What follows is fast and loosely written because it’s on my blog, and I barely edit anything I post here. Also, I’m tired and I just spent three hours editing something else, so I’m rattling these thoughts off while they’re still fresh after finishing the game last night.
I could sit here and write an entire review of Capcom’s latest action-horror hit, but I’m not sure how much unique that I really have to say from a critical angle. It’s a loving look at the franchise whose story is so stuffed with connective tissue that you might end up staring down the gaping maw of the fan wiki trying to figure out where you remember what from in the story. I won’t say that it’s a game built out of fan service – even though there’s plenty – but one that is fully aware of its history, it’s legacy, and how those things have limited its growth.
Requiem is the third (and probably final) take on the style of Evil established by Resident Evil VII: Biohazard for the PS4/PC/X1, in that you play an old school puzzle box filled with monsters inspired by classic horror tradition. In a unique turn for the series, however, the classic horror in RE7 was Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I will never admit to being creeped out by zombies and carnivorous plants, but people from the American south are terrifying. Village on the PS5/XSX would bring the Hammer thrills with vampires and creepy doll houses.
A point of contrition for some would be that both of these games would eventually drop their aesthetics to remind everyone that these new titles still shared continuity with the earliest titles in the series, dragging the player into the silly science labs to tell the player why they are surrounded by goopy monsters and werewolves. Chris Redfield shows up, flexes his cartoonishly large muscles, and then the credits would roll. Requiem does not hide the science horror or its ties to series history. Our new protagonist, Grace Ashcroft is technically a take on the legacy sequel horror prominent in modern horror films — she’s the child of a character from an older game.
Let me tell you, folks…I don’t think I have a problem with that.
Frankly, I’ve never taken Resident Evil all that serious as a vehicle for storytelling. I fell in the love with the series when it was b-movie cheese, and I respect the fact that it never stopped being reeking of melted artificial cheddar. The original Biohazard was originally made out of the intent to revisit Sweet Home and director Shinji Mikami had no interest in the story of his horror project. Instead, where Resident Evil shined was its intersection of setting and mood, stellar game design, and a script so incredibly stupid that it crosses that thin line from awful to awesome.
Fun fact – I spent about thirteen years looking for this version of the game only to learn that it’s much, much harder than the Director’s Cut I’d played before it.
And then there were sequels. And a mountain of spinoffs. Charting the conspiracy board connecting all of the events in the Resident Evil canon is a work that only fan wiki editors could aspire to, and they have done so with aplomb. I genuinely admire the dedication it takes to document the narrative of something so innately silly as the Resident Evil series.
And that’s what has been on my mind for the last few days as I led Leon through the dusty remains of Raccoon City towards the end of the game. I am no longer the thirteen year old who scraped the cash together to sneak a copy of Resident Evil 2 into my house (my parents had already forbade me play Goldeneye following the typical American media response to the Columbine shootings, so this game would NOT have made it past the front door without subterfuge). That kid thought all of this poorly acted drama about a zombie virus and the people uncovering the actions of villainous scientists was compelling enough to play more games, to read a gloriously absurd novelization, to think about making video games as a profession.
This adaptation of the PS1 game is fucking inspired.
Resident Evil, as a running narrative, is very stupid. It’s cheesy. It’s the dumbest iteration of 1950’s science-run-amok sci-fi coated in buckets of gore. Every villain is stupid. Their plans are stupid. The outcomes are stupid. The characters are threadbare and some of them drop the silliest action movie one-liners this side of Commando.
But most of the games treat every single moment with cold sincerity.
So many contemporary schlock horror films present their low-budget cheese with a flaccid attempt to reach “so bad it’s good” status by birthright of being cheaply made and stupid. And those films are generally awful because they do not understand that an effort still has to be made.
Resident Evil does want you to care about all of the silly things that underly the experience of surviving against ambulatory balls of flesh and blood-soaked crawling humans whose brains are exposed. Requiem, in fact, expects that you already care about that long running back story enough to remember beats from spin off movies, online PS2 games, derided mainline entries, and the revered classics alike.
The benefit of video games, however, is how a game can connect us to a character enough that we do feel that closeness provided that the game is designed to develop that bond. Silent Hill 2 (original) does not want you to feel close to James Sunderland, so the camera is fully disconnected from him, adding to the Lynchian nightmare state that the game functions in. Resident Evil puts the players close enough to the character to feel a tension from navigating with tank controls and snapping three or four of our small pool of 9mm rounds, but far enough away to enhance the inherent power fantasy of 90s action games. It’s through this connection that we can care about characters, to want to keep them alive, to escape as the clock ticks down at the last few minutes.
Because it’s wonderful to care about these stupid, stupid people who are always running headlong into danger. I loved playing as Grace Ashcroft because she is an FBI agent who is clearly so unprepared for field work that she went out without a partner into a condemned hotel and got wrapped up in a horror hospital. That’s nonsense. That would never happen. No one would ever end up in this situation.
I remember the derisive way that mainstream gaming outlets used to write about JRPGs. For those of us with a fondness for turn based combat and overwrought melodrama, it was a difficult time to engage with the culture around videogames. It was disheartening to see an entire subgenre that I loved so completely rejected.
The tide was turning by 2012, however, and one of the indicators that the turn based console RPG could again thrive was Bravely Default: Flying Fairy, published by Square-Enix as a spinoff of Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light. Praised at the time for its impressive iterations on the combat seen in games like Final Fantasy V, it sold well enough to see two sequels, one on the 3DS, and another on the Nintendo Switch.
On the launch of the Switch 2, I took another swing at Bravely Default. I played it at one point several years ago, and kind of bounced off of it, eventually trading it in towards a black label copy of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. However, I had heard for over a decade that it was brilliant, a shining exemplar of the strengths of the genre, so it seemed fitting that I should give it another shot on my brand new console. It seemed a perfect choice to start my new console up with a new JRPG, even if it is a remaster.
Yes, I did buy 3DS remaster with my overpriced console.
This review will not engage with how much I am frustrated that it came on one of Nintendo’s Game Key Cards though. Long time readers can understand my frustration and also wonder why I was stupid enough to buy one of those anyway.
After ninety hours spent in Luxendarc, I can confirm that my feelings on the qualities of Bravely Default are, of course, complicated.
What’s Old is Still Old But Shinier
Bravely Default presents a familiar adventure – a party of heroes has to restore four elemental crystals to save the world, and acquire numerous additional jobs (here labeled asterisks) in order to grow in strength to overcome a series of increasingly difficult dungeons and some truly fantastic bosses. It is easy to quickly compare it to Final Fantasy V-they share a lot of DNA.
Hey, Ringabel, Flavor Flav called. He wants his clock back.
The difference between the two comes down to how they handle the theme of environmental destruction and how it is tied to the crystals. Final Fantasy V puts the onus of saving the environment on the people of the world, saying that our personal choices are what can bring the world back from the brink of destruction. It’s a very 1990s view on environmentalism.
Bravely Default isn’t convinced.
Bravely Default can be broken down into six sections. The first chapter of the game brings the party together, and sets them out on their journey to save the crystals. The next four chapters brings them to each of the other four continents, where they meet the leaders of each country, and how they are exploiting the decay of the crystals for different ends.
It makes for a compelling journey in the first fifty-to-sixty hours. The machinations of evil were not so grand as the world annihilating threat of Exdeath, instead providing more immediately relatable woes for the people of Luxendarc. The people of Ancheim are forced into labor in exchange for expensive drinking water. Florem is a city celebrating beauty, but the people are clamoring for products that are designed to make them ever more vile to one another. A civil war has broken out in Eisen.
But its the final act of Bravely Default where I’m torn.
Eternal Recurrence
No game needs to run a certain amount of time to be fulfilling. Chrono Trigger is still considered one of the finest games ever, and it can be finished in full in around twenty hours. It also feels like a massive game despite this.
Bravely Default is not sharing this feature with Chrono Trigger.
Before I get too negative, I want to note that I did really enjoy my journey through Luxendarc. The writing was solid, the aesthetics appealing, the music wonderful, the gameplay razor sharp. It’s a damn fine game to pick up if you didn’t play it on the 3DS on its original release. Sure, it’s not going to put your new Switch 2 through its paces, but if you only buy new consoles because of graphics, I don’t know why you are reading my blog – I don’t give a shit about that kind of thing.
For evidence, this came in the mail while I was writing this review.
Bravely Default suffers from a significant amount of bloat in the last third of the game. The world map doesn’t change or expand. The dungeons are the same, with few new treasures to earn. There are no significant plot beats until the final chapter. The entire run of the last third is made up of repeated boss fights, and the only reward are small scenes showing the changes between each of the parallel worlds that the player is spirited to between chapters.
Now, the Chrono Cross fan in me is fine with this on the surface, but it feels like a slog over time. There are two full chapters of what I felt was fluff until I started to get invested again, and that’s because the game doesn’t get serious about the story it was telling in the first two acts again until chapter seven.
Of course, several days after rolling credits, I find myself getting just what the game did to me.
Going in on some mild-as-possible spoilers now, so run along if you don’t want that.
Space to hide the spoiler…also, nice map!
Airy, Agnes’ fairy companion, has been pressuring the party and the player alike throughout the game to stay on the journey, to revive the crystals, bringing them between the parallel worlds, one by one. It is revealed over the course of the last two chapters before the finale that Airy is hiding something from the party, a fact suggested through Ringabel’s flashbacks leading to this moment.
Much like the citizens of Luxendarc, the player and the party have been controlled by Airy, a being with immense power, and made to do her bidding through suggestion and manipulation.
