Somehow every review I write on this ends up
hampered by issues in clarity,
issues of both creative phrasing and,
technically, meaningful content.

For certain, my critique on the game is simple;
on any grounds, the writing and story are harmful,
routinely espousing the most toxic of views towards victims.

Clearly, Bloober Team relies on shock tactics to earn clout, an
underhanded attempt to earn viral attention through harmful
notions and rhetoric. I'm not writing in clearest terms, and
that could be chalked up to being tired of thinking about this
shit for cunts.

     'The shadow remains cast.'

Played with BertKnot.

Like other projects such as Final Fantasy XV (2016) or The Last Guardian (2016), Bayonetta 3's chaotic development cycle could not put the savvy player at ease. Experience has often shown that these chronic delays were the result of a real inability to narrow down the vision and realise the envisioned project. In the case of Final Fantasy XV, the eventual storyline is a twisted reflection of the original Shakespearean narrative, while The Last Guardian suffered from a poor execution, owing to the departure of many key figures from the development team. Bayonetta 3's development cycle began at least in 2017, with numerous comparable titles released in the interim – NieR:Automata (2017), Astral Chain (2019) and obviously Devil May Cry 5 (2019), to name but a few – arguably accounting for the lack of discipline and identity the game exhibits during its thirteen-hour adventure.

The player once again assumes the role of Bayonetta in a multiverse plot, which will hardly make sense whether one knows the story of the previous games or not. The title already stands out in terms of presentation with an excessively long prologue, whose dramatic overtones are out of place for a Bayonetta game. The player is often confined to a passive posture, surprisingly so, and this carries on throughout the game. Across the board, the title spends its time changing moods, unable to establish a meaningful tone: the most absurd sequences in the franchise sit alongside maudlin scenes, with mixed effect at best. It is as if Bayonetta 3 was carried by an MCU-esque cinematic inspiration: there is a succession of action scenes, jokes that often fail and unjustified pathos draped in a very grey colour scheme, but always outside the gameplay sequences.

     Disjointed gameplay, distorted references

These are always characterised by a disjointed execution. The various gameplay components are split up and fail to establish an elegant flow in battle. The Demon Slave mechanic feels very clumsy at first, as the player has to wait for their magic bar to refill, as normal attacks are just too weak. Moreover, the summoning of the various demons negates Bayonetta's ability to move, an unlucky choice for the franchise. In this respect, Astral Chain was much more elegant, pairing a joystick with Legion to maintain strong mobility. Bayonetta 3 seems to borrow ideas from different games, but fails to understand their essence. For example, Wartrain Gouon is an aberrant rehash of Cavaliere from Devil May Cry 5, while Viola feels like an empty facsimile of NieR:Automata's battle system. The combat pacing is also strangely reminiscent of Honkai Impact 3rd (2016), alternating between auto-attacks and bursts. The ultimate product is disappointing: some have considered it a compromise between the first two opuses, regarding the use of Witch Time, but the reality is mostly that it is always more enjoyable to avoid using Demons – except to weave Wink Slave moves – and try to play with the traditional gameplay. Unfortunately, Bayonetta 3 only offers two weapon sets and forces a skill tree, making the experience very gruelling, especially at the beginning of the game. A chronic lack of feedback is also noticeable, spoiling a lot of the combat adrenaline, especially when compared to Devil May Cry 5.

Some of the new features work better, like the Wink Slave, allowing the combos to remain fluid. As for some of the Kaiju Battle sequences, they sometimes succeed: the shmup section in Paris was very effective as an extension of the Demon attacks, while the rail shooter in China was satisfactory, if not completely successful. But these sequences underline the mishmash aspect of Bayonetta 3, which only manages to find harmony on a whim. The game piles up various references to please Hideki Kamiya's ego, but cannot synthesise them in a convincing way. The Side Missions with Jeanne are a hotchpotch of Elevator Action Returns (1994) with an aesthetic that overlaps with Cowboy Bebop (1998), Cutie Honey (1973), Mine Fujiko to Iu Onna (2012) and Metal Gear Solid 3 (2004). Despite their diversity, these missions fail to characterise Jeanne and blatantly lie about their content, as the fake opening presents pure infiltration gameplay. In the same spirit, the Kaiju Battles echo classic scenes from Japanese cinema, but the paucity of gameplay is prohibitive. Likewise, the China finale with Madama Butterfly takes up the Xī Yóu Jì (16th century) with a hypersexualised and unpleasant presentation.

