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The Best Games of the Decade, By My Estimations

With only a good month (ACTUALLY LIKE A GOOD 24 HOURS HA HA I WROTE THIS BACK IN NOVEMBER) or so left of the 2010s (we are regrettably not quite far along enough to really start giving them jaunty names like "the Roaring Twenties" yet, but soon we will be free of this chronological no man's land) I find my thoughts turning to my enduring hobby slash interest slash everlasting shame: video games. While a decade is ultimately a fairly arbitrary point of reference, in the business of video gamesdom, ten years is a small eternity and some very significant games have graced us since the clock struck midnight on January 1st, 2010.

 I might still be too young for this kind of nostalgia, granted, but I can't help but think about the game experiences I've had in the last ten years that have been altogether Important to Me. I am less interested in ranking these titles than I am in exploring why they made such an impact on me, and why, if we were to borrow the esteemed verbiage of one Sid Meyer, they stood the test of time. ...or less so, if they came out more recently. Sometimes on these lists I sort of scrimp and scrabble to actually fill it up with enough games and I have to sort of cheat and put things on there I haven't really played, but fortunately I am not so destitute that I have only been able to play one new game a year since this decade began. To that end, this is more of a personal list than usual, that will have less to do with "well the game was kind of a Big Deal........" and more to do with "well the game was kind of a Big Deal to ME."

Dark Souls The First:

This game will likely find its way onto many such lists in the coming days, because it is such a singular thing. Honestly, I would put Demon's Souls on here too, but that was actually like. 2009ish? At any rate, its spiritual successor was a marked improvement in most ways, expanding upon the core design tenets that made the unassuming FROM software ps3 title such an unexpected success: deliberate gameplay that demanded players go slow and respect both enemies and environment until they were sufficiently skilled and experienced, boss fights against extremely memorable monsters and also sometimes trees, strange asynchronous multiplayer that worked in spite of itself, and a meticulously designed world filled with oddities, grotesqueries, mysteries, and tragedies. Dark Souls was a phenomenon. "The Dark Souls of _____" is dig at gormless games journalists that endures and is relevant to this day. It created a whole subgenre that remains fairly untapped because of how much of a gamble it is to really go in on what made Dark Souls good in a game without that kind of name recognition and marketing blitz, and it changed the way the zeitgeist thought about video games in a lot of ways.

Inscrutability is an incredibly important part of the Souls experience. Abandon all hope of transparency, ye who enter here, because you're not getting it. The games were designed with the intent of being a sort of collaborative community puzzle, where players who stumbled on secrets and treasures in the game could leave down messages for others to alert them to hidden prizes - or just try to bait somebody to jump down a bottomless pit. Patches does that. A lot. It's kind of this thing. There is a very specific mood and atmosphere that Miyazaki and company were going for with these games that creates a sort of artistic catch-all for complaints I would level at basically anything else. "These weapons are poorly balanced." Yep. It's not really trying to be balanced. "Half of these systems are unexplained and nonsensical." Oh boy are they ever. "A giant man-sized baby just invaded my world and tried to kill me with a ladle." Yes, yes he did. The bizarre, fever dream ambiance of Dark Souls is enhanced by all of this. It will put a lot of people off and I can't really say "oh you just don't get it." because like no in any other game this would be bullshit nonsense for idiots. Souls just kind of makes it work by being compellingly baffling.

This murkiness also serves to highlight one of the core conceits of the game: the simple joy of greater mastery. Dark Souls starts you out with very little. You have nothing, know nothing, are nothing, and all the npcs you meet are pretty sure you're going to fuck off and die pretty much as soon as you break line of sight. On your first time through, that's probably true, too. The skeletons in the graveyard are infamous. As you claw your way through the game, as you learn more about it, you start to see measurable progress getting made. What was once a bunch of very tired men in armor giving you unsettlingly sinister laughs is now the outline of a story, vague but extant, with more waiting to be discovered. Where you used to flail around and die to random hollows in the undead burg, now you dance circles around them and paste them in one or two hits with your fancy weapons (or enormous wooden club, depending). A world that was once borderline impossible to actually traverse gradually opens up and becomes more familiar. In Dark Souls, death serves a purpose, and that purpose is not actually to block your progress. Its purpose is to get you to learn the game and get better at it. It's actually very player empowering in a way a lot of 'press F to pay respects' theme park rides are not. I'm probably treading a very thin line between thoughtful analysis (ha) and "you cheated not only the game, but yourself." here, but I'm going to stand firm in my belief that the way Souls games endeavor to make you improve yourself over time is a legitimate and meritorious way to design a game.

Of course, Dark Souls the First is very rough around the edges in spots. The second half of the game is somewhat infamous for being unpolished and kind of slapdash. The online was questionable, the PC port was laughable until the community went in and fixed it, Lost Izalith is a whole fucking thing, the works. The fact that it's so good in spite of the rough spots is, I think, what made it such a singular game. I'm one of those hopelessly sentimental idiot bitches who thinks that things that are imperfect are kind of charming and compelling in ways that very cookie cutter, by the book, technically competent but aesthetically bankrupt things are not. Miyazaki had a vision when he made this game, and that vision created an enduring legacy. That's worthy of respect in a way not many games are. It's messy and flawed but those flaws are just kind of endearing because they're proof that the developers were trying to push boundaries and be ambitious and make something new and interesting.

Dark Souls The Second:

Dark Souls 2 has a kind of weird reputation in the online net-o-sphere. There are as many opinions about this game as there are people who have played it. Sometimes more, honestly. I spent a lot of time kind of convinced it wasn't that good until some things clicked and I realized it was HELLA good. That you kind of need the DLC to get the whole picture is... unfortunate, but such is the age we live in. Going into this game, I thought that a second Dark Souls was unnecessary. The first had ended satisfactorily, and I had no desire to see FROM get tied down to the world of Lordran. The quote B Team unquote that developed 2 seemed to agree with me, and created what is one of the most metacognitive games I have ever played. Now, let's not get ahead of ourselves. When I say metacognitive, I do not mean it in the usual facile sense of, say, whatever Jonathan Blow has churned out recently that beats you over the head with the fact that you're playing a video game and you should probably feel bad about it or the way Doki Doki Literature Club does the Epic Subversions! of visual novels by trying to convince you that the game knows it is a game, but failing because it cannot overcome the limitations that it has as a static, unchanging lump of code. Dark Souls 2 aims higher. And you know me - I always try to aim high.

Dark Souls 2 deals with cycles. Most notably, cycles of futility. Cycles that are so enduring and perpetual that it matters not how you choose to resolve it, it will simply keep going no matter what you do. Drangleic is a hollow simulacrum of Lordran - and that is exactly the point. The familiarity and design consistencies between the two games is intentional. The curse of life is the curse of want. It took me a long time to really understand what Dark Souls 2 meant by that. The World of Dark Souls 2 is a sort of unending purgatory. Thousands upon thousands of undead have made the journey, linked the fire, perhaps chose to become the Dark Lord instead, only for some other undying fool to go and light it anyway. Each time, a new order is built upon the bones of the old, and in time, joins its forebears in the ashes of history. When I beat the game the first time and felt that the ending was unsatisfying, I failed to realize that was, again, the point. If the game had shipped with all endings in it, I think I would have been less miffed, but, well, the curse of life is the curse of downloadable content. If you choose to take the throne, link the fire, you have essentially accomplished nothing. Another age of Fire will begin, and then end, and so on and on into the ages, an unending litany of suffering and violence, because people cannot let go of what once was. They seek and scrabble to claim scraps of glory in a systemic nightmare of self-fulfilling prophecies and false dichotomies. When Aldia eventually arrives with the DLC packs, things really start to take shape.

Dark Souls 2 is a commentary on itself. An admission of the futility of trying to recapture the unique spark of the first game, and the necessity of doing something -different-. The playerbase hated it on release. It was both not enough like the first game and too much like the first game. It wasn't like, reviewbombing on metacritic hate, but the consensus rapidly became that 2 was just worse than the first game and kind of a bummer, a half-hearted cashgrab by a "B Team" while the really talented developers worked on Bloodborne. So, basically, they proved 2's central thesis completely correct. A hollow cycle of just repeating and iterating on what has come before serves nobody. In the words of Straid of Olaphis, "it is all a curse." That is the true curse in Dark Souls 2. An undead might link the fire to try and preserve their fading sense of self and memory, but it is but a temporary measure, a prolonging of greater suffering by bowing to an order designed to oppress. Before the Ringed City was ever a thing, Agdyne and Vendrick were here telling us about how Gwyn was so covetous of his own perceived right to rule that he cursed all of humankind into a twisted state of mutually exclusive ideas. Die as a mortal in the flame, or endure as an undead husk in the darkness, bereft of heart and soul. Or... does it even matter? All of this has happened before. It will all happen again.

Those who slave away eternally under this paradigm are doomed to never find peace or fulfillment, because it was not designed that way. Gwyn's fear was so great that he got entangled in his own karmic vortex, reincarnating over and over again with his other lord friends in slightly different forms and circumstances that would continue, eternally, to make the same mistakes in the pursuit of the same misguided goals. Aldia, the Scholar of the First Sin, is presented as one of the few beings in this entire misbegotten affair with an inkling of what is really going on. Both he and Vendrick knew that Drangleic was destined for the same dreg heap as every other civilization built upon the power of the soul, but all of their efforts to prevent this fall were for naught, because they were all confined by the same twisted system in which there can be no change or joy. It is only after Vendrick loses his nerve entirely and fades away into a mindless hollow and Aldia loses everything in his increasingly unhinged and ethically questionable experiments that he realizes that they were doing it all wrong.

I think I've probably gone on too long at this point so I'll try to be brief: the "true" ending of the game, made available after all 3 DLCs were released, involves gathering the power of truly mighty souls in a crown and using them as a sort of... loophole. The empowered crown does not cure the curse of undeath. What it does is prevent -hollowing-. The degradation of heart and mind. And after the final battle, you leave the throne behind. But there is a very important difference here from the Dark Lord ending of the first game. By finding this loophole, and rejecting Gwyn's order entirely, you and you alone have broken free from the endless cycle of suffering, and by doing so, perhaps gained the knowledge necessary to take the first steps into forging a new path entirely. Beyond the reach of Light, beyond the scope of Dark.

So yeah basically it's like Dark Souls the First, with some improvements and changes and what have you, so it's got the same fun to play deliberate explorey dark holey kind of thing going on, it just takes the concepts and runs with it to places I never would have expected a game to ever go. It is legitimately one of the only metanarratively aware games I have played (that I can remember, anyway) that sticks the landing, because it is not obnoxiously explicit about it. Undertale was fun and a worthwhile game by any reasonable metric, but it falls into the same trap as all the others: when you are acknowledged as the player of a game in anything more than a briefly comedic bit of 4th wall breaking, any hope of cleverness or thoughtfulness goes out the window, because it brings to light an ironclad truth of the medium: you, the player, are just as constrained in what you can do as the NPCs in the game, who are also fake. When they start haranguing you about about brotherkilling or being a cheating visual novel boyfriend or possibly girlfriend or what have you, it's just. Meaningless. It is a contrivance of the developer, specifically included in the game as a programmed possibility designed to be experienced.

Dark Souls 2 gets around this by not engaging with the player on that level of metanarrative. It deals much more in metaphor and allegory. It's not, like, especially subtle, but it is subtle enough to let your mind draw parallels without immediately blaring at you in comic sans "THIS IS A VIDEO GAME, KID" and taking you out of it entirely. It's a fine line to walk. A barrier between worlds has to be maintained for these stories to work. I'm the kind of player who will never do a renegade run of Mass Effect because I hate being mean and nasty for no reason, even to bits of code in a game, because I try to engage with it all in good faith and do my best to let myself buy into the illusion that these bits of code are characters with thoughts and feelings. When an angry flower man pops up and says "OOHOOHOO LOOKS LIKE YOU JUST RELOADED THE GAME BECAUSE YOU KILLED SOMEBODY" my first thought isn't "wow fucked up..." it's "oh well there goes my suspension of disbelief" because like. If you're going to call me out on that then fuck I can just go into the code and make you say "there is a frightful hobgoblin haunting europe, and its name is ligma" and like. Yep. Bow before my mastery. I guess. I don't want to get into a slapfight like that with Toby Fox. He seems like a nice person.

I don't know maybe this is just something unique to me, and other people can deal with these stories without immediately becoming depressed by the deeply artificial nature of it all. It's complicated. I will say that I like Undertale a lot, but the reasons that I like it come very much from the character interactions, spritework, and music, and not the time Flowey closed my game. It's just the same pony island bullshit as its always been. "OooOOoOOoh uninstall the game or you're actually just going back and messing with events for your own perverse satisfactionNNNnNNnN" fuck off dipshit it's all fake garbage for idiot children and I am not causing a cartoon skeleton existential agony by considering that maybe I could play this fun game that I liked and payed cash dollars for again. Now, all this considered, my next game on the list might be surprising...

Nier: Automata

Okay so let's just get this out of the way. Nier does a very famous thing at the end when you get the true ending where you are given the choice to forfeit your saved data in order to help another player get past the final boss, which is... the credits. So how is this different? Well, for one thing, it's not like the central narrative conceit of the game. The sexy android psychodrama functions perfectly well without it. It's kind of its own thing. It's... an expression of hope, kind of. An admission that you -care- about the fates of these characters, in spite of being bits of code, because their personalities and their world and the way they interact are all compelling and endearing, and you would give up something of tangible worth and importance to maybe give them a chance for a better outcome in somebody else's game, too. It's a very strange thing that I can think of no real equivalent for. You even get to put a little personalized message on the extra shmup ship you send over to help some other player get through to the end. It's an act that... kind of exists outside of the story, but also kind of in it. I think the important thing here is that the conceit is that you are making this sacrifice to help somebody else, not because a small goat child said something Foreboding. It's a confirmation that if a game makes you feel things, makes you think, maybe it wasn't just a waste of time.

So enough about that. What about like the other 99% of the game? A lot of people in my peer group are super sweet on the original Nier: Gestalt game. I played through it. It was... okay. Like it absolutely had very charming characters and story and all of that but it was just kind of a slog to play through and I kind of wished the entire game was just that segment where you're playing a text adventure. Automata continues to have very charming characters and story and all of that, but it also actually like. It's fun? To hit the buttons? Like, that Platinum pedigree isn't just for show. It's not the most technical game they've ever made, but it's fun and varied (shmups! shmups!) and there's some fun character customization and you even have a self-destruct switch which is always hilarious. The real attraction is the narrative, visuals, and gorgeous music, but it's also just a solid swordswingy dodgy robot smashy time irrespective of that. So like. Yeah.

The story and characters are very interesting and well done and goes to some very dark and uncomfortable places sometimes about the nature of memory, artificial intelligence, the often arbitrary labels we give ourselves, and the implications of sexy robot men with no junk. The nice thing about Nier Automata is that the events in game are fairly straightforward and relayed in a way that people who don't compulsively watch lore videos can understand without too much difficulty, so I don't really need to go into a detailed summary of why it's genius because of tHe AlLeGoRy. It kind of speaks for itself, for the most part. Does 9S want to fuck 2B or destroy 2B? Maybe some other verb entirely! We may never know. Well, I do know. He wants to fuck her. That is obvious. But it does not preclude the other, which is a salient and disconcerting point the game tries to make with that whole sequence. 9S has really had a rough time of it, you know? All that stuff in his own game and then he pops up on the First only to get his face caved in by the Warrior of Darkness. Rotten luck.

Basically, Yoko Taro sets out to say some things with his strange brainchild about androids with very big butts, but when you think about it, the attractiveness of the YorHa androids is also kind of a statement, too. If you're building something in your image, wouldn't you want to make it as sexy as possible? I would. Like, if you could make your machine children smoking hot, why wouldn't you? It's only polite. Nobody wants to be an ugly robot. Maybe the machine lifeforms would be having a better time of it all if they weren't put in categories like "short stubby." Anyway. Saying things. He says things. The game is thought provoking and evocative and at times very very sad. I love to cry. More on that later. I feel like I'm coming up a little short on this after my small dissertation on Dark Souls 2, but sometimes you need to fuckin. Get that kind of thing off your chest. Automata is challenging, but not Souls 2 challenging, where you kind of have to look in all the nooks and crannies and paid DLC packs to really get what it's trying to say. Though I think you fight the president of Square Enix in one of the Nier DLCs. That's pretty intellectually formidable.

Bloodborne:

It is no secret that I love the Bloodborne. It's very fun, very tight, usually works right most of the time, blood vials are shit but what can you do, and is one of the most visually arresting games like, ever. Ever ever. Behold! A Paleblood Sky! indeed. It's got the Souls pedigree to make combat fun and challenging, but its also very squishy and visceral and kind of grody in a good way because it ties in heavily to the themes of what really separates people from "beasts" and how more often than not we're just fooling ourselves. We're all rancid beasts. Hunger makes monsters of us all. It is this thematic strength, and the uncommon aplomb with which the game takes a hard left turn into "wait what the fuck???" town, that I regard it so highly. It's a game with a lot to say, especially about our narrow view of "intelligence" and the imagined "right" it grants us to subjugate and victimize those we deem inferior. The Victorian setting is no accident - a lot of the horror in the game draws heavily from classic colonialist sentiment and the erroneous conviction that all things are there for the benefit of Mankind (Glory to them, see previous) that commonly defines that era. Also that architecture is some spooky shit I tell you what. Even when there isn't a large spider man with a brain for a head hanging off of it. There are those, in this game, by the way. You thought you were gonna deal with werewolves? Bitch your eyes have yet to open, strap the fuck in.

Bloodborne is the coveted "what a twist!" game I so laboriously search for. A game that expertly leads you to believe some things, then gradually shows you that you are a fucking wrong idiot baby and now there are mushroom men from mars running around casting magic missile at you. It gets this right in part because the clues were there all along, if you bothered to search for them. The first part of the game is fairly expected of what the promo material was all about, save for some weirdness with dreams and cryptic mutterings of "Paleblood." Then, you know, some shit starts getting wacky. You start running into giantass monster men clad in the trappings of the church. The NPCs you talk to start becoming more and more unhinged. Sometimes you will be randomly lifted bodily into the air and die and it is fucking alarming the first time I tell you what. Strange men with bags start appearing in random spots, and if they kill you, they don't actually kill you - they put you in the bag and kidnap you, the only way to reach a certain area of the game early. This hidden area is filled with more bagmen and some very angry giant pigs, because those are in this game too. Then you finally enter the big cathedral at the center of town and its lined with really odd looking statues of aliens and you touch a weird skull and you get a vision from the Mothercrystal about how to progress, and you tell the password to the gatekeeper, and he's like "ok cool get in here" but actually he is a fucking dessicated corpse and this isn't Dark Souls there ain't no undead here. Maybe. Are there?

Then you get into the Forbidden Woods and there are like, the weird mushroom men, if you go looking for them, and snakes, and really BIG snakes, and men who are made out of snakes and kind of give you weird nostalgic memories of Resident Evil 4 and the las plagas sphagetti heads. And there are more statues and giant fucking gravestones? That are really unnerving? And also if you went poking around you might have also met Patches again, who is back, but also a spider, and he'll show you how to get into college, except the college is in a nightmare and full of slime people, which is actually pretty normal now that I think about it, and then you can go out into ANOTHER nightmare, which is just another obnoxious poison swamp but the winter lanterns live there and those things are a fucking trip. Anyway you get to Bergynwerth eventually and there are weird insect guys and weird disheveled looking fellas that literally eat your brains if they get close and this awful npc hunter (the real horror of the night i tell you what) who casts fucking megaflare and you FINALLY get to the center of it all and jump into the lake except it's not the lake, it's actually like a fucking pocket dimension and there's just a big spider chilling out. You have to kill it to progress. And then when you do things just REALLY go to hell. And this is to say nothing of the Old Hunters DLC. This game is a fucking nightmare and it's great. Easily one of the scariest games ever made, genuinely frightening and weird and it doesn't just lose its edge when you realize the monster is a big goofy man with a flappy jaw. You are the monster, and that monster is a tiny squid baby. You're a squid now! Because you ate umbilical cords! Why!? I DON'T KNOW! INSIGHT, MOTHERFUCKER!

So what I just described is probably sounding completely absurd, random, and borderline early 2000s era monkeycheese style humor, but you gotta believe me, it is only absurd. It's actually very deliberately absurd. A lot of people will say that Bloodborne is one of the only games to get Lovecraft right, but I have actually read some of that dreck and I will say Bloodborne really only shares some aesthetic DNA and nomenclature with the racist tentacle man who ate nothing but canned beans. The themes are actually very different. Lovecraft wrote of a paradoxical contradictory world where Unspeakable Elder Things lurked behind every shadow, ready to emerge and destroy everything, but they were also very apathetic and noncommital about the whole thing. They didn't actually care that much either way, but they were still Bad, because they were weird and alien and inimicable to human life because of that foreign aspect. Like Nyarlathotep was originally envisioned as a travelling black guy who would go from town to town and show people some awesome inventions and shit and that was supposed to be evil. The dude's neuroses about race permeated -everything- he wrote.

On the other hand, Bloodborne takes a different tack. One of the central theses of the game is that the Great Ones are -not- evil. In fact, they're rather sympathetic by nature and will do what they can to help, if asked. The horror of the game comes not from the actions of the alien monstrosities who are actually nicer than most of the humans, but from what the human characters do in the pursuit of knowledge and power. Atrocities are committed by the dozen in some vague pursuit of higher understanding, against both the citizens of Yharnam and the supposed cosmic horrors themselves. This point is driven home by the fact that a number of the more alien entities you encounter in the game aren't actually hostile at all. Rom, the Vacuous Spider, will just chill out with you indefinitely at the Moonside Lake if you don't strike the first blow, and doesn't even really begin to actively defend herself until you prove yourself to be a determined murder machine. Ebrietas, the Daughter of the Cosmos, is found minding her own business in an out of the way corner of the Upper Cathedral Ward, mourning Rom after you, you know, killed her in cold blood. Again, she is completely non-hostile until you start shit. In the Old Hunters, Kos (or some say Kosm) is actually benevolent sort of mother goddess to the people of a small fishing hamlet. ...until the "scholars" of Bergynwerth murder her in the name of science, too.

All of the evil and horror and stomach-turning cruelty in Bloodborne comes from corrupt systems of power run rampant, not something as facile as the supposedly intrinsic malice of beings different from us. The terrors of the cosmos are nothing before the vile, willful depravity of mankind itself. That's the idea at the heart of it all. The Great Ones, who exist on a higher plane of existence, seem to have largely left this cruelty behind. Even the Moon Presence, the principle cause of the Hunter's Dream, is trying to help Laurence and Gherman - it's just that it's so different from humans, its idea of helping is a bit. Strange. It's this really fresh and unique take on the genre, this byzantine tragedy of miscommunication, good intentions, and mortal greed, that creates one of the vanishingly few games at are actually frightening. It doesn't even have to sacrifice being a good game to do it! No hiding in closets from the scourge of screen blur and heavy breathing here. In terms of gameplay, it's probably the most refined of quintet. I'm unsure if I should count Sekiro with them or not. It's a much different thing. Trick weapons and hunter's garb are iconic, extremely stylish, original, and honestly just fucking dope as hell. You've got a hammer that explodes when it hits things, a giant pizza cutter, a katana you coat with your own blood to empower, a gunrapier and a gunspear, a giant... wagon wheel... because Miyazaki just really likes those I guess, a bow that is also a sword, a giant fucking ship's cannon you just carry around with you, a portable flamethrower, an... eyeball, that shoots space rocks, for some reason. Like the weapon design and selection alone is worthy of considerable accolade. Bloodborne is fantastic, play it if you can.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I was a little bit kinda wishy washy on putting this on here, but I think overall that it deserves a spot. In terms of story and themes, it's honestly a bit whatever. It's Zelda. Don't be an asshole to your genius daughter who knows like ten times as much as you do about everything I guess. Prince Sidon is a nice fishman. Link is like, distressingly, "this is a kids game!!" hot when you put him in certain outfits. I'm pretty sure every configuration of sexuality interested in the act of boning probably at least went "hoo boy" when Link put on the gerudo outfit. That is, of course, not really enough to qualify for such a prestigious position as one of the best games of the decade. Where Breath of the Wild shines is its world design, music, and the masterful layer of melancholy it drapes everything in. The ruined land of Hyrule is beautiful and sad in equal measure, the vistas enhanced by a fantastic soundtrack with an incredibly rich personal voice. It takes a very certain kind of design philosophy, in my opinion, to create an open world that is actually meritorious and worthwhile and not just an excuse to spend a lot of time hoofing it through vast expanses of nothing interesting. There is enough raw Stuff in the land of Hyrule, from enemy encounters to happening upon NPCs to just finding something really weird and inexplicable that you feel compelled to check out, to justify the massive open world.

I think the enemy design in particular is worthy of some praise. The game gives you a whole lot of tools to tackle any given fight. Sometimes you can just whack something with your sword until either the enemy or the sword breaks and that will work fine. Other times, you can literally do the Tao Pai Pai thing from Dragonball and launch a treetrunk into the air, surf on it, and land it squarely in the face of some unsuspecting moblin. This is a very popular speedrun strat. The sheer amount of Weird Stuff you can do in the service of ultimately saving Hyrule is a lot of lot of LOT of fun, things not many other games would let you do. There's also something to be said for the moments where you're exploring, minding your own business, and find yourself face to face with something fearsome and big and dangerous, like a Lynel in the frozen north or one of the big cyclops guys. It's heartpounding and exciting and really hits that "oh hell yeah let's fuckin FIGHT" button. And fighting in Breath of the Wild is a hell of a lot of fun! Probably the most its been in any Zelda game. Skyward Sword please go away you're drunk this was never a good idea. To me, Breath of the Wild is kind of the platonic ideal of an open world fantasy fuck around game. That used to be Skyrim, but BotW sort of made me realize you can actually have a functional game on top of all the aforementioned Fucking Around, too, and that sort of enhances the experience.

This might be a little weird and personal and I apologize, but I think the one thing that really sealed this game as something very special and significant to me was the moment I entered the Rito village for the first time. I was greeted with an utterly gorgeous piano melody that gradually unfolded into a soulful, excruciatingly bittersweet arrangement of the Dragon Roost Isle theme from the Windwaker. I admit that I was not in a good place in my life when I was playing Breath of the Wild. I was still reeling from some bad brain stuff. Be that as it may, Breath of the Wild is the only game I have ever played - hell, the only piece of art I have experienced - that has brought me to tears with nothing more than a song. When I realized what I was listening to, when the memories of a time when I was still a child with hope and trust and innocence and any faith that life would ever be something more than cruelty and suffering came flooding back, I had to put down my switch, go lay down, and just ugly cry for a while. It's honestly making me a little misty-eyed just thinking about. It was such a personal, intimate, keening feeling of... I don't really know. Nostalgia? Longing? Melancholy? Now, believe me, I love to cry. I am a crybaby. Things make me cry all the time. But not like this. This was something else. Something I still don't really understand, or can explain. All I know is that if a game can do that to me with just a few notes, it deserves to be here.

Salt and Sanctuary:

This is probably the most niche game for me. Even people who share some of my more eclectic tastes and sensibilities didn't like this game that much, but there was just something about this Metroidvania mashed with a Soulslike that hit some very primal notes in my soul. The art style, a weird mix of cartoony and utterly deranged, the enemy design, the bizarre way the world is put together, some extremely creative boss battles, and above all, some masterfully done atmosphere dripping with poorly understood dread and a sense of complete disorientation combined to create an experience that seemed to be made for me, and possibly me alone. It's not a flawless game. The music is fine, but somewhat lacking in variety. The character progression system is a good deal more complicated than it needs to be by any stretch of the imagination, as is the weapon upgrade system. The difficulty curve is uneven, and the raw inscrutability of the whole enterprise can make progression difficult in ways that it never really was in Dark Souls and Demon's Souls, which at least had the courtesy to point you in the right direction from time to time. The ending is a bit on the weak side.

Even now it feels difficult to really like. Elucidate on why I like this game so much. Maybe it's because it was the heartfelt effort of an extremely small team with more passion than experience? Because it's so unique and bold in ways other games are not, even while being a self-admitted derivative of Souls games? I just don't know. It's just such a fun and plucky thing, even if parts of it are kind of bad. It's not like, Deadly Premonition or anything where the badness is also the primary attraction. It's like, overall a good game? I believe? It's just that if it wasn't also kind of weirdly flawed and broken in some ways I don't think I would like it as much. God, I don't know. Just. Play it if you get a chance and see if any of this makes sense. One of the weapons you can use is a giant ass ship anchor, which is just fantastic, and you can start out as a chef, complete with a goofy hat and an extra helping of salt. Salt is important. Gotta keep those electrolytes up. You can also put a pumpkin on your head, and there's a boss called the Tree of Men which is just this giant torture machine that hates you and everyone else. It's so weird! The lighting is so moody and unsettling! The Queen of Smiles doesn't have a jaw! You have to brand your ass with a metal iron to double jump! ...hand, not ass, to be fair. But ass would be pretty funny. And horrifying. If you join the Iron Ones religion your healing item is just bread. And that is a fucking mood.

Super Mario Galaxy 2:

This one barely makes the temporal cut, but it was 2010 when it came out, I'm pretty sure. As a Mario game that doesn't have paper in its name, it's also going to be a bit fluffier and lighter on actual substance than pretty much every other game here, and I don't have that much to say. It's just this gorgeously realized and scored platforming adventure that's so tightly tuned you could play Smoke on the Water on it. It is the still the best traditional jumpy wahoo boing boing Mario game I have ever played. It just makes you feel good about space, and going to space, and seeing all the wonderful things in space. Though there most likely are not charming little obstacle courses themed around bees and and toy trains in space, the various cosmic phenonmenon on display on the map screen and in the background of some galaxies are close enough to what you might expect to inspire a sense of wonder and awe. SMG2 is like the purest expression of Let's Just have a Good Time design in games I have ever seen. It induces good feelings. Not everything has to be deep and troubling and thought provoking. Like, I tend to prefer it when they are, but there's always rooms for exceptions like this. Just fantastic. And the music though holy shit. Honestly I think the only game on this list that doesn't have a fantastic OST is Salt and Sanctuary, but it's still like. Serviceable.

Darkest Dungeon:

Let me start off by saying that Darkest Dungeon doesn't always hit the mark with its central conceit of stress management and the importance of mental health in your small army of adventurers. Nobody is going to start screaming abuse at their comrades or start stabbing them to death in a fit of paranoia because a skeleton spilled some cheap champagne on them. That said, I think that it -tries- to address these things is admirable, even if it is fairly easily boiled down into a simple matter of resource management and cost/benefit analysis. The reason I like Darkest Dungeon so much is that it is a game that excels at emergent storytelling. In terms of actual plot progression and character development, there is very little. You can have a party of four Occultists, each with the exact same backstory and with the exact same pact to the exact same eldritch entity, killing the exact same boss several different times. If you want. The dungeon crawling primarily serves as a vehicle for two things: the first and most obvious, the primary gameplay experience where you command your brave or at least foolhardy group of heroes to engage the ancient horrors of Grandpa's Party House. By itself, this is compelling and demanding. A bit like Dark Souls, Darkest Dungeon is a game that is fairly exacting in what it expects out of you, and it will not let you make mistakes without slapping you on the wrist and saying "no, bad." Similarly, it is a game where mastery is rewarded, but both in somewhat lesser degrees because DD is much more random and capricious in nature. The difference between a new player and an old hand is obvious, but sometimes even veterans can get completely dicked over by things out of their control.

