tizaster
2023
This review contains spoilers
Final Fantasy XVI killed Final Fantasy for me, and while I think I'll ultimately be grateful for that it's been exhausting to process.
In the early hours, I was delighted--finally, a new story I can get invested in with this series, one that's told coherently, with characters whose relationships I can follow. And while Active Time Lore™ was appealing to me up front--"remembering" my experiences with XIII and XV--I rarely even utilized it and could follow along just fine, only dipping in for deep dives driven by my own curiosity. Up front I had lamented the complete move to action combat, but I also braced for it knowing it was something they had been toying with already, and for what it's worth they managed to create a solid loop that expands into some decent variety over the course of the campaign, for a while.
But little by little, the foundations of my excitement began to crumble. A lot has already been said about FF16's treatment of women and its slavery/class narrative struggles, all criticism thoroughly justified. For me, it's how the game treats Jill specifically that paved the beginnings of its road to ruin. It's actually hysterical how much of an afterthought Jill is to the story they're telling, especially given that she's standing with you for nearly all of it.
It comes to be almost like a challenge the game puts forth to see how much worse her treatment can possibly get, to the point that it culminates in putting one particular endgame sidequest--which gives Jill an emotional moment with Clive and puts her "permanently" in your party until you proceed with the finale--behind another sidequest related to Clive's father. It is so easy to see a situation in which players put off that sidequest, imagining it to be a nice "final" one to go for, only to discover another with a key party member hidden underneath it--one where half the reward becomes potentially pointless as putting her in the party "for the rest of the game" might be actually zero time. And neither quest is marked with a signature plus-sign that indicates where the Real Rewards are, the "good stuff" like increasing how many potions you can hold or the ability to smith a weapon if you do hours of additional content to get the required crafting items from special enemies.
It sounds like a lot has been said about the game's sidequests as well. Here are my two cents: when FF16 sidequests are good, they are far and away the best content you can find in its runtime. Not because you get two more max potions, but because they spend more effort filling out the details of the world and some of the characters' relationships. They can be the strongest indication that the developers behind this world do actually like the people in it, can relate to their struggles and offer them glimpses of hope and camaraderie. But the sidequests are set up for failure from the start. They're introduced as strictly tedious chores, outside of one early on that gives the faintest hint of new character information after you've done the riveting task of finding a bag of supplies. And even when the narrative quality of the sidequests improves, that quality is still buried under artificial lengthening, long and unchallenging fights [I hope you like the raw feel of the combat a lot!], running [or fast traveling] back and forth.
Which is a long way of saying--by the time I reached the final barf-up of sidequest icons before the game's conclusion, it broke my heart but I was done with them. Full disclosure, in the face of my frustration a friend told me Jill had a sidequest dedicated to her amongst all these potential weeds, so when none of the quest descriptions suggested as much I straight up googled to find which quest it was. Imagine my surprise when I discovered it's because they didn't barf up all the icons up front.
This was the pivotal moment for me. Suddenly my mind was racing as it tried to reconcile what I had experienced for the past 45-50 hours. I marched on with the finale, trying to enjoy the "emotional payoff" of the story, but I was distracted by a dreadful feeling that dove into some weird kind of spiritual emptiness. And when the credits started rolling, I suddenly knew I had lost something and somehow hadn't seen it coming.
It took all that to realize what Final Fantasy as a series has truly meant to me. My first Final Fantasy experience was the now oft-maligned Final Fantasy VIII, which I still adore to this day. I rented Brave Fencer Musashi because it looked and sounded cool, but I maybe played it for half an hour tops because it came with a demo for FF8 that I immediately obsessed over, replaying a number of times before I had to return the demo along with the game I was supposedly renting. It was over for me. I would save money and get the full game in short order, and the next year saw both a heavy discount on Final Fantasy VII at a local store as well as my newly developed awareness of console emulation on my family's PC, opening the doors to all the SNES RPGs I couldn't afford. Super Mario RPG helped me discover RPGs, but Final Fantasy shot that appreciation into the stratosphere.
There are plenty of game series or creators that mean a lot to me, but Final Fantasy was probably the only one where my fondness went largely uncontested. I had my ups and downs with the games, but my love for them remained. It's also the only series that served as a foundational block for some of the closest friendships in my life, and while those relationships quickly didn't rely on those games, I don't know that they would have had that potential without that foot in the door.
I couldn't stop loving Final Fantasy games for a little over a decade, and then I played Final Fantasy XIII and experienced its relentless, nonsensical terminology. And Final Fantasy XV and its disinterest in anything beyond "vibes" of riding in a car across endless stretches of nothing. Yet I still loved Final Fantasy, still had expectations that when a new one came out I would be playing it. So what happened--why is that feeling now gone? Why wasn't this the result of playing XIII or XV? I would have initially guessed it's the aforementioned struggles with coherence that actually served as distractions, and that in the moment of playing both of those games I was convinced I was having some manner of a good time.
But it's now been literal months since I wrapped up XVI, and I feel I can more accurately pinpoint that, at the end of the day, even though I do not particularly like XIII or XV, I had an emotional reaction to them. I can poke fun at terms like L'Cie and Fal'Cie while marveling at XIII's clever battle system and beautiful sights. I can say however many times I like that XV's narrative left zero impression, but I will genuinely never forget the weirdo end-game side dungeon that I accidentally discovered, or buying soundtracks from other games in the series and putting them on for long car trips, or even just the meta insanity of putting out a game and expecting people to watch a prequel movie or potentially play a free beat-em-up for narrative clarity, like it was already worthy of that kind of dedication.
Almost as a defense mechanism, while watching FF16's credits I thought about Final Fantasy VII Remake, which I enjoyed a fair amount, so surely Final Fantasy isn't dead to me, but at the time it only made it worse. Sure I enjoyed it, but it was a different spin and presentation on a story I already loved, setting its laser sights on one of Final Fantasy's most iconic locales in Midgar. And in that focus they made some missteps--most notably the train graveyard sequence, a tedious expansion of a 2-3 minute moment in the original game. And now, as my brain dwells on that immediate gut reaction during the credits with the pondering that's occurred since, I've come to realize that it's because Final Fantasy XVI could have been practically any game released by a big studio in 2023, something I one thousand percent cannot say about XIII or XV.
As game development costs have increased exponentially, so too has the need for developers of massive commercial games to find ways to extend them under the false pretense that longer games with more content, prettier content, are inherently better or more worthy of purchase. And Final Fantasy--a series that has leaned into its bombastic production--is certainly not immune to that. Based on how Square always says their games underperform, they're even less likely to pivot to leaner, stronger experiences. The sidequests, as presented, are a solution to a game development "problem." Long dungeons with numerous repetitive encounters are another. Barely-interactive prolonged QTEs with elaborately produced cinematics are yet another. And Final Fantasy XVI indulges in all of these things.
At the end of the day, giving Jill a more impactful character arc--or just, I don't know, more to actually do in a game in which she's constantly present--both wouldn't have made a big difference to me with this particular title, and was also never going to happen. Not when it's easier to design a sidequest in which the player travels to three distinct locations and delivers items to NPCs and then reports that they did that and probably gets another goddamn meteorite; when it's easier to make another "castle" dungeon where you push a door open, kill some bads, walk down some stairs, kill some bads, climb up a ledge, kill some bads, and so on; when the budget is "better spent" creating a Sonic the Hedgehog-inspired spectacle shitstorm that refuses to end [shoutout to the Titan eikon fight!], because how else will people know their money was justified.
And so that special bond is gone. The Final Fantasy Experience now feels like some focus-tested husk. And that's ultimately fine. There are countless indie RPG developers interested in creating the sort of magic they grew up experiencing, whether it be Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger or whatever, and while most will fail others will succeed in genuinely speaking to and understanding that era with their own spin. Hell, Square themselves is publishing those sorts of games, and creating them with smaller teams. So when I wish to dive into that kind of game, I will not struggle to find one. Doesn't mean some small part of me won't feel lost.
