I'm counting this for both Final Fantasy VII and the Remake trilogy since playing one of them inadvertently reflects onto the other, like when you watch Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and then go back and read the book(s) -- you're probably gonna accidentally see Frodo as Elijah Wood in your mind. Somebody might prefer one over the other, but the love, or hate, for that work is going to be intertwined with its adapted counterpart whether we like it or not. Especially considering how incensed people can become about remakes (adaptations, reimaginings, reboots -- whatever you want to call them), the refraction of one's values in the face of a piece of art that chooses to neglect your specific form of love for it, it makes sense that their existence becomes the second face of a coin in our memories of said game (or in the case of games that get a ridiculous amount of rereleases of varying quality, an incomprehensible polyhedron of emotion).

My specific form of love for Final Fantasy VII has been neglected by Square Enix not leaving it the fuck alone -- why didn't these bitches just listen to Sakaguchi! Advent Children? Die. Crisis Core? Die. Dirge of Cerberus? Vincent deserved better. Final Fantasy VII Remake announcement made me roll my eyes. What's even the point? We have Final Fantasy VII, and it's perfectly fine as it is. I believe there's a growing sentiment that games don't age, and I agree. Sure, how digestible certain subject matter is changes over time, but if we're being honest even the casual racism and occasionally sexist writing of OG Final Fantasy VII was, you know, always just a Bad Thing About It. Time doesn't do anything to the games we play, but it does change us.

The kicker is, I didn't even know Final Fantasy VII was my favorite game until like, last year, kind of like suddenly realizing a close friend that you've known for years was beautiful the entire time, along with the creeping thought that, "Oh, everything else makes SO much fucking sense now". But them's the breaks for those of us that are forced to emotionally repress our sense of self in order to survive, which I guess is just everybody in the scheme of things, but particularly for queer people. Thinking back on how even at a young age I wanted to be like Tifa Lockhart, just a cool, strong pretty lady who mostly had her shit together, at least enough to own and run a small business by herself. Also, you know, everything else about Final Fantasy VII, another person might tell you that they were captivated by any one of the FMVs or maybe the story, but when you're young sometimes it's just enough to find an identity in something, even if you end up burying it for years.

It's funny then that Final Fantasy VII Remake and my own transition ended up coinciding within the same year (started HRT 9/7/2020), and while I wouldn't go as far as to say that my identity is intertwined with what is ostensibly a product made for mass consumption by a multibillion dollar company, I would say there's an almost poetic parallelism between my ability to love Final Fantasy VII Remake and my ability to finally love myself. Specifically, I didn't really like this game when it first came out! It wasn't my Final Fantasy VII, it was something new and scary and something that wasn't quite as smart as whatever ideals I had projected onto the original in both its lower fidelity visuals and its lower fidelity textual depth.

It's crazy to me that I also didn't really fuck with the gameplay at the time when nowadays it's pretty much the most theia-core gameplay you could possibly come up with (at least until Rebirth did it one better by letting Tifa Lockhart slam dunk a cartoon cat AND letting her go full puppy girl in two separate synergy abilities, I'm normal btw). I'm already just mashing the shit out of the button in turn-based RPGs, make it both action RPG and turn-based and suddenly it's just activating all my syndromes at once. Which, really Remake and Rebirth need that because they fail me on two major fronts: OG FF7 has my favorite boss theme from any video game, and we like never get to fuckin' hear it in either of the Remakes so far, and the menus and sound effects of original are just, ooooogh, Final Fantasy VII has my favorite victory screen music and victory screen presentation and I love the models and I love the overworld, I love how fucked up and charming everything is!!! But it's whatever that Remake can't manage to replicate everything, and it gives me even more reason to keep going back to the original.

The biggest, most realest reason I fuck with Final Fantasy VII is it's the only (J)RPG where I actually really love every single party member and every single antagonist. Even the abusive misogynist manages to be a pretty interesting character! Also FF7 just has my favorite assortment of Fucked Up Little Guys this side of Chrono Cross: a talking powers dog who's the goodest boy and only a little bit of a racist caricature for indigenous people of the Americas just don't think about it too much okay, a real estate agent's VRChat avatar that lives in pre-apocalyptic Disneyland, and a bisexual vampire who has the ability to turn into Darkstalkers characters. Also, I guess, I like the main character, and said character MAY or may not be subtextually a trans woman, in my mind. Canon. Maybe I'd kiss Cloud Strife? Maybe that he's fucked up and horrible makes him even hotter? Not for me to say. I am a simple lesbian, I cannot say more.

