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Rose hosts Maverick and John through yet another anime preview session. It’s one of the most harrowing ones yet. Elvie should count herself lucky she wasn’t here for such evil. We also are going to watch one of three shows for the full season. Which one? Tune in next time to find out…

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

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

The post Unlimited Rail Works Episode 143: Banished From Fall 2026’s Anime Season Preview appeared first on Gamesline.

As the Fata Morgana superfan, I was quick to dive into Schrödinger’s Call as soon as it was released, and similar to my experience with Fata Morgana, I made sure to establish an hour minimum reading period each night so I could ensure I’d get through it in a reasonable timeframe, something I’ve only done for visual novels I’ve truly resonated with such as Tsukihime or Muramasa. 

I was immediately in love with the game’s scribbly yet defined art style, its cutesy interpretations of other characters as animals, and the way every line is delivered with the Animal Crossing “animalese” style of speaking (incomprehensible gibberish sounds strung together like a half-heard phone call). The chapter format echoing Fata Morgana’s doors with different people in wildly different situations was quickly recognizable, and as you progress through the game it becomes clear its creators understood exactly how to utilize its soundtrack the way that visual novels do best.

Unfortunately, that’s where my love for Schrödinger’s Call runs dry. Unlike with Fata Morgana, where my affection only grew over the course of my journey—and its conclusion cemented my adoration—Schrödinger’s Call was an experience of waiting for growth and coalescence that never came. 

Schrödinger’s Call takes place within the confines of a single nondescript room. You, as the player, watch a young girl named Mary answer phone calls from ghosts, people who couldn’t move on from their death for one reason or another. You’ll see parents separated from their children, starcrossed lovers, and all the other archetypes you’d expect in your average tragedy. The twist? All of these people died at the same time, when the planet’s moon suddenly and inexplicably fell, killing everyone.

It’s a hell of a conceit; navigating the sci-fi underpinnings of this setting through the more mundane heartbreaks that make up our day-to-day lives is a stark contrast to the type of story you would normally expect from an apocalypse. When we talk about certain genres becoming oversaturated (i.e. superhero movies, coffee shop AUs), it’s usually predicated on an overreliance of formula over innovation. Humans are finicky pattern-recognizing creatures, and we’re most fascinated by that which breaks the molds our brains presuppose. The disparate nature of Schrödinger’s Call seemed fit to slowly build up to a slam dunk, or at least I had hoped.

Yet there really isn’t anything going on in Schrödinger’s Call to make good on the promise of its premise. Instead, we’re treated to a series of all too familiar narratives that are just as basic as they appear, and the moment things finally seem to be taking a turn towards the more interesting, it all suddenly ends.

As an example; the first call follows the story of a mother, her son, and the final conversation they shared together before the moon fell. You discover the mother went to prison for murder, and was forced to let her son live with her former boss, with their relationship being forbidden from rekindling due to her criminal past. At every stage of this storyline, I was thinking to myself “well it’s pretty obvious what’s happened here”, but the game forced me to walk through every stage of the deductive process repeatedly over and over again, while regurgitating the same information over and over again to every character I interacted with, only to have the most obvious basic reveal delivered to me at the end like it’s a stunning revelation.

There’s a recent trend I’ve seen slowly work its way into story-focused games with the advent of the gacha game where the player is forced to hit a perfunctory “keep talking” choice prompt, and Schrödinger’s Call is inundated with it. You have to prompt someone to finish their thoughts with a “yes?”, you have to call them back to repeat the same thing you said to them last time but with greater emphasis, you have to manually enter each individual phone number on a rotary phone to call the one-note NPC who has the answer to whatever question you’ve already figured out an hour ago, only to then immediately hang up and deliver the same conversation to someone else. It’s tedious, exhausting, and honestly just plain lame. 

When I opened this review by talking about that Fata Morgana interview, it wasn’t just to explain how I came across Schrödinger’s Call. Certainly that set the expectations I had, but more than anything as I progressed through the incredibly straightforward fables, I was shocked at just how obvious and surface level its inspirations from the game were. 