In the early hours, I was delighted--finally, a new story I can get invested in with this series, one that's told coherently, with characters whose relationships I can follow. And while Active Time Lore™ was appealing to me up front--"remembering" my experiences with XIII and XV--I rarely even utilized it and could follow along just fine, only dipping in for deep dives driven by my own curiosity. Up front I had lamented the complete move to action combat, but I also braced for it knowing it was something they had been toying with already, and for what it's worth they managed to create a solid loop that expands into some decent variety over the course of the campaign, for a while.
But little by little, the foundations of my excitement began to crumble. A lot has already been said about FF16's treatment of women and its slavery/class narrative struggles, all criticism thoroughly justified. For me, it's how the game treats Jill specifically that paved the beginnings of its road to ruin. It's actually hysterical how much of an afterthought Jill is to the story they're telling, especially given that she's standing with you for nearly all of it.
It comes to be almost like a challenge the game puts forth to see how much worse her treatment can possibly get, to the point that it culminates in putting one particular endgame sidequest--which gives Jill an emotional moment with Clive and puts her "permanently" in your party until you proceed with the finale--behind another sidequest related to Clive's father. It is so easy to see a situation in which players put off that sidequest, imagining it to be a nice "final" one to go for, only to discover another with a key party member hidden underneath it--one where half the reward becomes potentially pointless as putting her in the party "for the rest of the game" might be actually zero time. And neither quest is marked with a signature plus-sign that indicates where the Real Rewards are, the "good stuff" like increasing how many potions you can hold or the ability to smith a weapon if you do hours of additional content to get the required crafting items from special enemies.
It sounds like a lot has been said about the game's sidequests as well. Here are my two cents: when FF16 sidequests are good, they are far and away the best content you can find in its runtime. Not because you get two more max potions, but because they spend more effort filling out the details of the world and some of the characters' relationships. They can be the strongest indication that the developers behind this world do actually like the people in it, can relate to their struggles and offer them glimpses of hope and camaraderie. But the sidequests are set up for failure from the start. They're introduced as strictly tedious chores, outside of one early on that gives the faintest hint of new character information after you've done the riveting task of finding a bag of supplies. And even when the narrative quality of the sidequests improves, that quality is still buried under artificial lengthening, long and unchallenging fights [I hope you like the raw feel of the combat a lot!], running [or fast traveling] back and forth.
Which is a long way of saying--by the time I reached the final barf-up of sidequest icons before the game's conclusion, it broke my heart but I was done with them. Full disclosure, in the face of my frustration a friend told me Jill had a sidequest dedicated to her amongst all these potential weeds, so when none of the quest descriptions suggested as much I straight up googled to find which quest it was. Imagine my surprise when I discovered it's because they didn't barf up all the icons up front.
This was the pivotal moment for me. Suddenly my mind was racing as it tried to reconcile what I had experienced for the past 45-50 hours. I marched on with the finale, trying to enjoy the "emotional payoff" of the story, but I was distracted by a dreadful feeling that dove into some weird kind of spiritual emptiness. And when the credits started rolling, I suddenly knew I had lost something and somehow hadn't seen it coming.
It took all that to realize what Final Fantasy as a series has truly meant to me. My first Final Fantasy experience was the now oft-maligned Final Fantasy VIII, which I still adore to this day. I rented Brave Fencer Musashi because it looked and sounded cool, but I maybe played it for half an hour tops because it came with a demo for FF8 that I immediately obsessed over, replaying a number of times before I had to return the demo along with the game I was supposedly renting. It was over for me. I would save money and get the full game in short order, and the next year saw both a heavy discount on Final Fantasy VII at a local store as well as my newly developed awareness of console emulation on my family's PC, opening the doors to all the SNES RPGs I couldn't afford. Super Mario RPG helped me discover RPGs, but Final Fantasy shot that appreciation into the stratosphere.
There are plenty of game series or creators that mean a lot to me, but Final Fantasy was probably the only one where my fondness went largely uncontested. I had my ups and downs with the games, but my love for them remained. It's also the only series that served as a foundational block for some of the closest friendships in my life, and while those relationships quickly didn't rely on those games, I don't know that they would have had that potential without that foot in the door.
I couldn't stop loving Final Fantasy games for a little over a decade, and then I played Final Fantasy XIII and experienced its relentless, nonsensical terminology. And Final Fantasy XV and its disinterest in anything beyond "vibes" of riding in a car across endless stretches of nothing. Yet I still loved Final Fantasy, still had expectations that when a new one came out I would be playing it. So what happened--why is that feeling now gone? Why wasn't this the result of playing XIII or XV? I would have initially guessed it's the aforementioned struggles with coherence that actually served as distractions, and that in the moment of playing both of those games I was convinced I was having some manner of a good time.
But it's now been literal months since I wrapped up XVI, and I feel I can more accurately pinpoint that, at the end of the day, even though I do not particularly like XIII or XV, I had an emotional reaction to them. I can poke fun at terms like L'Cie and Fal'Cie while marveling at XIII's clever battle system and beautiful sights. I can say however many times I like that XV's narrative left zero impression, but I will genuinely never forget the weirdo end-game side dungeon that I accidentally discovered, or buying soundtracks from other games in the series and putting them on for long car trips, or even just the meta insanity of putting out a game and expecting people to watch a prequel movie or potentially play a free beat-em-up for narrative clarity, like it was already worthy of that kind of dedication.
Almost as a defense mechanism, while watching FF16's credits I thought about Final Fantasy VII Remake, which I enjoyed a fair amount, so surely Final Fantasy isn't dead to me, but at the time it only made it worse. Sure I enjoyed it, but it was a different spin and presentation on a story I already loved, setting its laser sights on one of Final Fantasy's most iconic locales in Midgar. And in that focus they made some missteps--most notably the train graveyard sequence, a tedious expansion of a 2-3 minute moment in the original game. And now, as my brain dwells on that immediate gut reaction during the credits with the pondering that's occurred since, I've come to realize that it's because Final Fantasy XVI could have been practically any game released by a big studio in 2023, something I one thousand percent cannot say about XIII or XV.
As game development costs have increased exponentially, so too has the need for developers of massive commercial games to find ways to extend them under the false pretense that longer games with more content, prettier content, are inherently better or more worthy of purchase. And Final Fantasy--a series that has leaned into its bombastic production--is certainly not immune to that. Based on how Square always says their games underperform, they're even less likely to pivot to leaner, stronger experiences. The sidequests, as presented, are a solution to a game development "problem." Long dungeons with numerous repetitive encounters are another. Barely-interactive prolonged QTEs with elaborately produced cinematics are yet another. And Final Fantasy XVI indulges in all of these things.
At the end of the day, giving Jill a more impactful character arc--or just, I don't know, more to actually do in a game in which she's constantly present--both wouldn't have made a big difference to me with this particular title, and was also never going to happen. Not when it's easier to design a sidequest in which the player travels to three distinct locations and delivers items to NPCs and then reports that they did that and probably gets another goddamn meteorite; when it's easier to make another "castle" dungeon where you push a door open, kill some bads, walk down some stairs, kill some bads, climb up a ledge, kill some bads, and so on; when the budget is "better spent" creating a Sonic the Hedgehog-inspired spectacle shitstorm that refuses to end [shoutout to the Titan eikon fight!], because how else will people know their money was justified.
And so that special bond is gone. The Final Fantasy Experience now feels like some focus-tested husk. And that's ultimately fine. There are countless indie RPG developers interested in creating the sort of magic they grew up experiencing, whether it be Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger or whatever, and while most will fail others will succeed in genuinely speaking to and understanding that era with their own spin. Hell, Square themselves is publishing those sorts of games, and creating them with smaller teams. So when I wish to dive into that kind of game, I will not struggle to find one. Doesn't mean some small part of me won't feel lost.
1993
On some shitty fundamental level, I probably believe that in order for something to be interesting as a "game" it requires a form of choice. I don't care about whether they have fail states, or whether your interaction with the world is limited--I just need that interaction to be driven by my curiosity, my skill, whatever it may be. Those are choices that I find engaging.
