That’s not exactly the ideal feeling you want to have when experiencing a work, but it’s also not that unusual. During the creation of anything, there will always be compromises, unexpected turbulence, and the creative classic of biting off more than you can chew. Lost Soul Aside is a perfect example of how all these aspects can intersect and create an inscrutable mess, burying its own honest heart.

Lost Soul Aside has been in development for quite some time, first being announced over 8 years ago with a short cinematic proof of concept that caught the eye of Sony’s China Hero Project, an initiative designed to shine an international light on various levels of games from China as its more mainstream gaming scene continued to grow. Afterwards, there were a few short playable sequences shown off over the years at various events like Gamescom to reassure that the game was still in development, but behind the scenes it seems like development was a lot rougher.  

If you couldn’t tell from looking at protagonist Kaser (who I viewed for years as a weirdly buff Noctis), Lost Soul Aside is heavily inspired by Final Fantasy XV, and especially by its prior incarnation as Final Fantasy Versus XIII. In an almost inverse approach to how Versus XIII’s development went however, Lost Soul Aside started as an open world game, and then pivoted to a more linear level-based affair. This was the correct move for sure, but as most of us can imagine the development debt of making an open world game and pivoting to something smaller is something that’s almost impossible to recover from (most recently seen in the bafflingly huge and death fog filled Bayonetta 3).

When you create an open-world game—as we’ve seen with countless series’ pivots like Elden Ring or Breath of the Wild—the impulse is to design things in a very specific way. Maps obviously become larger and more spread out, but there’s even more minute concepts than that. What do you fill your world with? It probably shouldn’t just be a bunch of wide expanses between main story events and areas, so maybe you should add a crafting system with ingredients scattered everywhere, and treasure chests with armor and weapons. You probably create a bunch of NPCs and settlements it would make sense to check in on every now and again, and you probably create a world map for fast traveling that has a bunch of cute little details in it.

Now think about designing a linear action game like Devil May Cry. You don’t need any specific world geography to make sense, so you can just make spectacular unrealistic landscapes. Smaller environments are much more conducive to things like focused platforming challenges. There’s no need to fill the world with a ton of gear and equipment because the focus is on player skill expression and filling out a kit, so you can tone down side objectives into more rewarding affairs since there are more obvious places to mete them out. 

With all of these variances in design philosophy and expectations, one might imagine that building one approach upon the bones of another could lead to an impossibly incongruous mess of a game.

In Final Fantasy XV’s case, this manifested as a game with a pretty interesting and beautiful world to explore and engage with, married to a perfunctory combat system and a linear main story that had basically nothing to do with it. In Lost Soul Aside’s case, you have a fairly compelling and deep combat system in a completely unremarkable and empty world, with a story that suffers entirely because it’s missing all the depth its original longer format would’ve provided. It’s a mess!

Long preamble, I know, but explaining what kind of process the development of Lost Soul Aside went through can help explain exactly what is so wrong with it as a game. Despite my comparisons to Final Fantasy XV, this isn’t a game with a huge budget and years of talent behind it at all. There is an impressive degree of graphical fidelity to be sure, but with a reported budget of around $8 million USD, it’s a far cry from something like FFXV’s $120 million+. This was also the team’s debut project, with its lead creative only just coming to grips with actually making a whole ass game, and a team that consistently lost heads to bigger and more established companies as the Chinese gaming market grew.

Even knowing all these things, and understanding the reasons behind it all, that doesn’t mean we can just sit back and be like “well, you did your best!” It would be disingenuous to Lost Soul Aside as a work! There’s this constant push and pull in the gaming critique sphere as we learn about things like crunch and executive interference that can cause us to want to be kinder, but by only ever being kind, we remove the potential to understand mistakes and try to create resources for the future to learn from. So with all this said:

Lost Soul Aside is a character action game in the vein of works like Bayonetta or the Kingdom Hearts series, where you control a specific character with a complex moveset as they navigate curated enemy encounters. You play as Kaser, the leader of a Final Fantasy VII-esque rebel group named GLIMMER that is attempting to fight back against an empire that has taken over and colonized most of the known world under the rule of its seemingly immortal leader Emperor HighCastle. During one of GLIMMER’s anti-imperial operations, aliens known as Voidrax suddenly invade, and Kaser strangely finds himself bound to a dragon named Lord Arena who’s been trapped underneath the imperial city for hundreds of years. Amidst the invasion, Kaser’s sister Louisa has her soul sucked out by a Voidrax, sending him on a journey across the world to save his sister’s soul, and stop threats new and old.

The first thing you’ll probably notice when playing Lost Soul Aside in English is that the localization is Not Great. Some lines of text are randomly untranslated, and everything is seeped in a super literal Chinese translation that you still see now and again, but was much more popular in the early days of machine translation. When I capitalized Emperor HighCastle like that, it was not a “bit”; most characters have similar naming conventions that surely make sense for the original text but come across as incredibly clunky in English; Lord GoldenLion, Lady RoseQueen…so on and so forth. Almost every line reads as incredibly stiff or declarative, following grammatical sensibilities that end up feeling just as alien as the Voidrax! (sorry i thought this was funny to say like a 90s review)

This doesn’t do the incredibly poor voice performances on display any favors, even if it’s one of the funniest dubs I’ve heard. Every character comes across as incredibly confused at all times, lines flow into each other, sometimes the audio just cuts out midsentence inexplicably. I saw some people refer to this as one of the worst dubs they’ve seen in recent times, but honestly, honestly, I think specifically the delivery of the two leads in Kaser and Arena actually elevate what would otherwise be an incredibly dreary, tropey pair you could find in basically any shonen anime. There’s something about the way that Kaser says things like “The Liquid Energy Entity…it seems so powerful” in a monotone, only to be answered by Arena going “Ahhh!!!! I was wondering when you would ask about that!” after they have already talked about the Liquid Energy Entity for the last ten minutes, that’s just…enrapturing.

Positively, Lost Soul Aside’s combat feels like a variant of Final Fantasy XV that actually cares about being something. My biggest issue with Final Fantasy XV outside of its story was that the core combat was absolutely miserable. Noctis warp striked. That’s all he does. He gets 13 different weapons but he may as well have half of one for all the depth they have. Even with DLC eventually opening up other party members to be playable with their own gimmicks, it’s not like you’re ever going to be meaningfully challenged by something within that game’s world for it to matter.

In Lost Soul Aside, Kaser doesn’t just mash the singular attack button and teleport in when he gets too far away, he actually has a pretty sizable kit. There’s a light attack, a heavy attack, a follow-up attack, and variable actions depending on analog inputs and whether or not you’re in the air. There are four weapons, each with their own gimmicks and skill trees that gradually add more combos and techniques as you fill them out. There’s the default Sword that basically just exists to let you do Devil May Cry’s Judgment Cut, a Greatsword used for slower charge-based attacks, a Glaive focused on spinning and ranged attacks, and a Scythe mainly used for crowd control while you use other weapons. On top of all this there’s a Gifted Energy system that lets you enhance your moves as you get your combos in, a stamina system that controls how much you can dodge, parry, or use special moves, three customizable Arena Powers (that let you do things like summon a tree that heals you, do a big hit, etc) with their own meters to fill up, all with a fairly simplistic Devil Trigger. 

This all sounds like a lot, but each individual mechanic is slowly doled out over the course of the game, with weapons coming into play hours apart, giving you plenty of time to gradually get a feel for what they’re capable of. If anything, the game could stand to unlock things more quickly. For the first ten or so hours you’re locked to two slowly charging Arena Powers and just the first two weapons, which gives a really bad impression of the potential in this combat system. When you have all your tools and most skill trees filled out by the end of the game, combat gets close to being as fun as something like Bayonetta, with its own twists and ideas. Finally pulling off a combo where your scythe is juggling an enemy with turrets around it, you’ve just made a tornado in the air with your glaive, and you quickly switch to your sword to unleash a barrage of slashes, it feels great! You can see the potential of what action games can be like, something that’s continually been eroded by the omnipresent influence of the Souls genre within the space.

I think concepts like using stamina to limit how many parries and dodges you can do makes combat interesting as well. There’s nothing wrong with the Devil May Cry approach of a Royal Guard stance you can utilize with a lot of practice, but there’s also fun to be had in being able to parry if you are smart. Having the stamina bar refill so fast in comparison to a Soulslike means even if you’re spamming moves, you can get back into a state of having resources pretty quickly, but you’re punished for mindless play. The only real problem is just how loose and inconsistent the presentation of all these things really is.

Presentation is actually one of the most important aspects of an action game that gets easily ignored when we’re discussing things like complexity and interest. Recently, we saw how the removal of hit-stop effects in Monster Hunter Wilds’ first beta made a lot of people feel much more negatively about a weapon’s moveset, even if the core of it hadn’t changed that much. That’s because the weight of those moves, the feeling of them being executed, was completely absent. In many cases, I think what can make people so anal about what a “real” character action game is, can be tied to just how weighty or impactful their attacks and movements feel within the game space. God of War is always in contention with this, because the original series very much leaned into a looser Hack-and-Slash feel, with impact only emphasized in its QTE boss fights.

A big issue with Lost Soul Aside is that a lot of attacks, and specifically the way you engage with enemies, can feel completely weightless. Various patches have come out since its release in August to try and remedy this, with louder sword clangs and cutting noises, or heavier slam animations with the great sword, but they can only do so much. A large component of this is the “break bar” nature of the game’s harder combatants, where most tougher enemies have a break bar you have to get through before they stagger or react to your attacks in any way. It’s fine to make a distinction between rank and file enemies and more elite thoughtful ones, but by the time you get to the halfway point of the game over 50% of the enemies you’ll face have break bars attached to them, which makes everything just feel so much more dull than it needs to be. If I’m slamming down a giant greatsword on a guy the same size as my player character, I don’t expect them to just stand there idly after…at least have them stumble a bit, you know?

But that level of weightlessness is pervasive throughout the entirety of Lost Soul Aside. Most mid-boss fight cutscenes have horrible audio balancing, cutting out the pretty decent battle themes to play sound effects at what sounds like 5% on the volume slider. The story doesn’t even try to ascribe any sort of comprehensive morality to any of its characters, taking for granted that you will just accept the idea of a rebellion against an evil empire. Why does Kaser want to fight back against the empire? We can assume nebulous concepts like class divide and fascism, but in what ways? What would any of this mean in this world where there are random immortals everywhere?

I assume many of these problems came from the game’s troubled development, but at the same time it reminds me so much of the types of RPG maker games you can find on places like DLsite where someone really likes one specific game and just replicates it as close as they possibly can while injecting their legally distinct OCs. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does showcase just how much of a freshman project Lost Soul Aside is, and I don’t think freshman projects should take almost ten years and millions of dollars to make.

Like I said at the outset, I really wanted to like Lost Soul Aside. The character action space is so devoid of new entries (though this is changing even as we speak), that it feels bad to tear down someone actually trying to fill the niche. There are some things that the game genuinely does better than other character action games! The bosses at worst are just boring, which is a feat given the average Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden has at least two guys you want to finish fighting as soon as possible! But it’s just not enough.

I don’t know if more time in the oven would’ve helped Lost Soul Aside, and I dread to think how it would’ve looked if it had met its original release date back in the spring. This is a game that punched way too far above its weight class, and while I admire the creators’ ambitions, they were not ready to take on a project of this depth and scale, and it’s little wonder the original open world ambitions fizzled out. If the developers get another shot, I’m sure they could take some of their ideas and make something with a lot more cohesion and impact, but as is, you’d probably be better off leaving this one Aside.

The post Another Unfortunate Versus XIII – Lost Soul Aside Review (PS5) appeared first on Gamesline.

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5. Final Fantasy XV

I played this game shortly after a really long road trip, traveling from Connecticut, to Louisiana, back to Connecticut, and then all over the eastern US to a bunch of different places like Boston and New York and Washington DC, and then landing finally in my new home in Louisiana. So, naturally, the best decision I made was to play a game simulating the road trip experience. This is a joke!

The drive physically was very grueling, even if the moments where I got to meet up with friends and hang out in entirely new places were some of the best experiences of my life. Spending hours on the road and then seeing these four very precious boys do the exact same thing without the endless hours, listening to podcast after podcast, calling friends just to keep myself occupied because today’s eight hour drive has been especially harsh.

I would occasionally take a break at rest stops, and it made me think about their geography and the daily lives of people who work at a gas station in Mississippi off a highway little to nobody travels through on a regular basis. Up north, rest stops are usually very scenic, nice hang out spots with campgrounds, and the next stop wouldn’t be far away. Down south, they’re more akin to something like the stops in FFXV, small isolated groups of businesses that exist simply for each other and the scant few consumers that roll through.

While FFXV makes them out to be something more like tiny towns, that’s not what these are. This is a McDonald’s and an off brand family owned gas station, maybe a dollar store, with nothing but fields and forests for miles separating the next stops. These people eventually stop working for the night and drive to their homes on distant country roads. The lives of people at stops in FFXV are even more isolated.

A lot of locations in FFXV were simply just a Crow’s Nest (it’s diner equivalent of a McDonalds) with a couple of other essential things like gas. The roads between these stops and the biggest towns are swarming with monsters, especially at night where it’s notably very dangerous to drive. There’s no real explanation why a lot of these tiny towns are so sparse, or how they can subsist with so little resources and accommodations, which left me with only to speculate. Do they sleep in their diners? Are they ok financially? The only explanation for any kind of sustainability in these kinds of settlements I found in game is that they’re all well lit so that scares away monsters from attacking at night. It feels like very little thought was put into these places, and yet they reflect the sparseness of real world rest stops.

Other stops are sort of like small settlements, with non-interactive buildings in the area as well, suggesting that the people who work at this stop live here too. It’s a weird concession that makes total sense within the world, but in a broader sense feels like a damning condemnation of capitalism in America, something that FFXV’s fantasy road trip aesthetic attempts to evoke through its stretching miles of open road and franchises. People are so tied to their work-life that they build settlements out of their homes. There’s only one major farm that I found in the world of FFXV, but they exist as a business.

There are no solitary locations that exist outside of businesses. No self-sustaining settlements that don’t exist to make money. You maintain a franchise because you cannot exist without it. I don’t think Square Enix thought this much about what it meant to have people’s lives tied so closely to towns about the size of a stripmall parking lot acting as tourist stops, the worst of these being one of the actual major towns in a game, Galdin Quay.

Galdin Quay is a fully staffed tiny resort with about two hotel rooms and one camper parked outside the resort also acting as a hotel. There are no beachside houses, no “exotic” huts that are actually very nice and high class on the inside. Instead it’s just a pier that the game treats as a major landmark. When the player isn’t here, how do these people live? This is probably a question you’re not meant to ask, but in the few settlements that seem to have apartment buildings just for the NPCs, someone working on the game decided to ask that question. I wish more people did, to make it feel like a more lived in world.

Aesthetically, Eos does feel like driving through America, granted with more giant stone arches overlooking expansive plains. Driving through scenic vistas, stopping at gas stops to pick up some food, gas up your car, maybe sleep for the night. You’re not meant to think about the lives of those who live there, these tiny parts of your road trip experience.

This is the same way we treat gas station workers, fast food workers, people making barely anything to scrape by in a place totally indifferent to their existence. FFXV is a flawed but beautiful game, an imperfect masterpiece. I enjoyed my time with it deeply. I still haven’t played the DLC, but maybe I’ll jump on them when the final one hits next year. I highly recommend it and I hope other people can find some meaning in it as well.

4. BATTLETECH

The semi-procedural events and missions from BATTLETECH’s single player campaign are engrossing and full of really amazing “I can’t believe this happened” stories that I caught myself telling to people. Like, for example, I picked up a couple of ne’er-do-wells named Peanut Butter and Rat Party because their names are, respectively, Peanut Butter and Rat Party, despite warnings that they may not be the most trustworthy folks. Everyone deserves a shot, especially if you have a great name.

Pretty quickly, they were getting into arguments with other staff members. At one point I caught Peanut Butter stripping out the copper wiring from my ship (really) and then he tried to spin it as there just simply not being enough space in the barracks. He was lying to me, obviously, but I let him off the hook as long as he fixed what he broke.

After that, times were tough. A whole squad of our mechs got totalled during a particularly hard mission, so we needed to wait several months in order to repair them. Thankfully, we completed that mission and made enough money to get our mechs repaired with money to sit on for a while. However, this meant we weren’t able to do any jobs until they were fixed. You do a monthly financial report, similar to XCOM, but instead of getting supplies alloted to you based on the quality of work you’ve done, you file an expense report on how much everyone earns. This meant a couple months of no new work and needing to cut people’s pay to make ends meet.

Morale was low. Peanut Butter, already a compulsive liar at this point, got caught in an argument with Glitch, one of the more well respected members of my crew. They were squabbling over who deserved the last cup of coffee. Peanut Butter said he was there first, but Glitch posited that Peanut Butter was lying and that he’d had several cups already. I made them split the cup, which they both seemed irritatedly content with.