That leads us into the second purpose: having the Ancestor narrate your constant struggle against Murphy's Law while completely hilarious bullshit conspires to send all of your highly trained and well equipped adventurers to the grave. Let me tell you a tale. I was fighting the Countess, the extremely powerful and dangerous final boss of the Crimson Court DLC. Everybody was afflicted with some manner of madness, and things were looking grim. She had shuffled my party around into a formation wherein some of them couldn't act without switching places. I ordered my vestal to switch places with Dismas, my highwayman. Dismas, however, was currently under either "selfish" or "abusive" status and simply refused to move. This meant that my vestal could not actually act that turn, and simply doing nothing incurs a penalty of stress damage. This stress damage was enough to put her gauge to the maximum, give her a heart attack, and kill her. Dismas literally murdered the healer by being too much of an asshole. I was beside myself at the time, but make no mistake - it was fucking hysterical. I later fed him to the final boss as penance for his crimes.

Darkest Dungeon is a grindy game that takes time and effort to complete. This is one of the biggest complaints leveled at it, and it's a fair one. On normal mode, though, you are more than capable of going at it inch by bloody inch, throwing corpse after corpse at the eldritch monstrosities until they at last drown in the blood and give up. No matter how grievous the setback, you can come back from it, unless you're playing on stygian/blood moon mode, which adds a fairly strict time limit and a hard cap on how many hapless adventurers you can send into the meatgrinder before the Nameless Thing That Ends The World wakes up and gives you an auto-game over. It's designed to be a long, bloody slog where shit goes wrong. Hopefully, in the upcoming sequel which I am very much anticipating not being able to play because I am poor, Red Hook can perhaps find a better balance with this. I am, for my part, fairly forgiving of grindy games, and at times even enjoy them. They were going for something with the way they designed DD, and I respect that. If you have the proper mindset of "whatever will be, will be" and learn to embrace the senselessness of death, your adventures in the Darkplace Estate will be both rewarding and oftentimes absurdly funny because your Arbalest was too depressed to eat anything, took more stress damage from starving, and then died of a heart attack, which then further stressed out the rest of the party. If that sounds more "oh my god that's awful" than "hahahaha you fucking dipshits" to you, DD might not be up your alley. But if it is, it -really- is. It's sort of the Dwarf Fortress principle, though Darkest Dungeon is far more user friendly and nice to look at. ...you know if you payed him enough the narrator voice actor would probably do a dramatic reading of Boatmurdered. Just saying.

Stellaris:

Stellaris is kind of the odd spaceman out on this list for a variety of reasons, but it shares the same kind of compelling emergent storytelling that Darkest Dungeon has. It's just less likely to be about how your alcoholic bounty hunter missed every hit against a fishman and went insane, and more likely to be about how you found this really cool Orb in space but it was in another empire's territory so you basically fabricated Space World War 1 to take it for yourself. Maybe that was just me. Much like the many habitable planets in any given Stellaris game, Paradox's grand strategy space game falls in the Goldilocks Zone of "accessible for mortal minds" and "satisfyingly complex." I'm not a huge fan of most Paradox stuff because I don't really give much of a fuck about kings and their crusaders one way or the other, but I respect them for what they are. Stellaris was kind of a proof of concept for me for that - given subject matter I actually liked (space!!!!), the various nitty gritty systems of planetary management and fleet organization and robo-modding and gene templates became compelling rather than overwhelming. They were, granted, still pretty overwhelming at first. The game still receives robust free updates and DLC even as of this writing, sometimes drastically changing the way the game is played (alloys! consumer goods! aarrrggh!) and making my 500ish hours of playtime seem a little less nonsensical. Look, a lot of that time was idling on the galaxy map while I did something else.

It's just really polished and technically competent and -enormous- and there's space dragons and sometimes you get to fuck a black hole. Stellaris doesn't really have a narrative, per se, save what you ascribe to any given game, but that doesn't mean the game doesn't have writing. A lot of very interesting, well written, and sometimes really funny flavor text can be found in the various anomalies and in-game events your science vessels will encounter as they uncover more of the galaxy, or sometimes a planet will have a mysterious portal to Hell on it, or maybe it's actually just a huge egg for a terrifying voidspawn. The game also navigates the usual 4X/strategy game dilemma of securing an early lead and just kind of chilling for the rest of the game by introducing midgame and lategames crises. It's not a perfect fix, but the ever-looming threat of a khanate space uprising, an AI uprising either from your empire or another, or ravenous space bugs from beyond the cosmos ensures that you have to keep at least a little bit on your toes. The presence of spaceborne aliens that range from "a nuisance" to "well gosh that thing is actually eating that sun this could be problematic" also ensures that you need to pay attention to both military and domestic aspects of governing. Stellaris happens in real time (though you can thank god pause whenever you want to issue orders) so there isn't really a Civilization equivalent of "oh the tiny pissant nations are declaring war, time to buy seven tanks with my enormous hoard of gold and run over their medieval knights" in Stellaris. Stuff always takes time to make, and it takes time to get in position, too. Space being exceedingly vast, and all that.

The lategame can get simultaneously get very overwhelming and very boring, but there are systems put in place to help automate the process of ruling a huge interstellar empire and one of the nice things about Stellaris is that you can kind of just. Stop whenever you want. There are technically win conditions, if you're into that sort of thing, but a lot of the time I will just play it through until I'm like "hmm okay im good" and then just either start a new game as an extremely different kind of empire or play something else for a while. It's kind of nice. The idea of "winning" in these games is always so weird to me anyway. I kind of like the framework where it's just kind of like. You tell a story, rather than try to win a game. Recent changes have made it much easier to actually achieve victory, however. Part of the thing that kind of encouraged my "eh i'll stop when i wanna" approach in the first place was how unreasonable some of the old victory requirements were. Occupy sixty percent of the galaxy? Excuse me???? Fuck off. Also, it's not like. A really salient part of the game like it is for most other games on the list, but Stellaris actually does have a pretty nice soundtrack. It's much more ambient in nature and there's not really enough of it for the amount of Game there is, but what's there is nice, even if you will probably end up turning it off and listening to your own music instead eventually.

============================= =Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers= =============================

Alright so if you've like actually looked at my twitter or talked to me or to someone about me for more than two minutes, it's probably pretty obvious that I really like FFXIV. An unhealthy amount.  I will cop to that. FFXIV is an MMORPG. Let's start with the basics. I enjoy the game's gameplay a lot. I would not have put 6 years of my life into playing it if I did not, I'm not a Dota 2 player, for Christ's sake. I like to raid, and have actively done it in every wing except for the Sigmascape. I even managed to beat the final encounter of the current Edengate raids! I'm currently sort of gathering my courage to try the latest Ultimate Raid, the Epic of Alexander. Ultimate Raids are fights that are absurdly difficult by any reasonable standard and further winnow the playerbase from "hit level 80->does endgame stuff->does savage raiding->clears savage raid tiers->does Ultimate Raids->.00000001% of the player base that clears ultimate raids". Ultimates are for a very specific kind of player. I'm just sort of mentioning it for context purposes, it doesn't really factor in to my overall evaluation.

Now, despite the fact that I personally enjoy the gameplay a great deal, it is not actually why I think this game is so good. This might puzzle you. What else is there to an MMO? Is the sense of community especially great? Well, I would say that I really enjoy the community of people I play with, but on the whole, XIV's community is about. Standard, really. Which is to say "a fucking dumpsterfire" by any human metric, but just par for the course for online video games. What keeps me coming back to the game is that in between all the endgame stuff and grinding and crafting and going to die in Eureka, there is a bafflingly compelling and superlative singleplayer experience. The game is actually like unironically the best mainline FF title since at least XII. I would personally say it's on par with IX as a narrative experience, which is no faint praise because i fuckin luv me some ffix. But how can an MMO have such a compelling story? It's kind of complicated.

History lesson for the ten people who still don't know: FFXIV actually launched way back in like. 2011 or some shit and it was -arrestingly- bad. "Embarrassment to the franchise name" bad. So bad that they decided to literally drop a meteor on the game world, bring in a new director, shut the whole thing down for a year or so, and then relaunch the game as A Realm Reborn in mid 2013. People really liked this version. It was nothing short of a miracle. It also layed the groundwork for something important: a real and genuine dedication to worldbuilding (and worldending, too). The destruction and rebirth of the realm of Eorzea is metanarratively (theres my favorite non-word word again) baked into the very DNA of the game as it is now. Learning about the people who lived after the Calamity and how they survived is a direct parallel to how the dev team had to survive and adapt to make this complete boondoggle of a game into something presentable. A lot of heart and soul went into the bones of the world the game takes place in, because it's an expression of that dogged determination to make it work. Yoshida and his team probably crunched like hell to get it all done, and that makes me really sad, but what's done is done. I wish it didn't have to be that way, but it is, and all I can do at this point is praise the team's hard work and vision and try to support them as best I can.

So there's this really weighty sense of reality to the game world, and all of 2.0 is basically spent just establishing Eorzea and how it works. If you were an early adopter of ARR, like I was (2.1 is early right. it's gotta be.) then you grew to genuinely care about the place you spent so much time in and looked so pretty and was kind of obnoxiously laid out but don't worry there will be flying in the expansion. The longrunning nature of the game sort of necessitated a sort of serialized story. It had much more in common with an episodic TV Show than a usual Final Fantasy story, which for better or for worse are usually self-contained little things until somebody decides its fuckin Nova Crystalis time. It created a really unique sense of anticipation and participation in an ongoing story and evolving world. I think this is where a lot of people find their attachments to MMO style games, why people are still faithfully playing World of Warcraft 15 years on.

So FFXIV gets two expansions, Heavensward and Stormblood, and they were very Good, and added lots of neat things to the game and advanced the story and introduced new and beloved characters and also Zenos yae Galvus I guess and the long-running nature of it all started forging a kind of personal narrative of necessity, if that makes sense? Like, your own protagonist, who is mostly silent, who you created and customized and further customized and maybe turned into a lalafell once just to see what it was like to be so short, has been an important part of this world for so long your brain kind of just fills in the gaps in spite of itself. What would my character think about this? What would she do? Why would she do it? That kind of thing. The Warrior of Light, as one is called, has had a leading role in the game's story since pretty much day one, but one of the things that compels me about the character is how much work it took to get where she is today. Like, it's not a Diablo 3 style "hmm well you killed those zombies really good so i guess you're basically stronger than god and also satan put together" affair. You start out as a newbie adventurer, you do newbie adventurer things, like helping orange pickers keep the orchard clear of bees or deliver packages for guilds or whatever sufficiently adventuresome task needs doing. You gain notoriety for doing things that are, well, worthy of notoriety. You really get noticed when you defeat the primal Ifrit in a pitched battle, get recruited by some organizations, and you keep steadily working your way up from there.

As of Shadowbringers, the warrior of Darkness is kind of stronger than god and satan combined, but it took a fucking -lot- to get there. One base game and two expansions worth of life or death battles against utterly intractable foes and also Zenos yae Galvus I guess. It is beyond the scope of this piece to just give you a full plot summary of six years worth of storytelling, so I will just cut to the chase and try to explain what I'm taking five million words to say. Shadowbringers did something I thought heretofore impossible: it made me care about my tabula rasa cipher avatar as a character in a story and not just as an expression of digital self that I had grown fond of. Don't get me wrong - Dazzlyn Reed the adventurer is absolutely an expression of digital self that I have grown -disproportionately- fond of. I figure I'm a few more patch cycles from becoming that girl in the Jack Chick tract about Dungeons and Dragons who had a psychotic break because her DnD character died. However, for the most part, that affection was more of... kind of taking pride in her appearance and the outfits I put together and the achievements I had accomplished with her and stuff like that. Shadowbringers made me care about her as a character in her own right, which seems borderline miraculous to me.

It's sort of hard to explain without totally spoiling everything. And even with spoiling everything. In vague terms, I'll try to express it this way: the game put Dazzlyn in a situation where she had failed. Like, spectacularly. Everything she had done in the course of the expansion had gone up in smoke, and her own life was in real and severe danger. When you play these kinds of games, your first instinct when things go wrong in the story is pretty much always to just flippantly say to yourself "okay okay just calm down and let me fix it i'm like level a billion it's fiiiiine". Shadowbringers turns that on its head. You went to fix things... and you couldn't. Despite good intentions, it's arguable that you only made things worse. Everything you worked for since arriving on the First was just utterly undone, and the game lets you see the toll that has taken on your character. It's weirdly heartwrenching in a really uncommon and compelling way. Dazzlyn had been on the outside looking in at this kind of situation plenty of times before, and she had always had a nice and encouraging thing to say as she helped shoulder the burden and get things back on track for Alphinaud or Lyse or Cid or whoever. The game has, since antiquity, given you much appreciated little dialogue choices that don't really matter much in the scheme of things but let you kind of carve out your own characterization, and the way Dazzlyn turned out was somebody who just really cared way too much about all of her dumb stupid impossible friends who kept fucking up.

One thing that longtime players of the game have complained about quite a bit over the years is that your NPC friends never seemed very. Like. Personally close to you, with a couple of exceptions like Alisae. Shadowbringers both fixes that by introducing the Trust system, which lets you take your Scion buddies into dungeons with you instead of other players, if you are so inclined, and sort of turns it back around to be a kind of poignant narrative point. After everything she had done for them, unconditionally and with a smile, none of the Scions could actually find a way to help Dazzlyn when she finally ended up being the one who needed it. And this -fucks them up-, emotionally. Like, bad. Alisae nearly has a crying fit over it in one of Shadowbringer's more affecting scenes. And just watching the whole thing unfold fucked me up, too. Like, I hadn't signed up for this. I was (relatively) safe in the knowledge that they would not have the gall to actually kill off the player character in an ongoing MMO, but it wasn't necessarily the fear of something happening to her that was getting to me. It was more just this feeling of "god, she deserves better. this isn't fair." The emotional pain that, well, everybody involved is going through is extremely real, even if the threat of genuine death is not. I know (mostly) (please god) that Dazzlyn is going to be okay, but she doesn't. Her friends certainly don't. And even when she does miraculously pull through, it's not like all of this grief and fear and anxiety is going to just vanish like it never happened.

I really have to stress how completely and catastrophically wrong this could have gone if the writers responsible weren't sufficiently skilled. I'm pretty sure if I idly suggested a BFA era World of Warcraft storyline like this to somebody who still plays they would have an apoplectic fit. It would have been so easy for this kind of exercise to ascribe character traits and emotions to a very personal interpretation of the Warrior of Light that they would never have, for any one person's vision of them. The FFXIV writing team avoided this issue entirely, probably because they knew if they didn't people would go ape, by focusing the brunt of the expressed distress on your friends and just leaving you yourself some time to take in the enormity of how badly things have gone wrong in customary silence. A subdued facial expression here, a dialogue option there. No more than strictly necessary. The game encourages you to draw your own conclusions about what your Warrior is feeling, how they're coping, if they even have any hope left, but it does not overstep its bounds and do it for you. It's just... really masterfully done. The overall arc of Shadowbringers can be described as "intriguing, well realized, and competently done." The overarching ideas presented aren't like, groundbreaking or anything. What is groundbreaking, at least to me, is this miraculous giving of life to a character that was originally intended as as simple player avatar.

At the end of the day, everybody rallies around you, as they usually do, but it is markedly different this time. It isn't some facile repetition of the idea that the Warrior of Light/Darkness/Pants-theft is this focal point of hope given form and life to everyone. Instead, it's this... oddly touching expression of friendship. Commitment. It's all probably going to end in tragedy. There's nothing anybody can really do. But they're going to stay with you until the bitter end anyway, because they care about you. If nothing else, they can't bear to think of you dying alone and in agony. Even the citizens of the Crystarium, with whom you do not share a bond that goes back literal years, show up to give you some words of encouragement. They show up to tell you that it's okay that you failed. It's okay that you got hurt, it's okay that you're in pain, that you're scared, that you're vulnerable, that you don't know what to do. After spending such a long time in the game's lore as being kind of invincible and infallible except for the occasional matter of pesky Imperial Viceroys and Old Kung-fu Men, it's just... affecting. It's not often done in games, at least that I have played and seen.

Does this one story moment justify making Shadowbringers the game of the decade? Honestly? Kind of. To me, art has always been about emotional reaction. This kind of reaction is something special, even for a crybaby idiot bitch like me. Moments like these are what make or break truly fantastic experiences. Finally finding Vendrick in the Tomb as that haunting, off-key melody starts playing. Realizing the true nature of the Upper Cathedral Ward. Hearing a beautiful piece of music in Rito Village and thinking about what that song means to you. Admitting that you care about your Warrior of Darkness more than you thought. They're all quite different, running the gamut from existential despair, stomach turning fear, a deep and abiding nostalgia and longing for what used to be, to a sincere, melancholy affection for a game world I've been a part of for almost six years. There's one unbroken thread: a cascade of genuine emotion. Something that goes beyond the simple pressing of buttons and jolts of serotonin as the numbers go up or the bad guys die.

Fortunately for my general credibility, Shadowbringers is also just really good in general. Soken's soundtrack is, as always, kind of spooky in how high quality it is. The presentation is top notch as usual. Encounter design is probably the best its ever been in terms of balancing accessibility and challenge and having mechanics that actually Work As Intended and not nightmarish garbage like Digititis and Black Hole Walking. Royal Pentacle! Server ticks! Server ticks! Uh. Sorry. Going slightly feral there. Anyway. Overall, I think Shadowbringers is the most polished expansion so far, in all respects, and its narrative quality in particular is kind of transcendent because of what it accomplishes in regards to how players see themselves in relation to an unfolding story. Also, it has an unfair advantage, because it's also a continuation of Nier Automata now! That's two games of the decade in one! Now, due to the serial nature of it all, I will allow that if something goes... like, inconceivably, catastrophically wrong with 5.2 - 5.5 I might be a little premature in my assessment. That said, 5.1 was just as fantastic as 5.0 and I don't see a reason to assume that the quality will so drastically drop in the coming months.

If you're somebody who really likes Rankings, here is a pretty noncommital list of them going from least good to best good but they're all special damn it.

10. Super Mario Galaxy 2 9. Breath of the Wild 8. Stellaris 7. Darkest Dungeon 6. Salt and Sanctuary 5. Dark Souls 4. Nier Automata 3. Bloodborne 2. Dark Souls II 1. Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers

And here's a couple of Honorable Mentions just because!

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

To be honest, this easily could have taken the place of like. Breath of the Wild or SMG2 if I was just a little bit more into Sekiro's aesthetic. It's easily the most technical and best-playing game that Miyazaki's team has put out so far, with a very simple to learn, difficult to master system of fighting based more around swordfighting than "shove large axe into monster butt" its predcessors liked so much. It also has a well-told story about a fairly down to earth conflict between an independent fiefdom and Japan's internal ministry trying to conquer it, with a splash of supernatural weirdness to give it some spice. There are monkeys with guns. Sekiro is just fantastically put together, and I really did end up loving Wolf as a main character, despite my initial misgivings about one of these games without a character creator. Wolf is kind of a lovable chuuni dipshit who tries his best in completely unreasonable circumstances and having him as an anchor lets Sekiro's story be more personal and self-contained in nature than the heady cosmological epics of the Souls games, which was a nice change of pace. Ultimately, though, I just find ineffably weird nature of the earlier titles to be a bit more interesting than shinobi and samurai, which is why Sekiro gets an honorable menchie and not a top spot. Don't get me wrong though shinobi and samurai are dope and Sekiro is not a -worse- game for their inclusion. It's just a matter of personal preference, and I could easily see this game taking a top spot on somebody else's list.

Pokemon X and Y

I am a Pokemon bitch. I play all of them, except for black/white 2 and ultra sun/moon, which seemed too similar to their predecessors to really justify spending my precious, jealously guarded money on them. I feel that in general, X and Y has overall, the best mix of available pokemon, world design, music, Fun Little Things, and general game flow of all of them. Sword and Shield excepted I am still in the middle of that one. Pokemon is absolutely kind of video game comfort food, and its kind of just. There's not a lot to it emotionally, though it does have some fairly in depth mechanics and shit if you want to look into it. I don't know I just really liked X and Y. I felt like it deserved mentioning.

Blade and Soul

This game is awful I'm pretty sure but I have so many fond memories of playing it with people I love and creating a ridiculous titty oil monster and having adventures with her sorry i'm trash

So there you have it. A very personal (sometimes maybe probably too personal) look at the ten games that I found to be the best that came out in the last ten years. Now, I usually consider my opinions on these things to be fairly well reasoned, but in this case, I did rely a lot more on the touchy feely qualitative things that are really important to me over the necessary but lamentable "yes i suppose this game is technically competent and plays extremely well" considerations a more objective list of this kind would entail. So you're free to disagree and think I'm stupid and wrong. I would prefer it if you did not think I was stupid, though, but the fact of the matter is I cannot stop you. Here's to another ten years of wonderful games that make us feel things.

[blessuswithblogs]

Video Games are a God Damned Mess: Bad Business Practices, Unsustainability, and the Fidelity Plateau

(shoutouts to the anon rando in my inbox for telling me about the read more button you were kind of rude about it but i don’t use this website so i legit didn’t know)

The video game industry has always been a bit wild and wooly compared to its older contemporaries. The emergence of a new medium is always rife with upheaval as paradigms shift and people discover that the old rules don't necessarily apply all of the time. That said, the past three months have been filled with what I can really only describe as catastrophes for many disparate publishers and development studios.

 You may recall I talked a bit about this during my game of the year list and Fallout 76 analysis, but to recap: with Telltale shutting its doors and shafting its workers, the writing was on the wall for the same thing to happen again as the intrinsically unsustainable boom and bust cycle began the less glamorous stage. It turns out I was correct in my predictions but congratulating myself for seeing this coming is not unlike congratulating myself for accurately predicting that tomorrow will be Tuesday. Or. Whatever day it will be when I post this. fuck i dated the lp thread ruined LOOK the point is that this was really obviously going to happen and that nobody felt the need to prepare for it or try to stop it before 10% of Activision-Blizzard's workforce got canned is a major failure of the industry at large.

So let's talk a bit about what's happened since then. There's been a lot, so forgive me if I miss your favorite corporate implosion. First, at Blizzcon, Diablo Immortal was revealed to what actually might have been the most actively hostile reception of a game in history. This has less to do with the more financial aspects of the ongoing Videocon Crisis and more just kind of served as an ill omen and an example of Blizzard's worrying descent into... wherever it is they're going. If gross incompetence was a place, they would be descending into it. On paper, a Diablo mobile game is a money-printing proposition. When all is said and done Immortal will still probably make them gobs of cash. In practice, however, they fucked the landing so hard they probably lost potential sales. The kind of folks who go to Blizzcon and get omegahype for a new diablo game are not the kind of folks who play mobile games. Mobile games have a Stigma among the hardcore crowd, and also the Ethical Business Practices in Video Games crowd (which as of this writing appears to be me, Jim Sterling, and the Warframe devteam). For a lot of braindead gamerbros, mobile games are synonymous with things like Candy Crush and Peggle, which are perfectly fine games honestly but they're For Girls or some shit so mobile games are bad and for casuals. More pertinently, mobile games are also a ferocious jungle of microtransactions, pay2win mechanics, and generally shoddy design. Command and Conquer and Dungeon Keeper, beloved franchises that have been ripe for revisiting for years now, both found mobile games and they were both utterly terrible. These games make a great deal of their money by exploiting "whales", or in actual human being language, vulnerable people with disposable income and difficulties with impulse control or addictive personalities. Or kids who know their mom's creditcard number. Kids play video games. Now that we are no longer kids (theoretically, anyway) it can be easy to forget that. I'm not the pearl-clutching type, but I think that stigmatizing a genre of games that proudly touts an exploitative-of-children business model is probably okay.

So there are lots of reasons to be skeptical of Diablo Immortal right out of the gate, and quite frankly whoever thought that just pushing that out there with literally no other Diablo related news items (like any whispers of the long coveted hd remaster of diablo the second) was either transferred in from another company the day before or had some kind of unspeakable grudge against the scheduled presenters, to whom my heart goes out to. There is also some undeniable precedent that Blizzard-Activision will, in all likelihood, monetize the everloving daylights out of it. Both Hearthstone and Overwatch have more or less become nicely polished vehicles with which to deliver lootboxes to players for a nominal fee. If this hadn't been followed by a seemingly unceasing calvacade of disasters, the whole debacle would have been really funny to point and laugh at. It's still pretty funny to point and laugh at, but it also has some less amusing implications. Blizzard in particular has been up to a lot of no good lately. Let's talk a little bit about their recent one-two punch.

First up, we have the complete and sudden abandonment of competitive support for Heroes of the Storm. Heroes of the Storm was essentially Blizzard's seething regret and resentment for letting Valve snatch up the whole Defense of the Ancients thing put into code and unleashed upon an unwitting populace. It had actually been gaining some renewed interest over the past year or so due to the developers putting in some elbow grease and making the game both more accessible and just. More better. HotS has also had a modest but respectable eSports scene since the game's launch, with a variety of professional players, shoutcasters, tournament organizers and emergency bugfixers employed. Many of them were anxious about their jobs for months in advance with no word from the higher ups about who would still be employed by 2019. Sometimes, companies have to make difficult decisions and let people go to keep operating. Even my communist ass reluctantly accepts this as a reality of the system we live in. However, there is a protocol about this kind of thing. Giving notice. Giving, you know, severance pay. Stuff like that. And of course this presupposes that this sort of cut to the workforce is actually necessary in the first place. Given that AB subsequently reported record profits for the year of 2018, I have some doubts. Completely dropping support for a game out of the blue is a scummy thing to do to your playerbase. When it is also directly impacting the livelihood of hundreds of people in your employ, it goes beyond scummy and turns right into Unacceptable.

But "unacceptable" is Bobby Kotick's favorite word in the English language so while shoving hundred dollar bills from his latest corporate bonus up his butt he and his friends in the boardroom decided that the HotS esports people might get lonely, so they had better go and fire another 10% of the workforce too. Just because. Like literally just because. His company is doing fine - better than fine! They are at record levels of better than fine. But the shareholders demand more and more exponential growth, so to cut costs that really didn't need cutting, away goes 10%. Will game quality suffer because of this? Undoubtedly. More work being piled on fewer people who are also living in mortal fear of losing their jobs Just Because is not a recipe for success. People are mad about this, much like people were/are mad about Fallout 76 - players of games, industry wonks, and iconic voice actresses alike are no longer tolerating this kind of thing in Two Thousand and Nineteen, Common Era. Nor should they!

Elsewhere in the Game-o-sphere, similar developments are brewing. ArenaNet, the folks wot do Guildwars, went through another round of mass layoffs. EA's stocks have plummeted and Battlefield V "failed to meet expectations" because it only sold A Ton and not A Fuckin Shit Ton, and Anthem is not really lighting the world on fire. After Mass Effect Andromeda's... curious debut, Bioware has probably been feeling the heat and a lot of people are concerned that it too will suffer the ultimate fate of all studios acquired by Electronic Arts: joining Visceral Games in a broken heap at the bottom of the garbage chute. Bring back Dead Space you motherfuckers. Bethesda continues to, improbably, suffer through PR disaster after PR disaster with Fallout 76, a game that seemingly cannot stop fucking up. Ubisoft has received some positive attention for vowing to NOT lay off hundreds of employees for no discernible reason, which leads me to believe that our standards for praiseworthy behavior have dropped alarmingly low. Even 2K Games in all of its monolithic glory seems to be feeling a bit of a Stock Price Squeeze. Honestly by the time I get this done and posted it's entirely possible that somebody else will fuck something up. I'm still kind of waiting on the fallout from Randy Pitchford's porn thumbdrive, but I'm also a little bit pleased that Actual Money Crimes are getting more traction in the news cycle.

So, returning to the main point: the industry is in a bad situation of its own making. It's a scene that's almost always been defined by trend-chasing. For a while, that meant that we would just have to suffer through an endless glut of EXTREME SPORTS GAMES SPONSORED BY A DUDE or a barrage of samey console shooters desperately trying to be Halo every once in a while. Unfortunately, the trend-chasing now extends not only to the games themselves, but to the methods by which they are monetized. Ever since DLC became a mainstream thing, the brightest minds of the boardrooms have been working tirelessly to deduce which method of fleecing players will scientifically speaking get them the most money. Inevitably, when some enterprising little weasel develops a new and improved monetization scheme, the rest of the little weasels will immediately latch on to that scheme and that's how you end up with Battlefront 2's ridiculous lootbox grind and Shadow of War's ludicrous inclusion of randomized lootboxes in a singleplayer action-adventure game. While I'm certain that the platonic ideal of the lootbox has existed in some form or another for decades now, I think that we can squarely lay the blame for the Great Lootbox Plague of the Twenty-Tens at the feet of Valve.

Valve has been known for questionable business practices for a while now (albeit in a more lowkey way than We Fired 800 People So Bobby Kotick Could Buy a New Yacht), largely getting away with it because Steam has been more or less unchallenged as the premier digital distribution service for video games. This might be changing soon, as Epic Games is going straight for the jugular with a number of aggressive moves with its own fledgling platform, but historically, Valve has faced very few consequences for just kind of being petulantly antagonistic towards its userbase because said userbase is easily mollified by steam sales and Gaben memes. When people think lootboxes in 2019, they probably think of games like Overwatch or Battlefront 2 or basically any contemporary multiplayer game. I certainly do, but a bit of fact finding allowed me to remember that Valve has been doing this shit since Counterstrike and Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2's byzantine cosmetics market can't be overlooked either. All three of these games are or were at one point genre leaders and made Valve so much money they basically decided that they didn't really need to make games anymore. A reasonable conclusion to draw, given the fact all three of these games are inextricably linked to their history as very popular mods. Valve just outsources a great deal of its labor to dedicated, naive fans and gives them a pittance of the huge mounds of dollars they make from their hard work. It's a good racket, but it has set an alarmingly poor example to the rest of the gaming world.

Games as a service, in concept, is fine for games that lend themselves well to the idea. MMOs have been using a variation of the model for decades now and that genre is actually like, Perplexingly Healthy. Free to play games like League of Legends and Warframe have also had success with a service model. The problem comes from the AAA Game industry's pathological insistence on shoving square pegs into things that don't even have holes to begin with. Shadow of War, or Assassin's Creed, or any other major singleplayer offering, has no business whatsoever being a Live Service. They are finite experiences by design and that's completely fucking fine and normal. Appending microtransactions and lootboxes to them is a transparent attempt to just suck up a little bit more money from players in the most unsustainable way possible. Here is a small hint if some WB Games bigwig stumbles upon this: first of all, I'm building a guillotine, so you better watch your ass. Second, how dare you fucking make Shelob a sexy lady. Third, (this is the one that is probably most relevant): People are willing to pay as they go for cosmetics and timesavers for games that they like and want to support. I've dumped a lot of money into League over the years because there was a period of time where I was playing it nonstop and having a wonderful time for quite literally no cost to myself, so I felt like buying the cute Panda Annie Skin was a good compromise. Regrettably I would later learn that there are aspects of Riot Games I'm not super okay with giving money to but at the time they seemed agreeable and my friends who work there gotta get payed somehow. This whole dynamic of wanting to support a video game goes out the damn window when you are already charging a $60 entry fee, plus whatever highway robbery pricing you put on the inevitable DLC. In this case, the onus is squarely upon the publisher to provide an experience and content one would reasonably expect of the pricetag. Putting in microtransactions for cosmetics is galling. Putting in microtransactions for actual game progression, like in Battlefront 2 or Shadow of War, is outright insulting.