Shoving this in here to say that people gotta stop doing the historical revision thing when it comes to Tifa in the Remake series because she's effectively just the same character, but written more like a person. I resonate so deeply with how insecure and people pleasing she is; pretransition that's basically all I was. Most of her character development is in the last third of the story in the original game, so it makes a lot of sense that we wouldn't be seeing that quite yet in the Remakes, but I'm pretty fucking excited for Tifa to be the de facto party leader in the first half of Final Fantasy VII Remembrance. Also like, Tifa has such wonderful and loving relationships with the rest of the cast, I've had friendships like Tifa and Barret have, and I don't know man, I'm a sucker for that shit, inject found family among society's rejects trope into my fucking veins... Also they better fucking actually add the triceratops tank next time, they've been really skimping on the dinosaurs in the Remakes, it's really pissing me off.

It's also kinda funny I guess that my official name change (and in a couple weeks my gender marker change) ended up coinciding with Rebirth's release as well. Excited for another major transition milestone to happen the same year as Final Fantasy VII Requiem!! Rebirth is weird because I ended up liking it a lot from the get-go, outside of being really angry at the ending at first. But you know, somehow it ended up clicking for me. I like to think all the cool games I've played in the time between Remake and Rebirth have helped me appreciate the beauty in things that before I might've dismissed due to any number of perceivable flaws. I don't know, maybe I just don't care as much anymore, or maybe I care even more, or maybe I just finally love myself enough to allow myself to have good things. I don't have to ruin things I otherwise like for myself anymore? The real Final Fantasy VII was the one inside of me all along.

As a lil treat, I'll go ahead and give arbitrary scores to all the games I put in this list since I don't do real scores anymore. Unless I can't think of a score for a game, then I'll do a bad joke:

Final Fantasy VII - 8/10
Final Fantasy VII Remake - 8/10
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth - 8/10

not as exciting as you'd think it'd be, huh. tho i'd probably give the remakes the edge just for making tifa and aerith into canon girlfriends. better luck next time original ff7!! maybe instead of being the game of a generation you should've tried having regurgitated NPC side quests and a nauseating amount of identical open world landmarks?

I don't think I'm really a fan of whatever I said in my review for this game. Yeah yeah yeah, it's the bestest game ever. It shouldn't really matter where an experience lands on some broader scheme of subjective Goodness, I just wanna let things be their own thing and enjoy them on their own given merits. For you see, Disco Elysium and Sonic Adventure 2 Battle? Those are basically the same game to my twisted and crazy mind... If you can't see the vision don't even bother @ing me...

But really Disco Elysium's just a video game for adults that allows itself to be fun and meaningfully game-y without bloating the experience with unnecessary systems and an unmanageable scope. I was pretty much in love with it from the opening dialogue with [redacted]'s inner voices. But then I just kept falling in love with it. Its worldbuilding, its characters, the way it masterfully interweaves even its most serious moments with geniunely great humor. I love that it's undeniably leftist in perspective without being masturbatory or moralizing. I like that it makes me feel smart-girl-brained when I understand the things that are happening in the text. I like that Kim Katsuragi makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, I would do anything for him even he's a lil bit of a centrist. And a cop, I guess. And maybe I also wanna marry that really cool sword lady and take really good care of her and her kids. Also how many games let you be a bisexual communist who can talk to inanimate objects!!!! The answer is three, and all of them are on this list. Stay tuned...

Anyways the moment you've all been waiting for, maybe you even skimmed over everything else just to get to this part (I sure hope you did please don't read any of that above):

Disco Elysium - 8/10

minus two theia dollars (that's what my scoring system is called now) because the boys don't kiss at the end even if you play the game really good

I wasn't sure how to eloquently place it into the Disco Elysium section, so I just wanna specify that my own mental hang ups with scoring video games isn't really aimed at anybody else, I was just having a lot of difficulty enjoying games as I attempted to arbitrarily quantify said enjoyment into a number scale that then also had to be applied to every single other game??? Even the games that don't feel fair to compare it to??? It's the same with this list, it took me so long to come up with another favorites list cuz I was stressing about how to even quantify my love for these games enough to place them into even a semi-definite order. Which, it's kinda just impossible. So I'm not even gonna bother, from now it's pure vibes!!

