On the list of archaic platitudes I’ve heard since childhood, that is the one that bothers me the most. A lot of life lessons can be truncated or adapted for comprehension by even the smallest child, leaving nuances or more complex concepts on the shelf for “when they’re older.” You do not have to look far or wide to see the material harm wrought by this adage at all levels of human society. Words have an exceptional capacity for infliction and damage, and they should not be underestimated or dismissed.

The goal of this proverb is to teach kids to avoid becoming disproportionately upset when another child mocks them, typically through ignoring the problem. It idolizes a very “stiff upper lip” mentality, and in some cases it’s a valuable approach and a worthy skill to teach kids. However, that’s not true in all cases. I’m sure we’ve all heard revisions or corrections to sayings like this in the past, with one example being “blood is thicker than water” being extrapolated out of “the blood of the pact is thicker than the water of the womb,” which flips the meaning of the shortened form entirely. Yet, I’ve never heard a revised variation for my least-favorite of these old sayings, so I shall endeavor to rectify this now:

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but bones can heal just fine. Words written with hate and scorn will scar me time after time.”

———————

As a gacha game, Limbus Company regularly adds new units to its roster for players to pull for via random draw banners. One such unit was added toward the end of June; a unit anticipated by the playerbase for roughly half a year. I’m going to call this unit “Thumb Rodion.” Her full label is The House of Spiders: The Thumb Nursefather Rodion if you’re curious, but all you need to know is her name is Rodion and as this unit, she is a member of The Thumb, one of the five big-shot criminal syndicates in the game’s setting.

Limbus Company does a lot of unusual things that separate it from other gacha titles, and one of these deviations is in how it conceptualizes its units. Normally, a gacha game will field a roster of various characters, but in Limbus Company, players only have access to the same cast of 12 characters. Instead of gaining new characters outright, players gain alternate versions or “Identities” of those 12 characters, typically from alternate realities where they’ve taken the place of other characters in the story, or became members of the myriad factions in the setting. Imagine a hypothetical Legend of Zelda gacha game where you build a team out of Zelda, Link, and Ganondorf, and instead of getting new characters like Midna or Tingle, you unlock versions of the trio such as Happy Mask Saleswoman Zelda, Zora Link, and Lon Lon Ranch Owner Ganondorf. That’s more or less how Limbus Company works.

As Thumb Rodion, Rodion takes on the role of Valencina, a major antagonist in the game’s 9th chapter, “Canto IX: The Unsevering.” Valencina is a Nursefather of the House of Spiders. To truncate a lot of details, the House of Spiders is a dead-end facility where the Five Fingers have dumped powerful once-members of their syndicates who have fallen from grace for one reason or another. They’re called Nursefathers as they’re effectively nurturing a special sort of person for a specific goal in order to prove they still have some value to the Fingers.

In Valencina’s case, she was promoted to a high position within The Thumb, a mafia-styled faction with strict rules and decorum, and despite her family name, was demoted and disowned after three days. When a war breaks out, she’s called into service as a formidable combatant, and though Valencina seeks to regain her lost glory and status, successfully fighting tooth and nail as a war hero of sorts, she is denied reinstatement. She’s abrasive, alcoholic, and aggressive. She treats two separate characters as items to be used and discarded, literally calling them “Textbook” and “Ticket” instead of their actual names. She’s the epitome of a prodigy being cast out for a single mistake, spiraling down into the depths of every bottle, and erupting into curse-laden diatribes at anyone who so much as looks at her funny.

Valencina (or more accurately, Thumb Rodion) had been a long-awaited unit, since Canto IX launched back in December, as she’s one of the first characters introduced in that chapter. This makes it all the more disappointing that in the English translation for Thumb Rodion, one of her dialogue lines features a slur.

When you unlock units in Limbus Company, and upgrade them to a certain point, you unlock a story vignette. These provide some additional background information; glimpses into the life of that character in this new context as they take on the role of another character, or work under another faction. As Limbus Company is a Korean game, its contents must be translated into English, and one line in Thumb Rodion’s Identity Story reads as follows:

“*puff* All right, then. Never thought that stuttering ****** with her E.G.O and the clankin’ tin-girl could stop ya, anyway.”

I’ve censored the slur, as it has no place here. Truthfully, I was hoping this would be a simple error of judgment, where those responsible either weren’t aware of the charged nature of the term or didn’t think it would be as big of a deal as it insidiously is, and the community at large would request its alteration. After all, regardless of what Korean term was used, the translation team would be savvy enough to know not to heedlessly implement a slur in the official translation, right? Surely it would be patched out and remedied within a week or two, right?

That does not seem to be the case, as we’re now weeks from the unit’s launch and there have been no changes to this line. This particular slur has gained more and more usage in online spaces over the last couple of years. I personally have seen it used in social media posts and replies the most, but there has been one instance last year where someone I was in a Discord call with said it out loud as a self-admonishment. One thing that’s clear to me is that this slur has become a lingual crutch for a decent number of English speakers online. I don’t want to simply dismiss this as the “erosion of morals among younger generations” because while I do tend to see its usage more often among younger people, it’s not like people my age and older unilaterally stopped saying the word, and the recent spread of its usage has permeated throughout the age strata. I’m mentioning younger people here because they tie into a hypothesis of mine regarding this slur’s use in Limbus Company.

If I had to guess, I’d say the slur’s application in Thumb Rodion’s Identity Story is a thoughtless inclusion banking on the “social credentials” of using current-era slang. Consider a unit released much earlier in the year: The House of Spiders: The Middle Apprentice Ishmael. Much like how Thumb Rodion is based on Valencina, Middle Apprentice Ishmael is based on Kira. I bring this up because Kira is written as the sort of person who says things like “aurafarming” which make her stand out as a more youthful character, and her language reflects that (Middle Apprentice Ishmael also uses this style of language.) Had Limbus Company been released a few years earlier, Kira would be written with different slang terms and phrases, to match the ones in use by youths at the time; she’s exactly the sort of character you’d write to say things like “sus” and “pog” since she’s also a gamer. My reasoning is that since they wrote Kira in that specific way, and Limbus Company‘s translation has a tendency to keep up with modern English language trends, the translation personnel were aware of the rise in usage of this slur and thought it would be okay to insert it into this vignette. That’s the extent of thought that went into using it.

I could make the case that by not saying which slur it is, it makes it more difficult for “proponents” of its usage to vie for it. Because it’s a slur they deem acceptable to use, and it’s one that’s unfortunately in vogue in the cultural zeitgeist of today’s lexicon, they’ll impishly claim that it’s “actually fitting for the character,” or that it “makes sense in context”.

Bullshit.

Would they make these arguments if it were a different slur? I suppose that depends on the individual, and I have no doubt some who bristle at that question would defiantly claim that they’d still make those arguments, when they know full well that using such terms in public and professional contexts would and will have consequences. The fact remains however, that Valencina never says the slur once in all of her dialogue. She was already written with a more fitting form of dehumanizing speech with her calling people objects and denying them their names, so such a vulgar term was unnecessary. Its inclusion here is even worse then, as while Valencina never says the term, Rodion in Valencina’s place does. Rodion is a complex character, but not the sort of person you’d expect to sling any kind of slur given her history and general demeanor. Now, it’s not strange at all for these characters to adopt different personas and attitudes as they use these Identities. Hong Lu often retains his upbeat joviality across his Identities, but this can be extinguished outright or twisted to juxtapose against the violence he commits depending on the context of the Identity. The normally uptight and strict Outis can be seen in more mellow or casual hues in a likewise manner, and this applies to the full main cast of Limbus Company. But never has there been a situation where a slur was involved in the localization, either in the narrative or in these little vignettes, and in such a callous and careless manner at that.

The language we use matters. For five years, I worked with children with learning disabilities, from kindergartners to fifth-graders. I’ve worked with people who have ADHD, ODD, autism, Down Syndrome, etc. You name it, I’ve probably worked with somebody who had it. One afternoon, during the after-school program, outside on the playground, I overheard a student say this exact slur. I called him over, and had him sit on one of the picnic tables for a timeout. I do not remember what I said to him exactly, but I remember being very clear and stern about the fact that such a term is not to be used. It wasn’t a term he specifically was disallowed from saying; none of us should be saying it. It’s not a term one should want to say, and if any other student said it, they’d be in the same situation he was in now. I told him that his mother, a coworker of mine at the school who worked with many of the same students I did, would be very unhappy if she knew he had said such a term. I told him that I wouldn’t mention this to his mother as he was already taking a timeout, and it was a singular mistake, but he needed to make sure he left the word unsaid.

He never said it again, at least in my presence. I would like to hope he left it behind, as I did in middle school. Because that’s what it sounds like to me whenever I hear it. There are two kinds of people who use this slur: middle-schoolers who are wont to make as many mistakes as humanly possible as they grapple with entering the tumultuous period of life where you’re not quite a child and not quite an adult and your pituitary glands are wreaking havoc all over; and people who were eligible to vote in 1980, who have given up growing as people in favor of living within the small confined worlds they’ve built up around themselves. Apart from this resurgence where I cannot go a week without reading that slur in a comments section or thread, that anecdote with that student was the most recent time I can recall hearing it; a snapshot from an afternoon almost ten years ago.

It may sound silly to stipulate on a singular slur in a video game where the setting is such that every horrible cyberpunk dystopian thing you can think of is somehow a million times worse. Where an entire district has legalized cannibalism, public transportation is a certifiably incomprehensible nightmare (and in the game too,) and you can be teleport-murdered for having a clone of yourself be alive for too long. Surely some people in this setting use slurs and pejorative terms for one another. But I’m not arguing about the slur’s suitability for the setting or the plausibility of its usage by this or that character.

I’m arguing that the slur has no value here, and only serves to tarnish the image of Limbus Company and the reputation of Project Moon along with it. This is a term with an extremely compromised and gruesome history; it should not be used without due consideration and an explicit, deliberate purpose. One must ask: “What was the objective in its usage here?” Is it being used in an academic context for a linguistic study or dissection? No. Is it being recorded as a matter of historical authenticity, accurately reflecting decades-old documentation or interview transcripts so that we maintain a complete understanding of a particular time and place, eschewing the desire to paint the past with a rosy tint? No. Is it being leveraged by a person who has been scarred by the slur as a means of connecting their experience to others through writing or song or poetry or some other medium? No.

When you work with people the term has historically been weaponized against, in order to demonize them and divest them of their humanity and rights, you will never want to stop seeing it, hearing it, witnessing it being used so flippantly, not just in creative works like video games, but in everyday life as well. There are other, less intense words that can be used in its place in virtually all contexts. But those who regularly employ it in their casual vocabulary know precisely why it “hits” just a little bit more when they use that word instead. The difference is in the measurable, tangible cruelty that laces the word, the history behind why it’s even considered a slur in the first place, and the knowledge that it is a slur and it is taboo to say it, which makes saying it or using it “exciting.” Just because people are mindlessly parroting it more often these days, feeding into its increased usage as they do, doesn’t change the fact that it’s a harmful, awful thing to say.

The truth is that it has no artistic merit in the context of a game like Limbus Company. It doesn’t do anything with the slur aside from drop it in one line for one backstory that isn’t even critical to the primary narrative, for what I can only surmise is shock value. It is flavor text.

And that flavor is rancid.

The post Sticks & Stones: The One Where They Put a Slur in a Video Game and Now I Have to Write about Why It’s Bad. appeared first on Gamesline.

My memory condition is not as open and shut as I made it out to be, however. Yes, 2014 is the cutoff date for what I remember for the most part. However, it’s more accurate to say that the memories before that time are like sun-bleached photos. Their backgrounds are destroyed; only certain subjects remain; I can only assume the context. Some are more destroyed than others and it is difficult to find out which is which until I examine them. Whenever I tell stories about the past, I’m left in a position where it seems like I’m being disingenuous about my condition. I can remember certain details, but it’s like telling a story about a dead world. I have a memory of visiting our grandparents’ house at some point, but everything outside the door has been scrubbed from existence. I don’t know what I looked like, what age I was. I don’t know that girl, I just know a body visited a room with wood-lacquered walls and crosses on every surface.

I tell you all of this to explain the strange way the following anecdote is conveyed. This is a story about video stores. This shall be both exposition and education; a story, and a demonstration of what memory is like for me.

At a certain point in ████, in ████, I visited a humble chain of video stores, once known as Blockbuster. I was visiting with my friend, ████, and their family. A faint smell of cheap theater popcorn lingered amid aisles of plastic cases. This friend, excited at their acquisition of a PlayStation 2, was eager to acquire a game with which to test out their new purchase. █ █████ ██ ███ ███████ █████ █████ ███ ███████ ████ ████ █ █████ █████████. I was ██, and from what I can surmise from context clues, easily impressed.

From other stories I’ve been told about myself, I know I was sheltered, almost entirely reliant on my uncles for any sense of taste. They, being teenage boys, were more than willing to corrupt the mind of an impressionable girl by making her listen to metal, play violent video games, and say swears at people knowing it would create amusing consequences—for them at least. █ █████ ████████ ███ █████ ██████ ████ ██ █████ █ █████ ████████ █████ ██████ █ █████ ████ ██ ████ █████ ████████ ███ ██ █████ ██ ███ █████ ██████ ████.

Being told by a █████ █████ that I could pick out any game I wanted was something akin to being given a blank check for an uncountable sum of money. I wandered down the aisles with ████ and saw a case. Upon the box was a black and red cover; a sword-wielding anime man sitting in a pose of indescribable despondence/ennui. Overtop, in stylish, curving handwriting were the words Devil May Cry. Some previously unexpressed sense of aesthetic called out to me; I absolutely needed to know what happened inside that svelte, black-jacketed case.

