Before you is a quote from a Magic: the Gathering card. It’s stuck with me for a while. It’s a little inelegant, and I like that about it. More importantly, the quote really gets to the core of what I’m about. There’s something absolutely electric to me about a big ego. A villain, talking themselves up before a valiant hero laid low. A haughty quip barked in the heat of combat. A show of pride. I’ve been thinking about this little line of flavour text from a pretty-good counterspell released almost 15 years ago, as I revisit my time with R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 this year. 

Over the summer, Gamesline writer and my dear friend Crystal had agreed to a little rivalry with me. We took it seriously. I learned the curves along that seaport in Yokohama like the back of my own hand. In that, I found myself adopting a sort of persona. I was so taken with it all. Simulated sounds of tires squealing, the taillights of racers still ahead of you trailing into the night. The announcer telling you to “take care of this loser” when you’re encroaching on that coveted first place spot—is this guy playing favourites? How could I do anything but lean into it? 

“Try to keep up with me.” That was always the little jab I’d throw in when I cleared some time she’d sent me. You can imagine me wearing sunglasses and a cool bomber jacket, leaning against the hood of my car while I say it. That overconfident racecar hotshot personality I’d adopted gave me so much patience to stick out the struggle to improve at the game. That’s what I’m here to tell you about: in all pursuits, in every area of your life, you need to get more chuuni.

The Ride/The Objective

Ridge Racer Type 4 is not a game that came easy to me; my only previous experience with racing games was Mario Kart. Having to drift by taking my foot off the gas, leaning into a turn, and hammering back on while making arcane micro-adjustments to my turning angle and velocity was a challenge. Even more than that, the game hides its fastest cars behind flawless performances on the highest difficulty. You must trudge your way through failure. Even your own team’s coach will talk down to you, at best sheepishly admitting they don’t think you have a chance, but that it’d be cool for you to get second place. This game is tight; it won’t give you that fastest car for the final heat unless you place first in every race. Ridge Racer Type 4 will not concede to anything less than perfection.

Of course, this is exactly how a Souls game sets up its power fantasy. You are an undead. You will taste the sting of defeat, but you will come back as many times as it takes, and with great violence, overcome those barriers. To a player who believes in their potential and their capacity to learn, Dark Souls is a game that mostly asks for patience. Victory, I came to believe, was a natural result of my perseverance. I think this is what happened to me with Ridge Racer, too.

When you change how you see yourself, you change how you act. The games came naturally once I’d slipped into that state of mind. A boss fight I wasn’t making headway on was a dance to be learned. Can you really blame your dancing partner for staying on beat? Without ever really meaning to, I began to treat these fights as performances I was putting on. I did a bunch of grinding for a weapon I wouldn’t ever use but which would coat my character’s hand in a dark energy because it looked cool. Because the Ashen One, to me, should look cool. I ended up stopping in scenic spots to let my character rest her battered greataxe over her shoulder and take in the blood red solar eclipse.

There’s something meditative about crafting a persona here. The Chosen Undead, the Ashen One… the titles bestowed to the player seem to hold with them a great burden of duty. Dark Souls asks you to endure the struggle to be strong enough to fight tirelessly in a dying world, a world that itself has given up when you cannot. You leave behind a trail of bonfires, once sputtering, now kindled, as you travel through each corner of the world. Atop the High Wall of Lothric, there is a light that never goes out.

There’s an interesting comparison between my experiences with these two Souls games, which is in how my characters looked throughout each. Pictured above is my little Fallen Knight in Dark Souls III, but through my run of Dark Souls, I got very attached to the idea of playing a dexterity character and I really, REALLY liked the light roll. So I had to seek out, with some direction, the gear that would make that build work; I wore the Gold-Hemmed Robes and swung around the Uchigatana for most of the game. And as I trudged through the infamously disliked back half of Dark Souls wearing that ridiculous outfit that shows off the Chosen Undead’s… dark soles, I observed my patience wearing thin. 

My commitment to mastery of these systems waned when my character looked silly. Where death, to me, should feel like a provocation in these games, it started to feel like a joke I wasn’t in on. I did still think the game’s general sense of humor about some of its more “unfair” rooms was great, but the overall trend was I took Dark Souls less and less seriously, while my momentum through Dark Souls III felt boundless. It came as a shock how affecting it was, how much I needed to be sold on looking cool. Of course, maybe I should have known this would happen. 

Silhouette Dance

This feeling isn’t something I’m a stranger to. I love Monster Hunter, after all. I am at this point well acquainted with these sorts of action games in which you take down a monstrosity several orders of magnitude larger than you while dressed in your best threads. Playing so much of these games in multiplayer may have primed me to treat Dark Souls the same way. 

Through December of 2024, I’d played through Monster Hunter: World, and this year I was ready for Wilds to take me in for at least a couple scores of hours. Unfortunately, I was left disappointed by the structure of its open world. Wilds wants to make sure you’re absorbing its story, in a way that feels unusually intrusive. To me, these games exist as vehicles to explore neat little locales, fight some strange and interesting creature, do it with your friends, and of course, look cool in the process. They’re notorious for thin stories. Wilds was a shame, and I bounced off hard.

Truth be told, even Monster Hunter: World didn’t fully satisfy me. World’s iteration of the layered armor system, which allows a player to craft unique armor meant to be worn over your regular armor for cosmetic purposes, is held back until extremely late in the game. If you want to truly control your appearance, you have to finish the base game, its DLC, and work your way well into post-game content. I opted simply to disengage from optimizing my stats as a result. If I couldn’t cover up my mismatched armor sets, I decided they weren’t worth compromising my Swag, not even for best-in-slot skills. 

The darkness growing in my soul was dispelled by Dark Souls. Imagine getting to play a game with those more self-contained, discrete-yet-interwoven locales after the perfunctory open world of Wilds. Navigating the Undead Parish for the first time made me think again of learning the ins and outs of World’s Coral Highlands. That Fallen Knight armor stole my heart; I never took it off after obtaining it. We were, as the cycle dictates, So Fucking Back. I think this is why I felt so positively about these games, and about Dark Souls III in particular. It is not only tight action that matters to me. Perhaps one day I’ll have to replay Dark Souls with a strength build, to reappraise it as compared to Dark Souls III. What I found, with regards to my chuuni self-expression, was that getting the chance to look the part genuinely gave me the strength to play the part. The Nameless King never stood a chance.

Moving a couple steps to the left of Dark Souls, I also took the time this year to finish Hollow Knight. I’d tried it a long time ago, but couldn’t stick with it. I’d chalked it up to a metroidvania aversion. When Silksong’s release date was announced, I decided I’d give it one last shot to impress me. I would describe the combat of Hollow Knight as… functional. It gets the job done. Sometimes, like when fighting Nightmare King Grimm, it’s even fun! 

That’s not to say I hated Hollow Knight—I rocketed my way through roughly 107% of Hallownest in a few weeks— but my fun was had in exploration. It felt like there was always something new to see. I struggled to see the purpose in the “Soul” mechanic, whereby hitting enemies enough times fills a meter that you can expend to heal, if you commit to a few seconds of vulnerability. Outside of boss arenas, it turned almost every enemy into something tedious. Where Dark Souls made every stray hit from even the most unimportant jobber enemy important—a drain on a limited resource that you can’t restore between a bonfire and a boss fight—Hollow Knight erases that tension. Worse yet, many of the more difficult bosses solve the issue of the player having effectively unlimited healing by never giving you a window to heal! This is not a skill issue, really—I have nothing to prove to myself after beating almost everything the game had to offer outside of the last two pantheons—I just think that choosing to eschew Dark Souls inspiration by dropping estus was a mistake. 

