I've seen several people complain that this is just a repackaging of the GBA game that's compromised in several ways. I don't really know about that because I haven't played a WarioWare game a day in my life, I'm as bare and pure as the day I was born, covered in fluids and screaming in the corner of the WarioWare elevator as the door keeps opening up to wacky minigames. I don't know how I got here and I'm scared.

The multiplayer component seems to be the big draw, but "come over and play WarioWare, Inc: Mega Party Games!" doesn't have the same magnetism today that it probably did in 2003, and for that reason I experienced the game solo. Which, again, is just the GBA game (or so I'm told), and since it's all new to me, I had a good time with it regardless.

I am currently playing through Mario Party 6 with Appreciations and TransWitchSammy, and while that's obviously a more complex game, I do think it's funny to compare how minigames are designed between the two. WarioWare fires its microgames at you rapidly, but they're so simple and intuitive that you're rarely left wondering what's expected of you, which allows the game to maintain its pacing. Mario Party requires a team of adults carefully study the instructions to each minigame, examining them like a technical manual several times over before jumping into a practice game to ensure everything is operating correctly. Saw a log, pick your nose, dodge falling debris... Easy. I do that every day of my life. Navigate the Gomba maze in Hotel Goomba by punching Goombas in the back of the skull to coral them into the correct positions? Yeah, hold up, gonna need to do a couple dry runs.

"But George, that's an unfair comparison. The connection between the two is predicated on the presence of minigames as a generalized concept and is tenuous at best!" Oh, well look at what we have here. A Mario Party defender! Well guess what, I called Dribble and Spitz and they said they're coming to your house tonight!

Hard Drivin' feels like a great example for a touchy subject among a few of my gaming circles, "does a game age? Or was it just as good as the day it came out?".

Obviously it depends and not everything is black or white, but hilariously I actually think Hard Drivin' aged better for myself after I went back to it. When I originally played the Genesis version back on the Sega Channel (yes I had that) all I remembered was constantly crashing and not being able to control the car at all. For a long while I remembered it as being one of the worst games I played on the console, despite the extraordinary 3D graphics that were cutting edge at the time. It turns out it wasn't so much the game being shit, so much as it was just that I was a shit driver.

Don't get me wrong, the frame rate is low and hits peak powerpoint presentation levels at pretty much the worst time, which is while you're trying to go through the loop-de-loop on the stunt portion of the track, but for the most part I found some enjoyment here even if it was only for ten minutes tops.

That's where the real problem comes in, the lack of really anything to do. There aren't any other tracks to drive on and there aren't any other cars to drive with (not that you'd tell since it's first-person only). You just have the base track with the fork that leads to either the speed or stunt portion, and maybe you'll get to race against a ghost racer named "Phantom Photon" who must've died flying off the loop-de-loop and was buried under the barn nearby.

This game is nowhere near as bad as I remember it being, but the lack of content and the lack of sense of speed due to the low frame rate are ultimately what keep it from being as fun as other racers during this time period. In the Arcades in 1989 it was fine, but spending money on this game for the Genesis probably wasn't a great idea at least at full price, especially when stuff like F-Zero was starting to come out, which IMO was more fun.

I'm sure there's one guy out there who disagrees, props to them I guess.

Compared to the pop culture behemoth it’d so quickly become, it’s easy to dismiss the first entries in the Pokèmon series as “having not aged well.” And perhaps there’s at least a little truth in that: as the first game in the series, many of the quality of life features present in later generations aren’t quite present, and are sorely missed. It’s certainly rather annoying to be perpetually in contention with the item limit, where often you’re going to have to drop things as routes and dungeons have more things on the floor than you’re ever going to have free space in your bag. It’s certainly rather finicky to have to manually go into the menu and select the HM move you want to use, and it’s certainly rather tedious to have to navigate the PC every time you’re suddenly required to use Cut. Pokèmon learn either every move or no moves, which not only makes training up something in the latter category feel like pulling teeth, but also makes a lot of the game's difficulty fold perhaps more easily than it should: the Ghost type, in particular, being incredibly adept in a player’s hands because so many Pokèmon only ever naturally learn normal type moves.

Not to mention how… it’s a game held together by duct tape and dreams. A type meant to be super-effective against another type actually doesn’t do any damage at all. The so-called “good” AI — an RNG stratagem given to important fights, meant to push them towards super effective moves and away from not very effective moves — is anything but, making it oh so easy to trap certain important fights in a loop because they failed to take into account whether the super effective move they’re programmed to prioritize actually does any damage. Sometimes when you get the catching tutorial and then go to Cinnabar Island you rip the game open, a malignant piece of code emerging from the shoreline, irreversibly corrupting the world around you, before then challenging you to a Pokèmon battle. Between the bugs, between the bits of design philosophy that took years to be iterated on, Pokèmon Red and Blue are more of a stepping stone: important to understand just what the appeal was and how the franchise took over the world, but perhaps, in the full context of what we have now, not the best Pokèmon games to actually play.

But that’s the thing: Pokèmon Red & Blue did not set out to be Pokèmon games, they set out to be RPGs. An RPG with a central mechanic that completely reimagines how said RPG gameplay traditionally works, yes, but an RPG nonetheless, and one that hews much closer mechanically, thematically to being one than any Pokèmon game afterward.

Because, on one hand, it would be easy to say the game folds to any player who knows what they’re doing. On the other hand, that’s coming from a world where you’ve gone through Kanto in so many other games. That’s with the years' worth of accumulated knowledge of the type chart — or the years spent playing games that’ll just tell you if a given move will be effective against another Pokèmon the moment they’re registered in your Pokèdex. Pokèmon Red and Blue, on the other hand, run under the impression that they’re the only games of their kind, for better or worse. Specifically, they kind of run under the old RPG paradigm where finding the way forward often required you to take in context clues, or often explore for exploring’s sake. Kanto is huge, and after a certain point, notably open-ended: moving forward only requires whatever you need to move forward, be that a key item, a HM, or the permission to use said HM. Once you beat Misty the game becomes one huge scavenger hunt, where you’re unlocking something that’ll unlock something that’ll unlock the way forward, and oftentimes, that whole process starts with you hearing what a random NPC has to say, or you just picking a direction and walking towards the horizon, hoping there’s maybe something on the other side.

This approach isn’t limited to merely what governs progress, either. The type chart, and the way certain Pokèmon evolve, while you can certainly find all this out in-game via brute force, exploring the region and listening to what people have to say tells you so much of what you might like to know. From the gym guide giving you the lowdown on what to expect as you go up to face your next challenge, from the guy in the Celadon Department Store who gets traded a Graveller and is shocked to see it evolve, to the random trainer on the seaside who informs you how Nidorino evolves via MOON STONE, you learn so much from the people you meet along the way, and you never know just who is going to give you the exact info you might happen to want. I love how indirect this can be, too: for example, how the positioning of the Fighting Dojo relative to Saffron City’s gym tells you about how Fighting types are weak to Psychic, or Diglett's cave giving you the exact tools you need to beat the gym right next to it. If I got to have all my memories taken of a certain thing, a chance to go through the whole game blind once again… I’m not sure Pokèmon Red would actually be the pick, but man, is it up there. I love how, theoretically, the road to progress is marked by exploration, through interaction, through solving the giant fetch-quest that makes up the Kanto region. It’d be awesome to see how that all works in practice.