Playing Ihatovo Monogatari really helped put that into perspective for me. I've struggled with, and continue to struggle with, visual novels--not in the sense that I "don't think they're games" because who cares about that and hopefully most people have grown out of that level of bizarre gate-keeping, but in the sense that my interaction with many of them is pretty strictly driven by whether I feel compelled to read more text--occasionally with making choices so I can read how that text branches. When well-written I'm sure the genre is great, but they don't particularly excite me because it just makes me feel guilty about not reading books or watching films instead. They may have accompanying visuals and sounds that resonate and enhance, but for me they don't really have what makes games special.
Games like Ihatovo Monogatari are different because, as inconsequential as it may seem on the surface, having a physical avatar exploring a space to largely the same mechanical ends as a visual novel makes all the difference in the world to me. The game wouldn't be special without its pleasant world-building, characters and story, but those things are allowed to sing because I'm truly inhabiting the world as I explore it.
There are specific triggers needed to proceed--and that's where most of my problems with the game showed up, namely in the snow village chapter--but they're easier to forgive when your stumbling gives you the opportunity to soak in scenes; to see if that dog you passed earlier has something to say; to check in on the woman who sings outside her home; to stop by the theater to see if it's playing something new, or anything at all; to experience a new work from the local poet; and so much more. The synopsis for this game mentions "the opportunity to play the role of a temporary school teacher"--something I apparently missed out on, which is okay. [Or it's referring to a largely off-screen role in one of the chapters, perhaps.] As simple as the verbs are that you're equipped with in dealing with this small town and its outskirts, they feel more powerful because they were perfect enough for me to express my own engagement.
And it's a world that earns that engagement. The story--an elaborate and lovely tribute to real-life novelist and poet Kenji Miyazawa--is filled with bittersweet parables about the nature of humanity, communication and place. The vast majority of chapters are standalone snippets where the [at least I'm pretty sure] unnamed protagonist, motivated by his search for seven of Miyazawa's journals, stumbles into resolving and witnessing conflicts in the region. It's all accompanied by charming art, including beautiful cutscenes that tend to conclude chapters. [Props to the English fan translation as well; I don't know if it's a fantastic localization, but I do know it communicated well enough for me to get a lot out of it.]
The aforementioned triggers are the only kicker, and unfortunately there were times I found them to be frustrating enough to hurt what really works here. In those moments the expectation the game sets for you to walk back and forth between these triggers doesn't feel like an opportunity but instead like an inorganic roadblock. The vast majority of this confusion can be avoided since the town provides, depending on how you wish to look at it, two to four reliable "hint" hubs that can nudge you in the right direction. But sometimes even knowing the key players in a developing story, even with the assistance of these hubs, isn't enough, leading to wandering around and hoping you talk to the right character that reveals, oh, they just had this important item stowed away and sure you can have it, or even actions as simple as leaving the area.
So the awkward remnants of games past are here, but I still couldn't be happier about getting around to it, and it makes me feel incredibly grateful to fan communities that devote their time towards making these sorts of experiences more accessible. It seems fairly celebrated here on Backloggd which is great, but it's still very much an unsung moment from this period in gaming and I'm thrilled to have experienced it myself.
Playing Ihatovo Monogatari really helped put that into perspective for me. I've struggled with, and continue to struggle with, visual novels--not in the sense that I "don't think they're games" because who cares about that and hopefully most people have grown out of that level of bizarre gate-keeping, but in the sense that my interaction with many of them is pretty strictly driven by whether I feel compelled to read more text--occasionally with making choices so I can read how that text branches. When well-written I'm sure the genre is great, but they don't particularly excite me because it just makes me feel guilty about not reading books or watching films instead. They may have accompanying visuals and sounds that resonate and enhance, but for me they don't really have what makes games special.
Games like Ihatovo Monogatari are different because, as inconsequential as it may seem on the surface, having a physical avatar exploring a space to largely the same mechanical ends as a visual novel makes all the difference in the world to me. The game wouldn't be special without its pleasant world-building, characters and story, but those things are allowed to sing because I'm truly inhabiting the world as I explore it.
There are specific triggers needed to proceed--and that's where most of my problems with the game showed up, namely in the snow village chapter--but they're easier to forgive when your stumbling gives you the opportunity to soak in scenes; to see if that dog you passed earlier has something to say; to check in on the woman who sings outside her home; to stop by the theater to see if it's playing something new, or anything at all; to experience a new work from the local poet; and so much more. The synopsis for this game mentions "the opportunity to play the role of a temporary school teacher"--something I apparently missed out on, which is okay. [Or it's referring to a largely off-screen role in one of the chapters, perhaps.] As simple as the verbs are that you're equipped with in dealing with this small town and its outskirts, they feel more powerful because they were perfect enough for me to express my own engagement.
And it's a world that earns that engagement. The story--an elaborate and lovely tribute to real-life novelist and poet Kenji Miyazawa--is filled with bittersweet parables about the nature of humanity, communication and place. The vast majority of chapters are standalone snippets where the [at least I'm pretty sure] unnamed protagonist, motivated by his search for seven of Miyazawa's journals, stumbles into resolving and witnessing conflicts in the region. It's all accompanied by charming art, including beautiful cutscenes that tend to conclude chapters. [Props to the English fan translation as well; I don't know if it's a fantastic localization, but I do know it communicated well enough for me to get a lot out of it.]
The aforementioned triggers are the only kicker, and unfortunately there were times I found them to be frustrating enough to hurt what really works here. In those moments the expectation the game sets for you to walk back and forth between these triggers doesn't feel like an opportunity but instead like an inorganic roadblock. The vast majority of this confusion can be avoided since the town provides, depending on how you wish to look at it, two to four reliable "hint" hubs that can nudge you in the right direction. But sometimes even knowing the key players in a developing story, even with the assistance of these hubs, isn't enough, leading to wandering around and hoping you talk to the right character that reveals, oh, they just had this important item stowed away and sure you can have it, or even actions as simple as leaving the area.
So the awkward remnants of games past are here, but I still couldn't be happier about getting around to it, and it makes me feel incredibly grateful to fan communities that devote their time towards making these sorts of experiences more accessible. It seems fairly celebrated here on Backloggd which is great, but it's still very much an unsung moment from this period in gaming and I'm thrilled to have experienced it myself.
2023
This review contains spoilers
In a way this is the worst kind of game for me, one that has agreeable yet shallow mechanics that aren't bad, but also has been designed to be an 8+ hour experience banking on my being enchanted by the aesthetics and story. It's nice enough to look at and listen to, and there are a few moments here and there where it lived up to its spooky Lovecraftian promise. It unfortunately seems like most of the focus went into boat and space management, and since it doesn't go nearly far enough it ends up feeling repetitive before the main quest has even reached the halfway point. And yet, because the "vibes" are so rarely effective or surprising, I spent like 90% of my time with Dredge thinking about finding resources so I could get more cargo space, to hold more items or better equipment so I could get even more resources for even more cargo space.
Making me spend so much time doing inventory management is only going to make me want a better-designed inventory system, or at least something more creative. I would say a lot of the other 10% of my time with the game was spent thinking about Wilmot's Warehouse, where inventory management, and even defining what inventory is, is actually the game. Your personal creativity and ability to compartmentalize determine your success, and likely your level of frustration. In Dredge, inventory management is of very little interest because you quickly fill up, even when you're far into the game, so it's more like you have the smallest suitcase that you constantly have to unload. The choices I was making regarding my stock were typically along the lines of "do I want to spend two minutes fishing or two minutes getting materials?" Management in this situation isn't really a choice, it's just homework.
So since inventory management is constant and mundane if you get anything, and the fishing mechanics while satisfying on a nonzero level don't particularly evolve, the worldbuilding [via exploration] bears the brunt of Dredge's burden, and while I occasionally ran into fun surprises, a lot of my reward was being informed of a new fetch quest for some specific sea creature. The writing wasn't bad enough to deter me, but only good enough to give me hope for a payoff that would make it all worth it. I don't know if I saw all the endings, but the ones I did see could not have landed more flatly and did not make it worth it in the slightest.
If the game was better at any of what it was doing I could have still come away from the experience with a positive stance. If it was worse I could have called it off after an hour or two and saved time. As it stands, it was really only good enough to pull me along, and left me feeling empty at the end. Oh well!
