Sometimes i stumble upon heated arguments about Hydaelyn on the internet. Was sundering the entire world into fragments justified? Why did she do it? Wasn’t there another solution instead of condemning every living soul to an incomplete existence? I dismissed them and moved onto consuming more content sludge like i usually do, but while showering, I found myself pondering the moral implications of Venat’s actions. It led me down a weird, self-made rabbit hole of thematic storytelling and existential questioning, which to be fair, isn’t that unusual, but i found it endearing coming from an MMO, which is supposed to be escapism at its core.

I feel like i’m losing you already so i’ll get on with my view on the meaning of the game, or what i think it is anyways. I don’t know man i’m not Ishikawa

"Well come and well met,
my brave little spark"

Endwalker’s theme is depression and suffering. It’s a stark contrast from Shadowbringers’ theme, which is hope and rebirth. It’s that very same suffering that the Ancients tried to ignore at all costs during their existence on Etheirys. They always believed their world to be a perfect and happy place, but the reason for this belief is that they always chose to shut their eyes and cover their ears in order to ignore all the problems they swept under the rug. They think lives outside of their own are primitive and therefore can be manipulated; they have no problem creating life and discarding it as they see fit; and they don’t mind sacrificing future generations just to sate Zodiark’s need for power. They don’t want to look outside their little paradise because it would be inconvenient for them. But this one guy, Hermes, chose to finally try to understand. That is Hermes dilemma, and the answer to the dilemma broke him.
Hermes is an inherently empathic person in a world where people are conditioned every moment of their lives to not be empathic. He feels alone, a bad person, and he is clearly severely depressed when we meet him. He doesn’t understand what makes life worth living, but he wants to understand, and believes that if life in itself exists, then it has to have meaning. Because if there’s no meaning, what was the point? The Ancients made striving for ‘perfection’ their life meaning, but Hermes doesn’t find joy in any of that bullshit, so he wonders: What is the purpose of life? And more importantly, what is its meaning? In a reckless attempt to find an answer to that question, Hermes creates Meteion, then multiple of them, and sends the Meteia into outer space. To ask others their meaning. But reality is full of suffering, and everybody is dead.

"Now sing with me once more,
share of your life"

Meteion is very powerful. Too much powerful. In his desperate search for meaning, Hermes threw all caution out the window, didn’t propose the idea to the council, and instead carried it out as a personal project. The being that resulted from that, a being made of Dynamis, could form extremely deep empathic connections with others, and others with her. Any slight emotion would affect her tenfold, and what she felt could influence the Dynamis that surrounded every single living being.
Meteion, being a hivemind, upon discovering that life has no real meaning, got stuck in an existential despair feedback loop, which made her more and more depressed, causing her in turn to give that very same despair to other civilizations. When Hermes discovered that the universe was filled with suffering, something finally broke inside him. He felt no better than the very same Ancients he so vehemently condemned; having put his creation through indescribable suffering, he felt like his last and only hope was shattered; he felt life had no meaning whatsoever. It didn’t matter anymore. Let everyone die. If his people were truly above the destruction that Meteion would cause, then they would have to survive it without his help. Without his guilt. And so… he deletes everyone’s memory. Hermes is a weak person; the weight this revelation had on his mind was too much to bear. So he did what a weak person would do and just got rid of it, simply enough.

"Remember the rain, near and far beloved
Each drop a blessing from heavens abovе"

Hermes is a selfish hypocrite.
He believes himself to be morally superior when it’s clear that his peers all feel the same way about the morality of their experiments. But Hermes shuts himself off, too engrossed in himself to care about how others feel. That would make him less special after all. He does the very same cruel experiments he hates so much and even cosmically blows them out of proportion, all without realizing... or maybe he did realize, but it was too much pain to acknowledge. This is the sin of Hermes. A fitting name, no doubt.

"Remember the rain, near and far beloved
Each drop a blessing from heavens abovе"

Despite everything, the Ancients tried everything in their power to go back to their world without suffering. Despite the Final Days laying bare how their vision of the world doesn’t exist, they desperately hold on to their childish utopia, so much so that they arrive at their final conclusion: sacrificing half of their world to summon Zodiark. Despite this, obviously, sacrificing half of their people didn’t sit well with them, and their solution to this problem is yet again suicide. Not only did they sacrifice half of the remaining population to bring life back to the planet, thus bringing the net total down to 25% of survivors, but worse yet, they planned on raising a whole new generation just to be cattle to sacrifice to bring their friends back.

"And how, as time flowed on, those waters became one
Streams, rivers and lakes,"

No wonder unrest and opposition grew as these temporary and extreme solutions were used, and Venat was among those who shared this feeling. She already knew, as the Warrior of Light told her, the decision she would have to eventually make. But she wanted to believe in her people regardless and pleaded with them to come to their senses, as we are shown in the “Thou must Live, Die and Know” MSQ cutscene. But they didn’t listen. They decide to carry on their murder spree to chase a perfect world which was long gone. Venat’s face and her expression in that moment are transparent. There’s no running from it anymore, she knows what she has to do. Etheyris had taken the very same path that all those other planets Meteion found had tread before them. Even if not directly, Meteion’s song of despair was working wonders, and the Ancients’ sins had become nightmare fuel. Venat then takes action: "No more shall man have wings to bear him to Paradise. Henceforth, he shall walk." She takes humanity on a different path.

"They carry onward, however changed
with each brief reflection
By setting sun, by storm's wake,
til welcomed home to gentle sea"

Venat condemns humanity to suffering. Because it’s thanks to suffering that people find meaning in life; it’s because you can feel sadness that you also know what happiness is; it’s because you will someday die that you can live your life to the fullest. This is Venat’s Answer to Hermes question, that being the meaning of life. And this is why the song is named Answer. Because that’s a literal answer: suffering, but living to the fullest, and entrusting the world to the next generation.
Hear, Feel, Think.

“Thy Life is a riddle, to bear rapture and sorrow
To listen, to suffer, to entrust unto tomorrow
In one fleeting moment, from the Land doth life flow
Yet in one fleeting moment, for anew it doth grow
In the same fleeting moment
Thou must Live, Die, and Know.”

This is the Answer. Her choice is a morally gray one, nevertheless it is the correct one; that doesn’t mean she isn’t suffering every step of the way for the pain her children must endure all their lives. The cutscene where she walks alone in the dark and gradually gets more bruised, hurt, and bleeding, is a visual metaphor that symbolizes this very same concept. She gets to the Warrior of Light’s fight with Emet completely drenched in blood; she shares our suffering and it gives her pain, but it’s this suffering that gives meaning to her actions, and to her life.

-----------------------------------------------------------

With me so far? You’re doing great. Unless you just skipped to this part or are reading even tho u didnt play the game, in which case, bad !!! shoo !
Let’s continue, we’re almost there. We’re just missing a couple of pieces.

"Should you meet a soul rising surface-ways,
With your unbeating heart, wish them well"

To recap, Hermes is a depressed, sociopathic nihilist who condemned the world to end and then erased everyones mind about it (what a nice guy!).
Meteion is one of Hermes victims, caught up in an endless cycle of misery and despair for an eternity. Until the WoL came along and made her understand that hope still exists and that life is worth living no matter what, thanks to the power of friendship™
Fandaniel, which may or may not be the same as Hermes depending on your POV, is the biggest nihilist of them all, committing suicide along with Zodiark to resume the Meteia’s song of despair, wanting to fulfill Xande’s wish from his time as Amon —“Do you remember when I told you that I wanted to die and take everyone with me? I meant it.” what a sick ass line
Venat/Hydaelyn decides it’s time for the world to move on to the next generation, so she sunders the world into 13 shards to bring Zodiark down. She already knows that we, the WoL, will eventually come along and try to stop Meteion, but she doesn’t know if we will succeed since we visited her in Elpis before the final confrontation. As a backup plan in case we fail, she makes the Loporrits and the Moon in order to spirit humanity away to safety, even if that’s a temporary solution. As for the permanent solution, she relies on our strength and tests us to see if we’re worthy to face the Endsinger. As we defeat her, she’s glad to finally let go and let us handle the rest. After an eternity of suffering, she can finally rest.
There’s someone missing. Uhm. That’s weird i was sur—*A TEST OF YOUR REFLEXES!!!*AAAAAA

Zenos.
Good old Zenos.

"Deep, dark, far away,
I have heard your voice"

Back during the Roman Empire, around the 1st century AD, there lived a guy named Seneca. (i promise i will be short okay) This dude Seneca was a very good writer. He wrote many influential books still studied and discussed today, among which the Dialogues, where at one point he introduces the concept of “Taedium Vitae,"  which was later picked up and thoroughly enriched as a concept by existentialist philosophers like Heidegger and Sartre. Anyways, this “Taedium Vitae” is essentially an existential condition characterized by a deep anguish that permeates every second of a person's life, consumes them, strips them of their meaning, and makes them feel nothing at all. It’s boredom and resignation at life’s inability to have any meaning. Sounds familiar?
That is exactly what has afflicted our boy Zenos for his whole life. Reading his short story ‘Let the Hunt Begin’ makes things even clearer: ever since he could remember, Zeno’s life has been empty, bereft of any real goal or meaning; moving from one task to another, going through the motions only because that’s what was expected of him, not being able to feel a sliver of any emotion. That was the life that Zenos has lived… up until he met us.

"Now our hands join
round the meaning you sought"

Back in Stormblood, Zenos did not understand other people; even after meeting us, he just assumed we were like him, an empty husk chasing the next battle high against the next formidable foe. But during Endwalker, something started to grow inside of him. He started to understand that maybe things do matter to people. The problem is, he can’t understand it; he doesn’t get why people care. But people do.

When we encounter him the second time in Garlemald, answering Julius's lashing out at him for all the terrible things he’s done, he says “Would you be ‘happier’, had I a ‘good reason’?” Zenos makes it clear that he understands others are suffering because of him; he knows his existence has only brought despair to the world. But morality, justice, and all these appeals to a person’s humanity are words used to further one’s own agenda; why shouldn’t Zenos do the same? Why shouldn’t he use those same words and give his own subjective meaning to them? In the end, he doesn’t care if he gets chastised for that. It doesn’t matter anyway.

"I'll catch your tears, quench your fears with joy,
til you near the shore"

This is gonna need a re-read, but try to follow me here.
While it would be normally easy to dismiss Zenos’ argument as wrong, Endwalker’s context actually supports it, and presents a vision of the world where objectivity exists only inside one’s subjectivity, and thus morality is subjected to the individual’s perception of it.
It’s a textbook definition of moral relativism, and even if someone can argue that moral propositions are subjected to human logic and common sense, we must understand that inside a person’s own objectivity (how they experience the world based on their own perception of the world itself), these propositions hold no meaning whatsoever, thus being unconstrained by the popular consensus of what's good or what's bad.

"Where in time, all shall as hope be reborn, ah..."

Zenos’ argument is sound, and even when Alisaie makes a rebuttal, she doesn’t attack Zenos’ logic, but his behavior. She says to him that he may be right, but he’s acting like a dick, and if he keeps acting like a dick no one will ever pay importance to him. It seems this actually affects Zenos behavior, and he decides to actually help us against Endsinger; the quicker we beat her, the faster we can finally duel to death. And if we decide, after his act of kindness, to finally concede the fight he craves so much, Zenos becomes elated. “Acceptance. At long last”.