The House in Fata Morgana, for those who don’t know, tells the stories of various residents of a cursed manor over the course of its long and storied existence. As the story goes on, you realize that all of the characters you’ve run into and seen, as well as the more basic struggles we’re privy to in their narratives, are in part metaphorical aspects of a much larger story. By the time you reach the end, you’ve had dozens of aha moments about the hidden natures of all you’ve seen, and it makes the whole work feel inconceivably well considered.

On the flip side, Schrödinger’s Call has no tangible payoff to the more basic nature of its storytelling. At best, the connective tissue between the core narrative of figuring out what’s going on with Mary in her room and the stories she listens to is that sometimes you hear a key word related to what you’ve seen. One could make the argument that the theme of the story is how empathy and sympathy can inform the understanding we have of ourselves but like…that’s it? 

Even the format of the game apes Fata Morgana: three disparate stories of different people in different places punctuated by a fourth “core” story that reveals the true nature of the work. Most egregiously, the third call of Schrödinger, and the third door of Fata Morgana are so similar in tone and events that it’s comical, and you’d be forgiven for mistaking one as a parody of the other. 

The biggest killer to Schrödinger’s Call is that it ends after its fourth call. Half of Fata Morgana’s narrative is hidden beyond its fourth door reveal, and it’s the part that makes its whole story work, so ending right as the ball gets rolling makes for an incredibly painful case of “what could have been”. 

Which is exceedingly agonizing as that fourth call is the best part of the entire game! The presentation is amped up, the music hits a crescendo, the art is switching perspective and tone with new gameplay tidbits…and then it all just ends. The moon’s fall isn’t referenced in a meaningful way—despite being an obvious metaphor for a specific event—and none of the ghosts you’ve met along the way actually represent anything intriguing beyond the surface level stories they told you again and again.

I don’t need to know why the moon fell—I’m not a TV Tropes page begging for the YouTube Explained of everything I read—but for such a compelling hook, it means absolutely nothing . There’s multiple interpretations you can come away with that make it seem as if nothing even happened at all, which isn’t as hot a story twist as it was for Bob Newhart in the 90s.

If you take away the conceit of the moonfall, what are you left with? Three stories you could find in the seasonal lineup of any long running procedural, told painstakingly slowly with forced choice sequences to break up the conversations in case you forgot you were playing a video game. I’m not one to opine about “depression porn” or media that feels like it’s designed purely to elicit an emotional response, but at the end of the day, that’s what it feels like everything in Schrödinger’s Call exists for: to make you feel sad. You’re not to think about or solve why you feel sad, but it’s all just for you, the player, to feel sad.

At its core, Schrödinger’s Call is a story about Mary and the situations that have led her to becoming the “world’s last confidant” at the other end of a telephone. The reason this happens is explained in great detail (just like everything else), but there’s no real purpose to it, or message to take away. The House in Fata Morgana resonated with me because it’s the story of several people, and it approaches each of them with an open mind and willingness to believe in the inherent good of humanity despite immense suffering and pain. It’s a story that works because it goes out of its way to go the extra mile every single time, even when you think it’s shown its hand. Schrödinger’s Call ends when it thinks it’s beaten you thoroughly into the ground with the emotion it intends.

My playthrough of Schrödinger’s Call took me around 6 hours, but your mileage may vary. Despite being less than ⅓ the length of The House in Fata Morgana or many other VNs I love, there were so many points during my read of the game where it felt like the longest story I’d read in years, just because of how redundant and dull its prose was. I feel bad about being so critical of something clearly made with a degree of sincerity and incorporates base themes of empathy and care, but those topics should mean something, and I always hope to come away from a work thinking of at least one thing new, instead of thinking about how it’s all just the same.