Its a ludonarrative harmony that I’m probably going to appreciate more and more as time passes, the longer that the memory of repeating entire swathes of game blurs into the general white noise of any RPG’s random combat. The thought of that little monster floating around the menu screen, hurrying me along to the next crystal, is going to sit around in my brain instead of the rote repeats of the undead boss that I unloaded Curaga spells on three damned times.
As I sit here typing this, I find that the framing changes how I felt about the last act of the game, that my apathy was reflected by the characters in a way that I wasn’t gelling with in the moment. The game started to feel like work around the same time that the in game Party Chats were dwelling on just how many times they had revived the crystals.
The part of me that is warped by film school auteur theory wonders if this was the desired effect, that I am meant to take this reading away or if this is just the result me spending several days unpacking my conflicted feelings about the two sides of this game, the classic JRPG romp of the first half and the less exciting rehash of preexisting design elements in the second half. I don’t think I want to know the answer given Square Enix’s history of repackaging existing assets into new games. Nor does it actually matter, given that this was ultimately my experience with the journey.
On Marking Time
One of the only reasons I continue to write in my blog (despite a nonexistent readership) is that I can bumble through my own thoughts and feelings on something like a recently released game and just throw it into the sea without a second thought. I tend not to edit these posts since no one reads them, yes, and that’s only partially out of laziness, but I can go back and look for something that I previously wrote and see my thought process on the page, and rekindle things like my issues with Bravely Default.
I see it as a game that will grow more beloved in my memory with time, and stranger all the same. It’s a hard game for me to grapple with at the moment, and may stay that way. Let’s be clear, though – that’s a wonderful feeling. I am leaving this game thinking about it far more than I did Final Fantasy XVI, a game I was ultimately just unimpressed with after the credits rolled.
I look forward to talking to people about Bravely Default for a long time. I hope that Square Enix ports the 3DS sequel to the Switch 2 and puts it on the damned cartridge this time. I want to go back and finish the game I never finished on the first Switch and give more of my attention to this series.
My relationship with the Ultima series started with the retrospective videos from The Spoony Experiment. Thankfully, GOG was in the process of releasing versions of the games on their platform around this time, and I picked up everything I could as it came out. Unfortunately, enthusiasm didn’t translate into finished runs of these games. I played through Ultima I first, and later finished a run through Ultima VII: The Black Gate. I loved every second of those games, and still tell everyone I can to play through them.
I was quick to tell other RPG fans that they didn’t need to miss out on the series in any way, despite my limited exposure. I didn’t want to “skip ahead” in each of the three trilogies, so progress was halted by the obtuse nature of Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress, and my old laptop crashing about 1/3 into Ultima VII Part 2: Serpent Isle.
A little over three weeks ago, however, I finally finished Ultima II. Excitement for this particular adventure was renewed, and I was ready to play more. I was left wondering which I wanted to play. I wanted to get back to Serpent Isle because I had gotten so far only to lose progress to Windows. I even bought an NES copy of Exodus in hopes of playing through at least some version of the game since I don’t play much on my PC.
And then there’s Ultima IV.
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, if you aren’t aware, is a free game on GOG. It’s been free as long as I’ve been playing games in the series. It was the first one I ever tried. It bounced me to the curb fast because I had no idea what I was doing – my first character started in Jhelom, which is entirely landlocked. I’d tried to play it numerous times, making different mistakes each time, even trying to rely on online help to make any kind of progress.
Regardless, it never worked out, so I would have to start fresh from time to time. Around ten years ago, I started what I had hoped would be the run that brought me to the end. I got a small notebook out from my writing supplies, and tried to play the game using only what would have originally came in the box – a map, a book of lore, a book of magic, a runic cipher.
The same Windows death that ruined my Serpent Isle run devoured that run of Ultima IV.
Needless to say, Ultima IV compelled me to come back far more than Exodus did on that night a few weeks ago. I grabbed a new notebook, printed a fresh map off from the downloads on GOG, got PDFs of the books loaded up on my tablet, and rolled a new character – this time a Tinker from Minoc.
I was determined to succeed in the Quest of the Avatar.
The Journey
For those uninitiated, Ultima IV is an open world RPG with turn based combat that takes place on a separate scene from the stages of exploration. Towns and castles dot the world, each housing a number of NPCs that the player has to talk to in text-adventure style keyword conversations. The player has to collect a series of items to succeed in their journey, explore a number of first person tile based dungeons.
But that description ignores what is most compelling about Ultima IV. The game is watching what you say, how you act, what you’re doing throughout, and is measuring your exhibition of the eight virtues: honesty, compassion, valor, justice, sacrifice, honor, spirituality, and humility.
On top of living the virtues in the world of Britannia, the player has to seek out eight runes, eight stones, seven companions, a three-part key, the wheel of a sunken ship, a book, a bell, a candle. There is meditation to be done at eight shrines. There are words of power to discover. There is an axiom to decode from visions offered by the shrines.
I don’t want to recount the specifics of the adventure here, though. There are excellent retrospectives and essays about the series that could do that just fine.
No. I want to talk about my journey throughout Britannia, and how I approached playing the forty year old game. I want to talk about my success. I want to talk my failures. And the things I ultimately had to look up to eventually bring my character to the depths of the Stygian Abyss.
A Veil Between Two Worlds
As previously mentioned, my intention was to play Ultima IV with no assistance from the internet. There was obviously some limit to how I could do this – I’d already seen videos about the game online, so I could only limit my exterior knowledge so much. Additionally, I had the experience of a few attempts under my belt. Regardless, I started my notes with a simple chart, knowing that I would need the mantras, the runes, a stone (which I thought was a gem at the outset, but no matter), and eventually to seek ascension in each of those virtues at the shrine.
From there, I started my journey out of Minoc, collecting the first pieces of my journey from there. I sought out a boat to simplify navigation. I captured every seemingly important detail in my notebook, and scribbled out the relative location of the various cities on my black-and-white map. Eventually I printed a second and translated the names on the map itself to give myself more information.
My avatar and his party died many times along the way.
But the experience of Ultima IV is not a cruel one. You respawn in Castle British, restocked with food and given 200 gold pieces. You are short a few items, but your key items remain – at least as far as I experienced. Check in with Hawkwind, and continue the journey.
Yes, my handwriting is awful.
There is a richness to the experience that I don’t find in modern RPGs. The quest journals automated by contemporary games are a blessing, sure, as nothing is forgotten if it is important. But I wrote my quest log, I wrote a guide to explore a world in the pages of my little journal.
In the ongoing drive for immersion in game design, I feel there’s still the possibility that the tangibility of things like printed maps and books of lore are viable in supplementing a gameplay experience. Where it does break the player from the controls, I don’t think that it removes the player from the experience. Those books exist for the player character. The game advises you to read the book of history before you determine your character class in the opening. The ankh the player character holds in their hand is the same as was included in the box back in 1985. That map is your map to the world of Britannia.
And, by extension, my hand written journal became my in-game journal, a document symbiotic with the texts included in the game.
As I pushed further in my journey, I developed a party of four, was blessed by the shrines, and made my way to the Stygian Abyss.
Those of you who have played Ultima IV already know what happened next from the last sentence.
The truth is, as dedicated as I was to navigating this experience through my own efforts, I wasn’t prepared to enter the Stygian Abyss. Certainly I had proven myself to be virtuous in the eyes of the game. Surely I was strong enough to face down whatever beasts awaited in the dungeon. I had the three part key. I had the wheel of the HMS Cape. I was prepared.
Still…I approached the chamber of the Codex, and was sent away. I was not prepared to enter and take the final test.
The Missing Pages
I took a break from Ultima IV in the days following my failure in the Abyss. I started playing the copy of Xenoblade Chronicles X that I’d been sitting on for a week while playing Ultima – I will have more to say about that game in the coming weeks. But, I eventually went back. I had to know what happened. I recovered my game, killing my entire party in the process. Turns out that the game got rid of my boat while I was down in the Abyss, and I hadn’t found mandrake root before going to the island, so I was stranded. No gate spell. No boat. Nothing.
So, I died, and respawned in Castle British, two hundred gold pieces to my name. I got a new boat and saved my game. Eventually, I would start poking around online to figure out how the game presents that you are prepared to go to the Abyss – I had believed that earning the eight stones and an entire ankh meant that you would be permitted access to the chamber of the Codex.
I didn’t find anything about specific indicators. Instead, I found the the answer – I didn’t recruit a full party.
Eight virtues. Eight runes. Eight mantras. Eight stones. Eight characters. Eight segments of the ankh earned at eight shrines.
Suddenly, I’d broken my plans to complete the game without online assistance beyond what I’d remembered from videos. Even those things I’d strived to find the clues to lead me through those quests myself – and I had, aside from the skull of Mondain. Which is a stupid story all itself that I will share shortly.
In the end, I would check on a couple of other small details. I never understood how to get information from the pubs regarding mandrake root, and never followed clues for nightshade at all…because I never came across leads for nightshade. Instead, I would find out that I wasn’t paying enough for rumors at the bar. At least, that’s how I understand it.
This is also how you are clued into where the white stone was left after it was taken from Hythloth, a dungeon beneath Castle British. When I found the back door in the castle and entered Hythloth, I found the hot air balloon, a most complicated device to use in Ultima IV. Riding around the world in the balloon, I just happened to see the ankh tile in the middle of the Serpent Spine mountains, and then wrangled my way to it with careful use of a single Wind Change spell – I reloaded my game more times than I can count.
Other than that, I managed to finish the game using my own notes. Sure, I am pretty disappointed that I didn’t pull it off entirely on my own, but I’m happy to have pulled it off regardless.