Soon after, when our mechs were ready to roll out and our resources were low, we didn’t have the means to make the best moral choices. When we were short on medical supplies, I instructed my commanding officer to try and save some money by looking for black market goods. We got the supplies we needed in full at a lower price than standard, but we learned pretty quickly from a news report that a humanitarian effort had their medical supplies stolen. The crew’s morale was hit hard by this.

We were having trouble finding contracts for missions from any major factions that weren’t asking for more than we could reasonably do, which is why the pirates, possibly due to Peanut Butter and Rat Party’s influence or because they knew we were purchasing stolen goods, offered us a quick job to take one of a major faction’s smaller bases. We took the job. On paper, it looked like a milk run with the quick money we needed to avoid bankruptcy.

Glitch and Peanut Butter both went out on this one, along with another one of my pilots, Behemoth. The mission was simple. Sneak up to a base, take out its turrets, occupy the base. In and out. As mercenaries who fought against several pirate groups before, this was such a flip of the script of what we were used to. Instead of holding out and defending against an enemy fleet or flying in and saving the day after pirates had taken a base, this time we were the ones doing the taking.

After we took the base, predictably, a squadron of mechs was sent to take us out. I couldn’t help but see our own past experiences reflected on this squad of 4, rushing in with fully repaired but lower grade mechs. They, too, were probably mercenaries, on the other side of a job we’d done before. They needed the money as much as we did. They followed a strategy we did several times before. They rushed down Behemoth and took out her health as quickly as they could. Behemoth was in a bad way. Glitch and Peanut Butter, outnumbered and surrounded, got around Behemoth to give her retreat into the mountainous woods behind the base. From there, all three stood their ground. While the enemy squad’s mechs were out in the open, my team had the high ground, had cover, and most importantly, we were tight knit and could focus down a single enemy better than they could.

Their tiny Jenner ran up to try and flank us, Peanut Butter let out a huge punch and was able to kill it in one hit. A mech we had damaged significantly went for an all or nothing melee attack on Behemoth, who somehow managed to take the hit. Behemoth is tough. She’s got a lot of guts. Now the mech was surrounded, and all 3 on my team took their shots, killing the pilot before their mech hit the ground. The odds were now in our favor. Victory was all but assured.

The enemy still plucked away at us, trying to find a way into our position, but they were outgunned. One of them got Behemoth good, running behind her and unleashing a full salvo on her backside. You don’t ever wanna get hit from behind, your armor just isn’t as strong as the front. She was on her last legs, but she was still standing, somehow. Glitch and Rat Party focused down fire on a different enemy mech, barely managing to kill him. Behemoth, however, had different plans.

All her guns were destroyed save for a single short range laser which wasn’t gonna do any good. She had one weapon left, her fist. She got into a fist fight with the mech that was antagonizing her, and was close to being knocked on her ass until Peanut Butter, out of nowhere, jetpacked in over the mountain straight on top of the enemy pilot’s mech, killing him on impact.

The mission was completed, and Behemoth would be out for several weeks having her injuries tended to. After that, however, I didn’t hear Peanut Butter getting into any petty arguments or telling any ridiculous lies. He was in it with us shoulder to shoulder, struggling to get by just as badly as we were. We’ve got a big score coming up. If all goes well, I’m giving my crew a bonus.

3. Deltarune

This game is a joy. Through all the weird memes and toxic fandom that disintegrated the collective consciousness of Undertale over the last few years, it’s nice to be reminded of everything I loved about it. Deltarune cleverly toys with the RPG genre, expanding on concepts originally explored by Undertale in new and exciting ways.

Pacifism is not only a viable way to play through these games, but the recommended way to play. Having multiple characters pop in and out of your party to mix up the formula of the game on fundamental levels is exciting. For example, Susie, the party’s big axe lady, will never not attack, so in order to prevent people from dying, you have to figure out how to work with your opponents to avoid them being killed. It’s delightful.

What Deltarune and Undertale both similarly understand is how a good sense of humor can endear players to characters and worlds. While games have shifted from a striving-to-be Monty Python style of observational humor to more of the snappier style of writing inspired by modern prestige TV and movies, designed very homogeneously to let the best focus tested punchline land at the exact correct time, Deltarune chooses to walk a different path.