The post Musings on a Moonfall – Schrödinger’s Call (PC) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

When I messed with Granblue Fantasy Original Flavor in college, I enjoyed the characters, art, music, and pretty much everything besides actually playing it. The battles themselves weren’t the issue; it was the grinding, the item drops, and the pouring over Google docs to craft parties that could clear more and more difficult boss fights and raids, which I did not personally find any satisfaction in clearing. As much as I liked the story, I still didn’t feel like I was getting enough out of what I was putting in. I put the game down and said to myself “I hope that Granblue Relink game is good, I’d like to experience that world as a normal game instead of one based on gacha and grinding.” Relink doesn’t have the gacha, at least!!

Initially I thought this was neat. You’re going into short quests to get upgrade materials, you’re leveling up a variety of equipment to get stronger; it’s a standard loop that a lot of folks should be familiar with, especially in the RPG sector. Once I got close to the end of the story mode, I started to look into the post-game and what was added in the expansion. What I saw was mostly more grinding to eventually reach the ability to fight super bosses, which is, again, exactly what Granblue Fantasy on mobile is about. 

I’m not calling Relink a failure of a game. It didn’t hit me the way I particularly wanted it to, and that’s because it’s an action RPG that’s still structured like Granblue. Applying this template one-to-one makes things far less interesting to me. I suppose my true desire is “a version of this game that has a definite ending”? Hell, I don’t even hate grinding for things, as my box of shiny Pokémon can tell you, but that’s more appealing because there’s a limit to the grind. I get the sparkly creature and I’m done, instead of grinding for the sword, the sword’s stats, the sigils on the sword, the character’s sigils, and on and on, which are then just used to do more battles for better swords/sigils/stats/etc. 

The demo for Final Fantasy Resonance made it apparent that the structure of that game is a bit different compared to its mobile origins in Brave Exvius. It’s a standard JRPG with classic Final Fantasy characters as extra ability slots; they trimmed the fat, so there’s far less of the mobile game hooks that make a person return every day for years. Maybe I’d have enjoyed Relink more if Platinum had finished it, and it was a smaller, more focused character action game that told its story and was done.

I still dig quite a bit here, but I feel like I’ll finish the main story and move on. If Cygames wants me specifically on the Granblue train, they gotta make a game that feels like it’s going to end. I know it will, but it feels like the continuous treadmill climb that mobile games have, just in action RPG form.  My friends can’t get me into Final Fantasy XIV because of this, and Granblue doesn’t have the combined effort of around ten people pinging me about the new Beastmaster class behind it.

I love Granblue VS, the ArcSys developed fighting game with Granblue characters! It’s got the characters and world I like, without the grind-focused gameplay structure I don’t care for. I suppose this entire article is me going “eh not for me”, but it was a personal bummer due to its initial concept. If you do love to do raiding in MMOs but want more active combat, you absolutely should play this game. Cygames has a good chance to mess with the formula though, so my tastes may still be met. Give me a Granblue game with a structure that doesn’t call to mind endless grinds, and I’ll be there!

The post I Couldn’t Gel with Granblue Fantasy: Relink, but It’s Fine! appeared first on Gamesline.

The prologue of Dark Souls concludes with an enormous crow appearing out of nowhere to carry you in its feet to the land of the ancient lords: Lordran. Who is this crow? Why does it carry people from the Undead Asylum to Lordran, and back again? No item description in the game will resolve this mystery for you, nor does any character audibly wonder about it. For the rest of the game, the crow roosts atop a nearby ruin in the hub area, giving the player a chance to consider the crow’s mystery every time they return.

Near the end of the first issue of Dark Souls: Mother of Mourning, a crow who has been following our heroic knights speaks in human language, projected directly into their minds. This is a shocking event that requires several panels of dialogue to accept. “What sorcery is this?” “Kill it now, it is demon-spawn.” “This strange speech is a clever trick.” 