Consistently off-topic, Bayonetta 3 stretches out its exploration phases with superfluous elements that are ill-suited to the title's gameplay. The platforming segments are obnoxious and feel like tasteless borrowings from the regular events of Genshin Impact (2020). Thule is built like a pseudo-open world, whose construction may remind of Dragon's Dogma (2012), but devoid of any substance; Ginnungagap borrows from both the disguised loading screens of God of War (2018) and the parallel dimensions of Astral Chain, albeit with a bland art direction. It is so hard not to compare the game with others, as it hides none of its inspirations and desperately tries to take mechanics that have worked elsewhere. These makeshift borrowings never hide the title's very weak technical execution, excessively reusing its level assets. Chapters 4 and 6 in China use exactly the same structure of lifts and chests to open, to the point where a disconcerting sense of déjà vu sets in.

     A fantasied and racist cultural representation

More aberrant is the cultural representation of the different worlds visited. Shinjuku is passable, but China and Egypt appear as racist parodies of the cultures depicted. The former draws on a Japanese interpretation of wuxia and offends by its lack of variety, while the latter is a medley of everything reminiscent of Middle Eastern cultures. The opening exploration of Cairo is an almost exact retread of the sequence from Uncharted 3 (2011), from the aerial drop to the desert hallucinations. Bayonetta 3 then has the ill taste to use a Western soundtrack, compounding its already despicable representation of Egypt. The temple scenes are marginally better, even though they borrow heavily from the Babylonian imagination, insofar as they mix in a rather effective Lovecraftian aesthetic. The notable exception is the depiction of Paris: one gets the impression that Kamiya has an inordinate love for France and its culture, so much so that numerous references abound in the streets. The spooky atmosphere around the Place de l'Étoile is in some ways reminiscent of the Gilets Jaunes protest movement, and the shops all have names that make sense – for example, Citron Télécom is perhaps a reference to Orange. This fondness for French culture is also supported by the Bayonetta-Arsène Lupin of this universe, very much on point, and with French dubbing for the NPCs. Nevertheless, the efforts on the Paris episode only underline the aberration of the other chapters, where not a word of Mandarin is spoken, as the mythical warriors of China all speak English.

     Bayonetta, drag queen aesthetics and heteronormative sexualisation

Certainly, this cultural representation is dependent on Kamiya's fantasised perspective, reflected in the way he describes the characters and their gender. Bayonetta 3, like many Japanese titles released in recent years, is perfectly embedded in the post-Abe philosophy, which encourages procreation in the name of saving Japan's demography. The emphasis on the nuclear family is very significant and highlights that the franchise has never been about queer representation. It has always been the product of Kamiya's thoroughly assumed fantasies. His conception of drag aesthetics fits into a patriarchal and sexist continuum. Jessica E. Tompkins et al. point out the deep connection between women depicted as strong and their sexualisation on screen, through their 'bodies as weapons'. Indeed, 'the female character's body is an object for use in voyeuristic pleasure and satisfying game combat. In a more empowering interpretation, the theme refers to depictions of women's bodies as the ultimate weapons, with an emphasis on physicality and violence as a means of overcoming obstacles' [1]. Bayonetta is always the target of Kamiya's male gaze, more or less subtly disguised, for whom drag queens are an object of desire, and which he transcribes onto a body considered 'purely female'.

Marsha A. Hewitt has rightly emphasised the importance of performativity in the behaviour of drag queens. They 'enact a "perpetual displacement" of traditional boundaries of anatomy and gender on a variety of levels, where identity is rendered fluid [...] in a continued hyperbolic and subversive process of "resignification and recontextualization", depriving "hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to essentialist accounts of gender identity"' [2]. The fundamental problem with Bayonetta 3 is that it leaves no room for the agentivity of its female figures: all the women characters share the same fate, which is that of a false independence, one that the game takes pleasure in destroying as it proceeds. Because these characters are represented as 'real women', there is no longer any subversion of gender norms, but rather a reaffirmation of traditional patriarchal values, fiercely defended by the ending. Similarly, Bayonetta's dances are vehicles for exposing the sexualised female body, while adhering to cultural standards attributed to women. Although it is not possible to completely deny the idea of female empowerment through dance activities, it is still a tightrope on which reclaiming one's body is very difficult for female dancers [3]. I would argue that Bayonetta's dancing in the first credits provides an elegant and interesting contrast when it comes to gender representation and expression of intimacy, but that the majority of the game – and of the franchise – glosses over these issues, settling for a conventional sexualisation of women.

