Haha…only 4 months later
So I initially planned this feature as being a thing I do every week as a sort of check-in, and that’s absolutely what I want to do with it, as a means of keeping me writing and engaging outside the medium of twitter threads and one-off pops. However if you know me, you also know I am, like, full of a sickness in practically every way you can think of, so my body either gets in the way of doing something like this, or my mind does with incredible leaps of logic and reasoning that would confound most.
Generally speaking, this is why I find it hard to stick to the titular “routine”, because I never know when I’m actually going to be doing something, therefore establishing a negative loop in my brain of either pushing through to do something (and be punished for it later), or not feeling the capability of doing it (thus causing waves of “I should have been able to do it…”).
There’s also the endless problem of concepts that are easy to convey within the limited medium of a social media post where it feels more off-the-cuff, that end up feeling self-fellating when extended into the longer format of an article. It’s tough thinking about this kind of thing all the time, guys; I wish I could be one of those journalists who just thinks everything they push out is god’s gift and they have no recourse, it seems like an incredible existence.
Humanity has always been forced to grapple with the forces of entropy in its various forms, however, and I would be remiss not to continue to fight when I can, against both of these outcomes.
Anyways gaming.
Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth
When they made Final Fantasy VII Remake I was blown away by how they managed to contemporize one of the most “of-the-era” games of all time, and Rebirth absolutely continued to impress.
I think the one word I would use to describe Rebirth is “Maximalism”. Everything is cranked up to the highest it could possibly be, and everything is so confident about being the most, that the “most” becomes the default. Even in spite of its by-the-numbers open world, Rebirth manages to inject the personality of its characters and world state every step of the way, making an experience that demonstrates why people have been so obsessed with this specific entry of the series since its original release back in ‘97.
I could just go off endlessly about, well, basically anything. Yuffie? How about Yuffie?
Yuffie is incredible. I think every character has received a glow-up in the remake series (Barret my beloved), but Yuffie is an incredible stand-out. There’s something just deeply wrong with her. At every turn. She has every mental illness possible, she’s going to die if she can’t do a jumping jack every 3 seconds. There’s a sequence of the game where you’re separated from Yuffie, Barret and Tifa, and you get to see a story on the walls told entirely through her cartoon scribbles as you catch up to them. There are cutscenes where characters are mourning their lost loved ones, and you’ll see them crying in 4K definition, with Yuffie behind them doing flips and falling over and shit. It’s insane. There’s something deeply wrong with her!!! I love her!!!
They made the Rufus Welcoming Ceremony into a multi-hour epic where Cloud Strife has to get a ragtag group of soldiers together, optimize their formations, and perform a rhythm game sequence on live television. It was just a button press minigame in the original!!!!! As soon as this sequence ends, you have to do a card game tournament on a boat where Red XIII pretends to be a normal guy to enter! The contestants include insane Remake OC Chadley, and a Robot! Sure! Fuck it! They just couldn’t stop themselves from cooking!
I think the moment I sat there like, god damn I just have to respect this game no matter what, was when I was cleaning up sidequests near the end of the game, and I was told I had to go pick some mushrooms for a quest. I went up to the mushrooms, and a tutorial popped up for an entirely new bespoke minigame for picking these mushrooms up, that existed just for this one singular quest. To pick four mushrooms!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have to stan! I have to stan this! What else am I supposed to do in the face of such flexing! In an era where most games have shown you everything you’ll be doing within the first couple hours! 70 hours in!
All that said I wasn’t huge on the ending, since it felt a lot more subdued than the crazy Kingdom Hearts energy of Remake, but it really didn’t matter! Every other moment I spent with this game was pure joy (don’t do the Chadley mini-games on hard), and I cannot recommend it enough. Genuinely, it is so beautiful.
Cait Sith, they still kept in Cait Sith, in his beautiful perfect form, fake gag death and all.
Rise of the Ronin
I don’t have much to say about this one since I’m only about halfway through it but, I am really baffled by the coverage of this game, though I do still find it pretty mid in a lot of respects (mid still means good! It just means it’s not a crazy barn burner).
Before my insane tirade, let me explain this game roughly to you.
Rise of the Ronin is a game by Team Ninja, and presumably from the same team that developed the Nioh games. I’m assuming this because Wo Long only just released last year, and was said to have primarily been a project that they put newer developers on to get a handle on their systems (which makes a lot of sense in hindsight). It’s an open world game, but it’s an older style of open world, very reminiscent of the late Xbox 360 era Assassin’s Creed games. It takes place in the Bakumatsu era of Japan, where the Black Ships (foreigners) are there in full force, and various parties are clashing over what the future of Japan should be.
You play as one of two player-created characters who are “Blade Twins”, fighters raised from childhood with a fighting style that hinges upon working in tandem. The second player-created character becomes your Devil May Cry Vergil-style rival who you’ll fight intermittently throughout the game. This concept specifically, I am a big fan of! Most of the narrative is focused on navigating through all these glamorized historical events with historical characters such as Ryoma Sakamoto, while trying to find and figure out why your Blade Twin is an American cyborg ninja now.
