Maverick went to Anime NYC, and he had a nice time all-around! However, he did have some thoughts about the overall evolution of conventions in a more corporate age. Is it possible to still find real connections while being so heavily advertised to? Plus, we all love the Major and Ghost in the Shell, Rose needs an intervention on isekai, and John’s sinking deeper into Digimon.

Our theme song is by Kirsten Carey, who can be found at @kircarey.bsky.social!

Send questions to podcast@gamesline.net, with a subject denoting it’s for URW!

The post Unlimited Rail Works Episode 141: Da Anime of New Yawk Baybee!! appeared first on Gamesline.

In a sea of games showcasing technological advancement through facial pores and scope creep, this was a surrealist Shoot ‘em Up where you watch all your millions of projectiles bounce around and collide with complex enemies in high-definition space. It was incredibly impressive to see, and had me cheering at what people so often call “next-gen” tech for one of the first few times in my life. 

It’s not the hardest game, nor is it the most interestingly unique mechanical sandbox ever created. At the same time, however, I was consistently drawn in by the mystique the game gradually unwound without ever fully answering. Returnal isn’t a game you solve; it’s an experience you meditate on and engage with as you explore its hostile, impossible alien architecture.

All this prologue is to say that when Saros was unveiled last year, and seemed to be a more mechanically nuanced successor to Returnal, I was incredibly excited! Returnal with parrying, shields, and The King in Yellow? Hell yeah sister, pass me some of that! Expanding upon the established baseline with more dynamic environments and a more considered meta progression seemed like one of the most straightforward slam dunks in gaming.

Unfortunately, even though it succeeds at so many of its goals, Saros disappoints specifically because of how safe it feels, a concept completely antithetical to the uniqueness of its predecessor. 

Saros takes place in a future where a hyper capitalist Earth ruled by Mega Corporations has ventured out to colonize and pillage the rest of the known universe. You play as Arjun Devraj, an enforcer for the Soltari Corporation who’s been sent out to investigate three waves of colonists and research teams that have gone missing on a mysterious planet named Carcosa (one has to assume that The King in Yellow doesn’t exist in this world, or else the old adage about the Torment Nexus has held true). Upon arriving, Arjun and his team quickly realize that the situation is far more dire than they could have imagined, as they face down an ever-changing landscape, horrifying bio-mechanical creatures, and eldritch forces corrupting their bodies and minds. 

If you’ve never read The King in Yellow (which you really should), Saros will probably come across as an incredibly original game, much in the way Returnal’s fooling around with cosmic horror felt fresh and bold. If you have read it, or anything directly inspired by it, you can kind of guess the broad strokes of where Saros’ story will go. There’s corruption, confusion, gestures towards romance and time foolery, so on and so forth.

As one intimately familiar with surrealist horror, The King in Yellow has always stood out to me as a particularly influential work. Yes, of course, the concepts of corruption and paranoia, alongside pivots towards breezier themes, can be found in countless works throughout history. Its specific portrayal of an almost “frame narrative” conceit with its titular play feels so astounding for its time, and has clearly influenced nearly everything like it that’s come after. Think of every creepypasta about a cursed movie, something like The Ring, cursed object narratives; they all take concepts and executions directly from the 1895 collection. It was an incredible breakout hit, and at the time there just wasn’t much like The King in Yellow.

However, it is no longer 1895, and we have access to pretty much every successor you could dream of in the far flung future of 2026, which hurts Saros in ways Returnal never quite had to deal with. 

Returnal is ultimately a story about trauma and loss, and it tells this story not through traditional cutscenes, but with first-person exploration sequences through mundane locations that instantly feel out of place in its setting of an overgrown alien world. Finding a contemporary and perfectly intact house in the middle of the wilderness, going in to slowly explore and experience things in a different perspective…it hits all of my strikezones as someone who pops off at all those times NieR suddenly becomes an isometric Zelda game. The spaceman is fantastic as well, a featureless observer stalking you through the world, adding mystique and ever more questions; effective for a game with exactly one character.

Saros delivers its take on the Returnal narrative quirks via gradually unlocked sequences where you slowly walk through surrealist contemporary environments with light visual storytelling (things like magazines with keywords, or clubs named “The Yellow Club”). The perspective doesn’t shift from the standard third-person method of play, instead slowing you to a crawl as you make your way through alleyways, hotel rooms, and apartments. It all comes across as incredibly banal; something you could find in literally any other big budget game.

Coupled with this, Arjun is not alone on his foray into Carcosa, and works alongside several Soltari employees who he has the option to talk to in between the exploratory runs into the mechanical wastes. These conversations are delivered in the classic style of stilted one-off conversations where rhetoric and quotations are spouted off, and the only back and forth dialogue is half-hearted “stay safe out there”s. Though I appreciate a different direction from the isolation of Returnal, where main character Selene only has herself to talk to (both literally and figuratively), Arjun’s aping of the static NPC interactions from the Horizons and Ghost of Tsushimas of the world doesn’t quite fit for a work so ostensibly absurdist.

But the story is such a minor part of both Returnal and Saros that it feels secondary to the real meat of the experience: its run-based roguelike center. If you played Returnal, you know exactly how Saros is structured. You enter a biome, explore along a Metroid Prime-esque map with side rooms and optional challenges that serve to bolster you with artifacts that can modify your play style, randomized variants of a few different guns, and, if you’re lucky, base stat upgrades that make you stronger as you go on.

To repeat myself: if you’ve played Returnal, you know exactly how Saros is structured. This isn’t just a hit on the same old rocky space Giger-inspired world, but that so many of the game’s procedurally generated rooms are almost 1:1 copies of several found in Returnal. There were countless times where I would walk into a ramped room and immediately flash back to fighting my way through as Selene, letting me predict what enemies will spawn and where with ease. On the surface, this feeds into some ludonarrative resonance with the mystique of just how many times Arjun has been experiencing his cycle of death and rebirth and how much his body remembers versus his mind. But, from a tangible gameplay perspective, it makes me realize just how little Saros has meaningfully evolved from its predecessor.

Which isn’t helped by an inherited problem also suffered in Returnal; rocky ruined terrain is great for making a wide open space a video game takes place in, but it’s not exactly super compelling to look at. The unique biomes in Returnal were a desert, a mechanical forest, and an underwater grotto; the pivot from grey to red to blue worked reasonably well for keeping things fresh. Saros, unfortunately, is less inventive with its biomes, and thwarts its own attempts at colorization. 

The first area of the game is a ruined marble palace on cliffs with lots of red flora peppered around. When you initiate one of the game’s core mechanics (“the eclipse”) to progress further into the level, everything is immediately subdued into a brownish-yellow sludge that removes all pastoral vibrancy. This goes for the areas with more muted colors as well: a mechanical mine glows more sinisterly yellow, a swamp becomes even more brown and yucky, the sea becomes orange and…you get the picture. 

Once again, in terms of thematic resonance this is a great mechanical execution—we see Arjun accept power that dulls the world around him as a means of fitting the role he must—but as players we also unfortunately live in a world of brown and gray sludge games literally everywhere since the advent of 3D titles. Coupled with the level design familiarity for players of Returnal, Saros falls into one of the worst pitfalls of modern big-budget gaming: an experience that quickly becomes samey and uninteresting.

Which is a shame, because a lot has been tangibly improved from Returnal. You no longer rely entirely on the modern action classic of dodging for survival, since Arjun has a shield that allows him to absorb most projectiles (while charging his weapons), and a parry that can be used to negate several attacks. This allows the gameplay to feel more interesting than Returnal in terms of how you engage with each encounter, without sacrificing the speed and impact of what you can do. There’s an illusion in games that shields go hand in hand with a slower and more methodical method of play, but realistically, shields should allow a player to execute on ideas with a speed otherwise not afforded. The best offense is a good defense, as they say.

I also appreciated the guns a lot more than Returnal’s arsenal, though much of it feels comparatively streamlined. You still have your shotguns, pistols, and assault rifles, but the new chakrams and crossbows feel really good to fool around with. Instead of a set of 8 or so traits on a weapon, Saros opts to create 3 core variants of each weapon, with two different sets of passives slotted on top. My favorite of these traits auto-fired my bullets directly at any enemy nearby, letting me focus on dodging and parrying over actually aiming. The way Saros is about quicker levels you deliberately choose to go to rather than the “One Big Run” format of Returnal means that having a greater variety of guns that may prove potentially useful compared to a deluge of Rotgland Lobbers with useless defensive modifiers is incredibly welcome. There are definitely still bad guns, but the ratio of good to bad, and how fast you’ll get them, changes the game substantially. 

Now, more divisively, I have to get into my Rosarie Rant that may or may not alienate you, the reader.

To me, Returnal was an absurdly easy game. I defeated almost every boss on my first attempt, and much of my time spent in the game was on the more repeatable post-launch DLC tower and co-op with friends. That first foray of exploration was intriguing and intoxicating, but it was also over in about 8 hours (with 6 extra for trophy cleanup). There wasn’t much meta-progression, and a lack of modular difficulty options meant I was left pining for the scary Shmup experience that could have been.

Saros is just as easy, if not even easier than Returnal, and the two features I was pining for have done little to mitigate this. 

The improved meta-progression allows you to become significantly stronger as you continue to play the game, meaning that players who are struggling with specific breakpoints can almost “grind” their ways out of frustration, but very little has a meaningful engagement with how you play the game beyond this. When I think of a game like Hades—one that inspires you to progress through interacting with different weapons, different passives, and building up your home base—I can see how people dump hour after hour into such an experience, because things feel increasingly different over time. Saros doesn’t create a meaningfully different experience with its progression, it just makes an easier one.

On the flip side (or perhaps, alongside), the modular difficulty options and sliders we’ve come to see in games like The Last of Us Part II or Doom: The Dark Ages are here in the form of Carcosan modifiers. These modifiers let you make your experience even easier, or more difficult. For the most part, there’s no deep or tangible reward to this, unlike something like the Tales of series’ encouragement to crank up the difficulty while grinding for better drops. There’s a balancing act of sorts where you aren’t allowed to launch into a run if you’ve made the game too easy, but you aren’t really getting anything out of making the game harder other than personal satisfaction.

This would be fine if the imposed challenges were actually interesting, but in practice they’re just making Arjun more fragile, or your enemies beefier. There are a couple more interesting limiters like losing weapons and passives over the course of your run, but those only went so far. I’m glad they tried more with Saros, but it really feels like their focus wasn’t on making unique experiences for players interested in an easier or harder time, but rather catering specifically to a mass production ideal of players. On the surface, modular features for difficulty seem like a no brainer, but in practice, you lose out on the curation of level design and tuning that’s had people trying to 1cc their favorite shmups for decades.

Another problem I have with Saros is, dear God I’m going to say it:

I don’t care about angry men.