What I also love about the more RPG-inspired design is how nearly all the Pokèmon you encounter serve some sort of clear mechanical purpose. They’re not just cute little creatures you sic onto other people’s cute little creatures, they lean into the RPG design philosophy too, and often have a clear role in how the game is constructed. Brock’s Onix and Misty’s Starmie aren’t just each leader’s ace, they’re boss fights: who, should you know where to look later on, you can then adopt into your own team, Shin Megami Tensei style. The Dragon and Ghost types, while they play rather oddly in further generations, make sense here when they each only have one representative: the player needing to figure out what works and what doesn’t against Ghost types for them to reach the top of the Pokèmon Tower (nevermind how you need to do another dungeon to perceive them in the first place) and the Dragon type’s notable strength compared to everything else makes sense when they’re only used by the most powerful member of the Elite 4, thus making sure what the player thinks is the final boss is not a battle you can merely cheese with type advantage. Voltorb and Electrode are this game’s take on the Mimic. Mewtwo is this game’s take on your typical RPG superboss. Zapdos is the boss — and reward — of an optional dungeon, whereas its brethren in Articuno and Moltres are rewards for delving into the Seafoam Islands and Victory Road deeper than the player ever needs to. While mons like Butterfree and Beedrill emerge from their chrysalis early, and are rather powerful for the point in the game you get them, they both fall off curve hard once you start encountering other evolved mons, imparting a lesson in the player that sometimes growing up is letting go of the things you used to cherish. In the same vein, while it quickly plateaus into merely being as good as everything around it, Dugtrio is a godsend for the part of the game where you can stumble across him, going up to level 31 when most everything around you struggles to pass level 20, and singlehandedly allowing you to bypass what could be a difficult boss battle with Lt. Surge. Mankey (at least from Yellow onwards) is an early method of mitigating Brock should you have picked (or forced into) a starter that’s weak to his Rock types. While rather rare Pokèmon like Porygon, Farfetch’d or Lickitung aren’t quite worth the effort it takes to obtain them, that’s partially the point — they’re merely the more tricky steps in the process of catching them all, and the game is nice enough to put the Pokèmon more useful in terms of beating the game right in plain sight. While later generations would mostly shy away from this idea (though with some individual exceptions), the original set of Pokèmon games, even today, stands out for how it makes certain Pokèmon fill specific mechanical roles, and from a game design perspective it's fascinating to see in action, to try and guess what the idea is behind each member of the original 151.

I like how the game counterbalances its kid empowerment plot with its loose coming of age themes. Like, it’s super cool to imagine yourself at ten years old taking on and beating an entire criminal gang, but the game itself addresses that this doesn’t meaningfully stop them: even if you foil whatever caper they’re up to today, that’s not gonna keep them from doing whatever they’re going to do next. Even Giovanni, the last time you fight him, says that this won’t be the end of Team Rocket, and I think it’s this kind of, like, kid’s storytelling of singlehandedly saving the day by sailing through the bad guys’ hideout, combined with the reality of how organized crime is like the hydra growing new heads and that you can't ever meaningfully put them in the ground, that really stands out as a somewhat notable plot beat. I love the loose implication that you’re growing older as you go through the region: your rival’s sprite continually changing each time you catch up with him, starting off as a little kid yet clearly looking so much taller by the final time the both of you fight. I too love the way your path through Kanto more than likely loops you back to Pallet Town right near the end: what once was your home becoming just a quick pitstop, a quick moment to say hi to your mum, before you’re off on your way to Viridian for your last gym badge. For games that don’t necessarily focus on a clear-cut plot beyond the premise — probably in part because of Kanto’s more open-ended progression — there’s a decent amount put into theming here, at least from what I could extrapolate. Maybe I’m just reading a lot from a little (though given Professer Oak saying "You have come of age! You've grown so much older since you left Pallet Town so long ago" upon beating the champion I'm fairly sure that theme was a conscious inclusion), but the fact that the game is capable of evoking those themes so continuously I felt was rather worth note, and a loose highlight of the experience.

There are some other things I quite liked: the music is so continuously stellar, and iconic for a reason. Playing this on a system where the game had backlighting let me see the towns in the hues they’re named after, providing a rather pretty visual shorthand of where the player is at any given time. Overall… I’m never quite going to have that special connection with this particular Pokèmon game that others might have — I never had a Gameboy as a kid, my first Pokèmon experience was a couple of generations down the line — so all I’m gonna see is something… with perhaps a bit less polish than what I’m typically used to with a Pokèmon game, but even then there’s so much here that’s so cool to look at. The non-linear, old-school RPG design. How each individual Pokèmon does something for the overall construction of the game. Narrative theming that, um, perhaps takes a bit for the series to attempt again. Maybe it’s a little buggy, a little bit of a relic quality-of-life wise compared to the juggernaut it’d later become… but this was the thing that ignited the craze in the first place, and there was certainly a reason it managed to do so.

(https://youtu.be/35YXvmEluYc?si=6sm75qPc4hx2utk9)


I don’t really remember when I brought this game onto my PC but I am certainly glad I did take the short time to download this game. Another challenge that would be faced with this game would be the language barrier, however, the game isn’t story heavy enough to burden anyone interested in this game. Meaning that every other aspect of this game is strong enough that the barrier isn’t an issue, but we’re getting to that.

The playstyle of Duo Princess isn’t unique to itself but isn’t commonly seen in games, a platforming beat-em-up with a nice hybrid mix of Brave Fencer Musashi and some of the middle Ys titles, mainly Ys: Ark of Napishtim. The handling of the character itself, placed as a sprite, is okay but nothing special or something that regards itself more than average. Some of the beat-em-up aspects come in where the game will trap you in an area, unable to progress, unless you obliterate this horde of what can only be a group of small forest creatures of various colors. There isn’t much to the actual combat, spam attack and crowd control, you are given magic attacks charged with MP but they’re ok, except for the meteor you get on the last two levels, all bosses from there get destroyed from that.

The story, or at least what I can gather from my small amount of Japanese, is that you play a cast of two sisters and pick from either Mint or Maya, Mint uses close range and Maya is long magic bursts. Both have different sets of magic spells they unlock through the game and are useful. The cutscenes between each level lose their luster when you can’t read what’s going on, if you can, it’s just charming, not great.

Music, the music is great, charming, and whimsical at heart, makes me feel funny, like butterflies in my stomach. There isn’t a lot to it, in fact, it’s about five songs in total, and it’s not memorable, but it’s great. Some may be able to listen to the OST while listening to this review, ill link it at the top of the review.

All in all, yeah, the game is short, has some shortcomings from being made as a fan project of a forgotten Square Enix game but there’s a lot of charm and passion placed into the game. It’s short and free so I cannot see any reason not to visit this truly hidden indie gem of a game.

When discussing a piece of fiction, I think it's important to consider the scope of it. How large and ambitious of a story it's trying to tell, whether it tries to weave complex, multifaceted characters or simple ones, the exploration of themes (or absence of, in the opposite case), and more. More often than not, the creator's intentions and view for their stories are directly reflected in the scope, and it sets a metric for what kind of criticism and praise to give it. I'm not going to bash Bloons TD5 for passing up on the opportunity to create deep, complex plots because that isn't within what it developed with in mind, but I can criticize something like, say, Stephen King's Duma Key for failing to follow up on its supposed themes of recovering from your trauma and learning to forgive yourself, because those are very much real themes that are woefully underdeveloped in the book for no real reason.

Though on the other hand, this doesn't mean that something is immune to criticism because they don't try to push their boundaries. Contrary to what I previously implied, these works of fiction can also be put under fair scrutiny if they don't try to do anything interesting with their settings, or if they're just plain boring to begin with, or if the execution is flawed. Being overambitious and falling flat is something worthy of scorn, sure, but doing nothing with your setting and using the safest, most vanilla tropes and story beats imaginable is no less worse. There's a fine line to walk when analyzing fiction within these parameters in order to cultivate an equal breakdown of it, and it's worth noting when your criticisms of them are believable or not. Execution is key, after all.

Shining Force is something I feel that is quite boring and fails in its execution, even when considering its humble goals.


So… where to begin?

