassing layers of QoL the series has glazed itself with, World still focuses on hefty player move commitment and punishment. Every weapon here feels great and each individually recontextualises your approach to any fight, but I found a home with the Dual Blades I’m afraid. I love these stupid ale blades man!!! Basically adored the progression right up until the Furious Rajang, where the game takes a very steep swerve into grind and Raid-like Design territory I find catatonic & diagnostic. The Fatalis fight is so much fun I wish I could solo it 😢

The first opus of one of Square Enix's most famous franchises, Kingdom Hearts FINAL MIX, in its remastered version for PC, is a particularly strong disappointment. The public, despite the effects of nostalgia, agrees on the structural and technical problems of the title, since its original release. The camera is one of the title's most notable flaws and exacerbates other weaknesses, such as the combat system and its rigidity. On the other hand, the remaster is a rare indecency, as it does not correct any of these problems. Its interest is supposedly an HD upscale of the title and a 60 FPS framerate, but this hardly hides the misery of the art direction, which is even more glaring. Worse, the high definition makes the lack of lip movement and other concessions that could be accepted in the PS2 era laughable. Generally speaking, the title retains all its archaisms. They are legion: beyond the graphics and the combat system, the writing remains particularly cryptic and mediocre, struggling to interest the player or even to properly mobilise the borrowed worlds. Apart from Winnie the Pooh, the different worlds are not very interesting, especially as they summarise the events of the various Disney films at lightning speed, in a sort of detestable fan service. Similarly, the use of Final Fantasy characters is pure cameo and doesn't seem to make any sense. It is this impression of futility that comes out of the whole title. This one tries to be varied, to mix genres that don't usually cohabit well together (action-RPG, platformer, shoot'em up, various mini-games), but doesn't excel in any of them. One would be hard pressed to find a gameplay element that works at all. The combat system is abysmally poor and the balancing doesn't help the title stand out, so it has no choice but to multiply the number of enemies to try and bring some dynamism; yet the floating targetting can't handle that many enemies. The platforming is not helped by the camera, nor by the particularly limited jumping palette. The gummi-ship sequences are miserable and the customisation system is one of the most unreadable in this medium. This is without counting on the aberration of the controller setup, which places buttons in a completely illogical way (in flight, Y to descend and B to climb). The problems multiply and you come out with few positive remarks. Some sequences are not too unpleasant, but the veteran player will find much better elsewhere. It's hard to recommend this title to anyone and the nostalgia goggles wouldn't even seem to be enough to bring salvation to Kingdom Hearts.

adding another feather to my cap by winning this year's monkey ball tournament at magfest after last year's typing of the dead win. a friend of mine has run lights and lasers at magfest on and off for the last decade or so, and when he told me there was a monkey ball cabinet in the arcade during a walk-through the night before it opened I was overjoyed. memories of old cons with filthy, unmaintained cabinets that one could barely roll through beginner courses on drifted away as I hoped this would finally give me the monkey ball arcade experience I had waited for. the last-minute announcement of a tournament was even more appealing; this would finally put my endless pandemic training to good use.

they had two cabinets in fact: an original stand-up cab, near flawless except for an uncomfortably dim screen, and a naomi kit and 3d-printed banana shoved into an astro city cab for those who preferred to sit down. both cabs were swarmed at open time, but I snuck in some time on the astro city cab late the first night. the setup was appreciated but god was it sensitive; imagine a joystick with the same deadzones and behavior of the gamecube analog stick, but with a porn-quality cock-sized banana attached to it, nauseating yellow from the printer filament. I resorted to two-handing the monster, using one hand to brace it while gently pressing it with the other. the original cabinet was completely stiff by comparison. even minimal motions required cranking it to either side, and certain full-length presses felt like they lacked the tilting distance of the gamecube version. definitely a learning curve, but it was to be expected. it was my first time, after all.

unlike typing of the dead, which at least had some head-to-head scoring support, monkey ball's tournament was structured as consecutive single credit runs between two players in bracket matches. begs the question of why they didn't just do a pool structure since it was all single elim anyway; a friend of mine who runs my hometown arcade organized the proceedings, so I wasn't about to crawl up his ass about it. score attack also left the crowd puzzled, as most of us ignore score in comparison to floor count. a quick google search as the competition started rolling led me to this particular guide (specifically section 2.6), which outlined the scoring system in some detail. effectively the number of seconds (including centiseconds) multiplied by 100 gives the bulk of the score, with the score doubled if it was done in less than half of the allotted time. bananas contribute another 100 points for each one obtained. however, warps contribute significantly more points, as a green warp goal will give 10000 additional points on the base value (reds give 20000) along with an additional multiplier for each stage skipped. the latter multiplier makes up for score lost on skipped levels, but the base bonus is pretty intense overall; there aren't levels that can give you anything close to 10000 points as a base, much less several in a row! when it comes to a score attack competition, warps are overly centralizing, to the extent that a player could perform worse and still secure a win by locking a warp.

so to the player I unfairly trampled first round, I'm real sorry. you breezed through beginner without dropping a single life, showing off little skips and flair in the process. I popped in after and warped through most of it and demolished your score, even tho I dropped a life and missed the extra stages. it was honestly a screwjob, and I don't blame you for running off afterwards. in the final round a similar issue happened, where two people in a match on expert each got the warp on floor 2, with one person failing at the infamous floor 7 (also known as Exam-C), and the other getting a couple floors beyond that. the former person flew through the warp and got the time bonus, doubling a 70k reward to 140k points and completely blowing the other person out of the water, floors be damned. hell, the same round I took a single credit all the way to floor 16 and I still did not get as many points as she did thanks to an overly cautious run through floor 2. it really was a bit ridiculous. however, these tournaments are about understanding the rules, not necessarily agreeing on whether they're fair. so, emboldened by my rather strong previous showing (only one other person got a run past floor 10), I threw caution to the wind on my floor 2 attempt, snagged the time bonus, and that was it, even with a total choke on floor 7.

of course, in console play I can comfortably take a 1cc all the way through expert extra, so this shouldn't have felt that impressive, but on the chunky banana the gamefeel transformed the game a fair bit. the whole tournament was on the original cabinet with the weightier controls, so nailing the precision of floors like 14 where nudges around pegs that will bounce you off ledges was as easy as just pressing the stick in the right direction; no attention to minuscule movement required. it's when it got to floors demanding quick build-ups of speed or wild tilts such as floor 18 that it began to dawn on me that perhaps the cabinet was not as in perfect of a condition as I had hoped; could have also been some early control mistuning by the developers, but I'd like to think they understood their own game well enough to design levels around the original stick. still, we got lucky that plenty of extremely challenging stages are front-loaded in expert, as we all still got a good show of some very solid east coast players taking a crack at a sega classic. maybe we would've all preferred to play on gamecube instead tho lol