Death Stranding

As Summer Slips Away

I love summer. Always have, probably always will. The warm, breezy nights, taking my cat for long starlit walks, fun midnight console launches. Wait, what? *Pops hip back into place and downs a handful of daily vitamins* Back in MY day… Seriously, though, when I was growing up, autumn/”holiday” was the prime window for console launches. Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Saturn, PlayStation, Dreamcast, GameCube, Xbox, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, and more were all released between September and December. There were a few exceptions (PS2, N64), but in general I don’t associate spring/summer with major console drops.

Yet there I was, sitting against the wall outside of my local Best Buy at 9:30pm on June 4th 2025, 16th in line but guaranteed a Switch 2 Mario Kart bundle for the midnight release. I didn’t technically need to be there. I was able to successfully snag a preorder from a big box retailer weeks before, but they estimated my Switch 2 would be shipped a week after launch. Not cool, bro, as the poets often say. So when I heard my friend Kimberly was waiting in line at launch, I texted her to ask how bad it was. Not bad at all, she reported, so I grabbed my keys and headed out.

I love console launches, and I have fond memories of the midnight launches I attended in previous years (even if they were a bit torturous). This one was very chill. This store said they’d have around 75 consoles, so even when they split the line in two (one for people who’d pre-ordered for in-store pickup and one for the rest of us), I was sure to get one. Kimberly made fast friends with the people in line near her, but she joined me to chat for a bit before returning to her spot for go time. There were a lot of guys like me in the line. 30-40 something, graphic tees, imaginary scars of console wars past. But there were also some kids with their parents, and their excited chatter about the Switch, Mario, Zelda and more made the night feel a little more magical. When the time came, we were only allowed in the store two at a time (a much slower process than previous launches I’ve been to), and we were guided by a sales person who tried to convince us we needed… well, everything. Extra chargers, “required” expansion memory cards, cases, screen protectors, digital codes, physical games, protection plans, amiibo. Okay, so I bought a couple of those last ones ($30 for the new Zelda characters! $45 for the new Street Fighter ones! An absolute wild increase from $15). After nabbing my Mario Kart bundle, a Pro controller, and amiibo, I headed home to set it up.

Later, when people asked me what I thought of the Switch 2, I made the very dumb joke that they should have called it the Switch Too, because when I first booted it up, excited to dive into a new generation of Nintendo weirdness, I was greeted by… the standard Switch home screen and interface. The console looks the same, the store is the same… I have to admit the sameness of it all drained a lot of the thrill. Aside from the few GameCube games they added to Nintendo Switch Online, there wasn’t anything new to check out. It was… a Switch, too. I’m glad it’s finally here, very happy that I have one, and I’m thrilled to have a new Nintendo machine that can handle beefier games – but ultimately the Switch 2 launch was just a bit of a letdown for me.

Mario Kart World

What saved me from tossing my shiny new console in place of the old Switch and forgetting about it for a month? Mario Kart, babyyyyy. I didn’t own the original Super Mario Kart for SNES, but it was a regular rental for us. It was the rare game that I loved so much I would play it during the precious few minutes between breakfast and leaving for school, then hop right back in when I got home. I’ve played hundreds of hours of the console versions and they’re the only games I will confidently talk trash about since I know I can usually back it up. I haven’t made an updated gaming tattoos post, but I have a Blue Shell tattoo on my elbow. My love for the Kart runs deep.

And there is a lot to love in Mario Kart World. Namely, Peach, Touring Peach, Pro Racer Peach, Farmer Peach, Sightseeing Peach, Aviator Peach, Yukata Peach, Aero Peach, Vacation Peach, Baby Peach, Touring Baby Peach, Pro Racer Baby Peach, Sailor Baby Peach, and Explorer Baby Peach. Did I mention I also have a Peach tattoo? Insert smirky smiley face here. I do love all of the different costumes, especially for my homegirl Peach, but I was a bit sad that Nintendo abandoned the IP expansion from Mario Kart 8. I’ve seen people trying to defend the decision, saying it keeps Mario Kart “pure” by sticking to Mario characters, but if you’re telling me you’d rather have a fucking Cataquack than Zelda himself (an old internet joke that I should leave without clarification, but I just know that to this day people will be like “uhhh aCtuAlLy tHaT’s LiNk, ZeLdA iS tHe gIrL”), I don’t know that I can trust you. When Sega showed the Sonic Racing: Crossworlds trailer at the recent Summer Game Fest, I was thinking “wow, what a weird time to show this when Mario Kart World literally just dropped.” Then they showed Hatsune Miku. And Ichiban from the Yakuza games. Then Joker from Persona 5. And I wept for what Nintendo lost. Yes, expand the roster with a bunch of goofy Mario characters and enemies (I wanna see Wart drifting alongside me before I blast him with a perfectly aimed green shell), but can’t we also dip into other fun IP too? It doesn’t have to be Super Smash Bros. Kart, but why not Zelda, Chibi-Robo, Ness, K.K. Powerslider (see what I did there)? Come onnnnnn, Nintendo.

That tangent aside, I do love Mario Kart World. It retains much of the same tight control that my favorite entry, Mario Kart 8 (and Deluxe) has, Knockout Tour is a blast (especially with friends), and the tracks are expansive and filled with fun details. I’ve gotten three stars on all the Grand Prix tracks and have just a few costumes left to unlock, but I’ve had a great time with it so far. I do hope they update the game or offer DLC to offer more tracks (I’d love some throwback or retro-inspired tracks and characters) and maybe fix the Mario Kart Wii-level BS rubberbanding, but overall I’m happy to have a new Mario Kart game to hop into whenever the itch hits.