It is difficult to find any redeeming qualities in Bayonetta 3, because every game design decision seems to be an uncertain half-measure, as if Kamiya's desires were constant objections to the development team's creative ideas. The game seems mired in archaisms. It can only be explained by a chaotic development process, disrupted by successive releases of innovative games. Bayonetta 3 lacks both identity and direction, whilst being overly ambitious. When all is said and done, there is little left enjoyable, nor anything positive. The few functional sequences remain gimmicky and are forgotten as soon as they are over. In the meantime, the game insists on what does not work and was never the focus of the franchise. There is obviously a boldness in renewing itself and wanting to move on, but when the end result struggles to please most people, Kamiya's thinly veiled arrogance comes across mostly as hollow hubris. According to him, the franchise should continue for a long time, but one can only be dubious, considering what is proposed at the moment.

__________
[1] Jessica E. Tompkins, Teresa Lynch, Irene I. Van Driel and Niki Fritz, ‘Kawaii Killers and Femme Fatales: A Textual Analysis of Female Characters Signifying Benevolent and Hostile Sexism in Video Games’, in Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 64-2, 2020, p. 7.
[2] Marsha A. Hewitt, ‘Cyborgs, drag queens, and goddesses: Emancipatory regressive paths in feminist theory’, in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, vol. 5-1, 1993, p. 143.
[3] Lisa A. Sandlos, Shimmy, Shake or Shudder?: A Feminist Ethnographic Analysis of Sexualization and Hypersexualization in Competitive Dance, PhD thesis, York University, Toronto, 2020, pp. 73-80 and 121-125.

What a lot of people either fail to realise or refuse to believe is that the best Sonic games are the flawed ones. The games that try to innovate with bold ideas unbecoming of a Sonic game, or any game. We've had 'perfect' Sonic games before like Sonic Mania or Sonic Generations and those games are great but they can't hold a candle to the way-too-serious tone of Sonic Adventure 2, the quaint but pointless Adventure Fields of Sonic Adventure, the audacity to make half the game a slow beat-em-up in Sonic Unleashed. People love Sonic for its ambition, not its accomplishments. People love games for their imperfections the same way they love people despite their flaws. Sonic Team has, for decades now, dared to do things that are new, bold, and weird. Sonic Frontiers is a continuation of that vision, and to reduce it to petty statements of "open world 🤓 sega hire this man 🤓 serious plot in cartoon rat game 🤓 the controls 🤓 but he's slow" is a pitch-perfect demonstration of how Sonic is doomed to fail. Look at your favourite games and try earnestly telling yourself they're flawless.

Credit to smaench for planting this seed in my brain, actual review when I'm done playing it and can let my thoughts digest rather than spewing unfiltered drivel onto your webzone.

h-h-he hey player burps This i-i-is the type-the type of fucking c-character I-I-I am. Other v-v-video games h-ha-have this type of character belches b-b-but i-in this video... this fucking video game it's f-f-funny, y-you might might think th-this would get REEEEEEEAAAALLY pretends to be sick really fucking a-annoying b-b-but we we're gonna p-p-p-p-p-p-p-point out the fact it's REEEEEEEEAAAALLY does a backflip a-a-annoying, so it it it's actually very very fucking funny.






This game costs £49.99.

As the only clown on this website who has played the whole game (in one sitting right at release to secure a free Pickle Rick back bling in Fortnite), I can say with confidence High on Life is dreadfully weak. And that's a bit of a shame since it theoretically has good bones.