“Oh,” said ████’s mother, “are you sure?” She eyed the incredibly prominent mature rating on the box.

“█ ████ ███████ ███████ ██████ ████,” I said.

It seemed she accepted this as an answer as we left the store with our newfound acquisition. We went out into ████ ████ ████ ███ ███████ ███ ████ ████████ █ █████ ████ █████ ██ ████ ██████████ █ █████ ████ ███ ███ ██ █████ ██████ █████ █ █████ ████████ ███ ██ ████ ████████ ██ ████ █ █████ ████████ ████ █ ████ █ ████ ██████ ███ ██████████ █████ █ ████ ████ █ ██ ███████ █████ ██ ██ █████ █ █████ ████████ ████ ██ ███████ ███████ █████ █████ ████ ███████ █████ ██ ████ █████ ██████. Even so, I have loved the franchise ever since.

If trying to read all that gives you a headache, imagine the headache that still pounds in my head trying to remember it and we can call it even.

Resurrecting My Dead Self

Staring back at the person I never was, I am jealous. Without realizing it, I’ve escaped the purity of that feeling: of finding something, resonating, and simply choosing to be curious, damn the consequences. Crumbling memory makes it even harder to get back into this state. I have a somewhat unique experience of being “born” an adult.

Adulthood means an essentially unlimited ability to pursue the things I like. My aesthetic sense is more developed than ever, but I still struggle to choose art based on what I like. I mistrust my ability to identify what is and isn’t worth my time. I tend to try to “hear things out” even when it is apparent my time is being deliberately wasted. The opinions of others often convince me into or out of things, further confusing my ability to self-select.

I talked previously about the oppressive burden of enduring other people’s thoughts. You open social media; you are told something you like is overrated. A fond recollection of a childhood favorite film revisited tells you it was never good; 45% on Rotten Tomatoes. Media piracy websites will feature prominent reviews, and star ratings aggregated from places like Metacritic—what the fuck is that about?

With free time being more limited than ever, there is an impulse to min-max. There have been moments where I have spent longer stretches researching a good time than actually having one. The Trails franchise, for instance, was one I put off for years because I operated from an oppressive point of view: I believed I could get something better, more polished, more refined, elsewhere, where a “mostly positive” was not enough.

It gets even worse when you must consider the politics of the things involved. I cannot begin to count the number of times I have been ecstatic for a new game release only to realize several of its prominent developers are scum of the earth. For my own sanity, I have avoided things seemingly developed in a lab for me, because the lead dev espoused a hateful ideology. Research becomes necessary and it is much harder to simply consider “the fun of the game” when such actors are publicly available and their words are a matter of record. Our purchases become signals to others about what we value, what we endorse, and so we endlessly submit ourselves to a panopticon of our own making.

Art has always been political. I’m not trying to assert there was some ideologically pure time where a person could just consume art without thought. Often, we imagine such a period, but it is just that: the product of imagination. Most people simply just had a time where they were sheltered from the political ramifications of the things they engaged with. I think we have a responsibility to others and ourselves to find beautiful things without giving up on what we believe in. There is a balance to be struck between cold logic and idealistic passions.

With all this in mind, I engaged in a thought experiment. I would attempt to revisit the mindset of this long dead person. I would play a selection of PlayStation 2 games, chosen entirely from the information I could glean from the box. I gave myself permission to drop whatever I felt like, and permission to be repulsed by what I found inside: The aesthetic need not be defended if the contents were vile.

I permitted no review scores, no research, and no gameplay footage. All I had, in some cases, was faint recollections of what others might have said or interest which came from a contextless fancy in the things associated with the game (soundtracks, keyart, ect.).

My Beautiful, Blue-Bottomed Disks

Bloodrayne

I’ll admit to being a bit on a mid-2000s vampire kick for this one to have fruited into anything. Bloodrayne’s box art was less enticing to me than █ ████████ █████ ██ █ ██████████ ██████ ██ ████ ███████████ ██████ █████████. Whatever effect of intelligence I may have completely crumbles in the face of a hot lady surrounded by dead bodies—I’ll admit to that being a me problem.

I have fond memories of ██ ███████ ██████ ██ ████ and being a passing vampire enjoyer, having an excuse to play a game predominantly about one seemed like a good enough time to me. Bloodrayne surprised me then, by being one of the games I played for the longest. A big part of that was the presentation; I am a sucker for any game which allows me to blast my way through a gothy, gravitas-filled world.

I was also quite taken with the gore in this game, as concerning as that sentiment might be for any psychologists present. Gore in Bloodrayne is fascinating because unlike many other games in the murdering genre, it lends itself a sense of permanency. Dismembered limbs, bloodstains, and corpses lay strewn about like the boomer shooters of old. By comparison, with the interest in increased visual fidelity and the need to regain system resources as quickly as possible, bodies in modern games often dematerialize as if the world’s most efficient black-bag service is following you around. I have played modern AAA shooters where the bullet holes disappear before the magazine is half empty, and here is Bloodrayne leaving corpses strewn around lobbies until I kindly choose to get on with the plot.

Compared to some others on this selection, I will likely play Bloodrayne to completion. The gameplay required little adjustment for someone spoiled on polished, modern control schemes. There was an even split in the game’s attention between showing me Rayne being cool and showing me her ass but, anthropologically speaking, it could have been much worse given the era it was produced. That said, I’m willing to do anything for a goth lady.

Evergrace

Of the games I chose, Evergrace was the one with the most prior baggage attached. Evergrace’s soundtrack by Kota Hoshino has ensured my productivity in writing about as much as having a keyboard. █ ████ ██████ ███ ████████ ██ ████ █ ██████ ██ ████ ██████ █ █████ ██ ███ ████ ██████ ███ ████ █████ █ █████ ████████ ████ ████████ █ ██████ ████ █████ I had not seen a second of the game, however, and the boxart itself had always intrigued me; it seemed, if not actually, spiritually in conversation with my beloved Devil May Cry. A white-haired anime swordsman sitting upon a rock and staring at an unseen point, carrying some emotional burden. What can I say, I have a type.

Considering FromSoftware’s current position as the Dark Souls factory, Evergrace was surreal. The control scheme was completely different from the one which has gradually crystallized into a soft necessity in action RPGs for nearly two decades. The ambience was consistently surreal and dreamlike in a way I haven’t experienced outside of indie games. And of course, it was great to finally hear my beloved soundtrack in its rightful place. That title screen experience was immaculate.

The gameplay is more interesting to talk about than to play, unfortunately. There is a combinatorial smattering of durability management, ability selection, and enemies being weak to certain types of damage which all persist even into later games, but it is far more crude here. I am not the most patient person in the world, but the cumbersome slowness which pervades every system, from combat to just getting around the place, is more aggravating than pensive. It reminds me of ██ ███████ ██ ██ █████████ █ █████ ████████ ████ █ ████ ███████ █████ ██ ██ █████ █████ ████ ████ ██ ████ ███ ██████ ██ ███████ ██ ██ █ ████ █ ████ Threads of Fate or Dewprism in Japan █████ ██████ ████ ██ █████ ██ █████████████ ███ ████ ██ █████ █ ████████ █████ ████ ██ █████████ █████ ███ ██ ██████ ██ ██████ ██ ██████.

Though I did not personally enjoy what the game was going for, the sense of aesthetic was wonderful. The sights and sounds on display really inspired me, and it was intriguing seeing the chrysalis of a beloved game studio before they become what would define them.

Shadow Hearts

I love Legend of Dragoon; it’s an imperfect game, but one I know was acquired in a similar fashion to the earlier anecdote. A small girl saw a game with a word similar to ‘dragon’ in the title and ███████ ██ ███ ████████ █ ██████ ████ █████. ██ ███ ███████████ ██ ██ ██ ███████ █ █████ █████████ ██ ██████ █████ ██████████ ██ ██████ ███. Shadow Hearts has been often recommended to me because of said appreciation. its timing-based combat being a major point of similarity. I never went out of my way to seek it out and as time passed it was always in a “someday” category.

Now fully immersed in this experiment and only burdened with hearsay, I decided to give it a try. Immediately the box art presents an interesting aesthetic and it always makes me laugh to see a damsel in distress psychically menaced by the world’s most normal looking man.

Shadow Hearts, in the first hour or so, disappointed me. It wasn’t the gameplay or aesthetics which bothered me, it was the writing. I don’t know how many games would exist in this category, but Shadow Hearts earns a shiny “homophobic caricature in the first hour” sticker. This was the year 2001 we’re talking about; there have certainly been bigger label bad influences to take umbrage with, but that on top of the protagonist’s flippant desire to sexually assault the woman he’s travelling with made me immediately feel the need for a shower.

All that considered, my sense of aesthetic did not let me down. There is an interesting world here, there are interesting points raised. The negative first impression did not diminish my desire to see the story further, simply because of the strength of the game’s mechanics and the interest I had in the setting. The promise of a dark world is still here, even if it is a little greasier than I would like.

Dark Cloud 2

Dark Cloud 2 was interesting because I was not intrigued by its cover but by the back of the box. The in-game screenshots displayed an art style I now see frequently replicated in the modern day. Cel shading is now common, but I still felt compelled by what the game was showing me. Within moments, it captivated me with its first areas. I ██████ ███ █████ ████ ████ █ ███ ████████ █ █████ ████ ███ █ ████ █████ ███ █ ████ ██ ████ ██ █████ ██ ████ ██ █████ ██████ █ █████ ███████ ███ ███ ██ ██ ███ ████████ ███.

I’ve always been a sucker for an RPG town. Show me a space which allows me to linger and feel a sense of time and place, and I will love it no matter how mediocre your game is. The first town of Dark Cloud 2 being a combination clown zoo and steampunk menagerie was so interesting that I felt compelled to continue playing just to see what else the game had in store.

The absolute breadth of the voice acting talent on display here was incredible. Paul Eiding, Michael Bell, Cam Clarke, Mark Hamill, and Scott Menville all made these fun and strange characters come to life. It was so stacked a cast I felt compelled part way through my first play session to double-check what I was hearing; a moment of offense at the fact that none of these professionals are apparently credited in the game.

The first forays into the gameplay loop of Dark Cloud 2 show an interesting gamut of interlocking systems so diverse that it made my head spin. You have dungeon crawling, weapon growth management, invention photography, mech building, world building; each tightly clustered within the first 2 hours. It was so much variety that I genuinely forgot for a few moments the first dungeon they put me in was a sewer.

Dungeon crawling has never been my first choice for a core gameplay loop. I first learned to hate dungeons when █ █████ ████████ ██ █████ ██ ████ ████ ██ ████. It takes a lot of convincing for a big dungeon central premise to hook me. Dark Cloud 2, in the time I played, couched the need to enter the dungeon in human necessity. The protagonist needs to leave the city and can only do it through a sewer. This is naturally because of the evil clowns extorting the local politicians—just like real life.

I’m not certain if I will play to the end, but I am more than curious enough to see where the story is going. Dungeon crawling will always be a less-than-ideal conduit for my personal investment but I’m willing to see it out, which is more than I can say for some other games in the genre.

Living Dead Girl

After finishing my little experiment, I had a long period of reflection.

I thought about the girl I once shared this body with and wondered if I did her justice. Passion is something I have in large quantities, but it’s often the part of myself I trust the least. Learning to trust my sense of aesthetics was freeing, in a way. I didn’t need to burden myself with the many details I would often find floating around my mind. Length, whether I would engage with the microsystems of the game, if I can justify whatever price the game is presently going for, what my clique of friends have come to believe.

In a world where games have become synonymous with the commercialism that constructs them, it’s easy to submit to the desire to research. It’s easier than ever to find several thousand games with which to indulge in; we can’t just settle on “middling.” At least, so we tell ourselves. If one spends a dozen hours finding the exact, optimal game you are desiring at the moment, you won’t have wasted any time! Except all the time you spent researching instead of doing. I don’t mean to imply a person can’t enjoy researching games for fun, but I, myself, have felt the dissatisfaction of trying to find something ideal, and ending up not doing anything with my time.

All the same, a sense of emptiness pervades me from doing this. The story at the beginning was not just a somber anecdote; I showed you what memory is like for me, but it was also an attempt to convey something I feel I’ve lost. As time has inevitably gotten away from me, I think often about the experiences other people have and feel jealous. Intellectualization has rarely been helpful for me to express the parts of myself I hold dear; yet, trying to get in touch with parts suppressed—or in truth never existed much to begin with—still requires conscious effort.

Nostalgia and I have never gotten along. When people talk about the experience of loving something, potentially for what they feel are childish, or stupid reasons, I feel pangs of envy. I have said I am immune to the cloying, choking fingers of the past because my history is so foreshortened; I think today, I realize it isn’t true. The nostalgic recollections of others compelled me to behave in this way in a desperate attempt to capture something I cannot hold.

No matter how hard I try, I can never be this backspaced person. I am her living dead recollections reincarnated as an echo. She deserves peace and she deserves it from me.

This experience has not been without value. I can appreciate the newly built trust in my sense of aesthetic, even if my reason for seeking it is unattainable. Research will not be completely abandoned, but I will permit myself more forays into the unknown. This kind of thing needs to exist on a spectrum: intellectualization and passion.

Opening myself up to novel experiences has always been worthwhile. It hasn’t always shown me some hidden version of gaming perfectly tailored for me, but it has given me more tools to hone my critical faculty. More so, I also think giving myself a lens to find things aesthetically appealing while also being bad gives me the most important thing an artist can have—spite. The times I’ve seen something beautiful, only to see it not executed in an appealing way, gives me an infinite amount of energy to construct something from its pieces.

Give yourself permission to love something imperfect. Find the things which speak to you, and if they don’t exist, you can make them. At any point, you can become the person you most need yourself to be. Video games might be a silly hobby meant for people who enjoy the tactility of virtual experiences interfacing with mortal flesh, but I think such things are best enjoyed when you’re the one holding the controller. Give yourself permission to love something only you can love.

✶✶✶

It has been one year since I joined Gamesline. Even when it has made me curse or miss out on sleep as I try to stick to my self-imposed deadlines, I wouldn’t trade it. I’m glad I got to be here.

Thank you for reading.

The post The Video Store in My Mind 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 goes by quick: the story of an imperfect yet happy family turned into a placid examination of an estranged and resentful relationship that forms between mother and daughter after the passing of their husband and father. The daughter – Adora – is tasked by her aunt to find an old key in her childhood home. During her search, she uncovers old memories by cleaning and restoring certain small objects in the house – like a record player and a typewriter – that each house their own unique anecdote.  

She catches glimpses of her mother’s old accolades as a writer, a pursuit she seemingly dropped out of nowhere despite some modest success. After her father’s death, Adora takes up making music, a hobby that reminds her of her father, and makes for her mother a cassette tape with music that reflects her desire to connect and comfort her. But her mother, predictably overworked in her drive to repress her own feelings of grief, throws it in the trash and admonishes Adora for being so reckless with her future, in wasting her time with a pointless hobby. Understandably, their relationship worsens, and when Adora goes off to her adult life, she refuses to call her until she’s proven her wrong. Her mother dies before they ever reconcile with each other, and her regret is obviously sour.  

I love to engage in anticipatory regret. One of my more pressing regrets is that when my parents eventually pass on, it’ll be a righteously unsatisfactory ending to a deeply dysfunctional familial situation. There’s no reconciling, because the situation only persists thanks to my casual lifelong performance as anyone except the kinds of people they deeply fear (gay, leftist, etc) and they allow themselves the peace of sweet ignorance. It’s alienating and weird. I think of it as a thin veil – we are opposed in virtually every way that matters, but they are all I have, so I know at some point I’m going to be like Adora, wishing for different circumstances, a better end to a path that only goes in one direction.

My own memory is pretty spotty, specifically in terms of my own childhood and periods of my life that occurred farther than ten years in the past. Letting a memory attach to something physical is a pretty powerful tool to keep an internal narrative going, especially as a person who never took up writing in a diary. I’ve been dragging around things for over a decade now, from apartment to apartment, simply because it holds the potential to help me remember something I at some point wanted to remember. Occasionally, during the few times per year I wander around the house I grew up in, I’ll pick up some old toy or stuffed animal given to me in a brief moment of harmony in an otherwise turbulent childhood and feel the fog of war lift from some part of my mind. Cleaning off the objects in Undusted feels similarly peaceful, brushing out the crud in the corners and wiping off grime; and finding little pockets of dirt in old gadgets opens the moment of reminiscence to breathe and reach its natural conclusion. 

The end of Adora’s story is the realization that she and her mother were suffering similarly but separately, needlessly for the fact that they could have met each other on equal grounds if they took the time and space to acknowledge their grief. Both had unspoken needs and tragedies through which they filtered their interactions with each other, which led to redundant animosity and miscommunication. Every time they had a moment to reconcile, they stalled.  

It’s a very personal story, and the depth and detail remind me yet again how a certain experience can be elevated by the player rather than the reader or watcher. Cleaning, thinking, coming to terms with each step of the story. Taking the time in its fullness, along for the ride with the author. Part of my bitterness is seeing a familial relationship that could be mended so easily in comparison to my own, but Adora’s story is familiar in its inevitability – there is no ending reflective of an entire life, all the rights and wrongs, things said and unsaid, perfectly preserved in a final moment of satisfaction. Mend what you can, brace for what you can’t.    

I won’t sit here and insist that every relationship is able to be mended—some are destined to be weird and fraught until the very end— but that regret may still remain. Someday I’ll be in a similar position to Adora: sifting through stuff in the garage, boxes of unorganized ephemera (and probably like a hundred bibles), cleaning off the dust and picking apart both the good and the bad memories, waffling between contrition and acceptance. 

The post Facing a Bitter Mirror in Undusted: Letters from the Past appeared first on Gamesline.

I am not angry about this, even though I’d rather things be different; art can thrive in any condition. I think there have been good revivals that play to the past, and reboots that interpret characters and stories through a modern lens. However, the ones that don’t work are the ones that don’t bother to reinterpret, purely playing the hits instead.

When I played Pokémon Pokopia a few months ago, I knew there would be callbacks to Red and Blue’s Kanto. Folks online had looked at the maps of each area and lined them up with cities in Generation One’s landmass, and the story in-game quickly told me that this was a Kanto, nay, a Pokémon world ravaged by some form of climate catastrophe that left the land bereft of both humans and Pokémon. When the player character, a Ditto that just so happens to be freed from its Poké Ball, begins to rebuild the land, Pokémon return and begin to emulate human society in a hope that people will also come back. 

The Pokémon are interacting with the world in a way that emulates the past, yes, but they are also bringing things forward. You aren’t tasked with re-creating the cities as they were before the disaster (you can if you want, but there’s no real guidelines). Instead, the Pokémon are inspired by what they remember from their lives with humans and want to show how capable they are by their own means. They want humans to feel comfortable if and when they return, but the Pokémon have their own needs, and request amendments to the cities to fit their likes and dislikes. The Pokémon are characters in themselves, and many of them act very differently to how people have always imagined them. There’s a reason the valley girl/gyaru Bulbasaur and Southern-drawling Kyogre stand out so much. It’s novel! 

If a remake of a game retreads the same roads with little deviation, it is not for those of us actively interacting with the media. It’s there only to court those searching for a cheap hit of nostalgia. Pokopia posits that building on top of a foundation while introducing new things for new inhabitants will still appeal to those returning.

There was a moment about a week into my playthrough where, even though I was already immensely enjoying the game, Pokopia became something special. I had created a good amount of homes in the Withered Wasteland, the starting area where Fuchsia City once stood. I got my little town of Pokémon to around environment level six or seven (shh), which means the residents were on the path to absolute contentment. For the whole game, a unique set of tracks played for each area, mostly original save for the Pokémon Center healing jingle as a common motif. 

Suddenly, without drawing attention to it, the music shifted to a new remix of the Fuschia City theme. It took me a moment to realize what had happened, and as soon as I did, I broke into a fit of sobbing. I don’t exaggerate here, I didn’t just tear up a bit, I started bawling. The use of an old piece of music, of setting this game in that first Pokémon world, was artistically resonant and moving. It wasn’t the song itself, even though it is a nice melody and I had memories of it playing in past playthroughs of Kanto titles, but it was more about what was being conveyed in that moment. No longer was this a Withered Wasteland, unfit for people or Pokémon. Ditto had brought life back to this area. This was Fuschia again, but in a new form. Sure, I may be a bit weak to Pokémon as a concept, it has always been a special interest of mine, but this was a use of expectation, subtlety, and the medium of video games that still impresses me. I was initially confused as to why Pokopia was the only big Pokémon release during the series’ 30th anniversary, but it’s not a mystery to me any more. 

Compare that to the other ways the Pokémon franchise has celebrated “milestone” anniversaries. We got a game that respectfully and lovingly reflects on the past while stepping into a new territory for the franchise for the 30th. For the 25th, there was the incredibly bare-bones and outsourced Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. Okay, we also got Legends: Arceus, which made me feel similarly to how Pokopia did! For the 20th, Sun and Moon on the 3DS were excellent games and a huge step forward for character writing in the series, but this was also when Red, Blue, and Yellow were put onto 3DS Virtual Console at a higher cost than any other Game Boy game on the eShop. I’m not opposed to remakes or re-releases from a moral standpoint, but I will always prefer a new take on concepts over a retread.

The first time Game Freak brought us back to Kanto is still the best, and it’s because of limitations and remixing. In Pokémon Gold and Silver, a limited version of Kanto is explorable, with a handful of areas slimmed down and the gym leaders all at the same power level, as the player can reach any of them at any point. These limitations can be frustrating at times, and Generation Two’s slow level curve is criticized for good reason, but things such as Cinnabar Island’s volcano erupting and forcing the people of the island to a new location does far more to expand the Pokémon world than Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee ever did. It moves the world forward instead of arresting its development to avoid rustling the feathers of those only looking for safe stasis.

When I watched the 1986 film True Stories for the first time a few nights ago, I was immediately enthralled. David Byrne spends an hour and a half talking about the concept of the Texan from as many angles as he can muster, and he loves every single one of those angles. It felt like an episode of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, but with a bit more affection for its characters. Afterwards I poked around at some of the special features on the Criterion Collection Blu-ray. One that stood out to me as a frustration, a short film called No Time to Look Back, in which filmmakers Bill and Turner Ross travel to the locations where the fictional town of Virgil, Texas was set. The Ross duo drive around and recreate a few shots from the original film, quoting it along the way. At one point, one of them says something like “David Byrne hates nostalgia, but we’re allowed to do this!” Yeah, dude, you are. It’s still really boring! They speak to almost nobody from the area, and when they do it’s either basic platitudes or straight up telling them “we’re visiting because a movie we like was shot here” met with “oh that’s cool” by the locals. 

This short’s title is a quote by David Byrne’s Narrator character from the film, said while exploring a mall and commenting on how shopping centers replaced the town square. Comparing this truth to today’s truth of the dead mall and the lack of third spaces notwithstanding, this walks in tandem with how I feel about nostalgia. It is an acceptance of a world moving forward while considering and incorporating the past. It’s an understanding that the world often rhymes and echoes, but letting it fully repeat leads to stagnation. While the Narrator says there’s no time to look back, I disagree. We can look back, but we shall not move back. We must take this information with us to forge the new. 

There’s another scene in which the Narrator speaks on revisiting things that holds far more truth to me. “I really enjoyed forgetting. When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don’t notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is.“ What the Narrator posits as forgetting is experiencing something in a new light. It’s novelty, it’s finding something new in something familiar. Creative Pokémon fans prove this every time they make a ROM hack that improves on the original game or creates something completely new in that framework. That same passion is palpable in Pokopia, and it’s why Ditto’s journey means something to me, and a re-release of FireRed and LeafGreen on the eShop doesn’t. I’ve gotten very used to Kanto in that form, and Pokopia finally helped me forget what I knew.

The post I Get Used to the Place and I Don’t Notice Those Things Any More appeared first on Gamesline.

Human memory has been on my mind a lot. It feels like on the internet it’s almost impossible to escape talk of nostalgia. Everyone seems to want to do things that will remind them of when they were a kid. In February The Pokémon Company announced the release of minorly updated ROMs of FireRed and LeafGreen versions, games from 2004 that are themselves reconstructions of games from 1996, and that they are seriously for real genuinely charging money for them. Endlessly we watch games get remade, remastered, rereleased, reimagined. I look at this and think it must mean there’s a demand for the chance to relive the past.

I don’t really relate to feelings of nostalgia as I see them described. Replaying a game is extremely rare for me, as when I’ve tried, I’ve typically found nothing of value. Maybe my knowing what happens saps the appeal out of a game. Maybe for those ones I forget I’ve just changed so radically that I couldn’t even figure out what younger me saw in this thing. When I do replay a game, I usually find my attention is caught most by the parts I hadn’t remembered, and just how much there can be, even in only a couple years since putting a game down.

And yet I have my own ways of trying to hold on to the past. I maintain not just a backloggd account, not just a letterboxd account, not even just a Rate Your Music account, I also dutifully fill out a Google Sheets file with details on every game I have played or am currently playing, a numeric rating of what I think of the games, to reference at a glance, and the dates on which I both started and finished them, going back four years. This is not so I can write reviews, it’s because in recent years I had found myself more and more disquieted by how little I had committed to memory of the art I was experiencing. I had hoped a more active form of engagement would encourage me not to sleepwalk through my own life. I don’t want to think “what the hell was I thinking with this one,” I want to be able to recall what those thoughts might have been.

This hasn’t really worked that well. Especially with music, so many albums tucked away in my Spotify likes mystify me. When did I listen to or enjoy At the Drive-In? Apparently, I thought fondly of that one Brave Little Abacus record with the long name. Records tell me it was less than two years ago I listened to this album and liked it enough to hold on to. Couldn’t tell you what I was thinking because I don’t know what any of the songs sound like, or are about. If I pull at the foundations I uncover one thought: their vocalist sounds like SpongeBob. Very well done.

In my fervor to make my time spent living and breathing mean something, to pull feelings out of art and chew on them for longer, I have played and loved and hated quite a few titles by now. My poor, poor screenshots folder is now absolutely packed with things I wanted to keep with me. In an effort to better understand my habits, and learn to mediate with these feelings I hold, I find myself now writing a few words about a few games that, to me, did something that mattered, that stuck with me, for better or for worse.

Long Season

A few years back I played through Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 with my girlfriend, via the wonderful fan translation put out by Hilltop. We committed to syncing Boku’s life to our own, playing one day at a time, through the month of August, passing the controller back and forth each day. 

I think part of what kept the game alive in my heart was this consistency over a long period of time. Had I binged it alone, it may well have been a footnote on my backloggd account. But more so than the matter of pacing, Boku no Natsuyasumi 2, in keeping with its predecessor, is a game that encourages you to absorb it. Time only passes in game when you move between different areas, and if you want to stay somewhere a little longer, you can. Stare at the river if you like, it’s not going anywhere. 

The knowledge that time will stand still as long as you do works to discourage the player from leaving a scene unless they’re certain that’s what they want to do. You immerse yourself in the mundane because there is no penalty for doing so—only a limit on how many different things you can do in a day. I find it quite counter to a lot of other games’ philosophies. Xenoblade Chronicles was made by sick, sick people. But even something like Persona, something made to limit how much you can do in a way that comes across as a “carpe diem”—they’re still, at the end of the day, something to the effect of ten billion hours long. Those games are jammed full of Game to be Played, and while I don’t think that’s inherently a bad thing, I find the Boku approach much more emotionally liberating.

Central to this, in my mind, is that our main character, Boku, also keeps a journal. Every night, just before he crawls into bed, he writes an entry about something he did that day, accompanied by a cute little drawing. On many occasions in my life, I’ve tried to take up journaling. It’s never stuck, the book will always find some forgotten crevice to sink into for years at a time, but that meant it fascinated me to have this little record of what I’d done that I could reference whenever I wanted to. I think part of what captured my heart was the game’s system for deciding what your journal entry will look like—even if you shape his overall adventure, Boku is the one deciding what he will remember. And while the game tries very hard to ensure you get an entry each day, if you do nothing it deems technically noteworthy, it tells you this:

The way that Boku cultivates deliberate slowness in the player is beautiful to me, it makes its environments truly sing. You begin to understand, and feel, someone else’s memory. If you can believe it, I was never a little Japanese boy growing up in the countryside by the sea, I never made beetles fight or anything like that. I’d never even seen a firefly until I was in my 20s. This is what I mean about creating a sense of time and place, though. Through the game I was able to be so engrossed that there wasn’t any incongruence to be felt. I could almost imagine what the sea breeze must have felt like. I grew attached to the little emotional arcs of the various characters. Towards the end, when one of them said, “I don’t know when it happened, but at some point I fell in love with this town,” I felt the game was talking right to me, the player.

Of course, these games never left Japan, not officially. I think this is also a vital consideration. The dialogue here wasn’t really written for someone like me, necessarily. If anything, Boku no Natsuyasumi is itself a deeply nostalgic work. This game had strong staying power—I even still remember what I named my first truly accomplished beetle wrestler: Red Lightning. Perhaps, then, the trick to making me feel is not tapping into my past, but rather, showing me yours.

The Summer Ends

A few months ago I played Umurangi Generation, a photography game that positions you as a courier during the end of the world, equipped with only a camera. I had expected a slam dunk; I’m very fond of my own silly little instant camera, personally. There’s an easy appeal to having a physical memento like a picture, something so much sturdier than human recollection. Having had this essay brewing in my head, and recalling the praise I’d heard for Umurangi Generation,  I booted it up and found something unexpected.

At first, I really wanted to root for it. I thought I was on board with what it was doing. You get placed into these little vignettes—a rooftop gathering, or some commotion going down at an intersection, or a vigil for someone we’ve never met—and given a list of things to find and snap photos of. I felt that by being forced to stay in one spot, I was encouraged to absorb details. I wanted to know the story of this world and the people in it; the minimalistic storytelling was really working for me. And then the game and I stepped out of sync.

After a couple of stages of contemplative stillness, the game pivots towards action shots. Battlefields with soldiers bleeding out and kaiju fighting giant robots. Suddenly I found it all tonally dissonant. I wanted it to be over with. Where once I saw a tasteful degree of restraint, I now felt I was wandering through a world that had failed to reach my heart, being asked “isn’t it so sad what’s happening?” Objectives that used to give me reason to linger in a space were now actively forcing me to search for graffiti with the word “boomer” on it while the world was meant to be ending. Maybe there’s commentary in that—the atonality of life, negotiating with yourself over your continued existence in a time of strife—but for me, it broke the spell. “There is no one right answer,” I thought to myself. “Weren’t you just telling me I won’t be told what’s right or wrong? That art is subjective?” The pictures I took ceased to have meaning when it occurred to me they would be roughly the same as the pictures everyone else took.

Even if I was sad to be fighting with this game, I still did see it through to the end, and something really interesting happened. After you complete all 8 stages, you get dropped into one final area, with no camera this time. There’s no pause menu full of objectives. I breathed a sigh of relief, that I could freely explore, take in my surroundings without being pushed any which way. I stared at the starry night overhead, lit up crimson. I thought about the game’s mascot telling me that Umurangi is a Te Reo word meaning “red sky.” I saw birds and flowers that seemed to be made of stardust. I saw something great and terrible, perched atop a mountain, blocking out the moon. The game handed me a camera again, and with irritation, I didn’t check to see how much film I had, didn’t think about making what was to be the last shot really count, and,

The game didn’t continue, didn’t chastise me for looking at the wrong thing. It showed me a mirror, and saw itself out.

The thing that I haven’t really been saying here is that part of what I wanted to find in Umurangi Generation was that special quality that I think a photograph has, that feeling of a particular moment, something normally fleeting and ephemeral, cauterized to staunch the flow of time. Even if I didn’t personally resonate with most of it, I kind of love how it ended, for me. This is a permanent symbolic impressing of my thought processes, encoded in zeroes and ones, that any computer screen can replicate. Whether or not I think Umurangi Generation is good means nothing to me—it told me something about what I value, and this final captured moment is far more interesting to me than any critiques I might have.

Fresh Flowers For All Time

This section will spoil critical plot details from Seabed. I think spoilers can work to give you a reason to enjoy a piece of art you might otherwise not have, but I also recognize that Seabed is a mystery novel. If you want to preserve your modesty, go read it and come back. I promise my words aren’t going anywhere—they will last until entropy takes them, like insects in amber.

Beginning to pull apart my feelings on Paleontology Soft’s 2016 “yuri-themed mystery visual novel” Seabed feels something like trying to split the atom with a butter knife. But we will try all the same. I’ll start with the age-old adage: women can do anything. Unfortunately, sometimes this includes suffering greatly.

Sachiko, our protagonist, is an amnesiac, unable to cope with the sudden loss of her life partner Takako. The entire visual novel traces a record of her winding path towards recognizing the symptoms of her trauma as they manifest in response to Takako’s death. In all but explicit terms, the novel is clear that she has DID, and the shock of that traumatic event destabilizes her and causes an increase in symptoms: dissociation, switching, hallucinations, and other sensory phenomena that might be classified as Not Super Normal. She realizes she had forgotten Takako was dead at all, and had lived her life talking to a ghost for years. What I want to take a look at is how she tries to cope—she flips through her old journal. Records of time spent with Takako. She hopes to find a passage that might cover her lost memories, and make it all make sense.

I will be forthcoming: it reminds me of my own experiences. Sometimes you find an old journal entry was torn out to protect you from knowledge you weren’t ready to process. Sometimes you find one you once wrote, and then later angrily scrawled out, in thick pools of ink, as if trying to measure out in millilitres your sense of disavowal for feelings you had earnestly held before. “Not even I will know what it said, when I’m done.” I may be so fixated upon journals, photographs, these physical records of life, because I know how easy it is for those memories to be stricken from the record while you’re not looking.

Seabed bills itself as a mystery, though its approach is not so direct as I think that might imply. If you ask me, I think it fits more into the iyashikei subgenre. It is Slice of Life, sharpened to a fine point, a knife’s edge to twist into your heart, and leave you feeling a little better and a lot worse when some of your humors are on the floor. 

There are dozens of scenes of mundanity. In that same way Boku asks you to contemplate, Seabed ensures it. Sachiko makes her breakfast and talks to the innkeeper about how she likes her eggs. She goes to the inn’s library and talks to a child that reminds her of her younger self. She gets pounced on by the innkeeper, drunkenly confessing her love for Sachiko, who proceeds to get up and go for a walk. Every suggestion of a fast-paced, forward-moving plot is snubbed by this novel. Prose is matter-of-fact and simplistic, and taking all of that along with the way the soundtrack will loop in these scenes, whether mundane or emotional, while the core mystery is mostly left to simmer, it works to pull you in like quicksand.

And so it really does something to me, deep in my core, when I listen to a song from the soundtrack, and it reminds me of my favourite scene in the novel. It makes me feel every bit of heartwrenching pain Sachiko does, as she discusses with her alter how she may never meet another person who could so easily understand her as Takako did, juxtaposed against the quiet of the hotel room she’s staying in, and the gentle thrum of life happening just outside her door. Scrolling through my phone’s camera roll helps me remember when and where I’ve been—but even recorded videos don’t put me into my old headspace the way this game can transport me into the heart of a grieving widow. It’s some kind of magic, to me.

But I mentioned I played through it twice. Over and over throughout my second reading I was struck by the same familiar feeling. “I don’t remember this part,” I would say to the friend I was reading alongside. “I thought this happened, like, WAY earlier.” It seemed despite my love for Seabed I still couldn’t really commit all that much of it to my mind. Not even the broad-strokes sequence of events. I had felt like I was somehow letting myself down—how can I be this bad at remembering things that matter to me?

I had to get worse before I got any better. My curious bookkeeping habit metastasized, over time, and became a need to record everything. My spreadsheet became a backlog, hundreds of titles long, paralyzing in its breadth. I dutifully held myself to finishing everything I’d started for the sake of some elusive, truer form of understanding. In this state I set so many arbitrary rules I had to follow—I would not start a new JRPG while I was on a break from Trails, because what if I came back to Trails and forgot everything? No, better to turn this hobby into homework for myself than to keep forgetting things. I hung a sword over my own head and called it discipline.

Fingernails on a Chalkboard

This leads me to my time with Final Fantasy 7. This game may have been the single worst victim of my compulsion to treat the hobby as a responsibility. When I see that something is critically acclaimed, historically important to the development of the medium, and even has Vincent Valentine in it—I’m gonna come running to see what’s going on.

At the outset, my adventurous spirit was rewarded! I still maintain that the Midgar portion of Final Fantasy 7 is great. I noticed a few little gripes—the translation in particular standing out to me—but for the most part, it was all killer, no filler. So much was new to me, too, and the novelty of my first Final Fantasy game was a big draw. The possibilities whispered to me by Materia seemed endless, the world and its concepts were all fresh, and while I may have known Cloud Strife and friends through cultural osmosis, seeing them in their game lit up my heart. I even liked that weird translation at first. This guy are sick! Tell ‘em Aerith!

The slow fading of its shine was subtle, and hard to detect, but without realizing it myself I had checked out. Something along the way broke in me. I think it’s less important that I detail what I didn’t like, and more so, that I kept trying to play. I had been playing this game for my partner, intending to go through it in chunks when she was in town. And all that time I kept guilting myself for not playing it when I had the chance. Deep down, I wanted to spend my time with someone I love on something better than Final Fantasy 7. Why was this something to guilt myself over?

Final Fantasy 7 leached out of the space between my eyes, leaving behind the suggestion of a game that I struggled to play, and yet held myself to finishing for years. The way it failed to stay present in my mind, failed to compel me to engage, began to feel like my own personal failing. It’s my fault for spacing out my playthrough so widely. I should be focused enough to know where I’m going, it shouldn’t matter that the translation is famously confusing. If I just cared a little more, I’d finish this thing. It didn’t strike me that I’m under no obligation to care about everything until my partner encouraged me to drop this game without remorse. I think I had still yet to understand what Boku might have been trying to tell me.

You Forgot It In People

Here we reach the core of it: feelings of obligation. The reason I felt so drained by Final Fantasy 7 was not just spacing out my playthrough, though that didn’t help me retain information. It was holding myself to it so ardently that really killed it for me. In the same sense, Umurangi Generation instilled a different sense of obligation. Artistic expression through photography felt stymied by a formula that produces nothing but an album of all the same photos each playthrough.

In contrast, Boku no Natsuyasumi and Seabed each remind me, through beautiful expressions of not-a-whole-lot happening, the value of deliberation and slowness in everyday life. Neither title fixed me on their own, it was and still is an ongoing process of self-discovery. But the ways they make me feel are relevant, in my opinion, to this process, and their lasting places in my heart stand as testament to their efficacy. If it wasn’t already obvious, I recommend both games wholeheartedly. You, too, should remember to slow down once in a while, and take in the art you love, rather than consume it. On another note, I haven’t remembered to update my spreadsheet in a while.

Isabelle is highly preoccupied with hype moments and aura, and the weight of human emotion. You can find more of her words on Bluesky.

The post Games About Nothing Mean Everything to Me — by Isabelle appeared first on Gamesline.

I often find myself in a similar rut between games. Not everything can sing to your soul; trying to find the importance in something you don’t give a shit about just makes you feel fraudulent. So I found myself in familiar trappings: games which weren’t breaking new ground but felt like I was doing something. I did my Final Fantasy dailies; I dallied with Monster Hunter; I tried out Marathon—the new one, not the original one, we live in Hell. While fun, none of it filled the void in me demanding satiation.

You can imagine me, head on desk, various drink cans piled upon my noggin, making sounds reserved for cats and bored games writers.

I found myself thinking about speed, about motion, the primal building blocks to my satisfaction. I played through all of Pseudoregalia, a free and flowing platformer. I wrote several drafts worth of thoughts on it; all of them found their way to my recycle bin. I replayed the majority of Super Mario Sunshine thinking about our long-standing relationship, a game which has followed me though all of the stages of my life. Those thoughts didn’t even exit my head; they were too abstract and sentimental to encode into something worth reading.

The groaning exiting my mouth and the grinding sensation in my brain intensified. I wanted something quick, something which could accelerate my heartbeat and make me feel alive again. I wanted competition, my primal darkness which compelled me to hunt down fellow gamers.