But I’m avoiding saying what I really think. This has not been an article about how I think estus flasks are well-considered thus far. The real problem I have with Hollow Knight is that I look boring! The Vessel is cute, and this is something I will always value, but where is my flair for the dramatic? Every swing of the nail is so automatic, so instant. Minimally animated. Momentum in midair is almost perfectly controllable. My expectations for Silksong are high, because Hornet looks so fluid in combat. I was pretty jealous of her, getting to do her cocky little laugh while I quietly, expressionlessly weaved in and out of her attack range. It was bad enough to accidentally play Dark Souls in such a way that I forced myself to look bad for the efficacy of my build; perhaps worse was playing a game where I was represented by something that is visually and kinesthetically not far off from a couple of bounding boxes.

Move Me

At the absolute opposite end of the spectrum was Robot Alchemic Drive. I’ll be forthcoming: I had only a brief stint with it, streaming a decent chunk of the game for friends in a Discord server. I didn’t finish it, but I still feel I got a lot out of it. For those unfamiliar, Robot Alchemic Drive positions you as a young prodigy of a mech pilot, in charge of the operation of a top-secret superweapon built to fight off equally dangerous alien mechs that have suddenly invaded Earth. Or I suppose one specific prefecture in Tokyo, if we’re splitting hairs. 

The game actually had a boom in popularity last year, at least in my circles. People liked the awkward voice acting and silly characters. It’s true, Nanao is a treasure, but I want to talk about what interests me mechanically about it. See, this is not Armored Core. These are remote controlled mechs. The player, an individual separate from their war machine, is always vulnerable, always fighting the constraint of what their line of sight permits. You will have to reposition to the tops of tall apartment buildings to get a view of the action, and in doing so risk allowing your foes (or your own mech, if you’re not careful) to knock it out from under you. 

The way the camera doesn’t just move with the body you’re trying to control makes the game uniquely interesting to me, and then on top of that, the controls for the mech itself are clunky. You have to walk by individually commanding legs to lift, then releasing that tension to let them fall. You throw out jabs and hooks with fighting game quarter-circle and half-circle inputs on the joysticks. It takes real effort to tame the beast. It can feel like one of those funny physics games that are supposed to force you to look silly.

We know how I feel about looking silly—of course I took this as a challenge.

Because I played it for a Discord audience, I had a crowd to impress. Laying the other guy out in the dirt wasn’t all that was on my mind. The necessity to position the camera instilled a feeling in me that I was both an actor and a director. The game is equal parts execution and presentation. It really captures everything I’ve been talking about. Video games, as a medium, are subject to a degree of disconnect between a player’s mechanical inputs on a controller and the character’s motions. Button presses, joystick tilts, trigger pulls: all of these are converted into a character’s motions. This process is direct, and seamless enough that the mind can suspend disbelief. Your neural pathways learn that the B button is for rolling, and the right bumper is for your light attack. Such things become shorthand.

This process is disrupted by Robot Alchemic Drive, a game that widens the gap between player and actor. This, in place of a stern racing team coach, or a pit full of Bone Wheels, is the provocation Robot Alchemic Drive provides: a body that won’t listen. The mech’s brain lives severed from it. You could do something very impactful, thematically, with this sort of setup. This game is mostly interested in how cool kaiju battles are. RAD wants to be rad. The genius operator of a mysterious superweapon was another mask I was happy to wear for a little while.

With my challenge laid out for me, I observed how I felt playing the game. A victory was not enough. It had to be flashy. I needed a good view, and would often risk my own safety to get a little closer to the epicenter. If I saw my enemy giving off the telltale black smoke that signaled impending victory, I’d stop firing projectiles. I wanted them undone by my hand. Decisively. 

In my heart of hearts, I am a performer. I threw myself with abandon into my racing rivalry. I smirked to myself when the Vessel walked into an arena, seats crowded with bugs looking to see a good fight. Having others by my side when I would claim victory over the Capra Demon, or knock the evil mech of the week into the Pacific Ocean, was a catharsis amplifier. Even just for myself, I wanted to do things that were cool, that stirred my passions. I fell into it naturally. 

Nothing I do is really free from this urge—this article I’m writing could have been a top 10, and part of me does feel a little odd that none of my top 5 games of 2025 are even mentioned here. But I got this idea in my head and just… went for it. This was my Year of the Chuunibyou, and as a huge dweeb and a wannabe musician, I couldn’t settle for anything less than my all. If there’s anything I hope anyone takes away from this, it’s that taking yourself way too seriously, puffing out your chest, and acting like the hottest shit on planet Earth can be a lot of fun. Failure becomes less painful, and feels less permanent, when you develop a bit of a complex. It’s all part of your greater plan. Fixation on mastery and self-presentation isn’t a silver bullet for self-esteem issues, far from it. This is not a “fix your depression by repeating affirmations to yourself” article. At the risk of getting too personal, I simply think that if you’ve fought your way through hell, clawed out of it, the least you deserve is a cool sword. Failing that, a sense of pride isn’t so bad.

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 Obsession Is Good For You: A Selection Of Games I Enjoyed In 2025 — by Isabelle appeared first on Gamesline.

I am not immune to this kind of retrospective. This year has been a massive learning experience for me. I’ve started writing about video games beyond just talking at my friends about them; my novel, which sounded like an insane combination of words just a year ago, currently exceeds 100,000 words; I’ve made and kept a group of wonderful friends.

This is also the point where I begin reflecting on my relationship with media. My ruminations on media were extensive and my entire relationship with art has changed—or at least I’d like to believe. For a long time, I was a victim of my own bad habits: I would devour art. On the surface, that doesn’t sound bad. Devouring implies a ravenous appetite for sure, but devouring something can also imply appreciation, right? For me, I fear I would have to say no. Often, I felt like others were getting something out of this medium that I was not.

Watching my friends play video games, I was enamored with their greater sense of appreciation. They were not suffering from my own checklist-minded, objective-oriented approach to gaming. They lingered in these digital worlds, remaining for only as long as it pleased them to do so; the pleasures of the fantasy taking them to places unknown.

The change I wanted to manifest most in myself this year was to find the same sort of appreciation. This little hobby of mine isn’t food; it shouldn’t be something I suckle the bone marrow from until I’m satiated, moving ever onward to something else.

Put simply, I wanted to stop and smell the digital roses.

My success was mixed, if I’m honest. I tried many new games, and I had many new experiences. Some stuck with me, others I forgot shortly after playing them, surprising me when they reappeared in my 2025 Steam replay. But truthfully, it was never my intention to “remember everything.” I had only ever intended to find the things that mattered.

So, after this lengthy year, I have come up with something of a framework for myself, something for me to share with you; the journey I have been on this year, and many years before.

The conceit of video games which has resided in my mind and has colored the very framework of their existence.