The notebook I collected my journey in can now be used in any play through I do from here forward, amended with the few details I didn’t maintain throughout the game – maybe I’ll even find the nightshade next time! I can even include that the skull of Mondain is in the area with the three splotches of fire. Early on, I thought that this was where the HMS Cape sunk, despite the clue listing that it was in the Cape of Heroes.
It would be two more days before I actually found the wreckage of the HMS Cape.
Of course, I didn’t know it was a wheel at first…
My second trip to the Abyss was almost as hard earned as the first. I had to collect enough supplies to safely make the trip, and bring four more party members up to a reasonable level so that they were at least somewhat combat viable. This constituted another weeks worth of play, spread out around long sessions with Xenoblade.
The Reward
Convincing anyone to play a 40 year old PC RPG is nearly impossible unless that person is already an enthusiast, and doing so with as little assistance as possible even more so. Playing any game that is nearly bereft of any modern conveniences is more than most want to put up with, even if it’s far simpler to save and reload than it could ever have been in 1985.
Ultima IV isn’t an impossible game to grasp, nor is it difficult in the usual sense in which we use the term to describe gameplay. It has specific rules that you will learn through play, and it subverts certain expectations that you might bring from playing nearly any other RPG made in the 45-plus years that the genre has lived. It’s more approachable than you probably expect.
So I challenge you here, friends – take up your pen and a pocket notebook of your choosing. Go get a copy of the map, printed if you can manage it. Download the books from GOG, and print those too if you feel compelled. Take the journey.
I promise you that you’ve never played anything else quite like it.
I will strive to keep nostalgia from coloring what I am about to write. After all, I am going to write about the only game in a series of four that I have played multiple times. Certainly, I have more hours in sequels to Diablo than I probably have in a single run of the 1997 original, possibly in all of my cumulative runs of the grisly little hack-n-slash. We’ll get to that, of course – I think that the run time of these games is part of the conversation I want to have, but it’s a lower-tier criticism I have to lay at the foot of the later Diablo titles. Additionally, I have to admit some hypocrisy on my part. And that’s where I really want to start.
I Bought and Have Been Playing Diablo 4
And that is why I’m a hypocrite. From day one, I said that I wasn’t going to give Activision Blizzard any money for something that seem designed to pull money away from the player. A ten dollar copy of Gamestop later, and I’ve made myself a liar. Curiosity got the better of me. I’m sorry.
I’m a few hours deep into the run, still exploring the first area in the game. The snowy expanses surrounding Kyovashad stretch infinitely around me to different questing areas, and I’ve slaughtered hundreds of foes on my climb to level twenty. It’s a Diablo game, for certain.
Though, it’s definitely a different beast than Diablo III, which I had a scattered opinion of. What strikes me strange about DIV is how far the frame of the experience has shifted from the first three games. There are extensive cut scenes, the player character is voice acted beyond short voice barks in the midst of gameplay. The game stops far more often to tell the story than in previous games. I’m not disinterested in the story about Lilith, so I’m not going to claim its to the game’s detriment. It’s just different, and that’s not a criticism I’m here to make.
The various little MMO features that spot the game, however, make the experience itch more than I like. While I haven’t felt the game hit me up for Activision Fun Bucks, the layers of hidden menus with various rewards, reminders of things I could get from a season pass, progress reminders, all ticking on screen at all times. I spent a few minutes at the end of my session last night looking over all of it, and just wondering if any of the moneymen who ask for these things think that legacy Diablo players want to waste their time with these things when the game is still stuffed with loot pinatas. Said loot pinatas now feel…predictable? I think that’s the word I want to use here.
My experience with Diablo IV isn’t long lived enough to write a review on the totality of the run, but it has had enough strange texture to have me reminiscing about the rest of the series. I’ve finished a run of each of the three games, done some post game stuff in DIII, and – as previously mentioned – taken multiple trips through Diablo I. To say that I was less than thrilled by changes made from Diablo II going to DIII would also be accurate, but those were more rooted in a disappointment over the general visual design of the game.
Like many people, I thought it looked too much like World of Warcraft, and not like the grisly grit of the first two games. It should also be noted that I’d never gotten past Act II of Diablo II at that time. My opinion of the art didn’t change, but I recognize that that’s not a salient critique of the game – the problems weren’t in the art design anyway.
Besides – after finally finishing Diablo II, I found that I still consider the first game my favorite of the series anyway. With that admission, I might have lost you, kind reader. And that’s okay – I’m not an online player, so my experience of the series is never going to align with the general audience. That’s fine.
A Church, a Catacomb, a Path to Hell
Diablo works quick – a cut scene about the evil that has befallen the world, and the player is dumped in Tristram only to be given their mission by a corpse outside of the church at the back of the small town. There are shops, sure, but you won’t have the money to buy anything meaningful for a while.
So on you go, into the church, and begin exploring. Every few floors, you’ll get a new shortcut back to Tristram, a new biome to click through. But the setting is window dressing for the one thing that stuck with the series as it progressed – clicking through hordes of the damned in order to collect money and loot. It’s a short, tight gameplay loop that dumps dopamine into the player’s brain.
I’m not here to argue the merits of building a game around collecting loot. I’m not going to sit here and make defenses that could be used to defend Borderlands as quickly as Diablo. I don’t think that Diablo succeeds entirely on the merit of its combat.
In fact, I would make the faintest argument that Diablo sits alone in the series for how the series left so much of the texture of the experience in the first game in lieu of developing further on the central gameplay loop.
Now, before I continue to make an ass of myself, I do want to note that these are not criticisms of the game design of DII-DIV. Instead, I am exploring the question that I’ve been sitting on while playing Diablo IV:
Why do I expect Diablo games to iterate on what I loved about Diablo when the series progressed off of the template of its immediate sequel instead?
So what is Diablo outside of its combat? Certainly, there is the grimy aesthetic, an illustration of what I’m sure my mom thought a Dungeons and Dragons session looked like when I was twelve, but that’s simplifying it far too much.
Diablo is direct. It’s blunt. It’s the instantaneous launch from the stepping into Tristram to wandering into the dungeon on a single directive. It’s the evolution of Gauntlet woven into the simplicity of the experience. It’s the source of the spice in the combat. It’s why the first three games waste no time getting the player entrenched in the slaughter. It’s the element that withered away the slowest across the four games. DIV spends far more time talking than any of the previous games, and DIII is overwritten in an entirely different way. DII is still more concise, but even that one spends more time on trying to build a narrative than Diablo did. Amongst others in the RPG genre, it’s fairly unique. By the time of its release, the genre was known for telling the biggest stories in games. Diablo was an RPG, but it’s heart is arcade. It’s a studded war hammer hanging in a gallery of ornate rapiers and golden bastard swords.
But an RPG it was. And probably the only game in the series that seriously adhered to those traditions.
And there goes another wave of people who are opting out of my opining on a thirty year old game. Fair enough.
Upon leveling up in Diablo I, the player is given a few points to drop into their stats. That’s it. Everything else is either tied to class, or learned from the spell books discovered in the labyrinth. Or purchased in the stores. The gold accrued from the grind could be given to the witch in town to get spells. And all three classes could learn the bulk of the spells in the game, so you could support your sword swinging with a bit of extra fire. Or more importantly, replace buying town portal scrolls with a book to learn the spell.
There’s a lot of agency given to the player in how they prepare to face off against the Lord of Terror. The player has to sculpt their avatar in game entirely against what they find or purchase in the game. As a result, there’s a texture to the experience that isn’t present in any of the three sequels. You are in control of what your character can do, and you can not respec at the eleventh hour. This also means that it’s hard to completely break a run. I’ve never had a failed run at Diablo because there’s always a path forward.
Diablo II, on the other hand, decided that I wasn’t allowed to defeat the final boss of the expansion because I didn’t follow a specific series of instructions on how to setup my druid. Again, I’m a solo player, so there wasn’t much I could do but respec. It still feels bad years later. Diablo III went down incredibly smooth. DIV seems to be taking the same cues, providing a skill tree to develop inside of a menu instead of stat upgrades and the hunting of spell books.
As a result, the ongoing string of player choices made in reaction to the trip down to hell leaves me feeling that Diablo was the only game to really sell the role playing part of being an RPG. Such a thing isn’t entirely tied up in attaching better numbers to a character.
It’s an appealing combination, one as old as the role playing video game itself. The player is the hero, facing impossible odds. They explore, fight, improve, and understand every step on the path to power and success. It’s tangible in every step of the journey.
But then it ends with a massive, glowing stone right to the head.
The Lord of Terror Goes North
Before I wax pretentious about the end of Diablo, I think it’s important to note that the game ends. No post game is waiting for players who venture into the heart of hell itself to defeat the Lord of Terror. It’s a concise game. I honestly think that is why it’s so easy to go back and take the ride again – which is not something I can say about the sequels, which only get longer and longer with each new installment, complete with expansive post game dungeon crawls.
The final cut scene of Diablo sees the player character slam the Soulstone into their head. It is revealed in Diablo II that they have been possessed by the Lord of Terror, and a new journey begins to truly defeat this evil once and for all. This time, the Soulstone is also destroyed.
Which, theoretically, means that theentity known as Diablo should be defeated, and any sequels shouldn’t follow the narrative conceits of the first two games. Unfortunately, video games are a multi-billion dollar business, and brand familiarity will win every damned time.
Without wasting time on details, I’ll simply say that the story in Diablo III left me cold with its fan service derivations on the first two games framed in an epic narrative that was about as fulfilling as a Little Debbie cake. Certainly I enjoyed playing the game, but nothing really sticks in my mind about that experience beyond the flat enjoyment of it. As I said earlier, it went down entirely smooth, and since I didn’t care about the story, there wasn’t anything else to latch onto.