Well, for starters, how about the story? To be frank, it's… pretty generic. Standard fantasy stuff. Guardiana, the good kingdom, is invaded by the other, more antagonistic one, Runefaust, and the hero and his band of merry men investigate the cause behind it and uncover the secrets of the world as they fight through battle through battle. It isn't bad, per se, even if the whole setup is pretty cliche in modern times, I did enjoy the world of Shining Force. The lore behind all the different races and history of the world was enjoyable to dig into, and something I do like is how heavily the headquarters plays a role into discovering it, giving you an incentive to not throw your units at enemies indiscriminately, something that's actually kind of clever. And speaking of the cast, I found them to be decent all around. They aren't the deepest characters ever conceived, but most of them have enough story presence and dialogue to come off as likable and charming for the most part, except for Lowe (please stop talking about food). Shining Force may not have the most deep lore or complex characters in video game history, but for what it does, it does so pretty nicely.

This game isn't known for story, however. It's known for its gameplay. So what do I think about it?

It's kinda ass, to be perfectly honest. And that is a big blow to my enjoyment of this game.

Well, for one, this is an easy game. Enemies usually aren't strong enough to seriously threaten your units, and you're handed an assortment of increasingly strong tools and characters throughout the game. The map design, for the most part, spreads these enemies out in such a way that throwing your strongest units at them will reward you, more often than not, and even when they are put in groups, they are still quite weak and frail. Not helping matters is that the AI is very, very stupid, and will often make moves like ignoring a nearly dead unit to focus on another character, or use physical attacks instead of ranged or magic based attacks when those would be more preferable. It's all to easy to blast through this game without much thought put into it. It gets uninteresting fast, and soon you're going to learn that strategic placement of your units doesn't actually matter that much when you can just put Zylo or Mawlock or a sufficiently leveled Max on the frontlines and watch them shrug off attacks without a care in the world.

Speaking of maps, the quality of them is… not good, to say the least. A lot, and I do mean a lot, have huge gaps of empty space for no particular reason, or uncrossable terrain to artificially stretch a battle's length, or so few enemies altogether that it turns them into glorified walking simulators, and so on. The earlygame maps are really bad in this regard, especially when considering turn limits, as they serve no purpose but to waste your time as you get from Point A to Point B while burning through your turns, creating this sense of fake urgency that I find to be deeply lame. A surprising amount of early chapters have strict time limits, not because they are hard, but because of this artificial difficulty. Battle 2 stands out because the 12 turn limit is far harsher than what it would appear to be at first glance, and only because you are forced to walk around a mountain range and into movement reducing terrain while small squads of 3 to 4 enemies engage you at a time. The midgame and lategame improve on this aspect somewhat, but it still persists even in those sections.

Additionally, the balance of playable characters is wildly unbalanced, to say the least. Units like Zylo, Mawlock, and Domingo are so far above other characters, it gets comical at times, while units like Hans, Bleu, and Alef either fall off very quickly or are just very bad at base. This wouldn't be a problem if said bad units were usable, but a reoccurring problem I've noticed is how much you're discouraged from using a unit beyond their supposed 'use'. Like, Hans is good for the very earlygame portions of the game, but he falls off a cliff soon after, even more so when Diane joins, and using him beyond that feels actively miserable. Tao is in the same boat, where trying to use her after a certain point just feels bad. Amon and Balbaroy are far too weak to make up for their flight and just can't do anything especially noteworthy. I can understand the appeal of using bad units - and I will admit I have indulged in that same feeling in various Fire Emblem games - but there's a big difference between making traditionally bad characters work through lots of effort, and feeling practically unusable after a set amount of time, and Shining Force lands squarely in the latter category for me.

And there's a lot of other small, but noticeable details that make the whole experience feel all that much more clunky for me. Not being able to view what kinds of enemies are on a map, instead having to go into battle to actually view them and then retreating if you want to adjust for them. Inventory management being unnecessarily drawn out just for putting certain stuff in said inventories. Not being able to view enemy stats until after getting a hit on them. Having no way to gauge how safe a battle may be for someone initially. Random status effects just to troll you. The list goes on.

Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragon is a simple game. It presents to you a simple game, and what you get is a simple SRPG in return. But beneath all that is one that's deeply flawed and really should've been ironed out a bit more, especially for a remake. At least the art's good.

It may be pretty obscure and generic when compared to many of the different shmups to have come out from the late 80’s to early 90’s, but all in all, the original Raiden was still a good enough time. It had fun and challenging gameplay, great weapons and weapon mechanics to mess around with, and it did feel immensely satisfying to get through some of these extremely challenging sections that were present in the game, despite arcade syndrome and its checkpoint system being a pain in the ass to deal with. Not only that, but it managed to do pretty well for itself as well, becoming one of the best-sellers for the arcade during its initial years, even if things were a tad slow at first, which meant that sequels were naturally going to follow. I mean, why not, it’s not like Seibu Kaihatsu had any other extremely popular games before this one… unless you are a huge fan of Dynamite Duke. But anyway, three years after the original game would come out, we would end up getting the sequel, Raiden II.

I wasn’t expecting too much out of this game, since it didn’t look like anything too impressive considering the screenshots I had seen from it, but I was hoping to get something noteworthy considering how long it took me to set it up. I had initially tried to get the game running on the totally legal Mame emulator, but I for the life of me couldn’t find the proper files for the rom online, whether it be due to roms not having it, or other websites preventing me from looking elsewhere because of my adblocker. So, eventually, I just decided to go with the version found on The Raiden Project, a collection for the PlayStation that features both Raiden 1 and 2 on it, with the port pretty much being one-to-one with the original arcade version. That was great to find, so I finally got the chance to jump into it, and what I got was… certainly more Raiden, alright. I would say it is better than the original Raiden, but that is only be a small margin, as in many ways, they are very similar in quality, but I did end up having a good enough time with the game anyway, so that is all that matters.

The story fills all the requirements of an arcade shmup sequel, where three years after their defeat, the Crystals return to take over Earth once again, thanks to the remnants of their machines forming a brand new army to take the planet over, so it is up to the Fighting Thunder to set out once again to take them down, which is about as generic as a sequel plot can get, but then again, I wasn’t expecting much from the story regardless. The graphics are practically identical to that of the original game, with only slight improvements seen here or there in terms of the icons and animations, but it still overall looks pretty good, the music is good, having plenty of decent tracks to listen to while blowing shit up, but nothing that managed to stick with me when I was done, and the control/gameplay is also practically identical to that of the original game, so any fan of the original can feel right at home with this game.

The game is a vertical scrolling shmup, where you take control of a Fighting Viper, go through eight different stages across several generic environments on Earth and in space, shoot down any enemy that comes your way using whatever weapons that you have at your disposal, gather plenty of different power ups and bombs to get yourself better equipped for the task, while also upgrading said power ups to their maximum potential, and take on plenty of big, threatening bosses that will give you a pretty rough time if you are not a god at dodging and firing back. A lot of this is what you would expect not just from Raiden, but from any other shmup of this era, although to its credit, it still manages to be fun enough for what we get here, and there are one or two new additions that do make things a little more interesting.

In terms of the main gameplay mechanics, nothing is changed: you are still flying along, shooting people down, and trying not to die, but what you shoot down people with has been improved upon in this installment. Most of the weapons and missiles that you get, along with the power ups that can upgrade them, are the exact same, with the exception of a brand new weapon known as the Bend Plasma. At first, when you get it, it doesn’t seem like much, just another regular shot weapon for your ship, but then when you fully upgrade it, it basically takes the form of a Proton Pack, with it being a laser that automatically homes in on whatever enemy is near, which makes it an instant favorite of mine. I love me some all-powerful lasers, and having one that can also home in on people is oh so sweet to get your hands on.

Right alongside this is a new type of bomb known as the Cluster Bomb, which is basically just one bomb containing a bunch of smaller bombs, which are deployed upon use and will consecutively blow up whatever is around you. I don’t think I prefer this one over the regular bomb, as it just does a lot more damage, but this one does cover a much wider range, so it could be useful for taking out any smaller enemies that are surrounding you at all sides, which is nice. And finally, for one last tiny change that was made to the game: the checkpoint system is gone, with it working much more like a regular arcade game whenever you die, and thank god for that too. Makes things a lot less stressful.