Connecting a Dream and a Machine

The humble gameplay mechanic is, to many games, a skeleton which forms the foundation of the experience; the rules as the game—and to an extent you—understands them. The jump of the platformer, the inventory and resource management of survival horror, the spatial, projectile dance of the first-person shooter; these traits, where they exist, define the games attached to them. They are a series of personal choices defining the feeling behind the game’s actions. These decisions are the formation of a fantasy.

The fantasy of gaming is what drew you to it in the first place. A set of rules which enables you to experience things, internalize stories that aren’t possible or feasible in the real world; what it’s like to be an expert sword fighter, the leader of a solar empire, or an impossibly precise musician. A game designer dreams a dream and chooses to express it to an audience. When you and the game design are in sync—when you agree to the fantasy and its means of conveyance is well constructed—you feel the things the game intends. Sometimes, you transcend the dream and manage to find one of your own. A game’s successes or failures are determined by how well it manages to capture the dream it set out to convey.

A single-player action game typically should have a fantasy which synergizes with its narrative. If the fantasy of something like Cyberpunk 2077 conceived of something like augmentation being a metaphor for losing yourself to corporate control and then didn’t have an augmentation system, that would feel incongruous; in its presence, the story and the mechanics inform one another to create a copacetic fantasy. 

Fantasies can also exist metatextually. A multiplayer first-person shooter or fighting game grants the audience a fantasy of clear self-improvement. Learning a set of behaviors makes you into an ideal player and by agreeing with the game on what its own game is, allows you to be in sync with the conveyed fantasy. Fantasy, here, is more in the execution than in the narrative; by dedicating time and energy to this set of game behaviors, you can get constant feedback of improvement in a way real life skill development doesn’t tend to have. Even then, the core fantasy at the end of the day is still there: you may indulge in the dream of being a street fighter or a gunslinger, by engaging in game mechanics analogous with the fantasy. 

To better illustrate my meaning, I’ll use two specific, personal fantasies. These will be superficially similar—at least, similar enough that your grandmother might mistakenly purchase one for the other under duress.

Devil May Cry 5 is an easy example that allows me to talk about Devil May Cry in an essay. The fantasy of Devil May Cry, at its simplest, is about being an effortlessly stylish devil hunter. In the best entries, the synergy between the narrative and the mechanical intricacies are perfectly in sync.

The skillsets of each character differentiate them mechanically, but also add interest and appeal specific to how they orbit the central fantasy of being a hyper-competent monster killer. Stamina is never a concern because, core to the fantasy, the player character would never question if they have enough juice to get through a single encounter—they simply know they do. The character’s most effective tools, in accordance with the fantasy, are metatextually limited by the abstract concept of style. It doesn’t matter if a weapon is technically the dominant, most appealing strategy; if you are playing in an efficient but homogeneous way, you will not score well.

Death in DMC is typically a momentary, fleeting inconvenience. You die and—especially in DMCV—you are granted the ability to resurrect on the spot, albeit with less style points than if you had not. Damage isn’t especially frightening unless you are attempting to go for the best score possible.

By abiding by these mechanics and the spirit they carry, you become the ideal player: you become the devil hunter seeking your own personalized journey of self-expressive violence, and ultimately your own sense of style.

Compare this to something like Dark Souls 3.

Mechanically, Dark Souls 3 encourages, at least on first play, a far more conservative, pensive approach. The game is quick to punish missteps and will require you to adroitly use the right tool for the job. In microplay, you must manage your health, stamina, and encounter-to-encounter resources like magic; this includes managing the durability of your armaments, builds, and the ablation of your resources which determines the arc of an entire play session. There is no style gauge here, no punishment for exploiting the world, the enemy, or any advantage your accumulated bank of knowledge gives you access to.

The game primes you to become the person the narrative fantasy suits: a hardened adventurer surviving a world which has all but rolled over and died. The punishment inflicted by the narrative ideally shapes the game mechanics to punish you in gameplay.

Anyone who knows anything about either of these games would obviously be correct in saying these games could not be further apart in tone or feel. But consider why this is. The games are remarkably similar when stripped of their aesthetics: you are a primarily melee-weapon-equipped dispatcher of monsters in a hostile environment. Each location requires dodge rolls, parries, ripostes; each engagement requires the ideal tool for the job and the situational awareness to know what that is. Where they differ is their mechanical approach, which grows from the fantasy they are attempting to evoke, which in turn shapes their aesthetic, making them grow apart from one another.

This divergence does not indicate either branch as being superior to the other. There is a lot of talk around what makes “objectively good game design;” I would argue such a thing does not exist. When new games come out and their design is said to be a high watermark, there is an unspoken or spoken expectation that it should somehow supersede that which has come before.

“This is how all open worlds should be designed now.”

“This is how combat should work now; everything else is inferior.”

Not every game benefits from capitulating to the same fantasy. Trends can be useful for understanding what is common, or what is most desired on average; fantasies can be demanded by an audience as well, especially when no one is seen to be building it. This should not dictate what the fundamental building blocks of art must be however.

No, I don’t believe new designs are somehow objectively superior to the old in the same way I don’t believe this year’s smart phones are objectively superior to last year’s. There are different needs for different people, different stories; ultimately, some design is as temporary as the tech waste filling tomorrow’s landfill.

Paying attention to these Mechanical Fantasies has been foundational to improving my consideration this year. I feel I am better prepared to receive what games are telling me; I am more interested in coming halfway. Where I would have griped at a particularly frictive gameplay mechanic, I find myself more likely to identify whether it captures the spirit of the game’s dream.

Streaming Signalis back in October, I was vocal about my irritation of the oppressively limited inventory. In the moment, I found it cumbersome and a contributing factor in lengthening the game. Now, I am brave enough to admit I disliked it for how it forced me to feel the pressure of resource management and scary monsters—I am, after all, still a gigantic weenie.

Considering the exact fantasy of Signalis enabled me to say it works even if it’s unpleasant to play. You are a creation of a fascist government; the programming of institutional hegemony limits your language, stymieing your ability to articulate that which oppresses you—and in the video game also. Ultimately, you can still find it distasteful, too frictive to deal with, but it does suit the story Signalis wishes to tell. Without mindfulness I wouldn’t be able to say that; I’d be just another person saying, “the game should never inconvenience me” even if that inconvenience was thoughtful design.

For less mechanically frictive games, like the Trails games I’ve indulged in this year, considering the fantasy made me something of a better actor. I was able to slip into the role the story had planned for me. Slotting into the story in both tone and spirit allowed me to find a place for myself, which the game had helpfully left open for me. Fitting the role of the role-playing game makes the experience more thoughtful, engaging, more immersive. You care. This is the heart of my understanding of Mechanical Fantasy: the calibration process which comes from wanting to meet art where it’s at. 

None of this comes easily though; it is often an unintuitive process. Many outside factors can contribute to forcing you out of sync with a game’s mechanics. Let’s talk about those factors now.

The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts and Our Own

In this era of internet communication, we are more or less constantly burdened with the weight of other’s opinions or consideration. The moment a game releases, if you’ve shown even a passing interest and find yourself victimized by discovery feeds, you are burdened with an unrelenting tide of gamer opinions. They linger in comments, they post YouTube videos, they even live in your Discords: gamers are coming to deliver their opinion, telling you that your method of playing a game is stupid and wrong.

Elden Ring upon its release, back when I still used the dipshit website for morons (formerly Twitter), was a veritable mudslide of angry gamers in the mood to talk smack. I saw everything from Spirit Ashes to the concept of magic being stated as inferiorities in playstyle. 