Diablo III only draws on the reputation of Diablo II for the short loop of fight-loot-sell-fight again gameplay, and relies on the library of lore to sell the rest of the experience. A variety of class specific skills means that the directness of the combat requires more dexterous inputs than in the previous games, at least as far as my experience of them is concerned (note, I have never been good at video games). Or perhaps just more inputs than the click-click-click-click-click-click of the earliest titles.
More noticeably, the world expands further with each game. It’s natural that sequels seek to have a wider scope than their predecessors. I just lament what is lost with the expansion.
In a sense, I am disappointed that there are – in the sense of what I most enjoyed from Diablo – no sequels to the original game after Diablo II. No games are iterating on the original, that focused journey through a specific setting and series of challenges. It’s not a problem for the series – it has only become more commercially successful over time. Aside from the disgusting efforts to monetize the series, it hasn’t effectively detracted from the overall experience either. Modern Diablo is still very much a fun game to play.
I’m just not getting that specific flavor back. And I can’t even suggest that I should have ever expected a studio to do such a thing. Sequels have to iterate and expand or they are criticized for never stepping away from the origin of the series – see the first five Tomb Raider games and their decline in critical and commercial notoriety. The massive leap in scope from the first Diablo to the second cemented the series place in the history of the video games in multiple contexts. Diablo II is still a game people play, having also been remastered in 2021, complete with the first ever console ports of the game. Blizzard has left Diablo I as a seasonal even in DIII. I don’t know that it will ever be rereleased outside of the release on GOG…which I really need to play since it has Hellfire included, and I’ve never played Hellfire!
Maybe that’s what I should do instead of pontificating on what might have been, as I am so frequently inclined to do. If anything, I hope I have sparked some curiosity for the oft forgotten original game in a series I enjoy. If you want to spice up your revisit, maybe even check out the PS1 port of the original – it’s honestly great.
Time does strange things to games, especially popular ones. We’re honestly lucky that Diablo, as compromised as it is by publisher demands, gets to be as true to itself as it really is. I may have issues with Diablo IV, but it’s still a Diablo game…even if it’s more Diablo II than Diablo I.
I have wanted to make video games for a long time – probably twenty-four years now. It started after I read an article in Electronic Gaming Monthly about jobs in the video game industry. The article gave shape to the vague concept of the work behind making games, behind writing about games, etc. It was interesting enough that I immediately wanted to do something.
This isn’t the only time this has ever happened to me, of course. The list of creative works I’ve attempted far exceeds the ones I’ve ever finished. I started conceiving video game ideas right out the gate after reading that article, certain that it was possible if I just planned it, it could be done. This was, of course, foolish. I was an idiot with a notebook, same as I have always been. My creative ambitions have always warped around whatever my interests are. I was writing my first stories at that time as well, and eventually got into making music. If you are here, you know which of these creative outlets have sprouted the most fruit.
Anyway, it’s 2024 now. I’ve tried several middleware engines out with the idea of making something over the last twenty years. I even downloaded GB Studio on two previous occasions. Game Maker Studio, Unity, Godot, Unreal, whatever the PlayStation Vita dev environment was called…the itch has always been there, but it was GB Studio that gave me a space that I could make sense of and start building in. I made a bit of progress on a project back in June that actually formed into a something I could open and move a character around in. It wasn’t particularly pretty, but it was on the way to being a functional prototype of something complex and interesting.
I’ll get back to you someday…
In other words, it was easily too complicated for my skillset at the time. It’s probably still out of my reach after everything I’ve done in the last five months.
And on the Saturday before Father’s Day, something happened.
I took my daughter out that morning. We went to breakfast before going to see Inside Out 2 at the theater. We were talking, joking, having a great time, and I asked her what I thought was going to be a hypothetical question.
“If I were to make a game for you, what kind of game would you want it to be?”
She would go on to talk to me about this for the next two weeks. And with that, development began.
No, I Didn’t Expect Her to Make a Design Document
Stripe Breaks Out is, like any video game that has ever been produced, a compromise. My daughter wanted a game where she could play as a cat and save other cats. She wanted a game with keys and bugs. She wanted a game that didn’t have boss fights. She wanted a game where the cat could get its hair done, similar to a Barbie themed game she sometimes plays on the Switch. She wanted something easy that she couldn’t lose at. None of the animals could be killed or hurt. Finally, it had to have exactly ten levels. As I started figuring this out, she still wasn’t reading fluidly (she’s getting better every day) so it couldn’t be heavy on narrative.
After talking about the idea with her further, we came to the agreement that it would be a platformer with some adventure game elements, like item swapping and overworld exploration. The prototype I was working on before slid into the rearview the more she asked me about it. Stripe Breaks Out became my key project over the summer.
My daughter gave me a drawing of the “levels” she had in mind. And I pulled from it what I could to put into the finished game. A spider in the tutorial level is pulled entirely from the drawing she gave me – a friendly spider, per her request.
It’s a bit more sinister in 8-bit.
She loved the prototype stages I put together, happy to see the little bits and pieces she talked about on the screen. She wanted the whole game all at once. That was in early July. I suggested that the player character should be based on her favorite plush, Stripe, a little grey and white cat she’s loved on hard for the last few years.
I’m writing this in the first week of September, before the release of the game online. She’s still persistently asking when the game will be completely finished, asking if she can test the game out, etc. Her excitement has driven my desire to finish the game, motivated me to stick with the project every step of the way.
But, as you could easily assume, making video games is difficult.
A Game Without Failure
Video games can be any number of things. However, given the limitations of the scope of Stripe Breaks Out, I didn’t allow myself many options. Narrative had to be limited, and the game had to be built entirely out of platforming skill checks and maze like level design. I had to make something easy throughout.
I don’t think I’m qualified to comment on the challenges of designing video games beyond the simple fact that it’s extremely hard to make games. I’m not going to posit that I’ve made something great. I shot for “good” when working on this project, and I hope I’ve reached that.
Thank God for the Sprite Swap plugin…
Development proceeded based on the ideas I put together in the prototype. I made new art assets almost every time I sat down to work on the game, from household objects, cats, new enemy sprites, more cats, and obsessing over the shape of trees (they’re fine?). The last three months have been an ongoing reminder that I am not an artist. Pixel art can be gorgeous. Mine is functional enough.
I think.
My adorable little producer likes it, and she’s the only critic I will answer to.
House levels started out with a goal of verisimilitude and breakable vases to acquire the flower collectibles described in the drawing I was given. Limitations in GB Studio collided with my programing ineptitudes as I realized that twenty actors went fast when adding enemies, switches, and collectibles.
A wiser me would have taken this moment to cut my stages into smaller pieces, akin to how games I played this year work. Something like Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Montana’s Movie Madness divides each larger level into individual stages with only a transitional break at the end of each segment. That’s what I should have done to the whole game.
The hardest lesson to learn continues to be sprite limits. Yes, I’m still learning.
Instead, I just made each house level its own series of progressively complicated challenges, introducing four keys that had to be collected by the end of the game to drive light exploration. It was a solution, but probably not the only one I should have strived for. Again, more spacious levels would have been more interesting and given the game a bit more length than it ended up having.
But, time was a pressing factor, and we all wanted to play a finished game.
I did eventually try larger stages spread across multiple scenes, and I want to believe that it made for a more interesting game in the second half than in the first. Time will tell of course.
The introduction of the keys as progression items had me include our housecats as characters in the game. The goal became not just to save some cats, but our cats – Jones, Dax, Hux, and Pumpkin.
The inclusion of dogs as foes came about as a result of the larger stages and need for new challenges. The idea was to have the dogs charge after Stripe once the player entered their range. Scripting this was far more complicated than I expected. This was the first time I went to the GB Studio reddit for help. The script that I assembled for this, even with their help, caused the game to chug. But I put up with it at the time. It was passible enough for that point in development.
This roadblock probably contributed to the fact that there are only two enemy types in the entire game. An oversight, perhaps, but also something that should have hit me a lot sooner. Given that this is the first game I’ve ever made, I’ll allow myself some grace.
I’m glossing over a lot of the process simply because it’s not interesting to outline the step-by-step grind of making pieces of a platformer and testing them to make sure the jumps are possible, that the game can be read well, etc.
I did fix this!
The best night in the project came in late July. My daughter has a tendency to delay her bedtime as much as she can each night. The latest method she’d picked up was that when she jumps in bed she will ask to play Rock Paper Scissors ten times. After two weeks of doing this, I decided to bake it into her game. I spent an entire session making a Rock Paper Scissors minigame from scratch, drawing cat paws, and scripting the minigame. I haven’t had to make any changes to that portion of the game after adding it. I’m still thrilled that it even came together. Look for Rock Paper Claw early in the game and in the forest before the end of the game.
Yes, this was hard to accomplish.
As the level design became more complicated, I kept adding concepts that were outside of the scope of the GB Studio engine. It was when I added switches and gates to the game that I discovered how limited the collision states were in the basic program. I added the Platformer Plus plugin at this time, solving some issues and creating entirely new ones from my personal ineptitudes as a programmer.
Leaving the house stages of the game was freeing…even though I started making jail stages.
July ended, and August saw me reaching the last stages of building the game. I finished writing the soundtrack and added it in throughout the game. I’m pretty happy with the score for the game. I get a few of the pieces stuck in my head on occasion. It was around this time that I also switched the game to being a GBC only game. The slowdown in several stages of the game was just too intense to deal with, so I let the extra processing speed of the GBC cover the fact that I wrote poor script.
Glitch fixes started entering my to-do lists. Gremlins persisted even up to the last two days as I added in i-frames to damage states and completely broke the game. Nothing has broken my motivation quite as effectively as hitting serious glitches like what happened with the switch gates and adding i-frames.