With that being said though, it doesn’t eliminate all stress completely. Just like with the original game, arcade syndrome is in full force, as you will be dealing with plenty of things at once shooting at you from all directions, and you need to be a shmup master in order to get through a lot of it. I don’t think I would say this is as hard as something like Truxton II, but it can still get pretty damn difficult. Aside from that though, there isn’t really much else I can say about this game. It is essentially just a slightly better Raiden, which is great to see, especially since it has its own set of stages, bosses, and different power ups to try out, but if you weren’t captivated by what the original Raiden gave you, then this game most likely won’t change your mind on that.

Overall, despite a major lack of change and how it is still incredibly difficult, Raiden II is a step in the right direction from the original game, and just a good game in general, taking everything that worked from the original game, improving on it with some changes and new additions, and just making for a really solid time that any shmup fan could get behind. I would recommend it for those who were fans of the original Raiden, as well as for all those shmup fanatics out there, because while this is far from one of the best ones out there, it still manages to provide the explosive and challenging fun that many would look for from one of these games, and that’s all that matters. But before we go though, I do wanna briefly go over the slightly updated version of this game that was released just a year after this game, Raiden DX. Not much was changed with this version, except there are now a couple of new modes to try out that do change up how the game plays, which is cool, but it doesn’t really alter anything too much to where I would say you need to jump on it if you loved the original so much. And… that’s about it. I would go ahead and ask that the next game in this series tones down the difficulty like I did last time, but seeing as this game didn’t do that, I can only assume it will keep going up from here, and I will be dead by the time I reach Raiden V.

Game #537

If there was one typically maligned game that I had expected to get more out of than the average person, it would’ve been this one, after all, it’s a colourful 3D platformer with a lot of weird ideas thrown into the mix. The amount of discussion surrounding such games to make them purely out as these punching bags to point and laugh at in bad faith is a tiresome thing to witness time and time again and my hatred for such a mindset is ultimately one of the many reasons why I strive to approach art with optimism. Unfortunately, while I definitely think I have a bit more appreciation for this than I often see, there’s a bit too much about Balan Wonderworld that is downright baffling to me, which when combined with how utterly milquetoast other elements of the game are, makes for a very stilted experience that never fully achieves the grander heights that it’s going for.

I think that the one button control scheme that the game goes for is one of the biggest missed opportunities here, as a lot of the groundwork for something really cool is in place, but the level design simply isn’t strong enough to accommodate for the weird ideas in play. There are over 60 costumes in the game, and due to the simplistic controls, each of these will only have one function, with an occasional 2nd one that will be activated in a less conventional way, and unfortunately, jumping counts as a function, so in this platformer game, you’ll be in situations at times where you’re unable to jump. This isn’t as inherently bad as it may seem, but the level design doesn’t seem to be thoughtfully designed around the potential limitations that the player will face. Another aspect that doesn’t help is that even though there are so many costumes with a lot of different effects, a solid chunk of these exist to interact in a very lock and key way with the environment, having only one specific use that’s blatantly stated, with no way of utilising it in any other ways. This results in a lot of costumes feeling extremely underwhelming to unlock, as you know that the only thing it’ll be good for is to open the paths in specifically designated areas, making it feel functionally worthless and boring in any other scenario.

Adding to the frustration is that getting hit a single time will make you entirely lose the costume you’re wearing, forcing you to go and recollect it if you want to use it again. This doesn’t really do anything beyond add a layer of tedium to it all, since it’s not like it even returns to an inventory or anything, it’s just gone. This feeds back into the frustration with not being able to consistently jump, depending on your costume loadout, since taking a hit can straight up leave you in a situation where you need to backtrack and grab another costume since you can’t progress otherwise. Despite my issues however, there’s definitely something here with the idea in its current form, it’s offbeat for sure, but not a totally lost cause either. Rather than crafting each stage to feel like the most barebones, basic 3D platformer stuff out there, the game would work a whole lot better if there were a bunch of different, branching paths within the stages that took advantage of specific abilities, or at least multiple ways to reach the same location so as to not completely lock you out of progression by getting hit once and still contribute to a sense of exploration, as a collectathon should feature in some capacity. This would lead to a more varied set of obstacles to tackle and would also be a great way of more deftly incorporating some hidden collectibles, having multiple ways to approach a situation, with each of them rewarding you for doing so.

This would also tie into the boss fights of the game much more smoothly to create a more cohesive experience on the whole, due to how they function and reward the player. While these fights are very simple for the most part, they’re also conceptually my favourite element of the game for how they’re able to work both as something very easy and approachable for the kids that are going to play the game, while still requiring a bit of thought for those who want to collect everything. Each boss has 3 different opportunities to hit it in its attack patterns, often requiring different costumes to hit its weak points, and for each way you utilise in the battle, you’re awarded one additional Balan statue, the collectible of the game. This shifts each encounter into a bit of a puzzle, since some of the methods of hurting the boss are pretty tricky to work out, and it adds a lot of nuance and intrigue to what usually are the blandest, or at least most simplistic elements of a platformer in this vein.

Despite the stages also not utilising it super well in a lot of cases, I also quite like the game’s artstyle, it’s very colourful and cute and absolutely shines in the boss fights especially, along with the character designs of Balan and Lance, further making me wish that a lot of other elements of the game were more fleshed out and vibrant. The one exception to my distaste over the fact that everything looks very “gamey” in the stages, for lack of a better term, is that it contributes to a certain vibe whenever you have the snow fairy costume that lets you completely break levels and skip large chunks of them, evoking a very similar feeling of exploring the boundaries of a game in the way that a lot of my favourite platformers hone in on. Hiding more stuff like this in especially out of reach and unconventional locations is another way that I think I’d have enjoyed the game more, it’s a very specific brand of weirdness that appeals to me greatly, and this game has all the tools to be able to accomplish such things with a few tweaks.

The one element of this game that I cannot really defend or appreciate in any major capacity is the Balan Bout however, these things SUCK in a way that very few game mechanics ever have to me. Having to do a QTE whenever you grab one of the Balan hats is tedious beyond belief, with a lot of the sequences that play out being over 2 minutes long and just, repeating sequences you’ve seen many times before, without any way to speed up or skip at all. The fact that you need to do these perfectly in order to get the Balan statue from them is a pain and a half as well, especially with certain telegraphs feeling borderline impossible to hit, and the fact that if you don’t get a perfect, the hat disappears and makes you beat the boss of the world if you want to respawn it, making each attempt at it an ordeal to get to. These made me genuinely mad and never stopped completely baffling me each time I had to think about them.

Overall, I liked Balan Wonderworld a bit less than I was hoping, the stages were dull and felt almost entirely lacking in progression, making the game feel stagnant, the weird mechanics were kinda just thrown into an otherwise extremely standard game, and the Balan Bouts are atrocious. With that said, I think the thing that disappoints me most is that there are elements of intrigue to be found here with how off kilter so many ideas truly are, even within the bits that I don’t really like in their current state. I love when a game is packed to the brim with idiosyncrasies, it just so happens that in this case, those idiosyncrasies do not gel well with the exceptionally standard foundation that the game is built around, it tries to feel dreamlike, but just ends up being either frustrating or pedestrian.

Jerry, it's Gen Fu! Tengu's here, Fame Douglas is dead, call me back!

Confession time: though I've repeatedly touted Dead or Alive 2 as my favorite game in the series, the majority of my playtime comes from the demo available on the second volume of Dreamcast Generator sample discs. Look, I was about 13-years-old, my parents weren't buying me the jiggle game, but despite DOA2 being patently Gooncore, I swear I liked it because it's fun to play. Jokes on them, anyway. They bought me Sonic Adventure 2. They couldn't have possibly anticipated Rouge the Bat! Nobody could've anticipated Rouge the Bat.......