"Hush, love, close your eyes, and in sleep abide"

Zenos is always portrayed as an incredibly intelligent person, who loves poetry, and with an attitude toward philosophy.

“Never have I understood those around me. Understood their obsessions. Besieged by their banality, the world was a mire of tedium and trivialities”

Zenos recognizes the Taedium Vitae that has haunted him all his life. And yet,

“But in these fleeting moments, there is… a spark. Blinding, brilliant…

Gone… too soon…”

as opposed to Meteion, who thought that by eradicating life she was doing everyone a favor, Zenos believes that despite life being filled with death and despair, it should be lived. For that spark. This is Zenos' answer.
He finally comes to understand that this spark can be anything for anyone, for the WoL it’s saving people, for Zenos it’s dancing with death in battle.
This is up to interpretation, but it’s implied that as his dying wish, he uses dynamis to bring the teleporter back to you, because he thinks you deserve to live on; there’s no connotation of ‘justice’ behind this action, he just wants to save your life.

"Know you will wake, on winds rise again
For this journey's end
is but one step forward to tomorrow"

One's spark doesn’t need morality or ethics to justify itself, but the desire alone justifies the action. You don’t save the Etheyris because it’s morally correct, but because you want to. He doesn’t fight you because it upholds his principles, but because he just wants to.
Because he cares about you. He cares. You are his spark.
Thank you for reading.

“What of you, my mirror?

Was this life a gift… or a burden?

Did you find… fulfillment?


I…”

... It took me a long time to finish the game. Sekiro revealed itself to be much, much longer than i expected it to be, and after i was done with it i needed a chill game to relax with. A game that let’s you experience it, that doesn’t ask anything of you. I couldn’t play a better game at this time...

I want to borrow a quote from Joseph Anderson: What Remains of Edith Finch is one of those pop-up books you played with as a kid, but much grander in scope. It’s an interactive story, you can’t really talk gameplay since the game leans much more on the ‘interaction’ side of things, reinventing or introducing various gimmicks as means to progress in the story, when you’re not walking. Walking, that’s what you’ll be doing for most of the game. You could consider walking as flipping a page in that pop-up book, a metaphor aided by the text that floats around when you reach certain triggers. Taking in the sights, reflecting on the elements the beautifully written story presented to you, What Remains of Edith Finch wants you, the player, to take it slowly and softly. That’s one of the first things that i got confronted with while playing: Edith, the protagonist, moves VERY slowly; it makes sense, after all no one is running after her, she doesn’t have a goal, she only wants to confront her past, one step at a time. The more i played the more i adjusted to the slow speed.

Im one of those guys who loves cinematic set pieces in games where you just walk around, so i found myself at home here too. It’s incredible thinking back just how quickly the game pulled me in its story. As soon as i saw the house, i knew i wanted to know everything about it. Entering inside for the first time was magical: the wind was blowing, the house barely lit, chinese take-out lying on tables, photos, journals, cutlery, everything felt so lived in, so real, the house was filled to the brim. And i quickly noticed it was also filled, overwhelmingly, with books.

Everywhere i looked, there books lied. On shelves, on chairs, on the ground, on the couch, stairs, every single piece of furniture is filled with books. I feel this is a nice narrative callback to the ‘power’ Edie holds over the house and the Finch family. I’ll be getting into spoilers now and i’ll assume you’ll know the story, so go play it please. It’s worth it !!

One of the most intriguing parts of the story is how your perception of Edie and Dawn start to change as the game progresses. At first Dawn looks as grumpy and unreasonable as one can be, and Edie as the cool, understanding person of the situation, but you soon start to realize just how much Dawn was actually doing the right thing and protecting the family from Edie. Edie is FUCKING WERID man. She’s obsessed with her family history, with the curse, with preserving memories and piling everything on top of everything, just like she does with her books, just as she did with her house. Edie loves attention and spectacle, loves to exaggerate and romanticize her life in every aspect, even horrible things like her husband death. Edie celebrates death more than anything else. Edie celebrates a persons’ death more than the person themselves. And by propagating this harmful rhetoric of a ‘curse’, invented to legitimize herself and romaticize her family misfortune, she’s ultimately the person responsible for all the death that surrounds her. She’s the culprit behind her family trauma. Starving your child until she poisons herself, validate a poor man extreme sense of guilt by aiding him in his own decade-log self isolation; this is only the surface of what Edie is willing to do to pump her ego, to make her life- and legacy, special.

This is a game about death. The first time i opened up the family tree i remember expressely saying “oh wow. A lot of people died. oh wAIT. THEY’RE ALL DEAD. EVERYBODY’S DEAD. Edith is the last remaining member of her family”. Death and one’s legacy are what drives the narrative forward, it permeates every second of the experience and leaves a strong message because of it, especially during some of the best emotional setpieces the game has to offer like the incredible sequence dedicated to Lewis, who died by suicide. If u didnt play the game and you’re somehow still reading this then please go play it. It’s worth it for that part alone.


Okay i needed something lighter and more carefree now. So i took one of the hardest decisions i could. I would finally play Deltarune.

You know how you constantly procrastinate enjoying something cause u already know you’ll fall in love with it? Not playing a game or watching a show cause then the first time wouldn’t be a first time anymore? That was me with Deltarune.

I love Undertale. So much. Its probably THE game i would be willing to score a 10/10.

The artstyle, the humor, the characters, the combat, the music, the atmosphere, the narrative, the dialogue, the serious moments, the designs, the tonal shifts, the mysteries, the silliness, the drama, the colors and sound effects and the meta and the endings and the extras and the datamining oh my god. oh my god. It’s made for me. this game was made for me.

I hate so much writing about it because i just don’t know, I don’t know what to say. It’s not that my words can’t do it justice or some corny shit like that, i just that i literally don’t know where to even begin, let alone where to take the discussion. I guess i could ramble for a bit about the meta-narrative and how it manages to pull in the player and never lets them escape it, maybe i can write about the characters arc or why the writing is good or pretentious shit like that which i pretend to know anything about, but what’s the point? What more is left to say that hasn’t already been repeated to death? We could talk about why Sans bleeds in the No Mercy run and it would still be more original than doing an actual review or retrospective. There’s still cool stuff to talk about even today, as demonstrated by this video, but i’m not remotely good enough to manage and formulate an interesting thought about the game on my very own… besides, i didn’t even actually play the game. I watched it. And i hate myself for it.

art by WatanoLemon! Back when i first heard about the game i tried pirating it. I was 12, and barely knew English, or how to pirate games for that matter. I didn’t have money and asking my dad was out of the question, so i resorted to the internet. I somehow managed to run the .exe and played up until about the halfway point of the RUINS, and the game crashed, always on that same spot. I gave up trying until one day i got spoiled the Toriel fight (which i thought happened very late in the game), which left me i SO MUCH DESPAIR THAT I GOT DESPERATE AND STARTED CRYING. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME ????? FUCK YOU

I could’t do it anymore, so i watched it on youtube. I couldn’t understand some part of the dialogue and narration, and yet it still resonated with me deeply. It’s a testament to the power of Undertale. Still, not being able to play it remains a big regret of mine, and it feels like a piece is missing somewhere inside my body. I played it on PS4 years later, hoping it would fix me, but i didn’t, and as such everytime someone asks me what game would i pick if i could erase my memory and play it again, i would choose Undertale without a second thought.

So now you understand why i was so hesitant to play Deltarune; it was my next chance, my scapegoat, and i wanted my first playthrough to be special. I strongly considered playing it after the whole game was out, but the itch was too big to resist. I suppressed my fear of “screwing it up” somehow and played it. I love Deltarune. So much. Its probably THE game i would be willing to score a 10/10.

The artstyle, the humor, the characters, the combat, the music, the atmosphere, the narrative, the dialogue, the serious moments, the designs, the tonal shifts, the mysteries, the silliness, the drama, the colors and sound effects and the meta and the endings and the extras and the datamining oh my god. oh my god. It’s made for me. this game was made for me.

As predicted, Deltarune was what i had from Undertale and even more. The production quality has skyrocketed but left intact the ‘homemade’ spirit of Undertale. The moment i saw the battle screen and Rude Buster started playing i lost my mind. I voiced all the characters and had the time of my life. Never in the last 10 years i had fun and laughed so much, so many times consecutively, i can’t remember a time where i smiled so hard for so long that my cheeks hurt afterwards. Life hit me hard when i was about to become a teen, and i couldn’t live those years as a normal teen should. I will be forever grateful to Toby for giving me a chance to open a window on it and see what it would have felt like, if i had the chance. And the moment i realized that, i felt so alone, and a huge wave of sadness came over me. Maybe that’s the piece that has been missing, and that i thought Undertale could give me back. But it can’t, and that’s okay. I’ll live with the scar. For now, i’m happy that UT/DR could care for my wound and give me a little kiss. It made me feel special, and for that, thank you.

That’s what i’ve been playing for the past months. I’m not talking about Splatoon 3 because i eventually want to talk about it once the updates end. Expect a full on wall-text solely about Deltarune, once it ends in a decade or two. I also want to give a shot about writing properly about Undertale but it’s very very hard for the aforementioned reasons. It’s been like a months where i barely touched any game at all, it feels like they’re down below my priorities list lately. It doesn’t feel good and i want to RELAX the evening !!! NOT STUDY !!!


okay bye bvye

MIPS is where i’ll talk about games i’ve been playing. These are not reviews and are almost effortless, just random stuff popping in my head.
Since september 23 i’ve gone ahead and played cool shit! including but not limited to

HADES - from october to november. didnt 100% it i just beat the game and moved on

SEKIRO - from november to january. DAMN this one took a lil while. I didnt get the platinum but i did basically everything. I just need to do the other 3 endings.

WHAT REMAINS OF EDITH FINCH - January. Cool game wow !!!!!!!!!!!!

DELTARUNE - January to february. currently on third playthrough. i love it and im gonna write a review proper
when ch 3 and 4 drop eventually. good job toby *pets

SPLATOON 3 - October to ??? i still play it even if…

It’s been three weeks now i havent played a SINGLE VIDEOGAME !!!! Like at all !!! I am so busy with school man. When i have time i either draw something or practice piano and guitar. Ughhhhhh im losing my mind
anyways

I got recommended Hades a lot past couple of years. I saw the game on YT a bit and thought it looked kool !!! fresh ! So i bought it cause it was on sale. My first couple of runs i wasn’t TOO impressed. I liked the game but felt like the gameplay was way too sweaty and chaotic 4 me. I didnt help that the sword, your starting weapon, feels the worst out of all the options u have later on. Nevertheless, once i started getting the grove of the game, i started falling in love bit by bit. One thing that helped TREMENDOUSLY with my enjoyment was changing the keybinds for attacking and dodging, considering the fact that you spam those for 30 minutes every run u do. My thumb was sore and hurting so i decided to change my layout and use L1 and R1. SO MUCH BETTER.