I scrolled through my games. Dead faces stared back at me from digital blue-grey tumulus with resounding goose egg player counts. Games, once played, interred in silicon graves; Ozymandias’ trunkless legs standing in the midst of a vast digital desert.

A dark miasma coiled around the room, pouring out of my monitor and clouding my thoughts. A nightmare more frightening than anything a mortal could imagine presented itself before me: Counter-Strike 2. It batted its eyelashes at me from my Steam library.

“You could always give it another try,” it said. “You’re probably still halfway decent.”

Beads of sweat collected on my forehead.

“Hey. Unreal Tournament 2004 is having a comeback,” said my partner from across the room.

“Oh shit, for real?”

A Shock Combo with Twenty-two Years Lead Time

Unreal Tournament 2004 in 2026 was a fascinating experience. It is both timeless and dated in a way only an arena shooter is capable of. The music pounds with an early 2000s industrial trance beat, immediately hypnotic yet non-descript. The weapons are these obtuse, strange things constructed by a gamer mind only obliquely aware of how a firearm works. Movement is sublimely clunky yet flowing; side-hops chain into momentum-boosting double jumps, which chain into exploding into meat because you fell into a spiral of cluster rockets. UT2004 is the only—non-pornographic—game in recent memory which could force me to read the sentence “Memphis was carved up by Cleopatra’s Green Shaft.”

It was a beautiful and sublime crystallization of a time I never got to experience new. CTF-Face is a map I only ever got to see as a pseudo-nostalgic drum and bass playlist on YouTube and now I got to see it in-engine; it felt like some kind of inevitable prophecy coming to its final act.

Yes, I write this with zero nostalgia of my own, playing only as a person seeing the game for the first time. That being said, I was fascinated by the differences in game design ideology between then and today. The game is feature complete, with no battlepass, and no promise of additional characters or skins in the content pipeline. All maps are either in the base game or provided by the community. New game modes are invented in real time out of a robust suite of “mutators,” modifying the standard gameplay. This game is finished, “dead” even in the eyes of some, yet we’re still playing it. This is the product of a twenty-two-year long resurrection made by a loving fanbase.

My partner and I played into the wee hours of the night, roleplaying as 800kb/s internet wielders listening to D&B while vaporizing one another into piles of cartilage. It was, in a sense, a playable museum, albeit one where a rejected Transformers design can coldly say “Die, Bitch” in a way definitely intended to sound hard to a demographic devoid of maidens. Yet, even as I raised an eyebrow at the misogyny of yesteryear, I was fascinated by the return of this “dead” game.

Back in the modern world of gaming, it’s dire out there. Games are announced, cancelled, and expunged from memory within a year of release. A community might call a game dead when comparing its player base to its contemporaries, because it doesn’t have a “content” pipeline which suits their tastes, or in some cases, simply because a YouTuber told them so. Yet, are such proclamations truthful? I still sit in a lobby with other people, twenty-two years after the release of this game, and it has the audacity to still exist. Old Unreal is easy enough to find, easy enough to download from, and off you go; people cared, and so the game is allowed to exist.

Many other games haven’t passed this test of time. My Steam library is a veritable graveyard of games which haven’t received the same love or attention. Strike Vector, Loadout, dozens more. Those games died despite all the happy memories contained within. Most people, it seems, just take it on the chin; this is simply the fate of all online games. One day, the lights go out, and the game dies.

Is this truly necessary though? We see this game make a return to a fanbase still willing to play it even if they only number in the hundreds. I believe, genuinely, that as long as there is someone to keep the lights on, someone to pass the torch along, there is no reason a game as a piece of art can’t live forever. How many apocalypses has something like Team Fortress 2 weathered? Yet the fanbase continues trucking along, for better or worse.

Ultimately, games only truly die when they are killed.

Trash Decade

In a less healthy period of my life, I played a lot of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4—Black Ops 4? Black Ops IV? Black Ops IIII? Who is responsible for this?

Anyway, I was playing a lot of Call of Duty: Black Ops 𒇹 in a state not dissimilar to how I described myself in the first segment: I was between games and desperate to satiate some dark urge inside of myself for murder and violence. Humble Bundle delivered unto me this piece of shit, which would take over my life for approximately one summer but no longer.

The game was ever so slightly more textured than the usual CoD fare. There were still killstreaks, but this foray was hero-based, and made you heal for yourself instead of sucking your thumb until the screen stops being goopy. The game was hypnotizing, dreary yet intoxicating, like the last 4 to 5 cm of a tallboy. The content, the battlepasses, even my fellow players meant very little to me; I was just here for something to jolt my brain and remind me I was alive every now and again.

Yet despite my criticisms, it was not by my own hand that I ceased playing; that decision was made for me. I was queuing one day, as per usual in my apocalyptic spiral to avoid checking what day it was. I was queuing. I was queuing for a very long time. This, I felt, was an exceptionally long time to queue, even for a game like Call of Duty: Black Ops 𐍆𐌹𐌳𐍅𐍉𐍂—this is the last time I’ll do this joke, I promise.

My frustration mounted but I kept waiting. It was only after getting up and forcing myself to live in my own thoughts for a while that I realized no game was coming. I exited the queue and stared at the loadout which had ferried me to something resembling catharsis. A phantom image of a dying horse begging to be put out of its misery popped into my mind, a decidedly not normal thing to think while staring at a firearm. I left the multiplayer menu; a jovial popup informed me it was time to purchase the new Call of Duty, to replace the old Call of Duty I was already playing. I made a throaty sound, roughly like a parent discovering a child entering the house past curfew, and exited the program. I have not opened it since.

I feel like the experience I just described is familiar to most gamers. We play multiplayer(or just online) games until we get distracted and find the doors closed, or we watch horrified as they unbuild themselves from underneath us. It is rare to decide your relationship with such a game has run its course, as there is no fixed narrative conclusion. We use it up until it is gone, or gone from us.

But it’s not solely on the consumer in such cases. Obviously the most guilty persons in the room are those who turn games into nothing but products. A game can live but must die because there is no profit motive for allowing it to stay living. A server browser might confuse your audience, after all; you have to handle the queuing for them. Sometimes 200 people isn’t enough to make a single game; you can only deliver the highest quality match. You cannot simply hand over the rights to run it off to the fans; think about your brand! It is childish to assume that these things can live forever, eventually the servers just need to come down, says a sales rep interested in selling you your dreams.

There is a learned helplessness, or at least an apathy, which emerges from such eventualities. We cope with the terror of the things we love being snatched away from us by pretending it is all inevitable—just move on to the next thing. This works ideally for the executioners of games: those who continue the commercialization of an art form into discardable toys, disposability with intent to incentivise more purchases. Live service games fill you with anxiety, a terror of losing out which manipulates your behavior to be more receptive toward choosing a single game to rule your recreation time; that is, until the game meets end of life and all of it was for naught anyway.

“Buy the new game”, a helpful prompt in the menu says underneath an end-of-life banner, flickering like a halogen bulb in a soon to be bankrupt grocery chain. “It’s all the same shit with a longer number at the end.”

Graveyard Planet

Being in the industry of games sucks right now. Discord sucks right now. Credit card companies would still really like for you to not be able to buy completely legal material. Your genuine attempts to preserve art will be met with a cease and desist orbital strike.

This is not, however, the inescapable fate of things. It is useful to call these trends unpleasant and to bring them to other’s attention. Knowing one’s material conditions are not acceptable is only the first step, however. Being able to imagine a better existence is the next step to building it, and while one pithily stating that something sucks and everything was always fucked since before you were even born might be attention grabbing, it doesn’t need to be the truth. It cultivates despair, but it should drive you to action, not simply angered capitulation; you do not have to simply accept that the things you love will be taken from you and then sold back to you in glorious, fucked up DLSS5.

Unreal Tournament 2004 still lives past its expiry date. Even the aforementioned Black Ops 4 has a modified client enabling play years past the expiration of its servers—I didn’t even know that, I discovered it while writing this essay, crazy right? Even the previously mentioned Strike Vector and Loadout have fan servers!

People have a tendency to always look for what is new, for the next new dopamine hit. I get it. The world is a really stressful place and we’re constantly looking for a feeling as big as the first time we ever loved something. A lot of my own personal attempts to find a new thing to light my heart on fire have been fruitless, but there is just as much beauty to be found in old things as new. The last essay I wrote was about how I looked backward and found something to love in things I missed, and just as often I could keep digging.

There are more games than I could ever learn and play in a single lifetime. I could play through the entire NES catalogue and find things nobody ever talks about. I could go on a quest to dig through an obscure console and find beautiful gems overlooked by people whose entire childhood was the PS2. I’m not insulting people who don’t go off the beaten path; I think there is much to value in even the more obvious places. Yet, cultivating a taste beyond what is obvious will open doors you never knew existed. Who cares if they’re dead; you, the player, are the one bringing it to life!

The old will always outnumber the new. The more you allow yourself to appreciate things outside of the immediate era, the more you can bring life to things beyond the year you live in. You don’t have to simply end your choices with the things sold or advertised to you. If MOBAs have gotten stale, try learning about where their inspirations emerged from. If you don’t enjoy the current extraction shooter trend, play the games from before they emerged. You will likely be surprised that other people still play them, or could be convinced to play them, if you’re insistent enough.

Nosgoth, a peculiar asymmetric team-based shooter entry of the Legacy of Kain series, has been resurrected; it can be played with the assistance of a modified client and a Discord server, if you’re so inclined. Anarchy Reigns, an often forgotten PlatinumGames online beat ’em up, has returned in the form of PS3 emulation, online functionality restored. All returned because people cared enough to gaze backward.

A sense of curiosity can foster a change; incuriosity often puts you at the mercy of those most invested in making a sale. Digging deep in forgotten places, in the areas which aren’t immediately appealing, can lead to great discoveries, and in turn bring vital blood back to the origins of the hobby. A little care and attention can resurrect the dead.

As long as people continue to care, a game can continue to exist. Modders will make custom clients, emulators will enable old games to live on new platforms, and even the most passionate will take server architecture into their own hands. The Concords and Highguards of the world are dispiriting, yes, but as people who care for this medium of art, it is our duty to take the things we love and carry them with us. A corporation preserving the things they make should never be the expectation, especially when they are financially disincentivized from doing so. Preservation is not impossible; we can love the things we love, provided we hold on tightly and refuse to allow them to be taken. Doing the work is hard but I think the effort is necessary.

A lone server in a game’s server browser, for those who will play can be enough. A person developing a website which enables others to remember that old things still exist can be enough. A person with a following and a curiosity in dead things can inspire others to pick through this graveyard with them.

So, won’t you go graverobbing with me?

The post Dead Games and the Necromancy of Love appeared first on Gamesline.

Recently, mainstream JRPG releases have consistently disappointed. Many of the most popular, big-budget releases are, generally speaking, fine; they’re well made but they aren’t exactly breaking new ground. Much of their material has been either co-opted by other genres or said before. That’s the biggest problem, really: it’s not the early 2000s anymore. My mind still believes this is the way longform fantasy stories are told, yet the times have changed. What people consider to be a “big game” is no longer a 70-80 hour epic of a story delivered through exposition and turn-based combat; they’re often open-world action RPGs with an emphasis on sizzle and spectacle. Even Final Fantasy has gradually evolved to meet this shifting cultural expectation.

JRPGs, when released intentionally under that label, seem to be operating under a similar misapprehension. They all seem afflicted with a self-indulgent recursion; navel-gazing games which seem to think storytelling began and ended with Chrono Trigger. Repeatedly they seem to say: remember Pokemon? Remember Final Fantasy VII? Mother 3 was pretty cool, right?To me these aren’t unplayable games from some bygone era, they are very much living and breathing because nobody allows them to fucking die. It is one thing to take inspiration from a beloved story, it is entirely another to repeatedly resell the same story while littering it with little winks to the audience which seem to say, “yeah, I know good games.”

I imagine my opinion can be potentially read as mean-spirited, but I only wish for this genre, one I have dedicated so much of my life to, to grow up and tell a story which doesn’t heavily borrow all its ideas from its predecessors. Yet, it seems more and more this is not going to be the case.

One could argue this is the nature of genre—familiar trappings which define this particular branch of gaming—but I’m not convinced. Motifs and tropes are a useful language for conveying complex ideas quickly, but something constructed entirely out of allusions to other things will be reduced down to a ghost of a story; forcing the remembrance you could be playing something with actual ideas instead.

When modern times fail me, I do what I usually do: I look back, to the things I missed the first time. John—your friendly CEO of gaming—knocked me onto this path when he gifted me The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. In his own words, this was a game Xenogears-enjoyers seemed to like. Nothing else was particularly interesting at the moment; I figured I would give it a chance.

Now, nearly 300 hours of JRPG later, I have words to say about it and, John, if you ever gift me a game that fundamentally alters the course of my life again, I will be forced to take legal action.

This is not going to be comprehensive, and in the interest of both myself and my editors, this will contain no story recap. From this point on, when I refer to Trails, I refer to it in respect to this particular segment of the story I have experienced. This consists of the three Trails in the Sky games as well as the Crossbell duology of Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure.

Trails is a story told in arcs, and over the period of five games, I have felt myself go through something of an arc. Even though it’s not the end of the chronicle, it feels spiritually analogous to a conclusion. These were games once rendered in chunky sprites upon 3D backgrounds. Hereafter, they traded their garb for something more contemporary. This transition, especially after the time I’ve spent with it, seems like something I should honor; it is the bow I need to place on top to consider it “done” in my mind.

A World of Change

Any story can worldbuild, and many do, often with mixed results. Writers joke about the nonproductiveness of worldbuilding—you can do it forever and still have nothing to show for it. Trails however is uniquely fascinated with the construction of its own world, and it only seems to be growing.