The most glaring problem is, of course, the dialogue. The pre-release comparison to Borderlands 3 is apt as characters literally do not cease their oral spew, and you are forced to listen to them before you can progress at key points. Borderlands has ameliorated this in part with the ECHOnet transmissions, keeping you apprised of plot elements as you messed about on Pandora. Save for key story moments, the dialogue therein is accompanied by your mad dash for loot and slaughter. High on Life quivers in its boots at the mere thought that you might miss a single phoneme. There is no means to skip dialogue. There is no opportunity to play the game when characters are talking. If you are not physically glued in place, you are locked in a distraction-less room. And should you dare to break from the tedium of a suburban hardwood floor and off-white walls by heading upstairs, you are scolded by your guns to pay attention. In a properly written, compelling narrative this would be fine, but a substantial chunk of the game is NPCs yammering incessantly. Fake arguments become auditory static, the white noise penetrated only by mention of racism, misogyny, or a cavalcade of 'fuck's. Does a holstered gun have something to say? Worry not, they'll speak to you over radio. That there is so much dialogue is rather interesting in and of itself, particularly seeing how your different weaponry will engage in conversations with NPCs, but there is not a moment where speech is not occurring. The only moment of respite is if you stay in place.

And some of the writing is passable, some even bordering on good. But it never comes out of Justin Roiland's many mouths. The closest I came to cracking a smile was when Zach Hadel, Michael Cusack, Rich Evans, Jay Bauman, Mike Stoklasa, or Tom Kenny was the focus. In a vacuum, some of their witticisms might have earned a chuckle or at least a considered exhale, but these moments are paltry oases after being duped by an infinitude of mirages. You know in your bones that a joke will not be allowed to stand on its own, and that Roiland or his other hack voice 'actors' will need to get their own two cents in. It is a Reddit comment thread not only in content, but in presentation, someone always retelling the above poster's joke but worse. In Roiland's world, stuttering is a feature, not a bug. His stammering makes Porky Pig seem eloquent. A one-take wonder.

"Is the gameplay good?" This question was asked more times than I can count during my marathon. As I emphatically repeated there, "no." There's a weightlessness to every second of combat that betrays the animations and premise of your guns being living things. There is more weight, more oomph, more impact to Spore's creature stage combat than there is to this gunplay. Your bullets genuinely feel as if they are lobbed foam balls. The only times at which there is some punch is when detonating sigh Sweezy's crystals with her charge shot. I can't tell if it's all a consequence of your enemies being shrouded in goop or not. Your shots take away the goop to expose their regular flesh, but this somehow imparts little feedback. Is it because there is so much flash and bedlam occurring that I can't even tell where and when my shots are landing? I have no idea. At the very least the juggling of enemies is semi-novel (even if it comes after Kenny begs lustfully for me to use his 'Trickhole'), and Creature is semi-satisfying if only because you can launch his children and go find a quiet[er] corner to recuperate mentally in. You get some basic manoeuvrability upgrade which makes this a Metr- Search Action game in some sense when coupled with returning to planets to find extra cash. You can upgrade your weapons and unlock modifiers for them but the changes are so minute I couldn't really tell how much of an impact they were having. What the mods do do is change the colour of your weapons. Given that so much of your screen real estate is occupied by their "beautiful dick-sucking lip" visages, this is the most substantial alteration you can make.

The music is like Temporary Secretary by Paul McCartney but bad.

Visually there is something of value here (in theory). While many of the alien inhabitants blend together with their amorphous sausage anatomies, the unique NPCs typically bear striking designs. Sweezy notwithstanding, the guns are cute as well, even if I feel Kenny is perpetually doing the Dreamworks smirk. Kenny and Gus' iron sights are adorable, and the way Gus clamps onto your hand indoors melts my heart. Creature reminds me of that Skylander that had the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. Inoffensive! Until you see his actual full model and you realise he has three tits and a prolapsed anus for a barrel. And Gus looks like he has a turtle's cock.

Errant thoughts:

Boy howdy is there a lot of mpreg talk.

One of the scenes you can warp in is a movie theatre where you can watch all of Demon Wind with the RLM crew. That would be okay but I don't think the MST3K style commentary works for a film that belongs in a Best of the Worst episode. There's a reason why they show you fragments of them watching it, and why their film commentaries are for more compelling films.