Making me spend so much time doing inventory management is only going to make me want a better-designed inventory system, or at least something more creative. I would say a lot of the other 10% of my time with the game was spent thinking about Wilmot's Warehouse, where inventory management, and even defining what inventory is, is actually the game. Your personal creativity and ability to compartmentalize determine your success, and likely your level of frustration. In Dredge, inventory management is of very little interest because you quickly fill up, even when you're far into the game, so it's more like you have the smallest suitcase that you constantly have to unload. The choices I was making regarding my stock were typically along the lines of "do I want to spend two minutes fishing or two minutes getting materials?" Management in this situation isn't really a choice, it's just homework.
So since inventory management is constant and mundane if you get anything, and the fishing mechanics while satisfying on a nonzero level don't particularly evolve, the worldbuilding [via exploration] bears the brunt of Dredge's burden, and while I occasionally ran into fun surprises, a lot of my reward was being informed of a new fetch quest for some specific sea creature. The writing wasn't bad enough to deter me, but only good enough to give me hope for a payoff that would make it all worth it. I don't know if I saw all the endings, but the ones I did see could not have landed more flatly and did not make it worth it in the slightest.
If the game was better at any of what it was doing I could have still come away from the experience with a positive stance. If it was worse I could have called it off after an hour or two and saved time. As it stands, it was really only good enough to pull me along, and left me feeling empty at the end. Oh well!
Season is at its best when dealing in broad emotional strokes and focusing on player expression, which for me were both prevalent and strong enough to get me to spend 8 hours in its world in a single day. Framing the camera for perfect photos, capturing audio, and ultimately arranging a narrative of each area in a scrapbook, especially if you buy into the premise of telling the world's story for future generations, is a tantalizing offer. Minor moments reminded me of Sable, though as an expression of a character's journey this doesn't quite live up to that.
Unfortunately, I think a big part of why is because Season also gives a little too much attention to its own presentation of the world's story. Some of the specifics of the plot can get pretty goofy and probably shouldn't have been allowed to interfere with what makes the game work, and the journalistic objectives you're occasionally tasked with are only nice in that they add pages to your journal, not so nice in that there are large portions of them that are effectively already authored. These "mysteries" you can solve are presumably optional, and are likely intended as direction for players who aren't as comfortable with self-motivated goals [or those who want more definitive lore], but pulling on a certain string in the world and being presented with a checklist of objectives isn't a great feeling in a game that otherwise isn't terribly concerned with how you decide to portray the locales.
Which is not to say that the game's authored moments always miss--they can speak poignantly enough to ideas of loss, memory, and lived experience, most effectively in the opening sequence. And the visuals are certainly striking! I'm very glad to have had a pleasant, chill Sunday with it.
Unfortunately, I think a big part of why is because Season also gives a little too much attention to its own presentation of the world's story. Some of the specifics of the plot can get pretty goofy and probably shouldn't have been allowed to interfere with what makes the game work, and the journalistic objectives you're occasionally tasked with are only nice in that they add pages to your journal, not so nice in that there are large portions of them that are effectively already authored. These "mysteries" you can solve are presumably optional, and are likely intended as direction for players who aren't as comfortable with self-motivated goals [or those who want more definitive lore], but pulling on a certain string in the world and being presented with a checklist of objectives isn't a great feeling in a game that otherwise isn't terribly concerned with how you decide to portray the locales.
Which is not to say that the game's authored moments always miss--they can speak poignantly enough to ideas of loss, memory, and lived experience, most effectively in the opening sequence. And the visuals are certainly striking! I'm very glad to have had a pleasant, chill Sunday with it.
I wish this could naturally be the definitive Theatrhythm experience for me, but it's more by circumstance of platform. The series is easily one of my favorite rhythm game experiences, a loving tribute to RPG music, most obviously Final Fantasy but also Square as a whole. And while I haven't necessarily needed the progression systems that they've included, I do find them charming and engaging, and I would say of the Theatrhythm Final Fantasy games this one handles that side of it the best. More character variety built in, significantly more appealing ways to unlock them, shedding the AP requirements of skills, more "loot" variety with the summons, and so on. I do ultimately take issue with some of the choices they made with this release, most notably that they would take an emotional centerpiece of one of their games [Final Fantasy X's "Zanarkand"] and lock it behind the more expensive versions of Final Bar Line [gross!], but also simple things like the way you unlock songs.
The "easiest" way to unlock a game's songs is to complete its quest mode, and you only get access to a new title by playing three or so songs in a title you've already unlocked to acquire another key, encouraging you to either stick to individual titles to unlock your favorites in their entirety more quickly, or sample every game enough to get keys and prioritizing unlocking all titles so you can hop between them later for variety's sake.
I suppose you could also unlock songs by hoping people select them in online multiplayer [and that their songs actually get selected for the battles]. Alternatively, you could fast track unlocking the endless mode--which takes decent effort, finishing seven full game quests, and then the Theatrhythm quest that opens up--which would be a miserable way to optimize [especially if you intentionally pick games you don't like as much because their quests are shorter] but does seem to pull from all songs in the game, not just what you have immediate access to. But again, song unlocking would be up to random chance at that point.
In Curtain Call, unlocking all the songs was as simple as finishing like 4 or 5 songs, which is so much better. There's already incentive for unlocking more game quests here [primarily getting new party members], so the awkward song unlocking isn't necessary. Yes, if you're buying Theatrhythm you likely already love Final Fantasy music so what's the problem of being "forced" to complete the game this way, but that's a pretty weird backwards stumble to me.
The other significant downgrade for me is that, frankly, I just find this more engaging as a rhythm game with stylus controls. It works well with buttons and analog sticks [an option that existed in the other games anyway], and obviously since this isn't a Switch-exclusive game and they designed the notes around a controller this time around, it's something I can accept. In the end, it's still Theatrhythm. I've still found myself thinking I'll play for a quick couple songs only to end up playing for a few hours. It's still a lovely way to experience a lot of classic RPG scores, and the preservation of the series beyond the 3DS is important to me, so I'm grateful to have it.
The "easiest" way to unlock a game's songs is to complete its quest mode, and you only get access to a new title by playing three or so songs in a title you've already unlocked to acquire another key, encouraging you to either stick to individual titles to unlock your favorites in their entirety more quickly, or sample every game enough to get keys and prioritizing unlocking all titles so you can hop between them later for variety's sake.
I suppose you could also unlock songs by hoping people select them in online multiplayer [and that their songs actually get selected for the battles]. Alternatively, you could fast track unlocking the endless mode--which takes decent effort, finishing seven full game quests, and then the Theatrhythm quest that opens up--which would be a miserable way to optimize [especially if you intentionally pick games you don't like as much because their quests are shorter] but does seem to pull from all songs in the game, not just what you have immediate access to. But again, song unlocking would be up to random chance at that point.
In Curtain Call, unlocking all the songs was as simple as finishing like 4 or 5 songs, which is so much better. There's already incentive for unlocking more game quests here [primarily getting new party members], so the awkward song unlocking isn't necessary. Yes, if you're buying Theatrhythm you likely already love Final Fantasy music so what's the problem of being "forced" to complete the game this way, but that's a pretty weird backwards stumble to me.
The other significant downgrade for me is that, frankly, I just find this more engaging as a rhythm game with stylus controls. It works well with buttons and analog sticks [an option that existed in the other games anyway], and obviously since this isn't a Switch-exclusive game and they designed the notes around a controller this time around, it's something I can accept. In the end, it's still Theatrhythm. I've still found myself thinking I'll play for a quick couple songs only to end up playing for a few hours. It's still a lovely way to experience a lot of classic RPG scores, and the preservation of the series beyond the 3DS is important to me, so I'm grateful to have it.
2022
Until Dawn was, for me, the Quantic Dream formula made actually tolerable--it generally had more fun with its concepts, and perhaps more importantly it had more love for its characters. A little odd given that it was effectively a B-horror tribute, except for the fact that its two writers, Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick, are both huge contributors to indie horror in film as a part of Glass Eye Pix. They're not game designers/writers who want games to be Like The Movies--they're horror veterans playing with a new medium. Frankly, it shows! And while I think there is a pretty low ceiling for games that operate like this, Until Dawn was in good hands and did better with whatever potential this template has. I had a good time with it.