Part of why DOA2's demo left such a strong impression on me was my total lack of exposure to 3D fighters at that time. I hadn't really played anything like it, and the game's relatively low difficulty coupled with its smooth controls made it a perfect way to ease into a new genre. I've played the full Dreamcast version via emulation over the years, but prior to installing a GDEMU in my system (which I just finished only a couple weeks ago), a copy of Hardcore that I grabbed for the PlayStation 2 was set to be my new version of choice... Until I played Ninja Gaiden Black and had realized Ultimate probably looks about as stunning.

Confession 2: I abhor people who tie their personality to media, but I will forfeit my finances and grant power of attorney to Itagaki if it allows me to fill my life with more Dead or Alive 2. I am as bad as those I criticize, if not worse.

The sharpness of the character models and environments, smooth performance, and glut of additional outfits (with Ninja Gaiden (2004) costumes available for Ayane and Ryu, a nice bonus after just finishing Black) might just make this my favorite release of the game if it weren't for one little thing... Aerosmith. The bulk of DOA2's backstory is bottled up in this opening, and I gotta listen to fucking Steven Tyler? Horrible. The sound of his voice is enough to ruin my day and is a stain on an otherwise flawless game. I'd hit him in the mouth if I weren't so sure he'd unlatch his jaw and swallow me like a god damned Kirby. I can't tell you how much I don't want that to happen to me again.

Thankfully, you can find an incredible amount of story in the game's manual, which might be a useful read if you want to know why there's vats full of Kasumi's or what Tengu's like, whole deal is. It's also completely unnecessary. I suggest you just watch the Dead or Alive movie instead and treat it as the series bible. That's what I've been doing for the last 15+ years and it's been working out just fine.

DOA2 is an arcade fighter through-and-through; easy to pick up and unlikely to demand much more than ten to fifteen minutes of your time if you want to run through a character's single-player campaign. That's exactly what I want from a game like this. Give me enough fun side modes (which DOA2 has plenty of, Survival being my personal favorite), make it feel good to play, offer me some outfits to unlock, and I'm happy. Just don't put Aerosmith in your game. That's all I'm asking, and for the most part, Dead or Alive 2 Ultimate delivers.

This has its own great style and personality when it comes to the art style and soundtrack that made it a cult classic to this day and I got curious about playing this game and took the opportunity to play it before it got delisted from the xbox store. That being said, the controls are very janky and clunky as its very easy to lose momentum. Despite that, its very fun to play through and short as there's 3 main maps to go through and a good selection of characters with their own personality. The soundtrack definitely makes the game much more fun and entertaining. I hope to see more of this series with its return coming soon having been announced as it deserves to get brought back into the spotlight.

Kenji Sasaki, the director of Sega Rally at one point in development worked so much on the project that he began questioning the very thought of finding driving "fun".

As a minnow you'll barely know how to drive a go-kart in Super Mario Kart, in comparison a fine-tuned high performance Toyota Celica GT-Four is well above your pay grade. You will start racing in the beginner-friendly Desert course just fine and dandy, until you try to make the very long easy right near the end and see yourself smacking head-first into the stone wall, sometimes even finding your curious eyes getting distracted by the zebras standing nearby. The Forest with it's pine trees welcome you to a hairpin turn that you have no hope of knowing how to handle in your weighty polygonal real world vehicle, and you barely find yourself making it to the end out of sheer luck. Then the apparent finale rears it's ugly head, an insurmountable Mountain with not only it's own hairpin turn, but many tricky curves, a long narrow turn leaving little room for error, and precise maneuvering through town. This is the end for you, this mountain cannot be conquered. You're left to zero knowledge of the hellish Lake Side extra course that lies beyond that mountain, home to narrow precision-demanding turns and chicanes that only true experts of the dirt may discover and have any hope of navigating.

You become enamored over how mean the mountain is, and find it's song mesmerizing through it's triumphant guitar riffs that feel like it's cheering you on. You're but a kid, but you try your best to figure out the science of operating a championship-grade motor vehicle. You only learn so much, even if you do get a bit better at the other portions of the track, a hairpin turn is still essentially a guaranteed crash. Despite an obvious skill plateau for your moronic self, you still find the game fun to play and come back to it just to hear it's cheery demeanor root for you. You've game over'd so many times, but it never feels bad, because the game only wishes to entertain and not belittle.

As an adult you come back to the same game with fondness, puzzled as to why you took so much leisure just driving by yourself in time attack. Was it really just the music? Was the Celica GT-Four just that cool of a car? You come back to the same course and struggle as you normally do, albeit this time with knowledge of how to decelerate and utilize the brake properly. You hug the inside of those corners, you get the drift around the hairpin without touching the embankment, and not a single wall is run into as you make the quick descend through town. That "cool part" of the music that you really liked is now suddenly the victory jubilee as you approach the finish line on the third and final lap. Addiction to the feel of the road sets in, and you find yourself beating the arcade mode and getting the esteemed honor to officially drive on the Lake Side course without the need of that code you found one time on your dad's shitty internet. The Stratos car also becomes yours, best of luck driver, you are now a true master and may access these dangerous assets at any time. You deserve it truly.

It's at this point we come back to Sasaki, who had taken a moment to drive his own car around the mountains to find his spark again to make good-ass driving games, he found the experience so exciting that he based the Mountain track on it and made the very same course that I loved and still do to this day. To transfer that experience to a video game and have it somehow resonate with a six-year old who is now a full grown adult that can handle that hairpin turn with relative ease is a true mark of brilliance, and why Sega Rally stands on it's own as the foundation of all rally racing games and possibly one of my favorite driving games ever made.

Hurrah to you Mr. Sasaki.

When it is tasked upon me, Mario 64-like, to collect adorable waddle dees to make a whole bustling town of waddle dees:

“Oh no, not my waddle dees! Not my sweet little waddle dees! Don’t you lay a finger on my dees, don’t you harm a hair on their precious heads! Don’t worry dees, I’m coming to the rescue! There is no journey too far, no mountain high enough or river etc, that will stop me from bringing you all back to safety, every last one of you!”

when one of the conditions for rescuing one of those waddle dees involves beating an enemy without taking damage:

“Eesh, ah… yeah, just sit tight for a while there and ah… I’m on my way, I just gotta… figure out how to ah… well, one way or another I’ll um, maybe after a couple stages or something I’ll get around to it. Don’t worry, I’m coming…”

when one of the conditions for rescuing a waddle Dee is participating in a nonsense-car timed race with unintuitive controls:

“Fuck you, ya little fuckin asshole, I hope you rot in that cage forever”

Content Warning: This essay deals with topics such as death, panic attacks, existentialism, the abstract and the unknown, a rather atheistic world view, and topics which float around them. It is also, coincidentally, a giant rabbit hole. These relate to my own personal experiences and are told primarily from my perspective above all else. The majority of the review will not touch upon these topics, but I will signal again later on when it becomes important. As well, there are spoilers for the endings of the game that I think are better experienced completely blind. I cannot stop you, but it was important to me that I got through this game as blind as I could've been, and if possible I want others to have similar experiences. I did not want to cover the entire review in a spoiler warning as it would've been an inconvenience for those who might benefit from the content warning. Thanks, appreciate ya.

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0D - A NEW PERSPECTIVE

The first time I started FEZ, I had bought it with Christmas money, played a couple hours of it, was completely lost, and eventually left it to rot in my Steam library for the next six years. I didn’t touch anything, barely found anything, and had essentially zero interest in progressing beyond the measly hub world.

In hindsight, that is maybe the best way I could have interacted with it at the age I was in. I didn’t really have a grasp on what power games could have on me, and I was still someone who didn’t fully understand the idea of playing a game as an artistic experience rather than a time-wasting exercise. Unknowingly, I required the help of other games which were more immediately eye-opening to me. UNDERTALE, for instance, enlightened me that gaming does not have to be a grueling slog of masculinity-promoting grindfests. Antichamber taught me that less can sometimes be more, that games can be pieces of art that stand up to snuff with other media like sculptures and music and film. OneShot, my favorite game as of writing, taught me that immersion is a key part of any game experience. Yume Nikki was able to emotionally resonate with me through its complete lack of hand-holding and its environmental storytelling.