However, thanks to the help of people in the GB Studio reddit and discord, my friends who have watched the progress of my work, played builds, etc…it’s done.
And Now For the Part Where You Get to Play
If you’re reading this, the game is out and available to download or play over on Itch. The soundtrack has been up over on bandcamp for a couple of weeks. I wrote this to give context to the experience, to put a pin in everything that I’ve spent the last few months chipping away on. Thank you to everyone who has encouraged me as I’ve worked on this thing. Thank you Jo for putting up with me as I’ve worked on it, listened to me ramble about scripting problems or the clips of music that I’ve bounced around to like an idiot. You are an amazing wife.
And to my daughter, should you ever read this…thank you for being you, for being the best kid I could have ever asked for, and thank you for asking for this game for four months straight. I hope you enjoyed it.
I spent a two nights this week playing through the frequently maligned N64 RPG Quest 64, using my Polymega. I put around eleven hours into the experience, rolled credits, and came to think that…yeah, critics are right about this one.
There is a good game in Quest 64. The writing doesn’t help, delivering a basic “collect the treasures of the elements” plot. The idea of an island inspired by Ireland is pretty interesting, but the art direction doesn’t deliver on this promise. The visuals are the most Nintendo 64 visuals you could imagine: flat polygonal buildings and sectored off areas with massive skyboxes, pointy characters, checkerboard textures – you get the idea. The ideas behind the magic system are pretty interesting, though the frequency of combat and lack of meaningful exploration across the journey means that the experience wears out its welcome around the same time you unlock the magic barrier spell. Giving the player a cheap invincibility spell was a poor decision.
So, I played a bad game from almost thirty years ago. That’s nothing new. I frequently play old games, good and bad. We don’t talk about how many copies of Sewer Shark I’ve had in my possession over the years through the general course of buying Sega CD games, and my love for the Rebel Assault games should be considered a black mark against me as a critic.
As a collector and a player of games both new and old, I try to engage with everything I play from the view that a game can be good if I try to meet it where it is. I don’t want to believe that anyone sets out to make an explicitly bad game – that goes contrary to the believe that games are an artform. At some point, there had to have been a kernel of intent and interest that led to the creation of any art. Such is the case with Quest 64. It’s one of the two reasons why I played the game.
The other is that my best friend gave it to me and said I had to play it because it was in my collection. Cruel bastard.
But Quest 64 isn’t terrible. It’s just boring. It functions well enough, the camera doesn’t cause too much irritation – something to be proud of for an N64 game. I could consider many ways that it might have been an amazing game. I could learn something that I could put into a game of my own someday if I ever managed to learn how to do that.
You can take something from all art, good or ill. Countless artists who are more talented and prolific than myself teach that anyone who wants to create should engage with more than just the best of their medium of choice, outside of their medium of choice. A game like Arzette doesn’t happen as a result of only good games. It is inspired by two games that have been the punching bag of Zelda fans for decades.
So I played Quest 64 and tried to have a good time. I did for a while. And then I wanted it to end for the last two hours. And that’s okay.
I have a few hours in Forspoken. I would like to pick up Wanted: Dead. I want to play Racing Lagoon for PS1 now that there is an English translation. For anyone legitimately interested in this medium, its history, its future, it’s important to find the good in the bad. It’s important to play games that have awkward controls from the early days of 3D. It’s vital to the future of the medium to have an appreciation for the missteps as well as the masterpieces.
Go play a bad game, and have a great time doing it.
What follows will occasionally ride off the rails. It’s why I’ve started writing it about eight times over the last three years, and why I’ve not written it before now.
Anyone who has ready my blog or social media feeds knows that I speak out against remakes of video games. Movies too, but we’re going to stick to games here, because the problems I’m going to be talking about are unique to video games. This seems like the right time to tackle this subject, with the follow up to That Game I Didn’t Like coming out this month, and renewed begging from a certain corner of the Final Fantasy fandom asking for a remake of Final Fantasy VIII. Rather than blocking another dozen Twitter users for their opinions, it’s time to just…put it all on the page so I can point to this wall of text in the future so people can continue to ignore me.
But the fact remains that this is a sensitive topic to me for a number of reasons. I do see video games as an art form. I think that it’s an interesting medium for narrative, both in terms of literal storytelling and ludonarrative alike. This means that original texts are going to be far more compelling to me than a revised text. The meaning can get lost in constant translation – something that anyone who has played Working Designs release can attest to.
This isn’t to suggest that remakes are universally bad. Some remakes are genuinely inspired works, such as Resident Evil. The Gamecube reimagining of the original 1996 game has been ported to modern consoles continuously for a reason.
But what about the original?
Replacement and Erasure
Resident Evil released in the US in March of 1996 on the PlayStation and Sega Saturn. The original long box release is a gem amongst collectors for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being the ridiculous art work on the tall CD box. But as I learned from a fantastic video by Stop Skeletons From Fighting, there’s more to the original version of the game than the box, or even the original soundtrack.
In the process of localization, Capcom introduced numerous changes to the original release of Resident Evil, all of which made the game harder. This measure was taken to pull players away from renting the game and finishing it in a weekend, a fact that’s hilarious given the sheer volume of people who have finished the game only using the knife. Ink ribbons came in smaller allotments. Auto aim was removed. Following the jewel case printings of the original game, the game would go through its first modification in the form of Resident Evil: Director’s Cut. Most of the changes would be considered to be for the better, since the game now had multiple difficulty levels and aim assist. Unfortunately, it would not be the last time that the game would get modified. The Greatest Hits release of Resident Evil: Director’s Cut would see the original score abandoned and replaced with one that is…let’s be charitable and call it experimental.
By 1998, there were three versions of Resident Evil. Sure, this is somewhat typical of Capcom given how their fighting games get numerous revisions. I would argue that this is different though. For one, I can play pretty much any version of Street Fighter II on my Switch right now using one of two different cartridges. I can not do the same with Resident Evil.
The 2002 remake only compounds this problem. A further revision on the Nintendo DS is yet another wrench in the works.
If you can hear terrible MIDI trumpets right now, I am sorry.
In 2024, you have two legal options to play Resident Evil on modern hardware. You can play a remastered version of the 2002 remake, or you can play Resident Evil: Director’s Cut Dual Shock Version through a PlayStation Plus subscription. There is no legal avenue to play with the original soundtrack, or to tackle the unique difficulty of the original release. Admittedly, this isn’t a worst case situation. But it does reflect how a remake or revision can push an original version out of the view of players.
Far worse is Silent Hill 2.
The original Silent Hill 2 was released on the PlayStation 2 in 2001, less than a year after the console launched. As recently discussed on this blog, it remains a revered classic. Months later, an expanded version would release on the original Xbox, akin to the Substance version of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. These versions eventually made their way back to the PlayStation 2. A poorly developed remaster of Silent Hill 2 released on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2012. There are also PC ports of the original, but…
There are no legal avenues to place the original version of Silent Hill 2 on modern hardware. Instead a remake is in the works from Bloober Team. If you’ll allow me to editorialize a bit: it looks completely terrible.
With the release of the remake, newcomers to the series will only have the newest version of the game to take into account. This is the case for games like Resident Evil 2, any number of classic Final Fantasy games, and dozens upon dozens of others. The only avenue to play original texts is often emulation or the purchase of expensive original pressings.
Preservation in a Time of Erasure
According to the Video Game History Foundation, 87% of video games are no longer available. I’d have to do a bit more digging to find out, but I do wonder if examples such as the ones I’ve listed above are included in this.
As more and more games are delisted from digital platforms, and the concept of ownership is further and further pushed into the trash, access to legacy titles is slipping through our fingers. Certainly, if you have the money, you could indulge in the hobby of retro game collecting, but that bubble never seems to burst. This leaves piracy, but not everyone is comfortable with the concept, or wants to learn the ropes associated with emulators and such. But this isn’t a problem for a number of younger players, who were raised on live service attractions first and foremost. That’s the market of the future, and the one that major publishers want to attract.
I’ve acquired so many sets like this on Switch for a reason…
The death of preservation, the erasure of classic games, is nothing but good for those who hold the money at the top of the industry. An industry that generated 347 billion dollars in 2023 has little interest in the past – it isn’t worth as much money as a digital t-shirt in Fortnite. It is a net negative for the potential of video games as an artform, however, to attribute success of the medium to the amount of money it has generated in revenue when most of that money comes from predatory microtransactions, not to mention the quality of life for the people who created everything that generated that money.
The ongoing push for remakes from an incredibly vocal public suggests that while the interest in classic games is there, there isn’t enough interest in playing the original texts. Certainly, you could go play Final Fantasy VIII Remastered on any modern platform, but this hasn’t stopped a number of people from taking to social media to demand a remake in the vein of Final Fantasy VII Remake.
Remakes Are Ultimately Uninteresting
For the sake of consistency, I will reuse one of my previous examples.
I know what Silent Hill 2 was about. I know what happened, I know how it played, I know what I saw and experienced. I know what the Red Pyramid Thing is and what it represents. Silent Hill 2, as a text, is a brilliant work of art that utilizes the medium beautifully.
This game is going to be bad!
The remake can not repeat the successes of the original text by the simple merit of the original text already existing. I have played the original, and there are no surprises to be had from playing a remake. The changes depicted in the existing trailers point to a game that seems to be alien to the experience I had while having no ideas of its own. The promise of a Red Pyramid Thing origin story isn’t appealing. As Patton Oswalt so perfectly put it, I don’t give a shit where the stuff I love comes from.