Meg was a huge roadblock for me, i lost to her many many times. Next huge hassle was that ASSHOLE Theseus (pun intended) oh my god DIE !!!!!!!! Elysium in general is very hard, especially the shield guys which are fucking immortal. I swear to god sometimes it took me less time to bring down the last boss than those guys. Once i beat [REDACTED] for the first time, something clicked. I won another run. And another. And another again. I started getting really good with the game and eventually managed to bring home a 9 win streak, which i was proud of. It wasnt even a matter of weapon since i changed them every run, depending on the bonus. I lost my 10th attempt, which is the last run u need to win to beat the game, and you can imagine how mad that makes me feel. I COULD’VE DONE A PERFECT STREAK !!!!!!! AGGGAGGAGA

The gameplay is super fun and the best way to describe it is “crunchy”. Hades is crunchy. Killing enemies and picking up stuff gives u the same feeling that biting into a crispy chip makes you feel. The soundtrack is a huge contribution to this crunchy feeling. The bass solos are crisp and raunchy, rhythmic, aggressive, they fit in the atmosphere beautifully. These are paired by some genuinely haunting and mesmerizing music pieces, sung by in-game characters. Please give this one a listen. Wow.

Hades is a rougelike, (rougelite? idk man) and a beautifully crafted one at that. Planning your next run is super fun and bringing it to completion is very satisfying, with a much needed break every run in the game’s hub, catching up with your pals and powering up Zagreus. The game offers you boons during an escape attempt to modify your build and playstyle. They aren’t very creative, like in The Binding of Isaac, and some are very underwhelming. Crazy synergies are rare but still present, so if you get them you’ll feel very powerful which is fun. If it wasn’t for the “Prophecy” mechanic (for which the game offers you rewards for picking up various boons instead of sticking to the usual) i wouldn’t have experimented much, since some boons are much more powerful and useful than the others. I think Hades 2 can improve a whole lot on this aspect !! PLEASE ??????

The npcs in the game are beautifully characterized. They feel like real people, with their history, their secrets, their passions and their role in the world. Hades makes a lot of effort to sell you these characters as real, own to the way they speak. The dialogue system is incredible. The amount of text and spoken dialogue is one of the most impressive feats of the game, and the way it cycles through all the possible dialogue opportunities, reacting to what you did or how you acted, is nothing short of incredible. How the fuck man? Such a cool system, masterfully done. GOOD JOB!!!!

art by Etcetera!

The characters are designed so well. The lines are chaotic but confident, the shapes used and the shilouettes ooze of charm. The devs’ take on ancient greek gods was one of the biggest wow factors for me, since i frequented a Classical highschool and i saw them in every possible sauce imaginable. Supergiant games managed to make them feel fresh and new, while maintaining what makes them interesting and replicating perfectly their hypocrisy, whims, and fluctuating moods. The game mixes 3D models and 2D drawings to give the atmosphere its vibe. At times crude, whimsical, dangerous, dynamic, this game’s environments have it all. Props to the team.

I really recommend it ! check it out if u fancy fast gameplay, good music, hot people, or good games.

After i was done with hades i wanted to play Bioshock. But i didnt. I dont know why.
I started Sekiro a year ago but i got my ass handed down to me so hard that i had to take a break. I guess i felt the game as a spirit haunting me so i had to complete it.
I have already written a full on, long, review of Sekiro, but i trashed it. First of all, IT SUCKED, it was boring, i hated it ecc. , second, i want to focus on the story. People have said everything there is to say about this game, but one thing i never see properly explored is Sekiro’s story. The game is so intrinsically tied to Japanese history and cultural context that many clues and key points will most likely go over your head if you didnt study beforehand. And so, i decided that in the future i’ll complete the other 3 endings and properly understand the story and all the crazy symbolism so i can talk about something interesting. I’ll condense everything i’ve written on the review down here, so hopefully it’s gonna be less boring:
Sekiro is not the “hardest souls game” because Sekiro is NOT A SOULS GAME.
Sekiro is an ACTION game. NO stamina, NO level up mechanic, NO loot left on ground, NO (almost) killable friendly npcs, NO rpg builds, NO strong roll with a lot of i-frames, NO weapon types, NO armor, NO magic or spells of the sort, NO backstabs, NO elemental weaknesses, NO pvp, NO summons and i could go on. Everything that makes a souls game a “soulslike” is missing here. The only reason associate it with a souls game is that miyazaki and from’s hand is very visible here. Fromsoftware has a very specific “smell” to their games which is absolutely present in Sekiro, and as such people just assume it’s a Souls game… and play it like its a Souls game. This is the reason people find Sekiro much harder, because they think you’re gonna be dodging and rolling, waiting for your opportunity to strike, managing your stamina. Sekiro is much closer to a rhythm game instead. Get close to the guy, parry the shit outta him, the second he’s not attacking YOU should be attacking. No breaks, no mercy, no strategy, just pure swordplay. The moment you stop treating Sekiro like a souls game it reveals itself for what it is, and it becomes much much easier. I think Sekiro is the Fromsoft’s game in which i died the least. 95% of my deaths have been to bosses, never to regular enemies. Stealthing your way out of areas is easy as hell, enemies are deaf and blind a stupid as fuck (this is a good thing), they go down in a couple blows, the game is very generous with healing and so on and so forth. Not fighting is often the best option truth to be told. The Wolf is fast as fuck, can get away from everything and everyone, and since level up is not an issue this time around you don’t even get too much punishment to do this. What you miss out on is skill points, but most of the time they’re optional and you can beat the game just fine without a lot of them (Mikiri counter excluded. We stan the Mikiri).
The gameplay is super satisfying. The clings and clangs of sword bashing together makes you feel like a badass, and mastering that L1 button is the key to your success. The game spices up things with unblockable attacks which require to jump, other button prompts, time your skills or dodge. At first it’s overwhelming, but you’ll develop your muscle memory soon enough to react instinctively. Another spice are prosthetic tools. Some are very very useful, some are not. Some are too situational to use regularly. Some tools are going in your slots basically permanently, like the shurikens or the firecrackers, but it’s good to have three slots and having the chance to switch the up anytime u want.
Bosses are so awesome man, and so fun. I dont have much to say about them tbh !!! they’re just super good. The learning curve is always well paced and satisfying, the movesets are always varied and deflecting them is orgasmic. One of the few things i remember not liking was Lady Butterfly’s gimmick. The way they present to you the snap seeds make them look like indispensable for her fight, and they literally give you one. Just one chance to use it. If you die, you’ll think the fight is off limits until you find more, but the seeds are actually just extra, no need for them at all !!!! I said all bosses are good, but 2 of them are literally my least favorite part of the game. I hate them and i won’t bother with them in my next playthroughs… im talking about the Headlesses and Shicimen Warriors. They are stupid, they are slow, they are boring, they are TOO MANY, they are tied rare consumables (until the very end), they are incredibly frustrating. Just …. why….. Please remove them. Make them a single one-off encounter. The game suffers from their presence,,, thank GOD theyre optional.
Exploration is awesome. It’s not open world but it’s not linear either, and you can tackle various areas and bosses in any order u wanna. Almost all areas are interconnected in some ways and seeing previous areas when looking over the horizon always gave me a sense of accomplishment. The areas themselves are fairly linear. They offer you some other paths to get lost into but the vast majority of them only have a reward with a dead end. Most people wont like this but i did actually!! what what ?? yeah i think this kind of level design gives the areas a nice sense of containment and improve the pacing a lot. I DO like a good labyrinthine level don’t get me wrong, but it’s nice not being TOO overwhelmed by choice at every turn, considering i always get scared of picking the “wrong one” and harming my experience while doing so. One thing i find lacking is area variety. This is a limitation of the game setting am stuff, but as you can see in the latter part of the game, it could have been improved upon sacrificing a bit the “real“ aspect of them. You will be seeing snowy valleys and burnt houses A LOT during your playthrough, and when you don’t get those you’ll either be inside some mansion or a dark cavern/gritty place with a very muddy color palette. The actual art direction and shot composition is insane, often surprising you with a beautiful scene carefully set up, especially when u go pick up the ingredients for lord Kuro. When i first stepped foot in Mt. Kongo it felt so refreshing seeing FINALLY new colors on screen. Rich oranges and browns, healthy trees and foliage, the game was finally using its potential to its fullest. The final area of the game is a marvel to look at, and the stark comparison it gives to the rest of the game (and the shock it gives the player) almost make up for the lack of variety beforehand. I saw it for the first time and i was like WOW !!!!! The pinks, the blues, the reds of the structures, enemies here are weird and alien like, it felt so hostile but also so beautiful, like i was a true stranger to this land while disturbing the quiet peace the inhabitants of this esoteric dream seemed to enjoy. I felt like a trespasser, but at this point i needed to see my mission through. One thing i didn’t really like about the Fountainhead Palace is how they managed the Great Carp encounter. I thought i was supposed to fight it when u first encounter it, and after i finally understood i wasn’t supposed to, i didn’t understand what you were supposed to do to actually take it down. I was so curious and anxious about missing stuff that i allowed myself to search the solution to this one on the web. I know i know it’s disappointing, but i will always say that if it benefits your experience, then searching on the internet shouldnt be off-limits.
Anyways, one thing i also found strange is From deciding you should do the Ashina Castle level not once, not twice, but THRICE depending on which part of the game. I incredibly appreciate the fact that it shows you how much the world is evolving, how much Sekiro has grown, and especially during the ending it gives the player a sense of impending doom. But i really think 3 times is going a bit overboard. The second time shouldn’t have deactivated all your totems, just to show you different enemies setting up the invasion that’s gonna happen later in the game. It could’ve been a cool extra the player could’ve found by themselves if they were curious enough, that would’ve been cool. When i beat the game i read up the number of endings possible, and found out i did the 3rd one. The one where Sekiro sacrificed himself to let Kuro live a new life, free of the burden of immortality. I found it touching and bittersweet, i liked it. I almost completed the full quest to get the 4th ending but i botched it and the end because i couldn’t find the Divine Child once she left. I thought, “mhhhhh, maybe she went inside the hall of illusions” so i went there, found Kotaro, but then the monk told me to get the fuck outta there, so i said “alright sorry fuck i’ll skiddadle” and that’s how i failed the quest LMAO. Thats what you get for listening to old people uuhhhhb
so
cant think of much else to talk about besides a few notes here and there
i liked the soundtrack but i dont love it. I dont go back listening to it and its not very memorable. I guess this is yet another limitation of being stuck to using strictly classical japanese instruments and composition style, but the ost as a whole feels like it was meant to be more “background music” than actual standalone pieces. In this regard it’s closer to a movie soundtrack than a vidya one (with due exceptions) but eeehhh i guess its still cool. *thumb up
The verticality in the level design feels incredible. Woah. Not only that, but one thing i see people NEVER TALKING ABOUT is how INSANE (INSANE !!!!) the grapple animation system is. The amount of work and pure skill that was put into not making Sekiro snap into an animation starting frame is absurd, and no matter the frame of ANY animation you find yourself into, as long as it’s cancelable, the model will smoothly transition into the grapple. I say to that: Amen.
Lastly: sound design, textures, characters, story, everything is perfectly executed. This game is tight man.
It took me a long time to finish the game. Sekiro revealed itself to be much, much longer than i expected it to be, and after i was done with it i needed a chill game to relax with. A game that let’s you experience it, that doesn’t ask anything of you. I couldn’t play a better game at this time.