There is so much overlapping of dialogue that I genuinely got a headache that intensified over the game. A horror during a Tylenol shortage in Canada.

I put more effort into gathering my thoughts than they did making this shit.

I wish that I had always been in a grave.

hehehe, hi, um... so we have a problem. So Sonic Frontiers came out, very recently, as of writing the speedrun.com boards are only like half open (you can only submit cyberspace ILs)... and it kinda did shit, shit that kinda impacts shit that I've been saying in this review series, I think I straight up need to make an addendum on the Knuckles review, once I can get a whole picture on what it did because hey, I can't actually play the game right now. Thanks me of a few months ago, you really planned this shit out. You know what tho, this is good actually, I think the bits I've seen and the discourse I've had with friends over this has clarified the points I wanted to make but didn't know how to, because you know what time it is. It's the Big Time. Let's talk about Sonic's Friends.

Quick history rundown I guess, it all starts with Tails in Sonic 2, a genesis game, so there's not much to him in-game besides some tidbits and the gameplay feature of flight, a mechanic that I know some of my friends were pretty convinced that it just didn't exist in that game, so that's funny. After we have Amy, it is what it is. Finally of this era we have Knuckles, the og rival of Sonic 3 who turns ally in & Knuckles, also positioned as an optional character for a separate campaign which unlocks no content afterwards. These are the OGs, the squad that due to the nature of their origins, not to mention the fact that they are the origins, no one really has a problem with them, so this really is not historically what people derisively refer to as "Sonic's Friends" and that fact almost makes it kinda clear the sentiment of "Sonic's Friends mucking up the franchise" is mostly used by ultra boomers wanting to return to their "golden age", but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Also not normally a consideration when talking about "Sonic's Friends", Mighty the Armadillo and Ray the Flying Squirrel, the Japan only arcade debuting SegaSonic homies. Even while Mighty will go on to be a part of heavily derided game Knuckles Chaotix, the game which birthed the absolute certified "Sonic Friends" Espio, Vector, and Charmy, Mighty himself does not seem to be a consideration when talking about "Sonic Friends", granted because he's obscure, but also because he and Ray seem to garner enough respect from important fan dev, and absolute certified coward and boomer, Christian Whitehead, in order to become playable characters in Sonic Mania, a game filled with fanservice for many, many characters from a very specific timeframe within the Sonic franchise.

Also not included in the discussion are the countless scrimblos of Sonic animated TV series', comics, side games, and no, not even Chris, Donut Lord, or the Sonic Adventure Man who Owns The Building. The specific subset of characters who were a major negative talking point for a long period of Sonic's history, were the additional playable characters, that have speaking roles, are required to unlock 2% of their respective games, in Sonic Adventure, Heroes, and 06, and continue to appear on some level throughout the mainline series. There is admittedly something kinda funny imagining a single bee sending AVGN knock-offs into enough rage as to spawn Sonic 4 as well as the entire game design direction from Unleashed onwards,but damn does it feel like this one ancient piece of discourse just poisoned this franchise.

Let's start breaking down some shit, is Sonic's wider cast as playable characters "padding"? I mean, sure, there's really nothing to say to stop you from defining it as such. If we define just playing as Sonic as, da game, then it would follow that these other campaigns are just filling for playtime. Question, is Mighty and Ray Mania Plus padding? They are side characters that are by all means, injected into levels that already existed before them, they're hardly a fully fledged inclusion. Is the Werehog padding? I feel most people would be inclined to say yes, it's ultimately viewed as an alternate gameplay style that takes away time from engaging with the core Sonic gameplay, the fact you're still playing as Sonic isn't quite relevant. Is Shadow The Hedgehog of SA2 padding? He's roughly the same gameplay style as Sonic and has his own levels, even if he is a different character. Is solving a GameMaker tile puzzle in order to spawn grind rails and stat-increasing collectibles in an open world padding, or is it the alternate gameplay style in the physically and structurally different Boost style cyberspace levels? The answer may shock you. Is Super Sonic, the alternate gameplay style locked behind all these other alternate gameplay styles, also ultimately padding? I spent 2 years not playing SA after beating Sonic's Story, could it really be that important? I'd like to think I made my point, that regardless of how one may answer any of these questions that actually defining an airtight criteria for what is the equivalent of an anime fan looking at Eva and saying that "Magma Diver" is the only "filler episode", is ultimately kinda arbitrary and just not as helpful as just calling Amy's story mid and moving on.

