partly as penance for my chronically bad & neurotic presence generally and partly in lieu of a post i still owe cuba specifically: i’m going to force myself to try to wring some musings out of some of the games in which i’ve hit a credits/clear screen within the last year or so that i otherwise probably didn’t feel like i had observations substantive or unique enough to bother posting. i’ve got an idea in mind for the other thread i still intend to compose i just . . . don’t want to do it at this time. part of what i was going to get into in that post was how i really haven’t been playing a whole lot until this recent stretch of unemployment & remembering that piracy owns & that i’m very lucky to have a passable-enough pc atm but also it’s kind of A Problem with me that my brain will run hot for a week while i fixate on something but i’ll otherwise basically forget all of it immediately if i don’t transmute any of that energy into something consumable by others. so!
SaGa Emerald Beyond
i recently realized that there were at least two SaGa threads on here i had apparently almost entirely missed. as exciting as this was, it mostly resulted in me spending more time hunting down pc versions of everything and making logos and box art for them all on steam than actually playing any. the most recent original title is the one that managed to get its hooks in me the longest, perhaps despite itself.
if there’s any takeaway from this i would like to get across it’s that the battle system is the sickest shit since fatal frame the Press Turn System dropped 20-odd years ago. i don’t think i posted about it here but i dropped SMTV halfway through in large part because i felt like i was literally making almost all of the same decisions i had made in some previous atlus rpg 10,000 times over. oh ok yeah i think this guy likes to get hit by zio, right? yep! guess so! i tried to make it more interesting by doing a luck-only build and endeavoring to steal as many turns as possible, playing it on hard hoping i would get that sort of razor’s edge feeling @felix and @bib were talking about re: dragon quest recently but it just wasn’t hitting. i’d squeezed this lemon already.
maybe it’s just the novelty (afaik Scarlet Grace has more or less the same battle system, yeah?), but i’m still very impressed by what this has going for it. almost every turn has this beautiful balance of forethought and wishcasting; genuine tactical play interspersed with dice roll spice; systems just coherent enough to make educated guesses about how your plan will work out without necessarily being able to nail it down to the letter, dot your I’s or cross your T’s. both the planning and execution stages of each turn is exciting in the way tactics games can be, but with stakes tuned for JRPG pacing. man it owns. i recommend anyone whose brain tingles a bit hearing that give one of these a few hours to get going. i would kill for a game with these mechanics in like…a matsuno setting. kill.
that said, hard to know how to talk about how singularly odd the writing is. you almost want to describe it as “irreverent”, but that calls to mind 
or, like, ricky gervais, unfavorably. it’s not quite that, it’s more like a game run by a GM who is very consistent about the internal logic of the world but otherwise makes no attempt to impart import to any of the proceedings. everything that happens is equally irrelevant so the decision making is more about the novelty of witnessing and manipulating the variety of outcomes than it is any particular narrative investment. it’s partly what gave me so much momentum through my first run–momentum i’d expected to take me a little further than it ultimately did when i realized just how detached of an experience it could be.
similarly to how Unlimited SaGa shed much of the visual pretense of the JRPG in favor of a tabletop-like affect, Emerald Beyond presents a sort of grab bag of world-vignettes, snowglobes perusable semi-randomly. it’s like polly pocket & mighty max by way of star trek: you visit these entirely self contained universes with their own little internal logic matter of factly carrying on as they do, poke your head in to the extent that you’re curious and ultimately leave everything as fixed or as fucked up as you feel like, hardly a second thought left to any of it once you’re gone. there’s a ghost pirate universe and a mole people universe and a bioresearch station universe all following their own stupid rules full-throatedly, irrelevantly.
it’s a fun if flighty conceit, but realizing all of the characters draw from this same pool of visitable worlds and that most of the gimmicks are thin enough to strain patience even the first time through dampened enthusiasm for the process of replaying with different characters, though i think i might try to keep picking through it, if only more slowly.