My childhood summers have been well spent, i like to think. I hit the beach with my cousin, we ate icecream, we played from dawn to dusk. And in the downtimes, we played videogames. I clearly remember the trepidatious feeling that run through my body while getting upstairs to play Spiderman and San Andreas on the PlayStation 2. I did’t actually play if i have to be honest, i was content to let him do the playing and me do the watching. My parents always said no when i asked for game consoles, and because of that i always had to wait for the summer months to step foot in a magical world that i could only dream of during school. So yes, i was incredibly happy to just watch. Even while watching, the prospect of actually having the gamepad in my hands scared me, especially the ‘killing people’ part. I was scared of the bad guys and felt danger in real life while they attacked me. Of all the games that we played, i noticed they all had one thing in common: killing baddies. I accepted it as a matter of fact. GTA, Spiderman, Fantastic Four, Metal Slug… i assumed that’s how videogames were. And with good reason! To be honest, the VAST majority of videogames involve killing someThing or someOne in one way or another. I think that was what has sparked my current interest in non-violent videogames. I saw, and maybe still see them as norm-breakers, intrepid and brave experiences that changed the landscape of the industry.

The first time that non-violent videogames disclosed themselves to me (not considering games like cooking mama, which i cowardly dismissed as ‘girl games’ that therefore ‘didn’t count’) i felt a world of unexplored possibilities opening before my eyes. During my 8th year of life my other cousin, 3 years younger than me, got a Nintendo Dsi XL. I felt betrayed, since my every attempt to ask for a measly Nintendo DS Lite, an older version of the console, got shut down before i could even finish the request. I swallowed my envy to get a chance to play with his Nintendo. He showed me New Super Mario Bros., which before then i only saw displayed behind glass in big stores. My cousin had an R4 with tons of games packed inside, but we always preferred sticking to what we knew, like Mario and GTA Chinatown Wars. The game were shown in alphabetical order, and everytime he launched the R4, a weird little leafy-icon was the first game on the list. Animal Crossing Wild World.
”Animals?” i remember thinking. ”No way i’m gonna launch that, that’s gotta be a girls’ game.” And i didn’t, as a matter of fact ! I loved GTA, and nothing about this Animal Crossing looked violent enough to be an actual videogame. A couple months passed. I went to my cousin’s house, he opened the door. A glow in his eyes. ”I gotta show you something” he said. We sat down. That was the start of my absolute love for Animal Crossing. He opened the game and showed me the town, running around and talking to animals. I was amazed, it felt so expansive to me. I asked what the game was about. ”it’s fun” he said, ”you run around and you pick up weeds. You can also shake trees and sometimes bees come out and sting you”. No way, is that it? Well, no. My cousin was 5 at the time and couldn’t read, so he missed every tutorial and explanation of mechanics the game threw at him. He navigated the menus at first by trial and error, and then by sheer memory, i was amazed. Yet i soon realised the game was hiding something. I noticed a weird star on the ground. Curious, i thought. He entered the shops and there i saw it: a shovel. I needed to try, so I asked my cousin to lend me the Nintendo to do something, and he did. I bought the shovel, he didn’t know you could actually buy stuff. I went to the star and pressed A. Surely, i had just dug a fossil. We FREAKED OUT. I felt like i just cracked the game, it was surreal. We continued to play in the following days, and i made my own character, and i got to know about the game, and i read all the text to my cousin to make him actually understand what was he doing.

The following year i FINALLY goy my own Nintendo. The 3DS, which came out just some months before. How i managed to get it is another story for another time, but the important bit is that i also got an R4, and i also got Animal Crossing Wild World with it. Summer came and i showed it to my other cousin. He loved it, and we spent a good part of the summer having a blast with it. I say a good part since during the end of July, the save file got corrupted. I remember it very vividly, it was a cold evening and we were out in the garden. My cousin liked fishing and during the summer in the evening we sometimes saw a weird kind of fish, very big and with a fin poking out. He was certain it was a shark. We hunt for that fish for days, and finally, he managed to catch it ! We could celebrate for a very short time only, since the game freeze soon after. We were devastated. I tried to fix the save for weeks after but to no avail. Things changed the following year when Animal Crossing New Leaf came out and… ooh boy.

Animal Crossing New Leaf was released for the Nintendo 3DS on November 8th 2012, Japan only. Not being Japanese or nowhere near Japan however, the game was brought to my attention on its European release date, June 14th. I saw the announcement on the Nintendo eShop. It was a promo video where the devs talked about the various aspects of the game and what went into making it. I knew i had to play it. I begged my parents to buy it for me: my R4 broke the very next summer my ACWW file got corrupted, and nothing worked anymore since i mistakenly updated my system. I felt orphaned and hungry for a new adventure. I didn’t ask for many games, so my parents eventually obliged. I played it for the next 3 years without ever getting bored. I didn’t really care about making my town beautiful and whatnot. I loved my villagers, and i loved my town for what it was, and i loved my place in all of it. I spent hours upon hours using the online features on the Island to meet new people. I browsed forums, i wrote my first ever fanfiction about this game. I loved it dearly. I still do, as a matter of fact, and that might seem like this review might be too much biased because of that. I say to not worry my friend, since i am a person of high integrity and i care too much about games to not point where they could be better. Besides, it’s not that i’m biased and i love the game for that reason, but the game is so good that it made me biased.
…Except i’m not biased. Oh c’mon dude, you get it. Do you want to hear about the game or not? You know i’m gonna praise it ! If you want to skip straight to my hot takes regarding New Horizons, click here ! I ain’t biting you ! However if you want to hear me ramble about why it’s so good, as well as some flaws and blemishes, let us commence forth.

The first thing that New Leaf does is putting you inside a train. Rover is there. The coziness immediately wraps your body and hugs you gently, everything about the game wants to make you feel safe. Old fans might also recognize this is how the first entry in the series starts. You see, the devs of this game wanted to take a step back to the roots of the series and change things while having their feet planted on the ground around them. After the retread that City Folk turned out to be the devs realized they needed to turn to a new leaf, and not forget the identity of the series while doing so. They were extremely successful. The game puts you in the shoes of the town’s mayor, finally taking part in how the town can be the most beautiful place it can be for your animal friends and citizens. However, even as mayor, Animal Crossing New Leaf makes sure your actions have their proper weight and make you feel like you’re still part of the community. Having power on the lives of your people risks making the player an outlandish creature, an entity that operates outside the NPCs comprehension to manipulate the game in order to achieve what is considerable ‘winning’ in an Animal Crossing game. Things take time to build, bells aren’t too easy to come around to, the animals free will is taken into consideration, and the game’s rhythm does its very best to make you match its pace. It rarely if never breaks immersion, it want to feel like a real world with real people in it. A sore note is the way you acquire diffrent projects for your town: a villager needs to spontaneously ask a specific project during gameplay, and it’s completely random both when and what, excluding a couple of things. Yet decorating and aesthetics is not enforced but still present with tons of customization options: different Resident Services builds, different architectural styles for your home, custom museum exhibitions, many many many upgrades to various shops and much more. Upgrading or building new shops always feels exciting and a big event for the whole town, as they are difficult and rare enough to make you yearn, and in turn work to build them. Doing minigames, interacting with the world, spending your hard-earned money, it all builds up to your town progressing constantly for what feels like months and months of playtime. During these hours the game does an amazing job at keeping you glued to the screen: you could work part time at the coffee shop with Brewster, or maybe visit the island to win medals to buy that cool straw hat you saw the other day, or visit Retail to make Cyrus change the color of your wardrobe, or go to the police station to see what new items have been lost, or visit the Club to listen to a dumb joke (make sure to bring some fruit !), or build that structure that villager asked you to build ages ago, and i could go on and on and on about all the different activities the game has in store for you daily. Many of the activities the game put in front of you were fairly obtuse at times, ESPECIALLY the character styles options. Your eye shape was determined by unrelated dialogue at the start, your skin tone could only darken while spending time on Tortimer Island, your hairstyle was determined by an absurd quiz you had no chance of knowing the result of. They added charm in a way or another, but at a huge loss of accessibility. Villagers will very often ask various favours of you which will entartain and sidetrack whatever activity you where in the midst of doing. Talking to them is always heartwarming, and many times will ask your opinions about many different subjects, or gossip, or games, or commenting on the stuff you’ve been doing or what you have built. This is of course a staple of the franchise, but i feel like i need to point it out considering the conversation we will have later in this review.

Charming as it is, villager interaction in New Leaf has been severely gutted since previous entries. If before they acted cocky they are now a bit smug, if before they were rude they are now mildly inconsiderate, if before they were furious they are now annoyed at best. It goes a mile to make them feel less like people with a personality, and more player-pleasers, there to make you feel always loved and accepted by everyone around you no matter your faults. As a result, the feeling of your relationship growing with them is absent most of the time and one aspect that made the game so much fun has been taken away to make it more kid friendly. It is an understandable position by Nintendo, since kids starting to cry because Resetti (now relegated to a minor role) started to profusely offend them wouldn’t have been a great look for the company. The world changes and so do videogames, i know that, but i do wish we could have had even more dialogue to make up for the problem. As a matter of fact, New Leaf doesn’t seem to boast the incredible number of lines the previous games had, especially Wild World. Yes, it is general consensus that WW had the best dialogue in the series and i concur fully. Playing for dozens upon dozens of hours as a kid and when finally finding the first instance of repeated dialogue thinking “ah-ha !! They’re not infinite after all !” was such a special moment. Okay, maybe it also was the fact that i was a kid and maybe i didn’t talk to them too much or forgot a lot of what they said, it may be, but that’s beyond the point !

Events in Animal Crossing New Leaf brought with them tons of minigames and side-activties, along with, more importantly to me, a completely new atmosphere to your town whilst keeping the very same cozy vibe the game advocates for so much. Even more so then previous titles, New Leaf is a master of making you feel the passage of time. The first songs of cicadas in the distance brings about heat in the player, the soft crackling of snow beneath your feet makes you want to snuggle in your blanket, the soft wind and browning leaves brings to your nose the smell of fresh air. The sound design complements this aspect incredibly well, as it muffles and mixes together with the OST to create the atmosphere it needs for the season and time of day. Not only seasons, but hours passing give the player sound, musical and visual feedback beautifully created, the sky mellows, new bugs start crawling out, lights from homes turn on while the music takes you by the hand and turn down the energy and excitement as the hours get late. The OST of Animal Crossing New Leaf has caught a lightning in a bottle and it produces a sound that feels like its distant rumbling while light rain falls on your bedroom window. It uses piano, a light guitar, a distant harmonica, and touches of calm percussions to create a very homely and nostalgic feeling, which is the whole vibe of the game. It takes some distance from the more chip-tuney OSTs of previous games and takes the music in a more melancholic direction, doing a great job of retaining that peculiar Animal Crossing vibe. Amazing work.

The graphical limitations of the 3DS do not hinder the atmosphere of the game at all, due mostly to the great art direction. Animal Crossing New Leaf is a great looking game although a bit dragged under the mud by the very limited original 3DS console. Watching the game from the 3DS screen and not a screenshot, the pixel separation becomes very noticeable, especially with slightly tilted lines, moving or not. It is still a huge step forward considering the older games, and your character has started looking more like an actual person and less like a squashed gremlin, which is both good or bad depending on your point of view. As for me, i love it.