Video game worldbuilding exists on a spectrum. Some games pay only lip service to the world; it is merely the space your avatar inhabits during play sessions. Others can have intricately laid out lore but ultimately convey it in an unusable way, telling you thousands of details with none relevant to play.

Trails’ world is relevant and, more importantly, fractal. Our knowledge of an area tends to grow broader and more abstract the further away it is. The knowledge of where you live, for instance, contains individual places, streets, people; while things further away tend to grow blurred and indistinct, reduced down to something your mind can better compartmentalize.

Zemuria, the setting of Trails, is a massive continent, but in any given game, you hear about far away places in the same way someone might tell you about the concept of something in another city. You learn the little details actually interfaced with; they aren’t forcing the entire Wikipedia article for Japan into your brain. This evokes a more natural curiosity, especially knowing those places are real, can come up, and often are the setting of future games.

Each individual Trails game tends to set its focus small, at least when compared to other JRPGs, which tend to be concerned with what occurs on the entire planet. When you exist in a particular nation, the nation’s problems balloon in both your mind, and those of the involved characters. While sometimes the fate of the continent is at stake, one often spends the most time in Trails experiencing the problems of a singular nation or even a singular city. In the first two Trails games—Trails in the Sky and Trails in the Sky SC—you are predominantly concerned with the goings-on in the small, mountain nation of Liberl. Things happen in other countries and impact your little microcosm, but the issues which unfold exclusively involve your neck of the woods. Warmongering elsewhere is frightening, but only because you know how it could impact you and the place you live. The decision to keep the scope small in this way keeps the struggles of the setting feeling real and relevant, free from abstraction.

The interposition between the broad and the hyper-specific is what makes the world so compelling. We know there is an Empire to the north filled to the brim with war hawks, but in this small village lies a single man in a store we frequent, who needs help. So you help. It is information conveyed in a human fashion. News of something horrible happening in another place is abstract and difficult to conceptualize without the presence of a person being affected by it. The individual is the emotional anchor which helps you better understand the wider reaching ramifications. This, to me, feels like an expression of the pain and anxieties of the real world. I may be forced to contend with the horrors coming out of a nation which isn’t mine, powerless, but I can help in the community I live in.

Trails’ relationship with technology further grounds players. Compared to many other JRPGs, the Trails series is much more “contemporary fantasy.” Technology and magic coexist; a dragon and a mech can be on the screen at the same time. As the series goes on and the timeline progresses, so too marches the inevitable progress of industry and technology. Many other games handwave subjects which don’t interest the writer. “The technology is magic; it works because it is magic technology—please don’t worry about it.”

Trails by comparison has a technological revolution as the series’ backbone for most of its games; it is both relevant to gameplay and plot. We see the burgeoning invention of the automobile, phones, telecommunication, and the internet. These stories lean into socio-political conflicts and the changing relationship between communities because of this technology. Though magic and technology co-exist, it mostly avoids the genre touchstone of magic traditionalism vs technology progressivism. There is conflict between progress and tradition, as in real life, but it comes across less like they are ontologically opposed concepts.

This approach to technology is a further expression of worldbuilding precisely because it is tactile. The things we can hold have a way of conveying where we exist in time; things thrown away remind us of what has passed. Time progresses as we realize a favorite film is suddenly, terrifyingly, ten years older than we remember it being; VHS or DVDs are no longer the standard way of conveying sound and video. Many games fail at such an organic conveyance of time passing. Fantasy worlds often enter technological stagnation out of aesthetic fear; the author is a little too scared of the game escaping from the medieval fantasy trappings and resultantly cripples any attempt at making a sense of time or place. Trails, it seems, has no such fears, and the world feels all the more real for it.

A grounded relationship with technology allows Trails’ world to comment on things which then feel organic and fresh. How does an adventuring guild deal with the burgeoning technology of the internet, cyber security, and hacking? How does a city and its developing roads deal with the real threat of spontaneously generated monsters? A willingness to engage with the conceit of one’s own setting allows the setting itself to be an infinite story engine.

Even the trope of the “bygone era” can be explored when you are interested in the worldbuilding ramifications of what such things present. Zemuria has a “lost era of fancy and decadence” like many RPGs, but avoids the often disquieting prelapsarian urge to return to it. We are told the ancients of the old world brought their own destruction and created a thousand-year dark age born of irresponsibility and bad decisions. Because the game does not abandon the chronology with every entry, the big truths revealed can stay true and the world continues to reckon with them.

Paragon of the Community

Worldbuilding is nice, but where many stories fail is in conveyance. They repeat the mistake of having “the wise character” dryly convey what the rules of the setting are, and completely flout any attempt at naturalistic storytelling. Video games are incredibly guilty of this. The amount of village elders who have started sentences with “as you know,” only to tell me the most asinine explanation of a magic system are too many to name. This should be a crime.

Another frequent crime of video games are side quests. Side quests typically don’t have the level of consequence to make for a substantive experience, usually ending up a utilitarian excuse to remain in the world for a little while longer, or simply a change of pace. It is material one typically considers as a passenger of the world, not an occupant of it. In a world of thousands of towers to climb in empty fields, or collectable baubles which exist to arbitrarily gate you from the actual ending, it’s easy to want to give substantial amounts of side material a pass. I am completely okay with my dead little brother going unhonored if it means I don’t have to collect 100 pigeon feathers; I am too busy stabbing the neighboring villagers in the throat with wrist-mounted cutlery to care.

Trails puts a lot of effort into ameliorating both of these game design woes. Side quests are a means by which Trails offers meaningful and substantial information about the nature of the world and its characters through naturalistic storytelling. This avoids more blatant player-oriented exposition. Paying attention to this information is often rewarded, in some cases with whole quests you would have missed if inattentive. In this way, the game rewards you for paying attention to the setting by granting you both material gifts as well as more information on the setting and events. This cycle of seeding information and seeing it meaningfully paid off invigorates world-player interfacing. You care more each and every time you are rewarded for doing so.

Even mundane dialogue can be rewarding for players who meaningfully engage with the world. Where another game might only update dialogue after meaningful story progression, Trails loves to update what characters have to say after basically any passage of time. There really is no such thing as a character revoking their personhood as soon as you finish their arc. A stranger has passed into your home village? You had better believe this is the talk of town.

Talking to NPCs might not seem like riveting gameplay in most games, but when you can watch the quiet parenthetical of other people’s lives playing out in real time, it becomes gripping. Will the girl obsessed with finally overtaking the city’s best baker come out on top? You better talk to her every single day to find out. Writers who put an absolutely monumental level of effort into making the NPCs feel like living people is an immediate difference from many other contemporary JRPGs.

The amount of dialogue becomes even more impressive when you consider the substantive interconnection between characters. NPCs exist outside of your characters and interact even when you aren’t watching them do so. Characters might comment on the location of another, which can allude to their motivations and actions to come. NPCs involved with side quests might provide additional insights which will be relevant when the game does one of its many “are you paying attention” tests during main story progression. Even outside of plot relevance, connections can come up in a way comparable to real life; a person randomly reveals that they have familiarity and a connection to a person you’ve already met several cities away.

Allow me to tell a story of this happening across two games. In Trails from Zero, you are regularly given missions by way of a computer console which more or less self-schedules your day for you if you are playing in the most strictly linear way. However, each and every day you are free to explore the lavishly expansive city of Crossbell; doing so often awards you with aforementioned hidden quests.

One such quest, “Search for the Kitten’s Owner,” sounds like both the joke and punchline for another game giving you busywork. You are tasked to find the owner of a lost cat found by two children, Ryu and Anri, who you have met previously. You talk to every child in an entire region of the city, which silently tests you to see if you remember where the people in the city tend to be.

Eventually you are acquainted with stockbroker Bond and his daughter, Sunita. Bond confidently declares that no cat lives in their household, which seems like a dead end. Eventually after some investigation, you discover Sunita has been taking care of the cat, but some anxieties have prevented her from revealing this to her father. Thus the game establishes the characters Sunita and Bond. In many games, this would end there; both characters would be resolved back into generic substrate.

Four chapters later, we are reacquainted with Sunita, potentially for the first time if you missed this quest. After interacting with a mysterious drug which has been running rampant in the city, Bond has gone missing; you know this is odd behavior for him because you met him previously and know he cares for his family. A simple but effective call for investment that doesn’t end there.

In the very next game, Trails to Azure, we once again find Sunita and Bond, living in a different home after the events of the prior game. In predictable cat fashion, their cat, Marie, is missing again. A newly introduced character and complication, Shirley, tags along to assist you, further entwining the old and the new. Over the course of this quest, you interface with a group of trashy corporate boys, from a country thus far only alluded to, who underscore the current issue of nationwide unrest occurring in the main plot; Shirley herself implies the political conflict of a different nation, which is colliding here in Crossbell.

Doing this quest reminds you of several other key actors who had been dormant since the last game, the Arc en Ciel theater troupe. We again see them intermesh with the new character of Shirley and the complications her presence implies. An actor of the theater troupe, who has a shadowy identity of their own, sotto voce implies familiarity with this new character; it remains a secret to the protagonists.

All of this intermeshing because of a cat who happens to get lost twice.

This intermingling avoids the divide between mundane individuals and “guy with white hair, tragic backstory, and limit break.” When everyone has a name and a place in the world, you see people as the complex individuals they are rather than the roles they occupy or services they provide. It feels like its own kind of social commentary: everyone has the capacity to be interesting if you take the time to know them.

None of this material is mandatory but it is meaningful; when the characters feel like people and the quests influence and change dialogue, you feel a greater desire to engage with the world. It makes even the main story content feel more substantial. Your role in the world is easy to fit into because your agency is actually respected. The story doesn’t need to make you the most important person in the world to make you care. When a game’s world constantly flatters you, it is easy to disassociate from anything not fluttering its eyelashes and telling you what a special fucking guy you are. Trails makes you care about aspects of the world in a human way: you are part of the world, you know the people in it and the ways your actions meaningfully affect them. It is because it is small and ultimately mundane, that I cared.

One Mundane Day in a Sea of Exciting Ones

Mundane can be an upsetting word to have associated with your work. The highest of high fantasy hate the idea of being mundane.

“No, our world is super fucking weird dude, instead of phones we got… the crystals, which work like phone.”

This to me is an insulting attempt to generate novelty, which ultimately makes a story for no one. Or worse, you accept nothing but trappings of the preaccepted idea of what fantasy is allowed to be; It is completely and utterly pedestrian.

Trails is mundane in the way a warm Sunday morning with a cup of coffee on the porch is mundane; the way having a loving but ordinary breakfast with your partner is mundane.

Trails is a franchise obsessed with the mundanity of ordinary life. Trails in the Sky is almost entirely what would be an introductory chapter of a different game which goes on for approximately forty hours. Even its explosive “story-starting” plot points are restrained in comparison. The contemporaneous entries of Final Fantasy released adjacent to Trails’ first chapter start on an apocalyptic destruction of a city and the political murder of a monarch; Trails, by comparison, begins with you starting your first day of work.

Sure, there is an empire to the north but there’s no explosive war happening right now. Sure, there is a legendary dragon which dwells in these lands but for the most part he’s just chilling. There is political unrest and civilians being let down by the systems meant to serve them, but that shit is just the news. Things stay this way until the signs which allude to upheaval become a full on earthquake.

Mundanity is so often defined by its antithesis; when horrible things happen, you can’t help but reflect on how life was normal just hours before. Things going sideways in the Trails series are juxtaposed with hours of people living their best, if ordinary, lives. When the worst comes to pass, the people you have come to care about are the ones to suffer; and often, you know the names and identities of those responsible.

Pain too can be mundane. Trails uses this mundanity to talk about things other games intentionally avoid. While it doesn’t always get things right, and sometimes stumbles, its willingness to talk about things like the realities of warfare, up to material as intense as CSA, is a type of painful mundanity. Things like war, or rape, or abuse are just edgy melodrama in many games; they talk about dark themes but in a way which wears darkness as a fashion accessory, rather than something it is interested in meaningfully engaging.

Fantasy worlds are frightened by the idea of such normal pains. “This fantasy world doesn’t have to deal with sex trafficking or systematic racism unless it’s inflicted on an orc or cat girl.” Trails’ willingness to talk about such subjects comes across as mature simply because it is willing to talk about them at all.

Antagonistic factions are often just as human in their mundanity. Violence breaks out as conflicts between people, not because demons spawned outside of town the second things got a little too peaceful; the presence of random monsters is treated the way real life treats wild animals–they aren’t evil, just inconvenient when they interfere with humanity. Even when an antagonist’s actions are unforgivable, it often comes from a specific rhetoric or political position which defines them. It isn’t always the deepest thing in the world, but at the very least it gets over the all too common bar of ontological evil. A villain who over the course of the plot chooses to abuse children does so for a simple reason: they do not care about the outcomes of their actions on others, and it suits their needs to do so, not because it is a fundamental aspect of their identity.

Even then, Trails avoids making singular villains responsible for all the world’s ills; instead, much conflict is born from factional interplay. For example, the machinations of a series of mercenaries committing violence for money is headed by an important leader, but said faction represents a way of life which abuts with other factions, not a single man in control of all wrongdoing in the world. These factions make sense to the people who occupy them and, in much the same way as real life, they foster a community which lives to self-perpetuate given it continues to meet their needs; or, failing that, because the world continues to deprive them of what they actually need.