Accidentally, in my essay about loving games, I have maneuvered myself into a gamer catastrophe: I might need to talk at least a little bit about difficulty in gaming. Let me get my opinions clear: regardless of the game in question, the best way to play a game is by maximizing the amount of fun you find in it. Completionism, difficulty, mods, they’re all distractions from the fact that this is a hobby. You are meant to be fulfilled and have a good time doing all this; let’s not pretend we’re Oakley-wearing dads yelling at the little-league mound, none of this shit actually matters, Richard.

Yet, we are all burdened with the weight of other’s thoughts. Even speaking as flippantly as I have, I have second guessed my own ability to have a good time because of other people. There are games I have spent dozens, sometimes hundreds of hours on, because someone argued I had an obligation to calibrate myself to the whims of another person.  When calibrated to someone else’s whims, it’s easy to find yourself in positions of discomfort or pain. The desire to prove yourself to internet strangers, even those who don’t know or care that you exist, can cause you to contort yourself into positions where the fun becomes unfun.

Beyond society is our own personal inbuilt ability to carry bias. I am often embarrassed by the amount of times I just thought I knew better, or was somehow better than the game trying to instruct me. This could manifest as thinking I already knew the material and carried an in-built advantage, or just the smug certainty that I wouldn’t need to care.

This refusal to match with the fantasy of a game, either out of a misinterpretation of what the fantasy is or because of the dreams imposed by other people, leads to disconnection and friction. You throw yourself against the game’s mechanics; you burn yourself out doing the things the game isn’t demanding of you; you forget what you’re even doing this for.

This doesn’t even need to be out of bias; sometimes, our own prior experiences render us incompatible with a story. That is a topic one could discuss at length, but in short, sometimes it’s not anyone’s fault—there’s nothing to correct. The correct action is simply choosing to walk away and find something better aligned to your dreams.

I’ve made the mistake of not walking away many times myself. To illustrate how easy it is to fall into such mistakes, I shall share two such cases now. Mercifully, in these cases I learned from my mistakes with time; though, there is still the potential for me to make them again in the future. My intention is not to paint myself as a victim of circumstance. I am a fallible person but in making my mistakes public, perhaps you–and even I–might derive some meaning from it. 

Exhibit A: Beyond the Pale

We are once again forced to dwell in the bygone year of 2019 or so; forgive me, as an amnesiac I only have so many memories to call upon; we’re probably going to be here a few more times.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a 2019 FromSoft action game of some repute. I was not originally going to meet its release date—life circumstances being what they were—until a friend’s generosity saw my life’s trajectory once more altered. FromSoft had ridden high in my mind for years, hitting home run after home run; each of these releases from Dark Souls to Dark Souls 3 had compelled me into a hundred-hour transaction. I had expected Sekiro to be no different.  

To reiterate a rhetorical passage from an earlier review: I fucking hated it.

Sekiro, to my fascination, is simultaneously similar and dissimilar from FromSoft’s prior Souls offerings. The slashing of swords and the presence of bosses to slay is staple, yet there is only one primary melee weapon and no real “build-crafting” to its gameplay. “Stealth mechanics? In a FromSoft game? How odd!” many felt. Self-resurrection featuring prominently in its identity had many speculating if this wasn’t to be the easiest FromSoft game yet.

One internet firestorm and an incredibly funny copypasta later, it was determined this was not the case.

So, where did Lily fall on this?

First, some background context. Credits had been rolled on basically every contemporary FromSoft game in the Soulsborne sphere (even some Armored Core, but that is a story for yet another time). I was not immune to frustration or feelings of “stuckness,” but having played them some dozens of times to completion, I felt like I was well equipped for a new challenge. I don’t say this in the gross, gamer meritocracy way: a person need not have beaten the entire game with a plastic guitar or a banana before critiquing a game the internet likes. I say it primarily because it better articulates the mindset I was in. I was, I thought, someone at the best possible state to engage with Sekiro fairly.

I am not immune to the perspective-warping arguments that circulate around these games. I am mature enough to admit I had been subtly coerced into a mindset which did not suit growth. Playing the game with a big sword, no shield, no spells, no tools, without summons, friendless, very sweaty, made me hot or attractive or cool or all of the above, so said the internet; and up to that point, FromSoft’s games had not pushed back hard enough to disabuse me of that notion.

Then, I played Sekiro.

From the get-go, one could imagine Sekiro would be almost easier to fall into this mindset with. There were no summons; there weren’t any other weapons to make wrong choices with; there was no easy way to grind your problems away. The first few hours passed easily. The first enemies were dispatched with ease. I started appreciating the improved agility, the tactility of the audio queues of the parry system; I was permanently mutated into the plastic-plinking parry pervert who writes this essay now.

I found the first shinobi tool. Within moments, the previous web of connections and neurons in my fried, elitist brain drove me to an inevitable conclusion: this is to be discarded. Mentally, I cast it aside. It was something to distract me from the purity of my precious sword-fighting game. Even as the currency to use said shinobi tools accumulated in my inventory, I elected not to use them; I didn’t need it, so I wouldn’t use it.

The game, within a matter of hours, ceased to be particularly kind to me.

Enemies, now far greater in number, with far better weaponry for dealing with me, began to—phrased as delicately as I am able—kill the absolute fuck out of me. Bosses expanded beyond the scope of what I was capable of comfortably dealing with. Flailing, crab-crawling Voldo cosplayers; Headless corpses who would actually, literally, fist your soul out of your ass; a really, really fucked up bull.

How had my prior experience failed me so? I asked myself.

I managed, through immense effort and no small amount of mental-illness-induced refusal to give up, to get to the first Guardian Ape fight. I will not belabor this point. I got systematically and humiliatingly destroyed. I got destroyed in the way that makes you question why you even play video games. I got owned so hard it makes you feel like a child; like a bully has specifically targeted the load-bearing piece of your self-esteem and kicked it out from under you. I knew, even then, it was unhealthy to base this much of my self-worth on my performance in something as stupid as a game. I just didn’t care.

“I fucking hate this game,” I told anyone who would listen.

I dropped my controller and closed the chapter on Sekiro.

A year passed. A pandemic happened, and while I listlessly played what had been old comforts, Sekiro continued to gaze at me from my Steam library. I had nothing better to do, I reasoned, and I decided to take the plunge again.

The first chunk of the game passed in much the same way. I played, got frustrated, took breaks, came back. In lockdown, it wasn’t like I had much else to occupy my time, and the confidence-bruising boss fights couldn’t make my mental state much worse. Grinding away, I made many of the same mistakes and found myself descending the same path again.

Then, through sheer coincidence, I met a character I had not given much attention to previously. Isshin Ashina is an important character in Sekiro’s world. Mechanically, he is a vendor who grants you scrolls which improve your already robust abilities; narratively, he’s mentor, opposition, and provisioner of lore; but in that moment, he acted as a bridge between the narrative and the mechanics. He gave me the gift of a single set of lines.

“About the ways of the Ashina blade… It’s our school of fighting, but there are no hard and fast rules. You just win your battles. That alone is the most important rule of the Ashina style.”

It seems simple, but it was a revelation then—it single handedly broke down every wall in my way. “None of this honor shit matters, there are no rules,” he seemed to say, “just win.” The gears, previously grinding, found their tread; I had recalibrated.