Overall, the game at launch was jam-packed with content and i didn’t even talk about half of it, like the beautiful online features, which run like shit, but i say that’s more Nintendo’s fault as opposed to the game’s. Even more stuff was put in it with the Welcome Amiibo update some odd years later, with MANY bug fixes. The game was kind of broken at launch, and clipping glitches or duplicating exploits run rampant. I should know ! I had many friends i’ve met on the forums, and this one girl insisted one day to something cool.I don’t remember the steps she made me do, but we duplicated many bells for me and her. I felt so guilty afterwards, that about a month later i deleted my whole town to start again. That was one of the worst decisions i have ever made. After starting again i felt so sad about having lost all my things and villagers that i stopped playing. I still wanted Animal Crossing, but i just couldn’t do it… that’s why i resolved that i would wait for the next instalment in the series, and play it to death. I knew i would have had a good time, and so i started waiting patiently. That was until 2019.

back to new horizons

thats right folks !

hi again, for those who skipped. In the last section we talked about my unending love for New Leaf, how the series evolved (DEvolved) its dialogue over the years, how the series music touched parts of my soul only Kensuke Ushio managed to touch since, how even after years i had stuff to do, and finally how what was supposed to be an innocent surprise brought me to delete my save file, regret it, and remain orphaned from this beautiful series.

As you may imagine, i brought a Nintendo Switch around some months after it was released being certain the next instalment in the franchise would come very soon. A friend of mine sold it to me for a measly 120 euros, plus my New Nintendo 3DS, which i barely used. I went out from his house with a diabolical expression painted on my face since i thought i basically just stole that Nintendo Switch from him. I still do think i made a huge deal back then, but less so now since the 3DS price inflated exponentially ever since the eShop was announced to close. I did buy a New 2DS some months ago for €300, which is fairly high, with the intention to mod it to death as soon as i got my hands on it. And mod it i did, even though i just ended up playing Tomodachi Life yet again and barely started Dragon Quest IV. My other intention, if i ever grew out of videogames or simply didn’t use the console much, was to resell it for a higher price, and that’s one of the reason for the model i choose to buy: a New Nintendo 2DS XL, Animal Crossing Limited Edition. As you may deduce yes, the main reason is just that i really like the green design and i really like Animal Crossing, but this is how i justify my compulsive purchase to myself and other people. I did’t like New Horizons, and we’ll get there in just a second, but i still love Animal Crossing. I am scared for the identity of the next games, since New Horizons sold extremely well, but back in 2019 this was the last thought i had in my mind. I was PUMPED for the game, i was excited for the formula changing, and the prospect of building an island-town from the ground-up was insane to me ! Since i live in Italy the lockdown started very early for me, and because i didn’t have a dime to my name, much less a credit card, i had to go through various hoops to preorder it. Yes i did preorder. DO NOT PREORDER GAMES. I will explain properly some other time, but do know it’s one of the most harmful things you could do with your purchasing power to the industry. As much as we love to romanticize things, companies don’t care about making good games, they care about making good money, and giving your wallet to them before the game is out encourages them to make false advertisement, spend less money on quality, and build hype culture. Stop preordering, wait for reviews ! As for me, in a moment of weakness, with hype to one side and lockdown-boredom to the other, i gave in and preordered. I would have played anyways. Midnight of the 20th of March 2020 ticked in, and i finally started playing.

Animal Crossing New Horizons presents itself incredibly well as soon as the game starts. As the 5th official instalment in a franchise which started out in 2001 on the, already then on its death bed, Nintendo 64, the series artstyle evolved naturally and organically together their respective console. The first 3 Animal Crossing games had a quirky, childhood drawing charm to them; colors were bright and unruly, browns were muddy and gave huge contrast to the vibrant green of grass and trees which made the wacky creatures that inhabited the world pop out from the screen. City Folk soaped-out the artstyle thanks in big part to the higher resolution that the Wii had going on, but kept the very same design philosophy of Wild World and changed very little. The big first leap was New Leaf, which took that childhood drawing and made it a bit older; mellow tones, warmer colors, and much more focus on the 3D models, making the more life-like and cuter, even if cranked down to match the limited 3DS hardware. Animal Crossing New Horizons has made the biggest leap yet, and reached a design philosophy which i think will be more or less kept intact in the next many years. If the first Animal Crossings was like seeing the world from the eyes of a child, New Horizons lets us experience childhood through the eyes of an adult, a very sugary childhood, but a beautiful one nonetheless. Colors are incredibly beautiful and they mix and mash in a bit more muted palette, which reserves very bright tones for sunny days or characters, who are now more on the ‘cute stuffed animal’ design philosophy more than ever. The animals have very grainy textures which resemble the short, soft fur you would find in most plushies, or have glossy, light-reflecting surfaces if fur isn’t present. Shaders on furniture, tools, fruits and buildings makes them very plastic-y, setting the trend of —one might say— a toy-box, which is a metaphor that will come back to later in this review. 3D models are masterfully created, and clothes and furniture are the best-looking they have ever been, clearly designed and modeled by people who know their stuff. Light and its interaction with objects and surfaces plays a huge part in the aesthetics of the game. It’s light that sets the tone of the gameplay, and behaves in a more realistic way that many AAA games struggle to achieve to this day. The museum and its suffused lights set a relaxed ambient to stroll around, bouncing around the fossils you helped uncover, spreading in blueish tones while traveling between the many aquariums, piercing through the thick leaves and leaving a puddle of bright light beneath your feet. Sunset comes and orange and yellow shades pervades every corner of the screen, relaxing your eyes and calming your senses after a busy day of… being god… i digress. One of the unsung heroes that carry this game experience is the sound design. The game is full of warm pops, tingles, clicks and whistles, which after a short while start muffling seamlessly into the background. Speaking of which, the background noise of the game is drowned by the OST, by the very few moments the music gives the player respite, there the background noise shows itself in all its glory. The sound of leaves brushing against each other being cradled by the breeze, the stream of water hugging and bouncing on the riverside, the soft waves crashing on the shore and backtracking between the grains of sands. Sound from speakers reverberate depending on their position, and change their dynamic range depending on where you put your camera, being more boomy and muffled from behind or brighter and cleaner from the front. Even when no music in being played indoors, a gentle white noise keeps your ears company and reassures them they’re not alone. It’s a sound experience that is meant to envelope you, make you feel safe and welcome wherever you are. Huge props to the sound-design team. The UI of Animal Crossing New Horizons received also a big overhaul from previous games: it’s cleaner, it’s wider, it’s… fluffier? I love it. Where the UI hits his mark however, the UX misses it completely. Navigating dialogue trees remained the same from previous games, which i don’t think it’s a bad thing at all since it’s an important part of the identity of the series. The problem here is that the jank that came with the UX in previous entries is exacerbated by the (questionable) choices the game choose to make in its inception, and then refused to facilitate to keep them ‘Animal Crossing-like’. Of course i’m talking about the crafting and the tool-breaking mechanic and the nook miles, but we will get deep in them in just a second.

Overall, the start of the game feels great. It sets you up for a proper Animal Crossing experience and makes you jump straight into the ‘action’. That’s when the game introduces you to its gimmik: crafting. Yes i’m calling it gimmik because i feel kind of gross calling it a ‘mechanic’. It becomes very clear soon you will spend a good amount of gameplay time hitting trees for wood, beating up rocks for iron, and hitting that sweet crafting table to make you some stuff. The concept is sound in theory: since you’re building a town from the ground up, why not give the players the tools to literally build it? Since the game features the much needed —and best— mechanic of placing furniture outside, building it yourself to make the game less reliant on shops RNG seems like an awesome idea ! Too bad ! You need to also craft tools you dingwad. Yeah, and they break. And they break extremely quickly, while we’re at it. I do not understand why they thought tying the most basic part of gameplay to a timer was a good idea. Let me be clear: tools are the second most fundamental mechanic of the game, the first is WALKING. If you decide to punish or obstacle the player while interacting with such an integral part of gameplay, and then offer as a solution interrupting what they’re doing, interacting with a slow system, and returning to that spot afterwards won’t be fun in the slightest. As a bonus, they will hate that system. They will hate crafting. I hate crafting. In Breath of the Wild, when your weapon breaks it feels bad right? The same thing happens in New Horizons. Except, in Breath of the Wild picking up a new weapon is almost instant, and if you know it’s about to break you can throw it on the enemy’s face and do a lot of damage, which transforms a feel-bad moment into a feel-good moment. New Horizons has none of this. If a tool breaks it’s just a malus, it’s not your fault if it broke since you need tools to play the game, if you don’t have the materials in your pockets you need to go pick ‘em up (or collect them if you used them all), and all the small animations and menu selections become so tedious that they feel like they’re an eternity long, even if very short. Hell, they don’t even tell you if it’s about to break ! Want to plan ahead without taking extra slots in your inventory? Nope !!! No can do !!! Want to discard the tool? What’s that? Oh sweet, i played the game for a lot of time and can finally use Golden Tools! No way they’ll break, right? Well so sorry dude !! They don’t do shit !! Have fun crafting them for all eternity ! “Golden tools break because we wanted to give players an incentive to go to the crafting table” my brother crafting sucks ! It’s boring ! All these things could have been made better with things like storage crafting, or bulk crafting, or portable repair-kits, but i don’t understand why you guys are so fixated to make simple things so tedious ! It’s not “Animal Crossing-like” to hit A for 20 minutes to craft fish bait ! It’s not “Animal Crossing-like” to hit A for 40 minutes to get Nook Miles tickets! Wanna know what’s “Animal Crossing-like”? Talking to the animals !!! I can’t fathom why the devs choose to remove so much interaction from the game. If before you needed to go to the hairdresser to change hairstyle, now just go face a mirror ! Yes the hairdresser needed a big overhaul, but not removing the mechanic completely ! Buying letters has become a menu interaction, buying clothes has become a menu interaction, literally every shop in New Leaf has been removed and made to be a menu interaction ! Is this “Animal Crossing-like”?? Is all your animals having 4 lines of dialogue “Animal Crossing-like”??? Is customising everything you can being the whole point of the game “Animal Crossing-like”?????? Is drip-feeding holidays and festivities throughout the year and calling them FREE UPDATES “Animal Crossing-like”???????? Is having TWO THIRDS of the NPCs completely ABSENT from the game ANIMAL CROSSING??????? WHAT’S GOING ON !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ahem. I’ll calm down. I got a bit ahead of myself, i can give you that, and i want to go in order. Unfortunately all the things i like about the game have been made clear in the first section of the review. It’s all downhill from now on and i don’t like talking about stuff i don’t like, so i’ll try to go faster now. sigh…

This game opening section is way too long. And i mean it. Looking back at previous games, they only wanted to introduce you to the world and its characters, familiarize yourself with the mechanics, and then just go have fun. Tom Nook offered odd jobs if you needed more time to get used to the game, and that’s it, that’s all they needed. Short, sweet, effective, straight to the point. New Leaf took a wee bit longer, since it needed to introduce the ‘mayor’s side’ of the gameplay. I still think it’s the best paced opening in the series, since all the game opens up pretty much immediately and throws at you extra stuff after a while, like the club or Tortimer Island. Wanna know how long it takes to get out of the New Horizon’s tutorial? Two weeks. TWO WEEKS !!!!!!! WHAT???????? WHY????? I swear to god if you don’t timeskip the last week drags on forever ! I understand the game needs to introduce more mechanics and needed more time, but two weeks is insane !