I’ve been beating the drum of how dull and insipid the worst parts of Sony’s catalogue have been for the last decade or so, and it just seems to get worse every year. God of War does a “character redemption” by turning Kratos from a parodical avatar of rage into the realistic avatar of rage; your dad. The Last of Us Part II couldn’t stop its cast of mostly female characters from fixating on the past and present futures created by angry men. Ghost of Tsushima is almost entirely about angry men getting mad at you, and Ghost of Yotei threw in your brother just in case you thought you were finally free. Indeed, it’s almost harder to name a Sony game that doesn’t have the stereotypical rage of a masculine force as a major theme, and Saros is no exception. 

Arjun is an interesting character for sure, and gradually eking out this backstory, and the absurd directions things take on the larger scale, has a degree of intrigue to it. Compared to Returnal though? A story about cycles of maternal abuse and self-reflection? Hearing about a guy who’s upset he fumbled his ex-wife is not exactly the most compelling narrative experience for me, especially when it’s wrapped up in the absurdity of a Lovecraftian draping. I get it, a lot of the creatives behind this game are men, and the same goes for much of the medium of game design, as the machinations of Patriarchy and its intersections with Capital collide to consistently exile women from most things. That said, however, was there really nothing more interesting you could have Rahul Kohli do than yell about how he needs to find his ex-wife? Like, that’s the depth of the emotional nuance we get out of him for 95% of the game? 

At the end of the day, the most damning thing I can say about Saros is that you could find its experience almost anywhere. Its blend of high budget and roguelike is still unique, and if you didn’t pick up Returnal, it’s probably still a very distinct experience in a lot of ways compared to the slurry of genericism you’ll find elsewhere in the AAA gaming space. I expected more though, and I will continue to expect more. Housemarque has consistently shown with games like Resogun and Super Stardust that they have the shmup chops and technical know-how to make something really interesting. Seeing something truly compelling like Returnal become just like everything else in its sequel is an unfortunate disappointment. 

The post Don’t Stare at the Sun Too Long – Saros (PS5) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

I’m not going to say “back again at last” or anything like that.

The crew finally had time to get back on the mic and looked at the ever enjoyable seasonal charts of upcoming anime! Will you follow the “Insipid Prince”? “The Villager of 999”? Or will you finally realize that “Oh Boy, Was I Wrong About Her”?

Our theme song is by Kirsten Carey, who can be found at @kircarey.bsky.social!

Send questions to podcast@gamesline.net, with a subject denoting it’s for URW!

The post Unlimited Rail Works Episode 140: Summer Season 2026 appeared first on Gamesline.

John and Rose are back to talk about the week in gaming. This week, John’s been playing Touhou: Mystia’s Izakaya and Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate. Rose continues to play Mina The Hollower alongside Wuthering Waves, Zero Parades for Dead Spies, and the Elden Ring Convergence mod. In the news they go over the chaos around Love and Deepspace‘s new character drop and the Sony disc manufacturing situation.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, John, and Rose.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 97: The Mega Powers Unite appeared first on Gamesline.

The trailer shows a continuing focus on the “one camera” cinematographic presentation that Santa Monica Studios has been consistently proud of. Sequences seamlessly transition from gameplay, to quick time events, to minute-long cutscenes. This was one of the most talked about aspects of the 2018 game’s design, commonly referenced with the words “immersion”, “scale”, or “consistent”. This approach mostly works with the presentation of the game as a road trip-esque trek across a fantastical Scandinavia, mainly because Kratos as a character is built like a tank you literally could not stop. You don’t need to worry about time’s passage, fatigue, or moments of enforced rest when your character is the quintessential angry guy who’s going to rush his way through every conversation and situation.

It works a little less when you’re a woman who is alternating between resurrection, doing air combos on plant monsters, stumbling down hallways, and being imprisoned as she’s held down by enemies she’s going to unmake within moments.

This is not a problem unique to the one camera format of the post PS3 God of War games, and it’s not even a problem inherent to the AAA cinematic approach that Sony has made their bread and butter over the last decade and change. While Ludonarrative Dissonance is perhaps best known by its usage in discussions around characters like Uncharted’s Nathan Drake and his propensity to alternate between quippish “I’m just a little guy” routines and the slaughtering of dozens, it’s a problem continually plaguing games big and small year after year. In all the years since, this situation hasn’t improved in the slightest..

Part of this is caused by video games’ propensity towards violence. While every medium has expressions of conflict, video games—being a mechanical and heavily interactive format—are understandably dominated by replications of the most visceral form of human engagement. People have always yearned for the physical sensation of impact (take a look at any sport to understand this), and gaming functions as an extension of this. We yearn for the crunchy hit stop, and the particle effects of collision and destruction. 

The other, more simple answer, is that in any creative field, people are going to rely on shortcuts or “standard” solutions to any problem they run into. We expect all fighting games to have a move list, so it becomes inherent to the genre; visual novels should have a text log; live service games demand a battle pass, and so on. Often these conventions are desired, but just as often we run into ideas that exist simply because it’s viewed as a necessity, e.g. the deluge of open world games adding loot systems straight out of Diablo even when designed to be static, or gacha games 1:1 copying the UI of Genshin Impact half a decade out from its release. 

The most egregious of these obligatory concepts to me has always been what I colloquially refer to as “the microwave hallway problem”, after Metal Gear Solid 4’s scene where a suffering Snake pushes his way through a hallway that’s killing him with radiation, as the imagery jumps from perspective to perspective.

In Metal Gear Solid 4, this scene is about Snake, as an old man, pushing himself through absolute misery for a moment of heroism. MGS4 itself is a fairly slow game focused on stealth, so a paced and deliberate moment like this doesn’t feel too out of place, and matches the artisanal tone that director Hideo Kojima has historically gone for. It’s iconic and remembered for plenty of reasons, especially for its place in gaming at a time when the average storytelling for mainstream titles was done through a purely divorced cutscene and gameplay split.