How does the crow speak? A blessed trick of the titular Mother. How does the crow know the location of the Mother’s soul, the great treasure which our knights seek? The Mother knew it in life, for it was her herald. “This is unnatural.” “No, it is blessed!” In two pages an arcane mystery has been introduced, debated, explained, and debated again, with little space given to ponder this strange event for myself.

Mother of Mourning has no obligation to mimic From Software’s obtuse approach to storytelling, which honestly started to wear on me by the time I saw the same old tricks yet again in Bloodborne. I welcome a fresh method that is unlike anything Hidetaka Miyazaki would produce; yet in practice, the exposition-heavy style that bookends Mother of Mourning is too conclusive for my liking. By the final issue, truths are unambiguously revealed, lines of good and evil are cleanly drawn, and the narrator even tells us the moral of the story.

Mother of Mourning promises a truly original Dark Souls tale, free from the gravity of that game trilogy’s characters and events, connected to the series only by shared thematic concerns: the magic of souls warmed by a world-sustaining flame, the crumbling kingdoms and accursed undead produced by the flame’s fading, and the powerful adventurers who seek to reignite the flame before the dark takes over. Then, there’s the most important shared theme of all: warriors seeking comfort in the embrace of a beautiful woman.

In this new take on Dark Souls, the Knights of Mourning quest for the lost soul of the Mother of Lilies. The Mother was a hero of a past age, but is now a holy relic-corpse guarded by the Knights. By returning her soul to her mortal remains, the Knights hope that the restored Mother can rekindle the fading flame and return their forsaken land to its past glory. Our protagonist is Lucadeus, a straight-as-an-arrow stoic knight who leads two companions on this quest that so many other knights have failed.

Tonally, Mother of Mourning distinguishes itself by emphasizing the horror and gore of Dark Souls, at the cost of de-emphasizing its quiet tragedy. This is most apparent in the treatment of the undead: rather than pitiable subjects doomed to slowly lose their sense of self, they are uniformly portrayed as hostile monsters to be righteously dispatched with bloody violence by non-undead knights. Although the story does eventually become critical of the Knights of Mourning’s reliance on heroic violence, the fundamentally monstrous nature of the undead, their eagerness to gruesomely attack any non-undead they meet, is never challenged. That concept shouldn’t work for me, but it does, thanks to Mother of Mourning’s greatest strength: the striking gothic horror artwork.

Maan House is primarily a horror illustrator, and he brings an unsettling terror to the monsters beyond what is ever present in the games, whose art direction is guided by Miyazaki’s concern for dignity and beauty. House’s monsters play on the primal visual fears of a predator’s gaze and a mouth that’s showing too many teeth, especially when attached to something that’s shaped like a human. That sounds simple, but it’s executed well enough to make me seriously consider the limitations of Miyazaki’s direction.

In general, Mother of Mourning is at its strongest when it allows the illustration, the color, and the panel design to communicate meaning without being crowded by text. The action is sometimes a little overindulgent in hyperviolence, but it flows propulsively from panel to panel, creating dramatic moments of tension and release beyond what the Dark Souls staple of “two hits and a dodge roll” can achieve. There’s strong contrast between dark stippled shadows and bold splashes of color: the green and purple of the ruined present, the red and orange of action scenes, and the yellow of the legendary past. Even in that golden age, the shadows always loom, threatening to swallow the light that the Mother of Lilies fought so hard to preserve.

The third issue is my favorite for how effectively its coloring and panel design contrasts the ruined present with the legendary past. Mother of Mourning emphasizes that history repeats itself, but also gets worse and worse each time. The current-day Knights of Mourning fight the same great monster that the Mother of Lilies did, and they are driven to precisely mirror the stories they so revere, but in a more dilapidated and darkly-lit monster’s lair. Even the monster’s coloring suggests that she has lost vitality over time. The Knights might be able to defeat this villain, but in the long arc of history, the darkness is winning.

The third issue also introduces the disarmingly bright blue of the Mother’s soul, reminiscent of the sorceries in Demon’s Souls. Through color alone, the comic communicates the overwhelming power of the Mother’s light, the only thing capable of lightening the shadows that otherwise dominate each page. Immediately, all the sacrifices of the Knights are justified. The Mother is different from everything else in the world, and maybe she really can save it.

