Sorry about this but just needed to dump word vomit I horked out tonight on two of these, thinking they would be in this week’s top 64 bracket because I can’t read.
Demon's Souls
Voting Demon’s Souls despite my dumb Sega brand loyalty. I got DeS after reading the first few posts on SB1 about it in mid-2009 when the Asian version was found to have a rough version of the final English in-game text. I think the aura of mystery around the game that initially drew me to these games faded for me as it became established in its own genre and From/Bamco openly flaunted its difficulty as a marketing strategy, e.g. Prepare To Die edition. Or maybe it was more that I wasn’t part of the cool in-crowd any more because the games went mainstream.
I’m shitty at games generally and was never really interested in skill checks. This game came out just before the wave of fan wikis, clickbait articles, YouTube videos and Souls games in general were widely understood, so it forced a level of digitally mediated human interaction on me that I usually shied away from in that I had to lean on early adopter SB folks’ findings and helpful summoned people online to complete the game. The first game I spent a lot of time with in this loose continuity was Eternal Ring, gifted to me shortly after the PS2 launch. I never got far as it quickly reminded me of being bitten to death by spiders in an untranslated PlayStation Underground demo of Shadow Tower that I think I ended up with from Pizza Hut somehow. I recognized the bleak, lonely, somewhat janky feeling within ER and its family of games had been inherited by Demon’s Souls.
Seeing that SB has a particular fondness for the more off-beat (in context with the rest of the games) DeS and Dark Souls 2 reminded me that I was playing these games more for the atmosphere than (Miyazaki-enforced it turns out?!) masochism and I just wanted to be able to exist within those slightly off-kilter Japanese mid-tier-game-budget dark fantasy worlds. Also preaching to the choir that the Bluepoint remake looks awful and if they don’t let you toggle back the original art assets at least it emulates really nicely now.
killer7
No matter how the Metroid ga Gotoku vote would have turned out I was going for killer7. It is singularly unique and and can be engaged with on multiple levels:
- on the surface as a beautiful mood piece with wild tonal and style shifts, a visual aesthetic partner to Nocturne
- as an indictment of real world U.S. hegemony from post-WW2 to, uh, it feels a bit tacky to bring this up considering what day it is but 9/11 and its aftermath/the US reaction to it. Even in this game’s funhouse mirror alternate reality where the internet and air travel is banned and 9/11 was satirically substituted by endless laughing mutant suicide bombers controlled by a personification of evil, America still only cares about its allies/tribute states in the dehumanized capitalist terms of the resources it can extort out of them and, when met by a materially weaker but actually competent adversary subverting its systems from within, it flails uselessly or overreacts, dragging the rest of the world down with it.
- a bitter video game coffee blend of the 70s wave of neo-noir/political conspiracy movies, over the top anime and Japanese direct-to-video movies, sentai shows, and hardboiled fiction,
- a commentary on personal agency/mental illness, human trafficking, child abuse/grooming, masculinity, tech startup Tesla/Rakuten-like fanatic corporate cults and obsessive fandom,
- a personal tale about a compromised/repressed guy living with his abused disabled grandpa who is delusional and/or manipulated by forces beyond his understanding that are locked in equilibrium forever,
- a severely minimalist fusion of Mikami’s absurd survival horror weird-object lock-and-key puzzles, point-and-click adventures (I sort of hamfistedly point to D2 as an ancestor of this bare-essentials-on-rails style) and the hardboiled killers and supernatural forces of Suda51’s early crime drama visual novels.
That’s a lot for me to puke out in my limited capacity so basically I hope killer7 and DeS make it as far as possible. But jeez there are some hard votes coming.