Secret of Evermore

Back in December 2019 (The Before Times, as we’ve taken to calling the pre-pandemic years), I posted about the oldest game on my backlog: Secret of Evermore. At the conclusion of that post, I said with a resolved twinkle in my eye: “writing this entry has made me determined to play Secret of Evermore at long last. It’s about time, I think.” What a fool I was. Well, to give myself a little credit, I tried. The SNES copy I owned had a dead battery, and Nintendo nor Square have made the game accessible to play legally, so against my usual judgement I downloaded a ROM, connected a controller to my PC and tried to give it a shot. It kept crashing in the same spot less than an hour in. I could not get it to work on two different computers. Ugh. So much for scratching the oldest game on my backlog off the list.

Fast forward to March of this year and I’d finally, after many years, decided to buy a soldering iron and teach myself that same useful skill. I watched YouTube videos, took a training course through my job, and practiced on some of my less-prized SNES carts before moving to Secret of Evermore. The “surgery,” as I like calling, it was a success, so I finally had a working Secret of Evermore cart to play! I busted out my old SNES and finally got to work.

It didn’t zoom straight to my favorite RPGs of all time list, but it was a solid action RPG with some cool enemy design, silly story beats, and charming art. The combat definitely felt dated, but I had several moments while exploring of that kind of nostalgic feeling you only get while actually playing an old school game on its original hardware. I wasn’t magically transported back to my childhood, but it felt about as close as I could get. In the end, I had a good time, I learned how to solder, and I finally, finally beat the oldest game on my backlog. Hell yeah.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

I haven’t played anything else on my Switch 2 and would have liked to jump from Mario Kart World to Donkey Kong Bananza, but I’m pretty deep into Death Stranding 2 and want to finish this before moving on. The Death Stranding games represent Kojima at his most… Kojima, to me. The narrative is loosely held together by a series of convenient plot devices, MacGuffins, and contrivances, the symbols and metaphors are far from subtle, and some of the gameplay mechanics and tutorials are overexplained or poorly integrated into game progress. And somehow I still love it.

So far, it really does feel like a carbon copy of the first game (it even has the lazy video game opening of “whoops, remember that big, satisfying conclusion from the last game? Throw it all out, we have to do it all over again”), with a new country to connect, mostly the same vehicles, tools, and weapons, the same antagonist (booooo), etc., but I’m actually okay with that. My favorite memories from the first game are captured in moments. Gameplay moments in hauling piles of packages from place to place, or intense moments with the colorful cast of characters. And that’s really what Kojima is good at. He comes up with powerful, memorable moments that exist outside of the sloppy narrative they originate from. And he gives us interesting worlds with lots of potential for fun, unique emergent gameplay events. I’m avoiding specific spoilers because the game is still so new, and maybe I’ll check back in later with more thoughts after I finish it, but so far it’s been a fun time tramping around Mexico and Australia.

[EDIT] Siiiiike, I took so long to finish writing this post that I’m currently watching the credits scroll. I could rewrite the last few lines to segue into something more natural, but I want to capture the reality of writing this specific post, too, which has been an exercise in finding time here and there to chip away at it, unlike my usual sit-down-and-do-it-all approach. Anyway, I spent over 250 hours playing Death Stranding 2. I almost have the platinum, I’ve five-starred all facilities and preppers, and overall, as with the first game, I enjoyed my time running and driving packages around, building roads, and climbing snowy mountains. My opinion of the storytelling remains unchanged, too, however. This game is dumb as hell and I don’t know that I will defend it in many conversations. Some of the silliness is fun, sure, but some of it is so damned hard to put up with, let alone like. The guitar duel, with added musical puns? I think the discord for me comes in the clash of Japanese storytelling, which is less concerned with logic and laying out a digestible story for its audience than it is with emotionally resonant moments and themes, and Kojima’s obsession with western media and film. At one end, the story feels automatically grounded because we see characters that are not only hyper realistically rendered, but familiar because they’re famous actors and celebrities. When you take that and mix it with the kind of over-the-top silliness of an anime, and you have giant babies, guitar jesters, and convoluted plot points that are a mix of fantasy and science fiction, it just doesn’t work for me. Great game, very fun, one of the most gorgeous games I’ve ever played… and also dumb as hell. I think that about sums up my feelings on both games, heh.

Venus Vacation PRISM – Dead or Alive Xtreme

I’ve never been shy about my love of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 and its iterative versions. I even platinumed two of them! It wasn’t just the busty, barely clothed virtual ladies I liked, either. The first two DOA volleyball games had those, too, but I bounced (lol) off those pretty quick. I liked the resort vibes, collecting all of the outfit pieces and gifts, and the dating-lite aspect of trying to woo the various badass volleyballers. At some point after the last release, Team Ninja said they wouldn’t pursue any more Xtreme games (in part, I think, because they refused to release them in the West), so I was shocked, shocked I say, when the trailer for Venus Vacation PRISM dropped and revealed that the next entry in the series was, essentially, a dating sim.

Sadly, the only shock I’m feeling now is over how disappointed I am in this game. It fails for me on multiple fronts. First, as a dating sim you don’t even really date the characters. There’s a lot of flirtation but it doesn’t have the full, satisfying romance arcs of most other dating sims I’ve played. It also has far, far fewer characters than the previous games. I do like the characters they’ve included, but no Helena? No Marie Rose?? No Momiji!? The gameplay is also a letdown. I legitimately enjoyed the volleyball games in the previous entries (even the ones I bounced off of), but I was willing to put that aside for fun romance-sim action. The romance part is a dud, but the photography gameplay is also pretty lame. It amounts to taking the same shots over and over, wasting time moving the camera around a bunch to try and get a three star rating and… that’s it. The system doesn’t even seem logical, as sometimes the same exact shot is worth very different points. Tolerable for one playthrough, but when I started a second playthrough to romance a different character I quickly lost interest. I have to take the same pictures of the same girls all over again? Ugh. It’s a beautiful game and there are some fun character moments, but unless they patch it or expand the roster, I don’t know that I’ll come anywhere close to the platinum for this one. Bummer.