We don’t review comics very often here at Gamesline, so let me close with a prescription for how to read comics. It’s really easy to glide quickly from panel to panel, reading the text boxes and skimming the images. But it takes an enormous amount of labor to make a single page of a comic, and it’s always worth your time to slow down and really digest what’s happening in each panel. Mother of Mourning is not very impressive as a read-the-text story, but as a series of sequential horror illustrations it’s a rewarding experience.

The post Dark Souls: Mother of Mourning Review — A Monster to Fear appeared first on Gamesline.

We’re back with another somewhat regular episode of Unlimited Rail Works! Sans John, Rose has been rewatching some isekai of yore, Maverick has been rocking with Science Saru, and Elvie checked out the retro Red River while revisiting some old faves.

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

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

The post Unlimited Rail Works Episode 142: Summer Vacation is Over appeared first on Gamesline.

John and Crystal ease in with news about the bewildering VR remake of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies. Then, we fill out on-mic The 9 Games That Shaped Who I Am, a recent games-listing trend that asks us not merely to consider what games are good, but to look deep into ourselves and connect who we are to the games we have played.

The 9 games that shaped John are:

The 9 games that shaped Crystal are:

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

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

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You can also join our Discord channel at gamesline.chat!

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

Edited by Crystal

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 108: The 9 Games That Shaped Who I Am appeared first on Gamesline.

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The post John Messes with the Spyro the Dragon RetroAchievements Revision w/ Rose & Lily appeared first on Gamesline.

Violence is a dominant means in fiction, where conflict is a fundamental need. Force is certainly not the only resolution, but frequently, if there is an evil king, in an evil castle, in the evil lands where everyone is conveniently just so evil, there’s probably going to be a sword to swing, and a throat to cut. Violence in video games is a common means to an end—one could say the default, by most standards. Unless the game is specifically designed around it, no, you cannot talk to these creatures; you must super shotgun, chain dash, ice grenade, meat hook, chainsaw, rocket launcher, rocket launcher, rocket launcher, etc. There are many theories as to why this is, but certainly a contributing factor is immediate visual and mechanical appeal. Violence is flashy, fast, visceral, and many other ten-dollar game review words.

Nowhere is more apparently indulgent in the power fantasy of violence than the AAA gaming space. Space marines were especially popular for a time; proud soldiers who exist in omnipotent armor tear through disgusting foreign “xenos” and this is the way things are, spoken uncritically with lesser or greater levels of self-awareness. This was replaced in time with the morally grey dad: a choleric older gentleman who can only seem to resolve his problems with a .44 magnum and a drinking problem—trying to justifiably deal with the loss of his daughter/wife/dog/car. This also came to a point of saturation in which people could see it for the trope it is, and grow tired of it.

In all these stories, violence is expected, justified. It fulfills a reactionary belief in the healing power of destroying your enemies before they can deliver the same unto you. In the revenge fantasy, they have already wronged you once, making you a perfectly justified force of violent righteousness. Such violence in turn comes to reinforce the already violent cultural norm which walks hand in hand with performative, reactionary masculinity. 

“Protect what is yours; destroy what threatens your way of life.”

The unsophisticated and one-dimensional violence of such works breeds the counterpoint video game. Stories where the entire thesis is about the unproductive destruction that is murder. What began as deconstruction, has in turn become just as common and as stale a trope as violence in the first place. A game where the character all but stares into the camera, realizing that the people they deliver violence unto are just like them, heavily saturate the same space as the righteous violence.

It’s easy to hate this kind of thing. Making a game where it is fun to shoot someone in the head with a sniper rifle while an impact font “you are a bad person” burns in on the screen, only gets so far as an examination of violent behavior. A game where violence is fun yet discouraged is annoying when anyone with problem-solving capacity can understand that violence is the only method of resolving problems when programmed that way. My irritation at games like Off calling me a bad person for committing violence—the only solution the game affords you—would not be quite so pointed if there were any other way.