And pure vibes is how I'm out here trying to play fighting games, and girl, I am dogshit at them!!! Vampire Savior doesn't care though, I love that a lot of old fighting games just kinda let you coast by on fundamentals and whatever the fuck finger jazz comes outta your brain. I think Morrigan Aensland is another character child Theia kinda projected herself onto, she's so cool. The lack of emphasis on combos is also huge for me, it's just an incredibly responsive game and I fuck with the flow of having two health bars each instead of having to win a two out of three. Like yeah, it makes it a little snowball-y, but it's perfect for that pick up and play arcade experience. This shit is unironically like Cocomelon for me.

Love all these fucked up guys too, except maybe Demitri since he's got big sex pest vibes. I privated the list I originally said this in cuz I didn't really like it that much, but I love that Darkstalkers in general is just a fighting game series about fighting game gimmick characters. Love how ridiculously broken some of these nasty fuckers are. Love their stupid ass EX moves, big fucking shout out to Lilith's Gloomy Puppet EX specifically. The Devilman-esque demonic revelry going on in this series is something I've always loved and have only ever really gotten out of stuff like Shin Megami Tensei, but now I can get that anytime I want without having to play 60 to 100 hour JRPGs.

Oh, this bit is already kinda playing itself out isn't it:

Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire - 8/10

zabel zarock for super smash bros. brawl

I don't know how this ended up here, but I kind of don't wanna get rid of it! It might be my favorite go-to for when I just want a simple adventure that doesn't necessarily try to sweep the underlying darkness of our world under the rug. That isn't to say it's much more than a Zelda game with a neat premise, charming characters, and memorable dungeons, but Twilight Princess more than carries its weight where it counts. If I want a Zelda with good pacing I'll play Ocarina, if I want a Zelda with fun combat I'll play Wind Waker, if I want a Zelda that's actually a good game, I'll play Majora's Mask. Twilight Princess is like the video game equivalent of a Sanrio Kuromi band-aid (glowing praise).

Twilight Princess is a bloated and shambling mass of a Zelda title that consistently fails to live up to the creative and mechanical pedigree of its predecessors, but... Midna. And you can be a dog? You get to be a dog. The dog parts are bad, but you know, we take what we can get out here, I like playing as dog. And it has easily the prettiest Princess Zelda design, I love her so much. The Mansion dungeon is comfy, the Bones dungeon is cool as hell, and it's got sumo wrestling mechanics for some reason (it's fucking amazing that a) they manage to include said sumo mechanics in one of the final boss fights and b) it's Midna doing it with her cool ass demon hair powers).

Playing Twilight Princess and its mechanical sequel Skyward Sword, it's easy to see why Nintendo dropped the rigid linearity with heavy structural padding formula for something centered around player freedom and gameplay expression. But at the same time, playing Tears of the Kingdom made me long for these more narratively-focused Zelda titles. And it's pretty dope when Zelda and Twili Midna kiss at the end.

Also the intro section that everybody complains about is good actually:

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess - 8/10

miyamoto himself just sent me an email confirming that midna and zelda are indeed married and deeply in love, and that every midzelda fanfic on ao3 is now canon

Chrono Cross gets me. Innovative combat system? All of your party members are fucked up guys? Zero hour heady sci-fi fantasy concepts that are bursting out of their overburdened textboxes in their utter incomprehensibility? God, it fucking rules. Kid and Harle easily two of my favorite characters in gaming, not to mention the 40 other little freaks that are hopping and bopping around this stupid ass experience that's ostensibly a "video game".

The combat encounters do overstay their welcome a bit towards the end, but it never truly ceases to be a great battle system in my opinion. I don't know, I feel like trying to either armchair game design or face value literary critique Chrono Cross just saps the enjoyment out of its creative anarchy. I understand that a lot of its spotty plotting is due to time constraints, but it's still a game I wouldn't really change in any sort of way. I find myself a little ambivalent on The Radical Dreamers Edition, but I do appreciate that we finally have an official English release of Radical Dreamers itself.