It’s an onslaught of jokes, both subtle and overstated, all delivered with an escalating cleverness and no bit overstaying its welcome. Very few series are so sublimely aware of every aspect of their medium as to set up and pay off in every single thinkable comedic scenario. As one critic pointed out in an essay on Undertale, there’s really nothing quite like the comedic timing of “Just a regular old bucket

of snails.”

What makes Deltarune so uniquely capable of being on this list, however, is it’s desire to not simply be Undertale 2. With a massive fanbase that all have their own fancanon, alternative universes, original characters and the sheer amount lore speculation happening, leaving the world behind was just not in the cards for Toby Fox. However, it also chooses not to be a part of the established world of Undertale. Described by Fox as an “alternate universe prequel” which in itself, to any other audience, would sound like a massive slap in the face, Deltarune chooses to be a best of both worlds of fanservice and unique storytelling.

It gives players who loved Undertale a chance to be with those characters again, while also not inherently invalidating anyone’s experience with Undertale. As such, there is no canon route in Undertale, paradoxically invalidating and justifying however you chose to play the game. Deltarune allows you to play lethally, but does not have alternate paths for a lethal or non-lethal playthrough, as it’s one singular contained story. Also as part of it’s cursory nature in relation to Undertale, it thus justifies all other instances of separate universes in Undertale. It’s the ultimate in validation. Everyone’s fan universe is VALID.

Kickstarter? Not canon. Tweets? Not canon.

Weird bootleg nursery rhyme video with my characters?

Hmm…

I haven't decided yet. pic.twitter.com/SwIWzKHlKm

— tobyfox (@tobyfox) November 25, 2016

Deltarune, essentially, creates its own world while also remixing the aspects of the Undertale world people are familiar with, which is so unique when compared to a lot of other series’ of games. The many entries in the Soulsborne series in it’s various iterations make direct reference to each other while keeping their worlds unique to one another, but Deltarune feels like that isn’t enough. It knows it isn’t enough for players just to have a character that has Jimmy’s sword. Maybe you liked Jimmy when you played the last game. Maybe you’re just excited to see him again. Deltarune lets you do that while still maintaining its own identity. It must simultaneously live up to and has no interest in being Undertale 2. It’s not Undertale 2. It’s the perfect Undertale 2.

2. The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories

The MISSING is excellent. The MISSING is a meditation on bodies and self, the story of a person who doesn’t yet understand who she is deconstructing and rebuilding herself over and over until she finds what makes her whole. J.J. Macfield is an incredible character, and while I love this game to death, I’d prefer to stay more in my own lane and not be too long winded about it. Instead, if you’re interested in learning more about the game, I’d highly recommend the review from our very own contributor Rose as well Nadia M’s reflections on the game. If you only play one thing from this year for some reason, I’d highly recommend giving The MISSING a shot.

1. Shadow of the Colossus

The malaise and excited trepidation I experienced playing the stunningly beautiful remake of Shadow of the Colossus this year was partially due to anticipating that huge road trip, completely uprooting my entire life and traveling cross-country for a totally fresh start. There was certainly a sense of comfort in experiencing SotC again, but its themes of uncertainty, anxiety, and being dead set on your beliefs while knowing they can have disastrous consequences, resonated deeply with me at such a vulnerable point in my life. Traveling through the world, touring the lonely countrysides and deviating from my path, feeling like I was seeing a world nobody else had ever seen, left me as lonely as I felt on the several eight hour car rides on my own. Nobody to talk to. Nobody to share my anxieties with.

SotC came at a weird time, just after I had replayed Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild on master mode. The two felt diametrically opposed and yet inextricably linked. While BotW emphasizes exploration and creativity, SotC could not encourage you less to explore. You, as a player, can only explore when you break down the mental barrier that encourages you to head towards your next objective. The world is massive and full of possibility, which seemingly countless multiple paths leading in and out of each other to newer and more beautiful places. However it knowingly doesn’t capitalize on it’s exploration as BotW does. In BotW, you can crest over a hill in order to discover a new secret, a new weapon to add to your inventory or another shrine to do some more puzzles. In SotC, you’re greeted with a few grip or stamina upgrades or a collectible or two, sure, but what’s more rewarding are the scenic vistas, the impossibly massive and yet lonely landscapes, the broken ruins of an empty land.