I’ve been following video games for 24 years at this point, and have played hundreds of titles. This includes a number of remakes, revisions, etc. It’s almost impossible to avoid, largely due to the way that video games were developed and ported and released over the first twenty years after the NES revived the industry. Good remakes, such as Ys Memories of Celceta, only cause me to have interest in the original texts. This entry in the Ys series is not a remake, but the canonical telling of Ys IV, as the original games Dawn of Ys and Mask of the Sun were outsourced to HudsonSoft and Tonkin House respectively rather than developed in house by Falcom. Celceta references both of these games. And, given that I quite liked Memories of Celta, I want to know more. I want to play these games.
Also, that 90’s anime box art. Yes.
Which means that I have to play original versions, emulated, patched for translation. And…I will. I have a Polymega now. I will be buying these games off of eBay and playing them using fan translations to experience the original texts.
But that’s not ideal at all. It’s not something that everyone will do, not something that many will be willing to do. It’s the kind of thing that obsessive enthusiasts and historians do, and I’m definitely of the former category. While I’m okay that Falcom has created their canonized Ys IV, I lament the fact that the originals are doomed to obscurity, much like the okay-at-best Ys III: Wanderers From Ys.
To press it further, I feel like there isn’t enough consideration for the practical costs of a full remake of an a idea. The cost of video game development is extraordinary at this point, and games like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth aren’t cheap to produce or promote. Asking for more of those means that the money goes to remakes, not new ideas. I may have thought thatFinal Fantasy XVI was mediocre, but I’ll gladly accept that over the ongoing rehash of VII. The original text should be maintained and rereleased on modern platforms, but I don’t expect a studio to pour tens of millions of dollars into “updating” a game when that original game is perfectly fine as it is. Even bad games deserve to be maintained in such a way. We have plenty that we can learn from bad games.
Revisionist History
Before I wrap this up, I want to address one of the common talking points I see in online discourse regarding remakes. This is the idea that a remake allows a game to “live up to the original vision” or something along those lines.
It’s still an incredibly captivating experience because the writing is superb.
I could spin an entire thread about how this ultimately gets us things like the Star Wars Special Edition trilogy, but I’ll keep this simple: A finished text needs to stand up to scrutiny. I’ll gladly point players to Xenogears as an example of one of the most fascinating JRPGs, an ambitious and incredible game that still isn’t celebrated as much as it should be because of a flawed second half. And as much as I’d like to step into the parallel universe where Xenogears was finished to its original spec, I can’t. I have to play the version we have. Thankfully, it’s very good, and worthy of study and dissection. See the incredible video from KBash that released in 2023 for one such discussion.
It may be true that Kazushige Nojima wanted Final Fantasy VII to be an endless battle between Sephiroth and Cloud in the original game, but that isn’t what the original text boils down to. The original text is about spirituality, grief, environmentalism. It isn’t about Sephiroth. If it was, in fact, about the spiky haired amnesiac fighting the silver haired guy with the long sword, there would have been more of that in the game. Instead, Sephiroth is just a villain to frame the adventure around, a means to bring the player to each beat in the story. He doesn’t do much of anything in the original game because it would interfere with the themes being explored through each character’s story. This idea that the original text would have been better with 80% more Sephiroth is grotesque to me.
I can’t imagine that Stephen King imagined the final chapters of The Dark Tower unfolding as they did before his traumatic accident in 1999. The accident informs the work, changed the way he envisioned it. Whether or not you think the final books in King’s epic are good are beside the point because they are what the author wrote, and it is there for us to experience as it is.
Final Fantasy VII Remake spoiler ahead.
This is a bit unfair. I really just think Zack is an awful, boring character.
Zack Fair walking through a portal at the end of Final Fantasy VII Remake was a Greedo Shot First moment for me. It completely undermines the meaning of the original text and reveals the remake to be exactly what it is: fan service, or even more accurately, fan fiction. You might like fan fiction, may enjoy writing it, but you have to admit that, on some level, you don’t get fan fiction without the original text existing.
That anyone thinks that Nojima meant for Zack Fair to be alive in the original game is appalling to me. It’s revisionist history. It’s deeply boring and cynical. It’s exploitative. It appeals to fans and no one else.
The Golden Age of Remasters
As I write this, Limited Run Games has collected remasters of Rocket Knight Adventures and Felix the Caton sale, marking the first time these games have been legally available since their original releases. Similarly, the boutique publisher and developer has sold a remastered rerelease of the obscene and awfulPlumbers Don’t Wear Ties, which launches digitally in March 2024. Konami has released numerous collections of classic games, Atari and Digital Eclipse released a monstrous documentary-esque collection with Atari 50. For all of the doom and gloom about the 87% of lost games, there is an effort being made in some corners of the industry to preserve and revive games that were left in the past. It isn’t difficult to play a game as bland and lifeless as Cybermorph or as challenging as Gimmick in 2024. The work is being done to keep these games alive.
Don’t skip this game! It’s great!
When the topic of games being remade comes up online, I immediately say “remaster or port only” I do not want a reimagining. I do not want remakes. I do not need games to have up to date graphics and retooled gameplay. Turn based games do not need to be made into action games. Action games, likewise, don’t need to be turn based. The original games were the way they were for a reason, top to bottom, and should retain those decisions as they are rereleased for modern players. I will give a pass to things like save states and rewind features. They are staples of emulation platforms, and can ultimately be ignored.
If you’ve reached the end of this piece, thank you for reading. Please understand that I’m not out to take the fun away from you, nor am I suggesting that the old video games are somehow better than new ones. They are different. The past isn’t wholly good or bad for any medium. But video games, like any art form, have a rich enough history that there will always be lessons waiting for the next generation to tap into. When we demand a remake, we are, in some form, asking to erase the original texts. To make them hard to access. The remake will be on new code, more likely to be retained and reused to sell the game again in the future. A remaster, port, or emulated rerelease may have problems, but they will give a player a far more interesting look into a work than a remake ever can. Because the art is in the original text. The remake is just tracing the outlines.
Konami has revived the venerated Silent Hill franchise. What remains of the beloved series resembles a reanimated corpse. 
Following the launch of the bizarre Silent Hill: Ascension, I’d wondered if some of the other projects that Konami announced as part of the series revival would go through retooling or even be outright cancelled as a result of the backlash. Based on the recent free release The Short Message, I do not think this is the case. Perhaps its because of the cost of producing a web series, a free release short video game, upcoming additional games from various studios that the train can’t slow down. One product will promote the next and so on simply by keeping the name in the public conscious. A decisively bad choose-your-own-adventure web series can be replaced by a free game that has all of the tact of a sack of hammers. That will ultimately be replaced by the anticipated remake of Silent Hill 2 by Bloober Team. Given the history of the series, one wonders if they will surface.
Putting aside my ongoing apathy for remakes – not to mention my complete lack of confidence in the Silent Hill 2 remake based on the trailers and reputation of the studio producing it – I find myself wondering if Silent Hill, as a series, should have just stayed dormant.
Part of what follows is a review of the free title, Silent Hill: The Short Message. Part of it is an assessment of what seems to be haunting Silent Hill as a concept. No, this will not be about the nebulous existence of Team Silent. Yes, the games I would claim as the “good” Silent Hill games comprise the first four titles, attributed to Team Silent in myth. However, PT is also a great Silent Hill. Yes, we will be talking about PT.
The Short Message
Silent Hill is a series known for many things. What comes to my mind, first and foremost, is surrealism. There’s something off about the world that the player explores. It bears the resemblance of an average small city, resembling any middle American vacation spot. It could even be the city where I live, whose downtown sits on the waterfront, and spells out a history of bloodshed and horror. This, of course, isn’t a rule. Silent Hill 4: The Room is tangentially connected to the city of it’s namesake. It is no less a Silent Hill experience.
Second, of course, is subtlety. The characters in Silent Hill games aren’t pouring out a novel’s worth of text. There are beautifully directed cutscenes, of course, but the dialogue isn’t natural. It’s the dialogue of a David Lynch character. It’s easy to trace a line from these games to a number of films – Jacob’s Ladder would be the one I always point to. The distorted Americana is all Twin Peaks, a series that inspired a lot of famous video games.
However, I’m sure that anyone reading this is aware of the lineage and aesthetic components of a Silent Hill. There’s something of a shorthand in place with the series at this point, one where it can be pointed to when any new horror game aims to copy it’s specific blend of uncanny storytelling and hellish environs. It is the thing that the weaker entries in the series can most easily copy, leaving us with games like Silent Hill: Homecoming, Origins, or the painfully awful Book of Memories.
Silent Hill: The Short Message starts here, with the aesthetics of a distorted reality. The protagonist, Anita, is dumped into the ruin of an apartment building, striking the bells of cliche by suddenly waking up and having to go and find a missing friend. The corridors of the old building are full of doors that do not open, trash, graffiti, and touches that foreshadow what will come in the last twenty minutes or so of the game. So far, so Silent Hill 2.
The problem is that Anita never stops talking.
Her constant speech breaks any connection that I, as the player, have with the narrative and experience. There is never a moment where I can put myself into what is happening in this dilapidated apartment complex because there isn’t enough space for me in this. It’s entirely Anita’s experience, through and through, and I am just there to watch it unfold. All subtlety is lost because there is no need to look into the visual storytelling – Anita will explain everything for you.
There is a certain amount of conversation that could be had about the script that I’m not entirely comfortable discussing. For one, I’ve seen the depictions of teenagers cited as realistic, accurate. I’ve seen defenses for the message of the game in regards to online bullying and abuse. I have also seen that this called trauma tourism, a comment that is itself damming (I could not find an original tweet referencing this, so I am linking to the recent Jimquisition on the subject.) I am going to limit my commentary to the issues I’ve had with the game.