Midnight Murder Club

In the clurb, we all dead. Sorry, that trend is like a year old so I just look like an idiot. Anyway, I work at PlayStation and I was still surprised when the beta for this game dropped. I didn’t remember hearing anything about it, but it looked pretty fun so I recruited some friends to play and we jumped in. It’s such an easy pitch: It’s basically hide and seek in a huge, pitch-black mansion. With guns. It didn’t have the same legs as Phasmophobia for my friend group, but we played a ton and had a lot of fun. I even got the platinum trophy for it. Playing with bots is a huge boost for us. The bots are sometimes very dumb and sometimes too accurate, but it’s always nice to have that option. I hope they add more levels in the future, though. The mansion is very big and fun to navigate, but I would love to shuffle between a handful of different locations, like farms, amusement parks, office buildings, etc. A bit of environmental destruction would be very fun, too. A shot ringing out in the dark with a bright flash is already scary enough, but I think the wood of a wall or door exploding in splinters next to your head would add some thrill to an already nerve-wracking moment.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

I own an Xbox Series X, but my primary console is PS5, which is why I was a little sad when Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was announced as an Xbox exclusive. I would buy it, I thought, but I really wanted to earn sweet, sweet trophies for it. Well, apparently Mick Jagger was wrong once again* when he sang “You can’t. always get. what you waaaant,” because I got exactly what I wanted when a PS5 version was announced for this year. Suck it, Jagger.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is one of the best video game adaptations of all time. If not THE greatest. I could talk about the incredible graphics and sound, the amazing music, the great level design and story, the acting, etc. But the game’s greatness transcends that, or perhaps is transcended due to all of that and a little magic to become an incredibly rare example of a video game that doesn’t just adapt existing material or fail on some level in an attempt to capture the spirit of its source material – it actually fully feels like an authentic, exciting addition to the series. I rewatched all the Indiana Jones movies before playing this game, including the newest one for the first time, and for my part The Great Circle feels like yet another thrilling Indy adventure. It captures the spirit of the character and his many wild exploits. [Major SPOILERS ahead] The recreation of the opening scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark lulls us into feeling like this might just be an impressive recreation of the Indy formula, but the rest of the game goes on to give us new Indy action, romance, exploration, and drama. And the fact that it ends with Indy exploring another famous Ark, this time Noah’s, was a nice way to wrap it back around.

Being able to wander the halls of Marshall College, chatting with Marcus Brody, getting into a fist fight with a giant Tony Todd (who was great in this role). Having free reign to explore the Pyramids of Giza, the Sphinx, and the many tombs and catacombs beneath Cairo. Beating the absolute shit out of an entire camp of Nazis and then piling their bodies in front of their flag to snap a commemorative photo. These are all memories that felt natural and magical at the same time, like I’d stepped into a secret Indy film that had been buried in Steven Spielberg’s basement. One of my favorite things to do in Egypt was to wear the Nazi uniform, approach an officer, and just as they say “Wait a minute…” I punch them in the face and run away. The best.

Punching fascists in Italy was also a blast. There was one soldier that always respawned near a ledge up on a building, and I took great pleasure in finding different ways to send him flying to his death every time I made my way near him. I punched him off, shot him off, whipped him off, and bashed him with a shovel off. Truly, with my country sliding ever-increasingly toward fascism, this game served as an incredibly cathartic experience. Bootlicker ass-kicking aside, there was so much more that I loved about this game. The care put into creating living spaces and communal areas had me paying close attention to every new environment I found myself in. I really liked the houses in the Sukhothai village, and the winding tunnels and tombs beneath Rome were so cool to explore. Speaking of being very cool, I loved Gina. I was convinced she was going to stab me in the back, like stupid sexy Elsa from Last Crusade. But, no. She was a brave, skilled, strong, and beautiful companion until the end. I also thought Voss was a great villain, and his relationship and scenes with Colonel Gantz were hilarious. This game had it all: Action, humor, intrigue, exploration, gorgeous locales, a sexy sidekick. I swear every time I played a new Tomb Raider or Uncharted game, I’d say I wish they’d make an Indiana Jones game like them, and finally they have. I really, really hope they make another.

Suikoden I & II HD Remaster: Gate Rune and Dunan Unification Wars

The Suikoden games have never quite breached the mainstream like other big RPG series, so although I had high, high hopes Konami would release remasters (HD-2D or not), I wasn’t holding my breath. Imagine my surprise when they announced not only a remaster of one Suikoden, but both of the original games and they would be bundled together. Smack my ass and call me [Hero], I couldn’t believe my luck. [Some SPOILERS ahead.]

I discovered Suikoden II first, not long after my mom had moved us to the suburbs from the city. I made friends at my new school pretty quickly, but it was a while before I was integrated into their lives like typical high school friend groups. I had a lot of downtime, so I signed up for a membership at a small movie/game rental shop that was walking distance from my house. It made me feel like an adult and I tried my best to be responsible and return things on time. I’d run out of N64 and PlayStation games to play and was looking for something new but also still chasing the highs of the RPGs I loved on the SNES, like Chrono Trigger, EarthBound, Final Fantasy III, and Illusion of Gaia. The beautiful cover art of Suikoden II is what caught my eye, but I had never heard much about the first or second game, and the 2D screenshots on the back did look a bit dated, but I didn’t have all that many other options. I gave it a shot.