Violence is meaningful when presented as a choice; one you’re making with intention. As much as Kojima receives—for good reason—a massive amount of criticism, I’ve always been impressed by the degree with which violence is a negotiated action in his works. Shooting someone in the head is always an option, frequently a convenient one, but it’s almost always just that—an option. Death Stranding shows us how easily choices can be reweighted. Violent options are given in spades yet I used virtually none of them. The inconvenience of dealing with my bloody aftermath was just not worth it. Rather than being as easy as I was used to death being, with pacifism being something of a challenge run, it was interesting to see the script flipped; killing someone being such a harrowing act that I screeched in terror if someone jumped out in front of my truck.

We’ve seen the opposite side of this coin articulated with much more bluntness, one frequently more evident in indie and lower budget titles. The disempowerment simulator, manifesting typically as horror games and other pointed-message games. Games like Pathologic come to mind, where an attempt to be an action hero is met by seven people beating you to death while you clutch a six-round firearm. The flipping of the script feels contemplative by comparison; suddenly, you are the victim of circumstance, and the forces of righteous indignation are no longer on your side. You scavenge, you survive, and you watch as the forces which would victimize you only seem to grow in strength. Yet, in just as much an extreme, it too can become tedious.

My feelings on this matter are complicated. I am often repulsed by the indulgence in the simplistic conservative violence which many games present as uncritically as any other hegemony-approved ideological framework. I’ve reached a point where the heroic action man genre of military shooter only disgusts me. In a world where I can see all too real images of genocide and death, I fail to find the heroism–the catharis–in any of this. At a certain point, such games are yet another recruiting arm for the military industrial complex and fuel for its resultant self-justification.

Just the same, I frequently utter my annoyance with games which seek to make you small and disempower you. I am already disempowered, doing my best in a world which wants me to feel small, unconnected, and constantly under pursuit by shadow people in my mysteriously red-lit apartment. A game can receive critical acclaim for its removal of the power fantasy, for its commentary on the nature of strength, and I am left feeling nothing. My eyes roll at stories with moralistic blanket statements about the perverting nature of violence, especially when the people who applaud such stories tend to feel substantially less of inequity’s boots than I do. 

Sometimes, I think this is a me problem: I’m some kind of indoctrinated violence pervert. Clearly, something wrong has happened in my brain to make me desire violent resolutions to life’s problems. Catharsis, in this way, evades me. Just as often, however, I felt anger, a resentment for people who endorse a status quo that may not be physically violent, yet still reeks of blood. 

Such thoughts stuck with me. I struggled with the feeling of cognitive dissonance that comes from enjoying violent entertainments, while immediately cringing at what such entertainments endorsed. Does enjoying the mechanical act of putting a bullet in someone need to carry your soul as a price tag? Does espousing non-violence need to come with an inherent acceptance for the way things are?

Metal-Jacketed Body Farmer

Armored Core 6 is not a game where you get to be a pacifist (okay, except like maybe the one time, but who is going to spare Swinburne, are you fucking kidding me?) You are an AC pilot and, as such, a murderer. You are a war opportunist, killing for credits. The most heinous act you can imagine is ultimately just part of the job.

All of Armored Core 6 is couched in what one could loosely call a power fantasy. As the pilot of a monolithic steel icon of death, rare is the occurrence which meaningfully threatens you. Most casualties tend to be MTs—the AC’s less glamourous, less armored, and less deadly cousin. You destroy these by the dozens in salvos of missile fire on the way to more “mechanically interesting” targets. Yet, even as I repeated the missions through the game’s three routes, I was fascinated by how differently these engagements felt.