Many will leap to the defense of these publishers and developers, saying that these measures are necessary to make these ludicrously expensive and lavish AAA games that all look suspiciously like one another. For the time being, let's accept this as a true statement. If this is, in fact, the state of affairs in the industry, then the industry needs to change to a more sustainable business model. When playing Destiny 2, during a big space cutscene, the cute pilot lady ferrying me to The Large Molerat Man's Murderboat had beautifully rendered skin where you could see the pores and the little wispy cheek hairs that swayed to the momentum of the space plane's movements. It was very nice but then the next year or so I heard nothing but people pointing out "hey this game has no content you dipshits" or "the devteam is actually scamming people with the experience system to wring more playtime out of them". The cheek hairs affair succeeded in making me want the pilot to buy me dinner and regail me with stories of her space adventures as I batted my lashes at her in romantic admiration, but also: stop it. You do not need to do this. This is strictly unnecessary. The graphics arms race of yesteryear is over. Nobody cares anymore. Fidelity is plateauing harder and harder, to the point where games running properly on console without having to settle for 30FPS is becoming very difficult. There is an Earth B somewhere out there where Bloodborne was not a sony exclusive and got a PC release with 60FPS support and loading times for humans and on Earth B I am still playing that game for the forseeable future because it is the best game ever. We are far past the paradigm where we are making Tremendous Graphical Leaps with each successive generation. Right now, as of this writing, games look jawdroppingly good. Just ludicrously pretty and grandiose. Continuing to push the graphical envelope for Every Damn Annual Release is a waste of resources: monetary resources, labor resources, system resources. As of March, 2019, what people really want is stability and functionality. Something that runs nice and smooth at 60FPS and doesn't turn its characters randomly into nightmare inverse-Rayman beasts. I think the huge success of the Nintendo Switch, a console with relatively modest hardware but superb functionality, portability, and a surprisingly full featured library of both massive first party titles, like Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey (which honestly look better than a lot of games on more robust hardware because of wonderful art direction) and smaller indie games, is testament to this line of thinking.

Maybe that's too bold of a statement. Maybe there's this huge swath of the gaming public that is just clamoring for more cheek hairs. If there are I think they're fucking out of their minds but who am I to judge. As long as games like that werewolf game The Order exist, where the universal reaction is "this is so pretty!!! ...wait there's nothing in here." I think that there is a serious responsibility to push back against that because evidently it's bankrupting the game industry and forcing them to violate international gambling laws to stay afloat. Except it's fucking not, actually. Many publishers are claiming record profits, upward trends, and are in a spot to have the raw nerve to say "well this game that sold 7 million copies didn't sell 8 million copies so it failed to meet expectations". They are doing ludicrously well for themselves in terms of generating revenue from sales. Where these highly successful corporations are running into problems is satisfying the almighty Shareholders. Shareholders are sort of like. Imagine if you got a job where you had to keep a large committee of actual babies happy, except the babies don't know shit about fuck about anything and demand that you routinely break all reasonable laws of sustainability and keep bringing in exponentially higher profits or they will take their ball and go home. There is still, evidently, money enough to give newly hired executives million dollar signing bonuses, but when it comes to just making a game that doesn't fall back on exploiting people with gambling addictions, we're suddenly dealing with an outfit of noble, longsuffering churchmice just trying to make ends meet. People are rapidly getting fed up with this blatant hypocrisy and dishonesty. Sales from Hearthstone card packs alone could fund a robust HotS esports scene for eternity if properly apportioned. This money is not properly apportioned. It is thrown into a gigantic incinerator so Kotick can get high on the fumes.

You might be wondering what this girls' deal is with Blizzard. Surely there are more egregious offenders? Firstly, Blizzard is very relevant at the moment because they are one of the highest profile publishers to recently Do A Business Oopsie. Secondly, I live in Irvine, California. Blizzard HQ is a ten minute drive from where I live. It's a local company to me, and it's legitimately kind of hard to see it continue to go down this path because I've had friends and neighbors who have worked there and enthusiastically described the experience right up until the very moment they get canned for no reason. My alma mater, UC Irvine, is one of the leading schools in the nation on adopting eSports into their collegiate athlete program. I understand, to a lot of people, Electronic Sports (please support them) are a big joke silly thing, but to me and my family who work in the UC system, they're actually like a huge and pertinent part of professional life. I'm literally being consulted by my mom's co-workers for advice and insight on how to minimize the abusive and toxic behavior that has become synonymous with streaming and professional gaming because campus now has a huge eSports center with rows on rows of gaming computers for students to use. Games Are Big. They are a powerful cultural and economic force in the lives of millions of people and denying that because of "haha nerds" is the same shortsighted, utterly-lacking-in-self-awareness wanking that resulted in the stupendously destructive "its just the internet, it doesnt matter lol" attitude that has caused the world so much grief. That said Bart Simpson becoming an esports legend sponsored by Riot Games is still pretty lame don't @ me.

What it comes down to is this: the games industry has grown into a hugely influential and powerful institution that affects the lives of more and more people every day. However, the appropriate growth in regulation, oversight, and worker protection has not occurred and has honestly shrunk. People love to talk up Satoru Iwata because when the Wii U was floundering he took a massive pay cut and refused to lay off any staff, reasoning that "it will be very difficult for our teams to create software that will impress the world when they are constantly worrying about losing their jobs." It's a little incredible that The Baseline Reasonable Thing To Do has elicited such effusive praise, but that's the world we live in and Iwata-san was pretty alright so I'm okay with it. Both his conduct and reasoning are both solidly above reproach in this case: it is really hard to be creative when the Sword of Damocles is hanging over your head! That’s 500% true! This goes for game developers, community managers, eSports staff, support staff, literally every part of the process that matters, even the totally unrelated clerks and communications people who are still completely necessary for creating games. The only people who don't suffer are the dipshits on top who don't actually contribute to the creation of games in any way. They're still fine. Better than fine, really. That's why people are mad. That's why people SHOULD be mad. Don't stand for this anymore.

[blessuswithblogs]

Katsura Hashino is a Big Fat Creep and Other Observations

(for the record all uses of the word “queer” in this post are meant in the academic sense as shorthand for a wide umbrella group of gender and sexual minorities and not as a slur i hope that is evident from my past history and status as Big Gay Bitch Who Loves Girls but let it never be said i don’t cover my ass)

A few weeks ago, Catherine: Full Body Edition or whatever gross subtitle it got was released. Catherine has had a very checkered history as one of those games that is just kind of slimy, though it has endured with a cult following and a surprisingly successful competitive community by way of the game's multiplayer mode where you compete to see who can climb The Dream Sex Tower the best. Honestly, I don't know that much about Catherine because it is difficult to think of a game that repulses me more on a visceral level, but I want to do my due diligence and not talk out my ass. One of Catherine's initial claims to fame was that it was by Atlus Japan, specifically the same people who made the much beloved Persona games. This is evident in the game's art, music, overall style of delivery, and being basically hate speech.

The original Catherine was a greasy, misogynistic mess with some really vile politics about trans people in particular. Deadnaming your own fictional character in the credits is some next level petty malice. Full Body returns with, stupendously, a double down on this ideology that is actually kind of comical in how convoluted it gets in trying to decry the Degenerate Queer Lifestyle. The game adds a scene with Rin, who is apparently a gay crossdresser from space(???????), getting slapped away and running away crying from their love interest after he learns The Terrible Truth. In another game, with a different writing team, this could have been a teachable moment about the destructive consequences of taking too narrow a view of human sexuality and gender expression, but as it stands it's just another tiresome example of Trans Panic with a sheepish admonishment from the other characters that gosh maybe slapping their hand away was a mean thing to do.

So we're already firing on all cylinders here, but the best is yet to come. The bulk of the outcry comes from the addition of a weird "true ending" cutscene where Catherine, who is also from space, goes back in time to make everybody's life better. Or something. This is already pretty stupid on the face of it because its Fucking Time Travel Out of Nowhere, but the scene then depicts a pre-transition Erica, the game's trans character who got deadnamed in the credits the last time. There has been a lot of exceptionally tedious discussion about exactly when this scene takes place in the game's chronology and what it means for Erica, and some brain geniuses have tied their thinkmeats into pretzel shapes to prove definitively that all this means is that she delayed her transition in this Better Timeline, that might not actually be better, because Catherine is weird and selfish, maybe. And. Fine. Sure. Okay. Let's accept that for now. Given the game's previous track record, and continuing insistence on using Erica's pretransition name in the credits even in the rerelease, it is meanspirited at best to show her before her transition at all (many real life trans people would be utterly mortified for such a thing to happen to them) and overall just in poor taste and pretty lousy writing at that because it's so unclear what any of this actually means. Since the game has not yet received an official english localization, the context of this scene is to begin with muddled by amateur translators on the internet all with slightly conflicting interpretations of the scene. It's a fucking mess, by and large.

So I would disagree that this is a fake controversy manufactured by those damnable essjaydubyas. Even with the most charitable interpretation possible, it's still just really sketchy and gross. Erica's english voice actress, who seems to be very fond of the character, has been vocal about her dissatisfaction with the new scenes on twitter and has recently come out to say that the localization team is going to try and take some steps to make things less blatantly hateful. Between this and Jennifer Hale's recent tweet about it being time to grab our pitchforks in response to Activision-Blizzard's mass layoffs, I'm starting to think that voice actresses are pretty cool. I mean honestly I always thought that but we're getting off topic. One of the top competitive Catherine players, who was by all accounts really hyped for the release of Full Body, just straight up said on twitter that he was quitting the game because he couldn't support something like that in good conscience. I don't know if he's remained consistent on this position since, but it was a bold statement, to say the least.

Now, whenever an incident like this happens, the inevitable string of More-Progressive-Than-Thou white boys who watched an anime once and thought the bouncing titties were a little much appears to start pontificating about the cause of such untoward elements in media. And it's basically all just a bunch of Orientalist bullshit. Every time. For whatever reason, people still really love to be racist towards Japanese people because it's still sort of socially acceptable when couched in the language of "oh japan!!! ecks dee" and so the neverending procession of softboi neckbeards declared with confidence that Atlus's continual inclusion of Actual Hate Speech towards LGBTQ+ people was the result of the inscrutable Japanese Mind and its Mysterious, Antiquated Culture. Many mentions of the philosophy of Wa, wherein the nail that stands out gets pounded down, and lots of very lovely psuedointellectual claptrap. Evidently, people just seem to think that queer people don't live in Japan, or that they don't fight just as hard as we do for equal rights and protections under the law. They do live there, and they do fight as hard as we do. Obviously. You fucking imbeciles.

In their quest to clearly illustrate their moral and intellectual superiority to the backward, collectivist Asiatic Peoples, these highly reasonable and enlightened manboys forsook a very important logical principle: Occam's Razor. Sure, you could blame jApAnEsE cUlTuRe for Atlus's impropieties and just conveniently ignore all of the fantastic queer media it has produced in recent years like My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, Horou Muskou, Nier Automata, etc. Or you could go for the simpler and more logically consistent option: Katsura Hashino is a big fat creep. Who is Hashino, you ask? He is the director of every Persona game since 3, as well as Catherine, and all of these games' gross shit and self-contradictory themes of self-acceptance and rebellion against an unust society (unless you're gay, ew) can probably be traced to him and his gaggle of accomplices. In addition to the fact that Atlus games not by Hashino's team tend to just. not have these problems to nearly as large a degree or even at all, Hashino himself has gone on record saying some really kind of hilariously backwards shit. Most infamously, when asked why in Persona 3 literally all of your social links with girls ended up with Hot Makeout Sessions regardless of like. Previously Committed to Relationships. Hashino simply said he couldn't imagine friendships between boys and girls. So that's where his brain is at. Since subsequent games in the series graciously allowed the player the option to not be a Huge Cheating Bastard, one can assume either his moral development has progressed past early puberty or somebody on the team convinced him this wasn't actually a normal thing to think. Given the man's output, I would say it's probably the latter.

It is because of this man's decisions and behavior that so many people are simply unwilling to give Full Body the benefit of the doubt. The game's director is, quite simply, a well known louse, and not in the endearing, Roger Smith way. Once again, it requires far fewer leaps in logic to assume that Hashino is just being a bigoted creep again than to go through some fuckin galaxy brain Kingdom Hearts-esque dot-connecting to justify it as just a LITTLE BIT bigoted not REALLY SUPER bigoted, or simply blaming the whole ordeal on some strange ineffable property of the Japanese Character. He's a gremlin! An overgrown manchild with a warped view of human interaction and society put in charge of games about exploring those concepts for.... reasons. My bet is that his dad knew somebody and then Persona 3 was successful enough for the rest of Atlus to just go "alright fine let him do it while we do mainline games". Unfortunately, Persona became so popular that the mainline games sort of switched places and became side-projects, at least in the eyes of the Western consumer base (which let's be real is the only perspective that any of these Serious Online Commentators even pretend to care about).

So I would once again caution everyone against just assuming that Japan is some sort of quaint anachronistic country of weird gameshows and backwards social mores. This is both a gross oversimplification of an entire culture and the struggles of their own subgroups and minorities and simply a grand display of lacking self-awareness. Like have you fucking seen the guys in the White House? The preposterous media that gets routinely greenlit on prime time TV, theaters, and digitally? Don't make me laugh. The West has no claim to any sort of progressive superiority to anybody else. The white cishet bubble of comfortable middle class affluence might distort what you see of the rest of the world, but believe me: we got problems too. Big ones. Even the presupposed bastions of Demsoc Virtue like Sweden have an awful track record of discrimination and eugenics. But Dazzlyn that's different, you cry! All of these groups and forces don't represent the entirety of Western culture! Yes. Exactly. Oppression is not culturally bound like cuisine or art. It is a nasty, universal thing that worms its way into everything, and it will use any excuse it can find to murder and exploit. It's against Christian values! It represents a genetic defect that must be purged! It's ostentatious and immature! The list goes on. And every time you giggle and go "oh those silly japanese" you're just being another expression of the same vile ideas.

I'm going to relate some of my own personal experiences, because as a noted Big Gay Bitch Who Loves Girls, I feel like maybe I have some authority on the matter? Just a little? Enough that if I make a well reasoned argument it can't be dismissed out of hand? Let's hope. So, what's the gayest game I've ever played? Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn. Look yeah I know I'm talking about it again but come back this is important. Final Fantasy is a series that has had a lot of LGBTQ+ undertones pretty much since forever, and while they have largely been in keeping with the times in terms of tact and representation (the Crossdressing Cloud debacle is a deeply bizarre, uncomfortable sequence in a lot of ways but there's also some genuine Good Gay Shit in 7 like Cloud's surprisingly cute and genuine date with Barret. I think. It's... it's been a while.), by God, it was at least there, and 13 had honest to god Lesbians, Harold in Fang and Vanille. I don't want to say it has pedigree, but the series has dabbled. XIV continues on the tradition with a vibrant world that's actually got a lot of characters and NPCs that are just incidentally there and kind of gay. The adventurer couple that befriended the Tonberries in Wanderer's Palace, a vendor that appeared in the Rising cosplaying as Minfilia at her wife's behest, a miqote lady bathing in the oasis that lets on she wouldn't mind having cute girls stare at her instead of grabby boys, every horny Elezen in Ishgard, Samson and Guydelot (shoutouts to Lulumi Lumi), and probably more that I've missed. More than that, though, is that because FFXIV is an MMO, it is by necessity a social space, and in my experience it has been one that has gone out of its way to be inclusive to everybody, from the GMs handling reports of abusive behavior right up to the top decision makers who made same sex player marriages a thing just immediately on its implementation and letting boys wear the gold saucer bunny costume too (albeit after quite a bit of pleading). The game's got a huge queer community of which I am kind of part of sort of. It's one of the reasons I keep coming back to it. Hell, they've recently partnered with a pride group in Australia to have an FFXIV float in a parade. I usually turn my nose up at such things as meaningless corporate grandstanding, but it does seem to be more meaningful than two boy pastas getting married or rainbow colored oreos because like. Cheesy as it sounds, it's more than just a brand to a lot of people, it's a place, sometimes the only place, they can go to feel safe and accepted in a community. Having official, vocal support from the dev team means genuinely a lot, I think.

Now, there is one quality about this game of which I am speaking that might strike you as noteworthy: it is Japanese. It's made by Japanese people, in Japan, under a Japanese company. A middle aged Japanese man goes up on stage in Gunbreaker cosplay to speak in Japanese about the upcoming expansion, while a meme obsessed gremlin translates for him. It's not perfect, there are problems, etcetera, why do I even need to qualify that in 2019, when everything sucks, god. But it's better than most things. I hope that it serves as an example to people that even in the supposedly regressive countries of the world, queer communities are still living, fighting, and sometimes even being heard, and that the only thing you're enriching by dismissing them wholesale as socially backwards is your own internet penis. And nobody fucking cares about that you simpleton. I expect 5.0 to be gayer than ever before because they're taming up with Yoko Taro to do a Nier themed raid and by the 12 Warrior of Light Dazzyn Reed is going to kiss 2B or an equivalent model right on the robot lips.

[blessuswithblogs]

2018 Game of the Year Top Ten List I guess

2018 has been an interminable mire of exhausting miasma and quite frankly I feel like it has been longer than the entire stretch of 2010-2015 combined. I also didn't play many games released this year because, like last year, I'm still poor. I'll see what I can dig up.

10. Sunset Overdrive PC edition: It's a fun open world game by insomniac. The PC Port is actually balls but like. It's a good game with a unique emphasis on how you traverse the game world, where you can grind and bounce on just about anything and indeed to do so is the only way to not get totally chewed up by the hordes of mutants and scavengers and robots you have to fight. There's also some pretty fun and out there weapons to use, like a gun that shoots vinyl records or one that deploys little auto-turrets kept aloft with propellers or one that shoots out a bowling ball at terminal velocity. The base game didn't actually come out this year (I dont... think it did...?) but it was an XBone exclusive so I didn't play it then. It's got some weird problems with narrative tone and some kind of out of the blue racism but the M rated Nickolodeon toy commercial aesthetic is charming in a weird way. I guess.

9. The Forest: I think this got an official release this year? I don't know I can't fucking keep track. Speaking of a game with weird problems with racism, if you can look past the garbage "main quest" and really deeply uncomfortable racial politics where you murder and steal from cannibal mutants, The Forest is probably the best cool treefort building simulator I've ever played. This game has a love affair with lumber and I respect that. Shouldn't you be looking for Timmy, you ask me? Shouldn't you be shutting the fuck up before I put this airplane axe in your skullmeats? Gazebos are nice. I guess.

8. Spyro: reignited trilogy: haven't actually played this yet but let's be real the spyro games were fucking dope back in the day and giving them an HD coat of paint and packaging them all together is a real standup thing for insomniac to do in between slinging webs and making questionable pc ports. Also its like Dark Souls so it has to be good, right? Everything old is new again. I guess.

7. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: haven't played this one either but like. I know that I am a smash-enjoyer. I even liked Brawl. This is the biggest, smashiest one yet and it's also on the switch which means it could also be portable if I decided I never wanted to leave my bed again. I'm probably going to find some money to get it soon. Should be fun. I guess.

6. The Quiet Man: look no game that is THIS hysterical can be all bad alright? Didn't play it. Won't play it. It's awful. But it's so fucking funny like oh my god. Still better than Fallout 76. I guess.

5. Dark Souls Remastered: was this even a good remaster? I don't fucking know. It's Dark Souls. It's better than 90% of released games by default. I miss Solaire of Astora. I guess there's Shadows Die Twice to look forward to. I guess.

4. Subnautica: I wrote a lot about this actually. Subnautica is great. Just fantastic. A wonderful, visually stunning (mostly) (when it works) journey under an alien ocean to unravel an ancient mystery behind a deadly plague. Building seabases is so much fun (when it doesn't hard crash your computer) and the peaceful playstyle you adopt where you really only kill things for food until you can grow your own, much more efficient produce is a welcome change of pace from everything else. Leviathans are scary, especially now that your cyclops is mortal and not indestructible. This game actually Came Out this year so it deserves to be on the spot. I guess.

3. Dragon Ball Fighterz: Honestly I'm hell trash garbage at fighting games that aren't smash but this was a very well put together, visually impressive as all hell fast paced tag fighter where you can have 3 gokus on the same team fight 3 other gokus on the same team. Goku density alone makes this game worth recommending. The eSports scene that has popped up around it is fun too. I guess.

2. Dead Cells: Another game that gets to be on the list by virtue of it actually coming out this year. Wait, was this on last year's list? Let me check. Ok good it wasn't. Early access is a fucking trip. It's fun, stylish, challenging, has a great deal of variety in ways to play, might have erased my entire save because it became obsolete and I'm definitely not bitter, and it has that classic rogue-lite replay value to give you some bang for your buck. There was that one review plagiarism scandal. I guess.

1. Monster Hunter World: If you really want to know what I think of this game my previous piece on it is a good place to start. In addition to everything said there, MHW is just a fun game. The loop is satisfying and, later on, quite challenging. The combat system takes some genuine getting used to and some monsters like Nergigante actually literally cheat but for the most part the game's unique fighting style, spread across several unique weapon types, is rewarding to learn because it demands some effort be put into it and the dividends of fighting well are very cool, like just knocking a flying monster on its ass with a single mighty swing of the hammer. When a game is hard in any capacity games journalists get dollar signs in their eyes and start drooling uncontrollably because they can immediately declare that Farm Sim 2020 is the next Bloodborne because they somehow managed to roll their tractor into a ditch, but MHW is actually quite similar in style and execution to deliberate Souls combat, but the comparison is made in reverse. Dark Souls is quite similar to Monster Hunter, the first game of which was popular and a couple of years old before Demon's Souls was even a twinkle in Miyazaki's eye. There's a lot of parallels between fighting a big ol' rathalos in monhun and going for the toes against a dragon in Dark Souls, but I think MHW actually does that kind of fight better.  There are a lot of modern conveniences present in MHW that are a godsend to newer players, making the game pretty easy to get into if you're willing to try. It was my favorite game of the year that actually came out in 2018. I kind of wanted to put Warframe in this list but it's been out of early access for years now. I guess.

There were a lot of games this year that I wanted to play, but couldn't. I don't think 2018 was a weak year for video games. It wasn't as strong as 2017 but it had some hits, I just couldn't afford to play them all. Maybe next year I'll be able to give a better list. I think that the whole industry is in for some hard choices and major restructuring of how things get done and how they look at the end result. Stocks continue to trend downward - not just for Bethesda but for most mainstream, prominent AAA developers like EA and Take2. Given the well documented volatility of "The Shareholders", I imagine that they would be most displeased by downward trends even if they were still making a modest profit.

The situation has been likened to an economic bubble ripe for bursting. Games as a cultural institution have come a long way since the catastrophic days of Atari's warehouses of unsold copies of E.T., and I don't believe that we're in any danger of a complete collapse of the institution, but the fact absolutely remains That Something's Gotta Give. The increasingly predatory practices that game developers put in place as they pathologically attempt to Make Every Money Ever are intrinsically unsustainable. People are willing to forgive and overlook the now ubiquitous microtransaction if a game is good enough to overlook it, or if it's the game's only real way of actually making money. Warframe's microtransactions, for instance, are reasonably priced, platinum is often heavily discounted as a login bonus, and you can make large amounts of it without ever spending money thanks to the game's surprisingly robust trading economy. So. Yeah. They get a pass. Warframe is also good on its own merits, despite being free to play. They also listen to their community about pricing. Go check out Warframe. It's free. It's free!!! Warframe is my unofficial top spot.

Sorry I got a little bit distracted. So there's only really two instances where people will tolerate microtransactions and lootboxes in the contemporary sense: either a game is good enough and polished enough and the lootboxes are unobtrusive enough that you can just sort of shrug your shoulders and say "it sucks but what are you gonna do" or it genuinely relies on those microtransactions to support itself. When these tenets are violated, people WILL get mad. People raised absolute hell about Battlefront 2's scummy monetization schemes, enough to get EA to back off. Fallout 76 is getting lambasted in no small part due to its utterly overpriced "cosmetic" shop where you pay ten real dollars to get your power armor to look blue. You can buy fullfeatured, critically acclaimed games for half that price and you already dumped $60 on this lemon of a game. Destiny 2 got into hot water for being cagey about how its exp values were calculated and how the previously free and user-friendly shaders became one-time use items you could only get from rolling the dice. The public is getting positively irate about all of this nonsense, and if Fallout 76 (and evidently battlefield V?) is any indication, we are fast approaching a breaking point where shareholder demand for profit will outpace the consumer's ability to provide it and the developer's ability to skinner box it out of us.

Of course Nintendo continues to march on to the beat of its own drum seemingly unaffected by all of this garbage. Not out of any moral superiority, I imagine. More likely it's just a consequence of that company still being in the process of being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Maybe a few years down the line when everyboy else has abandoned microtransactions Nintendo will pick them up, put a cute Mario motif on it, and we'll be back to square one. Time will tell. We're in a volatile time for games and the timebomb keeps ticking. I just hope the explosion isn't too messy. I guess.

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Wouldn't it be Nice to be Taken Home by that Old Country Road: The Curious Case of Fallout 76

A question that's been on the mind of a lot of people interested in or connected to the games industry lately is one that is tinged with both a sense of derision and a growing note of alarm: What the hell is going on at Bethesda Softworks? The studio does not have a particularly sterling reputation, what with Bethesda games being broken just being a wearily accepted fact of life and Todd Howard's incurable urge to Exaggerate Greatly, but hithertofore, the games that they have produced have been of a fairly high quality in both production value and general design. The Elder Scrolls and Fallout are both well respected, critically and financially successful franchises and as a publisher, the company has earned a great deal of good will by providing a platform for some extremely well loved titles like 2016's superlative DooM and the stealthy whale-punk wonderland Dishonored. The Bethesda name has baggage, but it also has a pedigree and some expectations of quality. With all of that in mind, it is impossible not to ask: how did Fallout 76 happen? To really explore that, we have to go back a ways.

The Fallout franchise has had a troubled history. Despite the initial success of the first two games, mid 90s isometric turn based RPGs with a heavy emphasis on finding creative ways to deal with the challenges of a hostile nuclear wasteland, work on Fallout 3 was plagued with delays and the studio behind it eventually went under, selling the Fallout IP to Bethesda. Bethesda, in turn, created Fallout 3. FO3 was somewhat divisive. While the general public at large enjoyed the curious mixture of gunplay, exploration, and role playing and the game enjoyed good numbers in both sales and reviews, longtime series fans were displeased with the direction Bethesda had taken the Fallout universe, as is well documented on fansites like No Mutants Allowed. FO3 was, personally, my introduction to the series because I was a small child when the first two games were relevant, so while I respect their position, it is not one I have personal investment in. My problems with Fallout 3 were less in comparison to its predecessors and more to do with the fact that the game, despite being fun to explore and mess around in, had all the driving narrative force of a piece of toast. The player's decisions tended to either not matter, or be so ridiculously, hideously binary between "i am a human being with emotions and basic empathy" and "i am a captain planet villain" that you couldn't take them seriously. You can detonate the dormant nuclear bomb in Megaton! For. No good reason whatsoever actually. The caps you get from the wealthy mustache twirling businessman are paltry compared to what you would get from a sustained investment in the town's economy and infrastructure and you lock yourself out of a number of quests and activities.

Fallout New Vegas, however, was an utter delight to play and experience, in part because of how deeply your actions as an agent in the Mojave affected the game world. New Vegas presented a complex and multifaceted political world where several different factions vied for control of the Hoover Dam, an old world relic with both practical and symbolic importance. The game was also just better than FO3 in a lot of ways in terms of world design and gameplay, and written better by an order of magnitude thanks to Obsidian, a studio with roots in the original Black Island that made the first two Fallout games and also tactics if you care about that I guess. The New Vegas team created an incredible experience with a development period that could best be described as "worryingly short", and I get the impression that the main offices never really forgave them for that. It was still janky and buggy but like, surprisingly not as much as the "you have like a year to make this shit" development cycle would seem to demand. New Vegas gave a lot of fans of the older series hope that Bethesda could right the ship and find a comfortable marriage of the looty-shooty-VATSy gameplay of the newer games with the narrative richness and wide variety of conflict resolution methods available in 1 and 2. The final confrontation at the Hoover Dam can be avoided entirely with the right speech checks and knowledge of the Mojave's circumstances. I think you could technically talk Colonel Autumn out of Poisoning the Entire Eastern Seaboard in 3 but uh. None of that plotline ever made much sense.

Unfortunately, Fallout 4 was, to a lot of people, a big fat disappointment and a hard pivot in a direction that basically nobody who played Fallout games actually liked. Taking place on the East Coast, far from the political intrigue of the NCR and Caesar's Legion, you play as a vault dweller with a fixed backstory and character, fully voice acted and deeply constrained by it. Gone were the complex dialogue trees of previous games, replaced by a watered down mass effect conversation wheel where you only ever have 4 choices: Yes, Sarcastic Yes, No, and Ask for Clarification. You don't even get to see what your character is going to say, as each option is represented by a short, often misleading summary of the ensuing dialogue, sometimes as vague as just saying "Sarcastic". Which could be basically anything. I have not met a person who has played the game that actually thought any of this was good or necessary. FO4 was, as had come to be expected in a post skyrim era, buggy and questionably functional. Unlike Skyrim which had the excuse of being super fucking massive by any reasonable standard or New Vegas which had a rushed development cycle, Fallout 4 appeared to be buggy because of a mixture of laziness and complacency. The superhumanly dedicated modding community that has arisen around these games has essentially been contracted by Bethesda as a department of unpaid quality assurance testers and patchers, and for Fallout 4, they seemed to adopt a "kill em all and let the modders sort it out." philosophy. The game ran poorly on launch and required a number of patches, both official and unofficial, to get to where it needed to be, and the console versions (especially the PS4, from what I recall) were unacceptably broken. This became a bit of a controversy after Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb, a critic quite infamous for Not Giving a Fuck about the corporate hype machine, gave the ps4 version of FO4 3 stars out of 5, largely because of how damn janky it was. Which in any sane world is a Good Score, but the Pipboy toting shills who were contractually obligated to see no flaw in the glorious Fallout 4 experience got quite pissy about it.

The game made some forward strides, like the expansion of the concept of Power Armor, turning it from a nice set of endgame equipment to what is basically a walking tank-like vehicle that augments all of your basic abilities and functionalities, or bringing the gunplay more up to par with modern standards. The problem with focusing on these aspects, though, meant that the unique, Fallout-y things about 4 suffered in turn, like the gutted dialogue system, terrible narrative, barebones character building (you only get SPECIAL Stats and Perks. skills flat out don't exist) and simplified radiation mechanics. It was a fun and serviceable enough game, when it worked, but it often did not, and cast a real pall of apprehension and uncertainty about the franchise's future. The simple fact of the matter is that continuing to shore up The Shooting at the expense of everything else is going to make a game that nobody wants to play, because games like Call of Duty and DooM are going to just be better at that, and the endearing things about the Fallout setting won't be around to make up for the less technically proficient gunplay mechanics. The entire system of Preston Garvey constantly badgering you about liberating settlements for the Minute Men has become a meme in and of itself and the base building sim mechanics are intriguing, but ultimately a little too half baked. Some weird grab for the Minecraft market I guess? I can't imagine somebody developing the game decided at one point "this game would be much better with a half-assed finnicky building system" because that is a very odd assumption to make. Further development on the concept could actually make a pretty interesting game on its own, where the Main Quest is actually just looking after your post apocalyptic settlements and making sure they don't starve as you go scavenging for funds and materials. The problem with FO4 is that it tries to juggle that with also being a Fallout game and doesn't do so very gracefully.

With the way that the series has been developing over the past decade or so, the announcement of Fallout 76 was met with some... trepidation, I think, is the best word. People were excited for a new Fallout game, myself included, but the details that emerged about what kind of game it was going to be were worrying. 76 was going to be an online multiplayer "Live Service" experience. Not an intrinsically bad idea - the original devs were keen on making an mmo type game even back when they had to sell to Bethesda, and the world is certainly an interesting one ripe for new stories. So people continued to be cautiously optimistic. For me, I think, the first real warning signs came when that article about how launching a nuke was "really epic" started making the rounds. Celebrating the atomization of civilization is categorically Not what Fallout is about as a game series. It started as a black comedy about how the excesses of the American Golden Age burned the world to cinders and while Fallout 3 and 4 were worryingly jingoistic in spots, the newer games were largely faithful to that conceit. Largely. The whole mini-nuke launcher was and is dumb. The fact that you could launch Full Scale Ass Nuclear Missiles in 76 as a major selling point struck me as antithetical to what Fallout is at its core. That's not to say that game franchises can't change over time, but this is less a gradual change and more an abrupt about face. Then the ad campaign debuted, with its utterly cavalier "explore the nuclear wasteland with friends! guns are great! nukes are great! licensed music is great!" attitude and my worries about 76 not being faithful to the franchise's spirit intensified. Then came the beta.