Unfortunately, this concept has been used again and again throughout countless games in the decades since MGS4’s release, and typically without much direction beyond the surface level. 

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game ostensibly about the dying V, a struggling mercenary whose brain is being torn apart by an entire other identity forcing its way through them. Aside from the consistent interjections from a ghostly Keanu Reeves, this fact is mostly removed from the player’s standard means of engagement, in favor of the expected techno-power fantasy… except for the random moments at ends of quests (and similarly-timed event triggers), where V will suddenly double over with a pixelated and messy screen, and start to move at 0.25x speed, before immediately regaining full and complete motor function without the slightest inconvenience. 

On the surface, this is the visual and mechanical language we have come to expect from cinematically driven video games, many of which are often free-form and non-linear. Developers, of course, can’t plot a set course with moments of defined strength and weakness if they’re providing you a venue with which to do things in any potential order. At the same time, however, is anything truly being gained from these moments of appropriate tonal resonance amidst a sea of completely untethered gameplay? Are these moments of weakness displaying a peek into the intended narrative, or are they showcasing just how limited the language of the common game is?

Countless games follow this format. There’s Red Dead Redemption 2’s concept of tuberculosis that involves the occasional cough and hallucination in between hundred-man slaughter sprees. There are several Resident Evil games that do this, but most notably this year’s Requiem, where Leon Kennedy’s T-Virus infection temporarily makes everything slow, blurry, and blue, before restoring perfect parry and suplex potential almost instantly. Even Kingdom Hearts 3, a game I broadly love for its absurdism, isn’t immune to forcing Mickey Mouse through a slow moving facsimile of the microwave hallway.

To reiterate: what do we gain from these moments of control? Indeed, putting the player behind the wheel of an ailing character is a powerful tool of empathy and connection, but when you jump away from that almost instantly, does that empathy persist beyond a fleeting moment? Does the dissonance not showcase the cracks and limitations of what you’re trying to do with the medium, and fall back on the base expectations of what a video game is rather than what you want it to be? 

It’s easy for me to armchair game design over here from my ivory tower of gaming critique, but we don’t have to conceive of new and innovative ways to fix these problems, when they’ve been executed on in multiple games since the genre’s inception. 

The Fear and Hunger series has a constant potential for characters to lose limbs and abilities as you face down the many horrors of that world. Kenshi, or freeform sandbox games like Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud, are able to showcase all sorts of gameplay systems related to loss of power by changing the means of engagement in a tangible and permanent way. Action oriented titles like Sifu or Eternal Sonata are able to demonstrate the gain and degradation of stamina and means of engagement as their characters go through various stages of life. Hell, many FromSoftware games are predicated on the concept of an “unpowered” or “hollowed” form that can only be temporarily salved. Even games like Final Fantasy IV, a mainstream RPG from 1991, work with the concept of mechanical and narrative intertwining through the character of Tellah, an old man pushing himself to the brink with dwindling stats on each level up. 

Indeed, an argument posited against many of these examples in the wake of their larger budget contemporaries would be that they’re more elaborate or hardcore games for niche audiences, despite games like RimWorld selling over 4 million copies, and persisting in popularity many years down the line. Another could be that these moments of disconnect function fine as abstraction; surely the core act of playing a video game is abstraction from reality enough that we can accept these limitations (this one I’ve seen in opposition to discussions on ludonarrative dissonance consistently). 

Regardless of reasoning, I believe these limitations come not from the medium of games, but from the nightmarish production management of many modern titles, as well as the expectations of capitalism; from operating under the belief that the market is truly something that exists, and not an artifice propped up by manufactured evidence and stubborn belief. 

When we look at how games are made, especially when it comes to titles with larger budgets, the creation process reinforces this issue. That need for a common language—a blueprint that can easily be executed on—becomes a requirement when we think about how many games are being created by contract workers. 

Looking at something even midscale in budget such as last year’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, we can see that hundreds of contractors were hired temporarily to work on things like art, rendering, sound, and quality assurance. If we look at Halo Infinite’s development, we have consistent reporting that workers were limited to 18 month contracts and then placed on a 6 month cooldown before being re-hired, to suit arbitrary leadership requirements and skirt labor laws that would afford these employees more rights in their workplace.

It’s not hard to imagine the difficulties faced by these contract workers in a broad sense, especially when it comes to getting to grips with the project they’re working on, or asserting creative agency over it. They have to learn the toolsets, the project outlines, the deadlines, where the last contractor was forced to leave work unfinished… so on and so forth. In the process of all this, there’s also the unending fear that they could be laid off on a whim, so there’s not going to be much of a desire to shake the boat with more radical creative interjections. From the side of more stable employees as well, things are consistently in a state of flux from the hands working on a project having to be retrained, with pipelines consistently altered like the Ship of Theseus. 

Taking all this into account, it’s easy to understand exactly how so many games end up eerily similar, or formulaic to a fault. Sure, this applies to things like Unreal Engine 5 becoming dominant throughout the medium as workers are able to pick up that shared understanding of how something works, but it also applies to how these works end up being made. If you’re pushing through a logistical nightmare, why wouldn’t you rely on the most commonly used or easy to understand tools? Why wouldn’t you frame a scene as so many other scenes have done before because that’s what’s easiest to convey to your detached creative team? Management has to be appeased as well, so there is a pressure towards showing them something that wouldn’t feel out of place in another successful game, matching the tone of another rather than cultivating it organically through the creation process. 