SotC would not only not exist without the Legend Of Zelda series, but is also deeply critical of it in many ways. It frames its narrative as a typical hero’s journey, a young boy sets off to save a princess. In this instance, he toys with dark forces he doesn’t yet understand in order to bring her back to life. Many Legend of Zelda games are about traveling the world and discovering greater truths, learning how to defeat the evil force to save the world, and while you would certainly expect SotC to follow that same formula from it’s initial framing at the start of the game, it becomes clear how little it cares for heroes and the paths they have to walk down.

Legend of Zelda usually has a running theme of the player getting stronger to overcome adversity. Here, in SotC, it twists that fantasy. Yes, there is some mechanical progression in collecting fruits and lizard tails for stat upgrades, but Wander arrives in the Forbidden Land with every tool he needs. He already has his blade, he has his bow, he has his horse. He is already complete. He is already equipped to handle any adversity he might run up against. It’s safe to assume that he is a character who knows what he wants. This right here is the key criticism SotC makes of fantasy games, or any kind of game that encourages an empowerment fantasy. It gives Wander agency.

In Legend of Zelda, you, the player, and Link, the character, each share a singular objective: defeat the evil forces of the world to bring peace to the land, often saving a princess in the meanwhile. SotC understands this framing and utilizes it to lull the player into a sense of false security. While it makes it pretty clear the Dormin is a dark force not to be taken lightly, it also sets the rules pretty plainly. You defeat these colossi, I bring the girl back to life. What it obfuscates until the game is willing to show it’s hand a little more is that the deal Wander and Dormin have made comes at a much greater peril than any darkness that might threaten the world in the Forbidden Land of the colossi.

Wander enters this pact willingly, and while it’s implied that Dormin has tricked Wander into it against his will, Wander has already gone against the will of his people. Dormin explicitly states that the price of this resurrection would be heavy, but it does not deter him. Wander has already sought out this fate knowing that it could possibly have a dark end. His will is to bring back Mono, the woman he is trying to resurrect, through any means necessary. While the implication is one of romance, of a young man who doesn’t know better acting out of love, we don’t hear Mono’s side. We don’t know her will. All we know is that she was sacrificed due to a “cursed fate” which can have many interpretations.

What’s important is that it is not Mono’s will to be resurrected. Wander made this choice implicitly, against the will of those around him, damning the consequences. It was his will that set the story in motion, and by his hand were Dormin’s machinations made manifest. There’s a reason why, at the very end of the game, you become the large monster, almost a colossi yourself, attacking your kin. A hulking, monstrous, muscular form. A hyper idealized embodiment of masculine form shrouded in total darkness. Wander achieves his goal, he brings Mono back to life. In order to do it, he has gone from stomping on the will of others to pursue his goals and irrationally endangering all of those around him. He goes from metaphorically stepping on others to quite literally stepping on others.

Shadow of the Colossus is a cautionary tale of unchecked toxic masculinity. This revelation didn’t come to a lot of people in 2005 when analytical critique of games wasn’t nearly as prevalent, or at least as mainstream as it is now. But I stand by this reading of it. The game all but confirms it by having Dormin, a character portrayed as dual-gender played by both a masculine and feminine voice actor in tandem, dropping their feminine voice and simply using the masculine one when all of the Colossi are defeated and Dormin is finally unbound to the Forbidden Land, free to run rampant on the world again. People who strive for every single thing to make mechanical and canonical sense craft weird theories like how the feminine side of Dormin went into Mono’s body so she can be resurrected as dark queen. But in a game about a man going against the will of those around him and conspiring with dark forces to serve selfish needs, doesn’t that make more sense?

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Support us on Patreon! Follow us on twitter @VGChooChoo, @YourPalNiall, @SocksMahoney, and @solonface, and don’t forget to rate & review the show on iTunes, as well as tell a friend! You can also send questions, comments, and concerns to podcast@videogamechoochoo.com or find us on Tumblr! You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

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During a second anniversary celebratory live stream, Square broke the news alongside an announcement that the development team Luminous Productions, which had been established earlier in the year, would be working on a new AAA project. That new AAA project has taken central focus for the development team, so more work on FFXV couldn’t really be justified.

On top of this announcement, Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata has resigned from both Luminous Productions and Square Enix, explaining his leave in a letter presented on stream:

Hello, this is Tabata.