The reason I bring these games up is not to say that FEZ is like these games. This game is almost entirely different from all of them save for their postmodernist design and their impact on me as someone who plays games. They fundamentally deconstructed my idea of what games were, pushed me to start appreciating games as pieces of art and less as products, and generally have made me more cognizant of games as a medium overall. As well, it helped me understand existence just a little bit more, and become just a little bit comfortable with the unknown, to embrace the unknown.

In FEZ, you are Gomez. Gomez lives in a 2D world typical of your standard 2D platformer, but is one day called upon to inherit a fez hat by Geezer due to his old age and lack of sight in one eye. Suddenly, Gomez is cast into a world of abstract text and purple figures, a giant corrugated cube looming over him. Indecipherable speech is echoed before the fez is awarded to him. Gomez tries it out, and…

[[glitch sequence, reboot]](https://youtu.be/avl6GJpwyR8?t=180)

…immediately bricks the game.

It’s later revealed that the passing of the fez didn’t exactly work as planned, as the ‘hexahedron’ that gave him the fez broke into 64 pieces and thus must be reconstructed. There’s never a huge catalyst for going through the game at first; It simply places you in a situation and tells you that something has gone wrong, similar to how older video games would often begin with no rationale for playing the game at all lest you read the manual.

1D - THINGS UNSEEN BUT ALWAYS THERE

FEZ, at its most shallow description, is a puzzle-platformer in which you manipulate your environment by shifting your perspective. By doing so, you will uncover new details you can use to traverse obstacles that would prove inefficient or straight up impossible to perform with regular, locked-perspective 2D platforming.

There’s a key word I want to highlight there. ‘Uncover’. The act of uncovery in this game is one that you’ll be doing quite often should you play this game for any amount of time, often literally having to shift perspective in order to reach the end of a puzzle. There are a lot of deliberately obscured platforms or leaps of faith, and it can often become a puzzle in and of itself to figure out what it is you have to solve for. A lot of the easier puzzles come with basic knowledge of the game’s mechanics.

For example, in the starting hub world, there’s a treasure chest within a house that is hidden behind a fireplace. The chest is immediately visible within the confines of the first room of the house, but it at first seems difficult to enter the other room. Trying to walk through the fireplace with a purely two-dimensional perspective fails, it just leaves you ramming into the wall. In other games, sometimes you could enter the fireplace as if it was a door or a hallway entrance, but that proves fruitless here. Were this a normal 2D platformer, you would have no option within your grasp and it would prove impossible. However, if you face the fireplace head on and rotate the perspective, you can appear on the other side of the fireplace and open the chest.

This kind of puzzle is key for navigating the FEZ world, and at some point it just sort of melts into your brain and hands. It’s the type of game where you sit down, play it, and get lost in it. It becomes second nature. You start seeing a piece of vine and process, intuitively, that you can latch onto it, swap your perspective, and end up somewhere else faster than if you simply walked there. It’s this sort of game design that initially seems impossible or untenable as the core mechanic of a game, but it’s executed so beautifully and gracefully that it barely comes across as anything unnatural by the time you get used to the controls.

It’s a gorgeous game too, what with all the pixelated fauna and incredible shading that amount to this grandiose sense of wonder and amazement. Its atmosphere is airy while at the same time being dense and substantial enough for you to bask in it for days at a time without being bored of it. The level of detail is impeccable for how blocky it all is, the way that the platforms are shaded and have shadows feel so strangely realistic yet stylized.

There’s sections of the game that intentionally take the ‘normal’ look of FEZ and flip it on its head, some for the sake of fitting an aesthetic, and some for providing a puzzle. One of my favorite sections is this extremely dank, monochrome sewer of sorts. It’s a really stark contrast to how vibrant the rest of the game is and lets you sink into the atmosphere. It makes you feel like a plumber almost, just diving into these depths and cranking these water valves to traverse, sinking deeper into its olive green darkness.

There’s a room in the game that I can only assume is called the “glitch room”. It has an incredibly unassuming entrance that seems like any other door in the game, but once you enter, you are treated to a colossal wall of constantly flickering tiles grabbed from all over the game, only interrupted by a circular field of view so you can see Gomez as you traverse through the level. I’ll be honest, the first time I saw this in the game, I completely freaked the fuck out. It was a bit startling traversing the level, it felt like something was constantly hiding behind the wall ready to jump out at me. I doubt that sense of startlement will be the same for everybody, but it had a profound effect on me and evoked memories of when I had fucked up my GBA cartridges by ejecting them without properly turning off the console, and it would make this weird, rhythmic, jagged, glitched noise.

FEZ is a game I love for how it allows me to explore this maze-like web of wonders. Every door I go through is a chance to view and experience some of the most thought-provoking yet fun puzzles I’ve ever had the privilege to play, as well as genuinely breath-taking art that I never thought possible for games this low-res. However, I would be absolutely remiss if I didn’t start to peel back the layers. The many, many layers of this game.

2D - THE SIXTY-FOUR BIT NAME OF GOD

FEZ has lore, but it’s not exactly gonna hand it to you. Hell, half of it is barely decipherable beyond cryptic connections you can only gather through incredibly out-of-the-box thinking. This makes sense, FEZ doesn’t exactly need an obvious and integral story with a beginning and an end, its gameplay and subtext alone suffice for it to be a game of quality. At the same time though, the lore clearly has effort put into it, there’s a surprising amount of detail without any sort of text to clue you in. Well, any sort of immediately decipherable text.

Throughout any gameplay footage you could find of the game, I’m sure you’d have caught wind of the various abstract lengths of symbols scattered throughout. These are what transitions the game from a simple creative indie platformer into something else, the first sort-of unwinding of this ball of cubed yarn.

There are three ‘cyphers’ in FEZ, ones without names, so I will be calling them by the ‘Tetris Cypher’, the ‘Cubic Numerical System’, and the ‘Zu Language’. I’ll be getting to the meaning behind the names later. For the sake of simplicity, I will only be talking about the former and latter as they are the most integral to the game and its puzzles and lore. The ‘Zu Language’ is the first code you can find within the game, it’s an alphabet of letters that correspond to the Latin alphabet almost entirely. The language can be found throughout the entirety of the game world, and for the most part add flavor text and bits of lore throughout. It’s not used for puzzles much, but the way you would figure out that it even existed in the first place is one of my favorite clues in basically any piece of puzzle-based media.

In the tree-trunk forest level, there is a stele with the Zu Language engraved onto it. Next to this is a quick brown fox, jumping over a lazy dog. At first glance, these two things seem entirely unrelated, added for flavor to the already bountiful bouquet of this world, and you would be forgiven for thinking so. There’s so much fauna within the game like frogs, owls, rabbits, and so on, that you become normalized to the thought of them appearing in places like these. However, we should look a little closer at these two.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. This phrase is often used as a pangram, a sentence containing every letter of the Latin alphabet. If we look at the stele once more, we see that the amount of text within it matches up with the pangram’s text. Thus, we are able to figure out the Zu Alphabet and decipher it. That purple pillar, it’s not merely a pillar. It’s a Rosetta Stone. It is your ticket to deciphering what has been left behind by those before you.

Beyond the 16-cube door lies a civilization named Zu. This is the first time in the game, besides his homeland, that anyone even remotely resembling Gomez would be seen. The civilians in Zu speak in the language scattered throughout the world he'd been exploring prior, which gets you to thinking about whether or not they were the progenitors of all the structures you’d visited so far, or whether or not there were more of the Zu in the world but had become isolated to this one village.