Gorgeous sprite work, an enormous cast of diverse characters, a castle I could expand and make my own, a riveting and sprawling story about war and vengeance, a series of tense but fun strategy combat sequences? I was in love. I started out not caring about recruiting all 108 characters, but of course once I started running into some of them, in their sometimes weird and unique conundrums, I had to have them. I ran out and bought the official strategy guide and finished with something like 85 Stars of Destiny. I replayed it later, after buying and playing the first Suikoden, and got all 108. I loved so much about it. Starting out with a best friend and excellent combat partner, being torn apart and ending up opposing each other, returning to my castle to find my new friends filling every new nook and cranny there…

And it was a blast revisiting it in beautiful HD. Most of what I’d loved remained intact, of course, and I found myself getting teary-eyed at the same dramatic moments and laughing at the same jokes. One thing that surprised me with this playthrough was how much I loved Nanami as a character. I remember thinking she was funny in my previous passes, but there was something about her strength, compassion, and unshakable loyalty that really endeared me to her this time around. She had some of the funniest lines and her big sacrifice scene (and the ensuing twist) wrecked me. What a great character in an awesome cast. Eilie’s crush on my character was charming as ever, Nina and Flick’s romantic scenes were hilarious, all the returning characters like Neclord, Kasumi, Viki, Viktor, and more were a welcome sight. I really wanted to platinum it this time, but doing so required some real dedication to mastering the very challenging minigames, and I just didn’t have the patience for that. Yet. Maybe I’ll do another replay some day and really commit. Regardless, I loved my time with this incredible game once again.

I also played the first game, of course, and before Suikoden II (I wrote it reversed to segue from my discovery of Suikoden II back in the day). I’d only played Suikoden once before, and I remember clearly preferring the sequel. I still do, but man did I love the first game so much more this time around. I don’t remember my original experience to say how much of my new appreciation is due to graphics or performance improvements with the remaster (though the backgrounds looked much, much clearer), but I found myself far more charmed and engrossed this time around. The character portraits look so good, too. Maybe better than those from the sequel?

If you can rename your main character in a game, I almost always name them Joey, so it was very fun to see that after naming both MCs after myself, there were jokes/references to the redundancy in Suikoden II. One thing I’d forgotten was how good the story in the first game is. I was very much into the rebellious (literally) son versus the blindly loyal father, and some of the political beats about people turning a blind eye to tyranny, being so willing to follow an obviously evil, corrupt leader, etc. felt weirdly resonant given the current state of the world. As with the sequel, I loved building up an army of interesting characters, forcing a romance subplot in my imagination (though I was torn between Camille, Kasumi, and Viki), and grinding levels while catching up on podcasts. I truly love these games and look forward to playing them yet again some time down the line.

Inscryption

Inscryption, like Doki Doki Literature Club, is the kind of game that creates a ton of buzz due to its narrative twists and subversive storytelling. That’s all people would really say about it is “it’s kind of a deck builder,” but when I would say that’s not my thing, they would insist that there’s more to it. And, to their credit, there is more to it than that. I’m not usually too shy about posting spoilers here, because I’m just sharing my personal thoughts for posterity (and fun), but I won’t spoil too much here either way. The deck building thing is still not my thing, and I think it prevented me from appreciating this game the way some others do, but I did very, very much enjoy the weird and wild story, the beautiful art and design elements, and just the general vibe and tone. I will spoil one specific thing, which is the mechanic where when you die and have your (character’s) photo taken, which is then used as a new card with perks you can choose from other cards in your old deck. At first this seemed like just a fun little quirk, but eventually I was able to make some super powerful, useful cards which carried me in some pivotal battles. There were seemingly small things like this that subverted expectations and made some of the more challenging stretches easier and more fun. The fact that death is built into the gameplay made me feel less stressed and precious in the earlier battles.

TimeSplitters 2

TimeSplitters 2 is not on my Top 25 favorite games list, but it’s very close. It was in my top 10 for a stretch in the years just after it came out. This was one of the few games I would play with music blasting in my headphones, just existing on some other level and feeling my feelings. Trent Reznor might be screaming in my ear about existential dread (or straight up fucking, am I right? High five, high five) and I’m just sitting cross-legged in my basement, blasting these goofy bots for hours. Fast forward to the remaster, and I played through about half the story and did some bot battling, in part to try and tap into that fuzzy nostalgic glow that comes with revisiting an old favorite, but unfortunately it’s one of those all-too-familiar examples of the memory being better than the game. For its time, TimeSplitters 2 was an incredible, fun, versatile shooter. But it definitely feels rough playing now, particularly the checkpointing and some of the humor. Fans have been shouting it for years, but we need a solid remake of this game, for sure.

Zenless Zone Zero

I was the copywriter for the PlayStation Stars program (RIP), so I got to see (and write for!) some of the really fun third-party partnerships we had. The studio supplied their own copy for our Zenless Zone Zero digital collectibles, but I reviewed it, wrote the campaign description, and got to see the collectibles ahead of time. I was only vaguely familiar with the game before researching it for this task, but I didn’t need to learn anything to know I wanted the Nicole Demara collectible on my virtual shelf. What a cutie. I only played for a handful of hours, because gacha games just aren’t my cup of tea, but I was very impressed by the presentation. The graphics are busy but bold and charming, the animations are stellar, and I generally had a good time in combat. Nicole turned out to be a fun character aside from her design, too, so it was a win all around. I had to cut myself off before I got too tempted to start unlocking (or buying) any of the very cool characters/skins I saw in the store.