It’s almost going to be two whole years since the release of Final Fantasy XV. I honestly believe the reason we were able to get this far is because of all you loyal fans. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Today, I have a personal announcement to make to all of you. I, Hajime Tabata, will be resigning from Luminous Productions and the Square Enix Group as of October 31, 2018.

I was able to gain so much experience with my time at Square Enix. Every title I was able to be a part of means a lot to me. However, Final Fantasy XV stood out from that group as it was a special project for me which I went all-in on.

Therefore, I decided to take this opportunity to officially announce my departure from Final Fantasy XV to all the fans who have supported the title across the globe.

In regards to my next endeavors and near future, I have a project that I truly wish to solidify as my next challenge after Final Fantasy XV. For that reason, I have decided to leave my current position and start my own business in order to achieve my goal.

As production of “Episode Ardyn” continues and Luminous Productions works on new projects, I felt that it was time for me to hand over the torch to the next generation group of talented and trustworthy colleagues and believe that they will create something amazing.

From this day on, I will cheer on and support Square Enix and Luminous Productions together with all of you fans.

I would like to thank everyone who continue to support Final Fantasy XV and those who have also supported myself personally.

—Hajime Tabata

The first of the planned DLCs, Episode Ardyn, will still be released in March of 2019, and a standalone version of the game’s multiplayer component Comrades will be released on December 12th on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The long in-development Final Fantasy XIV crossover event will also be taking place this December, with events happening in both XIV and XV.

There was a time where it seemed like Final Fantasy XV would just keep going on forever, but now it seems that its days have at last been numbered. While it would’ve been nice to see female characters like Aranea Highwind and Lady Lunafreya actually get a chance in the spotlight, I think it’s best for Final Fantasy XV to finally take a break.

The post Final Fantasy XV’s Second DLC Season Cancelled appeared first on Gamesline.

Support us on Patreon! Follow us on twitter @VGChooChoo, @john_michonski, and @YourPalNiall, and don’t forget to rate & review the show on iTunes, as well as tell a friend! You can also send questions, comments, and concerns to podcast@videogamechoochoo.com or find us on Tumblr! You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

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

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Support us on Patreon! Follow us on twitter @VGChooChoo, @john_michonski, @horngal, & @SocksMahoney and don’t forget to rate & review the show on iTunes, as well as tell a friend! You can also send questions, comments, and concerns to podcast@videogamechoochoo.com or find us on Tumblr! You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

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

Wear boob sweaters with Chooch via iTunes, Hipcast, Direct Download or listen below!

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The four new story DLC expansions will focus on a singular character, similar to the previous Episode Ignis, Episode Gladiolus and Episode Prompto expansions. The upcoming expansions feature the characters Ardyn, Aranea, Lunafreya, and Noctis as their primary focus. All of them are being directed by Takefumi Tareda, who directed Episode Ignis. The Episode III: Noctis expansion will supposedly be an alternate ending for Noctis as well.

The COMRADES multiplayer DLC will branching off into a standalone release this summer, with it’s first major update coming shortly afterwards. A second is scheduled to roll out this winter. The single-player story episodes are scheduled to start in February 2019, rolling out once a month until they’re all released.

The post Final Fantasy XV To Receive More DLC Episodes appeared first on Gamesline.

Ryan, Andi and Niall have gathered around to spend a couple hours laughing at John! The gang talk Seinfeld, Metroid, Destiny, Everybody’s Golf, Paul Giamatti, John’s distaste for K-pop, Danganronpa, Hellblade, Yakuza, MvC’s bonkers story, NBA 2k18’s garbage microtransactions, Randy Pitchford being Randy Pitchford, Tokyo Game Show, and Tigger’s Numbers.

Follow us on twitter @VGChooChoo, @JohnMichonski, @sewerpeak, @YourPalNiall, & @captaintrash, and don’t forget to rate & review the show on iTunes, as well as tell a friend! You can also send questions, comments, and concerns to podcast@videogamechoochoo.com or find us on Tumblr! You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Count Tigger’s Numbers with Chooch via iTunes, Hipcast, Direct Download or listen below!

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Follow us on twitter @VGChooChoo, @JohnMichonski, @finaldasa & @captaintrash, and don’t forget to rate & review the show on iTunes, as well as tell a friend! You can also send questions, comments, and concerns to podcast@videogamechoochoo.com or find us on Tumblr! You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Tongue Chooch’s sandwich via iTunes, Hipcast, Direct Download or listen below!

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