As far as Supermassive goes, I've since played Man of Medan and seen House of Ashes. The former was interesting especially as an online multiplayer experience with a friend but didn't carry the same weight; the latter was pretty goofy but a fun stream watch. But it was already pretty clear to me that outside of completely shifting what these games were doing it was always going to be to diminishing returns, even considering Fessenden and Reznick both returning for Man of Medan.
Reznick is still around for The Quarry alongside several other writers, and maybe part of why it flounders as much as it does is a mix of too many cooks in the kitchen and generally running on fumes for their design concepts. The Quarry's biggest problem is its jarring pacing, which leaves the majority of its cast stranded and underdeveloped outside of whatever the actors managed to power through. The two actors I'd like to highlight are Ted Raimi, who brings a swath of B-film experience to give brilliantly creepy vibes to the town sheriff, and Miles Robbins, who as Dylan is the only younger performer believably contributing to the game's camp charm and is single-handedly responsible for half a star from me.
But even with those few bright spots, the narrative is uninterested in itself, jumping way too quickly or not quickly enough between characters, creating set pieces just for the sake of doing it, and ending with a whimper and then a "podcast" that drained the life out of me. If they keep at it [and I guess they're going to if we've just seen "season 1" of the Dark Pictures Anthology] I hope they try to evolve what they're doing, whether it's taking time to consider the potential of simultaneous multiplayer in choice-driven experiences like with Man of Medan, or trying to find more creators from other mediums who genuinely want to take a crack at games.
As far as Supermassive goes, I've since played Man of Medan and seen House of Ashes. The former was interesting especially as an online multiplayer experience with a friend but didn't carry the same weight; the latter was pretty goofy but a fun stream watch. But it was already pretty clear to me that outside of completely shifting what these games were doing it was always going to be to diminishing returns, even considering Fessenden and Reznick both returning for Man of Medan.
Reznick is still around for The Quarry alongside several other writers, and maybe part of why it flounders as much as it does is a mix of too many cooks in the kitchen and generally running on fumes for their design concepts. The Quarry's biggest problem is its jarring pacing, which leaves the majority of its cast stranded and underdeveloped outside of whatever the actors managed to power through. The two actors I'd like to highlight are Ted Raimi, who brings a swath of B-film experience to give brilliantly creepy vibes to the town sheriff, and Miles Robbins, who as Dylan is the only younger performer believably contributing to the game's camp charm and is single-handedly responsible for half a star from me.
But even with those few bright spots, the narrative is uninterested in itself, jumping way too quickly or not quickly enough between characters, creating set pieces just for the sake of doing it, and ending with a whimper and then a "podcast" that drained the life out of me. If they keep at it [and I guess they're going to if we've just seen "season 1" of the Dark Pictures Anthology] I hope they try to evolve what they're doing, whether it's taking time to consider the potential of simultaneous multiplayer in choice-driven experiences like with Man of Medan, or trying to find more creators from other mediums who genuinely want to take a crack at games.
2012
Before ever playing La-Mulana I had heard warnings that, were I ever to play it, it's effectively mandatory to take notes, not counting resorting to guides of course. As someone who has historically enjoyed games with some form of note-taking--ranging from the original Tex Murphy game Mean Streets to more modern mysterious action puzzlers like Fez and Tunic--this warning served as a highly effective sales pitch, and I knew there was a very good chance I would like it when I finally got around to it.
Mechanically, it's a very focused action platformer somewhat analogous to the likes of the original Castlevania. It has confidence in its feel that makes it highly predictable and satisfying to pull off. While I did get a little frustrated with some of the boss fights, others were fun to figure out [or, at worst, easy enough to circumvent with subweapons]. A game like this would fail with poor mechanics, so it's nice that the foundation is strong.
But the adventure-puzzle side of this is the main attraction, and even knowing to some small degree what I was in for, I absolutely wasn't prepared for the kind of surprise La-Mulana offers. Specifically, it's difficult to create a Metroidvania-style game that lasts anywhere near as long as La-Mulana does, while also evolving what those areas are to the player basically the entire time. One of my biggest problems with Hollow Knight, a game I did ultimately enjoy, was that it was way too long. A lot of playing it was backtracking through environments that you have more or less "experienced" the first time you move through them. This is a problem with a lot of Metroidvanias, but most of them also aren't 20+ hours. It's a difficult problem to address, and I don't know that La-Mulana's solution is universal, but I do know it's very appealing--it is, essentially, "you have no idea what you just walked through," a sentiment often delivered by the game with a little bit of mischief.
Notes from the final hours of the game would reveal secrets about a room I may have seen within a half hour of starting. Sometimes, as long as I was decent enough with my scribbles, I'd come to realize that I should backtrack to the source of the note, where I'd find I actually wasn't thorough enough, and key details failed to register with me. No potential source of information is off limits, which can be intimidating and occasionally present some rough progression walls, but the moments in which an idea would come to me or something would click as relevant gave me an indescribable amount of joy. I started with a notepad file that served as my main research companion and ultimately surpassed a thousand lines, but by the end of my 40-hour journey I had supplemented those notes with numerous photos on my phone, a spreadsheet documenting connections between clues, a few notebook pages of translation notes...
For a particular brand of individual, this is heaven. I was absolutely smitten with this, and weeks after finishing I still think about some "a-ha" moment I had and what I felt when I had it. I know its reception isn't quite the same, but I'm excited that I have a sequel I can pull out whenever I want to chase even a semblance of that high again.
Mechanically, it's a very focused action platformer somewhat analogous to the likes of the original Castlevania. It has confidence in its feel that makes it highly predictable and satisfying to pull off. While I did get a little frustrated with some of the boss fights, others were fun to figure out [or, at worst, easy enough to circumvent with subweapons]. A game like this would fail with poor mechanics, so it's nice that the foundation is strong.
But the adventure-puzzle side of this is the main attraction, and even knowing to some small degree what I was in for, I absolutely wasn't prepared for the kind of surprise La-Mulana offers. Specifically, it's difficult to create a Metroidvania-style game that lasts anywhere near as long as La-Mulana does, while also evolving what those areas are to the player basically the entire time. One of my biggest problems with Hollow Knight, a game I did ultimately enjoy, was that it was way too long. A lot of playing it was backtracking through environments that you have more or less "experienced" the first time you move through them. This is a problem with a lot of Metroidvanias, but most of them also aren't 20+ hours. It's a difficult problem to address, and I don't know that La-Mulana's solution is universal, but I do know it's very appealing--it is, essentially, "you have no idea what you just walked through," a sentiment often delivered by the game with a little bit of mischief.
Notes from the final hours of the game would reveal secrets about a room I may have seen within a half hour of starting. Sometimes, as long as I was decent enough with my scribbles, I'd come to realize that I should backtrack to the source of the note, where I'd find I actually wasn't thorough enough, and key details failed to register with me. No potential source of information is off limits, which can be intimidating and occasionally present some rough progression walls, but the moments in which an idea would come to me or something would click as relevant gave me an indescribable amount of joy. I started with a notepad file that served as my main research companion and ultimately surpassed a thousand lines, but by the end of my 40-hour journey I had supplemented those notes with numerous photos on my phone, a spreadsheet documenting connections between clues, a few notebook pages of translation notes...
For a particular brand of individual, this is heaven. I was absolutely smitten with this, and weeks after finishing I still think about some "a-ha" moment I had and what I felt when I had it. I know its reception isn't quite the same, but I'm excited that I have a sequel I can pull out whenever I want to chase even a semblance of that high again.
2022
This review contains spoilers
For every minor success Stray has with conveying the notion of being a cat, there are approximately a dozen reminders that the game's imagination is limited to aping the conventions of generic third-person "prestige" games as well as the indie template made popular in recent years by Playdead Studios--and even then, doing so in some questionable ways.