The music never changes during the whole two weeks. It adds a bit more rhythm the more time passes, but if it sounds passable at the start, by the end of the tutorial you will be absolutely SICK of it. That’s where i start talking about the music. I was planning to go on a funny deranged ramble here, but it’s one of the things i hate the most about the game and it drains my energy just talking about it. Yeah, i don’t like it. I think it sounds bad. If you read my New Leaf section you know how much i love the music from that game, and when it was confirmed Kazumi Totaka would be composing for New Horizons as well i got incredibly happy. Totaka is a vet and a master of his craft so i trusted him but… i don’t know what happened here. Maybe he felt uninspired? Maybe the vibe he chose for the music didn’t work out well? I understand what he was going for: since it was an exotic setting, he went for chill-tropical music. The only outlier which is fairly good is 5P.M., i enjoy that song. As for the rest, tracks feel very much the same, since many instruments get very overused: guitar, snares, trumpet, and that fucking synth. Almost every OST is a fairly short loop interrupted by very irritating high-pitched bleeps and loud boops played on a synth, tracks feature drums and snares very prominently which are way too loud and give a rhythm that is honestly completely absent from actual gameplay, also thanks to the constant interrupting crafting poses to the experience. The main theme of the game sounds good, if not a bit ruined since it uses those very same musical instruments i’ve grown to dislike so much, but the leitmotif of the main theme is so overused in the actual game that i can’t stomach it anymore. I criticize City Folk’s soundtrack for the very same reason, too much of the leitmotif, but City Folk has a much more pleasant-sounding tune and instruments are not irritating, which is a huge plus. Of course all of this is subjective. This one, all my previous and all my future reviews will have certain parts of subjectivity in them, it’s inevitable. You can like the music ! It’s okay ! But for me it completely failed under every aspect. What’s worse, it completely drowns the incredibly beautiful background noise this game has, and there’s no volume mixer so you sadly can’t turn it off. It would be great to have one, since waterfalls are so loud they manage to overwhelm the synth (in volume and annoyance).

My favorite part of all AC games —not counting catching bugs— has always been talking to the animals. I loved it so much i always made them angry since i kept pestering them :P I saw some of the new animals they were gonna add into the game, and i noticed a slight design-philosophy shift in them: they felt more curated, more catered toward specific players, more cute and to be honest, a bit more fake. After the 2.0 update and the new animals added, it showed this shift even more prominently. I didn’t care! I still don’t, in fact. I love the new designs, even if i don’t want them on my town. But i wanted Reneigh and Audie since i loved their design. Guess what? I did get them ! Reneigh was a starter, and i found Audie while sparsely using Nook’s tickets. Great right? Not really. I still love both characters. Every day, i went to talk to them as my first activity, but dialogue in Animal Crossing New Horizons has hit rock bottom. Every NPC repeats the same ‘greeting’ line of dialogue every day, just a very generic ‘hi hello good day today innit’ without any depth. Having multiple villagers with the same personality type makes you feel like living in the matrix, since they repeat the same thing word after word over and over. If you want to have an actual conversation with the animal, you need to talk to them again. More often than not they will say how they keep running into you today. Brother it is the second time we talk today ! What are you talking about? Did the devs assume players wouldn’t talk to npcs more than one time or something? Even while making conversation, the things they say are extremely flat and samey across the board. Every animal is a lot more focalized around their personality type and interest, they feel nothing like an actual person with a life and more like little caricatures of themselves, making so much a fool of themselves you start to feel pity for them. Favors and minigames are almost completely absent from the game, and the animals will rarely take interest in you except for when they want to teach you a new emote, which makes the world feel much more emptier than previous titles. The only somewhat conversations i always try to catch are those between the animals themselves, as they manage to bounce of each other very well and actually talk about stuff instead of blankly bickering about their sore muscles or new book they read. The devs finally made them interact with their environment and i like that a lot, but if actually interacting with them plainly detracts from the experience then why should the player even care in the first place? Because they look cute? If that’s what they were going for, they hit just the right spot. People didn’t care that their friends had been gutted, they wanted the cutest and more popular animals in their island to display as trophies… Like dolls in a doll house.
They even managed to make my girl Isabelle extremely annoying ! They obviously wanted to maintain the tradition of an npc greeting you when logging in, but in previous games they acted as some “retainer” of sorts who didn’t intend to make actual conversation and opting to just wish you a good day if no events or special day was in sight. It was a useful space since it was the intended way to access the options for the game or select your character, but because New Horizons removed such options and put them in a separate section in the main title, there is no content to fill the space. The solution they went for involves Isabelle repeating the same uneventful slop about her socks or tv shows that only feel like its there to waste your time. It’s charming at first, and it could have stayed charming if they paid some writers to come up with some actual lines who could be scattered across more days ! Three or four lines do not make the cut by a long shot, they should have been a lot more ! Or just opt to not let her say anything, just wishing the residents a good day like she did to you in New Leaf ! Was that so hard to do?

During my first weeks of playing i started to notice something strange. I started to feel like part of the game was missing. I still didn’t meet many of the reoccurring NPCs, i didn’t unlock any new shops, i only upgraded Nook’s Cranny once, i still hadn’t unlocked diving, no sign of Brewster, i waited for rainy days to search for gyroids but none were found, there wasn’t any tropical fruits in sight (”it’s a tropical themed game ! There’s GOTTA be the tropical fruits !), no police station, no Resetti… i started getting a bit hasty. My friend asked me how was the game, and i remember answering that i still didn’t unlock or find many things but already felt like it was a smaller game as opposed to New Leaf. I didn’t search for stuff online to avoid spoilers. I feel sorry for myself, because little did i know. Little did i know i had completed everything the game had to offer a long time before. That’s right, remember the multiple and incredible expansions Nook’s Cranny has had since forever? GONE ! Remember when if you needed some flower seeds or bushes you could visit the shop? Or when you needed shoes? GONE ! Wait some days and HOPE they spawn in the plaza ! Remember diving? Nope you don’t ! It’s a BRAND NEW feature for the UPDATE we are being so generous to give to you FOR FREE ! Remember Katrina, Booker, Rover, Kap’n, Gracie, Pelly, Porter, Celeste, Tortimer, Dr. Skrunk, Brewster, Katie, Harriet, Reese, Cyrus, Lyle, Phineas, Digby, Luna and many more? Sure you do buddy !!!!!! Good times eh? Remember the different styles for your home and the sheer number of upgrades? Remember all the different Resident Services styles? The flea market? The dream suite? THIS SUCKS. I felt so bad when i eventually learned i was done, i couldn’t believe it. Everything was gone, from the music, to my friends, the gameplay was irritating, DYI was another RNG hell, the game was empty and i felt empty too. I cared about Animal Crossing, but for the first time i felt it didn’t care about me. Animal Crossing has been for many years a shoulder i could lean on, and now being gone i fell flat on the ground. I was a lonely kid. Hell, i am a lonely kid. I spent most days of my school afternoons alone in my bedroom playing with legos and building robots. I couldn’t talk to people well, i felt stupid cause i struggled at school, i hated myself because i felt ugly. Animal Crossing showed me people could be nice to me, and i could open myself up to them. I felt betrayed.

Animal Crossing puts you in the shoes of a person moving in a new town, meeting new friends and finding a new place to call home. Animal Crossing New Leaf puts you in the shoes of a person moving in a new town that just so-happens is in need of a new mayor. Animal Crossing New Horizons puts you in the shoes of an island settler who rules over its residents with the power of a God. The cozy atmosphere of the previous game is almost completely gone here, the island feels alien and cold and wild and empty. You are always completely surrounded by the vast sea with no end in sight. Your villagers sound like robots trying to please you in order to avoid meeting their eviction by your mighty hand. You could wake them in the middle of the night to move their house to a distant, lonely place, and they won’t utter a single word that is not approving of your benevolence. You can take your trusty shovel and bring the whole island to the ground to see your grand scheme brought to completion. Rise it from the ashes like the God you are. Because that’s the whole point of the game ! A decor sim. Your residents are plastic dolls in your doll house, waiting to be moved and pushed around to make the house look pretty. Or maybe aesthetic is the better word ? There have been many people like me who didn’t really care for the aesthetics of your town in previous games, as long as it felt homely. Having the coffee shop near the plaza seems like the natural thing to do, and having a lil bench to rest your tired feet from running all day and sip the coffee away is romantic, in certain way. New Horizons decides to turn up the notch so high regarding this aspect that now you can build your own coffee shop by yourself, with some stands and a bit of creative flair. No need to have an actual building right? Many experiences during my life have programmed me in a way which tie my worth as a person to my performance to whatever task i appointed myself to do. Keeping in mind how New Horizons stops being a videogame as soon as you take decorating out of the equation, and seeing how i waited a long time and promised myself i would play it to hell and love it, i set aside my differences with the game and accepted it the way it was, my own little virtual dollhouse. I promised myself i would build an island i was happy with and vibe with what the game had to offer. But the more i played, the more an ambiguous feeling started to creep in, and steadily but surely that feeling grew more and more until i could identify it with certainty: it was a strong anxiety and a quiet panic humming in the backside of my brain. You see, the problem with this kind of game and people with my personality (or issues, but let’s not call em like that) is that comparing your work— comparing your worth against that of other people is inevitable. You do want to live up to a certain standard and be your best self, because if you don’t you just kind of stop functioning as a person, and if you’re smart enough you can convene how that leads to unrealistic goals and as a result, an awful experience. I change my mind constantly because i am afraid of not being happy with the result, not being happy with myself (that’s why i went for a different theme for each page of the website btw !), and so anxiety permeated every fiber of my being each time i booted the up, along with the janky and slow system to terraform the island contributing in no small part. I eventually had to quit for my well being, since i started losing sleep over my island. This was in June 2020, and since then the game tried sparsely to fill up its holes (oops, sorry ! I meant to say updates !) by adding what the other entries had since the very start. During this time i tried with all my being to stop caring about the game. I didn’t want anything to to with it, but there was always this tiny little open door in my brain, one that despite my best efforts i couldn’t close. _{your island is cold and empty. All your animal friends are trapped there. YOU keep them trapped in that shithole}. The 2.0 update came around to mostly positive acclaim, but i was loath to praise it like others did, since the fundamental structure of the game was broken to me. Every new update felt like content glued to an inferior product with dollar store adhesive tape, since the game did’t have the number of buildings necessary to host those features in a proper way, and adding them to already finished-and-furnished islands didn’t seem like a realistic idea. Harv’s Island encapsulated this in a comedic way since it didn’t even try to mask where the game went wrong, and the paid dlc, all based around decorating and furnitures filled me with disgust. Still, the door remained open, asking to be approached, asking for another chance. I could’t do it anymore. I was tired, and in April of this year i gave Animal Crossing New Horizons another chance. I would make a nice island and not care about performance, i would be quick, get Bob and Coco, and finally free myself from this curse, from this nightmare i paid 50 euros to join while blissful and ignorant. I started strong. I made progress… and then i didn’t. The very same feeling, that pesky anguish gripping my stomach, the miserable experience, many hours of my life felt wasted playing the game, many more felt wasted thinking about the game. Dressing up your character is cute and fun until you start dread walking around with them, making mountains stand, making rivers flow, making the earth split beneath you while your residents decide to sit immobile just where your next magnum opus would have been raised, making all your powers completely useless. In this regard who is the more Divine creature? You, or them? In the grand scheme of things, i felt like Jim Carrey in Bruce Almighty, and strangely i had... fun. It's weird to say this far in, but when i'm not playing, i want to. And so i start, and i'm my enthusiasm quickly fades. It's like the smell of the game is delicious, and then you bite into it and you get a stomachache. Eventually, my initial amusement quickly gave space to a deep apathy, and again i stopped. I still haven’t freed myself from this game. I certainly feel more at ease, now that i gave it another chance and still came to that same result… but i think about this game more often then i’d like to, and everytime i can feel it beckoning me.