Metaphor: ReFantazio

Phew, I had to save this baby for last. A new game from the team behind my beloved Persona series? While I am eagerly waiting for any news on the next mainline game in that series, I was also very interested to see what they did in a new, original, fantasy setting. As you might guess, in part due to the many awards this game won, I loved it. I will say I disagree with some of the podcasters/content creators I follow who declared this game a “better” game than Persona 5, but I can understand that perspective given some of the extra polish and care (particularly when it comes to combat) that this game has over P5. Regardless, I love them both.

I’m always a little nervous starting big RPGs, even if I’m confident I’m going to like them. I’d heard that there were a lot of similarities to Persona (social links, Archetypes [Personas], calendar/day night cycle, etc.), but I get sucked deep into these huge narrative games so diving in always comes with some nervous energy, especially learning all the systems (and they introduce a LOT to you in the opening hours of this game). But the moment I felt my worries melt away was when I first stepped onto the main stretch of road in Grand Trad, the royal capital. The Grand Trad music swept along with epic flourishes, people chattered in the streets, and I was tasked with finding a recruitment center so that I could sign up to fight in the royal army. A warm nostalgia washed over me. All at once I felt all the times I had a similar rush in games like Dragon Quest VIII, Final Fantasy IX, Suikoden II, Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, Persona 5, even EarthBound. It’s the moment you forget all of the systems and rules and mechanics and just embrace the tantalizing journey that lies ahead. A whole new world of side quests, plot twists, death, and revival await.

I decided to save the platinum trophy for a second playthrough sometime down the line, but I only missed two trophies, one of them requiring a good chunk of a second run. I loved my time with the colorful cast of characters, the incredible soundtrack, and the unique, beautiful world. I really like having a home base in RPGs, and your gauntlet runner serves that purpose nicely here. There is something so satisfying about having a space to chat with party members, read a book, cook, and even drop a deuce between missions. And the travel music (“Journey’s Legs”) is amazing and still randomly gets stuck in my head. The story was a very fun twist on a classic succession trope, and the combat was fast, dynamic, and deep.

I do have to admit I was sad that one thing they neglected to bring over from the Persona games is a romance system. Yes, I understand that it would have seemed a bit out of place in this scenario, but I always want to date my party members. I suppose it was a blessing in disguise, though, because I was having a hard time deciding whether I’d like to woo Juani or Hulkenberg. Hulkenberg is graceful and strong, loyal and determined, and very funny (even if usually by accident). She also loves food and has the best little grumpy face ever. But Juani is so full of life, kindness, wit, and style that it’s hard to deny her appeal. She’s a talented, widely loved singer and powerful fighter in her own right. And then there’s the wildcard, Fabienne, who is very much my type but probably off-limits in any case. Or the badass, pink-haired Catherina? Oh, I dunno. Sigh.

Anywho, my unrequited attraction to fictional characters aside, I did love my time with Metaphor. I will say the last boss was a huge pain in the ass on normal difficulty. It took me a handful of tries with wildly different strategies before I got lucky and took him down. I’d grinded to level 96 beforehand, had the best weapons, maxed out all of my Archetypes, and more. I really thought I was ready. It’s hard to keep up when he gets twelve turns in a row, though, causing me to scramble to heal and cure status effects or cast buffs/debuffs, never mind doing any significant damage. He reminded me of some of the recent optional bosses in the Persona games, who were also deadly. Still, I look forward to going back for another playthrough (and that shiny platinum) at some point in the future. And I’ll have my fingers crossed for a dating sim spinoff. Please, Atlus. Please.

I’ve also been having retro game nights with friends, where we pick one console and play a little bit of a bunch of different games from that era. We don’t play any of them too extensively and we’re using the actual consoles (with a RetroTINK 5X-Pro for scaling) so I can’t get screenshots, but there have been some fun standouts. We jump between well-remembered games, like the Donkey Kong Country games for SNES and Ridge Racer for PlayStation, and less-than-fondly remembered titles like Quest 64 on N64 and Shaq-Fu on SNES. Shaq-Fu was fun to play and joke about, even if it kinda… sucks. I did buy an adapter to play some of the import games I’ve bought, and the first one I tried was Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon, a sidescrolling brawler which was very cute and fun. There are currently a ton of new games I aim to play, like Donkey Kong Bananza, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, and (soon) Ghost of Yōtei, but I look forward to regularly dipping into my collection for some of these retro gems. And maybe I’ll find the time to keep up with this blog more often. Maybe. Shhh.

*Jagger was also wrong when he sang “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away,” because apparently that’s all it took was boundary and trust issues

Save Point: Discussing My Dissertation

When I started this site, one of my intentions was to use it as a place to write notes and short blurbs about my dissertation as I researched and worked on it. I did post a thing or two about some book notes, but I haven’t really done much else. There are a couple of reasons for this. One, I think, is that I just didn’t feel very confident about my topic – for a while, at least. I am in a fairly traditional English department, so other than our one digital rhetoric professor, there isn’t much of a place for a dissertation that is essentially a video games studies project. The process of writing my prospectus was basically filled with anxiety and stress about convincing my committee that this project had the potential to be important and relevant. I was continually hearing dissenting voices in my head. “But why does this thing matter? What are you actually bringing to the field? Do you really know enough to write this?” But after I wrote my prospectus and began converting it into a presentation, I found my confidence again. Mostly. I won’t sit here and say there aren’t still doubts, but in the process of condensing my prospectus and thinking of how to verbally pitch it, I ended up convincing myself that it was as good as I had originally thought when I came up with the idea.