I would go as far as to say that Stray is only successful at all in little moments, when you can wholly embrace the chaos that only a cat can bring. I had minor amounts of fun aimlessly pushing paint cans onto apartment floors or city streets and then stepping through the spilled paint and spreading paw prints. I say "aimlessly" because almost every other remotely appealing cat action has been turned into a collectible or trophy of some kind, a repetitive and specifically designed task that shows the developers "get" cats, like scratching up carpet or rubbing up against predetermined robots. Replace carpets with audio logs and cat rubs with handshakes or some rough equivalent, however, and suddenly this game could have easily featured a human character and nothing would even feel that different. They even give the cat a "voice" by pairing it with a robot companion named B-12, maybe the game's biggest mistake as the last thing I wanted from games like Limbo or Inside [which I'm not crazy about to begin with] was an abundance of writing. I guess the traversal up buildings is meant to be the exciting cat thing? I hope you like pressing X a lot to navigate predetermined platforms! Or simply holding it in the blessed few sequences where it makes sense to do so. A lot of these choices seem to be made not to convey anything exciting about being a cat but instead a lack of faith in players to interpret and succeed on their own terms, and an insistence on making the experience familiar.
Even if the base story elements were good enough to make up for how generic Stray feels to play, it's hard to take them seriously. When it goes for serious reveals or emotional moments, they tend to land absent of any impact due to the flat text log that B-12 soullessly presents on the screen. It could stand to learn a lot from titles that present wordless emotional exchanges. The other barrier preventing me from taking the story very seriously is one of the enemy types Stray presents. The antagonist for much of the game comes in the form of Zurks, little mutant creatures that consume anything and everything. Aesthetically they're wildly out of place, a hybrid of Half-Life creatures that sound like mice and look like bloated insects. They're also kind of pathetic as a threat, as you only ever encounter them in scenarios where they're easily avoidable, whether it's tedious chase sequences or tedious puzzle rooms. You even briefly get a "gun" to deal with them, which is somehow one of the least satisfying weapons I've ever encountered [and considering how long you have it maybe they knew that]. The silly creature design reminds me a lot of the Last of Us franchise, which apparently decided zombies were too played out but then had its own form of zombies that look ridiculous.
Nothing gets any better by the end, including stealth segments where the design appears to have started and stopped with the thought "well cats love boxes" because they're otherwise any other stealth sequence from popular games of the past. It's so disappointing because the promise of Stray was something that felt any different whatsoever from countless action adventure titles, and instead it's, well, this.
I would go as far as to say that Stray is only successful at all in little moments, when you can wholly embrace the chaos that only a cat can bring. I had minor amounts of fun aimlessly pushing paint cans onto apartment floors or city streets and then stepping through the spilled paint and spreading paw prints. I say "aimlessly" because almost every other remotely appealing cat action has been turned into a collectible or trophy of some kind, a repetitive and specifically designed task that shows the developers "get" cats, like scratching up carpet or rubbing up against predetermined robots. Replace carpets with audio logs and cat rubs with handshakes or some rough equivalent, however, and suddenly this game could have easily featured a human character and nothing would even feel that different. They even give the cat a "voice" by pairing it with a robot companion named B-12, maybe the game's biggest mistake as the last thing I wanted from games like Limbo or Inside [which I'm not crazy about to begin with] was an abundance of writing. I guess the traversal up buildings is meant to be the exciting cat thing? I hope you like pressing X a lot to navigate predetermined platforms! Or simply holding it in the blessed few sequences where it makes sense to do so. A lot of these choices seem to be made not to convey anything exciting about being a cat but instead a lack of faith in players to interpret and succeed on their own terms, and an insistence on making the experience familiar.
Even if the base story elements were good enough to make up for how generic Stray feels to play, it's hard to take them seriously. When it goes for serious reveals or emotional moments, they tend to land absent of any impact due to the flat text log that B-12 soullessly presents on the screen. It could stand to learn a lot from titles that present wordless emotional exchanges. The other barrier preventing me from taking the story very seriously is one of the enemy types Stray presents. The antagonist for much of the game comes in the form of Zurks, little mutant creatures that consume anything and everything. Aesthetically they're wildly out of place, a hybrid of Half-Life creatures that sound like mice and look like bloated insects. They're also kind of pathetic as a threat, as you only ever encounter them in scenarios where they're easily avoidable, whether it's tedious chase sequences or tedious puzzle rooms. You even briefly get a "gun" to deal with them, which is somehow one of the least satisfying weapons I've ever encountered [and considering how long you have it maybe they knew that]. The silly creature design reminds me a lot of the Last of Us franchise, which apparently decided zombies were too played out but then had its own form of zombies that look ridiculous.
Nothing gets any better by the end, including stealth segments where the design appears to have started and stopped with the thought "well cats love boxes" because they're otherwise any other stealth sequence from popular games of the past. It's so disappointing because the promise of Stray was something that felt any different whatsoever from countless action adventure titles, and instead it's, well, this.
1986
The fascinating thing about visiting Dragon Quest, one of the seminal JRPGs from this era, is that for all the predictable garbage that comes with it--the two most obvious being the laser focus on grind and the lack of consideration that went into its save system--I was surprised to find a lot to like in its design. Maybe it's just that the years have worn on me and, while I still love to be swept up into a long and engrossing game, my preferences over the years have generally leaned towards shorter experiences. But it's not just that Dragon Quest is short, it's also that its map feels manageable and curated so that there isn't really a lot of wasted space.
Now, of course that goes out the window the second you have to deal with any sort of experience check, and my god it's never been worse to me than it is here with the final boss. I didn't time the walk from the starting castle to the final lair, but as "small" as the world is when it feels good to explore and discover, it gets gigantic when all you're doing is making your way back to where you were when you died. I still can't believe the trek you have to make just to retry the final boss of this game; as someone who loves to play games "as intended" and tries to avoid the major conveniences of emulation like save states, I can't fathom playing the final stretch of Dragon Quest without those conveniences. That is, in fact, the moment I decided to start using them, so I could simply retry the boss immediately. The expectation, I guess, is that you'll just grind and grind some more, and I think there can be something satisfying about grinding even when the combat isn't super involved, but it's not that satisfying when it's a set-in-stone requirement.
And yet I still have surprisingly positive things to say after reaching the conclusion. It's often fun to work out what you need to do next, where items are hidden in the world, and so on. Those little moments of hearing information and jotting it down for later can make the world feel rewarding in ways that too few games understand. And there's enough personality in the enemy set, as limited as it is on the NES, that you can see the charm that would ultimately capture decades of attention.
Now, of course that goes out the window the second you have to deal with any sort of experience check, and my god it's never been worse to me than it is here with the final boss. I didn't time the walk from the starting castle to the final lair, but as "small" as the world is when it feels good to explore and discover, it gets gigantic when all you're doing is making your way back to where you were when you died. I still can't believe the trek you have to make just to retry the final boss of this game; as someone who loves to play games "as intended" and tries to avoid the major conveniences of emulation like save states, I can't fathom playing the final stretch of Dragon Quest without those conveniences. That is, in fact, the moment I decided to start using them, so I could simply retry the boss immediately. The expectation, I guess, is that you'll just grind and grind some more, and I think there can be something satisfying about grinding even when the combat isn't super involved, but it's not that satisfying when it's a set-in-stone requirement.
And yet I still have surprisingly positive things to say after reaching the conclusion. It's often fun to work out what you need to do next, where items are hidden in the world, and so on. Those little moments of hearing information and jotting it down for later can make the world feel rewarding in ways that too few games understand. And there's enough personality in the enemy set, as limited as it is on the NES, that you can see the charm that would ultimately capture decades of attention.
2022
This review contains spoilers
This is by far the furthest I've made it into a soulslike experience--I probably played 20 hours combined between the original Demon's Souls, first two Dark Souls, and Bloodborne, with the vast majority of that being Bloodborne--and it initially seemed like it would finally be The One to get me into these games. In a weird way it might still have been, since for every QoL concession Elden Ring made, it also identified something that I didn't realize was holding me back from enjoying the older entries.