This is made worse through the intersection of marketing, management, and manipulation. When we talk about the artifice of things like focus testing or evaluating what an audience might “want” (an unrealizable notion, given that the “audience” isn’t a real group of people, but rather a handy abstraction of guesswork), it’s not an exaggeration to refer to it as an “unreality”. There are lessons to be learned through experience and inquisition, but they cannot be done through the means of our current economic and creative climates, lest we continually repeat the sins of things like the hastily edited ending to the theatrical release of Blade Runner.

When we surrender to the idea that games should be more than pure idealized “fun”, or more accurately, when we give in to the notion that fun can only be defined by unlimited player control and power, we limit the ideas of what the medium of games can be. Fun can be had in planning around and experiencing things like a dismemberment in Fear and Hunger. There’s joy to be found in those moments of overcoming the challenges of a game like Demon’s Souls. Not everything is killstreaks and SSS combos; sometimes a power fantasy can come from overcoming incredible odds, situations, or indeed even the way we control a video game.

A few years ago, I had a lot of fun with the presentation of Citizen Sleeper; a sci-fi game about functioning as a being trapped within a proprietary and expensive robotic body, trying to make ends meet and solve problems inside of an old space station. The conceit of the game is great—balance the needs of your mechanical body (allegorical of chronic illness), the needs of your community, and the imposition of societal pressures working against you—but in practice, it unintentionally becomes this oddly weightless and almost dismissive work. 

Within an hour of starting the game, the idea of balancing meters, or struggling against any sort of representation of chronic illness, can be thrown out the window with relative ease. Minigames let you play the stock market and gamble for infinite money. You can get a trait to start repairing your body infinitely with very little effort or risk, eliminating any chance of experiencing the detriments of disability. You can solve the issues of every NPC you meet, and complete the main story without friction or fear. On a certain level, I admire the game’s willingness to take the conceits of an economic manager and try to instill the idea that it’s all artifice and can be changed with luck, but it’s also limiting and ineffectual as an experience. 

I don’t expect every game to be Marathon—a complex and punishing game wherein the core experience is determined by a mechanical conceit that suits the type of narrative they’re trying to tell—but we can do better than serving (and in some respects, outright conditioning) an audience that exists in our most insecure assumptions. It’s understandable to rely on what’s easy and known, but we show the most interesting parts of ourselves when we mold what’s known into something only we can.

There will always be abstraction and ludonarrative dissonance in video games. There will always be that struggle to separate what a character should be able to do within the bounds of the narrative versus what makes an engaging and interesting game to play. However, this does not mean we should accept the absurd compromise that these patchwork microwave hallways provide. The medium of games allows for collaboration between creatives and viewers in ways other art forms could only dream of, and we should be trying to cultivate that charm, instead of abruptly ending the dialogue out of convenience.

The post In Cutscenes, You Can’t Double Jump appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s a full house this week on the Gamesline Podcast. John is joined by Lorelai, Maverick and Rose to talk about the last week in gaming. John’s still obsessing about Pikmin when he’s not playing Digimon cards or Pokémon Channel. Lorelai was Final Fantasy pilled at the Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival which got her playing Final Fantasy XI again while also digging in to Vampire Crawlers on her long road trip. Rose of course played more Marathon, Mina the Hollower, Saros, and Forbidden Solitaire while Maverick played a bunch of Hades 2.

In the news, we go over the interview Mike Fisher gave where he annihilated Yuji Naka, The Witcher 3 is getting more DLC, and a bill addressing the Stop Killing Games initiative is moving forward in California. In other news, Dark Horse Comics is unionizing after their new Embracer overlords started shutting down Things From Another World and shifting focus to Games. If you’d like to sign the petition to support the unionization effort, you can do that here.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, John, Lorelai, Maverick, and Rose.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 92: Fantasy Solitaire appeared first on Gamesline.

This was streamed live on our Twitch at http://twitch.tv/gameslinetv! Go follow and subscribe to it so you get notified of future streams!

The post Lily Tests the Steam Controller! appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s a biohazard this week as John and Rose tackle the most difficult challenges of Leon S. Kennedy’s career! John is playing Resident Evil 4 (2005) on Professional difficulty, while Rose platinum’d Resident Evil 9 with less than infinite equipment durability! Plus, they discuss Pragmata, Marathon, Vampire Crawlers, and Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo! In the news, there’s a new Star Fox remake, a Switch prince increase, one-of-a-kind Mindseye DLC, and unionization amongst the developers at Double Fine and Magic the Gathering: Arena!

After that, there’s plenty of listener questions this week, including: What did John enjoy most about his vacation? What games do John and Rose play to lull themselves to sleep? What is the most edible physical video game? What do they want to pulverize with a blender? And what video game feels like eating a stale Dorito?

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, Rose at fatamorgana.bsky.social and John at john.gamesline.net!

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 89: Finite Knife Durability appeared first on Gamesline.

After a brief stop, the Gamesline Podcast returns as John, Lily, Lorelai, and Rose sit down to talk about what they’ve been playing. John’s been big into RetroAchievements with games like Community Pom, Hatsune Miku Bomb Squad, and Azure Dreams while also digging deep into Pokopia, Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, and the new Umamusume scenario. Lorelai’s also been in that one when she’s not playing Monster Hunter Stories 3 or Nioh 3. Rose has been digging into Vital Shell, Resident Evil 9, and Crimson Desert when she’s not Playing Marathon with Lily whose been getting up to shenanigans in the Final Fantasy XIV Occult Crescent and Trails to Azure.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, John, Rose, Lilith, and Lorelai.