Before the beta, most of my concerns about 76 were of the aesthetic variety. I had naively assumed that regardless of whatever the story was about or what the game was trying to say it would at least be a reasonably fun and well made thing. The beta, which let's be real here was really just early access for preorders because you are not going to be able to get meaningful data and then implement it from a beta launching ten days before the finished game goes live, was by all accounts disastrous. Sometimes the 50 gig beta would delete itself from your harddrive for no apparent reason. Other people had the opposite problem, and couldn't uninstall the damn thing once the beta ended. The game itself was boring, empty, and of course, full of bugs. At that point I consigned myself to just giving this one a pass. Every report I heard from beta participants was either outright "this game is going to have some real fucking problems on release" or "well maybe they'll fix it later."

Things did not get better upon release. Quite the opposite, 76 could not stop fucking up. Aside from player complaints about the game being bad and broken and low scores from critics, the game has been plagued with gaffes and scandals. The canvas bag fiasco still sounds completely fake to me but it's real and it happened, god help us all. For posterity, the monstrously expensive $200 Omega Ultimate Grand Glorious Edition was slated to come with a neat canvas bag with 76 branding in addition to some other goodies, as has become customary in the AAA game sphere. The problem was that instead of functional canvas bags, the folks who shelled out instead got shitty little bits of nylon. After a period of quite frankly embarrassing silence, Bethesda finally responded by apologizing for "not being able to meet demand" and offered the affected customers 500 atoms, 76's ingame currency for micro-transactions (groan) as compensation. That barely buys you a virtual hat. And to top it all off the personal information of the people who were sending in support tickets for this mess got publicly leaked somehow. Some way. The whole ordeal has been bizarre to watch because as far as I know, Bethesda has usually had the money and personnel to keep this kind of thing from happening. It's genuinely uncharacteristic.

Let me be clear about something. Gamers can absolutely be whiny and entitled and have a weak grasp of history, economics and basic biology. But this is not the case of a set of missing vagina bones. What Bethesda did with the canvas bags is actually borderline illegal. You can't say you're selling something, sell it to customers, and then go "oops your thing is another, worse thing." Game developers promising the moon and disappointing with the finished product is nothing new, and they get away with it because Gameplay is a difficult thing to legally quantify and there is no law forbidding Bad or Underwhelming Media. However, you cannot creatively spin a nylon thingy into a promised canvas bag. Our society is not yet entirely post factual. The debacle has been funny and kind of absurd from the outside looking in, but there is an inescapable truth at the center of it: Bethesda advertised falsely. Ornery consumers with buyer's remorse are quick to accuse companies of false advertising because the bought product did not immediately make their lives better and shine their shoes on demand, so it can be difficult to take this kind of thing seriously, but in this case, there is actually factually some legal wrongdoing here. I've heard rumors of a class action lawsuit being brought against Bethesda and this might be the first Gamers As Consumers suit that won't be laughed out of court. Even if nothing comes of the suit, this is a serious breach of trust in the brand name and something that won't be forgotten easily.

Moving on from the perorder fiasco, the game itself has taken heavy criticism for being poorly balanced, buggy, and ugly. Todd Howard, He Who First Fucked The Mountain, was most enthusiastic at this year's E3 in promoting how 76 was going to be their best looking game yet, citing new rendering techniques and unprecedented graphical fidelity. I hesitate to throw the word "lie" around in regards to games hype-men, who are basically held at job-point to do everything possible to stretch the truth and sell the product, but after seeing how 76 looks for myself, this is actually just. It's just a fucking bald faced untruth. 76 looks worse than 4, and it runs worse, too. One thing in particular that incenses me is the presence of a bug that Fallout 4 was shipped with that the modding community had to fix. The fact that they're basically copypasting sourcecode from 4 to begin with is a little concerning given that 76 is supposed to be a multiplayer game supporting up to 24 players in the world at once and 4 often had trouble with just one getting a little frisky with the physics engine, but the fact that they're doing this so haphazardly that bugs that had to be fixed by mods years ago have resurfaced paint a very nasty picture of arrogant laziness.

The term "asset flip" has been gaining traction recently, thanks in part to Jim Sterling (thank god for him) and has been applied to 76 a number of times by many different critics. An asset flip is, essentially a video game that takes premade assets, like from the Unity store, and then mashes them together as cheaply and effortlessly as possible in order to obtain maximum time-to-profit return. It is a scummy practice beloved by scummy "indie" "developers" who peddle their wares on Steam, which has yet to receive any sort of meaningful curation. Asset flips are not usually in the realm of professionally made games, even bad and lazy ones, because with the proper application of talent and effort, the reuse of assets can create a sense of continuity between games in a series. New Vegas used tons of Fallout 3 assets but nobody in their right mind would call it an asset flip. At least, I hope not. The point of contention with 76 in this regard seems to be that 76 is completely lacking in a driving narrative. There are no NPCs in the game except for robot questgivers and one plucky super mutant merchant. This was stated as a design goal, but the presence of these characters undermines their commitment to it. It's almost enough to start thinking that maybe this game was made as cheaply as humanly possible and a slightly gussied up mister handy that has used the same voice for what feels like forever is much less effortful to make than a genuine character.

The developers of 76 claimed that they wanted players to be NPCs for one another, to interact and create their own quests and stories. This is, at best, extremely ambitious and rather naive about the nature of people who play games. It is, at worst, deeply cynical PR talk from people who know that the game they're pushing has fucking nothing except for a couple of voice overs and stacks upon stacks of notes and holotapes for the player to take the time to read in a game world that is always online and can never pause. A common complaint that I have heard about 76 is that the gameplay loop of Find a Place->Shoot Everything->Take All Junk->Go Home and Build Shit->repeat is artificial and exists only for its own sake. It is a naked hamsterwheel, a Skinner's box with a crudely drawn vault boy spraypainted on it. It's not even a good one because you're looking for literal junk and there is no "endgame" state where players must bring their fully upgraded guns and power armor to bear in order to even stand a chance against the challenges they must face. The lack of story, engagement, and honestly reason for being is I think what makes so many people call the game an asset flip of Fallout 4. There's some nice scenery, or so I hear, but it has no context because there is nobody living there except for mindless hordes of enemies incapable of sentience. I've seen the artificiality of it all be the straw that ultimately breaks the camel's back in people who put in a good faith effort to try and enjoy the game.

Now this isn't meant to be the Definitive Takedown of Fallout 76 and The Cowardly Liar Todd Howard. I'm not interested in that, in no small part due to the fact that at this point it's just old hat. Hundreds of youtubers bursting with invective and hot takes have already done so, and Jeffy G's now infamous comment that Giant Bomb might never actually put up a review of 76 because nobody on staff actually wanted to play it says a lot more than I could on that front. What I'm mostly trying to do is figure out what in the name of Akatosh's irradiated scorchbeast cousin happened during the development of this game. It's baffling that a company as big and successful as Bethesda would put out a game like this in a post Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 world. They had so many opportunities to say "whoah whoah whoah okay hold on maybe this needs some more time to percolate" and, from where I'm standing, very little reason to rush it out. Just rerelease skyrim again or something, you're doing fine, take your time. This is not even the first time that the studio has released an online game to a tepid reception - The Elder Scrolls Online MMO released in a pretty shoddy state and only some dedicated work from both the community and the design team has let it work its way toward where it is today, which I understand to be a pretty good place. Was nobody from that branch consulted? Was anybody consulted? 76 isn't just bad - honestly, the quality of the gameplay is kind of irrelevant at this point. It's an albatross around the studio's neck going forward because of how poorly handled everything about it has been. If the gameplay was of the quality expected of a Bethesda game (which to be honest isn't THAT high in the first place) and it looked like it should and it actually had some semblance of driving action then I think we would all be more willing to forgive the game's various trespasses, but it wouldn't change the Canvas Bag Incident, the microtransactions, the bugs transplanted straight from Fallout 4, the fact that it launched with its VOIP client being always on with no push to talk, how character data for an online game is kept clientside so cheating is readily available to anybody with fuckin notepad, and the other myriad instances of genuine incompetence now indelibly linked to 76. I've been looking forward to The Elder Scrolls VI in the back of my mind since I finished Dragonborn, but now I'm actually kind of scared about how it's going to turn out. Surely, they'll turn it around for an actual flagship title, right? I certainly hope so, but if you had told me last month that a company of Bethesda's pedigree would allow things to get to this level of train wreck I would have been very skeptical indeed. They're not perfect, and ol' Todd certainly has a penchant for borderline pathological exaggeration, but this is some amateur hour "help our small indie studio has suddenly been subsumed by a media giant and now the entire fucking world is hanging on our every update and we have no idea how to handle this better start lying our butts off" shit.

Bethesda is big. It is wealthy. It has many teams and even entire studios under its wing to draw upon. There are no readily apparent reasons for this kind of large scale meltdown to take place - it's not like they're swamped with work and games. Bethesda is refreshingly leisurely about their releases compared to their peers and I am deeply thankful that any attempts to make The Elder Scrolls and Fallout annual games like asscreed died in committee. Or did they? Is 76 the failed experiment in trying to make Fallout a Call of Duty style affair with a new Hyper Turbo Edition coming out each year? They certainly seem to be trying to tap into that demographic. I think that's deeply misguided, but the shareholders are ravenous, thoughtless beasts that are not easily appeased. They're certainly not going to be happy about 76. Preorders and micro transactions mean that it will probably turn a profit, but in an industry where being critically acclaimed and selling millions of copies is considered a failure because you didn’t sell ENOUGH millions, 76 is probably not going to be looked upon kindly by the holders of the purse strings.

I can only offer unsupported speculation as to why any of this is happening. Were I to be tapped for some sort of hypothesis, my guess would be that something is going very, very poorly in Starfield's development process. That is Bethesda Softworks' first original IP in what feels like centuries and I worry that without a solid foundation of previous Fallout and Elder Scrolls games to draw from they might be having some serious issues doing something actually new after all this time. Maybe there's some sort of restructuring of the company going on that we don't know about? I legit don't know at this point. Whatever it is, it must be pretty nasty. Even the best studios produce duds sometimes, but 76 is not a mere dud. 76 is a genuine multimedia disaster that's having problems outside of the game itself that really could have been prevented. Fallout 76 isn't a bad game sincerely trying to be good and not measuring up. There are Questionable Business Practices built into this game from the ground up that need to be answered for. I cannot overstate how utterly bemused 76's release period has left me because so many of its problem seem fake or exaggerated but they're all real and all happening and I just cannot see a reason for why.

In its current state, Fallout 76 is smoldering example of some of the worst practices in the business. It may yet improve, like TES Online before it, if given enough care and attention, but I can't shake the feeling that something profoundly warped was put into this game's being during its design that cannot be excised by patches and mods. Mods especially because, as an always online game, it is going to be difficult to make mods with any impact on gameplay without it completely fucking with the balance - even if that might be a good thing. I dearly want to know just what is going on over there behind closed doors, and how they intend to address the mounting heap of Bad Shit 76 is producing. I feel like in any other prominent, professional studio heads would fucking roll for this mess but so far Bethesda has been pretty cavalier about the whole thing. The recent game awards featured an announcement for a new spiritual successor to Fallout by the folks from Obsidian - people who actually had a hand in making the games in the series that were actually really good. They seemed to be keenly aware of this fact, and Bethesda's current situation, because they wasted no time in throwing some outwardly respectful and innocent but inwardly laughing-our-heads-off shade at them as part of their marketing pitch. There's a very real possibility that this is where the future of the series actually lies, which would be quite the wild story. The questions "What's Fallout 5 going to look like?" or "I wonder where TESVI is going to be set?" have become much, much more interesting and difficult as of late. I don't have much faith in my prognostications, but I do genuinely believe that some serious changes are going to be made by Bethesda going forward to prevent this kind of uproar from happening again. And if they don't, fucking hell, they really should.

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okay, the code is B107-4KD9-3GRX-VK9X let me know if it works!

it did, thank you so much!

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hello, sorry if this is a bad way to get in touch with you, but i have this promo thing where i can get a switch game code for Cheaper than Usual, so i was curious if you'd like tropical freeze or mario odyssey for your birthday. i like your streams and your ds2 lp, but am weirdly limited in how i can give money/gifts at the moment, but i'd like to show my appreciation if that's okay with you

oh my gosh! if you;’d be willing to do that i’d love to play mario odyssey. thank you so much!

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The Forest, Subnautica, and Survival: The Wages of Building a Cool Tree Fort

Spoiler Warning for both games as the article goes on! Do exercise caution.

I love survival games. That's just kind of a part of how my taste in games has developed over the years. I adore Minecraft, Terraria, Starbound and any number of creatively inclined "build and explore" games. I could think of a couple of reasons for this, the most prominent being that this kind of game is extremely good at making incremental progress feel rewarding, and that I've always had a fascination with habitation in extreme environments like the deep sea, space, and Magical Block Land where the Cacti Explode. Lately, I've been playing an streaming both Subnautica and The Forest, two games that belong in a sort of subset of the genre: Survive and Escape.

Both games start out with a cataclysmic (space)plane crash that deposits you and a number of other doomed survivors in a hostile world that wants to eat you. With Subnautica, you crashland on planet 4546B, an ocean world in which something has gone terribly wrong with the ecosystem. The Forest instead pops you out on a vaguely Canadian peninsula out in the middle of nowhere and cannibals kidnapped your son. Subnautica, as it is in most respects, has the more solid premise of the two. The Forest can scratch a kind of The Hills Have Eyes itch if you have one, but the overall setup of the game is sssssslightly too racially charged for my tastes.

In deference to alphabetical order, let's discuss the Forest first. Of the two games, it has the more robust crafting system. While it has overall less moving parts than Subnautica, you can still build a cool houseboat and you have a great deal of freedom in the overall shape and function of your buildings. In fact, that's originally what sold me on the game - I found the idea of having to build a base not only capable of sustaining you but also withstanding attacks from monsters to be very appealing. Base building can take a long time on your own (2 player co-op is a definite point in favor of the Forest versus Subnautica if you're one of those people that has to quantify the better game) but there are some things that can speed it along and make you feel like a regular Swiss Family Robinson - with all of the cultural baggage that entails. Completing a fort and finally creating a safe haven from the mutant hordes is a rewarding feeling, but it is one that the game almost immediately undermines.

The Forest is a game working at cross purposes with itself. It gives you the tools to create elaborate custom buildings or entire complexes if you so choose to do so, but there is also The Narrative, and The Narrative is most insistent on Finding Timmy. Timmy, your son from the beginning of the game, is assumed to be the player's top priority, but in actuality it's really easy to just forget about him. The game gives you a checklist of things to do as a sort of compromise between total freedom and a more linear experience. Most of the items on this list are some variation of "explore this cave". Cave Exploration is kind of where The Forest fragments into two separate halves: the crafty buildy survivey game, and a different sort of first person metroid slash cannibal murder simulator. The minute you enter a cave you basically go completely blind and have to rely on a variety of deeply inadequate light sources just to fumble your way around. The gameplay loop is simple - go into a cave, kill all the mutants, find a point of interest, go as far as you can until you find an impassible barrier, then retreat back to the surface. The points of interest are often interesting, to their credit, vaguely telling a story about A Deep Secret Beneath the Peninsula as you find various photographs and torn magazine clippings to gawk at for a few seconds, but it is impossible to shake the feeling that these spelunking expeditions have nothing to actually do with any of the other things you've been doing. You can find a number of useful objects in the caves - a flashlight, a map, a compass, a fine piece of hanzo steel - that will make your life easier, but are primarily designed to let you go into the caves Better and Deadlier.

Here's where we get to this stark divide: you don't actually have to make a base in the first place. All of the fantastic tools The Forest gives you to make your own log cabin city are, beyond Basic Fire and Temporary Shelter, utterly superfluous to actually progressing in the game. The weird thing about the caves is that they are actually borderline overflowing with supplies. The Forest has you spend your first couple of hours thinking that you're gonna really to have to grapple with the land in a titanic struggle for survival but actually you can just go into a cave and find like six respawning boxes of Fun Drink! soda and Snack brand snacks which work just as well if not better than like. Hunting for food and purifying your own water. Sleeping is entirely optional, too, something that becomes readily apparent down in the caves where it's always pitch black regardless of the day night cycle. You can easily manage just by building the occasional temporary shelter to save your game or just find one of the many tents already in the game world. There's a whole complex system of substats and sanity meters that you can basically just ignore as you go careening through the depths.

Progress in the caves is gated by two things: environmental obstacles, and enemy mutants. You will occasionally find a novel map feature like a climbable wall or an underwater pool too deep and dark to go swimming through without some help that will keep you from moving forward. You can blow up walls occasionally too, but not often or clearly indicated enough to make that feel like a genuinely well implemented system. To overcome these obstacles, all you have to do is find the right items - the climbing axe and the rebreather will let you go basically anywhere, once you get your hands on them. The world of The Forest is big, and it plays a dirty trick on you - most of the stuff aboveground is useless bullshit for idiots. Basically everything you want or need is down below, and if it takes you a while to realize that, I imagine that it would be pretty frustrating to feel like you had basically accomplished nothing for the last however many hours of exploring the lush but ultimately very empty forest floor.

Speaking of the game playing dirty tricks on you, there is one more instance of needing an item to get to where you need to go. But instead of some neat piece of exploration gear or a Really Big Stick of Dynamite, it's a keycard. The door that requires a keycard is at the bottom of an incredibly long and grueling run through several cave systems that empty out into the bigass sinkhole that dominates the landscape and taunts you with secrets and mysteries from basically day one. The keycard, regrettably, is not nearby. It's halfway across the world hidden in one of the many Super Fucked Up and Scary mass graves the mutants like to keep in their cave systems, requiring either foreknowledge or impressive pixel hunting tendencies to find beforehand. The game gives you a clue where to find it in the form of an old photo - located right before the door itself. It is a slog and a half, to put it bluntly, and since this is a survival game, you're working on a constantly ticking timer of hunger and thirst, and this particular cave system is quite stingy with soda and snacks where the other caves were giving them out like it was an afterschool baseball game. It might have actually been faster to simply reload a save file from before I even attempted the journey and just go get the keycard first, but I didn't think of that at the time. I'm harping on this because it's a huge departure from the fairly natural flow of cave exploration that came before and also a HUGE waste of time. Like, why. Fuck you, that's why.

The endgame sequence is kind of a mess, basically the devs realizing that the game had been in alpha for like literally 3 years and they needed to have some kind of conclusion in place for the full release. While I have no doubt that through the game's development history they had been most diligent about slowly developing and uncovering secrets about what's really going on in The Forest, the actual part where they have to put their money where their mouths are and provide some answers it's just. Kind of. Ehhhhhhhh. Basically you tumble headfirst into a SeCrEt PhArMaCeUtIcAl LaBoRaToRy where they were toying with ancient alien artifacts to create anti-aging cream or some bullshit which, somehow, ended up creating a race of weird mutants without private parts except in certain individuals who have like. ALL of the private parts and probably more besides. The Sahara Labs company even had this fucking supervillain Relic Laser System that shot down passing planes so they could abduct more test subjects away from prying eyes and honestly its like if you want to be that evil and kill people just jacking up the price of insulin is way more efficient and easier on the PR department.

Basically it boils down to you finding Timmy inside some alien bullshit device, dead as fuck, and pantomiming being very distraught about it. However, it comes to light that actually the machine he was hooked up to can bring people back from the dead in exchange for a sacrifice, so you continue deeper into the facility with even more murder than usual on your mind. You eventually find Megan Cross, the girl that Timmy's life force was used to bring back from the dead. Unfortunately, because ancient alien technology never works right, probably by design because ancient aliens are fuckers, Megan mutates into this fucking Resident Evil limbs monster and you have a fucking final boss fight. I aallllmost put the game down there because like. Seriously? Seriously seriously this is what we're doing? I have to use this game's janky ass combat systems to kill an angry little girl monster that can kill you in like 5 seconds if you get within 5 feet? I stuck it out because the devs were kind enough to just kick you back outside the Big Final Boss room with a health and energy penalty whenever you died (which was frequently). Eventually the thing dies and you go rushing back to Timmy with the corpse in hand. But, alas! The machine requires a living subject! After that you just kind of shuffle through some more cave systems with spooky skeletons in them until you find the control tower for the Airplane Killing Laser Beam and you are presented with... a choice.

You can either shoot down a passing airplane to kidnap a viable sample to resurrect Timmy, dooming every single passenger to a gruesome, cannibal related death... or you can just shut the damn thing off, which is really the only reasonable thing to do. Like, who the fuck even is Timmy? I don't know Timmy. Timmy can fuck off. Timmy wants to guilt me for building a gazebo? He can stay dead. It's the Fallout 4 problem all over again - you can't just take it for granted that the player is going to care about someone because you screamed "THIS IS YOUR SON" in the first five minutes of the game and then immediately deprived you of any meaningful interactions with them. It is the unfortunate tendency of parents to believe that their children are things owned by them, brought to the logical extreme. You have no reason to feel particularly compelled to rescue either of these kids aside from the simple fact that they're Yours, whatever that means. So when Shawn is actually the sleazy, amoral director of science fascists, fuck him. When bringing Timmy back to life means putting somebody else through what I just went through, keycard bullshit and all, fuck him! Enough! Time to move on! So I turned off the machine and escaped through some more caves and then I burned my picture of Timmy and got the crafting blueprints to a Timmy effigy made of cloth and sticks which was, admittedly, kind of hilarious. You also get one for your dead wife, which is just labeled "Wife". That was less hilarious and more of another look into the mindset of the people who make these games and why they are a problem. Also you can find another alien obelisk in a boat and open up a door to find a god mode sphere or something but I did not have the patience to go do that.

So I've been down on this game quite a bit, but I actually enjoyed my time with it a lot because what it gets right, it gets very right. Plumbing the dark depths of the cave systems with nothing but a shitty lighter for illumination and an airplane axe for protection, straining your ears for any noises that might break the deafening silence of the underground, constantly scanning the edge of your vision range for the signs of movement in the shifting shadows - it's a fantastic horror experience that a lot of games could learn from. Similarly, the crafting and survival elements, superfluous as they are, are also a lot of fun. You can hunt game for meat and skins, find berries and learn to tell the difference between the poisonous ones and the edible ones, make a bunch of improvised weapons like a fishing spear and a shitty bow and arrow set, build fires to cook food and boil water to make it safe to drink - all of these systems are well thought out and fun to engage with. Like I mentioned earlier, base building is fun and The Forest gives the experience a very down to earth feel by having you chop down trees and transport the timber by hand. You can also build a wide variety of traps and defensive structures, but that brings us to another major sticking point. The Forest wields silence and darkness like an assassin's blade, but falters completely when it comes to actually fighting things.

Combat. Do you ever wish a game didn't have it? I do. A lot. The Forest is one of those games. Fighting the mutants that inhabit the peninsula is as tedious as it is distasteful. It's mostly just a bunch of wild flailing about with an axe or other bladed instrument in the general direction of the enemy. If you're feeling frisky you can use molotovs or poison arrows or even TNT, tactics that become necessary when fighting the game's Creepy Mutants (name not mine i swear). The Creepy Mutants are large, monstrous enemies usually comprised of several individuals fused together. They're big and tough and they have soooo much fucking health god christ ass. You can skin them and use their mutated hides as armor which is pretty metal but fighting them is just not fun. Which is the same for all the other enemies honestly. You just kind of get the enemy into a stunlock and try to finish them off before another mutant puts two and two together and stops running around in circles and actually tries to hit you. Your enemies are hindered by very curious AI and stunlock vulnerability, but to even things out you have to deal with some of the same vulnerabilities, as well as certain lighter related limitations when it comes to explosives and incendiaries that really makes using them a chore.

It feels odd to say this, but The Forest doesn't need its mutants. It's better off without them, to be frank. The dangers inherent in spelunking and surviving in a cold wilderness are more than sufficient to create a sense of vulnerability. Like if you really had to you could just put more crocodiles in the game and make them more aggressive, those fuckers hurt. The story wouldn't even have to change that much - the real movers and shakers of the plot aren't mutants at all. They serve very little purpose except to be the architects of a number of grisly tableaus we've already seen in other games with aspirations of environmental storytelling. There are no toilets in The Forest but if there were, by god would they just be filled to the brim with skulls. There's a severed head in a water cooler at one point. That's in the same spirit. And, of course, there's the elephant in the room: the mutants, as a concept, are deeply racist. Facing down a horde of hooting and hollering brown and black miscreants clad in tribal body paint and loincloths while brandishing various sticks adorned with skulls at you cannot be separated from our bloody colonial past and demonization of native peoples. It's just not happening. This game is about the White Man versus the Savage, whether or not the devs meant it that way. They probably didn't, trying to offer assurances that these aren't actually natives, they're mutant hell cannibals with no dicks. But like. Nah. Not buying it. The mutants will occasionally marshal a big attack on your base or settlement, bringing a big creepy mutant or two with them to try and knock down your shit. What should be one of the game's selling points is marred both by really unfortunate historical imagery and the fact that it's really hard to actually defend anything from getting broken because none of your weapons can actually hit straight down a wall without either lighting them on fire or blowing them up. If they really needed to have an enemy faction in the game, there are five million other angles of mutant they could have gone with - lizard men, tentacle monsters, psychic fuckers, zombies, a Mitch McConnel clone race - but the fact that they went with "tribals" instead of something even moderately less racially charged says a lot.

So that's The Forest! Promising game, fun for the most part, but intrinsically flawed in some very inescapable ways. What about Subnautica? Well, I have good news: Subnautica is much better. It starts the same way, with the spaceship the player is riding on suffering a catastrophic crash landing in an inhospitable world, with most of the other crewmen missing or just dead outright. You start with a life pod fabricator and a sassy corporate issue PDA to point you in the right direction, but aside from that, your only real goal is to survive. Crafting is much more hands off in Subnautica - it's handled almost entirely by way of fabrication stations where you input raw materials and it spits out a finished product in a very scifi way. The way you progress in Subnautica is quite organic: you find a recipe in your databanks you want to build, you go searching for the materials, and in doing so you uncover more of the world. You build an enhanced air tank to stay underwater for longer so you can go deeper and farther. You build a seaglide vehicle to go faster, you build a little underwater seabase to hold your growing collection of rare materials and creature eggs, and so on and so on. Unlike The Forest, where the survival aspects can be basically ignored, learning how to maximize and streamline your food, water, and power production is quite pivotal to getting anywhere.

There are a number of ways that Subnautica arrests your progress, from hostile megafauna to severe radiation leaks to hiding important blueprint fragments behind laser cutter doors. The big one, however, is depth. Appropriate for a game about the sea, I think. At first, depth functions as a barrier of how deep you can go before running out of air - the seas are pretty deep, and after some changes from beta, you can only have so many air tanks equipped at once. Once you learn how to get around that by making some sweet submarines, depth becomes a matter of water pressure. Oxygen is no longer a problem, but crush depth certainly is - take your seamoth below 200 meters and you start to have problems real quick. This necessitates a search for ways to better withstand the pressure. Subnautica is a masterclass in making incremental progress feel rewarding. Instead of having your numbers go up slightly, you get extremely tangible benefits from the various gear upgrades you create or find in the world. The Seamoth is both extremely fast and convenient for getting around and your only practical way to bring an oxygen generator with you, and installing a depth module just increases your freedom and utility that much more. Finally putting a Cyclops together is actually just building an almost self-sufficient mobile base. Even something as mundane as learning how to make a planter represents a big boost to your food production and can expand your operational range by a great deal.

Subnautica is a game that delights in its own world. The vibrant underwater ecosystems you explore and uncover range from beautiful to the slightly terrifying, but there is a genuine love of nature - even scary nature - evident in Subnautica that's infectious. Subnautica does not really have combat, as such. You have a survival knife and a couple of space age tools like the Stasis Cannon which you can use to defend yourself in a pinch, but there is no mutant menace to contend with on 4546B. Hungry Reaper Leviathans and Crabsquids, maybe, but wild animals are wild animals. No moral judgment is cast upon the Stalker's tendency to try and take a bite out of your ass. In fact, you can learn to pacify and even play with them by bringing them fish to eat or scrap metal to sink their teeth into. There is only one entity on the planet that is actively and determinedly hostile to the player, and it's a real fucker, but there's a good reason for it.

The reason for your unexpected visit to the ocean planet is revealed to be the work of a planetary quarantine system installed by Ancient Aliens (again) a long time ago to prevent the spread of a particularly virulent and deadly variety of bacteria. You gradually find evidence of the Kharaa bacteria and the involvement of a precursor civilization as you explore: certain fauna will be covered in green pustules, the PDA will inform you of the presence of infectious agents in the water and how some biomes are curiously lacking in biodiversity, and you'll occasionally find vents and structures of an obviously alien design. A refreshing thing about Subnautica's Ancient Aliens is that they aren't depicted as magic space gods. They have advanced technology compared to that of Earth's, but ultimately they were just some dudes who got caught on the wrong side of a very nasty bacterial plague and didn't quite figure out how to cure it in time. At this point, you have two goals: get rid of the infection, and find some way to disable the giant quarantine laser gun and get off the planet. Finding a cure for the kharaa bacteria requires going deep into the depths with a heavily armored PRAWN suit designed to withstand crushing water pressure and even the most angry and enormous of predators, where you can find a number of alien facilities using the abundant geothermal energy of the planet's magma layer. Finding a way off world involves putting on a radiation suit and exploring the wreck of the Aurora to both fix the catastrophic radiation leak and to get in contact with the home office, who in between ordering ham and cheese sandwiches are gracious enough to send you the blueprints for your very own interplanetary rocket ship.

Throughout all of this, you'll get intermittent distress calls on your radio giving you the coordinates to various points of interest like other lifepods and bits of the Aurora that were unceremoniously scattered to the four winds upon impact. You can also find evidence of people who came to this planet before you and learn their story from PDA logs and the condition of the temporary shelters they left behind. I am not especially fond of the whole audio log method of storytelling, but in Subnautica it's framed less as "the entire population of earth compulsively records their thoughts on tape recorders" and more "corporate issue malware will obsessively observe and catalogue all interactions between you and your fellow employees." There is a definite undercurrent of anti-capitalist criticism in Subnautica, from the Alterra Corporation's insistence on framing interpersonal relationships as business transactions to your PDA's intermittent reminders that all of the things that you are building to survive and get off the planet with are steadily incurring a ridiculous amount of debt to your employers due to exploitative contracting. It can get a little on the nose, but more and more I am finding that even the most on the nose satire is leaps and bounds more subtle and nuanced than actual reality so I can't complain too much.

As the game goes on, a rescue attempt by the Sunbeam freighter ship goes terribly awry when the quarantine enforcement platform blows it the fuck up and your own level of infection steadily progresses. You start to receive periodic telepathic messages from a mysterious being, who claims that it wants to help you. When you finally make your way through the briny Lost River and into the dangerous Active Magma Zone, you find the alien's primary containment facility housing a remarkable organism: The Sea Emperor. The Sea Emperor is an enormous leviathan class entity, twice the size of the gigantic magma spitting Sea Dragons hanging out nearby. However, like the enormous cetaceans of Earth, the Sea Emperor is an intelligent, sapient being that feeds by filtering microorgansisms from the surrounding seawater. The story of the last remaining Sea Emperor is a sad one, contained by the precursor aliens for over a thousand years in order to study the mysterious Enzyme 42 that it produced. This enzyme was the only compound they had ever found with the ability to neutralize the Kharaa virus, but due to the Emperor's advanced age and their inability to communicate with it, they reached an impasse. The Emperor was no longer capable of producing large amounts of the enzyme, and its eggs were trapped in a sort of indefinite stasis due to the conditions of the holding tank not being optimal for their hatching. So its basically been waiting all alone for a good millenium or so for somebody to come and help hatch its eggs.