Perhaps more to the core is if there is any room for alternate playstyles at all and again we mostly just see more line drawing. Generally it seems like people are more appreciative when the alternate characters are only kinda alternate playstyles in the form of Shadow, Blaze, and the whole classic crew, maybe bringing a few mechanical changes but still ultimately engaging with the game in a manner that is comparable to Sonic... but the Chao Garden is also generally fine. Sitting around a square and feeding a creature in order to make its numbers go up is pretty much the least Sonic that you could be doing,but people value it anyway, it's a cute pace breaker and distraction for those that enjoy it, and for everyone else it's just out of the way, they don't force you into it like Unleashed or deny the human brainworm called "Closure" its satisfaction by delaying the true ending that you definitely absolutely cared about. Calling it a brainworm seems a bit dismissive, it kinda is "a brainworm" but, we live with it so I will admit that having some compulsory factor for engaging with all these modes that you just may not care for regardless of execution, is ultimately a bit of wrinkle. Were not for that tho I think there wouldn't be a whole lot of disagreement to be had that these non-core modes, tho not all conceptualized and implemented equally, do ultimately fill out the experience of these games.

Beyond that tho is just how low-key essential all these scrimblos are to actually writing these games. Like it cannot be over-stated just how much more interesting thing and flavorful things are when these games are an ensemble cast dealing with Deities and Government Conspiracies and not just Sonic and Tails fucking around in an amusement park. Like I know I spent a long time in my last review establishing Amy as one note, but the problem is definitely in like, how boring of a note it is, none of Sonic's characters are particularly full of depth no matter how many youtube video essays get thrown around. The character with the most is easily Shadow, he has like 3 character arcs over 4 games that can be easily summarized as "I wanted revenge but now I remember what my friend truly wanted, I will now sacrifice myself for everyone", "My past doesn't matter, I am myself and that's all that matters", "Ok that was kinda raw, let's make that a whole game instead of 3 cutscenes", and "Even as the world will turn against me, I will stay true to my beliefs". It's not much, and one of those was literally from 06, but it's cool, and rather importantly, Shadow isn't the only character in the game, not even in Shadow the Hedgehog. Just looking at these characters through that kind of lens doesn't really capture the effect they have as they bounce off of each other and the events of the games. Big the Cat is ultimately just a dumb fisherman, but part of what makes him hilarious is the fact that he's a dumb big cat fisherman that gets so wrapped up in the events of SA for no reason that he ends up having to fish his friend out of a god, you can't not have a big dumb smile on your face as it's happening.

This feels like very basic writing shit, right? Yet it feels like after 06 they simply became absolutely afraid of doing much of anything with Sonic's cast in the mainline. The last real non-antagonistic addition to the cast was Chipp, a nasally scrungo that they knew would be disposed of by the end of that game. After that you have... Classic Sonic, which like... no. Then you have "The Recruit", your oc of Sonic Forces, so again not really much of a character. The returning cast doesn't exactly fare well either, Shadow basically becoming "Hey, you remember this guy, right? That cool edgy guy from SA2! Buy our dlc". Where am I going with this tho... let's talk about Sonic Frontiers. Only bits and pieces tho, it's all I know after all. How does Frontiers handle the cast? Well besides Sonic you got Amy, Tails, Knuckles, and Eggman... I'm obviously not gonna say that the entire Sonic cast should be active at the same time all the time, that would be ridiculous, but damn, if that's not a cowardly selection if I've ever seen one. So the story has Sonic going around Islands as he works to save his friends, all the while his friends are left with not much to do besides reflect on the Island they're trapped on as well as their own past,the most important of these for our discussion being Tails... in essence kinda just going through his SA arc again. In a long running multi-installment thing like this, I'm not exactly entirely against characters falling back into old trappings, that's an incredibly human thing to depict. The thing I want to illustrate here is that, in the approach lacking much of anything new in regards to what the characters deal with, with the mission being to investigate the more melancholic aspects of these characters, then yeah, of course the one course of action is to simply re-iterate on the places these characters have already been, the road's been paved, there's no where else to go, "damn am I glad the characters are acting like themselves again". This is ultimately what I landed on as the importance of all those new characters just showing up to the story pre-Unleashed, even if it's something small like Big, or as Ultimate as Shadow, it's a new deal brought to the table, it's something new for the characters to bounce off of. You can argue for Frontiers that it isn't the point... the point might be kinda mid tho, and besides, Frontiers also illustrates this, because there is a new character. Sage like all the other Sonic characters has a simple deal going on, she's an AI character like many AI characters, and introduces herself as an antagonistic force against Sonic... and not Eggman. Eggman has had robot helpers before, that's nothing new, but Sage's screentime in this game is spent slowly showing a father-daughter relationship which, succeeded if the fan art of Eggman getting Sage McDonalds is any metric, and also created this facet of Eggman that wasn't there for the other 30 years of his existence and simply wouldn't exist without a character like this by which to create this dynamic. So old begets old, new begets new, that seems like a simple point to take away from this. If they don't let Ian Flynn throw in new fucked up Sonic ocs into the next game like they do for the comics regularly then I think it's safe to say that the whole "Frontiers experiment" has flopped tremendously, and that not even Sonic can outrun the culture of stagnation.

