Well, it’s been another week…and yet again there is a slew of games I have been working my way through. Don’t worry, I am still chipping away at Ender Lilies like I said I would, and I think I’ll have something more to say about it at another time, when I’m actually properly past the 1/3rd way marker I’ve stalled at before. For now, let’s talk about Garten of Banban.
I haven’t been playing the games myself, instead I was watching MandaloreGaming’s streams from a few months ago of the entire Garten of Banban series. Up until now there have been four releases in this mascot horror franchise of questionable sincerity, and each one has been even more of a doozy than the last. What started as an obvious capitalization upon Five Nights at Freddy‘s lore, and the format of all too many YouTuber pandering horror experiences, has grown into something that is… unfathomable. You don’t know what true horror is until you watch Opila Birds racing each other against evil Banban… you don’t know what to make of the messy break up of Nabnab (the evil Banban?) and Nabnaleena… you don’t know why they made a Skyrim joke at the start of a truly insane sequence inside of the Stingermobile (Stinger Flynn’s beloved car).
I will not talk about Banban anymore. I’m so sorry, but I’m just so endlessly fascinated by it. Why is the current Steam page for Banban 5 devoid of anything other than a cookie cutter description copied from Banban 1, but the steam page for Banban 6 has a custom description and also more trailers and screenshots? What’s going on? I don’t know. I really, really don’t know. Just look at the baby Opila Bird and maybe we can all calm down and become rational.

Okami HD

I’m a huge fan of Hideki Kamiya’s work –I bought a Wii U solely for Bayonetta 2 and Wonderful 101 for god’s sake– but for some reason I never played Okami properly until this year. When the HD remaster I’m currently most of the way through came out a few years ago, I made it a dungeon or two in before getting distracted every single time. While that is definitely in part to the slower, and more old fashioned linear Zelda-like format of the game making it less penetrable than a shiny new release, I mostly blame my own hang-ups when it comes to engaging with a lot of games.
I have this weird idea of an “ideal time” to do something I’ve noticed over the years. There’s the sort of fatigue a lot of people talk about when it comes to playing a lot of video games, but honestly it’s never been that, it’s always more-so been focused around the idea that I need to be “Fully On” to enjoy a specific game that I want to give an extra degree of respect and focus for. It’s such a weird vibe that I’ve tried to defeat over the years but I don’t know if I ever will. It feels that hardwired. It’s actually why I haven’t started Baldur’s Gate 3 yet! A game I know for a fact I will enjoy in many respects and will be able to casually play! I know a few others have talked about this phenomenon striking them as well so I don’t feel completely insane, but man I would love to just dig into all the various things I know for a fact are all the way up my alley.
Like Okami! Okami is great! I was always a big fan of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, and it’s kind of funny to see just how much that game was cribbing off Okami (while obviously developing its own takes on certain things). The game oozes style and cohesion in a way that games as a whole have generally gotten away from. Even when it’s dumping a brand new mechanic out of nowhere 35 hours in, and even when that mechanic will only be used once or twice, everything is crafted in such a way that all feels as it should be. It’s actually kind of funny to think about how the recent God of War reboot is more of an Okami clone than anything else, but where Okami is confident in its constant escalation of excess, God of War represents the sort of needless mechanical saturation that has become all too common. All I’m saying is Amaterasu did not need to craft the epic Dog Collar with 8.567% poison resistance to defeat Orochi!!!!
It’s really cool how Okami feels perfectly in-line with its Japanese mythological aesthetic in basically every way. The way it ends one story, only to open anew with a rotating cast, creating a grand canon to the legend of Amaterasu the same way there’s a bunch of stories about Momotaro or any other folklore hero. If I had one complaint, it would be the simplicity of the combat given that this is a Kamiya joint, though at the same time it’s still leagues above any Zelda game or most action/adventure games of the era. I just think Amaterasu should’ve had a Stinger, but at least she has Royal Guard, so I can’t be too upset. We are truly suffering in an era where Hideki Kamiya has been kept out of the director’s chair for a decade, and I will never forgive Phil Spencer for his crimes of cancellation, no matter how mid Scalebound actually looked; nor Platinum for locking him up in business meetings for years and then keeping him on a no-compete clause leash for the foreseeable future.
Crymachina