Fortunately, the survivor of the Aurora's crash is a determined and compassionate soul, and by working together with the Sea Emperor, manages to put together a vial of artificial hatching enzymes by gathering samples of flora from the outside ecosystem. The eggs hatch, giving both the Sea Emperor species and planet 4546B writ large a chance at a future. The adult Emperor dies of Being Over a Thousand Years Old shortly after. Most likely, it was only its determination to see its children grow and flourish and save the planet that kept it going this long, so once that purpose was fulfilled, it finally felt able to go to its final rest. The Emperor is a philosophical individual, with complex ideas about other minds and the potential of life after death and reincarnation, idly wondering as it dies if it might come back as an ocean current or a tiny being that fits between the grains of sand. It's an affecting sequence that taps into a lot of our hopes for maybe one day being able to truly communicate with and understand our own huge marine life. Once the young are released into the wild, you follow them and obtain a sample of Enzyme 42, which completely cures you of the Kharaa infection. All that's left after that is to disable the quarantine platform and build the neptune escape rocket.

After you complete the rocket - an impressively large construction, even bigger than the Cyclops submarine - you are prompted to create a time capsule before you take off. The time capsule includes space for a few items you can leave behind , a screenshot, and custom text note. The idea is that other players might discover it on their adventures and find what you left behind, another surprisingly emotional touch to the game. Admittedly it was slightly ruined for me because when I exited the cockpit to go and take a screenshot the entire launch platform was flung into the sky for no reason, me along with it. I did have the presence of mind to take a  blurry screenshot of the several tons of plasteel sailing through the air as if by magic. We both eventually landed and I managed to climb back up and (properly) launch the rocket. As you leave the atmosphere, the spirit of the Sea Emperor contacts you one last time to thank you once again for giving its family a future. As the credits roll and you reenter Alterra space, your PDA happily congratulates you on making it back and assures you that you will be cleared to dock just as soon as your outstanding debt of several trillion credits is settled. As the music fades and you return to the main menu, you can't help but think: man, maybe I should have stayed.

It is this sentiment, I think, that truly separates the quality of the two games as experiences and statements on the human condition. The Forest presents you with a superficially beautiful peninsula swarming with Evil Tribal Cannibals that must be overmastered in order to rescue your darling son object, that exists to be exploited and despoiled in your quest to build a Sick Fort that isn't even really necessary. You can even get an achievement called "climate change" for cutting down 100 trees and like. Fuck off. Not funny. You can legitimately deforest huge swathes of the game world if you find the chainsaw and some fuel. In the Forest, you are an invading conqueror masquerading as a victim of circumstance. In Subnautica, you are an observer and survivor. The primary building material is titanium, which you get mostly from salvage from the Aurora, occasionally supplemented with some more exotic ores and corals found naturally on the seabed. The ecosystem of 4546B, even though it is devastated by plague, is bigger than you could ever hope to be. It's beautiful and fascinating and glorious, and the attempts that your predecessors made to exploit and subjugate it ended in abject failure. Your seabases are compact and efficient affairs, equipped with machinery for survival and research. The game specifically forbids you from building most kinds of weapons, citing a historical massacre that necessitated all weapon blueprints deadlier than the survival knife to be scrubbed from the database. Combat is fruitless and difficult, even in the PRAWN suit - it's better to just evade hostile fauna and slip by undetected with silent running. The only way to survive and escape is to work in concert with the indigenous life, not thoughtlessly destroy it.

I didn't expect, going in, to feel so compelled to compare and contrast these games, but when presented with the reality of the situation and how similar they really were, I didn't have much of a choice. They're almost dark mirrors of one another, the Forest presenting a Bad Future where the nazi sound designer from Subnautica was in charge of the entire project. I enjoyed the Forest, but there is a deep moral emptiness within it that I have trouble compartmentalizing, especially when Subnautica offers an alternative outcome that doesn't make me feel vaguely monstrous for playing it. Subnautica is, at its core, a more beautiful, more engaging, more thoughtful and even more frightening work than The Forest. The Forest comes close to offering a genuinely scary experience during the cave sections, but undermines its own premise by filling the haunting void beneath the earth with giggling naked canninbal men. The dark, trackless depths of the ocean, however, remain a fundamentally terrifying environment, populated by the strange and terrible lifeforms adapted to living deep beneath the crush depth of even the hardiest submarines. The Ghost Leviathans that lurk in the endgame areas and in the tremendously unsettling open ocean beyond the crater's edge are frightening to behold and terribly dangerous, but their presence is almost comforting, a reminder that other beings still exist in the lightless void. The hooting and hollering of The Forest's mutants simply cannot compare to the otherwordly cries of Subnautica's megafauna, and indeed, The Forest is at its most tense when all is silent.

I would be awfully interested in a game that took The Forest's robust crafting, building, and survival mechanics and transplanted them somewhere far away from the wretched peninsula and its ravening caricatures, perhaps a kind of Subnautica that took place in an alien jungle, or an earth jungle, for that matter. Anywhere less relentlessly ugly and hateful would be fine. Subnautica makes good on most of its lofty promises (except when it crashes. Stability is an area where The Forest has an unquestionable advantage) and presents a strong, unified experience. The Forest is a jumble of compelling systems mashed together in an unconvincing way with set dressing straight from the production of Birth of a Nation. A missed opportunity at best, an extremely questionable exercise in tone-deaf xenophobia at worst. I would be interested to know how the developers of the game justified their design decisions as not-racist, or if they even bothered. Subnautica is reflecting and uplifting, while The Forest, in all of its cynical attempts to push boundaries and put blood and titties on the screen, ironically only ends up feeling safe and derivative, contradicting itself and wasting the genuinely strong mechanics it developed. With certain statements from E3 about how certain developers try to distance themselves as much as possible from political statements while simultaneously creating deeply political games fresh in our minds, I think we should be more insistent than ever that this kind of cowardice is both ridiculous and transparently self-serving. All culture is political, because all human experience is political, inextricably intertwined with the struggles and conflicts between nations and groups that serve as the backdrops of eras. Subnautica knows this. The Forest either does not, or does not care.

[blessuswithblogs]

no seriously could somebody please res me: Online games, the Diffusion of Responsibility, and the Bystander Effect

Recently, Final Fantasy XIV released the Forbidden Land: Eureka Anemos area, a new bit of content for the game that attempts to evoke the game's storied predecessor, Final Fantasy XI. I am neither interested nor qualified in judging whether or not they succeeded in doing so, but my recent experiences in Eureka lead me to some interesting observations born of moments of frustration. Eureka Anemos is a large island capable of hosting hundreds of players at a time in a single instance, home to oddly powerful enemies and special Notorious Monsters that spawn when certain conditions are met. The ultimate goal in this area is to collect enough Thingies for Geralt so he has enough materials to make you a relic weapon (and relic armor, if you're so inclined). There's also a story thread about solving the longstanding mystery of what happened to the Isle of Val and the Students of Baldesion based there, but I feel like that's probably secondary to most players. What makes this area unique to the game is that it bends a number of longstanding rules to create a much different experience than adventuring in Eorzea proper. All characters are synced down to item level 300 (a good 70 or so levels below the obtainable maximum as of this writing) and unceremoniously bequeathed with a Magia Board, a magical artifact that allows you to change your elemental alignment at will. This essentially boils down to having a sort of Fire Emblem style weapon-triangle to deal with. Along with this, you are given a special Elemental Level, the raising of which being more or less your only form of visible progress in Eureka. The enemies that inhabit the island are extremely tough, requiring a favorable elemental matchup and an equivalent elemental level to theirs to defeat. To top it all off, if you get knocked out either by overpulling or stumbling on an enemy 20 levels above you at a bad time, you lose a hefty chunk of your accumulated experience points unless another player casts a raise spell on you.

The environment that has arisen from these systems is a procession of barely controlled chaos. Rather than grind through countless weaklings on their own, players band together in huge groups to spawn notorious monsters on cooldown and swiftly defeat them, because they give far and away the most experience. This has two consequences: the first, the Eureka Train. At any given time you can find a throng of players either congregated in one spot killing target mobs, or more amusingly, forming a giant conga line of adventurers moving from place to place. The second is that low level players, by necessity because nobody is really doing things the intended way anymore, also must participate in this train. Casualties while in transit from one area to another are staggeringly high because after enough of a level difference, a wandering fish monster can knock you on your ass in one autoattack, and no matter how good you are at picking a path through them, you can't always evade enemy detection. To deal with this, players serious about progressing in Eureka tend to heavily favor jobs that have raise spells. Red Mage is supremely popular on the Isle of Val due to their ability to quickly chain cast raises as well as deal damage. Traditional healer jobs are also fairly common, and most parties will have at least one tank out of necessity, but dps jobs that are not red mage, the occasional summoner, or ranged phys dps for mana refresh on the raisebots, are alarmingly rare. The idea is to simply overwhelm the monsters with sheer player count. One unlucky sacrifice will inevitably take aggro, intentionally or not, distracting the mob so that the others can pass. They will inevitably die, only to get immediately raised by a passing player so that they might rejoin the endless train. It is an exceptionally weird system, but one that works pretty well... for the most part.

Problems arise when somebody gets knocked out off the beaten path, somewhere the train has no presence. These unfortunate souls have 10 minutes to try and convince somebody to come over and help them before they're forced to return to the starting area and take the hefty exp penalty. Whether or not somebody actually comes to revive them is largely left to chance. People generally like to do well by one another in FFXIV. Unlike World of Warcraft, there aren't any longstanding factional animosities at play that would motivate an adventurer to leave one of their fellows to the wolves, and certainly no overworld PvP. If you need help and ask, the chances are somebody will give it to you. They might be a white supremacist, of course, but in the context of the game, players are quite charitable. However, in Eureka, things are different. The sheer volume of players creates the psychological phenomenon known as the diffusion of responsibility. Simply put, when large numbers of people gather together, it is actually very difficult to get them to act to help somebody in dire need because they simply assume that somebody else in the crowd, braver or better qualified than they, will deal with it. This is heavily related to the bystander effect, where otherwise well meaning people will freeze up and refuse to act when somebody is in clear and present danger nearby because of the potential embarrassment or awkwardness of rushing to give aid only to learn that they weren't needed after all, or it was some kind of prank. The infamous case of Kitty Genovese, a woman who was violently murdered outside of her apartment complex while screaming for help to her neighbors, is a deeply upsetting and textbook example of this kind of social behavior - or lackthereof.

Now, fortunately for us all, everything in Final Fantasy is make believe and nobody is in serious danger of bodily harm (barring some sort of inane Saw-like hypothetical) and it doesn't really matter if nobody comes to the rescue. That said, there is something tangible on the line when one of the Anemos monsters gets the better of you. At higher levels especially, the exp lost from a death represents a significant chunk of time spent accruing it, and losing it really, really, REALLY feels bad. The chances of getting an emergency raise while a lucrative notorious monster is being fought is very low unless you happen to be in the path of some latecomer hurrying towards their destination, because breaking off to help somebody halfway across the map runs the risk of severely reduced rewards. There is also the considerable danger of rushing off to help someone only to get got yourself on the way, accomplishing nothing but adding another unconscious body somebody needs to pour a pail of water on. This is doubly true for lower level players without access to mounts or aetheryte travel. Not only would I need to brave a multitude of angry one-shot machines to get to you, I would have to do so entirely on foot with nothing but my sprint cooldown and sincere prayer to see me through. Sticking with the train is the only real guarantee of safety... but to do that, you have to reach them first, and they will often be in the thick of the most dangerous (and thus, lucrative) areas.

Diffusal of responsibility manifests in other ways in Eureka, as well. Without a decisive shotcaller "conducting" the train, players will simply mill around in confusion until somebody eventually takes off in a direction, which they will dutifully follow, even if they are going precisely nowhere. The idea here is that surely somebody must know where they're going, so I had better follow them before I miss a notorious monster! Lower level players like my most wise and learned self have an excuse when this happens that I discussed earlier: even if you know that the throng is going in circles, it's still your best play to simply follow them and stay in the relative safety of the train. Better to waste some time faffing about than lose a quarter of your exp bar. The train will usually right itself when somebody takes charge in shout chat or a notorious monster spawns on the map, but these instances of lull intervals are a case study in some of the less flattering aspects of human group psychology.

When this thought occurred to me, I also realized that Eureka was not the only place in the game that this kind of thing happened. Since their introduction, 24 player raids have been plagued with baffling cases of inaction and indecision wherein not a single player of the entire 24 will do the Important Thing That Will Keep The Raid From Wiping For the Fifth Time. The situation is different, but the reasoning is the same: somebody else will surely get it. Important mechanics will be failed for no other reason than Somebody Else's Problem Field spontaneously manifested on a pressable switch or a self destructing add. The problem is exacerbated by the FFXIV community's emphasis on good DPS parses and improving on personal performance, where self-absorbed monks will completely forget to do anything except their frightfully difficult 1-2-3 combos and end up killing everyone. Again. In the heat of battle, it can be easy to forget the ancient maxim: you can't do damage if you're dead.

Another, equally ancient maxim is helpful when attempting to overcome these limitations of our monkey brains: if you want something done right (or at all), you have to do it yourself. In these hectic 24 person situations, it's usually best to just take one for the team and do any applicable mechanics yourself on the assumption that leaving it to someone else will result in failure, not necessarily because your teammates are bad, but because of a quirk of human psychology. Conversely, one of the best ways to influence the outcome of mechanics that are out of your hands (for example, you get trapped in a cage and other players are expected to get you out by destroying it) is to pointedly assign personal responsibility to the people around you. Instead of saying "somebody get me out of here!" as you watch in panic as the jail's cast bar continues to fill towards its painful conclusion, identify someone in your party by name. Use one of the in game markers to draw attention to the situation. Assign somebody to the task of breaking people out before the next try starts if you wipe. This tends to work better (provided that your party is paying attention to the chat or you're on voice, anyway) because it sets forth clear expectations of behavior. Somebody is asking for you, by name, in front of everyone, to do something important. There is no uncertainty or assumptions that someone else will handle it, and any embarrassment resulting from this situation will squarely be on the person that requested your help, not you. In real-life situations where you might not know somebody's name, authoritative pointing and eye contact can also be effective - anything to communicate that you are specifically asking for their help, so that the responsibility is not diffused into the crowd.

Further expanding our thesis, it's not just FFXIV or MMORPGs on the whole that suffer from this - any online team multiplayer game with a sufficient number of people can create these obnoxious situations. For instance, back when Team Fortress 2 was a game I played regularly, I learned to avoid servers with huge team sizes because nothing in those games ever got done ever, especially on Capture the Flag maps. People would just play their favorite class and dick around wherever trying to improve their KDA because obviously somebody else like a Spy or a Scout would get the intel, duh. This mentality, combined with the player base's propensity for forgetting the "Team" part of the title, lead to stalemate after stalemate unless one side was uncommonly coordinated (or picked a ton of snipers without any engineers to actually defend the base). My experience with Overwatch has demonstrated that even with smaller numbers and more clearly defined objectives and game flow this kind of thing -stil- happens. Usually because of a Hanzo main, if the internet at large is to be believed. Diffusion of responsibility and the bystander effect can manifest in very toxic ways on smaller team games like League of Legends and Dota 2. Even the best players will, without strong communication protocols, assume that other players will do things that actually require their personal attention, and since there are only 4 other people there, the blame game can get ugly very quickly as diffusion becomes deflection. There isn't really a way to balance this out of games entirely. No matter how herculean the effort, this strange mental blind spot is just part of who we are as social animals, and it requires knowledge and introspection to overcome, not tweaks to the infinite skinner box.

My hope is that more people will come to realize the true nature of the specter haunting their Lost City of Rabanastre runs, and how to overcome it. Maybe even to be a little kinder to the guilty parties, who, in the end, are just victims of the limitations of the human brain. Of course some people are just incurably fucking thick and seem to take perverse delight in wasting the time of others, and sometimes your temper will just get the better of you. I know mine does when people don't listen to my extremely good and logically sound instructions like "step on the fucking pads you pissbrains" or "this content is older than my 4 year old cousin uninstall you hopeless fuckhead," but it's up to all of us to create a nicer, smarter environment in the online games we love or at least obsessively play out of a twisted sense of duty.

[blessuswithblogs]

On the Ecology of the New World: Monster Hunter World and The Irresistible Temptation of Surface Readings

Monster Hunter World has been tearing up the charts recently, having many longtime fans of the series noting with pleasant surprise that this might be the first time a monhun title has achieved mainstream success and notoriety in the west. I am, of course, not a longtime fan. This is my first Monster Hunter game, the result of an impulse preorder about 14 minutes before the game went live on PSN. I had heard from friends who had played the beta that this was probably the most beginner friendly and accessible the series has ever been, so I figured, what the heck, I'll try it. And it turns out I really enjoyed it, some 100 hours or more later. Monhun World charmed its way into my heart with its vibrant setting, bombastic soundtrack, painstaking attention to detail and small army of cat chefs.

I'm not really here to discuss the actual gameplay of Monhun World or even evaluate it or its narrative. It's not really that kind of game. What I'd like to talk about is the recent salvo of Hot Takes about monster hunter that has been launched by twitter tryhards and games journalists desperately attempting to look thoughtful and respectable (i'm not a payed professional so i am above such accusations don't @ me) about how Monster Hunter is a game about animal cruelty. Now, as somebody who has made something of a passtime out of finding problematic subtext in video games and other contemporary media, I respect the go-getter attitude, and until not long ago I would have likely had similar reservations about monhun. However, in this case, I can confidently state that they're barking up the wrong tree entirely.

For the uninitiated, let's take it from the top. Monster Hunter is a game about engaging large monsters in titanic battles spanning entire regions of the world with improbably sized weaponry. One might say that you hunt them. However, the classification of Monster is something of a misnomer. While these creatures are of monstrous proportions and ability, what with the electrical discharges and fire breath, they are not intrinsically malevolent abominations that one might find in other fantasy games that wait in caves for the sole purpose of terrorizing local villages by devouring foolhardy adventurers. The monsters of monhun are, first and foremost, wild animals that are part of an ecosystem. The game proposes a hypothetical: what if a planet's ecology developed in such a way that godzilla incursions were not the result of man's tampering with the atom, but simply a natural occurrence?

The answer that Monster Hunter World presents us with is more multifaceted than it appears at first glance. While the framing is first and foremost in service of a world wherein you can get into fights with dragons and chop off their tails for sick loot, there is a whole other dimension to proceedings that a removed, casual observer would never see: the dimension of ecology, environmental conservation, and zoological research. The Monster Hunter's Guild, to which the player invariably belongs, is an organization that is first and foremost dedicated to understanding monsters and preserving the ecological balance in which they exist. They also handle any elder dragon rampage situations with their big ol' dragonator weapons, but the majority of their work goes into trying to predict and prevent that situation from happening in the first place. Much as monster is something of a misnomer for the creatures of this world, Hunter is something of a misnomer for the individuals who work for the guild. I can only assume that this is because some market director in Capcom, sometime in the early 2000s, did the math and came to the conclusion that "monster hunter" was a much catchier, easier sell than "Fantastical Megafauna Catch and Release Simulator."

The Guild sets up designated hunting grounds, regulates requests to cull or relocate troublesome endemic lifeforms, and harshly punishes poachers with summary execution. At least, that is what I'm lead to believe by supplementary material I've found from previous games. Monster Hunter World takes place in the New World, an unexplored continent found beyond tempestuous seas filled with ornery marine life that may or may not eat ships for light midmorning snacks. Guild representatives, under the formal title of The Commission, are just about the only human life yet found found in this place, and they are quite far removed from the traditional administrative body of Guild affairs. Simply receiving a missive from the mainland is considered to be a fairly significant event. Due to the vast distances involved, The Commission has been active for decades while receiving staggered groups of new personnel from the mainland known as Fleets. The original surveyors and hunters were the First Fleet, the Second Fleet was comprised primarily of engineers, and so on. The game picks up as the Fifth Fleet begins making the journey to the New World, of which the player character is a part.

What this amounts to is that while in our history, explorers to the "new world" were little more than petty thieves and butchers, The Commission is comprised of highly qualified and dedicated surveyors, researchers, and engineers with a vested interest in discovering and understanding new forms of life. There is no colonialist sentiment to be found within Astera, the makeshift settlement that hunters of the Commission call home. There are no would-be conquistadors looking to stake a claim in the Coral Highlands. Being a part of the Fifth Fleet is more like going on an expedition to the Antarctic or the bottom of the ocean. The spirit of this rugged, frontier science is infectious and permeates everything you do in the game.

Of course, this does little to address calls of animal cruelty, which is a valid concern. In a fundamental way, I think that certain elements of the population will always regard this game as cruel for the same reason that they would regard actual real life ecology and animal research as cruel, a difference in ideology that I am ill-equipped to argue away. For the average videogamesman who after tweeting his enlightened hot take about how palicos are slaves and barnos meat is murder probably chowed down on a burger from Five Guys, however, the gulf between our values is likely less impassible. While it is undeniably true that you can kill the monsters you hunt and carve them up to make nice hats with bigger numbers, that is not your only, or even best, recourse for progression. The more lucrative option is almost always capture, wherein you fight a monster until its stamina drops to the point where you can catch it in a trap and tranq bomb it. You will actually get more monster parts from doing this than killing them, most of the time, mostly because the majority of monster parts you get in this game are external, superficial parts of the monster's biology. You can actually find many of these materials lying on the ground where monsters leave their tracks and markings: scales, claws, fangs, shed skin, etcetera. Your latest catch can be found sleeping peacefully in the Astera's makeshift holding pen, a group of eager scholars at the ready. Lest you worry that they will spend the rest of their lives in captivity, that is not the case: after taking whatever salient data is available, the researchers expose the monster's scent to the Commission's scoutflies (basically hunterpunk tracking beacons) and release it back into the wild to continue to observe its behavior.

As I mentioned earlier, this mirrors what actual ecological researchers on Planet Earth in 2018 do so that we can have a better understanding of how these animals live, and how we can better protect vulnerable populations from excess predation and habitat destruction. The only real difference in monhun is one of scale: whereas in our reality even the most troublesome and ferocious of beasts can be fairly easily tagged with a tranquilizer dart or two and then surreptitiously fitted with a tracking tag when they finally conk out, in the world of Monhun, simply getting the average monster to the point where a tranquilizing agent will have any effect is a titanic struggle. In that reality, this work is even more important than in ours, because while a mountain lion roaming into a suburban neighborhood is scary, a rathalos getting too close to a town could very well mean that town getting burned to the ground if the big guy feels that its territory is being encroached upon. It's vital to the safety of both humans and monsters that hunters take it upon themselves to tussle with them and learn about them so that a world wherein relative harmony can be maintained is possible.

Some of the more game-y parts of monhun are less defensible, like the perversely satisfying act of chopping off a monster's tail for parts or specifically breaking and disabling certain areas of a monsters body for the same reason. Even then, breaking off a Diablos's horn can be the difference between a successful capture and a gored hunter, so it's not completely senseless. It is also undeniable that what the second fleet master says is true: to conduct good research, you need good tools. To make good tools, you need good materials. It could be argued that this is a poor excuse, because in the end it is the game developers, and not external reality, that have set these paradigms, and they could have made a game wherein you were not rewarded for wanton tailchopping. I think that is a valid criticism. However, in my opinion, the game has built up such a tremendous amount of goodwill with its surprisingly true to life depiction of fantasy ecology that I can forgive it these trespasses. There's also the consideration that all of the big monsters in this game can regenerate from a near death state after a five minute nap so for all I know all of those body parts I sheepishly made off with will just grow back in a few months.

Some story spoilers follow, so you can skip this part if you're interested in seeing the game play out yourself.

For the majority of the game's main storyline, the focus of your efforts is conduction research on Zorah Magdaros, a tremendous, walking volcano of an elder dragon that is making the Elder Crossing. The Elder Crossing is a mysterious phenomenon that involves elder dragons, appropriately, crossing the sea in the direction of the new world, never to return. As you observe more of its behavior and the environment of the new world, it becomes evident that the New World's Rotten Vale is essentially a huge monster graveyard where many monsters come to rest at the end of their natural lives, Zorah Magdaros being no different. The massive amount of bioenergy that accumulates in the vale allows for the unique and vibrant Coral Highlands to thrive. Things go somewhat awry with Magdaros, however, who is lured into the Everstream by an unknown force instead of laying down to rest in the Vale. This is a problem, because as mentioned, Zorah Magdaros is a literal walking volcano dragon with an incalculable amount of amassed bioenergy that will need to go somewhere when it dies, and the Everstream is a network of tunnels and magma tubes leading to all corners of the continent. If it dies there, the researchers conclude, A Lot Of Things Will Blow Up.

The saga concludes with a setpiece mission wherein The Commission sets up a barrier in Magdaros's path and carries out an operation to divert its course out to sea. This battle interested me a great deal because, again, it was like a much larger scale, higher stakes iteration of wildlife preservation operations that take place on Earth. There have been many instances of large animals ending up in places they really shouldn't be and a team of dedicated professionals working their butts off to sort of prod it in the direction of safety without doing any lasting harm to the critter. Whereas animal control might use loud noises, long poles, and the occasional electric shock in dire circumstances, The Commission is forced to use cannonfire, falling stalactites, and dragonators to get the moving mountain of Magdaros to pay them any attention. At the end of the mission, Zorah Magdaros simply decides that this direction sucks because it's full of annoying little guys nipping at its heels and goes out to sea to die in peace. There's no real indication that any lasting harm was done to it or indeed if The Commission caused it anything more than mild inconvenience. The entire point of the operation was to allow Zorah Magdaros to finish its natural life cycle in safety. I feel like a game that goes to such pains to create a narrative about respecting wildlife can be forgiven some of the ludonarrative dissonance that comes with the territory of grinding for Gems. The Magdaros Gem is a myth by the way.

Spoilers now conclude.

At any rate, I genuinely feel quite strongly that Monster Hunter World is not a game that revels in animal cruelty. On the contrary, it sparked a feeling of deep appreciation for wildlife and the natural world, a feeling I used to get as a kid when I watched Animal Planet and saw Steve Irwin wrestling with crocodiles. He was never really a crocodile hunter either, was he? I mentioned earlier that there will always be an ideological gulf between this point of view and that of hardliner animal rights activists, and I suppose that's fine. For what it's worth, I am not an animal rights proponent. I am an animal welfare proponent. We can improve the lives of animals and protect their habitats better with these occasionally intrusive studies, and to me, that is more important than respecting some amorphous conception of autonomy. Of course,  I doubt that this sort of nuance was being considered by the average videogames take-haver, but I wanted to make my position clear. Games like Monster Hunter World should be celebrated, especially in a world where Gather Ten Bear Asses by Killing Ten Bears is still accepted quest design in many high profile games.

I would also take this opportunity to caution everyone against the sweet but fleeting satisfaction of surface readings. I’ve done it too. I probably will again, because I am a fool. Even so, try to approach things with an open mind if your first instinct is to immediately look for a nuclear take to get that sick likes to replies ratio skyrocketing. Things may be more complex than they seem at first glance. Or they may be made by nazis again god damn it this is like the third time this month. At very least, I don’t think any of the influential people behind monster hunter were nazis. Maybe one of the sound designers? You can never tell these days.

[blessuswithblogs]

Top Ten Videocons of Twenty Seventeen, More or Less

2017 has, by all accounts, been a fantastic year for Video Games. Unfortunately for me, it has been a not so fantastic year in Having Money. So while in a perfect world my now annual game of the year list would have been a terribly contested and dramatic affair of cutting games I thought were good but just didn't make it, in actuality, I had to scramble and cheat a little to just find 10 games to slot in and talk about. I did at least manage to find them. Mostly.

10. Destiny 2

Destiny is a franchise with a troubled history, which feels weird to say about something that came out in late 2014. Nevertheless, Destiny 2's shooty looty gameplay loop finds its way on to my list. The story is tepid and the characters, with a few exceptions, are scarcely worthy of memory, but the visuals are good and the core mechanics of shooting and using abilities are a solid foundation to build upon in the inevitable flurry of DLC packages and expacs. It's all quite reminiscent of Borderlands, except without the unmistakable caustic ooze of Randy Pitchford's involvement. That in and of itself is praiseworthy.

9. Gravity Rush 2/Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze

Okay so I maybe didn't actually play this one myself. I usually try to exclude stuff that I watched and enjoyed but in this case I was sitting on the couch with other people playing it so that's basically the same thing as playing it myself right? I think I held the controller for a little bit. Anyway this game is super weird and charming and a little nauseating in parts because you sort of go flying off into the stratosphere randomly? But the aesthetic and Mood the game goes for is very unique and fun, it even has its own cute little made up language I mistook for French at first until I heard some Japanese and Spanish sounding words in there as well. The main characters Kat and Raven are dating I think? They're happy and alive girlfriends. Raven is a little broody I guess but they're definitely not the Sad, Dead Lesbians I have grown to detest. Raven is not Velvet. Just reminding myself. Tropical Freeze is just really good and while it maybe came out like years ago I only got to play it very recently on my friend's Wii U. The music is super good fuck you Jeff Gerstmann I will fucking fight you and your shitty opinions about video games you god damned grumpy old man.

8. The Surge

My Thoughts on the Surge are well documented on this very website. It's flawed and frustrating in a lot of ways, nonsensical in others, and the story never quite commits to its original conceit which is a real shame. All that said, I respect the game for what it was unabashedly trying to do: be Dark Souls but with cyborg powerloaders and robots. Like, you gotta live your bliss, right? Lords of the Fallen was utterly miserable and the improvements that The Surge demonstrates gives me cause for optimism in future games from the developer. Anything that gives me cause for optimism in 2017 has to be worth something. That said, the inevitable The Surge 2 is probably going to be kind of by the numbers and unnecessary but that's just how you make games in the 21st century.

7. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

To begin with, BotW would be much higher on this list if I had not only come into owning it and a Switch yesterday. It is by all counts extremely good, an open world game that's actually pleasant and charming and has meritorious mechanics outside of Todd Howard style "you can go fuck that mountain" nonsense. I mean don't get me wrong you can fuck plenty of mountains in this game. Link is fucking Spider-man in this game, the only surfaces he can't mysteriously latch on to are inside the puzzle shrines so you can't just cheese them. Weapon degradation is maybe a little excessive? I feel sort of like Bayonetta in the first cutscene where she keeps yelling "Guns!" when she runs out of ammo except I'm yelling "shitty wooden sticks!" when the one I'm using breaks into a million tiny pieces. I understand the reasoning behind it, I do. It establishes a certain rhythm to the game of exploring, fighting, stocking up on shitty wooden sticks, and repeating. When you find like, an actual sword or spear it feels like an occasion to celebrate, and the whole thing demands that you use a variety of different weapons and weapon-like objects. I'm not nearly far in enough to give an honest, comprehensive picture of the game. I just really like what I've played so far so I'm just compromising by putting BotW relatively low on the list.

6. Cuphead

It's Cuphead! Everybody knows Cuphead by now. It's gorgeous, the soundtrack is great if somewhat lacking in variety, King Dice is really cool but has extremely unfortunate racial undertones, the game is pretty hard (not that hard?) and Cala Maria is a babe. It's a singular game that is extremely worthwhile and hopefully paves the way for future games in a similar style of aping specific styles and eras of animation. I really want a game that goes hard on the 1950s Looney Tunes aesthetic where you just drop anvils on people forever. Cuphead isn't perfect, as a lot of the game's difficulty and length comes from bad checkpointing. It's a necessary evil, because if the game did not blatantly disrespect your time in a lot of the later fights, the game would be like, two hours long. I'm not a proponent of the "git gud" philosophy but I can't help but feel like I really want to say that to the various bad-at-games journos who got bent out of shape about Cuphead being hard. This is your damn job. You can suck it up for one game, especially when it's really very good and unique like Cuphead. Also my mom came in while I was playing it and thought I was watching a popeye cartoon so that was kind of cute I guess.