Your first playthrough is–even if you attempt for better–the most corporate-controlled route, with minimal options to deviate from the script. On subsequent new game plus routes, previously hidden options present themselves. In the third, and typically final, route, the status quo of the original story shakes itself further and further apart. You are given the option to shirk the corporate factions altogether, betraying and breaking ties where necessary, before finally going MIA. Your protagonists forge an alliance with a predominantly metatextual AI. Through its procedure, it comes up with what it imagines to be the best possible ending, one which kills most named characters, and leads to a new state of being for humanity. Even it, in the end, is an authority you must shirk. 

Killing for a corporation feels fundamentally different than killing for an underdog, or even for yourself. The Rubicon Liberation Front, when acting as your opposition, frequently makes calls to your humanity, demanding justification for why you kill them for nothing but money. For an empathetic player, these certainly sting; but given the elevator pitch of the game, you take them on the chin and keep going. Engaging in corp-on-corp warfare often has them making yips of audacity: how dare you bite the hand that feeds? Killing for an AI feels like an optimization game; ones must become zeroes; it’s the only way to avoid a worse death in the future. 

One path feels like fighting a hopeless battle against insurmountable odds, in the faintest, dimmest hope of making a better future; the other like being another firearm for a jackbooted authority. It impresses upon me what I’ve come to see as a truth to the nature of conflict: all violence is not born equally. When the Rubicon Liberation Front fights, their violence is born out of desperate necessity, to protect the only home they’ve ever known. When the corporations fight, they battle to strip-mine a planet of a living and thinking resource to continue fueling a needless capitalistic forever war. When the Planetary Closure Administration fights, they fight as authoritarian thugs, even the worldbuilding of how their firearms work reinforces a belief that they will always be firing from upon high, and come crashing down the moment something stands at eye level.

Armored Core 6 does not advocate an idealistic platitude that all violence is unilaterally bad. I think its story simply understands that systems which inflict violence—and this includes the bloodless political violence of authorities—are devoid of humanity. When survival is on the line, violence becomes a necessity, especially when the political position of your opponent requires your death. Someone feeding on mealworms while being shelled from orbit need not tolerate a lecture on how their violence is unattractive or incapable of changing minds—clearly, the minds have already been made. The violence of an authority which can mark you a persona non grata, bloodless depersoning and disenfranchising, yet it is just as murderous as a gun barrel to the head, and it is an aggression which often comes first. The unattractiveness of retaliatory violence should then be understood as a product of necessity; they simply cannot build towers as high as their opposition—it was never allowed.

There is additional textual commentary on this when you realize that options to work for the underdog were obfuscated from you, only made available in those new game plus playthroughs. By the achievement percentages on Steam, we can see a substantial portion of players did not complete this journey; they followed orders, and let Rubicon burn. Frequently, people do what the natural curvatures of inertia prime them to do–taking the easiest path. People do the work of monsters because better options did not come intuitively, or were made inapparent. In this, the game seems to believe, “I was just following orders” is a phrase uttered by cowards, unwilling to find a way. The simplest path is walking forward when you are told to, unwilling or unable to make choices for yourself. Even if the most individualistic path kills the most, it is a choice, not death born of passivity.

This is the element I find most compelling about AC6: the violence is never optional. You must kill; but it is the why which makes you. Every route features the death of named characters, some of whom you might be quite fond of. Conflict and the differences of ideology will cause bodies to crash against one another time and time again. Some labor against you for simple greed or pride; while others fight you because they do not believe your dream is possible. To many, whatever heaven you attempt to construct will only be their hell.

You are denied a clean answer, one which perfectly saves everyone you wish to save. It is your answer. The blood on your hands is yours to decide, but there will be blood nonetheless. Choosing to stand perfectly still only makes you an ideal tool for the one who wishes to wield you.

Morality’s Firing Solution

The power fantasy of being a moral arbiter is not new to video games. RPGs have long lost their monopoly on deciding if people live or die. The amount of leash a game gives you to be a monster has an immense amount of flexibility depending on what game we’re talking about. I’ve complained before about the binarism of morality and the seemingly unslakable need to paint options morally black or white. Evil red-flavoured morality for boys and good blue-flavoured morality for girls, etc. Yet, here, I speak specifically on the tendency for morally grey stories to paint all sides as equally monstrous in their magnitudes.