Connecting to the fantasy of Sekiro—that of the Shinobi inured to bloodshed and willing to do anything to win—did not suddenly make the game easy. There were still fights to win or lose, there was still training I needed to grind into my fingers and hands. But suddenly, there were no rules to force myself to abide by. The game didn’t hurt anymore.

The idea of needing to synchronize with a game was certainly planted then, but had not grown. Arguably, it made a secondary, worse idea:

“I can’t trust my gut instinct. I need to give everything a fair shake or else I risk acting like this again.”

More to the point, it also made me hostage to the fear that I was “missing” something. People did not like things by accident; they were clearly seeing something you weren’t. This prompted me into the second parenthetical to come. A second revisitation and another anecdote; my apologies.

Exhibit B: A Perpetual State of Indifference

My partner is a superfan of Final Fantasy XIV. Over the course of about 3 years of our relationship, she tried to convince me to play it approximately 94,608,000 times. At the time, I smugly asserted—despite my previous and ongoing affection for the Final Fantasy series—it wasn’t for me.  MMOs were something I could not imagine the appeal of; the grinding, the social interdependency, and the general fantasy did not sit with me. The wrath of Counter Strike’s finest had ensured I wasn’t interested in environments where social conduct was something I needed to count on in others.

At heart, I’m still a romantic though. Seeing the excitement in her eyes during one of her visits from over 1500 miles away as she watched the world premiere of the Shadowbringers teaser trailer in 2018, I was inspired to give it a try.

To reiterate a rhetorical passage from earlier in this very article: I fucking hated it.

Once more, I’m emotionally mature enough to admit wrongdoing. I played Final Fantasy XIV wrong in just about every way possible to play it wrong. If Sekiro was the finger painting in the art of playing games wrong, this was me sculpting marble busts dedicated to playing them wrong.

I played the story singlemindedly, desperate to find these supposed “good parts” of this game. I walked when I could have rode, in a self-flagellating exercise in better hating this world I had begrudgingly paid money for. I pressed one button in a rotation, when I should have pressed three, all the while saying this game was brain-dead and empty for not forcing me to do better. I zoned out in dungeons and generally made my partner drag my limp body through slate-colored piss cave after slate-colored piss cave. I make myself sound more intentionally villainous in my misbehavior than perhaps is due; from my perspective at the time, I was trying; I simply did not understand how to make the gears click.

To me, the writing was pedestrian and slow, the worldbuilding was cool but constantly forcing me to run this-way-and-that doing favors for people. The coolest parts of the game, I believed, were inexplicably hidden behind hours of busy work. My partner put up with many thankless hours of my grumbling, intolerant prejudging to show me something she loved very much; and to spend time with me.

“Just get to Heavensward,” I told myself. “Just get there, and that’s where the game gets good.” That’s what I had been told, and I had no issues blindly believing it.

Imagine my disappointment then, when Heavensward gave me much of the same. Worse, it had introduced me to, at first blush, the exact sort of traditional fantasy that I went to Final Fantasy to escape from in the first place. Elves in a cold stone castle under attack by dragons.

“Babe. I can’t do this.”

“That’s ok. Thank you for trying it.”

And then we did something else. Even then, it made my heart hurt, disappointing someone I loved so much.

Then a pandemic happened. Then Sekiro happened. Then, as mentioned before, I doubted myself. I decided to give a game I maligned another chance.

So, I booted up Destiny 2. I played it for 500 hours during the pandemic in the most mentally ill state this body could manage and let me tell you: that game is still a piece of shit!

Then, after getting that out of my system, in 2021, I pivoted to Final Fantasy XIV.

It felt strange being back in this betrayed game. I reemerged into this virtual world in the same place, the same position now years later; time appearing to restart as I arrived. Overjoyed at my change of heart, my partner was once more along for the ride. Many of my grievances were still the same: stiff writing, banal world building, snow, dragons. Whatever.

Then, I found the Dark Knight questline. Then, I played the Dark Knight questline. I cried many incredibly complicated tears over the Dark Knight questline; an incredible number of mental-illness-related tears were shed because of the Dark Knight questline.  

Another set of clunking gears snapped into place. I found my calibration in the fantasy of the world. In a fashion, I discovered more than one fantasy could exist within the fantasy; if a dream was big enough, it could contain other dreams. Here was a class, a role in the game, whose writing seemed just as irritated at the banality of being a yes man to the whims of fate. Sometimes, you can’t help but express near vengeful derision at being used by people who don’t appreciate you. Yet, it is because you care about people, you care so much about being a protector for those the world would see fit to discard, you must care. Someone has to.

I wailed to myself. I had fucked up again. I had somehow managed to once again get a game completely wrong.

The game whispered, “I forgive you; I forgive you; I forgive you.”

After that, my avatar stopped being a polygonal cage and started being as real as the meat and blood I presently occupy. My calibration afforded me the ability to find a place in this virtual world. I could feel things about it; I could imagine that which the world did not stipulate. It wasn’t about difficulty or the right or wrong way of doing things. It was about reaching out just as far as the game reached to me; letting our gears intermesh until we could understand one another.

Final Fantasy XIV is now one of my most played games.  It’s something I still play frequently with my partner. This calibration to the fantasy of the game was not me somehow breaking or lowering my standards; I realized I just needed to be willing to allow myself to connect. The mechanics and the world design of XIV are often at odds. There are flaws in the way it presents the dream it wants you to feel—even I can admit that as a fan. But, even imperfect things can be worth finding value in, if you’re willing to try. Aligning myself, and discovering the dream that suited me within the fantasy, allowed me to care. I clicked into place and found my own in the many disparate dreams which make up this strange, slow, incoherent, beautiful world.

Force Your Way

My framework, my anecdotes, are not meant to convince you my perspective is correct. I have struggled for a long time to feel like I was enjoying things correctly; this is my little attempt to make this make sense to me. Finding the point of synchronicity between myself and a game was something I had to fight for.

Everyone dreams. Everyone has their little, illogical, private dreams. Maybe you imagine being the kind of person who can own a successful business or run an empire. Maybe you’re someone who dreams about brandishing a raw, impossible slab of iron, wielded to protect those who can’t protect themselves. Maybe you dream about just having the energy to clean your room or take care of yourself.

Our shared hobby has room for all these dreams. Allowing myself to sink into the dreams of others has allowed me to find and appreciate things I never knew were within me. Taking the time to think, “what is the fantasy the creator is trying to share with me?” has enabled me to find the stories that best sing to my soul.

I’m not saying thinking this way will liberate you from playing bad or mediocre games ever again, far from it. Playing many games just gives you much more opportunity to play something disappointing. For me, thinking this way is worth it. Games can succeed or fail at delivering a dream. They can do things badly or contradictory and you still endure the lost potential of what could have been. Trust me, I have been haunted by the thought of games just short of being amazing.

Really, this is not self-help. Art is profoundly useless; but it still might save you. This is an exercise for the soul. Feeling things is a muscle you need to exercise. Meeting a game halfway isn’t weakness or rule breaking. Sometimes, you just need to take your feelings out, rotate them in your palm, and find what you need right now.