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Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited and Produced by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 85: The Tale of Kliff McDuff appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s a work that thrives off of its continuous nature; a rarity in an artform filled to the brim with resets, reboots, and retreads. Years pass, technology changes, and every person you’ve met along the way is molded by the events you all experience. It’s among the closest video games have gotten to a grand scale epic like “The Odyssey”, only instead of Odysseus possibly cheating on his wife, you watch a goth girl grow up to invent Linux. There’s nothing like it in games, and oftentimes I feel as if there will never be anything else like it when it inevitably runs its course.

As the thirteenth consecutive entry in the Trails lineage, and the third in its respective arc, Trails Beyond the Horizon is a fascinating step forward for the story; delivering not only the warm community comfort we’ve come to expect, but also a recontextualization of what everything we’ve seen up till now has meant. We’re past the era of NPCs talking around large scale issues, and Not-Organization XIII’s hiding in the shadows whilst opining about the “Truth.” We’ve learned about SiN, we’ve launched a rocket into space, and we’ve gotten payoffs to some of the longest laid bits from nearly 20 years ago. 

Trails Beyond the Horizon takes place a few months after Trails Through Daybreak II, with the Calvard Republic’s plans for the first ever manned flight into space quickly underway. As a space boom hits the continent, Van Arkride is doing his best to keep up with the various schemes and circumstances that rise to the surface amidst the turbulent times. There’s cults, political intrigue, and the everpresent meddling of Ouroboros to worry about; but also more mundane situations like stock scams, charity fraud, and all the standard troubles anyone can run into during day to day life.

There’s a balance to Horizon that matches a lot of earlier games in the series, like Trails in the Sky FC or Trails of Cold Steel. Those games spend a lot of time slowly eking out their broader conspiracy with small-scale events that gradually lead to a bombastic finish. This is a hallmark of Trails in general, but it’s a bit odd to see it done in what is ostensibly the Daybreak arc’s third game, which can definitely create an amount of friction or fatigue if you’re the type of player that somehow gets thirteen games into a series without appreciating its core conceit. 

I joke to an extent, but it is odd, especially when paired with the title change and overall belief that this would be one of, if not THE final game in the Calvard Arc; and previous third entries like Cold Steel III were able to marry a large amount of rising action with an explosive climax that sets up its finale. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the “calm before the storm” approach of Horizon, but it does mean you’re left wondering just how everything is going to play out a lot longer than you would in a more thrilling, chapter based entry like Trails from Zero or Sky SC.

A big part of that dissonance is due to the route-based structure Falcom has leaned on since Trails into Reverie once again making a return. Van shares his protagonist spotlight with Cold Steel’s Rean Schwarzer, Sky’s Kevin Graham, and to a lesser extent the ever funny Rufus Albarea who deserves so many games of his own. Each chapter has you ping-ponging between these character’s perspectives, and each has their own party composition, plotline, and resolution largely unrelated to the other. It’s an interesting format, showcasing the strengths of the series for sure, but at times it can exemplify the breaking points of Trails’ many tropes. It’s one thing to be tested by a couple tough guys as Van Arkride and his kids, it’s another to be tested the same exact way by eight other tough guys across the various routes over and over. A route change should feel more meaningfully different, but here it just feels like we’re model swapping who’s dealing with what.

Taking all this into account, we’re also back to encroaching upon the dark times of Reverie where 50 people file into a room to share their thoughts and ideals against a singular antagonist, but mercifully the overall party member count stops at 24. That is, however, still 24 different characters that the game has to balance and attempt to do justice over the course of your adventure, and inevitably this means many characters get sidelined with the assumption you sort of get them already and we can focus on something else. This is a little frustrating with characters like Fie or Crow who have a lot going on but chill in the background; it is even more egregious with characters like Kevin who has been conspicuously absent from the series for over 10 years, and seemingly almost reset to an amalgamation of what you’d expect a pre-Sky 3rd Kevin to be like.

Equipping all these characters can be exhausting too, especially with the sheer amount of quartz, spells, and accessories you have to kit in and think about across every party. Kevin’s party in particular stands out as uniquely frustrating to work with since they lack a core dedicated support unit, relying entirely on the hope and prayer that Nadia’s silly healing teddy bears will be enough (they aren’t). 

It’s not as bad as it could be, mainly because a large portion of the combat is cordoned off in the “Grim Garten”, a dungeon crawling side mode that lets you use characters from all three routes in your team building. While it’s about as exciting as the Märchen Garten from Daybreak II (read: not at all), it’s aided by at least having an actual story attached to it with really charming Ouroboros characters fooling around, which is always a series highlight. There’s surprising revelations about the mostly forgotten Professor Novartis from Trails to Azure, and new character Ulrika is a standout as a streamer who spits some of the most insane lines in the entire series (done via galmoji in Japanese and modern slang in English).

Ulrika uses “power words” when she speaks that allow her to control and manipulate certain aspects of the people around her (though she insists she never uses them on-stream), which is reflective in-game via the new Shard Command system. These commands are an iteration on the Brave Orders from Cold Steel, and let you activate various passive effects for a certain amount of turns i.e. +60% Physical damage with a small part wide heal. This system is usable by enemies as well, making some boss fights a real nightmare of buffs and debuffs. Just like Brave Orders this almost works, but the inability to use it in the midst of an enemy deluge often makes it feel like it’s just sort of there. If the system worked similarly to the turn order interrupts of the series staple S-Crafts, this would be a great addition! As is, like much of the combat in the Trails series, you can pretty much forget it.