The biggest flaw with Elden Ring to me is inherent to big-budget game design that I can certainly understand but still question the motivation behind. The first 20-30 hours felt pretty magical, as there were numerous small threads I enjoyed and I would find those moments that recontextualize my understanding of the world, especially the Siofra River region. But repetition quickly drains the magic away, and Elden Ring is rotten with repetition and, as a result, a very awkward predictability. Everything on the surface of Elden Ring would suggest it's Not Like Other Big Budget Open World Games, but then you enter the fifteenth crystal cave or set of catacombs and fight the third Watchdog or fourth Black Knife Assassin, with the slight hope that the mini-dungeon leading up to them will have some kind of gimmick to keep things fresh [and sometimes they do, but often they don't]. I get reusing assets when you make a world this enormous, but considering the negative consequences of the repetition maybe the world shouldn't be that enormous?
It wasn't until I finished Ranni's quest--by far the most invested I was in the story--that it dawned on me that it was the only thing keeping me from feeling poisoned by the repetition, as it pointed me towards some of my favorite locales and had an intriguing, small group of characters. Once that was done the experience became incredibly hollow. Spot the abandoned churches on the map, get the sacred tear, spot the evergaol circles for minibosses, spot the red circles for crystal caves. And since the main narrative was only occasionally doing anything for me, it was just content for content's sake.
But I'm happy to have played it, for one because I did really enjoy it in parts, and secondly because I think it's positioned me into giving the older games another try given the right circumstances. I'm usually not one to be bothered by framerate [as a big fan of Shadow of the Colossus I think it's in fact illegal for me to care] but in the context of a soulslike I feel as though it made a big difference for me, to be playing one of these games at 60 fps. I may not get a horse mount and I may have to put up with weapon durability when and if I return to the older FromSoft titles, but I finally feel like I have a foothold in a series that has until now completely eluded me.
The biggest flaw with Elden Ring to me is inherent to big-budget game design that I can certainly understand but still question the motivation behind. The first 20-30 hours felt pretty magical, as there were numerous small threads I enjoyed and I would find those moments that recontextualize my understanding of the world, especially the Siofra River region. But repetition quickly drains the magic away, and Elden Ring is rotten with repetition and, as a result, a very awkward predictability. Everything on the surface of Elden Ring would suggest it's Not Like Other Big Budget Open World Games, but then you enter the fifteenth crystal cave or set of catacombs and fight the third Watchdog or fourth Black Knife Assassin, with the slight hope that the mini-dungeon leading up to them will have some kind of gimmick to keep things fresh [and sometimes they do, but often they don't]. I get reusing assets when you make a world this enormous, but considering the negative consequences of the repetition maybe the world shouldn't be that enormous?
It wasn't until I finished Ranni's quest--by far the most invested I was in the story--that it dawned on me that it was the only thing keeping me from feeling poisoned by the repetition, as it pointed me towards some of my favorite locales and had an intriguing, small group of characters. Once that was done the experience became incredibly hollow. Spot the abandoned churches on the map, get the sacred tear, spot the evergaol circles for minibosses, spot the red circles for crystal caves. And since the main narrative was only occasionally doing anything for me, it was just content for content's sake.
But I'm happy to have played it, for one because I did really enjoy it in parts, and secondly because I think it's positioned me into giving the older games another try given the right circumstances. I'm usually not one to be bothered by framerate [as a big fan of Shadow of the Colossus I think it's in fact illegal for me to care] but in the context of a soulslike I feel as though it made a big difference for me, to be playing one of these games at 60 fps. I may not get a horse mount and I may have to put up with weapon durability when and if I return to the older FromSoft titles, but I finally feel like I have a foothold in a series that has until now completely eluded me.
2022
Saying an action-adventure game is "like Zelda" is getting to the point where it's like saying a platformer is "like Mario." It may be helpful on a surface level, but oftentimes it's just useless, and I don't think it's ever been more useless than the comparison being drawn for Tunic. Tunic is similar to Zelda in that the main character wears the titular item and has a sword and shield, as well as some loosely similar tools like a hookshot equivalent, but I wouldn't recommend it on the basis that someone likes Zelda. I barely like Zelda; I've never taken to the 3D entries I've tried, and while I fell in love with the original Link's Awakening in recent years I tend to lean more towards respecting the franchise than embracing it.
I guess it would also be fair to say Tunic is similar to Zelda in that it plays into nostalgia, with one of its central conceits being an in-universe game manual you gradually fill out by finding pages, that looks like it was lifted straight out of the NES era of physical manuals. And what the manual provides is actually the only comparison point that matters in determining whether Tunic works for someone. Tunic isn't necessarily great for people who like Zelda, but it could be great for people who often think about Eventide Island or cherish discovering the Chris Houlihan room. Or, for something non-Zelda, it could be great for people who like Fez.
There are very few feelings in games greater than being rewarded for paying attention, feeding your own curiosity and coming out the other side with a surprising experience. Tunic is a game filled with those moments, whether it's poking around the edges of the world looking for shortcuts and hidden rooms or combing over the manual and potentially even learning its mysterious language. For the former, the world never ceases to surprise in how it's revealed to be so connected, emerging after dungeons via a path that you could have taken hours before but just didn't know existed, or stumbling upon mysterious rooms that later become clear in their purpose. And for the latter, I personally get excited by games that motivate me to take notes, either in a notes app or physically with pen and paper. At least one of Tunic's "main" secrets even requires a pretty significant understanding of its language. Over the course of the postgame [based on some in-game context] I managed to decipher approximately 3/4 of the language, and even without "concrete" reasons I can see myself returning to try to finish out my understanding of its symbols.
I can see people getting frustrated with the more physically demanding side of Tunic, as its combat is occasionally pretty tough and takes some inspiration from the likes of the Souls series, with dodge rolls with limited i-frames, a stamina bar, health flasks, and so on. But the developer clearly knew this could hamper the actual star of the show and included options for infinite stamina and health in the settings, helpful for those who need the assist, those who simply don't like the combat but are intrigued by the world, or people like me who messed with the settings on a new playthrough after finishing the game in order to more quickly reach the unfinished puzzle bits. It's very accommodating for the less "necessary" components without ever sacrificing what makes its core so special and exciting.
It may hit harder for people like me who, as a kid, would sit in the car on the ride home from the local rental store with a game studying the manual to hype myself up, or wondering what previous players' passwords in the back pages did. But I think even without that the game would speak to me for its ability to instill and celebrate a sense of wonder. It understands that discovery is more powerful and memorable when it's self-driven.
I guess it would also be fair to say Tunic is similar to Zelda in that it plays into nostalgia, with one of its central conceits being an in-universe game manual you gradually fill out by finding pages, that looks like it was lifted straight out of the NES era of physical manuals. And what the manual provides is actually the only comparison point that matters in determining whether Tunic works for someone. Tunic isn't necessarily great for people who like Zelda, but it could be great for people who often think about Eventide Island or cherish discovering the Chris Houlihan room. Or, for something non-Zelda, it could be great for people who like Fez.
There are very few feelings in games greater than being rewarded for paying attention, feeding your own curiosity and coming out the other side with a surprising experience. Tunic is a game filled with those moments, whether it's poking around the edges of the world looking for shortcuts and hidden rooms or combing over the manual and potentially even learning its mysterious language. For the former, the world never ceases to surprise in how it's revealed to be so connected, emerging after dungeons via a path that you could have taken hours before but just didn't know existed, or stumbling upon mysterious rooms that later become clear in their purpose. And for the latter, I personally get excited by games that motivate me to take notes, either in a notes app or physically with pen and paper. At least one of Tunic's "main" secrets even requires a pretty significant understanding of its language. Over the course of the postgame [based on some in-game context] I managed to decipher approximately 3/4 of the language, and even without "concrete" reasons I can see myself returning to try to finish out my understanding of its symbols.
I can see people getting frustrated with the more physically demanding side of Tunic, as its combat is occasionally pretty tough and takes some inspiration from the likes of the Souls series, with dodge rolls with limited i-frames, a stamina bar, health flasks, and so on. But the developer clearly knew this could hamper the actual star of the show and included options for infinite stamina and health in the settings, helpful for those who need the assist, those who simply don't like the combat but are intrigued by the world, or people like me who messed with the settings on a new playthrough after finishing the game in order to more quickly reach the unfinished puzzle bits. It's very accommodating for the less "necessary" components without ever sacrificing what makes its core so special and exciting.