Play isn’t something taught. You can’t intellectually get into a state of play. It’s something you find, feel, grow within yourself. In this hobby, and its attached parasitic industry, so obsessed with achievement and right and wrong ways of playing, it can be easy to forget this is something we do for fun. Even now, however, this is a part of you that remembers how to dream. This is a part, if you are like me, that you can grow, and grow, and grow; No matter what your age, it can grow. So, make it a pleasant dream, for your own sake.  

The post Mechanical Fantasies or: How I Made an Art Out of Playing Games Wrong appeared first on Gamesline.

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On this episode, Scott B returns to the parlor to talk to Dr. Sophie Pilbeam about media literacy and politics within Dark Souls lore community, Dark Souls‘ similarities to Neon Genesis Evangelion in it’s utilization of aesthetics, the ways in which Bloodborne and Sekiro broach topics of colonialism and nationalism, and the economics of King’s Field. You can check out Sophie’s podcasts at youtube.com/sinclairlore.

The theme for Starlight Car is a “Super Chill Remix” of Aquamarine by Magic Circuit, which is available off their newest self-titled album, Magic Circuit. You can follow them at @magic_circuit on twitter for more details.

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The post Starlight Car Episode 4: Media Literacy in the Dark Souls Lore Community with Sophie Pilbeam appeared first on Gamesline.

Insofar as the “Anime Souls” moniker rings true, it does so much more in the anime portion. For good and ill, the designs typify an aesthetic where perfectly coiffed hair covering eyes and jackets draped over shoulders will remain in place in the middle of a sword fight. Also your jacket can turn into twin dragon heads, which is cool. This also means, unfortunately, that most women in the game will sport dresses that somehow have all been torn around the thighs and the cleavage. And that is when they don’t forego blouses altogether in favour of a bikini top. Whilst I’m no puritan and can sometimes tolerate, or even enjoy, that kind of appeal to baseness, it contrasts poorly with the tone and even the overdressed men. Suffice to say, if you find any of the guys living in Vein attractive, that is entirely of your own accord, and not a perspective the game’s character designer is interested in entertaining. Luckily the character creator tools do allow you to create a variety of feminine outfits that do not revolve around sex appeal.

Lopsided fanservice notwithstanding, the visuals do a great job of reflecting the rest of the narrative. Saturated and bright colours are the order of the day, where an ice mountain is more a winter wonderland than tundra and a toxic swamp is a glowing mass of reds and purples straight out of a stylized world like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. A single cathedral becomes an angelic Castlevania with beautiful carved marble patterns inspired by the Cathedral of Milan extending for miles on end.

The combat is also pleasantly surprising. Whilst it wouldn’t be worthy of a style meter, it is certainly more complex, speedy and varied than even Bloodborne. This is due to the titular “codes” of the game. You see, in Code Vein you play as a “revenant”, a sort of science-made vampire that derives its power from the “BOR Parasites” implanted in them. Every revenant’s biology constitutes a certain code and concedes special abilities complimenting it, but your character does not share in this. Mysteriously codeless, your character can adopt the abilities of anyone whose blood they can get their fangs on.

In gameplay this means that your character’s entire build levels up instead of making you allocate points across individual stats. The latter being determined by your current code instead. This allows you to wield different weapons, but it also allows you to use different “gifts”—which is where the fun really starts. Gifts are essentially spells that will range from enchanting your weapons with different elements, to augmenting stats, to special combos and states; such as having your health bar fully replenished and your stamina enhanced but having a set time to finish the fight or else you will automatically die.

Every code, even the ones focused on melee, has a wide variety of gifts to use. Which is where the drain and ichor mechanics come in. To use a gift you must expend ichor. As such, a third attack button will unleash a drain attack; powerful and slow moves that, if landed, will replenish a fair amount of ichor and even increase the amount of it you can carry. Drain attacks can be woven into combos or charged up as their own special move, and if you play skilfully enough to reach a “focused state” they can even be used for basic juggling of the enemies when paired with a special input for launching.

Gifts take on greater importance as Code Vein progresses. Since the sheer power and usefulness of the drain move ensures a constant influx of Ichor, it quickly becomes second nature to make the expenditure of it just as regular. No-frills melee combat then simply becomes a way to sustain an offensive during cool downs. As you begin to amass codes, the inheritance system is given an opportunity to start developing some complex builds.  If you fulfill certain conditions a gift will be “inherited” and become available for use in any code that meets its stat requirements. This gives you an opportunity to customise and optimise your gift loadout to complement any code’s stats and its ultimate, uninheritable gift to truly fearsome results.

This makes Code Vein a varied and much more explosive experience than any game it may share influences with. Any monotony that it might suffer from as a consequence of the limited moveset is easily ignored by the fact that futzing around menus for a few minutes is all that’s needed to transition into an entirely new playstyle.

Vein’s louder sensibilities are not only apparent in your own abilities but in everything surrounding you. After getting past the tutorial stage, the simple and weak enemies quickly turn into shotgun wielding warriors and giant bug people capable of trapping you in honest-to-god combos that’ll take a three-quarters bite off your health. To aid you, the game provides a bevy of optional companions, turning many encounters into exhilarating sequences where the head count nears double digits and everyone is constantly powering up as a symphony swells in the background.

All the praise is not to say that Vein doesn’t have flaws in its fighting. Whilst ample, its variety of fauna isn’t nearly as expansive as the ones FromSoft tends to come up with. And instead of a steady progression the game simply throws neck-breaking difficulty spikes at you when you arrive at new areas.

In its quieter moments, such as they are, exploration is still a big factor in the game. The levels are so winding that shortcuts are found every few minutes and the level progression has you constantly walking new paths barely a few feet above where you recently stood. It can be wildly confusing at times, and when your companion says lines like “Everything is the same colour, my sense of direction is useless.” it’s hard not to feel like someone at Bandai Namco is laughing at your expense. In a semi-successful attempt to ease this, the game provides you with a dotted line tracing your recent steps at the top-right corner of the HUD, and nearing the end of every gauntlet you will find items that reveal the whole map you just got through to keep better track of your explored areas.

For its part, the story of Code Vein is uniquely winding in its own way. Not content with having its main fantastic conceit be a slightly confusing mix of vampires and zombies by way of shounen anime, its backstory is convoluted like few. With two duelling catastrophes preceding the story and many different scientific projects leading to different variations on the BOR parasite. As well as several governmental, military, and paramilitary organisations overlapping each other. All in a timeline that could be 10 years long just as easily as it could be centuries.

Thankfully, most of the game’s narrative efforts aren’t actually aimed at untangling the fake history of the world of Vein. Instead its moment to moment conversations and important cutscenes are devoted to the personal drama of its main cast. And it is disarmingly affecting. The melodrama description rings perfectly apposite in a world of lifelong romances and one-man quests to remake the world in a more just image. Though it had seemed clichéd at the start and I approached it with a heavy cynicism, I was deeply moved by several scenes. Even if this being a shounen-type story ultimately means that I was robbed of a well-deserved love confession.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Code Vein’s script is its almost-episodic rhythm. Whilst individual moments of earnest sibling love or long-awaited romance may feel all-consuming when they happen, the game finds it comically easy to move on and explore other dramatic or philosophical musings on without looking back for hours, if at all. This does a particular disservice to the latter, as the script shows an interest in themes spanning from the usefulness of charity, to matters of personal devotion to parents and friends, to the many positive and negative shapes that admiration can take. It’s singularly frustrating when it goes on just long enough to reveal it has interesting thoughts on each of them yet never runs with any one long enough to elaborate on them.