All this whining may seem odd, especially if you slid by those five stars at the top, but here’s the ultimate truth: I had a smile on my face the entire time I was playing Trails Beyond the Horizon, and the theorizing and cliffhangers it’s left open have kept my mind buzzing nonstop as I pore over the older games in the series to go “OHHHH” at. I haven’t felt this burning intrigue in my heart since the secret endings of Kingdom Heart games. At the same time, the quiet slow buildup of the game as I wandered around the now-familiar Calvard checking in with all my favorite NPCs to see what the hell everyone’s doing is like heaven to me. Synthesizing everything I love about Trails into one game, with perhaps the most bespoke localization I’ve seen in games…yeah, you can understand why I might be pretty pleased with Horizon.

Similarly to my Daybreak II review, I wanna run through the appeal of all these characters, because it’s the intersection of world building and character writing that makes Trails Trails. 

Van Arkride continues to impress as the slowly healing traumatized guy who wants to pretend he’s actually twisted and evil. Watching him continue to make the safe choices and focus on improving his interpersonal relationships with others in a way he never has is heartwarming. There’s a scene with his ex-girlfriend Elaine you can get where he finally explains exactly why he has such a fixation on sweets to begin with (this is what romance is all about). I really like how characters notice that he’s being more normal in this game too, with a lot of the more adversarial allies getting closer and conceding that he’s not the bad boy they made him out to be.

Agnes is in peak loser girl mode in this game. While there’s a lot of layers to what she’s doing and the reason she acts the way she is, I adore seeing her stumble more than anything. She wants that problematic age-gap relationship so bad, and I really can’t blame her, but also it’s so over for her. The next game is probably going to go all-in on an Agnes focus too, so we’ll finally be able to see if Falcom is #Woke or #DarkWoke.

Risette got a big boost in Horizon as the story starts to actually dig into exactly what her insane backstory might be. They do a good job of balancing various possibilities of what may have been before you finally get a clearer picture near the end of the game. A big thing that’s hit Trails as it’s gone on is this idea that you can sort of get what a character’s archetype is going to be within a few minutes of meeting them, and that persona can easily overlap with one who’s come before. There are like 3 girls who act like Tio Plato in the Trails series, and they all work at the same place. Risette could almost fall into the same gang of “disaffected voice tech women”, but her fixation on learning where she came from and how that relates to the world is uniquely cool, and instantly sets her apart.

Judith continues to fail and her mom is really hot.

Aaron has some of the worst lines I’ve ever seen, as he should. There’s a meme going around where people post a picture of a character they hate/love and say “you can tell from their eyes they genuinely think they deserve to live”. That’s Aaron. When he said “I stay in shape by going to pound town every night” I wanted to lock him in a box and throw the box into the ocean. A+ work.

Feri is…a child so she still once again doesn’t have that much going on. At the very least her brother Kasim finally had something approaching a personality in this game, but the Al-Fayed family continues to be the biggest “yeah sure” of the game. 

Quatre has another great event related to their gender identity, as well as a separate absolutely insane one. I think it’s really interesting to continue leaning into what it means to be a gender non-conforming person in what has ostensibly been a very conservative world up to this point. Falcom has basically confirmed HRT in Zemuria! Persona could never! There’s this really charming bit where Quatre’s friends show up to hang out with him in the city for a day and talk about loving his anime girl v-tuber streams. You get the real energy that they have no idea what gender he is transitioning to at any point and I eat it up. 

Bergard is an old man, so I adore him as always, but he continues to just be there. There’s always been this undercurrent in Trails that the Old exist to guide and light the way for the Young and it feels like it’s really hitting its culmination with what Horizon sets up. It’ll be very interesting to see if there’s anything more to his bizarre circumstances given the ending’s revelations.

As for the other parties, the Cold Steel party is extremely the Cold Steel Party. Crow is putting on the “I’m not gay” show, while gazing longingly into Rean’s eyes and recoiling in fear from women. Towa is continually the perfect woman, and Fie continues to be chilling since she’s found her calling in life. I wish they had a little bit more going on beyond the classic “haha oh Rean you are dating 10 people” joke but at the same time, when they make a joke about how Rean is never going to marry anyone because he’s dating 10 people… I’m just saying some real people might find that a little relatable.

Kevin and Rufus’ group is a little disappointing, but only by virtue of how strong these characters usually are. Kevin is almost a decade out from overcoming his trauma, but at the same time it feels like he isn’t allowed to do that much, especially bereft of his sister Ries. There’s this interesting angle of Kevin trying to sacrifice his ideologies for the sake of the world that could definitely be approached, but as I mentioned earlier, it almost comes across as a retelling for the sake of nostalgic remembrance. Like “Oh you know Kevin! He had a darkness to work through underneath that funny guy bit! He’s back at it again!” which hits a little rough after Sky 3rd dedicates so much time to bringing him out of that darkness. 

Which is a similar problem for Rufus and his picnicking front, though it is much less severe given Swin and Nadia’s fleshing out in Daybreak II. They continue to have a great Team Rocketesque vibe going on that stood out to many when they hit the scene in Reverie, but a lot of that is stifled by their representation of a morality that Kevin must adhere to. Rufus can say he’s evil and crooked all he wants, but his actions will never reflect that because the situation will never demand it. Lapis is allowed to suck though; we all love a faildaughter.

Though I mentioned a big part of the issues with this game is the routes not feeling distinct enough, it’s not really because of any specific problem with any given party, but more Horizon’s nature as the third entry in an arc. When Van meets up with that NPC you know from previous games, there’s an immediate rapport and remembrance; we’re continuing something here. When Rean or Kevin run into someone Van’s group knows for one of their quests, they usually bemoan that Van isn’t there for a moment, before jumping right in as if the group had that level of familiarity with them.