It may hit harder for people like me who, as a kid, would sit in the car on the ride home from the local rental store with a game studying the manual to hype myself up, or wondering what previous players' passwords in the back pages did. But I think even without that the game would speak to me for its ability to instill and celebrate a sense of wonder. It understands that discovery is more powerful and memorable when it's self-driven.
2022
The Castlevania II comparison is probably trite, but Infernax really does feel like an attempt to answer the question "what if Simon's Quest wasn't obtuse nonsense?" As much as I don't like that original game, I do sort of appreciate that it was a prototype for a future staple design in the series solidified by the release of Symphony of the Night. Infernax is an alternate reality where they realized their design goals the first time, and I think that's both a good and bad thing.
It's good because it allows for the thematic bleakness to come across without ever swinging too far towards either talking down to me like a child or practically requiring a walkthrough to parse. It's also playful in a way that the original designers were probably hoping for when creating an open-world Castlevania, without being flat busywork. And its homages to classic games don't come across as just cheap nostalgia--some are surface acknowledgements but others are entire new ways to play the game, some even offering nice flexibility as far as accessibility.
But it's bad because it carries some NES level design tenets with it. It's a pretty friendly game by "hardcore game" standards, but that doesn't stop it from having the occasional precarious waterwheel platforming segment with annoying enemy placements, or crumbling platforms a single block wide strewn about a room with trap spears shooting at you, or blind spots to enemies that can land on you from above the screen with no warning and even a borderline blind jump every now and then. There are two "dungeons" in particular that were so frustrating to me that I strongly considered quitting, though I ultimately stuck with it because of the positive qualities I was seeing.
The morality system is also only interesting inasmuch as it offers some alternate content; the choices themselves [mostly dull in how binary they are in the first place] don't really add a lot to the world, as the game is more interested in reveling in its bleak, gory setting and there being "good" and "evil" paths isn't actually that rewarding in that context. But it's still a fun throwback experience on the whole.
It's good because it allows for the thematic bleakness to come across without ever swinging too far towards either talking down to me like a child or practically requiring a walkthrough to parse. It's also playful in a way that the original designers were probably hoping for when creating an open-world Castlevania, without being flat busywork. And its homages to classic games don't come across as just cheap nostalgia--some are surface acknowledgements but others are entire new ways to play the game, some even offering nice flexibility as far as accessibility.
But it's bad because it carries some NES level design tenets with it. It's a pretty friendly game by "hardcore game" standards, but that doesn't stop it from having the occasional precarious waterwheel platforming segment with annoying enemy placements, or crumbling platforms a single block wide strewn about a room with trap spears shooting at you, or blind spots to enemies that can land on you from above the screen with no warning and even a borderline blind jump every now and then. There are two "dungeons" in particular that were so frustrating to me that I strongly considered quitting, though I ultimately stuck with it because of the positive qualities I was seeing.
The morality system is also only interesting inasmuch as it offers some alternate content; the choices themselves [mostly dull in how binary they are in the first place] don't really add a lot to the world, as the game is more interested in reveling in its bleak, gory setting and there being "good" and "evil" paths isn't actually that rewarding in that context. But it's still a fun throwback experience on the whole.
2019
Gnosia's design premise--a single-player randomized Werewolf with stat progression--is both its most intriguing asset and the source of its violent downfall. It works for a certain amount of time, as you're still getting used to how characters act, still discovering new skills through leveling stats, and likely seeing healthy amounts of new story content. But there comes a point when certain events are required for story progression, that require specific interactions with specific characters in specific configurations, and the game will allude to what's important but fights against itself by how it's set up.
God help you if a story event is locked behind SQ or Raqio, because keeping either of the most suspicious characters alive long enough to trigger events [and hoping that you don't need to meet other hidden variables], while also praying that you're not selected to get murdered or put in cold sleep yourself is not only unideal, it can often feel like downright trolling on the game's part. And since doing this may actively fight against a win, you're possibly not going to get much experience either, so I guess you could just play randomized games and try to win with the impression that increasing your stealth by 2 or 3 points will actually matter for your "story runs" whatever the hell those are.
What's even weirder is the game has a built-in "event finder" mechanic after you've done a certain number of loops, where the game will select randomized settings for you that "guarantee" to satisfy requirements for at least one event you're missing, and yet it's not like I'm going to know what event they have in mind [you would hope they'd prioritize story-mandatory ones but who can say] and it ultimately feels as though I'm selecting my own random settings anyway.
There was only so much of the same dialogue over and over that I could personally take, whether I was actively pursuing story progress or just hoping to level up. Just because a game operates as a loop narratively doesn't excuse when design repetition sets in, and the alarming speed with which this feels repetitive does a great disservice to whatever sci-fi tale they wish to tell. While there are some red flags [great treatment of your one trans character by the way] I won't ever know what that tale's finale is, and part of me wanted to know, but oh well.
God help you if a story event is locked behind SQ or Raqio, because keeping either of the most suspicious characters alive long enough to trigger events [and hoping that you don't need to meet other hidden variables], while also praying that you're not selected to get murdered or put in cold sleep yourself is not only unideal, it can often feel like downright trolling on the game's part. And since doing this may actively fight against a win, you're possibly not going to get much experience either, so I guess you could just play randomized games and try to win with the impression that increasing your stealth by 2 or 3 points will actually matter for your "story runs" whatever the hell those are.
What's even weirder is the game has a built-in "event finder" mechanic after you've done a certain number of loops, where the game will select randomized settings for you that "guarantee" to satisfy requirements for at least one event you're missing, and yet it's not like I'm going to know what event they have in mind [you would hope they'd prioritize story-mandatory ones but who can say] and it ultimately feels as though I'm selecting my own random settings anyway.
There was only so much of the same dialogue over and over that I could personally take, whether I was actively pursuing story progress or just hoping to level up. Just because a game operates as a loop narratively doesn't excuse when design repetition sets in, and the alarming speed with which this feels repetitive does a great disservice to whatever sci-fi tale they wish to tell. While there are some red flags [great treatment of your one trans character by the way] I won't ever know what that tale's finale is, and part of me wanted to know, but oh well.
An all-killer-no-filler action platformer with mechanics that truly transform over time, razor-sharp level design, and the sort of intrigue and exploration that is both vital to games in this unfortunately named genre and yet somehow also too rarely executed to this level. It's not 1:1, but the depth in its world loosely reminds me of the likes of Cave Story, with secrets small and transformative. Simply cannot believe how creative and exciting this is. In a year that actually has shown quite well in this genre space, Astalon sits comfortably above the rest for me.
2008
Legitimately disappointing as a Picross knockoff because the color mechanic occasionally works really well. I think it helps illustrate why the proper Picross series didn't mess with color until the second entry in the 3D series and why, when they did, they made it two colors. When I would come across puzzles in this game that used two shades of yellow/green that looked quite a bit like the parts of the grid I hadn't solved yet it was just immediately a terrible time. Which is a shame, because in its best moments it does communicate that feeling of brush strokes that the premise should naturally capitalize on.
Also, at this point I'm not really a fan of 2D nonogram puzzles where a misclick is an automatic penalty, especially when puzzle size gets wild. I'm a much bigger fan of just relying on my own awareness to know something was a misclick and fixing it myself, and for puzzle solve "fails" to be getting to a point where I clearly messed up somewhere and the puzzle is unsolvable. Starting a puzzle over because the game registered my stylus taps slightly differently than I wanted is not a great feeling.
Also, at this point I'm not really a fan of 2D nonogram puzzles where a misclick is an automatic penalty, especially when puzzle size gets wild. I'm a much bigger fan of just relying on my own awareness to know something was a misclick and fixing it myself, and for puzzle solve "fails" to be getting to a point where I clearly messed up somewhere and the puzzle is unsolvable. Starting a puzzle over because the game registered my stylus taps slightly differently than I wanted is not a great feeling.