Ultimately I was caught off guard by Code Vein. What little expectations I had, it exceeded all of them. Where I was expecting serviceable dungeon crawling with the evergreen stamina management system I was presented with a fast and varied combat that I always wished for in games like this and that I was always happy to catch a glimpse of in late-Souls-series inclusions such as weapon arts. And where I’d initially held the story at arm’s length it quickly found a way to my heart and almost moved me to tears in a couple instances. The torn jeans and synthy heavy metal flavour was always a winner because it’s still 2002 in my heart, however.

If you so choose you can ignore the ichor system completely, stick to a single code religiously, dismiss the AI companions, tape over the map, and play the game as a more colourful Dark Souls and you’ll still get a fair bit out of it, I would assume. But it would lack the ambiance and understated approach you probably enjoyed in those games. And I’m not sure that conciliatory efforts like a way to recover some of the experience lost upon death could truly win over those who found the Souls games actively hostile. It feels like a game made outside of the dominating cultural conversation surrounding the series. And though that is all I ever wanted as someone who felt underserved by both sides, those invested in it may need to make an active attempt to meet it halfway. You do need to invite a vampire into your house, after all.

The post Code Vein (PC) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

The upcoming game from From Software’s Hidetaka Miyazaki and Game Of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin comes Elden Ring. While definitely medieval fantasy inspired like From’s seminal Dark Souls series, Elden Ring looks to be an entirely new franchise. We can probably except some minor crossover and references (there’s gonna be a Moonlight Greatsword somewhere in this game, I promise), the reveal that this is a brand new IP is really exciting to me as a fan of Soulsborne games. Not being tethered to the series’ deep well of characters and lore means we can see something totally fresh from this collaboration, even if the aesthetics remain really similar.

Elden Ring has been rumored for a while now, with the idea that it’ll be an open world Souls-like game. A lot of critics have gone out of their way to say that Souls games really benefit from having straightforward, linear design, and that an open world game would detract from what makes them so good. However, I personally trust From’s ability to put together an open world and make it engaging.

Elden Ring is promised to release on Xbox One and PC, but it wouldn’t be a far cry to assume it’s coming to the PS4 as well.

The post From Software Announces Elden Ring At Xbox’s E3 Conference appeared first on Gamesline.

The original Nioh had a troubled development lasting almost 14 years, and over that time the game warped from a Ninja Gaiden style take on an Akira Kurosawa script, to a Dark Souls/Diablo hybrid. As it got closer and closer to release, Team Ninja did several alpha and beta tests that gradually shaped the full release, and continued to improve upon it with DLC that added better bosses and areas, alongside new weapon types and quality of life fixes. Nioh 2 really feels like all of those lessons have finally come together in a package that may just be able to stand on its own.

From the beginning of the Nioh 2 Alpha, you create your own character in lieu of playing as the gruff William players were (mostly) stuck in the shoes of in the last game. While Nioh did eventually let you use various bonus skins, being able to actually mold the character you play as always adds a level of ownership to the experience of any game. Plus, as a woman, it’s always nice to be able to play as a woman without having to go through some sort of absurd “bonus” unlock. While you can only choose from a few presets for now, you can definitely peek through the locked options and see that there’s the usual depth one might expect from a Dark Souls, and even more with implied “Yokai Form” customization.

After making your beautiful Oni lady or whatever else you’re into, there’s a short tutorial before you get plopped into what feels like a typical Nioh level. You will quickly find the game’s old bloodstain system, where players can fight AI ghosts left behind by players in hopes of winning a piece of their gear, but you’ll also find a couple of blue graves scattered around too. Alongside the old system, a new one similar to Dark Souls’ summon signs has been added, which lets you summon an AI version of a player who played through that area to help you fight through the level. While you can still do the classic matchmaking with real players, this new option lets players quickly (and in my case, less anxiously) get some help in a harder part of the game.

After beating the game’s first mini-boss, you’re quickly introduced to two of the game’s new systems. One of them is the cursed weapon subset, which is a type of weapon that gradually powers up the more you fight. When it finally gets powered up, it’ll start yelling about how it loves to kill people, glow purple, and buff pretty much everything you do. While I slightly worry about the disparity between using weapons like this as opposed to other weapon rarities, using them was a blast, and having those short windows of power open up new opportunities in the midst of an escalating scuffle can really help improve the experience.

The other new system involves learning and using a robust and expansive slew of “Yokai Skills.” Yokai Skills let you take a move from the arsenal of every single enemy you run across in the game, and use it pretty much whenever. When you kill an enemy, there’s a chance that they’ll drop a glowing Yokai Core. When you take these cores back to a save point, you can purify them and turn them into the Yokai Skills, which you then slot into your character for up to two actions at any time. These skills can range from slamming a big flaming hammer down to deal burning damage, to turning into a massive tornado for a few seconds and just flailing into everyone. These skills level up the more cores you get as well, so when you get your third “Skeleton Warrior” skill, you’re actually making it better and better.

These moves completely change the flow of Nioh’s combat for the better, without taking away what made it good in the first place. Where there were plenty of times where you had to disengage in the original Nioh when fighting a particular boss or horde of enemies, you’re now able to quickly turn the tides by pulling some outrageous bullshit. No longer is Nioh a game where the second guy shows up in the fight and all seems lost; it’s become a “I’m not stuck in here with you, you’re stuck in here with me” type deal, and god does it feel so good.

Yokai Skills aren’t the only part of your arsenal that’s going for that Yokai sensibility either. While the original game had a devil trigger-esque form change system with Living Weapons, Nioh 2 doubles down and transforms your character into various different types of yokai with incredibly different movesets and abilities. The three choices selectable in the demo include a classic bulky club Oni, a floating fox-masked mage with spectral blades, and a teleporting-dashing ninja who attacks with incredible speed. These feel so much better than the original game’s tendency to just differentiate with passive gimmicks, and turning into a big oni to wreak havoc gives the game a unique and distinctive vibe that the original Nioh didn’t quite pull together.

Even just tonally, that vibe of a Yokai-filled world is so much better expressed throughout the game’s world and characters. When you wander into an area with particularly hard Yokai to fight, it’s no longer just a patch of grey blocking your path, but complete zones warped with a monotone filter and spider lilies rampant. These zones feel oppressive and otherworldly, and the effect is amped up when you notice your character’s Oni horns are sticking out as you wander through them. The bleakness will dissipate once you’re able to defeat the mini-boss style Yokai of the area, making these experiences much more satisfying than the frustrating areas in Souls games that tended to be permanent annoyances that you needed to trudge back and forth through.

The bosses are much more expressive and supernatural feeling as well. Most of the boss fights in the original Nioh felt like they either had to be a one-on-one duel with a humanoid opponent, or a big large enemy who was clunky and slow. Both of the bosses that you can fight in this Alpha however, feel much more unique and dynamic. The first boss is a big tornado that surrounds itself with pottery shards to become a hulking big monster, but that doesn’t mean you fight him by dodging his hefty swings. Instead, they can dash around very quickly, and use quick and narrow attacks, all the while you’re contending with brutish swings. The other boss was a big snake with smaller snakes growing off it that sometimes fell off, while it slithered around the stage quickly and threateningly. Both of these bosses would have been functionally identical in Nioh, but here they’re able to break outside of those archetypal molds and become something really fun and unique.