All of this is to say, Sonic's friends are cool.

How great it is then, that this is a Big the Cat review.

"You like fishing, shitty jungle shacks, loitering in strange places, and a frog. You can't fly, you can't spin dash, and you can't fight more than a monkey. Face it, you're never gonna make it." I don't wanna make it, [I just wanna-][This joke is still under construction, please come back at the end of these reviews]

Big is the Mystic Ruins' local cryptid. He's a simple creature, he hangs around his humble makeshift house, goes fishing, and takes care of his friend Froggy. Perhaps he is a role model to surpass even Man Who Owns the Building. At the start of his story Froggy gets possessed by the tail of Chaos, and Big takes it upon himself to chase down his friend. As we make it to the city, we find the Man Who Owns the Building, playing the role of the Man Who is Scared Shitless by Frogs, he is truly a multi-faceted building owner.

So Big's story has you go fishing your friend froggy inside pools of water in small isolated sections of existing levels. The devs clearly knew that this is a simplistic departure from any of the gameplay styles going on so they clearly didn't get too distracted making anything new for it, nor did they ask much of a minimum amount of playtime to be spent on it. The objective, Froggy, is set to a fixed spawn that is never really too far from Big. Ice Cap, the second of three levels, has one additional pool with an upgrade that you can explore for, but Froggy is always swimming around under the first fishing hole you see spawning in (Ice Cap is also kinda jank, you're gonna want to not be standing on the ice while you fish, the water tends to reject you otherwise). Fishing itself is of course not as complex as say, Sega Bass Pro, you cast your line, you move it bit by bit til the creature you cast it at bites, then you pace yourself, reel it in, move the rod with the fish, don't let the line get too tense. It's probably a familiar formula for this kind of minigame game, the Yakuza series fishing mini-games don't tend to be much more than this either. It is very much a mode that despite the patient aesthetics of fishing, knows that it doesn't really want to keep you waiting long, nor really do much of anything testing, it's hardly uncompromising.

To say that anything bad you can say about it hardly lives up to the performative anger of youtube Sonic reviewers is a given really. You're either kinda unimpressed for 30 minutes, or find it a cute distraction, not too dissimilar to the admittedly less compulsory Chao Gardens. Then of course you fish Froggy out of Chaos, which, is definitely one of the top 10 Sonic moments that will ever occur. There's absolutely something to be gained out of approaching these things not so seriously, not in the ironic "haha, there's no way his name is seriously Doc Ock" sense, but just actually indulging in these silly moments. Big just is what he is, and that's cool.

Lazy Days -Living in Paradise-, is a very silly song, and spawned some serious arguments in vc over if the lyrics is a convo between a metaphorical Chicken and Egg or just Big and Froggy.