So, having said all that, I am going to start posting blogs about my work. The second of the previously mentioned reasons for not doing so earlier is that I was nervous about people taking my ideas. After much reflection, I have come to conclude: who gives a shit. I’m doing this work with the intent to share it anyway, and I don’t love academia’s habit of hoarding and gating off knowledge to boot. What scenario is that little anxiety-corner of my brain imagining? That someone will see my blogs and publish their own version of my dissertation? I mean, maybe, but that seems pretty unlikely, especially given that I have lots of material that I’m not posting. What is more likely, I think, is that someone might end up seeing this and thinking “hey, that’s kind of like my work,” and if I’m lucky, they’ll reach out and I’ll have a new contact/friend to chat about video games and research with.

Future posts will probably be a lot more specific. I don’t have an exact plan for what I’ll be sharing. Sometimes it will be fully formed thoughts, sometimes it will be aimless rambles, sometimes it will just be interesting tidbits (to me) that I may or may not even end up using for anything. With that, I suppose I should say a little about what my project actually is. The working title of my dissertation is Soft Power-Up: Japanese Games as Cultural and Rhetorical Exports. The “soft power” in the play on words in the first part of the title is kind of a key component of the project. Soft power is a term that essentially describes a nation’s capacity to influence other nations with culture, rather than traditional forms of global power, like military might and economics. There have been lots of studies on Japan’s use of soft power to fill the gap left by its loss in economic superpower status in the 1980s. Most of these studies focus on widely known things like sushi, karaoke, tea ceremonies, anime, manga, and more. Studies on the use of video games as a part of this national strategy seem surprisingly lacking. The most recent edition of The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture has chapters on music, education, food, anime, and much, much more, but there is not a single chapter on video games. This edition was published in 2009, which is far too recent for any excuses of “well video games weren’t big yet.” Video games are and have been huge exports for Japan since the 1980s, to the point of being the only cultural product that Japan exports more than it imports.

So it seems like a no-brainer to me to study this. I was recently pointed toward Rachael Hutchinson’s book Japanese Culture Through Video Games, published just last year (after I had stopped research for my prospectus), which seems to cover much of what I intend to look at in my work. I have yet to read it, because academic texts are vastly overpriced and I am a poor grad student, but I’ll hopefully find a cheap copy soon. I feel pretty confident that my approach will be different enough that I won’t be treading the same ground, but I can’t deny I was a little sad to see that someone had (at least partially) beat me to print. On the other hand, I was so excited and felt weirdly vindicated (to the doubting voices in my head, anyway) to see that a very close approximation of my idea was not only taken seriously by another scholar, but published by a major press as well.

One thing that differentiates my project from Hutchinson’s (I think) is our choice of case studies. Of all the games noted in her introduction and table of contents, I don’t see any mention of the Persona, Yakuza, or Resident Evil series, or Death Stranding, and these are the games that I’ll be looking closely at. She does have a whole chapter on absentee parents which I am interested to read, because that is one of the many aspects of Japanese culture I see reflected in a metric crap ton of Japanese games and was planning on talking about in my project. I chose the Persona and Yakuza series because they both take place in real Japan, often depicting real, specific locations that exist today. So they offer insight into how the developers chose to depict their culture in explicit terms. On the other hand, there are notable Japanese games that are set in America or other Western settings, like the Resident Evil games and Death Stranding. I want to use these games to show that, regardless of setting, there are a whole host of aspects of Japanese culture that end up showing through in these games (in implicit terms). When consideration of these two types of games are combined, I hope to show what Japanese games are “saying” about Japan to the Western world, how that message has changed over time, and why it all matters.

Okay, I should shut up. As usual, I am mostly writing these for myself, to work out and solidify ideas, and just start writing things out that might be useful later. However, I’m also sharing this for anyone that’s interested in Japanese games, is or will be writing a dissertation, or is in any of the many fields related to games studies. If you want to reach out, please do. I’d be happy to answer any questions or share/swap sources. Thanks for reading, and look forward to more posts like this. Or don’t, I guess. That’s cool, too. You do you.

Late Fall Video Game Medley

I don’t love doing long blogs that cover multiple games, but I’ve had the fortune of playing several games over the last couple of months, and the misfortune of not having as much time to write about them. So, here we are. Because this is in large part my way of tracking my own thoughts about games, I should put a general spoiler warning out there, in case anyone happens to read this and has yet to play any of these games, particularly since some of them are very new. I’m not used to writing about newly released games, so yeah. The screenshots are especially potentially spoilerific. Having said that, it feels good to be “caught up” with my recent backlog enough that I can actually play new games and be active in the conversations around them. I’ll have to go back to playing specific Japanese games for my dissertation soon, but I’m giving myself until the New Year for that. So, without further ado, I begin with a couple of games that I didn’t finish.

Ghost Recon: Breakpoint

I haven’t played a Ghost Recon game since the GameCube days, but my friend wanted to play this co-op and I liked the idea of getting back to some multiplayer action. The story didn’t quite hook me, and as with the Division games, I wished there were more character customization options at the start, but I did have a fair amount of fun in my time with the game. Sneaking around in my tiger stripe camo, crawling through mud and resting behind a tree stump to line up the perfect shots on two unsuspecting enemies never got old. What did get old was clearing out enemy strongholds. It was fun enough the first few times, but after playing games in the Far Cry and Assassins Creed series’, it felt a little uninspired after a while. The lighting and environmental effects made traversing the map visually stimulating, but when I was playing alone I found exploration less rewarding than it was in other open world games. There were a few times in particular when I’d see something mysterious on the map, spend a fair amount of time carefully making my way to it, only to discover that it was blocked off for a later story mission or something. I didn’t dislike the game, but with so many games to play, I moved on without much regret.