5. Civilization 6 (CHEATING AGAIN)

YEAH I KNOW THIS GAME CAME OUT LAST YEAR AND IM A HUGE IDIOT FUCKER but hear me out Civ6 is really fucking good because of the fact that Wonders take up physical space on the map and districting does the same thing. Like just this single mechanical change basically doubles the amount of thought and planning you need to put into playing the game even on low difficulties to optimize your output and production. Like it's a civilization game so there's not really anything too groundbreaking here but I fucking adore this game. Really looking forward to Rise and Fall, which will be early 2018. With the initial release being late 2016 I feel like this is like, an honorary 2017 game. Don't @ me.

4. Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight is another game I wrote about previously on the blog, but unlike The Surge I had basically nothing but good things to say about it. Hollow Knight has gorgeous hand drawn graphics and environments not entirely unlike Cuphead, but obviously goes for a much more reserved mood. Hollow Knight is a rock solid Metroidvania game with strong aesthetic and musical chops to back it up, as well as some Dark Souls-esque flourishes to give the game a bit of bite and a haunting narrative arc. A fantastic indie game and I can't wait to see what Team Cherry does next. I need to get around to doing the Halloween DLC, come to think of it. Did you know Zote actually has as many precepts as he says he does? I listened to them all. Some of them aren't too bad.

3. Nioh

Geralt the Witcher's moonlighting adventure as a samurai came out quite early in 2017, but remains one of the best games of the year due to its complex and rewarding combat system, beautiful Warring Kingdoms era Japanese architecture inspirations, fun mythological monster designs, and genuinely well done historical fiction backdrop. Coming into it, I fully expected "Dark Souls except the bosses are like Tengus and Nues and shit", but that description does the game a pretty big disservice. It's much more than that, both from a narrative standpoint, which is a fantastically tinged retelling of the Warring Kingdoms period, and from a gameplay one. The combat in Nioh is much more technical than in Dark Souls, with more pretensions of a combo based character action game than the deliberate, heavily customizable experience of the Souls games. Nioh is still quite hard and has the whole death-recovery mechanic, but it makes sense diegetically due to Guardian Spirit system and remains distinct. There are times when it tries to have the best of both worlds and just kind of ends up feeling like it doesn't do a good job at either, but for the most part, Nioh is tremendously fun, and at times infuriatingly difficult, especially in some of the post game optional battles that pit you against multiple bosses at once. Also, finding Kodamas is extremely rewarding because they are so damn cute. I love them. Find them at all costs.

2. Nier: Automata

Nier: Automata, Yoko Taro's latest brainchild, is, well, what it is. It's a hauntingly weird story about what it means to be human, and if that definition is really even adequate. It's a game with a lot to say, which is why I regard it so highly. The core gameplay is fun and serviceable, which is much more than I can say for its predecessor, the first Nier, which was memorable and affecting but played kind of like butts. 2B's android adventures are much more fluid and stylish, and you have a surprising amount of customization options available (though some arguably make the game a little too easy at points, like regenerating health) and there's enough variety in the little Machine Life form enemies (and the big ones, too) that fighting never felt like a chore to me. Of course, others have disagreed, but I think that the tedium really only sets in when you play as 9S, who has a much reduced arsenal of fighting moves in favor of his hacking skills. I liked the little shmup minigames that hacking entailed, so even 9S's story never felt too dull in the actual mechanical execution of it. People tend to have a misunderstanding of how the game works, that you need to complete it 4 times to get the whole experience, but that's not actually true. The 4 endings separate the game into acts more than anything. While 9S's story has a lot of overlap with 2B's story, endings C and D are just entirely new content where you play as A2, who has some tricks of her own distinct from 2B and 9S. It's not perfect, but it's not like you have to play the same game 4 times. It's a very story focused game, so much so that I would say experiencing the narrative is the main draw, but it has the decency to also be varied and fun to play. I love the parts where you get in the transforming flying robot and shoot the dudes. Especially the big dude. You know the one.

1. Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood

The latest Final Fantasy XIV expansion, Stormblood, is super good. I wrote a bit about it earlier, and how it has improved upon Heavensward in almost all respects. Stormblood is a superlative MMO expac, with well designed and amazingly presented raids, dungeons, and trials. It's full of "holy shit that's dope" moments, like when you get into a blade struggle against the primal Susano's gigantic Ame-no-Murakumo in an active time event or storm the fortress city of Ala Mhigo. Ultimately, though, what really makes me evaluate Stormblood as my game of the year is how surprisingly thoughtful it is. FFXIV has, since the relaunch of 2.0, been a game that has not shied away from complexity in its narrative conflicts. The juxtaposition of the mythically strong Warrior of Light and the surprisingly mundane issues even she cannot seem to fix has always been the game's most interesting element to me, and as you spearhead revolutions against the Garlean Empire in two different countries, you learn a lot about how imperial colonialism has made things too complicated to be fixed simply driving out the oppressors. You do, eventually, of course, but the story is quick to remind you that this is only the beginning, and a lot of key issues remain unsolved, both in the newly liberated provinces and back at home. Also the Dark Knight questline from 60-70 is basically the best the game has to offer. It feels to me like that Dark Knight is the unofficial Job of Stormblood, despite the promo material and opening movie having you believe it to be about Monks. Monks, as usual, are boring. The themes explored in the Dark Knight questline, about regret, about shades of gray, about self-destruction, all align perfectly with some of the subtler narrative arcs of the main story. It's just really good and I love it. I still really want to write a piece about it on its own. I probably will soon. But for now, I name Stormblood my game of the year, for reminding us that we are still heroes. That we are still good people.

[blessuswithblogs]

On the anti-imperialist roots of the Super Robot genre

Tadao Nagahama is probably not a name you're familiar with. I won't reproach you for it, it's been a while, I had to look it up myself to help me remember. However, Nagahama is an extremely important person for my current subject of discussion: the anti-imperialist, anti-war roots of the Super Robot genre. Shinzo Abe, the current prime minister of Japan, probably most widely known in the west for wearing a Mario hat to promote the next olympic games, has been in his own quiet (and not so quiet) way contributing to the rise of hard right nationalism, historical revisionism, fascism, and a whole bunch of other nasty isms that have found traction in today's sociopolitical climate. Recently, I saw in passing a tweet about how the ever-popular, ever-mystifying Kancolle had an episode where Japan ended up winning the battle of Midway. Propaganda in media is nothing new, but that was quite egregious, even by my desensitized standards. It got me thinking a little bit about my own niche anime interests and how the common perception of the mecha genre is probably one either of random Gurren Lagann bullshit or simplistic, thinly veiled pro-Japan ideology packaged in a kid friendly, larger than life veneer. In a lot of ways, early Super Robots shared more in common with classical American Super Heroes than actual Japanese Super Heroes like Kamen Rider, which evolved into their own tokusatsu genre quite distinct from either paradigm.

I cannot rightly dispute these preconceptions as wrong, but I do want to at least bring up that some early, influential franchises rejected this narrative. One of the first of these, of course, is Mobile Suit Gundam. While now we have the distinction between Super Robot (robots that are like larger than life super heroes) and Real Robot (robots that are presented in a realistic context as weapons of war using standardized technology employed by military and paramilitary forces to project force) for tedious nerds to bicker over indefinitely, in the days of the original Gundam, that distinction did not exist. Indeed, to play for ratings, Yoshiyuki Tomino, famed creator of the Gundam franchise, had to make many concessions to his sponsors and make Amuro Ray's Gundam more like its more popular contemporaries, with goofy mid-season combination upgrades and some extremely anachronistic weaponry like a beam trident and a huge, MS sized ball and chain. On the back of his later success, Zeta Gundam and the seemingly never ending number of side-stories like War in the Pocket and Stardust Memory, Tomino would actually go on to revise the original series in a definitive movie compilation that cut out a great deal of filler and blatantly unrealistic (or at least immersion breaking) elements. This version is extremely good by the way. Give it a watch if you're interested in the genre's history or if you just like old sci-fi.

The reason I bring this up is sort of my roundabout way of arguing that while the Gundam of today is made of entirely different stock than Super Robots, the original article deserves a space in this discussion. The discussion being, of course, the distinctly anti-nationalist bent of a lot of early Super Robot shows. In all of its many incarnations, good, bad, and inbetween, Gundam is a story about war really sucking and how tragic it is that we fail to understand one another because it's easier to just kill one another instead. Now, of course, a lot of fans are either too thick to understand this subtext (and text-text) or simply willfully disregard it because they like cool robots that shoot lasers. Basically think of Dan Ryckert's relationship with Metal Gear. While certainly not all Gundam series have been good, they have always been faithful to these ideas, which is laudable. In broad strokes, anyway. SEED Destiny was pretty weird in spots.

Mobile Suit Gundam 079, which chronicled the One Year War, was not at all shy about this. The One Year War began as a movement for Spacenoid (a slightly ridiculous term for a person living in a space colony or on the moon) independence from the hopelessly corrupt Earth Federation. Naturally, the Federation did not take kindly to this and moved to suppress the movement, but found itself overmatched by the Principality of Zeon's advanced Mobile Suit weapons. To keep an even footing in the war, the Federation resorted to using nuclear weapons and other atrocities on largely civillian colonies to buy time as they developed their own brand of Mobile Suit. In retaliation, Zeon counterattacked with an even more devastating new weapon: dropping space colonies on earth. All told, the One Year War was not a good time to be alive, and nearly half of the Earth Sphere's total population died in one way or another. While all this was happening, the original founder of the independence movement died under suspect circumstances and power was seized by the Zabi family, who were Really Bad News. The Federation, meanwhile, turned to conscripting child soldiers in a desperate bid to keep pace.

This all culminated in the creation of the Gundam by Tem Ray, Amuro's emotionally absent father. Due to Circumstances, Amuro finds himself in the cockpit and becomes the most important soldier in the war overnight because the Gundam is several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything Zeon can field. The character of Amuro is explored most fully in Char's Counterattack, when he is a fucked up adult instead of a fucked up kid, but from the outset, Amuro is defined by forces completely out of his control and his fatalistic acceptance of his own lack of agency. Despite his nigh legendary piloting skills, Newtype powers of precognition and telepathy, and status as hero of the One Year War, Amuro might actually be the most passive motherfucker in the god damned galaxy. This puts him immediately at odds not only militarily but interpersonally with the dreadfully overambitious if mostly well-intentioned Char Aznable, his lifelong rival. Their entire history of conflict is based entirely upon the simple irony that they both want the same thing but, despite being Newtypes, lack the ability to understand this. The One Year War's violence and brutality defined them and their relationship to another, because of a petty twist of fate that put Amuro in the Gundam's pilot seat instead of some other sap.

Gundam uses many more overt methods of conveying that the One Year War is not glamorous or cool or just. Characters die regularly on both sides of the conflict, oftentimes for no real reason other than "this is war, sucker." Tomino developed quite a reputation for this style of storytelling, earning the moniker Kill-'em-all Tomino, especially in some of his non-Gundam works like Aura Battler Dunbine and Space Runaway Ideon. The entire continent of Australia got rendered uninhabitable by colony drops. The White Base, the federation battleship housing the Gundam, is crewed and staffed almost entirely by people who have yet to reach 20 years of age and they've got a pack of prepubescent toddlers running around on the ship because they've got nowhere else to go. I personally find the interpersonal conflicts acting as microcosm for ideology and war to be the most interesting, and most intrinsically Gundam thing about the franchise, but you don't have to go looking between the lines to find evidence of the show's ardent anti-war, anti-nationalist proclivities. The intensely nationalistic Zeon is surreptitiously usurped by a power-mad dictator without anyone even catching on after Ghiren Zabi uses a giant ass space laser to kill both his father and an influential Earth Federation general while they're trying to broker a peace deal. The death of that general, in turn, allows the worst elements of the Federation government to run amok and eventually create the deeply fascist Titans in Zeta Gundam, who make it a point of policy to oppress spacenoids as brutally as possible.

So Gundam, at least, has profound roots in the denunciation of military power as a metric of moral superiority. That's not really news to most people. Oddly enough, it's the most obsessive of fans that tend to miss the memo because they're presumably too busy making sure Mobile Suit measurements are exactly as documented and all character motivations are completely rational and logical, like them. Let's dig a little deeper for some more surprising examples of this kind of ideology in unlikely places. It should be noted, of course, that I am not heralding Gundam as some sort of bastion of progressive thought. Tomino's sexual politics are located roughly in the Stone Age until about 2000's Turn A Gundam, where they progress to about on par with inudstrial revolution social mores. Progress, I suppose. This is a problem with a distressing amount of media, especially in the 70s and 80s, but I'm trying to look at the bright side of things. At least it's not Cross Ange, right?

Moving on, when we look at the genesis of Super Robots as a genre of animation, we will invariably look to Go Nagai. Though a number of shows about large robot men fighting evil like Tetsujin 28 and the live action Giant Robo came first, the seminal Mazinger Z had the popularity and iconic staying power to define everything that came after. Though I could write a great deal about Go Nagai and his Dynamic Robots, they don't really pertain to my particular topic of discussion today because Go Nagai was about as progressive as a sack of bricks. His work was largely apolitical, at least in the sense that he did not intentionally make his stories about contemporary political issues, so at very least Kouji Kabuto never waxed nostalgic about the time Japan was allied with Nazi Germany. In fact, one of the show's major villains, Count Brocken, is a reanimated SS officer cyborg who carries his head around with him because of a decapitation in a previous life. Generally speaking, not a good or sympathetic guy, despite his protests to the contrary. Go Nagai focused on themes of brotherhood and being outcast by society for just being too damn hotblooded and having sideburns that were just too damn thick, though these mostly manifested in his manga. The TV adaptations of Mazinger, Getter Robo, and Grendizer were largely sanitized and inoffensive.

I mentioned Tadao Nagahama at the beginning of my piece, and it is now with him we come to a very important point in the genre's history. Nagahama was the director of three particular Super Robot shows: Combattler V, Voltes V (here the V is treated as the roman numeral, so it's really Voltes 5), and Toushou Daimos (roughly, Brave Leader Daimos). Colloquially, these three are known as the Nagahama Romantic Trilogy, and they are denoted not only by the iconic designs of the robots themselves, towering, blocky things made out of many constituent parts in a fairly sensical way (as opposed to the famously Unpossible Getter Robo), but also by the injection of genuine interpersonal and ideological drama into the proceedings. They were also super popular in other areas of the world, much like Go Nagai's Dynamic Robots. Voltes V in particular was popular in Southeast Asia. Combattler V was instrumental in cementing the notion of The Honorable Rival in the genre, a character aligned with evil that still conducted themselves with decorum. While you would find few such characters in the ranks of Dr. Hell's armies or King Vega's invasion force, in the Romantic Trilogy, they were critical to the show's success. Combattler V was not especially revolutionary, but it laid the groundwork for Voltes V, which in many ways was.

Voltes V is the tale of the Boazan Empire, an interstellar civilization with an expansionist streak and a highly stratified caste system. Unlike previous villainous organizations, the Boazans are noteworthy for being three dimensional and not painted in shades of black and white. The Boazans invade earth for the purposes of annexing it to their growing empire, with the crown prince Hainel leading the charge. Their battle beasts are too much for earth's military (and the militaries of many other planets), but the super electromagnetic robot Voltes V, piloted by a team of five headed by Kenichi, appears to beat them back. Things become interesting when we learn about Kenichi and his two brother's lineage. Their father, the brilliant scientist behind Voltes V's construction, is actually a Boazan expatriate. Not just any expatriate, but former royalty, no less. Boazan's strict caste system is based solely upon whether or not a citizen has horns. If they do, they're nobility. If they don't, well, uh, sucks to be them. Such a system, already untenable, is exacerbated by the fact that the vast majority of Boazans don't have horns. It's a rare genetic mutation. The whole Boazan war machine is powered by a gigantic underclass of slaves-in-everything-but-name. Kenichi's father believed that this was morally reprehensible and that reform was necessary. Unfortunately, this was not a popular opinion among the nobility, and he was disgraced, de-horned, and ousted for his ties to rebellion movements.

Complicating matters even further, he had a son while on Boazan, the aforementioned Prince Hainel. After relocating to Earth to escape persecution and devise some way of bringing change to the empire, Kenichi's father settled down and had a family. Now bereft of horn, he was largely indistinguishable from the average earthling. Parallel evolution is a concept emrbaced heartily by old sci-fi in both Western and Japanese media, probably because people thought alien babes were hot. Fair, honestly. At any rate, Kenichi engages in mortal combat with his half-brother's forces on a regular basis, which creates interpersonal tension mostly lacking in earlier shows. Sometimes Duke Freed got snippy at Kouji for being all love and peace at the Vegans but that was usually resolved at the end of the episode. Hainel himself gradually changes, too, starting out as arrogant, dismissive, and openly ashamed of his connection to a disgraced expatriate and his sons but gaining more depth as time goes on. The end of the show takes place on Boazan itself, with Voltes V spearheading a hornless revolution while Hainel turns on the emperor, vengeful and disgusted by his cowardice. Or maybe it was a movie. Look it's been a long time and I'm going from memory give me a break.

For a kid's TV show at the time, this was honestly pretty wild. Voltes V was not shy about displaying its moral core: people are not defined by the circumstances of their birth, and systems of government based upon the oppression of an underclass deserve only to be destroyed. Voltes V is not as morally complex as Gundam, but it is leaps and bounds ahead of many of its Super Robot contemporaries. Nagahama believed in a sort of fusion of genuine human drama and moral complexity with the more simplistic, bombastic style of storytelling common to his predecessors, and it resonated with viewers all over the globe. At the time of airing, a number of Southeast Asian countries were under the thumb of repressive dictatorships, and the final episodes had to be heavily censored and edited so as not to promote seditious ideas. That, more than anything to me, is the mark of something that is genuinely anti-nationalist in nature. Who would know better than fascist dictators themselves?

The final entry in the Romantic Trilogy, Toushou Daimos, continued the trend of creating morally and politically complex circumstances in which the karate robot made of transforming trucks must punch bad guys. The aliens of the day are the Barmians. The Barmians, however, buck convention and come to earth in genuine peace. Their story is a tragic one - their planet was destroyed in a catastrophe, and the survivors were evacuated on the aptly named mobile space city Small Barm. Due to severe space and resource constraints, a billion Barmians have to remain in cryogenic sleep while a skeleton crew of nobles and military officials keep Small Barm afloat as they search for a place to live. Naturally, they find earth to be a charming place as any to settle down (as it must have seemed in the early 80s before the environment started collapsing) and initiate negotiations with the governments of earth to try and accommodate their people. Expert martial artist and principle protagonist Ryuzaki Kazuya is the son of a brilliant scientist who created the robot Daimos and the special Daimolight energy that makes it so scary strong. Said scientist is part of the diplomatic delegation sent from earth to Small Barm (in some universes alongside the illustrious Rilina Peacecraft, but that is a story for another time entirely) and is a major proponent of the Barmian's request for peaceful integration into earthling society.

Regrettably, this all goes awry when the Barmian hardliner military faction assassinates the King of Barm during the meeting with poison and blames the earthling delegation on it, engineering their own perfect casus beli for a war of domination against Earth. Fascists are remarkably bad at sharing and getting along with others, as has been demonstrated. Prince Richter, the honorable if somewhat dim and hot tempered son of the King wasn't too hot on the assimilation idea because of his prideful belief that the superiority of Barm's culture and technology should allow them to dictate more favorable terms, but was ultimately loyal to his father above all else and acquiesced to the idea. When his father is assassinated, of course, he flies into a rage and declares earth to be the enemy of Barm and kills Kazuya's father. So there's a lot of bad blood between the two of them. Kazuya and Daimos stand up against Barm's battle beasts and prevents the invasion from progressing. He eventually meets and falls in love with princess Erika, Richter's sister. Where Richter is brash and hasty, Erika is intelligent and patient, and much more compassionate. These qualities allow her to see that the circumstances of the King's death, and any motivation the Earthling's might have had to assassinate him, were extremely suspect. They part ways, but Erika eventually joins a resistance faction on Small Barm against the military hardliners who had assumed power. Richter continues to dance to their tune, too consumed by misplaced anger and vengeance to see what is really going on. Erika's relationship with Kazuya only makes him more unreasonably mad.

Of course, Earth has its own hardliners, and in his battles, Kazuya not only has to contend with Barm's battle beasts, but General Miwa, an odious Earth-supremacist convinced that all Barmians, regardless of their disposition, must be eliminated immediately and without mercy. If we want to talk about more alternate universe scenarios, for reference, Miwa was a fucked up enough dude to cast his lot in with the Blue Cosmos organization after his Barmian extermination ambitions never panned out. He really fucking sucks. Ultimately, Kazuya and Erika manage to uncover the plot to assassinate the King, defeat the military holdouts, and bring the peace their fathers wanted about. Where Voltes V presented a scenario of a civilization run by ultra-nationalists needing to be restructured from the ground up, Daimos offers the inverse: a peaceful, tolerant civilization in a time of crisis gets hijacked by a few selfish, warmongering fascists and nearly destroys itself. Coming to understand and love one another, even when from different planets entirely, is an even bigger theme in Daimos than Voltes V, and is in many ways a more personal story. A romance, if you will, for a romantic trilogy.

Nagahama's Romantic Robots were well loved around the globe and left a lasting impact on their genre, encouraging those who came after to experiment with more complex themes and characters, even in the larger than life universe of Super Robots. While not all (or even very many) of these successors live up to this high minded ideal, it's an important part of the history of Japanese animation, proving that drama and politics were not just for Gundam or more "serious" shows. We can see the legacy of Nagahama in a number of more contemporary titles. Evangelion is so much more about interpersonal conflict than actual robots that the final episode of the TV series didn't even have any fighting in it (albeit mostly due to budget constraints). People hated it, of course, and Hideki Anno went on to make End of Evangelion to either appease or piss off further the angry fans, but it happened nonetheless. Gun X Sword represents an evolution of the genre into that of a pseudo-western, where heroes and villains are separated by the thinnest of ideological margins despite the fantastical robots and setting. Gurren Lagann briefly flirts with political complexity before promptly imploding on itself (maybe this one is a bad example). Even Shin Mazinger, an unabashed love letter to older Go Nagai properties, managed to create a surprisingly affecting and compelling character (dare I say, Protagonist?) in its reimagining of Baron Ashura.

The Mecha Genre used to be, and still kind of is, one of my big guilty passions in life. This essay is more personal in nature than a lot of my others, because from time to time I feel like I have to justify to myself why I like this garbage even when it's weird regressive shit. I guess the compromise I have found is that, in certain circumstances, it can be weird progressive shit, too.

[blessuswithblogs]

My Experiences with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Today's piece has very little to do with video games, but instead, me. This is more of an exercise in catharsis and thought ordering than something really meant for other people to read and go "o yea thats neat," but you're welcome to do so anyway. I'm also putting up some content warnings for Mental Health Junk like eating disorders and severe anxiety, as well as allusions to stomach flu symptoms (this one probably bothers me more than anybody reading). If you wish to proceed with all that in mind, by all means.

Let's start at the beginning. I've suffered from minor post-traumatic symptoms for over 20 years after the conclusions of traumatic events, usually severe illness. In the past, these symptoms have been self-limiting and usually resolved after a couple of months. Even after I was terribly ill with pneumonia, had an allergic reaction to pneumonia medication, and spent several afternoons with a nebulizer in my mouth, it only took half a year or so to mentally recover from the incident, and all I really suffered from was mild worry when I started coughing. All this changed, however, in September of 2008. A number of unfortunate circumstances occurred in quick succession and I ended up dreadfully sick with gastroenteritis alone with my dad, who also caught it. It was an uncharacteristically virulent and severe strain of whatever norovirus was going around at the time. My working hypothesis is that my brother caught it at Disneyland after using the bathroom without washing his hands like a frickin idiot, because he caught it first and then spread it to the rest of us. My mom seemed unaffected, or was extremely adept at suppressing symptoms, so she hauled my brother's sick ass back up to his dorm in Santa Barbara. Originally, this was going to be a family outing, but I argued that I really didn't need to be there for other reasons entirely, which, as it turned out, ended up dodging a bullet. We both got sick after they left, and it was a miserable night by all accounts.

It marked a couple of milestones for me. Sheltered child that I was (let's be honest, sheltered child that I am), I had never been in a position where I was seriously debilitated and my mom wasn't there to be mom at me. It was also the first time I sort of had to take care of somebody else being ill, because as sick as I was, my dad was even sicker. He's also an unreasonable old fuck who demanded that I didn't let mom know that we were both the next victims of the plague, but I disregarded that order because I was freaking out and in that pre-sick period where you feel pretty nauseated but you're not really sure if that's because you ate too fast or something or you're actually sick. She came back the next day with some pedialite or however you spell it. I was actually kind of delirious at that point, utterly sleep deprived and running a nasty fever. I still vividly recall a strange sort of fever daydream I had in the shower about The Big O being featured in the upcoming Super Robot Wars Z, which is really strange to me to this day but there it is. Showtime, I guess. Prior to this bout of sickness, I had been struggling with tummy troubles the whole year due to the stress of acclimating to living in a new state and a few unfortunate cases of much more mild gastroenteritis. By the time of this incident, I was already pretty worn down, and it turned out to be the straw that broke the camel's back. After making a physical recovery and doing okay for a few days, I started exhibiting severe anxiety symptoms. At the time, I didn't know it, but I was actually a fairly textbook case of post-traumatic stress disorder, and it basically stopped me from being a functioning human for a good year or so.

Let's talk a little about PTSD. The classical understanding of this disorder is that of combat fatigue, something that only soldiers in hellish warzones suffer from after seeing their squaddies get blown up by the Vietcong or whatever. A largely more enlightened view than the previous perception of the disorder as "shell shock" or, even worse, "malingering," but one still inadequate for a modern clinical context. PTSD can be brought about by any sufficiently traumatic event meeting with a sufficiently susceptible person, as per the diathesis model of medicine. If that's what they're still calling it. It's actually been pretty long since I've taken any psych courses, the last two years of college was mostly just filling in credits with random bullshit. At any rate, while soldiers are a large demographic of PTSD sufferers, people can contract it from just about anything -- car accidents, sexual assault (this is a big one, almost assuredly more prevalent than in active combat personnel), and, of course, severe illness. It took me a long time to actually be honest enough with myself and my various therapists to reach the diagnosis. I had suspicions, because even then I was studying psychology, albeit in highschool elective curriculum, and I was at that point familiar with most high profile mental illnesses like PTSD, depression, schizophrenia, and what have you. I also knew, however, that young students diagnosing themselves with diseases they had recently read about in a textbook was also a definite phenomenon. Thus, I was reluctant to bring up the possibility and actively downplayed symptoms, both because I had no faith in myself to make an even marginally accurate diagnosis and because I felt ashamed of the possibility. People get PTSD from actual trauma, not a weekend bout of stomach flu, or so I thought. To be honest, I still feel pretty ashamed of it, but I'm old enough now to know that lying to myself and others will get me precisely nowhere.

Fortunately for me, I think that my therapists and psychiatrists at the time were altogether too clever and perceptive to be fooled by a fairly half-hearted show of resistance. We didn't really give what I was feeling a name until quite a ways into it all, but from the outset, my treatment was focused on alleviating these symptoms. And, wouldn't you know it, the SSRI anti-depressants I had been on-again-off-again taking since I was 14 were also the medication of choice for treating post-traumatic stress. It took a long time, but I eventually managed to get myself together enough to start community college, then transfer to a UC school and graduate. Not without difficulty, mind you, but it's still fairly miraculous to me that it happened at all. I had occasional flare-ups, usually linked to a trigger of somebody else throwing up in my general vicinity. My brother seemed to make a habit of coming home from college only to immediately get sick, which was always harrowing. To this day, I don't know how one person can contract so many instances of gastroenteritis. I always seemed to avoid catching his bugs, probably due to my redoubled hygiene practices and general hypervigilance, though there was a period in the summer of 2012 where I got sick with -something- that made my stomach miserable. Not enough to puke, but enough to make me really worry. That was the summer right before I went to go live on my own in campus housing, so, I ended up coming home on weekends to keep myself together.

Recently, as you may or may not know, I've had a major resurgence of symptoms after a very mild case of stomach flu. I honestly wasn't sick for very long, or very violently, but it was enough to bring bad memories flooding back and reopen a terribly inconvenient can of worms. At the time, I was not on any medication due to just generally being at a fairly high level of functioning but a fairly low level of Have Money. I still feel that the decision was mostly sound, but I severely underestimated my potential reaction to a triggering event. Which I suppose in and of itself was a good indicator of my mental health prior to the incident. With the old wounds reopened and no psychoactive agents to help with the pain, I got. Bad. I'm doing better now, thanks to meds and the passage of time, but I'm still not at full capacity, and summer was utterly dire. One of the halmark symptoms of PTSD is going to great lengths to avoid situations and stimuli similar to the trauma that originated the illness. Unfortunately for me, it is very difficult to avoid "feeling nauseous" or "eating food," though God knows I gave it my all. With my comorbid emetophobia back in full swing, I drastically altered my diet and eating habits. I heavily favored foods that I could cook or supervise the cooking of and foreswore fast food and takeout of any kind. Going to a restaurant to eat was out of the question - my first time back to one was this sunday, and it was an altogether miserable experience for a lot of reasons. My handwashing has increased in frequency to the point where I occasionally need to stop myself from doing it unless absolutely necessary so my skin doesn't crack open. Above all, I have been eating a lot lot lot less. Hearing compliments about weight loss is nice, but given the circumstances, it's hard to enjoy them. I spent most of the summer forcing myself to eat and drink when I really, sincerely did not want to. I found comfort in hunger. Hunger was a signifier that all was well, that my body was operating within acceptable parameters, that being hungry and vomiting were not states that could coexist - at least, that was the thought process. The stomach is more complicated than that, of course, but defense mechanisms rarely make a lot of sense.

The anxiety, fear, and tired listlessness of post-traumatic stress disorder are all well documented. I had those in spades. I think my mom caught me doing the whole thousand yard stare a couple of times, though I doubt she realized the significance of me spacing out. A particularly nasty foible to my particular situation is that one of my body's most cherished stress responses is to get sick to my stomach. Feedback loops are quite common in mental illness, and if I am not Queen of Feedback Loops, I am at very least a Minor Duchess. I know the cycle all too well. Stomach pain into anxiety. Anxiety into worsened stomach pain. It doesn't take long on my bad days to literally think myself sick. My symptoms have trended towards the more mild side of the spectrum, at least after medication was reintroduced, but I make up for it by having a trigger that creates itself. A lot of the time, the only way I have to deal with bad episodes is to try and throw myself utterly into something else and forget about physical being for a while. Long hours in FFXIV and Civ6 can attest to this. When that doesn't work, I often have to lie down and bury my head into a pillow until I calm down enough to start feeling better. It is, in a word, disruptive.

One aspect of the disorder that is not often discussed is the heightened fight-or-flight response and startle reflex. It is especially ridiculous in my case because you cannot run from your digestive system. It tends to follow you around. Be that as it may, being constantly on alert for any and all signals of potential gastrointestinal distress is utterly exhausting. You listen to your surroundings. To other people. To yourself, for any normal stomach noises that you're convinced are the sign of the apocalypse. White noise becomes torture as you try to pick up any salient sounds distinct from the hum of the fan, and a great deal of innocuous noises start to sound a lot like worried words and puking. Coughing is the worst because it shares a pretty similar aural profile to vomiting. Naturally, my dad has been suffering from acid reflux induced coughing jags at all hours, so I'm never at a loss for something to listen to in alarm. And alarmed I am! A constant state of hypervigilance necessitates a constant state of being easily startled. People coming up behind you when you're occupied with something else, for instance, becomes a terrifying experience because they just seem to materialize out of thin air. My new room has my back to the door and my headphones are noise-cancelling, so I am snuck upon on a regular basis, though at least with no ill intent. Probably. The garage door just below me seems almost vindictive in its loud rumbling, but I shouldn't add inappropriate anthropomorphization to large sheets of metal to my list of neuroses.