Of course, it isn’t just the antagonists who organize. The first game is defined by the induction of our two protagonists into the Bracer Guild, a group engaged in community outreach across the continent; it solves problems with the flexibility and compassion of individuals, defusing conflict governments cannot. In the Crossbell arc, the Special Support Section is formed from a similar ethos, quite literally mirroring the behaviors of the Bracer guild.

This is what I see as the core of Trails—community. It links all my prior points together and becomes what I value most. The NPCs, the world building, the side content. You watch as a world becomes a series of interlocking networks, irremovable without digging up another part of the world. The protagonists are guardians of the community, defending it from disruptions and outside malfeasant actors. To abide by this community, you must be a part of it, both in and out of character. You do the side quests because ultimately your immersion demands it; you are someone in the role of helping others. You pay attention to the details of the world because you are meaningfully affected by them as a member of the community. You talk to the NPC because they are the roots in your network.

Even from within the plot, the mundane connection of community becomes Trails. The Bracer guild, the Special Support Section, and even the villainous factions are forms of community. They rise from need, and whether adaptive or maladaptive, they suit the needs of the people who join them; they serve and are of service.

A Thousand Hours More

Trails is defined by its most delightful mundanity; it is the palate cleanser I didn’t even know I needed. Games which feature a protagonist’s home burning as the anguished hero stoically stares into the flames are a dime a dozen; a game that can make me care if a random guy in town decided to stay in medical school or not, is really something special.

Both the pain of disenfranchisement and the joy of bonds define Trails. It feels relevant and timely, even now. In our time where the affliction of loneliness seems worse than it has ever been, despite constant connection, it’s important to remember the bonds shared together. It is a series interested in and intrigued by the little people, the ones who might not solve the big problems but day after day, week after week show up to attend to the small ones.

I can’t pretend Trails does everything right. There are patches of insensitivity, many friends of mine have alerted me to a precipitous drop in quality to come, and in some senses the slowness can be too slow. All that said however, it’s a franchise which has—thus far—managed to make me feel something in a genre I love, when many other games have not. This of course can be tied up in a lot of things; I could simply be experiencing a shift in prioritization, for instance, but I would be loath to say it is anything as simple as just being fresh.

Craft is a thing I endlessly appreciate. When a game is made by a person having a good time, intentionally seeking to express something, it can be an enjoyable experience even when there are bumps in the road. I also love games meticulously ground down and polished over thousands of iterations. Something simple can be beautiful when worked down to its most unadulterated pure concept.

The Trails games ultimately feel like neither of these things, a perfect middle point of design maximalism. The jaggedness of encounter balance is frequently alarming, exploding you with ice-wielding sewer toucans without warning. There are times where the gameplay feels like a tertiary concern when compared to the lavish treatment of the writing. Yet, I can only find myself compelled.

There have been very few games with this much emphasis placed on writing, characters, and immersion, combined with this particular sense of aesthetic; it hits my buttons in a way that makes me feel like I was always the target audience. On more than one occasion I have said that this game feels like a portal into someone else’s nostalgia for this genre. It is a glimpse back in time, back when this genre had novel ideas and wasn’t simply a series of outstanding examples endlessly copycatted until I almost wished they never existed at all.

Despite the implied cynicism, I will continue to play Trails; I will continue to play JRPGs even as I find myself growing more and more estranged from the kind of things fellow fans seem to want and appreciate. In the end, I just love a world that feels like I could ask a question about the setting and somewhere—provided I had the know-how and the desire to dig—find an answer.

Many games are simply impressions of worlds. The electrical lines don’t actually connect to anything, the streams, topologically speaking, run uphill, and the people would starve to death because technically there isn’t enough farmland to support this population size. Those things are fine too, and even Trails isn’t immune to such oddities—it is, after all, incredibly difficult to make a world. Yet I love its detail, I love its characters, and I love a game that makes me feel guilty for not finishing side quests; not because of some lingering remnant of completionism, but because I felt like someone actually needed my help.

Ultimately, a world is a living thing, as long as we believe in it, it lives. I believe in the world of Trails. I’m excited to see what it lives to do.

The post The Trails Franchise and My Growing Love of the Mundane appeared first on Gamesline.

8. Fresh Fruit Freefall

Easily the most harrowing of jobs. A variety of fruit falls from trees, as Milano attempts to catch it in a basket on her back. Different fruit fall at different arcs, so you will have to position her accordingly. In reality, if I had to hustle back and forth to catch fruit falling from trees, I would be miserable. Picking fruit is already an exhausting career, one that should be compensated much higher, but having to add further hand-eye coordination to things is a layer nobody should have to put up with. I am left to wonder why fruit that hits the ground is immediately a lost cause, since a good rinse would remove any dirt. Some people are just too picky, it seems. Milano is also harangued by wasp-like creatures called “bombos,” and if huge wasps were trying to keep me from gathering fruit, I would personally take the hint.

7. Dishwash Whoosh

I was a dishwasher a few times in college. It’s not the worst job in the world, but I do not wish to do it ever again. While I was under quite a bit of stress at times to restock dishware, Milano admittedly has it worse than I ever did. She must scrub each plate individually, checking to see if there’s any leftover food before setting it aside to dry. If she takes too long, the plates will continue to pile up, and newly entering plates will shove the old stack onto the floor, shattering them. I imagine Milano would immediately be fired for this. Occasionally, a plate will have an exclamation point on it instead of food, which alerts Milano to a flying kitchen utensil that she must dodge. I’m sure tensions run high in many kitchens and spatulas may end up flying, but Milano is an innocent soul and things seem quite calm in the kitchen she’s working in. I cannot fathom why she is being pelted, unless this is the norm where she lives, in which case I cannot abide this sort of work environment. Normal dishwashing would be less of an issue; this is dishwashing under fire.

6. Tick Tock Takeout

Dealing with customers at a retail or food establishment is already a hassle. Most of them enter the business feeling like their needs are most important, and any proof to the contrary is a failure on the staff’s part, not a reality of the existence of other human beings that are also attempting to get service. In Milano’s case, the customers entering the fast food restaurant are hedgehog-like critters with clocks on their backs. The clocks count down to when they will become fed up with waiting, so you must grab the items they request and hand it to them before this happens. I think it would be helpful in a way to have knowledge of when someone will get pissed off for waiting, but there’s another part of me that is even more stressed out with that knowledge. I should not know the specifics of someone’s mood down to the second. This is a simple gig, one where simple memorization and reflexes are key. I would rate this job higher if not for the strangely uncomfortable knowledge the clocks bring me. 

5. Round-about Wrangler

This job involves walking in a circle around a ranch and seeking bovine-esque beasts called “moogans.” They are pretty much exactly like cows in our world, except these ones fly. Milano can jump up and grab their udders, gently bringing the airborne animals down to be milked. I am not good at estimation, but I know for a fact that Milano, as a prepubescent girl, weighs much less than I do. If I were to latch onto a moogan’s udders, let alone an Earth cow’s udders, I would at least cause it immense pain. At worst, I’m ripping an udder clean off the poor thing. This is before we take into account the green “trampoli,” piglike beings that chase birds called “coccos” around the ranch. Milano can grab onto the moogan’s udders to dodge getting rammed by the hostile trampolis. I have no such luck. While I made this sound like a complete disaster, if I am able to coax the moogans down to the ground in another way and separate myself from the trampolis, this wouldn’t be the worst job in the world.

4. Pastry Pileup

I enjoy cooking, baking, and otherwise creating meals. I don’t do it as often as I’d like, mostly because I hate wasting food (as I’m only cooking for myself) and leftovers spoil before I get to all of them. Working at a bakery would allow me to indulge in this action without worrying as much. For Milano, she must match ingredient blocks as they fall into the pit before her to turn them into cakes. If new ingredients fall into the pit and crush the previous ones, they create germs, much like how cross-contamination does in real life according to Jon Taffer of Bar Rescue. Milano’s ability to turn piles of single ingredients into a full cake is astounding, and this is a feat I cannot meet. While baking large quantities of food would be stressful, it also seems quite rewarding, and knowing that people are enjoying something I make so directly would be satisfying. I’m not sure doing things Milano’s way would be my favorite, but I’d still take this job over the last few. Also, I would give out what I don’t sell to those in need. All food establishments should do this. 

3. Pop Star Power

Being a celebrity has many benefits. It is a career that allows for a lot of excess and freedom, but with this gift comes many a struggle. Your life is not your own, especially if you do music, thanks to controlling contracts and a constant touring schedule. It’s nearly impossible to build a good family life this way, and rigid happiness is often brushed aside for fast, hard pleasures. Now, I don’t think Milano is doing anything untoward in this instance. I’d have to imagine that she’s just doing cute dances and singing a song and everyone loves her and she’s happy, too. If I could match that 100%, I would have this job be number one with a bullet. However, I see how people act once they become rich and famous, and I am not as strong as Milano. I don’t want to forget my friends and family in pursuit of cheap thrills. Also, I think this rhythm game is kinda bad.

2. Viral Vamoose

Here, Milano is a doctor, curing patients of various viruses via button-masher minigames. If illnesses could be treated in this manner, I would hope that treatment would be swifter and cheaper than we have now. Hell, Milano is a child—and she’s not just treating these people, but fully curing them. Imagine what a trained team of adults could do, myself included (if I did get said training). There is a sense of duty I feel thinking about this hypothetical, even though I could be doing something similar in reality…I could’ve gotten a medical degree. I could’ve done something better than being a game critic online…On second thought, if Milano screws up the treatment, the viruses multiply, and I don’t know if I could emotionally handle messing up a few button presses and causing Covid 2. Milano is far, far stronger than I am. 

1.  Pizza Pronto

Delivery workers deserve far, far more than they are given. It’s a job that is treated so flippantly, but keeps the world spinning. Here, Milano delivers pizza to waiting customers via scooter, all while dodging obstacles laid all over the street. She can weave as well as jump to avoid these hindrances. She can also pick up speed boosters and run over arrows to make her scooter faster, as your score is higher when your delivery is faster. I wouldn’t be against doing this work, as I don’t mind traveling around in my car or a similar vehicle to deliver things. If I can put a podcast on or something, I’m good. Milano is also most likely getting paid better than the standard Uber Eats driver is, and while I say “good for you, Milano” here, I also say “everyone should be getting paid like Milano. I want my pizza and I want my pizza deliverer to be able to afford to purchase their own pizza.” It’s pizza all the way down, if I had my way. 

If I were to rank these jobs based on how fun they are minigame-wise, I’d say it’s pretty much the same except I’d put Pop Star Power at the bottom and swap Round-about Wrangler with Pastry Pileup. Milano’s Odd Job Collection is an adorable game that is worth checking out, with the translation as a highlight. Support releases like this if you want to see more like it! And to the workers of the world, thank you.

The post Milano’s Odd Jobs Ranked By How Much I Want To Do Them appeared first on Gamesline.

In the weeks following Dawntrail’s launch, there were hundreds of thousands of voices talking about it on social media, on YouTube, in Discord servers, and on in-game chat channels. People shared their impressions and opinions about its story, pacing, characters; everything you’d expect. I cannot give a comprehensive portrayal of these myriad voices, at least not without conducting innumerable surveys and interviews, but broadly speaking, what intrigued me the most was how there was no consistency on which part or parts of Dawntrail were “good” or “bad.” There were players who liked the first half, but found the second half bizarre and jarring, and there were players who found the first half boring but thoroughly enjoyed the latter half. There were players who strongly felt that it did not have enough voice acting, while others enjoyed the performances and were highly enthusiastic about characters old and new. Dawntrail has certainly been a divisive installment, to say the least, something that I haven’t seen since the Stormblood days.

With the whole of Dawntrail’s story completed, and the narrative now shifting gears as it leads us into the next expansion, I feel ready to talk. I will only be touching upon the story of this expansion, as an all-encompasing review of its new gameplay additions, features, quality-of-life updates, and such would widen the scope of this piece to the point of losing focus. Furthermore, many such additions can and already have been altered from their initial state at launch, whereas the writing of the Main Scenario Questline is very rarely altered outside of typos or errors. I also won’t cover the story in its entirety so as to remain as spoiler-free as possible; this will make sense in a bit when I get to one of my criticisms.

[There are minor spoilers for Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Dawntrail in this article.]

Dawntrail is an expansion that excels in the details. Sure, it has a grandiose plot with mystery, drama, and epic set pieces the likes of which we’ve seen all across FFXIV before, but that’s par for the course, that’s what players expect. It starts with the uncovering of a mysterious letter from her grandfather, mentioning a “golden city,” and quickly leads into a Rite of Succession for Tuliyollal, a nation spread across two continents. In any of the other expansions, the whole story would revolve around the trials involved in that Rite, but Dawntrail concludes that arc halfway through its runtime, and for the first time in any expansion in FFXIV, the road is left open without any signposting about where the story will go. The northern continent is made accessible, and players go on a whimsical non-sequitur questline about troubles in a wild west frontier town. There’s a saloon, there’s a catboy sheriff, there are tumbleweed crabs, there are dinosaurs; it’s a whole thing and it’s incredible.

The first time I played it, I briefly forgot I was playing Final Fantasy XIV, the MMORPG. That’s how well the story drew me in. It felt like a breath of fresh air, like I was experiencing what this game would be like if it were taken off the rails and allowed to descend into the Beast Road; that is, allowed to break free of its constraints as a railroaded storyline and be a truly open-world experience. It still was a railroaded storyline at that point (hell, it even becomes a story about a literal railroad later on) but one could see, however faintly, an alternate version of this game where exploration and discovery were the driving force behind its story, and not the other way around.