Borderlands 3

And Borderlands 3 is what I moved on to. I played and liked the first two games in the series, but I wasn’t rushing out to buy the third. I think I got the first two on sale, but I’m generally not much of a looter shooter fan. Having said that, I like playing games like this with friends, so the previously mentioned friend and I played this for a while after giving up on Breakpoint. Having not played the first two games for such a long time, the first thing that struck me was how crisp and vibrant the graphics were. The smooth controls that I remember made a return, so running or driving around from battle to battle was fun enough. The humor was, as expected, hit or miss, but overall it was a fun, lively world. But, as with Breakpoint, I eventually got bored, especially when not playing with my friend, and since we both had other games to move on to, we gave up on completing the story after a while. I can see myself going back to it someday, though, maybe.

Night Trap: 25^th Anniversary Edition

I was only ten years old when Night Trap came out, but my former diehard Nintendo fanboy self didn’t own any Sega system, let alone a Sega system add-on like the Sega CD. I have to admit, though, reading about a game with real video of young women running around in nightgowns was certainly something that ten year old me was, shall we say, curious about. The game’s role in the 1993 senate hearings on violent video games only increased my curiosity, but as you might have guessed by its inclusion in this post, it wasn’t until this year that I would get around to giving it a shot. I picked it up when Limited Run Games released a physical copy for several systems, but I didn’t get around to playing it until this past Halloween.

And, oh boy, was it not a fun experience. I mean, on one hand, it was very campy and dated and I love things that are really obviously from a specific time period because they’re fascinating time capsules that offer a much more authentic view into the styles and culture of a time than you might see in a modern throwback TV show or movie. On the other hand, it’s a frustrating mess of a game that is impossible to really enjoy in terms of the video content because the core mechanic is not watching the screens on which action is happening, so that you can trap the many, many enemies that are trying to sneak into the house on other screens. For some of the traps you have to spring, you only have a 1-2 second window, and if you miss it, it’s game over. I had waited so long to play it, though, so after making several attempts on my own, I eventually gave in and used a guide to beat it a few times. I think the core concept of the game is interesting, and if they had spread the story out enough so that you weren’t constantly having to miss narrative progress to trap enemies, it could have been a lot of fun. With the recent revival of the FMV genre, I would very much love to see a remake of this game, set in and satirizing the 90s.

Alien: Isolation

Speaking of games I played for Halloween, I was very surprised by how much I liked Alien: Isolation. The game is a masterclass in atmosphere. From the persistently mindful use of lighting, to the accurate sound effects, to the appropriately retro futuristic technology, this game truly feels like it’s a part of the same universe as the films (particularly the first few). If I’m ever lucky enough to have the chance to design my own class on adaptations, I would seriously consider pairing the first Alien film with this game.

I think my only real complaint is that the pacing near the end is a little frustrating. It’s from a British developer, but it does the thing that a lot of Japanese games do, where it keeps leading you to believe that the game is almost over, only to pull the rug out from under you and give you another challenge. In my experience, that move is effective once, maybe twice if you’re careful and one of the challenges is short. But when each challenge stretches the game out longer and longer, it starts to feel frustrating and makes me want the game to just end. This game isn’t as guilty as others (*cough* Death Stranding *cough*), and ultimately it didn’t overshadow the incredible achievements in the rest of the game. One of those achievements is respecting the alien and making it as formidable as it is in the early movies. It is truly tense and terrifying when the alien is nearby. In one area, I knew the alien was crawling around in the vents above me, searching, but I didn’t know hostile humans were also nearby. I sneaked over to a terminal and began stealthily reading an entry, when, well, I captured a video of the encounter:

Unscripted moments like this are my favorite in all of gaming. I totally thought I was alone… #AlienIsolation pic.twitter.com/cISV2AdTNX

— Joey Crundwell (@Losperman) October 19, 2019

The way this scene played out was quintessential Alien. Just when you forget about the alien, just when you let yourself get distracted by a strange woman hacking a terminal, hisssssss. Ya dead.

The Outer Worlds

As a fan of Fallout 3 and 4, I was of course excited that a Fallout-like game was coming from the developers of Fallout: New Vegas and Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (which I loved). And it really, really feels like a Fallout game, down to the retro corporate propaganda posters and artwork. That’s not a bad thing, but it is inescapable. Weirdly, it felt like a kind of mashup of their experience with both BioWare and Bethesda licenses, because while the gameplay and style is certainly Fallout-esque, the party system and planet-hopping are straight from their work on KotOR II. So, in short, I was here for it.

While the game isn’t as engrossing and immersive as a Fallout game, I enjoyed the more compact, punchy story, and I loved having my own ship and a crew. Parvati was my favorite, so I almost always had her in my party. I did miss a romance system, even if Parvati was off the table. I would have totally made a play for Celia Robbins, if I could convince her that she’s too good for that dumb merchant she was swooning over.

The Outer Worlds_20191105033050 — Okay, ouch, never mind then.

The game is stylized, so it doesn’t quite have the same realistic sci-fi wow factor that the Mass Effect games did, but I think it gives it a unique personality and will allow it to age more gracefully than the Fallout games tend to. I think they did a nice job of making the planets look unique and interesting, though I wish there were more to explore. The Outer Worlds doesn’t really break any new ground, but it’s a good, fun, safe game.