The 'Tetris Cypher' also carries similar implications. Instead of being connected to an alphabet, it's instead used as indications for button sequences, similar to a sort of ritual or spell. Performing the sequences engraved in various spaces allows for things like opening doors, unlocking secrets, et cetera. There are references in the game to the learning of the 'Tetris Cypher' like a classroom, but all the way across the other side of the FEZ world, there is a puzzle room with an obelisk and lights that shine upon entering button inputs near it. This is how you crack the code.

It doesn’t stop there. There’s even physical differences between the cultures of the beginning town and the Zu civilization. Notably, the Zu people’s heads are enlarged, and the navigation of each of these villages are entirely different when looked at from the perspective of the people living within. Touching on the latter point, notice how the beginning town is virtually entirely concentrated to a front-facing perspective. This is where most of the doors, people, and fauna reside. Now let’s gander at the Zu civilization. It seems explicitly designed with the power of perspective-shifting in mind, with how many doors and such are hidden behind corners that only become accessible with a perspective shift.

Combine that with the fact that the civilization is the same shades of purple as most of the puzzle levels, and a clear story begins to emerge.

It’s clear to some degree that the Zu people had either emigrated or were torn from the people in the beginning of the game, and were enlightened to the knowledge of perspective shifting. This allowed their heads to grow and for them to build with considerations for three-dimensional design. Unfortunately, it seems as though a collapse of a hexahedron similar to Gomez’s hexahedron had transpired with his distant relative, hence the passing-on of the fez and the endangerment of the space-time continuum via black holes.

With this enlightenment, the soon-to-be Zus would take refuge across the land, honing their skills. They were, however, plagued by black holes due to their constant warping of space-time. This lines up with Dot reminding Gomez that perspective-changing can often lead to black holes, and it's implied as the reason for their abandonment of certain places within the world before ending up in what is now the Zu village. This is where the star-gate resides, and it’s possible that this star-gate may have allowed them this enlightenment in the first place. It’s also true that this story could have happened in reverse, that the Zu were living in their civilization and that the townspeople at the beginning of the game are people who have drifted away and de-evolved. Nonetheless, the details remain the same and the Zu people have had their hand in every single little thing built within the confines of the FEZ world, building their cryptography and languages along the way.

Despite how lonesome it may have seemed, when you played FEZ, you were not alone. You were in the presence of potentially tens, hundreds, thousands of Zu people and their legacies. It’s no wonder their language is scattered everywhere on purple stone, that their seemingly archaic spells and codes are foreign to you, that every single building aside from the places you once lived in, are overgrown with vines but otherwise scarce in people.

The Zu have been here before you, and their presence is felt with every single move you make in FEZ.

Its world, at times, has scared me. Not in a jump-scare way, not even necessarily in a horror way, but in pure abstraction and eeriness. With every little tuft of pixelated grass, with every animal and piece of architecture, there’s a counterpart which similarly feels… off. At times there’s places in the game that plain-and-simple don’t have the OST’s conventional chirpy, fun songs as soundtracks, but instead opts for this austere, thin whispering of the wind. It brought me goosebumps when I first discovered this. Additionally, the indecipherability of the languages and codes made me feel lost, like I was peering ever-so-slightly into a lovecraftian world that I could not even begin to unravel. The portals that bring you from the end of a puzzle to its entrance make this soaring, roaring whine before casting you off into the abyss as you land back in a familiar place.

I remember coming across the puzzle in which you needed to solve a riddle coded in the Zu language, I remember how imposing it felt and how taken aback I was, and that was before I even started to think of the solution. It’s this sort of pit-in-your-gut feeling, this sense of staring into the abyss and receiving something that you could never hope to understand. It’s something that comes up frequently in my own life, this feeling of staring into the abyss and attempting to exist despite its presence in your head.

So, finding the Zu civilization and making these connections clicked in a way I hadn’t felt in forever. It felt like I had hope for the world, for myself, that I could genuinely fix things and make the FEZ world better, even if I, a person in the real world, had no stake in it. This is without having discovered, in my opinion, the most grandiose statements of the entire game.

It's at this point I'd like to again stress that the following segments cover topics such as death anxiety, existentialism, and the other topics I mentioned within the beginning of the essay. I appreciate your time here reading this and I appreciate you, so please do not feel obligated to finish something if you feel what I'm about to go through may make you uncomfortable or panicky. Thanks.

3D - ALL OF TIME AND SPACE

FEZ has a tendency to break the fourth wall. This isn’t exactly new for video games nowadays, but the way in which the game approaches it is incredibly before-its-time and, in my opinion, is incredibly fun when you discover the puzzles that do this.

Most of these puzzles take the form of anti-cube puzzles, cubes that function as rewards for more difficult puzzles in the game. One of the puzzles people will point to off the bat as a fourth-wall breaking puzzle is the Clock Tower puzzle. The tower provides a variety of anti-cubes at seemingly random intervals of time. It’s not until you realize that the tower keeps track of your system’s time that everything clicks. Each hand of the clock at the top of the tower strikes at 12 depending on how long you wait. When a hand on the clock strikes 12, an anti-cube will spawn. One hand will strike 12 every minute, one hand will strike every hour, and so on, until you have to wait an entire week for the last anti-cube. These can be achieved by either waiting real hours and days, or by altering your console’s clock.

This isn’t scratching the surface of the more difficult, postmodernist puzzles in the game.

In the same general area, there is an observatory which contains a telescope. You must wait at night and find two red blinking stars in the very bottom left corner, which bleep in binary. This binary translates to button inputs, which nets you the red cube.

However, there is one, incredibly infamous puzzle, that triumphs over all the others in the game. But first, we need to talk about the first ending of the game.

Upon collecting at least 32 cubes and/or anti-cubes, you can enter the big door in the Zu civilization, which brings you to the stargate. Upon entering the stargate, you are transported to this alien world with octopus-like creatures floating around. Entering the cube at the top brings you back home. Then, you seem to be playing the game as normal… but there’s a problem. Everything is getting bit-crushed even more, pixels are merging into one another, the music is getting increasingly noisier and, eventually, Gomez is nothing more than a square with a smaller red square on top.

What follows is a cutscene of incredibly psychedelic and trippy visual effects, utilizing elements from the game as set pieces. It’s a total diversion from anything and everything that we had seen prior, and it’s a complete mystery as to what it’s supposed to convey. And then, once you’re settled in, suddenly Gomez appears on his drum set, a cheery chiptune song playing in the background, as he frantically drums along before jumping in joy. It’s a non-ending. It never resolves whether or not what Gomez did had any impact on the world around him. It very much is reminiscent of older games which would often end in a simple “congratulations!” screen, but it goes one step further and doesn’t even show you a fragment of the story after he’d gone all this way to save his people.

It soon becomes apparent that this game is meant to be played more, now with an extra ability to see in first-person. To complete the hexahedron that you had only half-recovered.

Remember how I reminisced about the freeing feeling I got about understanding the FEZ world? That was my sentiment towards the game until I came across a specific puzzle. One that, to this day, remains impossible and unsolved. For some backstory, there is one treasure map you can collect in the game that has a burnt corner to it. There is also a room within the hub world that apparently just has nothing in it. I’d assumed this was simply a blank room with nothing going on in it.

In the first person view on the New Game+ campaign, in that room, there is a specific pattern in which you need to center yourself on. Inputting the code found on the treasure map, in the correct position of the pattern, reveals a Black Monolith. From here on out, every single person that has tried this puzzle has failed in one way or another. It’s an impossible feat. Sure, you can look up the solution for the monolith, but that’s cheating. So what’s going on here?

The Black Monolith is the endgame of FEZ. To date, not a single person has been able to successfully find out how exactly it’s intended to find the series of button inputs required to get at the red cube inside the Monolith. There have been false theories, red herrings, and even confirmations by the team who worked on the game that certain fan-theories have been false.