From a player perspective this works just fine because of course We know what’s been going on with these storylines, but for the in-game narrative vibes, it sort of throws a weird wrench into things. Trails sidequests can take up most of any given game’s runtime because we’re seeing a community grow and learn interdependence as any relationship does; we’re getting the payoff of watching how all these characters change and address similar issues as they grow and learn. It’s a lot harder to get that full payoff feeling when it’s Rean Schwarzer going “oh hello, child Van helped escape from his abusive father in game #1, I guess I’m going to talk to you like I vaguely know you now.” It’s not the worst ever, but it does create a little narrative dissonance that I hadn’t really run into in past games, especially since Reverie is so uniquely structured, and Daybreak II’s routes always ensured there was a member of Van’s group around to give context. The quests are still good, but they’d hit harder if they were actually tied to the characters experiencing them, which is a problem that’s just… never come up before.

I mentioned that these quests range in severity, but things feel very similar to Trails to Azure in this department. You’re running into a lot of storylines that relate to what’s going on behind the scenes with the bigger picture, and oftentimes acting as a result of that bigger picture. Particular standouts involve dealing with the continued exploitation of migrant workers, and a homeless artist who’s turned her life around struggling with the idea of her art becoming commodified by the wealthy she disdains. These are really great contemporary concepts that wouldn’t be too out of the norm to find in an RPG, but the level to which it’s dissected and examined, as always, sets Trails apart.

Bolstering all this is an absolutely stellar localization that I was continually stunlocked by. Every character has a distinctive voice (aided by a consistently improving English dub that I can easily recommend), helping the prose sing in a way that showcases the quality of the translation. There were over six writers credited under translation, and just as many editors; their hard work and genuine passion shines through in every crass line from Aaron, every detached nicety from Risette, and all the shits and fucks they’ve managed to cram in. An interesting aside about the informing of the original text on localization changes, Mirabel is a character that now speaks with a southern accent since she’s supposed to be from the same area of Zemuria that Kevin does; which is very funny to see from the outside as some sort of Forced Cowgirlification.

As the Daybreak games take place in a much more familiar and modern setting than past titles, they’ve understandably leaned more into the type of slang we see in our real world. In previous games this manifested as the occasional “same” or “rizz” drop, but here we’re firing on all cylinders 24/7. When you see the new Ouroboros enforcer call The Thousand Oathbreaker Unc while they talk about him getting ratio’d online… it’s cinema. It really helps elevate the vibe of this place that’s almost like our real world, but ever so slightly different. 

This has actually been a major issue some people have had with the Trails series—technology moving incredibly fast—but Horizon takes great strides in maintaining exactly what makes sense for the setting, and also why these technological advancements might happen to begin with. It’s one thing for Apple to organically create the iPhone over a period of decades, but it’s another for Apple to receive the iPhone in 1980 and then reverse engineer it over the next few years. Human nature is all about learning and mimicking before making something our own, so it’s great for a series to examine just how far you can take that concept when married with fantastical concepts. 

It’s soooo cool that as you go around this country stupefied by the Space Launch, you’re seeing younger people watching YouTube on their phones, while news broadcasts are plastered on giant screens in the streets of popular town hubs. This is a world that never had TV! This is a world that jumped from Radios to an iPhone! That’s so cool! They don’t have a stable output of cinema yet because there’s no home market pipeline of VHS to DVD to Digital for anything to be based on! They just re-run that shit every few months like the 1900s! It rocks!!!!

It’s one thing for a world to suddenly pivot to future tech (think Final Fantasy), it’s another to gradually integrate and interrogate how the medieval peasant would be affected by the advent of the Dorito. It reminds me a lot of Ascendance of a Bookworm, one of my favorite light novel series, because Trails genuinely cares about the world its characters live in, and how it informs their world view and vernacular. Bookworm does this with the implications of what providing the working class with literature and information does to change society, and Trails approaches it from every conceivable angle. We watched our own world change dramatically as telecommunications technology developed rapidly over the last 50 years, and it hits even harder in this world where countries once separated by monsters and mountains are able to intermingle and uncover things about themselves and the world.

I don’t want to spend too much time just talking to you directly about what precisely the ending to Trails Beyond the Horizon is—everyone who’s played a Trails game knows that there are endless cliffhangers and absurdist revelations at the climax of most—but I will say the most surprising thing it did for me was improve upon what Trails Through Daybreak II had fumbled with; which is something I’ve rarely seen a game do retroactively and well. By the time you finish Horizon, you have a complete understanding of basically everything going on with the previously uninspired and confusing antagonist of Daybreak II, and not in the sense of “oh they fleshed out his backstory now with a text log” or something, but because it appears your confusion at his diatribes was intentional. It’s such a novel and interesting concept that works perfectly within a series with a defined lineage like Trails, while even series like Kingdom Hearts has stumbled to maintain cohesion.

That’s really my continual message with the Trails series distilled: it’s able to consistently pull off and do things that every game could have the potential for, if the limitations of industry and marketing didn’t get in the way. When I think of my childhood yearning for series like Dragon Age and Mass Effect—these big interconnected epics that spawn multiple entries and remember your every action—I find it meaningfully accomplished here in the budgeted and ambitious world of Zemuria. Sure you might not have the sweeping grand set-piece moments, or sexy AAA fidelity elves crooning into your ear, but the heart is here, limited only by the time they had, rather than what they think it must be, and that makes all the difference.

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