I feel like i’m done with Animal Crossing New Horizons for at least the next two or three years. After that i don’t know what i’ll do, and if my wounds will finally be mended or leave me scarred for life only time can tell. May be that the next Animal Crossing will fix itself and remember what made it special in the first place, but it may also be that this new identity for the series is here to stay. Animal Crossing New Horizons sold over 40 million copies, an absolutely insane number, and Nintendo has likely found their new potential cash cow franchise. The reasons for its massive success are to be attributed to its extremely timely release window, which aligned perfectly with the worldwide lockdowns happening during those months. It’s funny to think about how the game was also delayed from 2019 to 2020, making it the most financially successful delay in the history of videogames. Being stuck inside with nothing better to do helped tremendously to mask the massive flaws the game had going on, and during the summer months i felt insane and alone in thinking the game being a disappointment was a euphemism. I tried to get my voice heard online, but that only resulted in arguments and piling shit on what i had to say. I felt maybe i was being unreasonable, i felt maybe my nostalgia for New Leaf was blinding me, until august arrived and along with it the first sign of criticism against the game. To be honest, another thing the game was always criticized for was the baffling choice of limiting only one island per console, an aggressive anti-consumer move which most likely netted Nintendo record profits exploiting people during a time in which they were most vulnerable. A massive flaw which was pointed out fairly early was the online connectivity and online features. I could’t speak on those at the time since i didn’t have a subscription to Nintendo’s online services, nor any friends for that matter, but many people being jailed behind their four walls used the online features to keep in touch with their friends or spend some time with them. It’s no wonder then how people quickly noticed the lacklustre quality of the service and the many missing features from other games for those who played them. One reason because people needed a bit more time to start looking at the game from a more objective point of view was the psychosis that its release caused online. If i defined Animal Crossing New Horizons as being “a doll house and its God”, people online pushed the concept to its limit without even noticing, and i watched as the fandom run rampant without any restraint. The Animal Crossing fandom was, even then, no stranger to insane people and manipulative practices, but fortunately this cases were more or less contained or infrequent enough to be ignored. It’s no secret Animal Crossing New Horizons garnered A LOT of attention, and with it many new people, so it makes sense problematic behaviors were exacerbated to the extent they were. People set exorbitant prices for villagers, amiibo cards, desirable DIYs and even just interacting with certain residents, and no i’m not talking about prices in bells but in real money. Ebay enacted new policies to counteract scams and exploits specifically because of New Horizons, and on Twitter and Discord things went even worse. The reason i said that this massive attention distracted people from the game being unfinished is because from one side the drama was not focalized on the actual game at all, from the other New Horizons was many, many player’s first Animal Crossing experience. Not knowing any better it’s fair to think the series has always been just a decor sim more than anything, and because of this i’m worried Nintendo might follow the money and cater more towards their new audience, removing focus from player interaction with an existing world to player expression in a sandbox filled with “aesthetic” possibilities. Having a more hands-on approach to the looks of your game world is not a bad thing at all, yet trading it for such a huge loss in identity and content is not worth in the slightest. We might never know what went on during the development of this game, but the devs stated the started working on it pretty much immediately after New Leaf was published. 7 years. For this? Really? I don’t believe it. The game is obviously unfinished and those ‘Free Updates’ were put there to not make the fanbase start a civil war, considering also the fact that the initial release for the game was pushed by a year. Assuming the dev team didn’t have a build for the Switch a lot early than the release that it might be safe to assume from 2013 to 2016 the game was in pre-production, and actual development started around 2017. The free updates were slow and lacking in content, so they were either low in numbers or inefficient while working, and since they managed to avoid the ire of the fans they started working on one final “big” update and released it as the 2.0 version, officially ending support for the game. Nintendo is the real winner here, since they made a shitload of money, didn’t get bad press, dropped the game as soon as it became financially superfluous and popped a paid dlc to squeeze some more money from all the fans who were left to starve for months. Fucking geniuses. Of course this is all speculation but that’s the narrative i like, and you can decide to believe it plausible or not.

And so we’re done. Animal Crossing New Horizons lured me in its sweet embrace and then exploited and overworked me as a slave, bewitched me and ripped my heart out. And i keep coming back to it, like a Stockholm Syndrome victim. Animal Crossing New Horizons soured a bond with the series that i cultivated since i was 8 years old and i feel the very same Phantom Pain that fans who grew up with Metal Gear Solid felt upon learning what had befell Metal Gear Solid V. One day, i will look at this silly little game and cherish all the bad memories and awful experiences it offered my in exchange for my 50 euros. One day, i will heal. But that day is not today. Maybe tomorrow, but tomorrow is tomorrow’s me business.

Thanks for reading my review of Animal Crossing New Horizons today. And if you skipped to read the last part only, scrolled past all of the almost -- words i wrote about this game, and thought to yourself “is this guy for fucking real?”, that’s okay too. I understand and envy you for all the things you can do with your time that do not involve reading, or god forbid, writing this review in any shape or form. As for me, i just like Animal Crossing, and the result is this unhinged thesis i spent way too much time working on. Yes it is a chunky boy, but this was a notable exception i made. My other reviews will be, hopefully, much shorter and less cringe. Except for when i will review The Last of Us Part 2 maybe? Don’t get me wrong, it’s not gonna be long for the same reasons this review is so long, instead the exact opposite ! I think that game is good !!! I think it’s a good fucking game !!! And the people who shit on it failing to make even a single sensible argument kinda makes me angry !! Kinda a lot !! So if i didn’t turn you off with this long winded essay look forward to that :) I got tests coming up and everything so expect the next one mid October or something. In the meantime i will keep thinking about New Horizons.
This was a videogame review. Let’s think too much about videogames next time too ! Bye !

Back when i was 11 years old and my tiny gullible mind had unrestriced access to the whole web, i used to get around some internet forums which i started frequenting regularly posing as a 17 year old high school student searching for adventures in the virtual role-playing scape. Not the kind of infamous role-play that festered Tumblr and the likes in those years, but actual RP with a master and stats and all that sweet stuff that i would love to partecipate in now, but my 11 year old self didn’t get in the slightest. My characters were cringe, i WAS cringe, but that didn’t stop me to interact with other people at the best of my cringeful self, and they accepted me. It was during that time that i had first heard about a certain game called Final Fantasy 7. People where praising it so vehemently that i felt compelled to butt in the conversation and add nothing to it. I took pride in the fact that i, in my venerable 11 years of life, had never even heard of Final Fantasy 7. People as expected immediately jumped on me saying “you never HEARD of it??” - “DUDE, you GOTTA play that motherfucking game right now” and along those lines. I didn’t care at all. I always loved videogames, but i was in a phase of my life where opinions others had about a certain subject dictated my opinion as well, only in the opposite direction. Anyways, i eventually discovered that the ‘cool dudes’ i saw in Kingdom Hearts were in fact, from Final Fantasy. I absolutely loved Kingdom Hearts but in one way or another i managed to always ignore the Final Fantasy side of it. From my prospective they were… well, cool dudes. And so after my ignorance was finally profaned the natural thought that occurred to me was “huh. Guess it is a cool game then”. My simple mindedness aside, in that exact moment i had just cursed myself for all eternity, all without knowing: i had just added Final Fantasy to my ‘2 play’ list. And i did. Eventually. It was summer 2019, i was 16 years old, even more stupid than 5 years before but at least, slightly less cringe. Final Fantasy 9 was on sale. I watched the trailer. Fell in love with it. I don’t know what happened, but i watched that trailer SO many times. It spoke to me in one way or another… and so i started playing. It’s one of my fondest gaming memory to this day, but that’s another story. Cause for this story is MUCH more complicated !!! Final Fantasy 16 is a COMPLICATED game !!! Not for the game itself, the game is very simple in fact, but the whole economy surrounding it !

Now, as a fan (but not a fanboy) i was hyped as shit. Yes YoshiP was at the helm. Yes the guy who did DMC5 was working on the combat. Yes dudes who worked on FF12 were writing this one. And yes, Soken was at the DJ Set. It was the game dev dream team, people called them the Avengers, i agreed. I played FF14 and knew what they were capable of, i played what they were capable of. And it was a goddamn MMO !!! ‘Imagine what they could do with a AAA budget !’ i kept telling myself, wringing my hands in preparation, smiling and doing a little dance on the spot. The marketing for the game was crystal clear. No delays, no hollow promises, they handled it so elegantly i was astonished it could be actually pulled off in an industry where consumers are more concerned to see what promises actually make it into the game than play the game itself.
However, i started getting a bit anxious. They kept showing us these amazing battles, epic orchestral music, explosions and screams. I started wondering if there were any actual quiet moments in the game. Where is the banter? The minigames? The actual rpg ? Wait up, is it an rpg? Fortunately at PAX est they promised to show the ‘rpg elements’, so i relaxed, and leaned back. But when they ended the presentation, i felt disappointed they didn’t show more. I thought yes, they showed a little bit the rpg, but they really didn’t get too deep into it. Little did i know. Little did i fucking know. THAT WAS the rpg. There was nothing else. Again, i commend the transparency of the marketing here, but… It’s time to talk about the actual game.