Phew. I just finished Death Stranding a couple of days ago, and I ended up playing it for over 75 hours, so my brain is still a little addled. From Hideo Kojima’s split with Konami, to the bizarre reveal trailer, to the celebrity cameos, this game was hyped to hell, so I did my best to avoid most discussion of it. It was everywhere, though, so I can’t say that I evaded the hype with 100% success, but its launch was (as is becoming normal for AAA titles) beset by a loud seeming-minority of people that absolutely hated it, which clashed with what seemed to be a fairly positive critical response overall. So I went in not knowing what to expect, really, and I was wary about making any judgments about the game until I was a good 20 or so hours in.

There is a lot I could say about this game’s themes, characters, and messaging, but I’m going to keep that commentary brief (partly because this would be a massive post if I didn’t, and also because I plan on including some of it in my dissertation). So I’ll just say that Kojima is a very ambitious, visionary game director, whose love for Hollywood is apparent in how he tells a story. He tries to rely on style and visuals to tell the story, like, say, Stanley Kubrick did, but he seems to always pull back and use endless exposition as a crutch. The visuals in this game are phenomenal (the Decima engine is amazing), and I appreciate the chances that Kojima is taking with the narrative, but there’s not much denying that it’s sloppy and redundant in places (like the incredibly long and drawn out end sequences that I alluded to in my discussion of Alien: Isolation).

Okay, having said all that, I still really loved this game. As I said, the visuals are stunning, and more specifically, the geology and various landscapes are amazing. Furthermore, the walking mechanic works really well because the landscape is mapped so well that your feet land where they should land, instead of on invisible planes. This made navigating the map an immersive and visceral experience for me. This was most obvious during my journey to scale the highest mountain in the game. I wrote previously about my experience climbing Death Peak in Chrono Trigger, and even in that 2D game I felt a weird sense of accomplishment at braving the elements and overcoming environmental diversity to reach the top of a snowy mountain. The same can be said here, though there was much more working against me.

I should also point out that I didn’t have to climb to the top of the mountain. I was in the area, though, and it seemed like a fun challenge. Could I even do it? It was quite steep in places, and snow in the game quickly erodes most equipment that you’re carrying, so I probably couldn’t rely too much on that. Welp, I decided to give it a shot, so I strapped a couple of ladders, climbing anchors, repair spray, and an extra pair of boots on my back, and I set off on what looked like a safe enough route.

It snowed almost the entire way up, so one by one, my pieces of equipment started decaying and becoming unusable. Sometimes I could climb pretty steep inclines, but this was before I had gloves or level 3 boots, so I spent a lot of time zig-zagging through deep but somewhat level snow. The storm increased in severity, and plodding through the snow began to take a serious toll on my stamina. It dwindled, dwindled, I would rest a little or drink some water, but I had to keep moving to keep from freezing and to protect what remained of my equipment. I slipped a few times, lost some cargo at one point, but I kept picking myself and my gear up and trudging along. Each time I thought the peak above me was the very top, I’d crest it and see that there was another to be won just a short distance away. I made it, finally, as evidenced by the screenshot below, but my stamina was shot, most of my gear was destroyed, and I wasn’t sure I had enough water or equipment to make the descent.

Lucky for me [/sarcasm], a whiteout hit as soon as I began my descent, which meant I could barely see what was around or below me. I would plant an anchor and drop a rope, only to slide down into nothingness, hoping to find footing. I did, and I made it to the bottom having only faceplanted a couple of times, so when I finally reached a Bridges post I was on the verge of collapsing but filled with a sense of achievement and adventure. It was moments like these that made me love this game. The characters and stories and all that were varying degrees of weird and fun, but this, for me, was a game about adventure and overcoming all kinds of trouble. I really dug it.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

I’ve only just started Fallen Order, but I wanted to leave my thoughts about the opening sequence before they fade or are subsumed by the rest of the game. I think it’s especially noteworthy given how similar but different it is from Death Stranding. Both games are very cinematic, but where Death Stranding ends up not fully trusting its audience to pick up on visual cues, the opening of Fallen Order is rife with them, and they subtly tell a whole story that connects previous events in the Star Wars universe with the game. There is no overt narration or pre-game text that explains the characters or settings, but we get small snips of dialogue or background animations that do that for us, making for a very natural feeling mix of visual and audio storytelling. The game uses a guided camera at specific points to draw attention to the background, and if you hold a second to take it in, you’ll see Republic cruisers, a droid control ship, and lots of Separatist artillery. If you’re familiar with the prequel trilogy of movies or the animated Clone Wars features, the game doesn’t need to say anything: you can deduce that the Clone Wars are over and both the Separatist droids and Republic clones are, like their ships, out of commission. This is confirmed by the appearance of Stormtroopers, placing this somewhere after the execution of Order 66 and (probably) before the events of A New Hope, when all Jedi have reportedly been wiped out. And this is all conveyed without the game saying “hey, just so you know, this game takes place…” Which is really cool, I think.

Other than that, as I said, I’m not very far in the game, but I can feel myself getting hooked. Wielding a lightsaber feels, looks, and sounds great, I love that I get to travel around on a ship with a crew (callback to The Outer Worlds), and the environments of the only two planets I’ve been on so far are very detailed and Star Wars-y. The Second Sister, who I’m assuming is the main villain, seems super cool. My character feels a little float-y, which I never like as much as precise movement, but I will hopefully get over that if the rest of the combat is solid. I’m also marathon-ing all of the Star Wars movies and TV shows and reading the newly released Star Wars: Resistance Reborn, so I feel like I’m in the midst of another Star Wars Renaissance. I’ll probably post more thoughts on the rest of the game later, but for now I have a prospectus to write. Dang it. May the Force be with me.