All of this comes down to a single thing: it's hard to feel like yourself when all of this is going on. Sometimes in a moment of lucidity you realize that this bizarre stranger who washes her hands way too much and refuses to eat anything has been ruining your life. Severe, prolonged stress creates a deep and abiding sense of unreality. You lose faith in yourself. You stop trusting yourself. The things you do don't seem to come out quite right. Interacting with other people feels like trying to talk to somebody on the other side of soundproof glass that's kind of smudgy and gross. Sometimes you yell too loud so that they can hear you, other times you mumble halfheartedly because you don't expect it to work anyway. And on rare occasions, you sort of lose touch with reality and try to beat down the pane and make a terrible fool out of yourself because to everyone else it looks like you're slamming your fists into a wall for no reason as you scream and cry. Even then, it's sort of worth it, just so you can say you've felt something other than creeping dread for a little bit.

I suppose, in a way, that this piece is part explanation, part apology, part anecdote. I haven't done as much stuff lately. I've been more reclusive, quicker to upset, a good bit spacier than usual. I've mentioned a few times that I've been suffering from a PTSD resurgence, but those are just words. There's no context behind them. It bothered me. I wanted to put down, in more concrete terms, how I've been feeling and coping and why that's cut into me being me. I don't know what this will accomplish, but maybe somebody out there will find it resonant, or even helpful. It feels necessary to get it out in the open and be honest about why I don't make many videos or streams anymore, or why I'm harder to get in touch with, less willing to do stuff with other people. I'm making progress. Hoping that I can get to the point where I could maybe hold down a job. Gotta dream big, right? Either way, thanks for taking the time to read this. It doesn't make anything that's happened better, but maybe it will help with things in the future. I'm rambling. I've never been good at conclusions, even when they're obvious and big and juicy. When it's just my thoughts, sort of stream of consciousness, I don't really know how to wrap things up because I could keep writing for a while, if we're being honest. Look in closing, 2017 fucking sucked okay.

[blessuswithblogs]

Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood: A launch analysis

(note that there are some spoilers for patches 2.0-4.0 here if you haven’t played but want to)

Stormblood's first major content patch, 4.1, has been going strong for about a month now and most people have seen the majority of the initial cycle's content, so I feel confident in writing about something that's been on my mind for a while. Namely, taking an in-depth look at how Stormblood launched in mid-June and how it compares to its direct predecessor, Heavensward. I didn't want to commit myself to anything before enough time had passed to really get a feel for how things developed, but I think enough time has passed at this point to make a fair and honest evaluation.

Overall, I think that Stormblood had a much stronger launch period than Heavensward did, no doubt thanks in large part to harsh lessons learned back in 2015. I'll start with the bad part so I can get them out of the way: the first few weeks of Stormblood were a god damn mess in terms of server stability and functionality. Raubahn Extreme and the Unending Coil of Pipin will probably stick in the memories of lots of players who really just wanted to get to Kugane please please let me in to the instance please god. The main story quest instances were all of high quality and memorable, experimenting with implementing various group mechanics like stacking, spreading, and tethers in a single-player battle both to make playing through the story more interesting mechanically and to acclimate newer players to common to mechanics in level cap content. Regrettably, none of that actually matters if you can't get in to the damn thing in the first place. Server congestion was so monumental that, ironically, having to create an instance for each individual player instead of being able to consolidate them into groups of 4 or 8, made it nigh impossible to get into the main story quest battles at all for a majority of people. When faced with this obstacle, many players decided to simply progress by grinding out FATEs in the Fringes and the Peaks, and in some cases, managed to exploit their way past certain terrain features nominally impassible without flight or story progression to reach areas with higher level events and enemies. In a bizarre but touching display of cooperation, players with 2-person capable mounts who were experienced in exploiting the level geometry would ferry other less adept players across the thresholds so they could actually get to new places. For those fortunate enough to get into an instance and successfully complete it before the servers caught up with themselves and spat them back out again, sailing was mostly smooth from then on due to the natural if unintended throttling effect severely limiting the amount of players actually competing to get into subsequent instances. Not too much later, a potentially game-destroying bug involving Susano, the first Primal battle in 4.0, and entering his instances while sitting down would cause considerable consternation among the unlucky few who discovered it and paranoia in those who had heard of the bug but hadn't yet discovered the cause. This issue, at least, Square was able to identify and fix fairly quickly. Errant coding is a much less daunting challenge than several more million people playing your game than you really accounted for.

In time, these problems resolved, and it bears mentioning that the height of these issues were present only during the game's early-access period for pre-orders. I remember mentioning to someone that in the end, as annoying as they were, the congestion issues would create some lasting memories of the launch period. While small consolation, I feel that in that respect, I was right. Heavensward had its share of congestion problems, but they were largely mitigated by creating separate instances for each major expansion zone. Stormblood did the same thing, but the battle instance servers simply weren't prepared for the volume of traffic they received. Fortunately for us all, once these issues resolved, Stormblood proved to be a delightful experience in almost all respects.

The main story of Stormblood chronicles the liberation of Ala Mhigo and Doma from the Garlean Empire. The revolutions of these countries have been alluded to, mentioned, and hinted at since the early days of 2.0 (and in Ala Mhigo's case, 1.0). When Heavensward was announced and the late 2.0 story switched gears to heavily involve Ishgard and the Dragonsong War, a lot of people were sort of perplexed at this seeming nonsequitur. While Heavensward's story proved to be one of its stronger aspects, the fact remained that we were leaving the imperials up to their own devices indefinitely to go galavant with catholic elves and dragons for 5 patches. Stormblood returned us to the more down-to-earth realm of imperial occupation that underscored most of 2.0's main story. I don't necessarily want to spoil the entire story arc of Stormblood, so I will be vague when possible. In some ways, the narrative of Stormblood feels a bit unfocused, as the warrior of light gets punted around to opposite ends of the world to agitate rebellion in two different nations entirely. It does make a certain degree of sense, given that historically, huge expansive colonial empires were weakest when dealing with multiple fires at disparate locations, so the divide and (re)conquer strategy survives scrutiny, especially when one considers that the warrior of light has the semi-canonical ability to just teleport instantly over vast distances with aetherytes for a modest fee. The fact remains that one does get a feeling that in a perfect world, the writers would have liked a unique expansion for each nation's struggle. This was exacerbated pre-launch by a number of player's vaguely racist negative reaction to Hingashi and Doma as "stupid weeb shit". Given that Final Fantasy XIV is a primarily Japanese developed game, of course, the idea of anything in it being "weeb" is preposterously self-centered by western audiences. I understand the desire to focus on Ala Mhigo before Doma, but overall I think that the writers did a good job of combining the two rebellions into one more or less concurrent narrative. I mentioned earlier that many of the single player instances in the main story and job quests were very good and memorable, experimenting with a lot of different things to keep the experience fresh and engaging. The Dark Knight job questline in particular stands out and honestly I want to write a piece on that alone. I probably will. The leveling dungeons are also all of very high quality, ranging from the very memorable Sirensong Sea's introduction aboard the privateer vessel crashing into a haunted ship's graveyard straight out of Final Fantasy 5 to the heroic final assault on the Ala Mhigan capital alongside all of your Grand Company and Resistance Allies. The post 70 dungeons, though somewhat limited in number compared to 3.1, made the wise decision to include the 70 story dungeon in the Expert Roulette table to avoid the Heavensward problem of only ever doing Fractal Continuum or Neverreap. Jesus Christ, Neverreap.

The climax of Stormblood's story, I think, is one of the major ways it outshines Heavensward. Stormblood ends with a titanic confrontation with Zenos yae Galvus, the inexplicably powerful imperial viceroy that has been kicking dirt in your face the entire time. Zenos is an interesting existence within the FFXIV universe, because historically, the Warrior of Light Does Not Lose, while Zenos managed to defeat them twice - once without seemingly expending much effort. It was a necessary story beat, I think, because the player needs to be reminded that they aren't invincible, and having a legitimately dangerous Imperial foe to contend with is healthy for the story. It's easy to forget the scope and power of Garlemald on a personal level because the Warrior of Light has left a veritable mountain of crumpled centurions, prelates, magitek weaponry, and even legatuses (legatii?) in their wake. Giving the imperial war machine's vast power and influence a face in Zenos puts some stakes back in the story that have been missing since the third time you personally trashed Regula van Hydrus on Azys Lla. Initially, I was pretty offput by losing to Zenos, both because I felt like if I had the time, I could have beaten him in a battle of attrition and because I felt like the Viceroy had not earned the right to be as strong as me. The mythology of the warrior of light is justified by how difficult and effortful some of the endgame battles are to beat. When you earn the Final Witness title or clear Sephirot extreme or earn an Alexandrian chestpiece, when you defeat these enormous godlike beings made of pure magical energy and hatred for all human life and you especially, you feel that all the effusive praise you get from NPCs in the world isn't just the game trying to make you feel special. It's an honest respect for your legendary prowess and heroism. There's a moment in late Heavensward, when Alisae Levilleur returns to the story after being mostly absent since the final destruction of Bahamut, where she begs you to go to the Ixali homeland and prevent another summoning of Garuda. If you went through the whole Binding Coil of Bahamut beforehand, once she learns that you have departed to deal with matters there, she immediately relaxes and considers the matter cosed. She knows just how capable you are. She was there in the bowels of the earth with you as you cut your way through ancient machines, dragons, and bioweapons. It was a powerful moment of a character showing you genuine and heartfelt respect in a genre where, despite your status as Biggest Heroine Ever, you are still tasked by NPCs to pick up poop.

So, when Zenos brought me to my knees not once but twice, I was mad. By design, I'm sure. How was he so strong? How could he even hang with me, someone who makes a living killing gods and vengeful elder dragons? Your final confrontation with him at the end of the level 70 dungeon is satisfying because your soundly beat his face in and make him retreat, but not entirely. There's still more to go. Here we get into blatant spoiler territory, so if you want to experience this for yourself and haven't yet, you might want to clock out right about now. At the pinnacle of the royal palace, in a field of flowers, you confront Zenos for a final time, only to find him standing in front of Shinryu, wrapped up into a nice little package by the erstwhile Omega Weapon. After a conversation about the nature of the Echo and its relationship to Primal beings, he frees Shinryu from its prison, and in a single shot, Zenos's overwhelming power up until now is explained clearly and succinctly as his eyes glow with the telltale pattern of a Resonant. What felt inexplicable up until that moment was suddenly perfectly clear: the Viceroy has, in broad strokes, the same power that you do, augmented with imperial technology, the best training available in the modern world, and a lifetime of military experience. And now he's riding around inside another vengeful dragon god. The final battle with Shinryu is an incredible and much anticipated spectacle. The battle between it and Omega was the capstone of 3.5 and the major catalyst for Stormblood even happening, and now the game makes good on what it promised. It's also pretty hard? Like beating it with a bunch of randos in 290 artifact gear is not trivial. When you triumph, Zenos falls to the earth in a spectacular green comet, and now finally satisfied in meeting his match, the one person who understands him, he takes his own life. It's a somber moment, because as pumped as you might be to finally be done with this asshole, it also reminds you that behind this unfeeling monster of a person was a deep, abiding loneliness born of a life of experimental augmentation and violence. You don't feel bad about killing him, but as Lyse opines afterwards, you are reminded that none of us start out evil, and it is a difficult task indeed to escape the bonds of our forebears. With the Viceroy's death, Ala Mhigo and Doma are both free. Imperial forces are in disarray, scrambling to retreat back to the mainland of Ilsabard, with the Emperor feeling the sting of decades of wasted time and money more keenly than the death of his son. When confronted by the always enigmatic Elidibus about his grief, Varis surprises even the immortal, inhuman ascian with his response: he snorts dismissively and simply states that the throne is no place for a monster. It's a chilling exchange that sheds some light about how Zenos came to be what he was - the implication here is that Varis was going to have his own son surreptitiously disposed of at some point to ensure that he never ascended to the position of Emperor. Reasonable given what we know about the son's character, but callous and calculating enough to give even a Paragon pause. The conclusions to the 4.0 story is a strong conclusion. It doesn't neatly wrap up everything in a bow. There are still many stories to be told about reconstruction, repatriation, the establishment of new goverments, how old friends fit into a new world. Also there's Omega chilling out in a hole somewhere. Despite all that, it is a strong, decisive ending to the main story arc of Stormblood, closing with a touching rendition of the Ala Mhigan national anthem as Arenvald raises the nation's flag to recreate the beautiful Amano logo.

Contrast to Heavensward, which ends the 3.0 story arc in an extremely "Tune in next time!!!!" series of events that honestly just sort of leave you feeling bemused. You fight your way through Azys Lla to get to the rogue Archbishop, who becomes the godly reincarnation of Ishgard's first King Thordan and his knights twelve to destroy Lahabrea, your longtime immortal masked nemesis, in an extremely anti-climactic and valor thiefy way. You end up fighting him because A. a realm-wide theocracy dictated by the decree of an egomaniacal elf-pope with a hateboner for dragons sounds fucking shitty and B. he became a Primal, and you are contractually obligated to kill those before they suck the world dry of Aether to sustain their untenable physical forms. There's a good moment after you win where a dying Thordan beholds you with raw terror and demands to know exactly what you are, that you could withstand the power of a thousand years of fervent prayer, the eye of a great wyrm, and the dormant power of the warring triad sleeping beneath Azys Lla. It looked a little silly because my Warrior of Light is a cute and well mannered midlander girl about as intimidating as a puppy in her Sharlayan Philosopher's Hogwarts factulty coat and witch hat but I imagine if you were like, playing as a roegadyn or a highlander wearing something slightly more threatening it could have been a stark shot portraying you in a much different light than what you're used to. Anyway, Thordan dies, Estinien runs in a full five minutes too late, realizes that the second eye of Nidhogg was in the Vault's basement all along, and resolves to put them both out of reach of man and dragon forever. Unfortunately, putting both of the eyes together makes Nidhogg's spirit rematerialize and posess Estinien's body, and he flies off to go take a nap back at the Aery before he resumes with the total destruction of the Holy See. And. That's kind of how it ends. Like there's a nice scene afterwards where Ser Aymeric signs some documents to officially become a part of the Eorzean Alliance and switch to a parliamentary system of government as Merlwyb almost shoots somebody by accident again. And then Elidibus goes to the moon and recruits the Warrior of Darkness to come down and fuck shit up and also Alexander activates in the hinterlands due to goblin hijinx. It ends on like 3 different cliffhangers which don't really feel earned and you get the feeling they didn't really know how to wrap this up until 3.3, which, admittedly, had a fantastic overall conclusion to the Dragonsong War arc and 3.4 finally did literally anything with the Warriors of Darkness in a pretty spectacular way.

Having a strong conclusion is not the only way that Stormblood compares favorably to its predecessor. Of much more concern to most of the playerbase and not my literary-analysis-obsessed-ass is the endgame raiding scene. Which is, also of my concern because I'm a literary-analysis-obsessed-ass who also raids. The initial Alexander raids in the Gordias sector are infamous among the community for basically killing the robust raiding scene that had evolved from the excellent Binding Coil of Bahamut. The idea behind them was sound, and was repeated and refined in Stormblood: they first released the normal difficulty raids that most players could do without exerting too much effort to get weekly drops for better gear and experience the story behind Alexander and the Illuminati, and then followed up with the Savage difficulty. Savage was more in line with the previous Coil raids, offering much harder, more complex encounters with greater rewards like the highest item level gear available and upgrade tokens for gear bought with tomestones. Sadly, the Gordias raids were bad. Well, maybe bad is a strong word, but they were not nearly up to the caliber of quality set by the Binding Coil. The normal versions of the raids were serviceable, but not very memorable, and the musical score was, uh, shall we say, divisive. The Savage tier raids were punishingly difficult exercises in frustration as players scrambled to relearn how to play jobs that had changed on fundamental levels and understand poorly defined and programmed mechanics like digititis and the gobwalker. On release, Savage Living Liquid was mathematically impossible to defeat before enrage witout very specific compositions optimized for damage above all else and the best possible available gear - these compositions weren't actually discovered until the delayed Chinese release, which had the benefit of hindsight and a more solid understanding of how jobs functioned in the post 2.0 world. Living Liquid was where raid groups went to die. When people finally got to Savage Manipulator, they quickly learned that the optimal way to get through it was to intentionally fail certain mechanics and die, then utilize the Free Company buff Back on your Feet to quickly revive that player and minimize time spent in the Weakness state. It was a trip, and people were not happy. During the anniversary stream, statistics about the number of players who had entered and cleared Savage instances came out. For ALexander 1 and 2, the numbers were fairly reasonable, but fell to triple digits for 3 and literally zero for 4. Post Heavensward launch was one of the roughest periods for the game, both because of the raid situation and because a lot of company money was tied up in delivering the giant bloated baby of Final Fantasy XV and the XIV team were working with a skeleton crew for a lot of the duration. Subsequent raid tiers in 3.2 and 3.4 gradually fixed a lot of the problems present in the Gordias sector, but the damage had been done.

Stormblood, however, has had no such issues. The Bend of Time: Omega Weapon raids have been very well received both mechanically and aesthetically. It seems that the developers erred on the side of caution this time around. Instead of introducing a bunch of largely random and samey Goblin robots to fight, Yoshida and the team went back to a bottomless well that has served them with distinction over the course of the game's lifespan: references to older Final Fantasy games that people loved. The first tier of Omega consists entirely of fights against demons of the dimensional rift from Final Fantasy 5, digitally reconstructed by the godlike Omega Weapon in a special dimensional space to participate in a grand experiment to see who The Strongest Fucker is. The Warrior of Light and the Garlond Ironworks find themselves caught up in this scheme during their investigations into the weapon's whereabouts after its battle with Shinryu. Midgardsormr, King of Kings, father of the first brood, and judgmental grandparent to the Warrior of Light also makes an appearance, seemingly with a deep connection to the mysterious Allagan supermachine. The raid tier culminates in a fight against the fan favorite villain Exdeath in one of the best fights in the game so far. With the possible exception of Alte Roite, who is kind of just there, all of the fights in this tier have unique, memorable mechanics to deal with, some of which are quite hysterical, like using an anti-gravity device provided by Nero to float above ground attacks, realize with alarm that you can't get back down, and then realize the boss will just do it for you, or strategically turning into a frog to get bonus limit break. The savage fights are obviously a step up in difficulty, but the developers decided to tone it down from Gordian levels and make the fights more accessible and clearable by more people. Which is not to say that they are easy fights - savage Halicarnassus and Exdeath require strong coordination and adaptation to survive. In order to entice more experienced players to take on these marginally-less-absurd challenges, the team has included mechanics and in the case of Exdeath an entirely new fight in the Savage instances that are quite fun and not present at all in the normal versions. This trend was actually started by Brute Justice in the Midan sector, who had a final hyper mode phase in savage that was absent in normal, though it was infamous for its incredible difficulty, even by Alexander Savage's standards. So, like with other aspects, they took this element of what came before and refined it and toned it down so now you can fight Neo Exdeath in glorious 3D.

The Omega raids are not flawless, by any means. While the Final Fantasy geek inside of me is vibrating constantly at the thought of more throwback fights later on, the more objective game critic side does genuinely prefer original content like what was found in Alexander, at least, in theory. Hardcore raiders are also quick to point out that they were kind of easy, but I'm not sure that their judgment of these matters is actually sound because only a small part of the population can sit down for 8 hours a day and ram their heads against the challenge and pave the way for the rest of us. Fortunately, the team expected this and has recently released The Unending Coil of Bahamut. The Unending Coil is a reimagining of the fights against Twintania, Nael Deus Darnus, and Bahamut himself condensed into one and made excruciatingly, preposterously difficult. This gave the hardcore groups a meaty bone to chew upon, and a clear didn't come nearly as fast as it did for Omega savage. There are tangible rewards for clearing it, as well - you get shiny dreadwyrm weapons which may have better stat allocations than their genji counterparts and the aptly named title "The Legend." They also released the Royal City of Rabanastre 24-person raid not long before at the launch of 4.1 for more casual players to enjoy and gear up with. Rabanastre has seriously ludicrous lore implications and tons of fanservice for the Ivalice Alliance appreciators in the audience, and in general is just much more fun and interesting than the Void Ark (though sadly lacking in Voluptuous Void Booty department). With the introduction of a radically new PvP mode in Birds of Prey where you get to ride around in giant robots, and rumors of the Forbidden Land Eureka making an appearance soon, the  Stormblood launch is enjoying much more support and longevity than Heavensward did.

Of course, the possibility remains that later patches in this cycle are going to be total trash heaps, but I think that it's fair to assume that they will not be those. The FFXIV is one of the best around at learning from mistakes and iterating upon good ideas until they are also good in execution. It's a game that has genuinely gotten better each time it has been updated, with some notable exceptions that were usually fixed pretty quickly anyway. At this point, I feel confident in saying that Stormblood is a superlative expansion with 4 more content patches to go promising a lot of really really cool shit. I'm super pleased, and it's probably my game of the year. It's extremely gratifying to watch the team grow and learn over time and create some really excellent experiences in every arena: social, mechanical, narrative and graphical. A haven for the bold is a great place to be right now.

[blessuswithblogs]

Thoughts on Hollow Knight: I gazed into the void and it was full of cute buggies

(very minor spoilers for Hollow Knight ahead)

It occurred to me when I was writing up my thoughts on The Surge that Hollow Knight probably deserved the same treatment, as it is another recent Dark Souls inspired offering that I played quite a bit of. I think the reason I haven't really put my thoughts together about Hollow Knight yet is that I haven't really needed to. The game is simply very good in a straightforward, easy to understand way. Hollow Knight is a metroidvania made by the indie studio Team Cherry with charming hand-drawn graphics. Mechanically, it draws much more from modern Castlevania titles than Souls. The only thing that really even qualifies it as a Dark Souls inspired game is the fact you lose your money on death and have to recover it again. It's a rather unnecessary addition, but at least in Hollow Knight, this mechanic has some (vague) diegetic reason for being.

I don't feel quite as inclined to explain the systems of Hollow Knight in such excruciating detail as I did for The Surge, mostly because they are simpler, better implemented, and easier to understand. You swing your sword (or Nail, in the parlance of Hallownest, the ancient bug city where the game takes place), it does damage to enemies, enemies drop money (or Geo, as it is called) you can use to buy things, and you explore a huge 2D interconnected world. Character progression is done entirely by finding upgrades in the game world, or finding NPCs in the game world to buy things from, so Hollow Knight is quite light on RPG aspects. The main character customization aspect comes from charms, your only real gear analogue, which you can equip at benches, your rest and respawn points, for various helpful effects like increased swing range, extra health, and a passive magnetic field that draws Geo into you so it doesn't go flying off into the abyss all the time.

What I would say is the most unique mechanic in the game is the Soul system, which sounds ridiculous, but it's not what it sounds like i swear don't close the window. Instead of currency, Soul is basically your MP equivalent, which you use to cast spells and heal yourself. You regain soul by striking enemies with your nail, creating a rewarding rhythm of using basic attacks to power up your big moves or keep yourself alive. It encourages using spells instead of hoarding them because your Soul is effectively unlimited as long as you have things to smack. The game can get pretty hard towards the end because bosses and tougher enemies tend to go berserk the moment you step back to take a moment to heal, but otherwise it's a well realized system that gives you a lot of variety and flexibility in how you approach the game's various challenges.

Where the game really gets its self-proclaimed Dark Souls inspiration is in its world design and preferred method of storytelling. You play as the nameless Knight, a cute little bug child with some interesting powers and no sense of smell or verbal communication skills. The Knight is explicitly and importantly genderless. You start the game making your way to Dirtmouth, small town of friendly bugs situated on top of Hallownest, a huge bug metropolis built beneath the ground. Unfortunately, Hallownest has been visited by a Terrible Calamity and most bugs brave enough to venture into the depths eventually lose their sense of self and wander the tunnels aimlessly, attacking anything that moves. The comparison with Lordran is quite self-evident, and the general structure of the narrative mirrors the original Dark Souls quite faithfully. The world is designed similarly, exploring the nooks and crannies of a once great civilization, marveling at its grand archtiecture, and gradually uncovering the unseemly secrets it was built upon.

Unlike The Surge, which was so much of a narrative mess I felt like I had to go into it in detail just to sort my thoughts out and sort of confirm to the world at large that I wasn't having some sort of fever dream, I have enough respect for the tale of Hollow Knight that I don't really want to spoil it. It's worth seeing and exploring for yourself, and at a very affordable price point, I would really recommend giving it a try. A lot of love and care went into Hollow Knight. One area where the game shines is in its characters, a motley collection of bugs from all walks of life with many different perspectives and goals. They are both memorable in personality and in design, each one drawn in an expressive and unique way that emphasizes their own little idiosyncracies. Quirrel, a happy go lucky adventurer explores Hallownest for its secrets much like you do and you get to be friends with him as you go through the game. Zote the Mighty, a supremely overconfident and haughty warrior, becomes your rival of sorts after you get him out of a sticky situation. Cornifer, a jolly and helpful cartographer, can be found in each area selling a map for a reasonable fee and offering insight about the locale. You need to buy these to have a map to begin with, so you tend to be extremely grateful whenever you hear his trademark hummning and find the paper trail he leaves behind. There are a lot of characters in Hollow Knight, and most of them have their own stories and surprises. They're also "voice acted" in a sing-song fake bug language sort of reminiscent of older Legend of Zelda titles that's quite charming and evocative.

The game's various bosses (of which there are more than 5, I might add) are quite similar to the characters. They've got their own stories and goals and take on a variety of forms, some cute, some terrifying, some a little bit of both. I've been fairly effusive in my praise of the game so far, and while I do think that the bosses are very good for the most part, it is worth noting that a lot of later fights in the game, especially some optional ones, are huge difficulty spikes that can kind of take you out of the game. Being optional, of course, means that this is never a huge problem, but Hollow Knight can get pretty brutal later on even on the critical path. It has a much more traditional difficulty curve than the average Souls style game, which usually start very difficult and become easier as you master the mechanics. Instead, the game starts off quite leisurely but gradually (and sometimes not so gradually) ramps up into a very difficult fight for survival. Bosses, and regular enemies, also have their own bits of lore courtesy of the game's bestiary system, the Hunter's Journal. The Hunter is an NPC you meet fairly early on in the game who, impressed either by your courage or simple disregard for your own safety, bequeaths to you his journal and exhorts you to hunt and grow strong. By killing a certain number of each enemy type, you get both basic information and the Hunter's own thoughts and feelings, which can be quite edifying -- or at least amusing. I will criticize that the prose used in some of these entries is a bit amateurish, but, glass houses and all that.

Speaking of optional bosses, Hollow Knight has a lot of them. It has a lot of optional stuff period. It's a legitimately pretty huge game, especially your first time through. You go through a large variety of environments, from crystalline mines to verdant gardens to horrifying spider-infested tunnels. Hollow Knight can, on rare occasions, go right for the jugular with that primal fear of things that skitter and bite, and given how cute and pleasant most of the game world looks, these occasional forays into nightmare made manifest are extremely jarring and if you are particularly afraid of phylum Euarthropoda, you may want to give this game a pass. Or at least maybe have somebody hold your hand while you go through Deepnest. Spider hell aside, the game rewards exploration with all sorts of hidden goodies, vendors, and even entire areas that somebody only going through the critical path might never even see. It is in this aspect that the Souls lineage really shines through, at least by my estimation. The game is so big and multilayered that not having a map available from the start can be kind of difficult, since 2D space tends to be more difficult to make a mental map of. There's plenty of options for fast travel and shortcuts to take from place to place, but without some sort of anchor, getting lost is an inevitability.

My biggest singular complaint comes at the very end of the game, on the way to get the Best Ending, so it is once again optional content so I can't count it against the overall package too harshly. Even so, it's pretty bad. Leaving out on the specifics for spoiler's sake, you find yourself in a sawblade and spike infested deathrap straight out of Super Meatboy. The platforming in Hollow Knight is Perfectly Fine, but not quite precise enough to really shine in situations where I Wanna Be the Guy style jumping puzzles are presented as obstacles. It's a very out of place segment with no enemies to fight whatsoever (and thus, no really reliable way to refill soul and heal yourself from the inevitable damage you're going to take from whirling death) and while the payoff is good, I still came out of it feeling more annoyed than anything. The checkpointing in some of the game's later segments can be obnoxiously unforgiving, most of all in this particular part. Eventually I had to entirely reconfigure my charm layout to go for maximum survivability, and I would not envy the player who made it there without finding some of the special HP regen charms or enough mask fragments to upgrade their health bar. Also I keep almost calling charms badges because I am a huge Paper Mario girl until the end of time so sorry if that ever slips through.

I mentioned earlier that the story of Hollow Knight was worth seeing and experiencing for yourself, and I stand by that. I think that there are some criticisms to be had with the execution and perhaps the derivative nature of it all, but an indepth analysis of Bug Lore will have to be its own post, should I feel like making it. For now, I will simply say that the characters are brilliant and lovable, and piecing together the mystery of Hollownest is quite rewarding, even if it is frustratingly vague at times. I think a lot of people forget that in Dark Souls, most of the digging had to be done for the finer details about the various historical figures and places. The main thrust of the narrative, the curse of the undead and the Dark Sign and all that, was actually kind of just Out There from minute one. It gave you a foundation to work with. Hollow Knight goes for Maximum Enigma and obfuscates even the foundation until a pretty good chunk of the way in, which is maybe a little bit excessive. Ultimately, I think it's a valid stylistic choice, but one I'm not a huge fan of.

Hollow Knight is good. Hollow Knight is great! Aforementioned considerations of arachnophobia aside, I would recommend it to anyone who ever enjoyed a Metroidvania or similarly styled game, or any Souls fan. There's lots to see and do, most of it gorgeous and haunting in equal measure. I have a few fairly minor complaints, and people without much patience for Hard Games might want to consider just sticking to the critical path and looking up the rest on Youtube, but overall it's a fantastic package made with a lot of love and heart. There's an earnestness and sincerity to Hollow Knight that's very precious and should be nurtured as much as possible. It's this extremely high-concept bug adventure that is nevertheless very affecting and memorable. The eventual payoff for seeing and doing everything is very impressive and quite a spectacle, with some evocative visuals that will stay with you for a long time. Definitely a game of the year contender as we approach the conclusion of 2017.

[blessuswithblogs]

Thoughts on The Surge: in the future, nobody has guns

~there are, by necessity, spoilers on The Surge in this post and also a lot of rambling holy cow~

Yesterday, I finished the Surge. It was not something I was particularly expecting to do at that juncture. I was getting very close to beating a boss, but I had about 5 minutes to go before I had to go raid in FF14. I figured that if I beat the thing, I would just save and quit and come back to it and that would be that. Imagine my surprise when it turned out this fairly nondescript monster was actually The Final Boss of the game and immediately after beating it, I beat the game and the credits rolled. I was a bit nonplussed by this, both because the game only had 5 bosses in it and because I had to hurriedly explain to my raid group that I was going to be a few minutes late because I Accidentally Finished A Game, Oops. After some reflection, it occurred to me that this experience was quite emblematic of the whole game: a strong start with good ideas that never really go anywhere and sort of implode on themselves at random intervals without warning.

Let's start with brass tacks. The Surge is Souls-like. Not one of those games that games journalists think are souls-likes because they're fucking awful at video games and they died a bunch, but an actual honest to god "our mission is to make dark souls with robots." product. The systems, mechanics, and level design philosophy are extremely similar to FromSOFT's critically acclaimed action RPGs. The Surge is from the same developers as Lords of the Fallen, which was a putrid mess. Their sophmore effort is much, much better. I quit Lords a few hours in while I'm considering a second playthrough of The Surge. One of the big problems with Lords was that it was seemingly designed from the perspective of someone who played Dark Souls 1 exclusively clad in Havel's armor and the Dragon Tooth and thought that playstyle wasn't quite deliberate enough. The Surge, conversely, is much faster and more responsive, about on par with Dark Souls 3. It also gains a lot from its unique aesthetic sensibilities, at least at first, but more on that later.