Still in disbelief that one of the earliest party members that you can recruit is an androgynous visual-kei idol who strums his guitar in order to damage enemies:

Chrono Cross - 8/10

please sign my petition for square enix to patch radical dreamers edition to give lucky dan his real name back in the english localization

I don't know how this ended up here, but I kind of don't wanna get rid of it! It might be my favorite go-to for when I just want a seemingly morally dense adventure that is mostly carried in entertainment value by the bonds shared by its cast. That isn't to say it's much more than a Drakengard game with a neat premise, charming characters, and memorable setpieces, but NieR carries its weight where it counts. If I want a Drakengard with good pacing I'll play none of them, if I want a Drakengard with fun combat I'll play none of them, if I want a Drakengard that's actually a good game, I'll play Killer7. NieR is like the video game equivalent of a Transgender Jack Skellington band-aid (don't know what this means).

Okay, I can't do that entire bit for a whole other section; NieR/NieR Replicant ver.1.22 is an important game to me whether I like it or not. I can't say I definitively prefer one over the other: NieR's aesthetic is so much stronger in the original, the more casual script also lends itself better to the riffing between the characters, and it actually has meaningful gameplay interaction that's just missing from the remake. Ver.1.22's combat is somewhat of a homunculus formed from elements of both DoD3 and Automata's systems and animations (mostly just ends up feeling like DoD3 with less end lag tho), but letting the gameplay sink into the back of your mind really helps during the most monotonous parts of NieR's unconventional narrative structure. The voice acting is overall improved as well, but something is lost in a number of scenes, usually something humorous. Ending E is heavy-handed and breaches slightly into fanservice territory, but I fuck with it if only because of how deftly it reiterates the performative selflessness baked into many of Nier's selfish decisions throughout the story.

The real reason we play this game is for the cast though, even if their relationships feel a tad underdeveloped (kinda feels like we get the sparknotes version of their initial bonding) during the first half of the game, everything ends up working perfectly during the much more important "second half", particularly once you start getting the text-based PoV stories. Kainé's backstory obviously resonates with a lot of queer people, but it doesn't make it any less personal for myself as well -- especially because I also had a tough grandma who loved me unconditionally and taught me more about life than my parents ever did. Emil and Kainé's whole queer sisterhood situation also just... it makes me feel insane (in a good, heartwarming way), I would also kill the whole world for them, you can't even blame Nier!!!

I think Ver.1.22 only really becomes annoying once you get to the ship level which like, is really not that great the first time around, becomes better the second time around, but let's be real we didn't need it more than that. OG is also just way funnier, Papa Nier just booking it all over the fucking place, sliding around, digging in the dirt like a hungry bear, and his post-timeskip design is so good. Love that asshole. But I still think I prefer the dynamic between a younger more age appropriate Nier in the context of his friendships with Emil and Kainé, and several actions the character takes outside of the confines of the script itself just make a lot more sense when the character is a teenager. Though we love our big, immature, deeply caring and protective, stupid ass Papa Nier anyways.

NieR/NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139... - 8/10

they really should've figured out a way to do the nier automata different playable characters in each story branch thing for the remake just to set it apart a bit more, but maybe that was outside of the scope. i wish the situation when it comes to the commercial availability of older versions of games wasn't getting so fucking dire, the original should've been like free DLC or some shit at least!!!

It's all right, I guess:

EarthBound - 8/10
















earthbound was my first "favorite game". now, that's not a particularly unique experience, especially for nintenbabies like myself, but i wouldn't disregard it as an important part of my personal development. that is, i had several games before it that in retrospect weren't so much favorite games, as much as they were formative games. pokémon, kingdom hearts, sonic adventure: they formed the foundation of my tastes, but none of them were really capable of aesthetically and "spiritually" satisfying me to the extent that earthbound eventually would

and you know, earthbound deserves every ounce of praise it gets. now, that's not a particularly unique sentiment, especially for people who, whether they can help it or not, revere shigesato itoi's creative output in video games, but i feel like even if we didn't have countless analyses of this series the games would still speak for themselves well enough. mother and mother 3, despite itoi stepping down from the director's chair for the latter, are games i love equally as much, but you can't really choose which experiences resonate with you the most. mother 2 feels the most personal to the player, and while mother is similar in that regard it focuses more on the external factors affecting ninten and his friends compared to mother 2's focus on the inner journey reflected through absurd external events, with mother 3 being the most directly character and theme-focused of the trilogy -- lucas has an actual character for instance, something both ness and ninten textually lack.