You’ll even wander into some friendly Yokai along the way that always bring big bonuses. As you break boxes sometimes you’ll just find a little fat cat curled up in a ball- if you pet them, they’ll roll around with you for a little bit, buffing you in the process. While I totally enjoyed the whole buff thing, just the addition of a little baby cat orb rolling around on the ground with me while i beat up Yokai was extremely charming, especially once I got into a nasty tussle and my little furry friend grew spikes and tried to help me fight back harder. There are also little purple fellas with masks you can find walking around all over the place, and if you drop a weapon near them, they’ll pick it up and trade you for some random loot they’re carrying. These buddies are particularly helpful if you really don’t like a specific type of weapon, since they tend to trade you back an item of similar rarity or power.

When you add all these elements together, you get a much more cohesive and engaging package than what the original Nioh had to offer. Underneath all this it’s very much the same game, but tuned up and given a fresh coat of paint. Combat in Nioh 2 still feels intense and enemies aren’t exactly easy fodder most of the time, but all of these systems help make them puzzles to solve instead of walls to overcome. It’s much more satisfying to swap out and look through all the different combos my twin hatchets have in the process of beating a boss than just doing the same two attacks over and over again until I memorized everything they did. Everything feels so much more rewarding, and fun, which has been refreshing in the face of recent games like Sekiro that tend to promote frustration and simplicity.

I enjoyed pretty much every second I played of the Nioh 2 Alpha, and I cannot wait to get my hands on the full game whenever it launches later this year. Everything about the experience feels like the developers really understood what made their game good, and what could make their game better, which is so rarely seen in any medium. Most sequels tend to either play it safe or go wildly different, and while Nioh 2 is definitely pretty wild, the ways it stays true and improves upon its core are incredibly welcome.

The post Nioh 2 Alpha Impressions appeared first on Gamesline.

One of the hardest lines to walk in game development, and one of the most consistently debated topics in gaming, is of difficulty. Whether it’s the latest release’s tough third act, the hottest new roguelike, or the endless turmoil over Dark Souls, everyone has an opinion about how hard a game should be. Since everyone has a different skill level or familiarity with any given genre, these discussions almost always end up falling down into personal arguments and anguish, with the most famous example being the ever obnoxious adage popularized by Dark Souls, “Git Gud.”

As I’ve been playing through the most recently released chapter of Fate Grand Order, I was faced with a lot of difficult fights, with a pretty compelling narrative behind them. The chapter has a large focus on a nearly hopeless situation, with a ragtag group of individuals coming together to fight against one of the largest possible threats. The atmosphere around this chapter is intentionally oppressive, with most of your main cast, who had breezed through most of the other chapters with levity and ease, now feeling hopeless and endangered. It’s effective storytelling, and one of the best cases I can think of for how the interactivity of games helps foster immersion better than any other medium of art. This got me thinking about those difficulty debates, and where exactly I stood on how hard games should be.

There have been a lot of pieces over the years arguing over whether or not all games should have an “easy mode”- one where enemies are incredibly weak or the player is absurdly strong- and I’ve never quite found myself agreeing with those in favor. The most egregious were always those discussing Dark Souls, posited by players who had yet to put significant time in after being understandably disheartened by the steep learning curve and vitriolic player base of gatekeepers. While the gut reaction for many is to say the more the merrier, I’d actually like to argue in favor of challenge done right.

In Dark Souls the world has ended, and the player finds themselves drudging through a destroyed landscape of broken people. No matter the locale, the world is completely permeated by death, darkness, and depravity. The first characters you run into regale you with their failings, their surrender to the harshness of the world with lackadaisical lethargy. The atmosphere is coarse and oppressive; it feels like everything is out to get you and that pushing forward might be impossible. That’s the tone that Dark Souls is going for, one of fear and adversity, and if, say all of these imposing enemies before you all died in one attack or hit you with wet noodles, how well would that tone hold up?

My stance with difficulty in games is that of what’s appropriate or not. I believe that if a game’s tone is telling you that things are hard, that things are supposed to be a challenge, and presents all of the tools to contend with such a task, then it’s right for it to be an ordeal. Dark Souls is at its best in those moments where you finally push through a hard boss, or manage to complete the exploration of a particularly harrowing zone. Dark Souls has characters like Siegmeyer, whose character arc is explicitly focused on his failure to contend with adversity, and his jealousy of your persistence and success. If Dark Souls all of a sudden had one of these easy modes, would Siegmeyer still be a sympathetic character, or would he become a joke? Could his character arc still be able to exist as it is, or would it be completely changed to suit a new potential tone?

I’m not so foolish as to believe that everyone is capable of executing everything in a highly technical game like Dark Souls, but I also believe that there are so many options in this world to help those incompatible players still have their own experience. The Souls games feature co-op, which can greatly ease many of the game’s challenges through sheer numbers or the potential to gain a significantly stronger ally. Let’s Plays have been popularized for a reason, and one could simply experience the game through one of the many offerings online for any given game, or by even watching a friend stream or play it through. The conclusion I have come to is that not everything has to be for everyone.

There’s a lot of things in this world I’m unable to do just because it doesn’t mesh well with me. I can’t play competitive modes in most games because I don’t like the pressure, I could never play professional sports because I never put in enough effort to get good at them. At no point, however, have I ended up thinking these things should sacrifice the inoffensive qualities that make them what they are, I simply accepted that they were things that were meant for others, and that I had my own activities that suited me.

If there are demands for “accessibility” in games, it should be for the right kind of accessibility. Things like controls, performance, and support for colorblind or deaf gamers. There should be smart design in the game that makes the narrative work- for example, there are plenty of infamous difficulty spikes in a lot of JRPGs that are just flat out arbitrary instead of well-reasoned. Dark Souls could legitimately benefit from more accessible multiplayer features, since engaging with them in their current obtuse form is hardly related to any particular theme or design philosophy.

Even Fate Grand Order, for all the compliments I paid it, probably has a lot of difficulty derived from its nature as a mobile game. While the design works in tandem with the atmosphere of this particular chapter, there are plenty of examples of these types of games getting more difficult to encourage real money purchases. You can even see this in games that might not be particularly hard like Assassin’s Creed, or even potentially the upcoming Devil May Cry 5, as both feature systems that let you pay real money in exchange for in-game currency or stats. The difficulty with difficulty can often end up meaning so many different facets of a game, it can be hard to pin down just what someone is complaining about.

The culture around these games, and the never ending plague of toxicity and competition that is bred into nearly every video game circle, often paints a lot of expectations in our minds. I’ve known plenty of people who hear about the Souls games, or character action games, or tougher online games like MOBAs or Monster Hunter, and end up dropping them fast because so many have perpetuated this notion of their difficulty. Once you hear something is a certain way negatively, it becomes difficult for you to get rid of that first impression, and you can often judge your own performance or the content of the game more harshly than you would’ve in ignorance, with the chance to practice and grow.

I don’t think it’s wrong for people to be seeking inclusion- media exists to be shared, after all- but I do think that there needs to be an evaluation on whether or not the context of something being harder to access, or more oppressive than its peers, makes reasonable sense. Games can be hard, and if it’s not for you that’s sometimes okay. Video Games are made to provide a compelling and engaging experience, and just like with so many things, everyone will be looking for something different.

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