The splicing of live action scenes into the story to break up gameplay was an okay touch. Honestly, the writing for Maya is far more interesting than Anita because she bears all of odd touches that make for a Silent Hill character. She’s a bit pretentious, which means I liked her more than anyone in the entire series, and there is a degree of unease that surrounds what she says despite how lively her paintings are.
See, I can say nice things too…but they aren’t about the gameplay. And the gameplay is really what kills this for me.
The Short Message seems to want to fill the space left by PT, itself a free game made in the leadup to a larger project. The player explores linear corridors and does a few light puzzles to proceed to the next story beat, and there is a loop to the experience where the story splits into three chapters. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a tedious romp. The building doesn’t change from loop to loop, just the access to a couple of new places, including a vibrantly lit high school hall. This is the place where the first of two puzzles is introduced, a tedious number search that feels completely out of place.
Between the slow crawls through repetitive corridors are sequences where Anita is chased down by a monster. Passing through a door marks a delineation between the exploration portion of the game and the Scary Monster Time portion. These parts are, mostly, incredibly easy. I didn’t see the monster at all until the second to last chase, and even then, it’s easy to avoid it.
This also describes any number of indie horror games that spawned out of the success of PT and ultimate cancellation of Silent Hills. The chase sequences also remind me of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.
Except this isn’t scary.
Part of this is on me, of course. I saw the cherry blossom monster the first time and thought it looked like the cornflake homunculus from the Jimquisition, and that immediately killed any terror it might have inflicted.
But more than that, separating the monster chase hallways from the rest of the setting means that there is no reason to feel tense at any other stage of the game. It’s just a place where cutscenes happen and a character constantly talks and texts people. There is no isolation, there are no threats. The game does not engage with the player beyond sticking the movie in their face.
So, it’s not a good game. That’s okay. We haven’t had a good Silent Hill game in a long time, and this didn’t change that. Why would this keep the series on my mind for days after?
The Looming Spectre of P.T.
PS4 consoles containing PT still sell for hundreds of dollars. Efforts remain ongoing to keep the promise of a brilliant Silent Hill in the form of this experimental demo alive years after it was taken off of the PS4 online store. There’s a reason for this – it’s genuinely an incredible little game, and thanks to a single publisher’s poor thinking, one that will be impossible to play someday. Hardware fails us all, eventually.
Lamentations continue for the death of Hideo Kojima’s Silent Hills, a game that promised to bring back the unease and terror of the legendary series, snuffed out in the night by Konami much like their relationship with the esteemed creator at the helm of the experience. PT remains a point of discussion when talking about video game preservation, and there have been numerous efforts by fans to recreate the game for PC. The shadow of this little game loom large over the series, as it truly was a promising glimpse of what Kojima Productions could have done with Silent Hill.
Comparisons of The Short Message to PT are not an accident. It is no doubt an effort to fill some of the space where the conversation of PT took place. But it lacks everything that made PT worth discussing. It’s far to easy and straightforward. There wasn’t a concerted effort by players to figure out how to finish this game because it folded over within 90-120 minutes of effort. What’s more, The Short Message lacks any meaningful interactivity as the player proceeds through its environment. The only inputs required by the player are for movement and opening doors. PT didn’t ask much of the player beyond a few light puzzles, but even some moments required the use of a the zoom button, which pushed the tension up for some quick jump scares.
Cheap? Sure. But usually effective because of how it uses interactivity to drive the experience.
Part of what makes PT special is that it exists as an allusion to Silent Hill while bearing few of its hallmarks. There is no thick cloud of fog on a lakeside town. There are no unusual side characters. There is only one monster, and doesn’t have a simple symbolism attached to it akin to any number of post-Room Silent Hill entities. It is raw and it is itself. It can bear the name of Silent Hill without directly making visual references.
And it didn’t even need a Pyramid Head stand-in.
The Legacy of Silent Hill 2
Silent Hill 2 is often considered the best horror game ever. It is frequently cited as one of the best video game narratives. It certainly deserves those accolades. I would call it my favorite in the series as well. However, do not take this as a sign of my bias against other entries in the series. That isn’t the point of this section, nor is it to continue gushing about one of the most over-analyzed and celebrated video games.
Silent Hill can not get out of the shadow of Silent Hill 2.
The upcoming remake is cashing in on the iconic Red Pyramid Thing just as games like Silent Hill Homecoming before it. Like the 2006 film Silent Hill before it, which was a soft adaptation of the first game in the series, not Silent Hill 2. Even when the towering monster rapist (look, that’s just what I see in the first scene with Pyramid Head, you can have your interpretation if you want) isn’t in a new Silent Hill, the very basic idea is there. There is a symbolic monster that wants to kill the protagonist. Anita has a flower covered Pyramid Head in The Short Message. Why was it in the movie? Homecoming? Because it was expected by a certain group of people who didn’t buy the other games in the series, I guess. Sales of SH3 and The Room certainly didn’t size up to Silent Hill 2. So what’s a business to do to make money other than copy the successful thing that they did twenty years ago?
I’m rambling. I am. It’s 1AM. So let me put it this way:
Silent Hill 2 is great for all of the ways that it differentiates itself from the other three games that surround it. This can be said for the other three games as well. Art means creating and saying new things with the craft, with the medium being used. Later Silent Hill games were the kinds of products that Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty railed against.
Still, the series grinds ever onward, dragging its legacy out to be redressed for another age. Silent Hill is now about playing the hits and hoping the old fans still show up to the concert.
So much of what made the series special seems locked in the past. The production cycle of modern video games is almost completely alien to the processes of the PS1 and PS2 eras. Even the explosive reaction to PT is nearly impossible to recreate in today’s social media landscape, which has evolved away from that of even a decade ago. The technical limitations of the PS1 created so many of the hallmarks of the Silent Hill series, and developers are still mired in those ideas over twenty-five years later, unable to meaningfully iterate on the mere idea of what Silent Hill can be.
For now, it will just be a character and how they are haunted by symbols of trauma.
NOTE: Forgive me readers, I just wanted to write this before all of it left my brain. There will be wild leaps across subjects. Also, there will be spoilers for a twenty-two year old game.
I rolled credits on a replay of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty last night. It has been around fifteen years since the last time I played it through to the end.
What a beautiful mess of a game.
There are valid criticisms that can be laid against MGS2. It’s overwritten. There is a lot of needless backtracking that is misunderstood as an aspect of the metanarrative. The marketing cycle misled players into believing that they would get another adventure where they get to play the grizzled mullet man they remembered from the first Metal Gear Solid. Much of this is by design, of course, something that wasn’t picked up on when the game initially released in 2001.
I could think of other games that would benefit from a massive interactive documentary.
I can imagine that MGS2 in 2023 benefits from context provided by twenty years worth of think pieces on the series, the rise of the video essay, and even the creation of The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2, released by Konami for the PS2 in 2002. Certainly, I didn’t take in every aspect of the inner workings of the narrative when I played the game in late 2008. I took the experience at face value, thriving on the density of Hideo Kojima’s world building and the bleakness of the final hours of the game.
The idea of the game being overwritten hadn’t occurred to me yet. That was pointed out to me by critics of Kojima’s writing and storytelling. They aren’t wrong, of course. Video games being an interactive narrative implies that the game itself should be telling more of the story than the interruptions the game is inundated with. It was a part of the experience that I accepted, though it remained on my mind during my replay of the game over the last couple of weeks (I took a long break before the bomb diffusion section).
While I feel that the metatext of MGS2 has been dissected, I don’t think that enough has been said in defense of the writing. Again, yes, there is definitely too much writing in the game, too much dialogue, too many codec conversations, too many cut scenes. What I have spent much of the last two nights thinking about is how this story could have done what it did with less.
So that I don’t prattle on too long, I will focus this on a topic that I seem to recall annoying people back in the gaming press in 2001: the codec chatter between Colonel Campbell, Raiden, and Rose.
I Need Scissors. 61!
From the first time that Raiden meets Lieutenant JG Plisken some twenty or so minutes into the Shell chapter of Metal Gear Solid 2, Campbell will recount the following to Raiden any time the resurrected Solid Snake is brought up: he was not part of the simulation. This is a break in Campbell’s script, foreshadowing that something is innately wrong with how he communicates with Raiden during the first two acts of the game. Everything else he says is an echo of the events that transpired at Shadow Moses in MGS, a revelation that isn’t clarified to the player until the third act.
Admittedly, this is easier to read into the game on a second play through. The very nature of sequels, something that Kojima was critiquing with this game, cites that a sequel should refine on is predecessor while playing into what fans of the original enjoyed about the first. So much of what Campbell says and does, how Paul Eiding performs the lines, is reflective of the original game, and feels natural to the player. But the foreshadowing is still there, and in the middle of the second act, it becomes a provocation.
As Raiden becomes increasingly suspicious of Campbell and Rose, Campbell reiterates on his comments about the simulation, sparking an outburst from Raiden that see Rose urging him to calm down. The trust between Raiden and his commanding officer has been broken, and isn’t resolved. The fractures in Raiden’s person are growing deeper as the second act pushes on, carrying him into the Sniper Wolf Redux where he defends Emma Emmerich from drone gunfire, snipers, and soldiers alike. What isn’t clear is that Campbell isn’t the only person provoking Raiden, pushing him further and further to the breaking point.
Rose
Rose is difficult for some players to accept. On the surface level, many of her conversations with Raiden do not match the tone of the game. They seem wildly out of place for what is ostensibly a military operation. Campbell never intervenes in these conversations, a fact that I’m only just now thinking of as I write this.
Rose wants her boyfriend to talk about their relationship at a time when he is focuses on his mission. He doesn’t want to dwell on the time they spent watching Godzilla movies, or what April 30th means to their relationship. For Raiden, those topics can wait.