I tried to play Crystar a few times when it came out because several people in my life told me that it was “kusokino” (a concept wherein a bad game is still full of insanely sick moments that elevate it above its general mediocrity). Unfortunately, I actually kept running into technical issues with it crashing repeatedly, so I wasn’t exactly up for persisting through said mediocrity for the moments of excellence that allegedly exist within. Crymachina is a spiritual successor to Crystar however, and I knew several people who were swearing up and down by it so I decided to properly commit myself this time and, yeah I do in fact get it.
The gameplay of Crymachina is nothing to write home about: it’s a basic third-person action game with hack n’ slash ideology and a fairly basic loop. You’ll go into a zone, run through with light platforming and puzzle solving, fight a mid boss, and then go home. There are three playable characters, who each represent the classical melee trifecta of lance, sword, and axe, and each has their own special type of ranged attacks to complement said weapon. There’s nothing deeply compelling about the format, but it is still leagues above the deluge of mediocre musou games that we’ve apparently been forced to suffer through because Omega Force decided to stop making decent Dynasty Warriors games for whatever reason.
Really, the appeal of Crymachina lies in its storytelling and ideas around really liking NieR: Automata and wanting to go a step beyond and do proper novel character work around machine-based lifeforms, rather than just positing the default quandaries of the genre. Almost everyone in this world is female presenting, and while I have my biases for sure, it’s just nice to actually see a game be so openly lesbian like this. Two of the main characters, Ami Shido and Mikoto Sengiku, are just dating each other. Like, they literally talk the exact way that I interact with my own girlfriends and it’s kind of mind blowing to see this properly represented in a game, especially when so many queer experiences in fiction are either (understandably) forced to be either self-realization stories, or treated as a twist. Many of the conversations in the game revolve around discussing problematic relationships with families, and wanting to find a new way of having a family that doesn’t feel tied to genetic or nuclear formats that society tries to entangle everyone within. There’s a specific line early in the game where Ami jokingly says something about how having a bad relationship with your father must assign you as “more human” in the eyes of the machines controlling their existence that really struck me with a feeling of “finally, someone gets it”.
When it comes to qualms, I’m really only frustrated by a lack of conveyance at times, which was something I ran into with Trinity Trigger (a game also published by FuRyu earlier this year). There are a bunch of bonus combat encounters and hidden stages you can access, but they don’t tell you what level range you should be at when going in, other than that “powerful enemies await.” These optional areas are exactly that, entirely optional, but at the same time it can be frustrating to think you might be okay to just head on in, only to be met with a one-shot and instant game over that resets your progress in the stage. It might sound exceedingly frustrating, but it’s honestly more baffling to me than anything else. Trinity Trigger did the exact same thing, where you could find super tough enemies scattered around meant to be tackled later, and it just strikes me as such a weirdly specific design fetish to have. I’m all for reasons to go back, but you should probably tell me when I’m actually supposed to go back, or I might not want to go at all.
Again though, the narrative of Crymachina is so novel, and everything about its aesthetics are so beautiful, that I’m basically willing to ignore any of its flaws to sing its praises. It’s the type of game I want to see all the time, the type of story that feels unique, yet is clearly driven by other works that its creators loved. Mikoto’s main character bit is that she’s a film bro, but in-between quoting standard flicks like Pulp Fiction and Shutter Island, she pulled a recommendation for 2014’s truly awful I, Frankenstein and I was just flabbergasted. They know what they’re cooking over there at FuRyu, and between this, enjoying Trinity Trigger in spite of its failures, and having Caligula Effect 2 on my to-do list, I’m optimistic about the types of games they’ll put out in the future.
Lethal Company

I always wanted to get into games like Phasmophobia because I love seeing the way that experiences can so wildly vary from person to person, and the format of these minimalist multiplayer experiences are incredibly conducive to that sort of innovation. Unfortunately, I was never really able to get anyone to play that, or any of the various games like it that have popped up across the last decade or so, but finally, finally, I have gotten an entire squad that’s into Lethal Company going and it’s so much fun to just fool around in.
I don’t have much to say about this that you probably haven’t heard from everyone else in the world, so I’ll just say that if you’re presented with an opportunity to get a group together, you really should. Developer Zeekerss has really made a game with such a beautifully perfect loop that I’m really excited to see grow and evolve over time. There are already tons of mods available that range from balance tweaks to entire mechanical overhauls that really help sweeten the deal. I think especially with this format, by the time this game is “fully released”, it will be a really incredible thing to keep on the back burner in case the discord chat is in the mood for something, but doesn’t quite know what.