Come around next time as we explore Gamma's story and why Eggman is the ultimate lifeform.

not morally egregious per se but rather a depressing culmination of a decade's worth of design trickery and (d)evolving cultural/social tastes and otherwise exists as insipid twitchcore autoplaying bullshit that should come with a contractual agreement binding its devotees to never speak prejudicially about mobile games or musou ever again lest they face legally enforced financial restitution. just play nex machina man. or watch NFL. been a fun season for that. fuck the review man let's talk sports in the comments

some delightfully goopy visuals and sets aside, i am honestly stunned by how completely this failed to work for me. i am by no means one of the resi 6 faithful but i found myself constantly wishing i was playing that while trudging my way through this turgid exercise in insecurity. this to me far more aptly demonstrates the air of extreme desperation many people accused resi 6 of, a supremely unconfident attempt to play catchup to an entire history of the horror zeitgeist. texas chainsaw massacre, evil dead, the shining, the ring, blair witch, the hills have eyes, escape rooms, even america's most haunted and ghostwatch...it's all been thrown in and blended together until all that remains is a tasteless textureless black sludge.

the found footage angle is one i found particularly shockingly poor, as someone who counts the blair witch project a personal favorite, and who jumped back into resi 7 because of letshugbro's reflections on this point. aside from the reality show pastiche at the start (easily the highlight of the game for me) there is absolutely zero consideration at any point given to the camera or it's presence or physicality: we simply plainly see through the eyes of the character with a generic vhs filter put over it. it's brazenly pillaging the most basic imagery signifiers of this form possible without a single iota of consideration for the intent or form, purely cynical exploitation in the meanest sense of the word, a reference to it's influences as shallow as a MCU quip.

this is the entire game, a rickety haunted house built on the thinnest veneer imaginable, where every element is never deeper than the skin. the stiff and robotic movements of the bakers, with their glitchy animations, clinically transactional relationship with the player, and scripted sequences based almost entirely on simply waiting around running in circles for the switch to flip in their head that makes them do something that lets you progress, annihilates any sense of organic living atmosphere the game strains to affect, revealing these walking pathfinding algorithms for what they really are. the overtures towards being a return to classic resident evil is similarly merely an illusion that falls apart under moderately close inspection: the inventory management and shared stash is here but the considered map and encounter design that necessitates careful planning and macro-tension across the experience is wholly absent, a build of resources towards a payoff that never arrives, a series of engagements against a single enemy type that never meaningfully intimidates or frightens. a fractured facsimile of classic resident evil is here, but none of the effects it produced is, and what remains is a tedious series of empty frictionless jogs between item transactions to unlock the next area of this vacuous escape room.

if all this wasn't enough, biohazard might honestly be in contention for the narrative low point of the series as i have experienced it. at least resident evil 5 has wesker. the game sure mentions the word "family" a lot but anything it might have to say about that is rendered so completely incoherent by this dangerous combination of shockingly underwritten narrative and tedious "the writer has just had a bad breakup" misogynistic energy that it can scarcely be believed. i was wondering whether or not this was a 1-star or 2-star affair but learning that not being unflinchingly loyal to your cartoonishly evil wife (whose evil is basically never so much as remarked upon by a game that instead chooses to heap infinite mean-spirited scorn upon a child turned by her and her compatriots into a bioweapon) gives you an unexpected Wrong Ending an hour after you make that one choice is what made me decide on the score i did. i am by no means going to defend the travails of prior entries like resident evil 5, but at least that game has been deservedly dragged through the mud for it's perspective. the fact that, five years on, the nightmarishly terrible gender politics of this title have gone almost completely unremarked upon speaks volumes to the degree to which mainstream critics in this medium are completely willing to turn the blinkers on for anything that affects even the thinnest veneer of Western Prestige.

like i say, the word of the day is desperate. frantically pillaging from every horror movie it can find without any care for intent or meaning or context, desperately floundering for relevancy in a world that rejected the apex of what it was pushing towards post resi 4. and yet, ironically, despite my total failure to invest in it, resident evil 7 can only be called a success in terms of reinvigorating the series and giving it a new direction: theme park horror, a series of shallow pastiches, a linear sequence of homage, that has laid the groundwork for the tremendous critical and financial success of resident evil village. and for those who are loving this direction i say, go with god, but there is no way in hell i am getting on board a rollercoaster with foundations as completely rotten as this.