The big mechanical selling point of The Surge which differentiates it from other games of its type is the practice of targeting specific limbs and body parts. It's not at all the first Dead Space parallel one might notice, and certainly not the last. At first, it's quite novel, but The Surge never quite leans into it enough to make it very deep or rewarding. Invariably, the strategy is "attack the unarmored parts, idiot." If everything is armored, it's "attack the head, idiot." The only real exceptions to this rule are when you are engaged in the tedious process of farming gear or when the game forgets its major draw and simply throws enemies at you that don't have any limbs to target. Initially, the process of getting new gear is kind of exciting, as to acquire new weapons and armor, you have to target the body part of an enemy wearing it and successfully do a finishing move to cut it off and receive a schematic you can bring to Operations (the bonfire equivalent) and build. This sounds like a reliable and engaging way to improve your character, but there are some issues with it. To build a new piece of armor, you need to use specifically Mark 1 upgrade materials. Which is fine, at first, but as you progress through the game, enemies will stop dropping this teir of materials. They will not stop dropping new schematics, however. After a certain point, to create new pieces of gear, you need to backtrack to an earlier area just to get the proper parts, and then a different, slightly later area, to get parts to upgrade them. It's real bad. Bad enough that I'm doubting my own experience with the game. Surely, there was some way to buy older parts or exchange them that I missed? Please somebody tell me I'm wrong I hate living this world where there are no alternatives.

REVISION: I did miss something!! You can actually just skip upgrade tiers entirely by using higher grade parts, though it costs more scrap. I feel silly for not catching it myself, but it seems that a lot of people didn’t. Either way, this significantly alleviates some of my major issues with the upgrade system! Praise IRONMAUS!

At any rate, the intent is to create a tension between going for easy kills by targeting unarmored body parts and going after armored parts for more difficult fights with better rewards. It's a good idea, theoretically, but the execution of the idea makes it tedious and grindy. The Surge is extremely crotchety about experimenting with new things, both because of aforementioned weird upgrade material scarcity issues and because the game's difficulty curve is a stickler for wearing gear that is up to date, unless you like getting killed in one hit. I, personally, do not. I find it to be quite frustrating. In my theoretical second playthrough I'm going to just stick to one set and not bother with branching out. There aren't very many armor sets to begin with, so it sort of balances out. You tend to have more freedom with weapons because they use a universal upgrade material all enemies carry, though I personally found most weapon types to be way too slow and awkward for my liking and stuck with the Vibrocutter for 90% of the game. That seems altogether too subjective to really count against the game, and is also the focus of my next playthrough: trying to learn weapons I passed up on in my first.

Character progression is done via upgrading your Core Power level with tech scrap that everybody drops on death. Core Power determines the quality and quantity of gear pieces and implants you can have active at any one time. Core Power also gates progress behind overload nodes that require a certain power level to activate, one of the more random and haphazard mechanics in the game. It's usually not an issue, though you will occasionally run into nodes with requirements so high they might as well read "backtrack here later asshole." Progression itself is kind of muddled by the way implants work, which is somewhat too broadly. Implants can provide minor bonuses, but they can also dictate your entire suite of healing options, maximum HP, and your ability to see enemy healthbars (which is quite important when you need to keep them alive long enough to cut off their limbs, because it would be rude to do that while they're dead. You find implants all over the place in various grades. I assume that the idea is to gradually upgrade your older ones as you go along, but I always felt a bit lost about where exactly the Surge wanted me to be at in regards to my implant setup. I would count this against the game less if I didn't consistently run into points where I would find a new enemy that just killed me in one hit from across the room and feel very sad about life.

This brings me to what is one of the game's biggest design problems: enemy variety, or lack thereof. The designs of the enemies are more than a little uninspired. For a good 80% of the game your only foes are Zombie Men in Robot Suits, Small Drones, and maintenance/security robots. There's enough room for variation in the zombie men that it's tolerable, but the god damned leaping security robots show up everywhere, are never any different, and are incredibly obnoxious to fight. High defense, hypertracking, and the ability to leap across the room from any angle and deal what is consistently 80% of your healthbar in damage is nightmarish, and certain areas of the game are just CRAWLING with these fuckers. You can cut off their tails to get some implants you can sell for scrap. That's something. But god I hate these things. The crystalline nanofriends at the end of the game have many of the same problems with unreasonably high damage and absurd tracking, but I found them much easier to deal with because of how easy it was to bait out their railgun attack.

The bosses in this game are a mixed bag, which is usually okay, but there's only 5 of them. I try not to harsh on games for not having enough content for value, so believe me when I say that my criticism here is based on the fact that bosses are desperately needed to cut up some of the monotony of samey enemies. The first two bosses are big robots, as they should be. The camera is a little shitty in spots but they're big and tough and impressive looking. You can also fulfill special criteria to get Super Strong versions of the weapons they drop during the fight, but there's no way to actually know what those criteria are and some of them are eso-fucking-teric. The first boss, the P.A.X., has a mechanic where you can lead its own missiles into it to stun it and make it vulnerable and the game telegraphs it fairly obviously. To get its special drop, you have to not do this. Conversely, the second boss, the Firebug waste disposal robot, has a special weapon you can get by specifically doing the mechanic that is presented to you and cutting off all its limbs. Then the next boss, the Big SISTER construction platform, needs you to not kill any limbs at all. It's extremely inconsistent. These first 3 bosses range from good to serviceable, and are pretty good spectacles. The last two, however, are ffffucking dire.

The 4th boss of the game, the Black Cerberus, is a fight against a human opponent with military grade equipment. It's pretty fun to start out with, requiring different strategies from the huge robots previously fought. Things go south extremely quickly when the boss, after taking some damage, becomes invincible, runs away, locks himself in a room, heals himself, and summons a P.A.X. for you to fight. There are only 5 bosses in this game and they still found a way to recycle them. So you kill the P.A.X. and the actual boss comes back powered up. Fine. Alright. However, you have to do this cycle 3 times. 3. fucking. times. It's actually inexcusable that this is a thing in a game made in 2017 and I get mad just thinking about it. It makes the Bed of Chaos look like a reasonable fight because it at least had the decency to save your progress. You can get a beefed up version of his energy axe thing by cutting off his right arm but who even fucking cares. The final boss is a sort of neat looking monster made of nanomachines but I think it's borderline plagiarizing a bit of fanart I saw once for a Cyber-souls game. It's kind of whatever honestly. You have to kill the parts that glow white until the whole thing glows red, then you have to... hit a button? It's weird and random but I figured it out quickly enough that I'm not going to say that it's bad or unintuitive. Then it turns into a humanoid swordfighter guy with no armored parts at all and you just stab him in the head until he's fucking dead. It's a joke of a fight. You can get some Super Good Claws if you cut off his right arm but at that point I just wanted the boss to be dead so I went for the cranium. All throughout the boss spouts off voicelines from other characters in the game because of some bullshit about nanomachine networks that's extremely underdeveloped and tacked on. It's a fine boss fight, but the fact that it's the final confrontation and the last bit of gameplay in the whole game makes it such a wet fart of a thing I still feel kind of depressed about it.

So now we come to my biggest complaint about the game. The gameplay is mostly good with some tedious parts and some fucking awful parts. The story and setting, however, are just. How do I even put this? Imagine if System Shock, Dead Space, and SOMA got mashed into one thing by a thirteen year old. Let's start with the good, because there is good in here, and it kept me going for a long time even if I was ultimately disappointed. The game starts out with an extremely Corporate Culture advertisement for a job at CREO, which is probably an acronym for something, but hell if I can remember it. What is immediately striking is how true to life that ad is, stuff about cybernetic enhancement aside. CREO ends up as this sort of idea of "what if Apple dealt in sick robot arms and rockets instead of phones", which I feel like is a concept that is going to become more and more popular to explore in the near future. At any rate, the protagonist, Warren, accepts the job offer and goes off to his first day of work at CREO HQ. The first thing we learn about Warren, aside from looking like an average mainstream western video game protagonist, is that he has to get around in a wheelchair. The reveal of this is one of the very few character moments we really get in this game, and it immediately gives us some insight into why Warren was so eager to go work for a company that turns you into a fucked up robot man. Being a fucked up robot man is probably a pretty sweet deal if you get to Ambulate With Your Legs again. So Warren wheels his way into the lobby to check in and get kitted out with his Rig, an extremely Dead Space name for a sort of power loader exoskeleton wot lets you do the cool robot things as happy corporate music plays as a hip young guy on the monitor extolls the virtues of working at CREO, the revolutionary company out to save the world. Then he gets into the Robot Chair and has extremely invasive surgery done on him without anaesthetic because I guess the opening was just too down to earth and needed some fuckin gore.

I personally feel like the surgery scene is ultimately unnecessary and tacky, serving no real purpose in the narrative except to hint to more trusting players that "maybe CREO bad???". That notwithstanding, the opening is very strong because it establishes a very intriguing world. The Surge is set in the 2060s, or thereabouts, making it near-future firm-ish scifi, and the world of 2060 and beyond kind of fucking sucks. Not because of any great cataclysm or alien invasion, but because late capitalism is a hellish, undying force of destruction on a planetary scale and Earth is rapidly approaching a point where it can no longer support human life due to pollution and over-exploitation. That's about as hard sci-fi as it gets. There's mentions of failed nations, wars, riots, famine, and all of the lovelies we can expect in the next half a century. CREO's mission statement is to use revolutionary new technology to save the world and undo the damage with Project Resolve. Project Resolve is a sort of nebulous terraforming initiative involving CREO shooting rockets into the upper atmosphere that release chemical agents that will gradually repair Earth's atmosphere. The science becomes much squishier here but that's honestly fine with me because it sets up the core tension of the game: how can the same institution that destroyed the planet for centuries turn around and save it? Turns out it can't.

After Warren awakens in the junkheap, about to be disposed of for being "defective", he goes on a fantastical journey through CREO HQ to accomplish basically nothing. Everything in the facility has gone completely off the rails, with the majority of employees hooked up to rigs having completely lost their minds due to some sort of technical malfunction in the neural network. Warren is presumably unaffected by this because he wasn't linked up to the system yet when it happened, and so can adventure around and kill lots of deranged construction workers. You learn more about CREO from audio logs (it's a gritty sci-fi game with pretensions of being scary so naturally everyone in the world compulsively records their thoughts on things on oversized PDA things), environmental storytelling (blood on the walls, skulls in the toilet), and more promotional company videos about how great CREO is. The latter is the most organic and believable mechanism of exposition, and provides a strong sense of juxtaposition between Corporate Image and Reality. It's at times a little on the nose, but, well, art imitates life.  The real problems with the narrative occur after you meet Dr. Chavez, a disgruntled former head of R&D at CREO who worked a greatl deal on Project Resolve. It comes out that there's a problem with Resolve that basically makes it poison to living things. Chavez believes she can fix it, but is unceremoniously fired and replaced by another scientist more willing to compromise. This is fine, and is a great illustrative moment of how even something as noble as saving the world becomes harmful when performed by a beuaracratic, for profit institution. The problem comes from what Dr. Barret, Chavez's replacement, cooks up. Instead of just holding steady on the flawed Project Resolve, Barret decides that's not villainous enough and creates Project Utopia, an alternative to resolve that will absolutely repair the Earth with the small side effect of killing 97% of the current human population.

It's at this point that things start straining that suspension of disbelief, both because of the general unbelievability of something that can wipe out the vast majority of humanity by itself, in a short enough time period that no other organizations would be able to counteract it, and simultaneously restore the environment and because it's hard to believe that a profit-oriented organization like CREO would willingly kill off 97% of their consumer base. The mechanism by which Utopia works isn't revealed until the end of the game, and it's a bit of an eyeroller: nanomachines. The game's sudden, weirdly low-key shift from all-too-believable corporate negligence to literal grey goo end of the world shit is jarring and makes a lot of what came before weaker. Warren is no longer just a Guy With a Robot Suit trying to make it, he's the world's last, best hope to not die horribly. This raising of the stakes was honestly quite unnecessary. Simply finding the cause of the CREO-wide malfunction and reversing it was a worthy enough goal, but I guess it just wasn't enough. Also Dr. Barret is a literal mad scientist making human-machine hybrids and waxing philosophical about the necessary evolution of mankind while all this is going on so there's like 4 unresolved plot points sent careening on a collision course with eachother with not a lot of game left to wrap it up, and also like 2 of these plot points are stupid.

The final area of the game, the launch facility for project utopia, is infested with nanite monstrosities that look kind of cool at least. Up until now your primary foes have actually been company security personnel, hilariously enough, who are largely unaffected by the big neuronet hiccup from earlier. I had no problem with this, honestly, because beating up rent-a-cops sounds like a good time to me. Where it gets weird is that the rent-a-cops are seemingly 100% on board with global genocide of everybody ever. ACAB, and all that, but maybe not to that degree. So you get this weird scenario where you can find security guards harmoniously cooexisting with nanite gestalts of an emerging consciousness spreading and repurposing the launch facility. The guard posted at the entrance to the launch site even gives you a verbal warning to back off like there's nothing going on, something that no other security guard has given you since the beginning of the game. It's super bizarre. There is a subplot of an NPC who gradually loses their identity and memories and joins the guard, so there is evidence for some weird neural implant fuckery. I think I might be missing some information, since I didn't get all of the audio logs and shit.

Basically the climax of the game is that you go to the Nucleus launch facility to try and stop Utopia from getting into the atmosphere, or at least slow it down. You get a virus from Dr. Chavez you can upload into the payload to weaken the nanites. You would think that would be the Main Goal of the Game, but it's actually a totally missable side thing you can do if you feel like it. The actual end point of the game is getting to the rocket launch platform and fighting the Rogue Process, who appears to be guarding the rocket. The rocket launches anyway no matter what you do so the whole situation seems forced. The trigger for the fight is overloading a node by the launch panel. Prior to that the Rogue Process just sort of hangs out in noncorporeal form babbling nonsense at you. If you put the virus in the payload, then what are you even doing here? Just let it do its work and don't fuck around with nanites and rocket engines more than you have to. If you decided that you're okay with 97% of the population dying, then what are you even doing here? Just hang out or try to escape. You fight the Rogue Process because the game needs a final boss, and for no other reason. The damn thing doesn't even die if the ending is to be believed. This whole part of the game left me feeling extremely perplexed, like there was a big chunk of the story just missing. Like a conclusion. Or hell, even a climax.

My working theory of it all is that the Rogue Process developed sentience at some point before Warren arrived and started working on getting Utopia into the atmosphere to spread itself, heedless of human casualties because there's no possible way an AI developed at CREO could have any ethical considerations. It needed the board of directors to vote in favor of the launch, and engineered this impossibly convoluted chain of events to kill one of the no-go voters by Doctor Octopusing him to his chair in the board room. Or something. It might have been one of the board members who became unhinged? I'm really genuinely unsure of what actually happened except that Warren basically didn't do anything the whole game. You've got this very system shock style of progression where voices on the other ends of speakers yank you around to do stupid bullshit and you just sort of End Up where you end up. It's not really so much uncovering a mystery as desperately searching for a supervisor to give you some form of employee orientation, which, to the game's credit, is appropriate. I have no problem with vagueness in video games, being a noted devotee of Dark Souls style storytelling. It just feels extremely random and haphazard in The Surge, like part of the game is told one way where Atlas is asking if you would kindly fix the valves on the bathysphere and another part is digging for Lore on the Ancient Board of Directors Who Passed Long Ago to figure out what any of this even means. Except the Lore is audio logs. Some people don't like Lore. -I- don't like audio logs.

In the end, the whole thing starts strong and doesn't, or can't fulfill its promises. I'll say one thing now: the overall package would have been better and more coherent if they had just leaned in on the nanomachines. One of the things that super bugged me about The Surge was the death and recovery mechanic. The currency in this game is tech scrap. Little bits of metal. That's lying around everywhere. It is not precious or special in any way. There is no diegetic reason for why you drop it on death, and why Warren can come back from being bisected. It's there purely for gameplay purposes, To Be Like Dark Souls. And that just drives me up a wall. Demon's Souls and Dark Souls built their entire worlds upon the cycle of Try, Die, Repeat, Succeed. It's engraved upon the very DNA of those games, from top to bottom, mechanically to thematically. The Surge just does it because it feels like its supposed to, and that is a rotten reason to do anything. The timer mechanic, which was present in Lords of the Fallen, which had similar issues with nebulous "Experience Points" being lost on death, adds insult to injury because it's ridiculously Video Game-y. There's no reason why an inert pile of scrap would disappear after two minutes or why killing some random drone halfway across the map would extend the timer. The reason I mention this with the nanomachines is because nanomachines provide an elegant solution to the dilemma. If you're so damned determined to be like Souls, then just use nanites as the diegetic justification for death recovery. Nanites can reconstruct your body after lethal trauma, but it means that the excess nanites you were carrying are discharged or used up to do so. Something like that. Expand on the nanomachine constructs from the end of the game, and the neat adaptive nanite armor some of the endgame enemies wear. I personally prefer the initial approach the game takes with less apocalyptic do-anything technology, but I would totally respect the decision to go whole Metal Gear hog on nanotech to explore some of that Try Die Repeat Succeed theming.

Also did you know that they even managed to stick in some poison swamps? Please. Please no more. Stop. I guess that brings us to environments? They're kind of bad in The Surge. It's all just industrial zones with occasional but extremely appreciated detours to greenhouses (poison swamp greenhouses!!!!), a show floor, and swanky executive offices. I think what really wore on me was the maintenance tunnels all looking identical. So many dark yellow cabley tunnels. Why didn't we ever go to space? The entire game takes place in a rocket production facility. I feel like there's a whole other act that takes place on a satellite or the fucking moon or something that got cut. Let me go to space you cowards. The NPCs are all extremely forgettable, too. They're all bland character archetypes with no agency and they all die. Not that I really cared. But god even in Bloodborne a couple of characters made it through the night! Even if it was only like Suspicious Yharnam Man and the Chapel Dweller. But the Chapel Dweller was a good person, at least. I guess if you don't give The Crazy Widow tech scrap to make a weapon Hobbs will survive. Maybe the doctor also lives? His robot-daughter doesn't, which is a shame, because she was like the one character I did enjoy. The whole game is very soulless, despite best efforts, another problem shared with Lords of the Fallen who in my 4 or so hours playing did not have a single character I did not wish violent death upon. It's a step up that only a couple of The Surge characters fit that criteria. I guess.

In conclusion, I still don't really know how I feel about the Surge. It's.... worth playing? Like I would enthusiastically recommend Bloodborne or Dark Souls 1 and 2 to anybody who likes video games, but I think the only people who would enjoy the Surge are those who specifically enjoy Souls-like games. I think most players would find The Surge needlessly awkward and difficult without much payoff in other areas. You can cut off heads real good, I guess, but if you're really hankering for satisfying dismemberment for some reason, you'll get a lot more mileage out of 2016 DooM. The Surge wants to be too many things at once and seriously Warren just feels so much like off-brand Isaac Clarke after the opening when his one defining characteristic is no longer salient. They're both engineering types, have Rigs, and their arsenals are comprised entirely of power tools being used in the most unsafe ways conceivable by the human mind. That's not really a criticism. More of an observation. I don't know. God I wrote lots of words about this. I hate video games.

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Convoluted Time and Ordered Space: Why We Still Yearn For Lordran's Connected World

It's been a good 5 and a half years since the initial release of Dark Souls. For the number of games in the series that have been released since then, it's actually a surprisingly short amount of time. This makes the great reverence that many fans have for the first game slightly puzzling. Not enough time has really passed for nostalgia to cloud the critical eye, but then again, if there is one thing gamers are good at, it's getting nostalgic about things. Make no mistake, while Dark Souls 1 was beloved from the very outset, there were many outspoken voices criticizing some of the game's more questionable design decisions, and many people felt that the game’s latter half, after obtaining the lordvessel, was outright bad. To be perfectly honest with you, I never found the latter half of Souls 1 to be that appalling. It's the weaker half of the game, certainly, and Lost Izalith and the Crystal Caves make for a truly vile one two punch of drudgery, but it was still very strong. These days, people tend not to mention these areas when waxing poetic about the deific status of the first Dark Souls. There are as many takes on why it was so magical as there are people with thoughts about it, but I have discovered a common thread: the game's interconnected world.

Since this seems to be such an important part of the experience, it bears going over even if most people are familiar with the gist of it. The first Dark Souls is layed out in such a way that the entire game world is more or less completely contiguous with itself (with a scant few exceptions). A few points of no return at the end of certain paths aside, you can actually walk the length and breadth (and height, quite importantly) of Lordran in its entirety in a geographically sensical and unbroken session. What's more, there's a wide variety of hidden paths, shortcuts, and clever elevators that the player can use to get around the place quickly. It is, essentially, the long unfulfilled promise of a three dimensional Metroidvania game. Metroid Prime got there, but really only for the Metroid part, and Dark Souls delivers on the weapon findy level uppy boss fighty npc talky that made people fall in love with Symphony of the Night. It is a superlative use of digital space that makes Lordran an area that people can make a detailed mental map of years after last playing the game. It makes Lordran feel real and immediate in a way that many game worlds don't because of their disconnected nature, later games in the series not the least of these. The architecture and layout of Lordran doesn't always make sense in terms of "this is a space that people lived in and used", but it makes a good attempt to not be utterly ridiculous. Most of the more esoteric routes you take to get places are justified by, say, the main road falling into a state of disrepair or the bridge being guarded by a fire breathing dragon. It does, however,  almost always make physical point A to point B sense, the few exceptions to this rule usually being intentional, like the Painted World or Past Oolacile.

People went nuts for this design, myself among them. It remains a feature of the game I adore and cherish, and will remain a definite advantage of Souls 1 in comparison to later titles. Compelling arguments have been made that this interconnectedness was sort of slapdashedly put together and actually makes the game worse in some ways, especially if you go through areas in ways the developers maybe didn't expect. They're fair points, but I believe that the pros outweigh the cons, and I will outline why in 3 points. First of all, it gives the game some significant replay value. Secondly, as I touched on briefly above, it helps to create a coherent and compelling world. Lastly, it accentuates and compliments the achievements and mastery the player has gained over the game. Naturally, I'll go over the hows and whys in more detail one at a time. I wouldn't expect you to take my word for it, after all.

Let's begin with something quite important to me, unemployed and impoverished as I am: replay value. I highly value games that are fun to pick back up and play after you've beaten them. Dark Souls, albeit to a lesser extent than its direct predecessor Demon's Souls, is a game that very much has replays in mind. The New Game plus feature allows for as many cycles of play as you want with the game's numerical difficulty scaling with each pass. However, I actually don't bother too much with NG+ in Dark Souls. Doing the same thing over again with the same character, just with more Numbers, isn't that appealing. Fortunately, simply starting anew with a different build is also something the game encourages thanks to the wide variety of ways it allows you to approach its first half and the Master Key gift, which unlocks a couple of key doors that allow access to later areas much earlier. A new character can make use of this gift along with the foreknowledge of previous playthroughs to beeline for certain weapons, armor, and spells to jumpstart unique builds for PvP or just for a different way to play the game. The critical path can be subverted, circumnavigated, and in some cases skipped outright for different challenges and contexts. Did you know you can actually just skip the dang Taurus Demon? And the Capra Demon? It's pretty neat. It doesn't always make the game better to play, but it keeps things interesting on replays and allows for some memorable builds and pvp shenanagins.

I briefly mentioned Demon's Souls earlier, and I want to be clear: that game also had fantastic replay value with a very different idea of world design. I have most often heard DeS's world described as the spokes on a wheel, where you start from the central hub of the nexus and branch off into five distinct areas that are totally separate from one another. It's similar in practice to how Megaman games are layed out, honestly. However, in Demon's Souls, the the areas are segmented and you can warp back to the Nexus after a boss fight signals the end of a "stage". The common way to refer to these is as, say, 3-1, 2-3, 5-2, etcetera. The way you can mix and match your progression makes the same things true of Dark Souls replayability also true of Demon's Souls, though I would argue that DeS is a less full featured game to take full of advantage of it. Also those fucking crystal geckos only spawn a limited number of times. What even the hell. The point of this aside is to establish that I think that Spoking Paths are also good! The interconnected world is not the one true way! However, I believe that part of the reason that many people so drastically prefer Dark Soul's approach is that it's so much more uncommon and fresh, even if it is somewhat unrefined. People are fiercely attached to the Metroidvania style, now more than ever thanks to Konami's questionable business practices and the apparent death of Castlevania as a property. One of dark souls 3's bigger issues, to me, is that it's quite linear without really justifying it, being neither an interconnected world or a spoking one. It's well designed for the most part but it does hamper replays and specialized low level builds quite a bit. HAD TO DUNK ON 3 A LITTLE SORRY SORRY WHY AM I LIKE THIS

Moving on. Let's talk more about how interconnectedness makes the world more coherent and compelling. The first part is kind of easy. For an interconnected world to work, it must be at least a little coherent to begin with. If your shortcuts, branching paths, and doublebacks don't make any geographical sense, then your world falls apart before it begins. This is why many games prefer more segmented approaches to world design - it gives you more freedom to explore a variety of locations without compromising on the spatial integrity of your world. It's not a contradiction for Sonic to explore both Green Hill Zone and the Magma Heck Zone and the Weird Giant Casino Zone because they're in different places entirely and he just ran to each one off screen. He's fast. That's Sonic's thing.  The Chosen Undead can move at a pretty good clip while naked, but is no Sonic the Hedgehog, and thus is more locationally constrained. Lordran is self-contained. There are a few areas outside of it reached by Hard Transitions, like a magic painting or a giant bird taxi service, but everything else is just, there. Dark Souls uses vertical space very heavily to pack as much variety of environment as it can into a fairly compact region. You've got decadent Anor Londo up on top of it all, with Sens's Fortress guarding the entrance, and then down below are the various levels of the Undead Burg and Darkroot garden, essentially residential areas. You can see these places from one another, which is extremely important to this whole enterprise. This is both a Cool Thing and pertinent to gameplay: you are given rather sparse direction in Dark Souls, and more than once I was spurred on by seeing something neat looking in the distance to continue on and see if I could reach it. And I almost always could! It moves the game along and it's an intrinsically rewarding exercise. It's like, when Todd Howard says you can go fuck the mountain, that's all well and good, but why do I want to fuck the mountain? It's just a dang mountain and I probably have to do my best billygoat impression to get anywhere with it. In Dark Souls, you can see that Lower Undead Burg from Firelink and you can go there, and there are Things To Do There, and more of the world to uncover.

Now it's not perfect. The interconnected world really only applies to the first half of the game or so. Once you reach Anor Londo and find the lord vessel, the game actually transitions to more of a Spoke layout, with distinct paths with end points that do not intersect (though you can see Lost Izalith and Ash Lake from Tomb of the Giants, which is real cool). This is also where people, on release, started really harshing on the game, and not without justification. The areas seemed unfinished and the jarring transition to a strictly spoke based world for the final stretch was offputting. This is not a failure of spoking world design, it's bad because the game was just kind of half-finished and messy on the back half, but I think that it may have poisoned the well on future Wheelworlds in the series. Some of the shortcuts and hidden paths also added to lore and worldbuilding. Ash lake, for instance, offered insight into just how the planet Lordran is situated on is constructed - a way very different from our own, and one that still kind of gives me the Fear of Deep Water heeby jeebies. I will defend dark souls 2 to the death, but magma castle in the sky is a hill I will leave for hbomberguy to die on. There is merit to the reading of Drangleic as a place where space as well as time is convoluted, but that one was just lazy, and if souls 2 wanted to have a sort of geographic reveal like Ash Lake, it really wouldn't have worked. It wouldn't have been a fundamental truth about the composition of the world, it just would have been another nonsensical transition. I think this is why people can get so down on 2's world even though it really is quite good. The seeming randomness of the places in Drangleic takes away from the concrete physicality that made Lordran a character in its own story. Dark Souls 3 is another thing entirely that I think I'll talk about at more length in its own article, that game has a very deliberate world architecture unlike both of its predecessors.

Finally, we come to my most abstract point. I assert that the interconnected world accentuates and compliments the player's mastery and achievements throughout the game. What does this mean, exactly? Essentially, the way the world is layed out naturally reinforces and rewards getting better at the game. My point is encapsulated by that moment that every new player has: you fight your way tooth and nail to the chapel in the Undead Parish. Home base seems miles away. You're not sure you could get back if you needed to. But, suddenly! You find an elevator shortcut right back to Firelink Shrine, illuminating the purpose of some of the odder architecture there and cementing your mental map of the world. It also feels fantastic and relieving and inspiring. You have made tangible progress. That elevator remains operational. You can come and go as you please. Your achievement in making it this far at all is celebrated and rewarded by a quick way back to safety, which in turns makes further explorations and adventures possible. It's a feeling that's distinctly diluted by unconditional warping bonfires. I don't think those are bad, necessarily, but it's undeniable that finding them feels less significant. In Dark Souls 1, there's a risk/reward aspect even to bonfires: if I rest here, it makes getting back to where I came from that much more difficult. Certainly, one could argue that all of this just results in lots of unnecessary walking and tedium, but I found Lordran to be a compelling enough place to be in that I didn't mind it so much. Your mileage may vary.

Continuing with my theme of abstractions and game "feel", the interconnected, crisscrossing, backtracking world of Lordran allows players to feel strong and see the fruits of their labors in ways that the more linear and streamlined games in the series miss out on. When you first start out, the enemies in the Burg and the Parish are threatening. You engage them carefully and deliberately, and never too many at once. The Undead in proper armor are credible enemies that cannot be taken lightly. Then you fastforward to a while later when you're on your way to Darkroot Garden or Sen's Fortress by way of Andre's bonfire and you're just bowling through these guys like they're nothing. You have grown stronger and more skilled, reflected both in how you handle enemies that were once threatening and how your weapon now kills them in one hit. By revisiting these areas to access new ones, you reaffirm in a different way that progress is being made. Even the once terrifying baldur knights in the chapel proper don't pose much of a threat anymore. The demons in the ruins used to be minibosses, but now they're just regular enemies. It's a sense of progression in an often harshly difficult game that uplifts and gives you the energy to keep going. Unless you go out of your way to search for items that you missed, this sensation is quite lacking in Souls 2 and 3, since you can just warp past everything from the getgo. Earning the ability to warp at all in Souls 1 is a big-ass deal, the reward for one of the hardest, most climactic fights in the game, and it's a real Hell Yeah moment. It's another way that your mastery has been affirmed, and it feels good to have worked for it. I think that the later games would have benefited from holding off on giving you warps immediately, but only if their worlds had been designed from the ground up with that in mind, so, maybe not actually. And I can certainly understand why somebody would not like all this beating of feet to begin with and be more than happy to just warp everywhere. Like I said, it's a feel thing, but it's an important part of the game to me. To others as well, if I'm not mistaken.

I've said many times before that I don't think that Dark Souls 1 deserves the effusive reverence afforded to it in contrast with its successors. I love it, it was a singular game, but it wasn't the second coming. With that said, I wanted to take the time to really think about why people loved the game so much, where I agreed and disagreed, and I came to the conclusion that this interconnected world of Lordran was a key piece of the puzzle. Fans fiercely love this aspect of the game, and I am with them in this. A longing to return to this format of world exploration is something that I deeply understand, even if I also acknowledge the merit of other approaches. It does boil down to preference, but I try to keep my preferences grounded in a certain degree of rigor and objectivity. If I didn't I would probably start demanding that every game have a main theme composed and performed by Crush 40 and a talking dog companion. That would be bad. At any rate, it's not surprising that fans cling to this aspect of the game so doggedly even when all indications point to it being a single, one-off thing. Something so good and affecting must be hard to design over and over again, after all.