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Final Fantasy XVI is split in 2 parts: what the game wants to do, and what the game doesn’t want to do. It does the first extremely well, and it reaches a level of spectacle and tension that only God of War 3 manages to come close to it. It does the latter extremely poorly.
Starting with the things that the game wants to do: the story, the combat, the music, the visuals, they are INCREDIBLE. The game is a true spectacle, when walking through a field of wheat at dawn, when beating the shit out of bandits along a path carved in the grass, when taking a break with your comrades at the hideaway, when battling a winged demi-god in space with lasers and reality-shattering spells. It’s jawdropping. The details on the streets make the world alive and dynamic, people shouting their wares along the streets, prostitutes seducing tired soldiers down the alley, smithies hammering an iron covered in sweat and people shopping for food in the stalls full of hundreds of fully-modeled fruits and bread, talking about the status of the realm, of economy, of gossip, all the while all kinds of sounds muffle in your ears, the sound of the steps, your armor clinging, people talking, dogs barking. The game is absolutely packed with npc banter that constantly evolves while progressing through the story or doing certain side quests, and it makes Valisthea an ever changing place, always evolving thanks to you and yours. Throughout the story you will change the fate of many people and the landscape of Valisthea (kind of literally) and you will look BADASS while doing it. The models of the characters are beautiful and full of life, never suffering from same-face syndrome even for minor npcs. The voice actors did a phenomenal job, and while talking they feel like real people interacting in the same physical space instead of polygons giving an illusion of human interaction. The animations are masterful, even the very subtle ones or the ones off-camera: characters shake their hands after lifting something heavy, cracking their shoulder, scratching themselves, even the way they walk gives them their specific personality.
The story of Final Fantasy XVI is crude and dark, often upsetting for how much no-filter it is. It’s the very first Final Fantasy with this much blood, sex and death in it, and i fear it will very well be the last. Square made a bet with 16, one that either pays off extremely well or is gonna be the last of its kind. Many people say that the story ‘falls off’ in the last act. These people often refer to the “old Final Fantasy games”. These people, are what we call posers. They didn’t play the “old Final Fantasy games”. If they did, they played them without paying attention or didn’t finish them. In every Final Fantasy you end up in one way or another killing god in the most shonen way possible. 16 is no exception to this rule. What the hell did they expect? Even leaving the killing god part for granted, the final act is full of symbolism and emotion. If you think Barnabas was a wasted character, you didn’t understand him. If you think Ultima getting angry was out of character, you absolutely did not understand him, i’m sorry dude. The story is good, very good yes, but still didn’t reach the heights FF10 or FF7 reached for me (i’m not counting ff14 since it’s an mmo and has an incredible amount of time to set up its plot and characters to pay off later. It’s good but it is kinda cheating). I got teary and cried a little at the end of 16, but it’s not the emotional rollercoaster that made me broke my friendship with FF10. Then again, maybe for you it was. The music tho. Jesus. 10/10, i dont have anything else to say about that
The combat was controversial… for some reason. People who think it’s just pressing square are dumb AND uncool, plus incorrect. The game is packed with combos and abilities to mix and match. If you take advantage of the systems it gives you you’re going to press an insane amount of buttons. In clips i took of me playing the game you can hear the absolute chaos of sounds my controller produces (clicktyclicktyclick). If you choose to play the game ignoring the incredible amount of tools the game gives you is fine by me, but it’s like playing Dark Souks without equipping your Estus and then complaining your health is too low to survive. One rebuttal i can agree with on some level is that the game’s story is too easy and so it’s useless to use all your abilities. The way the game tries to make you use them is by making the enemies an absolute slog to kill, however the devs didn’t consider the fact that many people aren’t very bright and so that’s not sufficient to make them “git good”. That’s also why one of the more common complaints is enemies being bullet sponges. It’s because you suck at the game dude. The particle effects on the screen sometimes are a mess, but fortunately the enemy animations are perfect and their attacks are telegraphed incredibly well, so you can dodge without having a stroke. The boss fights are choreographed like a dance and many of the boss attacks are very, VERY similar to MMO mechanics which is fun and also funny. The grievances i have with the combat system are all exclusive to the slaughtered RPG elements the game drags along like a chain to its foot. Let’s talk about them.
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Things the game doesn’t want to do: I strongly believe the initial plan for the game was a pure action. No rpg. They feel so forcefully pushed in and badly implemented they make me half-laugh, half-cry. For starters, the level up is pathetic. The stats boost are inconsequential, they are fixed and always the same amount, they feel like a total waste of your time. It’s so useless you can’t even notice you just skipped the level up screen without thinking about it. Such a nice UI animation totally wasted. The uselessness carries on the weapons of the game, that i do not understand why but have a separate section for damage and stagger. Which is always the same. WHY. It’s like the weapon window was too empty so they had to add something? There are no accessories in the game which boost your weapon stagger damage and the ones that do boost your normal damage are so tiny they don’t justify another stat added to all weapons. It could have been an hidden number and nothing in the experience would have changed. It’s just a number there, for the sake of being a number there. This could have been fixed with the addition of elemental damage which was a given for all previous games in the series (except 14). The problems that adding elements would have caused are NOT an argument that hold any value. Making the correct element give a damage boost and the incorrect one a low damage would’t have caused any trouble at all. They could have made the small enemies before a boss be the same element of the boss so that you swapped or knew what to expect before, or make a new system to swap eikons at the start of the battle. The problems created by elements could have been solved with basic game design, and they could have given various boosts to the stagger bar or health regen or damage that would have made the game much more interesting to play and explore.
Yes, exploration too is hurt by the lack of rpg elements. The only incentive you have to explore the map is the various trinkets scattered on the ground, which becomes very apparent very soon, serve no purpose other then collecting dust in your inventory. The materials given you by sidequests and hunts are more then enough to satisfy Blackthorne, your smithy (god bless his sweet little soul), and get all weapons and armor you will ever need. Chests also rarely give fulfilment, since few gear pieces or orchestrion rolls are scattered among a mountain of garbage going straight into your pockets. Dungeons also borrow the FF14 formula and prefer being corridors (VERY beautiful corridors) as opposed to an actual place to be explored. The few times (two or three really) the game gives you a choice are illusions, as both paths come back around the same place after a very brief diversion. This design philosophy is considered acceptable in FF14 since it’s made to reduce as much as possible the friction between players, but in a single player game it just feels very.. lazy. Which i know it’s not. There clearly is a lot of care put in all playable areas, because of which is a shame seeing them truncated in this way by the very systems of the game. Or the lack thereof.
Because when i referred to FF16 as a simple game, i meant it. It is a very simple game. That’s what makes the sidequests the (ostensibly) worst part of the game. Beginning slow, and at the end just going all out without much thought, Final Fantasy XVI SHOWERS the player with sidequests that i dreaded the more i played. The funny thing is: they are actually quite good. We aren’t talking about FF15, where there’s three times the number of sidequests and there’s no story behind them or any setup at all (have fun going around an open world with limited fast travel picking up beans or killing slobbering dogs !). Every, or almost every sidequest in the game has a proper setup, interesting parts at play and at the end useful information on a character or the lore of the world. The voice actors are stellar as always and they often add a nice touch of narrative flair to the main story. So what the hell is the problem here ! The GAME is the problem !!! You don’t do anything fun in them ! They are quite literally, MMO sidequests. If you’re starting to see a pattern here, it’s because there is. There’s a lot of FF14 in FF16, and this isn’t the last of it. The sidequest consist of going to point A to point B back to point A (or point C) killing a couple of creatures on the way. There is nothing else. No weird mechanics, no unlockable areas (except 1), no minigames in them, they are empty. The fact that you can take them when you want in the game means they couldn’t make the party talk to each other, and they feel like ghosts during half of the whole game. NPCs refer to Clive and Clive only, party members are ignored, silent, and cut away from cutscenes, much to the loss of immersion.

I may go on a tangent here: this may be just my problem, but what in the hell happened to sidequests in old games ? Back when they had no markers and you had to listen to the dudes? When they span the entire game ? What happened to the dude in FF9 mentioning coffee beans, and after finding them you thought “holy shit that old guy on top of that cliff wanted this” and you could go and bring it back to him ? What happened to the Kalm traveler ? The Airship passwords ? Obel Lake ? I get that the devs want every player to see every single part of the game, but that really hurts the longevity of said game. When people, while talking about your game, discover there’s huge secrets they missed, they will play it again. That’s what makes older titles in the series classics. It’s okay if your game doesn’t span 70 hours of playtime on a normal playthrough. It’s okay to trim the fat from your game and/or putting it as optional content. Make it short and very sweet, with other stuff for people who really liked it, that way you make everyone happy ! Because people are not happy with the pacing of the game, and i’m not either !!!
Remember when i said there’s other suff FF16 borrows heavily from FF14 ? Well, the whole game is basically a 14 expansion. The pacing of their stories are the very same. Final Fantasy XVI always reaches peaks in its story where the pacing is so fast and so much stuff happens at once you just stare at the screen with your mouth open, not knowing what to think. And then the game decides to slooooooooow. doooooown. Just like the usual 14 expac, Heavensward excluded, you’re gonna spend hours of playtime without anything interesting happening, just going around talking to people or fetching stuff for them (yes this is not exclusive to sidequests). Again, the story being told is captivating (most of times. The part with the orchestrion made my blood freeze cold) but the actual game here is… not much of a game.

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I think this summarizes the issues i have with Final Fantasy XVI: there isn’t a whole lot of game here. The actual game is all in the combat system, and besides that you can very well put down the controller and watch them cutscenes. I think this opens the debate which questions whether a movie-like game is an actual good videogame, or a good movie. But to tell you the truth, i don’t even understand the question. Games have been trying to be closer to films than closer to videogames since (almost) their inception, and i think it’s cool to have movie-like games and game-like games both. I think striking a balance between the two is a winning move (the first three Metal Gear Solids come to mind), but if a game leans in one direction or another then the matter is whether you personally enjoy that direction or not. Gatekeeping the term “videogame” is not useful when talking about if a game is good or not. So is 16 a videogame ? Yeah ! And a very good one while at that ! But if you want to get dirty with the controller, then there’s not much fun to be had i’m afraid. Either you draw enjoyment from the setting and story, or you will be disappointed. Just like i was disappointed when i realized the game wouldn’t have scratched the rpg-hunger my brain craved. I hope Baldur’s Gate can fix that.
I want to round up the review with a couple of minor grievances, minor yes, but that in the grand scheme of things make me want to smash my poor controller on my poor desk.
The UI design of the game is very beautiful: minimal, elegant, and very clear. It is not however, what your usual joe would call ‘efficient’. I want to address what it seems to me like a fetish of the designers. The font is SMALL. If you play on your television with a low resolution, prepare to squint a lot my man. Many texts in the game are extremely small, and you can notice it as soon as you open the start screen. The npc banter log is small, the descriptions are small, missives are small, and yes it does look cool if you look at it right, but it comes at the expense of user legibility. The menu is laggy, especially when opening the map, as it takes its sweet time to load and only after it is done it allows you to get to the tab you actually needed, which is weird since the game loads the actual in-game map in approx 5 seconds without fail. The map also loves to take control from you to show all the new shiny markers added on the map, even when you don’t need to see them. The game has many of these time-wasters, such as making you press the R2 button just to open a door, and not registering the input when you try to anticipate it, almost like mocking you for being an hasty little bitch. The sprint is not bound to a button, even if there’s a lot of free real estate on the controller, but it instead activated automatically after walking a little bit, often being completely wasted since you stop after talking to somebody or entering battle. Every time you finish a battle, even if completely inconsequential, the game loves to show you a glorious ENEMY VANQUISHED screen with a second “spoils” screen which looks kinda ridiculous when you just one-shotted a bunch of plants and two birds. They are not easily skippable since you need to finish watching their elaborate animations first. The quest accepted screen and quest finished screen, full-on FF14 style, take forever to be shown and again can’t be skipped. Added to the fact that sidequests can indeed be frustrating to players, watching Clive stare blankly at an NPC waiting for the little jingle to end gives a weird “itchy” feeling to just get to the damn point already. Hunts are very fun, verily because it’s the only “game” part of the game and the combat system is extremely well made. I don’t understand why you can access their locations only in the Hideaway. There are so many you can’t just remember them all in your head, but there is no system to see hunts you already accepted or seen posted. At the end i just used the screenshot feature on the PS5, but i can’t understand why they chose to not have a system to access them properly, even as simple as taking the poster with you in your inventory.

And so Final Fantasy 16 ends up on a sour note. Many long time fans feel alienated, understandably, and offendedly don’t accept 16 as a “real” final fantasy. I can’t really understand what people mean by ‘real final fantasy’, the way i see it, the ‘real final fantasy’ is your ‘favorite final fantasy’ more than anything. Every entry has in one way or another changed the entity of the series. These people think they know better then the devs of the actual game, when in fact the nearest figure of authority on the matter is series creator Sakaguchi, and going on by what he thinks, Final Fantasy is what the devs think is best for the franchise at that time. There is no “real” Final Fantasy, there are many Final Fantasies and each one tries to tickle a different part of your fantasy. What entry tickled you more depends on the person you are.
I doubt we’re gonna see a Final Fantasy XVII soon, but we will see it by the end of the decade, and i do think CBU3 are gonna get reconfirmed as the dev studio. I do hope they take in the feedback they got and try to get away from their MMO roots a little bit more. I think we’re gonna get a lighter tone, and i would love a steampunk setting finally. But to not get ahead of ourselves, FF7Rebirth is just around the corner. Expect me to talk about that at lenght.

This was a videogame review. Let’s think too much about videogames next time too ! Bye !