And as the player, it can be easy to align with his point of view. In a game that is already pulling control away from the player for cut scenes and codec conversations at a rate that exceeds even the first game’s verbose jargon-laden chats with Naomi, Campbell, and Mei Ling, having to talk about the shaky relationship that Raiden has with his partner doesn’t seem relevant. Much like Campbell’s comments about the simulation, however, Rose is pressing Raiden.
This is the only screencap I stole from the net.
The third act of Metal Gear Solid 2 does not work nearly as well unless Rose establishes the narrative of her relationship with Raiden along the way. What we should take away from every one of those scenes are an assessment of Raiden as a person divorced from the gameplay. The opening of the Shell chapter and the first half of the following events see him striving to live up to his VR experiences. It’s Rose that pressures the human part of Raiden, to emerge from the cocoon built up by the nebulous Patriots and Solidus.
The downside of all of this is that the ultimate reveals about Raiden’s history are muddied while the reality depicted up to the third act breaks down into the finale. Finding out that Raiden was a child soldier is a contradiction from the opening hours that depict him as a soldier trained by video games rather than experience. It’s a dark twist in the narrative that ties him directly to the villain, and it does prove entertaining as a beat in the story. However, so much is happening by this point, it can be easy for details to get lost in the noise, especially if you’re dining on this particular brand of crazy in the middle of a night where you’re short on sleep. This is also why this little blog post about a video game I like is going to get messier here. I need to go to sleep.
Last Bit About MGS2
But I want to close with a response to a criticism I often see thrown around.
Occasionally, I will see someone defend the Kingdom Hearts series with some variation on the line “it’s just as confusing/convoluted as Metal Gear Solid, but no one complains about that.” First, the statement is just factually incorrect. People have complained about the writing in Metal Gear games for over two decades. But that’s not what I’m interested in responding to.
I think that there is a distinct difference in the complications that are present in each of these series. Kingdom Hearts was launched as a mostly kid-friendly action RPG where you team up with Disney characters to save other Disney characters. As a series, it started clean and neat, only to be disserved by an encyclopedia of terms and half-baked world building that doesn’t come up during 90% of the gameplay. Tetsuya Nomura, as I’ve said in the past, makes fun games, but he’s a poor storyteller, unable to handle the medium he’s working in well enough to layer the story he clearly wants to tell into the series he is famous for – one where he has to also give the cliff’s notes version of a stack of Disney films at the same time.
It is not an easy prospect to handle those disparate ideas, and I do not envy anyone who has to do it. But it is a problem with the way that Nomura decided to evolve the series, and it does make the series difficult to approach, impossible to discuss with a fervent crowd of fans, and frustrating for reasons that aren’t relevant to this conversation.
Hideo Kojima doesn’t have these problems in his games. They are indeed overwritten, explaining a suite of ideas and elaborating on the military shorthand and technojargon as to not leave players out of any the obsessions that Kojima brought to the table. Kojima is an avid reader, a devourer of cinema and music. Reading his book The Creative Gene is an illustration of this love of art, as well as an assessment of where some of his ideas were born.
As a game designer, he designs the game, and as a storyteller, he tells stories. The gameplay reflects the stories he wants to tell, even if the writing could be pared down. There may frequently be a wall between narrative and gameplay, but the information is presented cleanly. Cinematics illustrate the action movie set pieces that have always inspired the series. Lengthy codec conversations delve into the backstories of the characters, grow the intrigue about the unveiling mysteries, and as listed above, always drive the plot forward. For the first three entries in the Metal Gear Solid series, there aren’t any wasted moments.
The answer is actually extremely disappointing.
I can’t say the same of Kingdom Hearts, a series which has its protagonist gawk at an iconic scene from Frozen for five minutes straight for no other reason than the game has to tell the Disney stories. 0
The criticism that MGS and Kingdom Hearts have similar amounts of baggage is a misunderstanding of MGS as a series. Hideo Kojima did not want players to endlessly obsess about things like the identity of the Patriots after Metal Gear Solid 2. He wanted players to leave that game thinking about the passage of information down through generations, not what was coming up in Metal Gear Solid 3.
And yet, we know that he did not get his wish. People and publisher alike pushed Kojima back into the director’s chair, over and over, demanding that Metal Gear continue for as long as it could be profitable.
I took a bit of a break during my editing this morning to watch the latest Nintendo Direct. It was good! Great at times! Nintendo is about to make a lot of money.
But, from a promotional angle, Nintendo is definitely preparing for new hardware next year.
The winter lineup for 2023 going into 2024 is a set of safe bets from Nintendo. There’s a lot of Mario coming our way in the form of remakes/remasters of Mario RPG and The Thousand Year Door alike. Two new platformers in the series are on the way. WarioWare, Luigi’s Mansion…it’s a bit much, really. But the diversity in gameplay styles means that there’s something for everyone if you like Mario games, and that’s great for Nintendo. I…will not be buying some of them. I have my eyes on the RPGs (obvously) as well as both Mario Wonder and the newly unveiled Princess Peach Showtime. However, none of this captured my attention as some of the other news.
First up, Horizon Chase 2 is an absolute must-have for me. I spent dozens of hours on the first Horizon Chase Turbo, reveling in the stylish visual, tight controls, and massive series of races. A sequel is a safe bet in my book, especially since even the DLC for the first game was stellar. If you’ve not played the first, squeeze it in before the sequel drops. It’s a great throwback to 90s arcade racers.
SaGa: Emerald Beyond is a title I’ve been waiting for more information on. A brand new SaGa game is somewhat unbelievable for those of us who watched the series get snuffed out by Square-Enix in the PS2 era, and since I’ve actually played some of the games now? Absolutely. Give me all of your weird, Square-Enix. I much prefer it to your fan-bait loaded Final Fantasy VII rehashes! The trailer looks nice, but the combat UI is absurdly overwrought. I hope that gets tweaked before release. Or that it earns its keep. Whichever. I’m still in no matter what. The series is great. And weird. And hard!
And while I talk about enjoying difficult games, a trailer for a set of remastered Tomb Raider games was announced, coming from Aspyr. I’m pretty happy about this one: you can switch their ugly updated visuals back to PS1 level, and Aspyr is, in my experience, the kind of studio that hashes these ports out as quickly as possible. What does this mean?
It means that they didn’t actually change the game and it’s going to be just as jank as the originals! And that’s fantastic!
Video game history and preservation is important to me, and remaking everything to “bring it up to a modern standard” usually means that the edges and quirks that make the classics interesting get sanded away to be easier for modern players. And…accesibility is fine, but those games should still be accessible in the original format. And Aspyr will do that. Even if it means the game is kinda awkward in adaptation like their Jedi Knight remasters on the Switch. Those are direct PC ports. There is a software registration button. I have no idea how they got that through quality control!
I am using an irresponsible amount of exclamation marks tonight…chalk it up to me trying to hammer this out before bed.
The biggest surprise for me out of the entire show was the announcement of a new title from VanillaWare. If you aren’t familiar with VanillaWare, you have some amazing catching up to do. The developers of some of my favorite 2D games ever are currently working on a strategy RPG called Unicorn Overlord, a game lush with beautiful visuals. And…yeah, I’m the same person who likes to wax about how graphics don’t make a game great, but VanillaWare creates the most beautiful 2D games out there. And they’re damn fun to boot. This is a day one pick up for me. If you want to know why, go play Odin Sphere or 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim.
Beyond this…well, there’s a pair of League of Legends spinoffs that I snoozed through, a new Contra that I’m hesitant to get excited about, a lot of games that slipped off of my brain as soon as the trailer was over and I’m not going to recount despite their presence in my notes, and even some things that I need to go read up on, like Another Code!
This has been a sloppy recount of the entire event. But that’s fine. It’s late. I’m tired. I spent hours editing a story today and then even more time trying to do house related stuff while spending time with my daughter. It was a fine day, and a fine Direct. I just haven’t got any sense left.
I do want to close on a bit about F-Zero 99. First off, I haven’t played it yet, though I intend to. My comments aren’t going to be about the quality of the game that is currently out, but more so the conversation that I knew would surround the game as soon as the trailer shifted from the SNES footage to the new game. F-Zero fans have waited literal decades for a new game from Nintendo, and this definitely isn’t what any of them had in mind. I’ve seen some genuinely nasty comments about it online, including several comments comparing it to the dreadful Metroid Prime: Federation Force for 3DS. While I think that such comments are beyond extreme, I can understand being disappointed.
But, the reality is pretty simple F-Zero isn’t a known money maker for Nintendo. Neither is StarFox. Both series have been surviving on scraps for decades, and Nintendo doesn’t seem to know what to do with either of them to draw an audience that isn’t people in their thirties who enjoyed the N64 or GameCube releases. However, remakes and rehashes aren’t going to draw that audience, nor are games with experimental controls like Star Fox Zero had.
We’ve been pretty fortunate during the Switch’s lifespan to see what many people refer to as The Switch Effect – games with historically weak sales having record sales on the Switch. This is partially due to the massive install base for the Switch, as well as the fantastic games that have come out on the console, like Metroid Dread. The time for such a game is drawing to an end, as Nintendo starts their transition to new hardware over the next eighteen months (this is likely a stretch). I think that Nintendo is being careful, and testing the waters with F-Zero 99. I think that, with enough interest, the next Nintendo console will feature a new F-Zero.
But everyone needs to relax with the rage. Have a little bit of common sense.
…
What the hell am I talking about? The internet doesn’t know what common sense is.
Anyway. It was a fine Direct, and I am going to drown in Switch cartridges by the time this console is finally discontinued. Thanks for reading.
WordsThing 