For Team Ninja’s first open world game of any kind, it’s pretty decent! The map isn’t going to blow you away with its high fidelity 300 million dollar budget wasted on stupid fucking poetry trees and Mongolian relics plundered off their corpses as a faux masquerade of “cultural respect”- oh sorry I got distracted thinking about something else. I think it still looks nice is my point, and it runs at like 100 fps which is extremely welcome for a game so focused on things like frame-perfect parry timing and shooting people with your gun while you ride on a horse.
All in all, if you’re a Nioh fan you might be slightly disappointed by the lack of build and enemy diversity, but if you’re also an old Assassin’s Creed fangirl like me, then you might go ohhhh I love climbing around, I love grappling hook, I love casual stealth where I just stab a guy really satisfying like unh unh unh unh. Also, you can play as a woman! You wouldn’t know that from any of the pre-release coverage at all! Hell, I pay super close attention to this stuff and I didn’t even know until the day I got the game in the mail! Please be better about this stuff! People love to play as women!
So, crazed ranting time.
The reviews for this game kept referring to it as “Ghost of Tsushima at home” or some other variance of that conceit and I am baffled by this in every respect. I’m sorry to be a hater, but Ghost of Tsushima is one of the most asinine video games I have ever played in my life. If you have kept up with me, you know how I felt about the insane flashbacks, the murderous foxes, and the incredible Digital Deluxe, so you know I’m a bit of a hater.
Ignoring any statements I want to make about how the combat is actually thought about to any meaningful degree in comparison to Ghost of Tsushima, even while being a watered down variant of Nioh, or how the open world is at least fun to traverse with actual cities to climb around instead of endless post-apocalyptic shanty towns because apparently you can actually make an open world without wide expanses of absolutely nothing and no-one, even when in residential areas; it’s just disingenuous to both games to compare the two so flippantly. They are different games going for different things entirely, and seeing this type of consistent rhetoric from people allegedly attempting to do “critique” of something is just disappointing. Please use your mind to determine why you don’t like something instead of just mindlessly praising that which has the most money, or highest marketing budget. Thank You.
Also every game should copy Rise of the Ronin’s fashion system, which separates armor pieces down to individual parts like Undergarments, Undershirts, Belts, Gloves, etc. It’s really good, and the fact you can just set up multiple sets instead of it being tied to the armor pieces you have currently equipped…why isn’t everyone doing this?
Umineko When They Cry
A lot of people seem to be surprised I haven’t read Umineko before, and honestly, fair. I do feel like I position myself as some sort of Visual Novel aficionado, when in reality I’m just a sicko who loves Type-Moon and serialized fiction which just happens to take form in Visual Novel formats in the current gaming climate. This is the real reason I play gacha games, if you thought it was for the gameplay or beautiful women, I’m sorry to tell you this, but I’m just there to get my persistent world state that I get to see unfold gradually over the years as the developers mature and change…
I’ve tried to read Umineko several times, but I think there was something about whatever translation I used, and the presentation of just a Whole Ass Wall Of Text that was just putting me off every single time. It also didn’t help I think I learned about it long after everyone else had, so I was being exposed to the classic folly of only knowing a work through its fandom (which when one doesn’t fully understand the minutia of, can be incredibly frustrating to be overwhelmed with).
This time, however, I went through and did all the crazy mods that alter the TL slightly and add rain effect and voice acting that I saw a friend on Twitter do and hell, I read the whole first episode in 2 days.
I think Umineko, so far, is really cool! I really like the way everything is slow burn and specifically focused around gradually explaining not only every character’s personality, but also their motivations and reasons for existing in the current situations. I can already see how they’re going to alter these perceptions, or work with them over time to gradually unfurl the mysteries at the core of the narrative. I’m sure I “don’t even know yet” (as I like to say to people about my favorite works when they engage with them), but the whole package just exudes the type of confidence I love to see from a story.
Specifically, I really like when you finish the first episode, and you get a sort of meta/detached interlude where they properly introduce the main character of Beatrice. The shift to complete over-the-top comedy and mystique is really really good, and I always adore it when a work takes itself so seriously that it knows that not everything has to be serious, and that the format of an experience like Umineko allows the player to know more than characters should, but that fun can be had with just saying “fuck it” and letting the characters just talk about whatever.
Also Battler! Battler is one of the best protagonists I’ve ever seen! The way his empathy shines through in every situation…his goofiness…his internal monologues about how he seems to be the only human being in his entire family who realizes misogyny exists…man. My girlfriend told me that he “only gets better as the story goes” and that intimidated me so much, because I already love him. I’m excited to learn what the deal with all these insane women I’ve seen on Tumblr over the years is, and I hope that I come out the other end of this story as appreciative of it as it’s already made me.
Yeah…
I have been playing a lot more as you imagine but let’s just end it there for now. I would actually like to use this time to say hey, if you want me to play any specific games I haven’t mentioned like, genuinely shout them out to me. I am always ready to try most things generally speaking, and I especially love learning what others love about things that I’ve maybe either missed or written off.
As always, thank you for reading my ramblings, and I hope to be back doing this again sooner, rather than later.