One prominent theory extends back to the game’s original console, the Xbox 360. Fans speculated that the code to break the Monolith was an extremely decoded version of the original release date for the game. On the FEZ subreddit, this was debunked. Renaud Bédard, a developer, said in a 2019 post:

*“The Xbox 360 FEZ build that shipped was sent to certification on March 18th 2012. We locked down the release date (of April 13th) on March 28th 2012, 10 days after sending off the build. The Black Monolith was not added in a post-release patch, and it was not added to the game last-minute. To be 100% clear, we had no knowledge of the exact launch date when adding the Black Monolith to the game.”

The community of FEZ made a trail of evidence ultimately leading nowhere, a red herring of their own creation. There are also other similar red herrings, involving spectrogram images found within the game’s soundtrack release, a set of coordinates found within them, and so on and so forth. The FEZ* subreddit these days is a cesspool of people attempting to figure out the truth of the Monolith, to crack the code and figure out what secrets could lead to its solution. A downward spiral of people, lost like children in the woods, looking for something, ANYTHING to solve the mystery of the Monolith.

And yet, I have the heart cube from the Monolith. Here it is, sitting on my screen and rotating alongside its brethren in the all-cubes garden. The only way I would ever have this is through cheating, and ultimately, that’s what I had to do. In the days following the game’s release on the Xbox 360, the community had brute-forced patterns to feed into the monolith. Eventually, the code was cracked. But, of course, this ‘victory’ was ultimately hollow due to its unintelligible nature.

There is no known solution for the Black Monolith, and, in my opinion, we won’t be seeing one any time soon.

This rather grim puzzle is coupled with the rather grim second ending of the game, the one you unlock after collecting every cube and anti-cube. It starts much the same as the first ending, what with Gomez being back in his hometown. However, instead of a textural crush taking over the entire game, the world seems to float away. The camera pans back further and further, revealing what appears to be the world’s container. Fittingly, cuboid in nature. The camera pans back further. More cubes of similar size and shape emerge as the camera pans back further, and further, and further. Suddenly, the menu screen looks familiar. The faint sound of the soundtrack is soon overtaken by the piercing noises of computers, as the camera pans back even further, and further, and further. There are so many cubes, all equal in size to the one we had just played our game in. The camera pans back until everything is a purple wall, before the camera reveals that all of these cubes are contained within the hypercube that had been following you around the entire game. Suddenly, even more hypercubes. And more, and more, and more, as the noises get louder and everything starts to jumble together once more into a wall of noise. It only gets louder, and louder, noisier and noisier and noisier, it never seems to end, until you’re left at the mercy of a wall of static.

[[...]](https://youtu.be/WX3ivTj8oTQ)

The TV turns off.







4D - WHERE DOES IT END

This ending, I think, is one of the most powerful statements a video game could ever make. It speaks to me on a level that has only been matched by one other game.

There is no reason the Monolith is unsolvable. There is no reason Gomez is cast into this world, and there is no resolution, because, ultimately, we are chasing down a rabbit-hole that only goes deeper and deeper and deeper. FEZ is a game about the increasing abstraction and intangibility of the world around us, it’s a game about learning to cope with the abyss.

To me, the Monolith is an allegory for the abyss. Whatever you want to call that abyss is fine, but I generally define it as the lack of resolution. It is the lack of any form of reprieve or comfort from the horrors in our life, it is the lack of answers, it is the lack of anything.

I’ve had occasional bouts of horrible, near unmanageable death anxiety. I’ve had panic attacks a couple days in a row, screaming fits in bed while my whole family peered down at me. The absolute spine-chilling fear about what happens after I am gone had gotten to me, and I’d be lying if I said I don’t still have that anxiety with me as I write this script. The abyss of knowledge terrified me, damn near petrified me in this state of grasping for anything, anything to comfort me as I looped thoughts back into my head about the absolute uncertainty of consciousness after death. I’m not a very religious person, I consider myself an atheist and I was born in a somewhat agnostic household, so I had no form of spiritual reprieve either.

It’s not that FEZ cured my death anxiety, far from it. As I write this, I’ve recently had bouts of it as I go to sleep every night and it takes a massive amount of mental energy to not let it overpower me. What FEZ did for me is that it helped me realize that there does not need to be an answer. The fact that the final ending only reveals that the scope of FEZ is far too small to answer every single little thing about every single problem in every single universe signals that there is no need to fret about things you cannot know about ever. There does not need to be a way for me to definitively know what happens after I die. I do not need to understand every single nook and cranny this universe has to offer. I do not need to spend hours and hours of my time pawning over every single detail of every single interaction I have with my body in order to scope out what’d happen if that happened to my brain.

FEZ’s imposing difficulty, its rather unforgiving puzzles, amongst those that are more sensical and within-the-box in scope, remind me that life is only as stressful as you can make it. There is no consequence to not knowing, and when I do leave this mortal coil, I hope the very least I can do is pass on this message to everyone. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

---

I would like to thank my partner for helping me through this essay both with her revising aid and her emotional aide. I'd also like to thank my friends April and Jillian for helping with parsing it. I'd also like to thank you for reading this far. Love you. Have a great day. Do something you know will make you feel happy today.

{Cue end credit music.}

I've become convinced that there is no way to substantially improve this game, and/or its story, without drastically altering the final product and its core identity for the worse. If Spike Chunsoft's Danganronpa series is an exploration of character relationships dynamics at its most hyperbolic and brash, Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors explores those same dynamics with the tact of a carefully crafted pressurized chamber. There are so many moments within each stroke and line that are created with the sole intent of increasing the dread between two characters, whether by sowing discord or pulling them together amidst almost certain death. The tension isn't overbearing at first but it builds and towers into this monolith of anxiety, to the point where its true finale brought me to tears on my first playthrough.

That's not to discount the gameplay, which is in effect perfected (for the most part) in the PC port but is just as gripping and fun in the original DS version. It's the type of escape room puzzling that I absolutely adore, fully realized and made even more gripping with the eclectic ways you craft solutions. Combining objects, altered arithmetic, careful dialogue traversal, it's all so wild and fresh as someone who plays around with this genre as a matter of habit, let alone taste—it makes me wonder just how much more developed this idea of room traversal and additive puzzle-solving can get if this game is the best I've seen the genre offer. It's such a shot of euphoria peeking through each individual notch in this labyrinth of rooms, putting together pieces and creating more puzzles. It's this type of design that makes me swoon and weep for more of its kind, even as the escape room genre wanes in its popularity little by little every year. This is the type of puzzle game I fucking adore, concentrated and purified to such an extent that replaying it was an immediate rush of dopamine and anxiety.

Yakuza 4 aged better than the third episode, that's for sure. Like all the previous games it's still a solid entry in the series, which I enjoyed for the most part. Personally, I liked that the story is full of betrayals and that we got bombarded with plot twist after plot twist. And the soap opera quality of the emotions that run through it made for yet another great Yakuza experience. But the last 2 hours or so felt really rushed.

Introducing several new main characters was quite ambitious back then, but still well done. Though, Akiyama was really the only new addition I grew quite fond of.

However, there is one thing I have to nitpick because it kind of soured the experience for me a bit. Let me preface this by saying that I absolutely adore the Yakuza franchise and that it's one of my favorites of all time..

...so with that out of the way, I need to talk about -that- scene. Yes, it's about Saejima and Haruka’s introduction scene. I understand what the writers were trying to do, but using Haruka for that was just wrong on so many levels. The excuse, “he hasn’t been around a woman in years”, is terrible because Haruka is a child, not a woman. It's gross and it made it very difficult to like Saejima afterward (I eventually did though). The idea that we're supposed to applaud Saejima for having the strength of will to not rape a child, like that isn't the base level of behaviour we expect out of anyone who wants to participate in human society, is laughable. There's literally nothing to applaud in that scene. It was neither deep nor well written, it was just bad in taste. Like I said, I love Yakuza but I will never excuse that scene like so many other fans did. It was unnecessary.