ness's journey is also the player's, and it never fails to move me despite how simple and textually thin the game actually is. i love that jeff has a little boyfriend waiting for him back home, even if paula is kinda shoe-horned in as more of a love interest for ness she's still a character you remember for her boldness and strength, and poo, he's a guy. yeah i mean, there's something there with poo, i love the dismemberment scene you get in his intro too. back half of the game is just so fucking good, like if final fantasy 4 had an actual emotional thrust to it

i'm not sure i'm quite as attached to the trilogy as i once was, but i know that once i play earthbound again, it'll all come flooding back. love can fade, but sometimes it perseveres

Drakengard 3, beneath it all, is a game about the struggles of domestic life in a world where things don't always go as planned. It's hilarious, but it shares a few narrative elements and themes with the film Finding Nemo, albeit with a mother and son rather than a father and a son. There's an implied intimacy between Zero and Michael, his loss devastates her, mentally, physically, and spiritually -- and she's left to take of "their son" Mikhail alone. Zero isn't a particularly good mother, in fact she's undeniably abusive, a fact that's only softened by the fact that Mikhail is a dragon. But it's a story that resonates deeply with my own life experiences on some level, even if not literally.

After a certain point though, it's really not that hard for all that to melt into the back in your mind, and all you're left with is the poopoo peepee cum game, and I can't blame anybody for ending up feeling that way. It's infamously incomplete, not really properly conveying the weight of Zero's history and characterization, making a lot of the underlying themes like ending cycles of generational abuse and fatalistic duty pretty understated until the final ending. That isn't to say it isn't there, every single ending in Drakengard 3 manages to choke me up every time (which is more than any other Taro game ending has done for me beyond a first playthru), but much like its slapped together repeated ad nauseam faux musou structure, the player really has to put in the work to acquire that underlying meaning.

It's also just an unabashedly feminine game. For all the penis vagina balls sex jokes none of them ever really come off as objectifying to any specific gender, outside of maybe how cartoonishly vulgar and buffoonish the Disciples can often be and the way Drakengard 3 intentionally plays with gender roles to highlight the absurdity of society's double standards. There's a scene towards the end of the game that I adore where Zero is giving her Disciples very genuine and meaningful "performance reviews", and it's like, damn I've been on both sides of conversations like this, that's real as fuck!!! It's easy to look at Drakengard 3 and dismiss it as nihilistic or horny, but I feel like that's almost missing the point. Love and meaning through chaos and pain is Taro's whole schtick at this point, and I don't think any of his works get that point across as effectively as this one.

Drakengard 3 - 8/10

the real reason i continue to play this game is because zero's design fucking rules and her fruity little sword is the kind of shit i'll never not autistically* obsess about (i was NOT normal about the kingdom hearts 1 keyblade designs as a child)

*i do actually have autism, i don't think i've ever directly said as much on my backloggd (personally i feel like it's really fucking obvious), but i felt the need to clarify that i'm technically allowed to say that 💕

Part of me wishes my favorites were more diverse, cooler even, but I've kinda learned the things we love in life are ultimately out of our immediate control. Like red flags in a blooming relationship, we might find reasoning that allows us to deflate that subconscious affection through logic, but everything else is at the behest of environmental influence and biological predisposition. But even if we can't choose, I don't think it makes the what and how of our love any less special. When our bodies perish so do our memories, so I find something meaningful in the fact we're all just these pulsing synapses trapped in a prison of flesh, and we should learn to cherish it while it lasts.

Shadow of the Colossus took me 15 years to finally get around to playing, and frankly I hated every second of it. But we're into enemies to lovers stories in this house, and nowadays it's an experience I don't think I could live without. Deprogrammed me from thinking about games in terms of mechanical and ergonomic perfection. Clunky? Is that the name of a clown? I suppose it's maybe overanalyzed and put on too high of a pedestal at times, but to me it's just a cool as hell experience with a deeply pensive and relatable narrative thrust, on top of having the chops to make that adventure feel memorable and worth returning to again and again. Also, Kow Otani's soundtrack here is, so fucking good it almost ruins music in other games for me.