Right at the conclusion of this leg of the journey, there’s an explosive earthquake that’s foreshadowed so lightly, you’d miss it if you weren’t paying enough attention. A giant purple dome suffused with lightning appears on the horizon, and flying futuristic airships start pouring out of it, heading for the capital city of Tuliyollal. This leads into the second half of Dawntrail, which goes into the mysterious dome, its denizens, and the conflict between them and Tuliyollal which seems all but inevitable.

One of my criticisms of Dawntrail is that what’s in the dome was spoiled in some respects through pre-release material. There’s a city in there that is unlike anything in FFXIV, and feels wildly out of place even among the more science-fiction locales of the game. It’s stunning and impressive and extremely cool… and it was shown off well before Dawntrail launched, denying tuned-in players a chance to experience it fresh and in its proper context. It’s the sort of thing that should’ve been kept secret, and FFXIV has often withheld certain locations in upcoming expansions from pre-release material to keep them as surprises. This city should have been one such surprise.

Be that as it may, this dual-nature of Dawntrail serves to reinforce many of its narrative throughlines and messages. Stormblood has been the only other expansion so far to be split in some capacity, but that story was still unified in its overall themes about the impact of war on people and land, why liberation is a cause worth fighting for, and how even the mightiest of foes, be they constructs of faith or machines of empire can be toppled and dismantled when pushed with many hands. The split was geographical, but not textual. 

This is not to say Dawntrail has two different messages, but rather that the first half tackles and searches for what it means to be a good leader for one’s community, and how communities can be strengthened within themselves and made even stronger by building bridges to other communities, and the second half begins by taking one possible answer to those questions and accelerating it to its logical extreme, with all of the horrifying consequences made manifest. After all, your communities, your people, need land and resources to survive and thrive; running out of either would mean that you did not take proper care of your people and thus are a bad leader, so it is only righteous and just for you to find new lands and new resources and claim them for the sake of you & yours. Even if they belong to someone else, the needs of your people must come first.

It is this duality which makes Dawntrail fascinating to me, as players have mentioned disliking one half or the other. The story works best when intertwined as it is, and yet some are quick to bring up complaints I haven’t heard since Stormblood. Stormblood itself was split between the region of Gyr Abania and the eastern continent of Othard, and several voices following its launch in 2017 expressed preference for something more monoptic. They wanted either an expansion solely within Gyr Abania, or one solely within Othard, and didn’t like that the story was separated across these areas. These old complaints always struck me as odd, because they seemed to dislike the presentation and not the actual story, as Heavensward did not receive any such criticisms despite being split across the regions of Coerthas, Dravania, and the Sea of Clouds (i.e. it wasn’t solely about Ishgard, from the Ishgard perspective). Echoes of these sentiments have resurfaced for Dawntrail, and while they do address the narrative more than just the setting this time, they still come across as being arguments on the principle rather than the material. All of the expansions and thus all of FFXIV’s story has been told through the connection to a wide variety of different cultures and peoples across all kinds of places, and this is why one of the prime questions that pop up in conversations about upcoming expansions is “where are we going next?”

This drew me to an understanding of Dawntrail which may explain why there are so many differing perspectives on it. I believe that Dawntrail is an amalgam; a combination of every previous part of FFXIV combined and condensed into one single expansion. It has the slower pace and worldbuilding emphasis of A Realm Reborn and the earlier parts of Shadowbringers; it has the trek into enemy territory and reconciliation between opposing nations present in Heavensward; its dual nature I’ve already likened to Stormblood, but it also has a bit of the “war story” and leadership soul-searching present there. To cap it off, it takes the triumphant, defiant answer given to The Question posed at the end of Endwalker and immediately perverts it, twisting it into a nightmare scenario that has far-reaching implications for the universe of FFXIV. It’s got a bit of everything from everywhere.

This admixture is necessarily diluted as a result. One of the antagonists of Dawntrail has a backstory that is all but absent, which makes his motivations flat and uninspired (especially in a game with impressive villains.) While this narrative lacuna was addressed in a post-launch patch, it would’ve had a more lasting impact if shown before his demise and not after, as it makes his final moments comical to the point of absurdity. There’s a historical faction introduced toward the end of Dawntrail, who are only brought up as a matter of trivia in the base expansion. This faction ends up being very important later on, so their mention serves as foreshadowing, but given the extent to which they impact the narrative, it again comes across as something that should’ve been addressed in the base storyline, but was held back in favor of ending the initial story on a high note. 

There’s also a case to be made that Dawntrail tips its balancing act too heavily toward the latter half, leaving the nation of Tuliyollal and many of its denizens (like the ever-charming Wuk Evu), who are the focus of the first half, out to dry in favor of the thunder dome and the many loose threads trailing out of it. Many of the threads left open regarding its first half are addressed in side stories and activities, but to put things into perspective for the main story: the thunder dome and the history behind it are responsible for five of the currently six major boss fights, with two of them taking place within the dome, two of them in a place previously attached to the dome, and the latest one in the region the dome came from.

It’s not that Dawntrail has a bad story, however, or that its foibles are particularly unique in FFXIV. Heavensward kills off two major characters through self-sacrifice, and while one of them is afforded intimacy in a tender final moment, who is remembered by fans over a decade after their death because of said moment, the other is blasted out of the sky to die a lonesome disintegrating death, and who isn’t afforded the same ceremony or reverence by fans all these years later, and you get three guesses as to which character is a woman. Stormblood arguably has the worst writing in the whole Main Scenario so far, with the baffling decision to bring in a comic relief gillionaire-type character to ask him, in earnest, how to help an ailing nation recently recovering from imperial occupation, to which his reply is “well you can’t just give them money because then they won’t develop the working mindset needed to make it in this economy!” Even the beloved Shadowbringers has some pacing issues leading up to the end of its second act, and while I can appreciate that crafting a mountain-sized golem takes time and many hands, that questionable pacing is why Dawntrail turns its homage to this exact sequence into a quick and cute montage.

One could argue that Dawntrail’s story tries to do too much in too short a time; it has to introduce several new characters, locales, and story hooks; it has to follow up on the impressive finale of Endwalker; and it has to set the stage for the next major story saga. All things considered, I find it was more than merely satisfactory, but impressive in its own right. From my viewpoint that Dawntrail is a combination of every other part of the story blended together, the result is something familiar yet refreshingly new. It’s still Final Fantasy XIV as I’ve known it. It’s still keeping in form and function with both its connection to the rest of the MMO as well as its place within the Final Fantasy lineage. It’s just told in a new light through a new perspective.

Previously, the story of FFXIV has built up the player character as The Warrior of Light; champion of the wronged and the weak, seeker of truth and justice, and ender of apocalypses. Every major story beat has been punctuated by a formidable foe who bars the path or threatens the innocent, who must be laid low by the player character. Often, the Warrior of Light is the only one powerful enough to contend with these adversaries for one reason or another, and while the powers of friendship, sheer determination, and hope do much to bolster efforts in vanquishing villains, much of the narrative is built around small acts of kindness, favors, and chores.

Much and more has been said and bemoaned about “the MMO fetch quest” wherein a player is tasked with collecting some amount of items and delivering them to someone, but even in the earliest days of A Realm Reborn, FFXIV has always used simple quests like these to provide context, build out the world, flesh out characters, and inform the player of details. Skip through the dialogue and you’ll miss that the bucket of water a bar’s owner asked you to fill up and dump on a rowdy patron, was done so because he was being incredibly racist to someone else, behavior which the bar’s owner tells you is unfortunately common in these parts but which he forbids in his establishment.

There are hundreds of examples like that one in the multiple quests throughout the game, and they serve to build up the player character as a true hero. The Warrior of Light isn’t someone who only appears when a battle needs winning, who is only known for violence. They’re renowned for their incredible acts of selflessness, kindness, and communal love, too. It is this focus on building up someone to be a champion of the people, who is driven by action and a burning desire to do right by their neighbors, which sells the concept of the Warrior of Light. This resonant fiber is stitched throughout every chapter of the Main Scenario Quest, and this extends into Dawntrail as well, only this time there’s a twist and it comes in the form of Wuk Lamat, the deuteragonist of Dawntrail. Even calling her “deuteragonist” doesn’t do her character justice, as Wuk Lamat’s journey is a core aspect of Dawntrail, and why she is one of the game’s most interesting characters.

Introduced at the tail of Endwalker, Wuk Lamat approaches the player character with a proposition: be her ally in the upcoming Rite of Succession for Tuliyollal’s head of government. She is the underdog (undercat?) of the contest, and the exploits of the Warrior of Light compel her to seek them out and request their assistance. She is earnest and eager, but out of her depth, and aware of that fact. While she has no selfish ambition to take the Dawn Throne for herself, she is driven to counteract the frontrunner contestant who plans to plunge Tural into a war with nations across Eorzea and beyond. She’s not strictly in it to win, but he must lose at the very least.

The Rite of Succession requires contestants to connect with several communities across the southern continent of Yok Tural, completing their requests as decided by community leaders in whichever manner they see fit. Some leaders use the Rite as a means of educating the participants in their local culture, while others have pressing concerns and see the Rite as an opportunity to have an urgent need met. This Rite is analogous to A Realm Reborn, wherein the player traveled around Eorzea meeting leaders of various communities, towns, and organizations, doing favors and services for them in exchange for information, cooperation, supplies, and support. The context is different but the motions are the same. There’s even an undercurrent of mystery; A Realm Reborn had the looming threat of the Garlean Empire and the shadowy machinations of the Ascians, while Dawntrail’s primary mystery surrounds the “golden city of Tural” and how to locate it, which is actually the final objective of the Rite of Succession.

It is through this Rite, and all the trials and challenges that come with it, that Wuk Lamat is sharpened and shaped into the leader she wants to be for her people. Much like how the Warrior of Light was forged from a simple adventurer into a true hero over the course of A Realm Reborn, Wuk Lamat is built up in the same manner. One of the earliest complaints about Dawntrail was that its story defocused the player character in order to put Wuk Lamat centerstage. While it makes sense that some players would have that takeaway, especially after how intensely Shadowbringers and Endwalker made the player character the central focus of their stories, such a perspective fails to realize the role the player character is given and how it complements the narrative of Dawntrail.

The Warrior of Light’s role in Dawntrail is that of the mentor. The example I’ve been using for over a year now is Auron from Final Fantasy X; an older, more experienced party member who can be relied upon both for their combat prowess as well as their wisdom and worldly insights. Dawntrail’s story is refreshing and exciting because it makes another character the focal point, allowing the player character to run support for them, and then maintains that shift throughout most of its runtime. Riding shotgun for another character’s story is done plenty of times in and out of the main story of FFXIV, but Dawntrail capitalizes on the concept by focusing on Wuk Lamat, Krile, Erenville, Sphene, Gulool Ja, and a few others all throughout. This paradigm shift enhances Dawntrail’s messages on communities and families and coming together to build a better tomorrow, by allowing the characters who can best convey those messages the proper attention and narrative respect.

But I want to focus on Wuk Lamat in particular, because this mentorship role the player character has with her left a lasting impression I still think about to this day. I said Dawntrail was a combination of every other part of FFXIV, and I see that in Wuk Lamat too. From her introduction and all throughout Dawntrail’s story, I see myself in her. I see a fledgling me, nervous about playing with random players but eager to learn how to tank so I could be ready when I got to Heavensward and could unlock Dark Knight. In Wuk Lamat, I see every new player; the ones to whom I’ve given advice, or assistance, or just some words of encouragement. As she grows throughout the story, I see the growth of every player, myself included. You see her confidence grow, her doubts subside, and her resolve crystallize, until she’s a warrior in her own light: A Warrior of Dawn.

There’s a part in Dawntrail where the crew has to board a hot air balloon to fly deep into the jungle, and Wuk Lamat is embarrassed but finally admits to the player character that she is nervous about the flight, and asks if they can hold her hand. Now, I’ve made several alternate characters in FFXIV, and when I come to dialogue options in the story, I’ll pick the ones that seem appropriate for the character I’m playing, or I’ll pick the options I’d never pick for my main character just to see the alternate dialogue. I have never denied Wuk Lamat a steady hand to hold. I cannot speak to the performances in other languages, but Sena Bryer does such a phenomenal job portraying Wuk Lamat as a character brimming with kindheartedness, strength, and sincerity, that my calcified skeleton heart is immediately incinerated with warmth when she asks for help.

That is what makes Dawntrail special to me. It is a story about what makes family and community important to us, and how to strengthen our ties to them. It’s about how to forge new bonds and reinforce old ones which are wavering or even broken. It’s about how to weather change, and to possess both the reason and the resolve to identify and act when the only sensible option forward is to sever the ties that bind us; be they to the past or to people who have wronged us. It builds up these ideas bit by bit in the first half, and then uses the second to test them, twist them, and ultimately make them more resilient. It’s not content to simply state “Wuk Lamat is a good leader because she cares about her people and that’s why she wins the Rite of Succession!” It demonstrates the strength of her character by building her up in the same manner as the Warrior of Light, turning the perceived weakness of her reliance on others into one of her greatest powers—a staple message of FFXIV at this point, but the perspective shift given to the player character makes it shine because she learns it from us—and then playing her off of another character who shares her virtues but who has taken them too far.

I believe Dawntrail to be an expansion story with flaws like any other chapter in Final Fantasy XIV. But for all of the divisiveness it’s seemingly instilled, I also believe it’ll be looked back on fondly. When we’re further on into this saga’s storyline, and the Dawntrail callbacks start hitting like waves of nostalgia; when Wuk Lamat, my third-favorite Dawntrail character, shows up with Mr. Baby President and Shale from IT to help us out of a jam, that’s when people will realize what I’ve known all along. Dawntrail was an excellent tale, and a solid foundation for the future of Final Fantasy XIV.

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