A morally grey story frequently has an obligation to make sure you understand that the people fighting for freedom might be “fucked up” to make their retaliatory violence appear more morally nuanced. A grievance I have with efforts to peddle an “emotionally mature” story is that they frequently need to paint the downtrodden as just as deserving of retaliation as the people they fight back against. Worse, when war is depicted with no victims, and the world simply becomes a conflict of factions devoid of people. 

I appreciate then that Armored Core 6 allows for people victimized by the way things are to fight back without having a morality fairy in your head wondering “ah… aren’t we just as bad as the people we’re fighting?” I say now what might be a contentious opinion, but I’m tired of stories which feel the need to undercut their own morality in the name of alleged equality. It might seem morally nuanced, but you’re only making excuses for why the oppression was valid. An angry person might be frightening, but you don’t get a license to kill just because you’re scared. While fighting alongside the Rubicon Liberation Front, it’s hard to feel mercy for the people who gleefully shoot civilians defending their homes from the safety of their $75,000,000,000 death machine. Even then, the status quo destroyed Rubicon before it was lit aflame.

What value does it add to a story, to scold people driven to endure the unendurable? Sometimes, the fairest thing you can do is simply comment that the scale was never balanced to begin with. I understand, of course, that such decisions come from higher up, from people uncomfortable with games having any beliefs at all, but it’s the only way I can be comfortable with such stories.

Armored Core 6 understands that violence is not glamorous. Death is ugly and it comes in screams and gunfire; war is filled with people who don’t get a moment to have a catchy one-liner before dying. But, depending on the route, that same violence can be cathartic. I’ve said it before: the aesthetics of death and violence are loud. Blood is bright. Some emotions are too loud to whisper. A story where a violent regime is overthrown by the downtrodden is not the same power fantasy where you uncritically protect the status quo. Both stories are violent, yet that violence is not equal.

I am a pacifist. I love violent media. This is a contradiction which exists within many people. I adore the sensation of cathartic violence. Being able to see the highest possible authority and having the fictional catharsis of saying no, to have the power to refuse, is liberating.

In times of great moral turbidity, it’s understandable to hunger for stories where good and bad are easily demarcated, but I think for many, that is a privilege. As someone who is frequently victimized by the status quo, my expressions of directed frustration are not compatible with a desire for life to get simpler. Life, unfortunately, is complex. Morality is always a consideration when interfacing with other people, and this should carry over to our interactions with stories. We must ultimately ask if this morality is simply easy and convenient, or if it represents what we actually believe about the world. Violence can be fun, but understand too if that desire causes you to encode odious beliefs in the name of your pleasure.

I would not want violence to depart from the media I engage with. Games which allow for non-violent problem resolution are welcome, but violence too has its place. I simply ask for a more nuanced portrayal of the nature of violence, of its necessities, and the way this reflects the tumultuous world we live in. I would ask that we understand that violence does not manifest exclusively in glory kills and quick-time-event dismemberment; it manifests too in policy, in culture, and in norms. I would ask that we do not equivocate the violence of the oppressed with the violence of the oppressor.

For the audience, all I can ask is this: if you must live life as a bullet, be one that always knows its trajectory.

The post Deathmachine: Living as a Bullet appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s time for another episode of the Gamesline Podcast. This week John and Lorelai sit down to talk about the Nintendo Direct before discussing the return of so many classic games they grew up with coming back in both new and old packages. They also spend some time talking about the games based on games that are sometimes also in games. John also wanted to talk about Granblue Fantasy Relink and Mario+Rabbids while Lorelai played Fire Emblem and the Wo Long 2 demo and they have thoughts to share.

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

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

Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 107: Old School Gaming appeared first on Gamesline.