Can't think of a cute way to end this, so I'll leave you all with the final score (for now):

Shadow of the Colossus - 10/10

the real joke? I do actually think most of these games are 8/10 ass video games. except maybe earthbound. there's a lot of other games i wanted to include here as well, but i either couldn't think of what to talk about or i'm not ready to talk about them yet. like pentiment, really wanted to put it on this list, but i literally just reviewed that shit so i'll just put it on here later, maybe. if i still like it when the next solstice comes around. honestly there's probably no way in hell i'll have the patience to stick to that gimmick, but i'll at least try keeping my additions to this list to a minimum this time

Politically and thematically Metroid as a series is all over the fuckin' place, both in terms of its diegetic content and in relation to the way a lot of its key creators like Yoshio Sakamoto have treated Samus over the years. Whether that's putting her in a tacky, skintight latex jumpsuit that allows them to create more opportunities for the presumably horny male player to ogle her, or making her into a galactic federation dog who submits both her personal autonomy and bodily safety to the whims of a male superior in misguided pursuit of some sort of deeper characterization for a character who was ostensibly a player surrogate for the previous two decades, Samus is an infamously mishandled character.

But I just ignore all that shit and don't even think about it. As far as I'm concerned Super Metroid is a game about a butchy transfemme (this is canon) in a cool robot suit that her two gay bird dads made for her who fights cool monsters with a missile launcher that she taped to her arm. Like okay, the reward for beating the game in under two hours is unabashedly male gaze-y and I'm gonna go out on a limb and say their intent probably wasn't feminine empowerment, but in this house we reclaim these sorts of things, and I think she looks pretty cool! She probably think she's look cunty in that outfit and who can blame her. Not sure if the mid-calf combat boots go well with that pantless two-piece, but who am I to judge the fashion of the future (also I think I'd probably wear that outfit myself, not sure what that says about my own taste in fashion).

Now, this isn't Metroid II, we aren't really thinking about the full moral implications of our scorched earth crusade across Planet Zebes, but the monster designs in Super are really fucking great so that's somethin' to chew on, even if we can't get cool resonate themes about the nature of violence anymore. All of them have so much personality that even the kind of awful encounters like Draygon and Botwoon remain memorable. There's a creative integrity to the flora and fauna on Super's Zebes that future Metroid titles would have trouble fully replicating as the formula began to homogenize, wearing away at the underlying expression of the real main character of the series: the world and its inhabitants.

There's a reason that Metroid is the only IP in Smash Bros with a 1:2 protag to antag representation ratio, Samus's adversaries are cool as fuck. It's really no wonder they just kept writing Ridley to be more and more evil, their mutual hatred can be felt through visuals and gameplay alone in Super, you almost want to imagine that their bad blood runs deeper than the politics surrounding -- and perhaps Samus's implied attachment to -- the baby metroid (and I guess the fact that Samus exploded Ridley into a billion pieces two games ago). Ridley just fucking rules in this game, and I don't think the way he's utilized in Super has ever been topped. From a strict scripting and mechanics perspective, the fight in Ridley's lair is like, kinda bad? But in the moment that shit REALLY goes off, you're both flying all over the fucking place. You're stacked with all the upgrades you've collected throughout the game, and you're just unloading all you've got into him. Like, despite being the least designed Ridley fight in the series, it's the Ridley fight that I think leaves the biggest impression overall, and probably why I don't really marry myself to the notion that "most quality game design possible = the most emotional impact possible" for any given scene in a game.

Super Metroid, like Symphony of the Night, is just so fucking cool to me in a way a lot of subsequent games in the series just aren't, at least by my own tastes. There's something about early entries in a subgenre before game design expectations have been codified that just hits different. Samus has a humanity to her that is kind of absent in future Metroid titles outside of maybe Fusion and Prime 2; I love that you can save the cute animals that helped Samus learn how to get out of an inescapable pit!!! I love that you get saved by the baby metroid because of how Samus imprinted on it in the last game!!! I know those are just accepted facts about the game at this point, ubiquitously known and uninteresting factoids in the scheme of gamer's mind. We've collectively dulled Super Metroid's specialness by the abundance of attention and unconditional admiration we've given it over the years, there's just so many things we take for granted about the game. But like, thinking about it abstractly in some sort of secret gamer vacuum, it's still just a cool as fuck little experience, and I hope we can start preserving that feeling, or at least I can for myself.

Also Samus is a lesbian, almost forgot to say that part. It's pretty cool of Nintendo to have so many openly and textually explicit LGBTQ+ characters! It'd be really embarrassing if Nintendo EPD were still releasing in-house-developed games that had characters whose queerness were relegated to merely implicit so that they could retain mass market global appeal, with all the explicitly queer characters being quarantined to a couple niche franchises developed by either subsidiary-run or non-acquired partner studios.