Hotel Barcelona + Romeo is a Dead Man
i’m actually writing this section LAST out of tribute to the time travel elements involved in both games.
ok fine it’s because i don’t actually want to talk about them. i actually hadn’t played any GHM releases since finishing NMH1 and just starting 2. i will say that during the process of playing these i started to become nervous i would become so disillusioned by suda’s trappings that i would retroactively not like killer7 anymore. that didn’t happen! it actually did remind me how much his work helped me appreciate iteration and intentional, almost meditative repetition and variation on images and themes as a core design element in games and media. in suda’s case it has almost always been a cost saving measure first and an artistic statement second, but necessity is the mother of invention and all that.
i am running out of steam for this. i don’t want to talk about hotel barcelona, but i eventually came to kind of like romeo as an exhaustive tone poem summarizing his Kill The Past works. towards the end of the game there is a music video interlude. i kind of took the following line to be the thesis statement of the game:
a thin if unfortunately relatable millennial/gen-x cuspy sentiment of: hey, wasn’t the future supposed to come at some point? what happened while i was day dreaming about that? did it happen yet? huh…
there’s something more tasteful about suda’s version of getting old than kojima’s, even if they both can’t stop being sexist trying to express whatever that is
DooM The Dark Ages + Ninja Gaiden 4
hiding my dastardly xbox posting until the end to maximally undermine any rebuilt good will. jk i pirated these too, though i know even that will not be forgivable by some!!
i used to have much stronger, more prescriptive feelings about games and game design. yes, part of that is being older and having other shit to think about, but a lot of it is me realizing that a lot of media was only ever interesting to me to the extent that its poking and prodding promised something more interesting in the future; that we have to pay attention now to learn the Right Lessons about what to pass on. this is mostly just to say that, like, it’s hard for me to imagine what the fuck i think i would even want out of a character action game at this point despite there being a time when i considered them to be Totally My Shit. i’ve had only the vaguest outlines of where i might take the format, but this isn’t really the post for that. in any case it took them four tries and almost two decades for capcom to come up with a coherent sequel to the original Devil May Cry and while they mostly accomplished it it’s also a design dead end. Ninja Gaiden 4 feels the same way for the Platinum and Team Ninja branches of these design trends, closed into one tidy loop.
something all of the games in this post have in common for me is that it’s kind of a pain in the ass for me to play anything anymore because i have become increasingly particular about having to figure out how to make my own fun in games that i otherwise find dull when approached on their own terms. for example: most games are unplayable for me on normal difficulty or below because i tune out and die more when the stakes are too low for me to care. i just get depressed and dissociate if nothing’s being asked of me. on the other hand those same games will often take the most boring route to increasing their difficulty. i will pick too hard over too easy almost every time, but it ends up feeling like a compromise either way. i never really feel like the designers have got this all figured out and i’m just along for the ride, anymore. i’m always having to ignore half the mechanics or invent my own narrative framing to keep from being bored to tears. part of the reason i’m grouping DtDA and NG4 together is because i don’t and have never had quite the same personal affinity for FPS games despite a fair amount of experience with them, but the effect on me is similar regardless and i’m not entirely sure what to make of it.
to that end DtDA having micro and macro difficulty options was interesting to me. i’m even less sure what i want out of shooters than i want out of character action, but i’m also sort of surprised to find most single player FPS campaigns not very challenging either ime. and that’s what i found here! i remember playing FEAR on 360 largely because of the talk about it on sb but being grumpy about it because i could clear each encounter by slow mo sliding head first into every enemy with the shotty without much thought. i didn’t feel like i play these enough to be having this relatively frictionless an experience, or that the encounter design should be so universally solved by this one tactic i didn’t exactly have to think very hard to come up with. i had a big rambly post in my head after i finished doom wanting to ask people here if they found the challenge as empty as i did but i didn’t really know what my point was, knew most people [reasonably] weren’t playing it/wanting to talk about it, and maybe it would just sound like weird bragging, but…
…like, everything having parries is probably going to be over soon, right? you can’t just keep narrowing active frame windows and making enemies go “neener i’m not touching you” more times before actually attacking you forever, right? like, yes, video game industry, we all did play elden ring. that’s why you have to think of something else now.
and that’s all either ng4 or dtda were, really! and clair obscur for that matter. and it works inside these discrete moments–usually the culmination of a boss battle, tension and release–relief, even, that the microchallenge is over. it’s thrilling in those moments, but how many more times are people going to sign up for the experience of being in a situation they hope is over soon? i think i am about done with it, myself! i’m glad i tried a bunch of these again recently and had that experience, but there has got to be another place for all this to go besides
“not now…not now….NOWjustkiddingnotnow…okay NOW”
i guess i didn’t actually talk about either of the games mentioned but i doubt that would’ve been much more enlightening anyway. i also didn’t take many pictures of these ones so instead here is a music recommendation by way of ninja gaiden 4:
