It's that jolly time of year, when everyone waits around the Gaymer Tree for all the video game awards to appear out of thin air! And fear not, everyone's favorite awards blog from an unprofessional video game write-about-er has returned yet again! It wouldn't be the end of the year without me writing too much about the games I already wrote too much about, often while just repeating what I wrote about them months ago! And it especially wouldn't be the end of the decade without that!

There's a lot of people out there saying that 2019 was a weak year for games. And I'm not going to say it was the strongest year, but I still think it had plenty of great games. Was it as strong as the last few years, which were all fantastic? Not really. It was more of a year with really solid, capital G Good games, than anything revolutionary. I played a healthy amount of games I really like, and I'm here to tell you all about why they were good!

And maybe mention a couple games that I still enjoyed, but wish had been better.

But first, the traditional recounting of last year's predictions, and the (in)accuracy of each!

11th Annual Moosies 2019 Game of the Year: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

I always open the predictions with a bold guess at what the next year's game of the year will be. A silly exercise, but one I enjoy nonetheless. You'll have to keep reading to see if I was correct!

Sony, attaining new levels of hubris, announces the PlayStation 5, featuring the Perfect Cell Processor. With that, it has full backwards compatibility with PS3 games, but not PS4 games. Costs far too much money.

Aside from the name PlayStation 5, I completely got that one wrong. Though in my defense, the idea of the PS5 being announced and released in the year 2019 seemed more reasonable back in 2018. Of course there's still plenty of time for them to announce the actual price and end up with another five hundred and ninety nine US dollars debacle (I don't think they will, though).

Despite the fact that everyone else seems to think The Last of Us Part II is coming in 2019, it doesn't.

Honestly, if I only get one prediction correct a year, I consider it a success. And I was correct. I still don't know where everyone got the idea it was going to release in 2019. Maybe it was people with insider knowledge hearing rumblings of them aiming for 2019 and then missing. And we'll see if they can hit the current date without delaying (again).

Nintendo puts out the New Nintendo Switch XL, which is a bigger, more expensive Switch. Does not drop the price on the existing model. Everyone else buys one (including those who already had a Switch), but I still hold out because they're expensive.

Well, by the letter of the law, I was wrong, because instead they announced the Switch Lite, which is smaller, and cheaper. BUT! Lots of people have bought Switch Lites, even those who already owned Switches. Nintendo hasn't dropped the price on the Switch original, AND I still haven't gotten one, so I'll say I was half right.

EA, those bastards, announce the Mass Effect Trilogy for Switch, but still don't remaster those games for PS4.

No Mass Effect Trilogy remasters, no Mass Effect remasters of any sort. STILL.

Microsoft, in their continuing attempts to get people to care about the Xbox brand, starts giving Xbox Ones out literally for free.

Wrong, but they're basically giving out new Game Pass subscriptions for free, and thus "free" games, so the spirit of this, that Microsoft was going to go to new lengths to get people into the Xbox ecosystem, that was right!

Tired of waiting for another game, Captain Falcon decides to leave this galaxy, and find peace amongst the stars. Meanwhile, Nintendo officially announces that rumored Star Fox racing game, and Falcon has a brief twinge of pain as he looks back in the direction of the Solar System, before he continues onward on his journey.

I had forgotten about the rumors of there being a Star Fox racing game. Imagine if they actually made a futuristic racing game, but instead of F-Zero it was Star Fox? I know I would be a bit disgruntled.

Sony not being at E3 turns out to be a ruse when Phil Spencer tears his Xbox shirt off on stage to reveal a PlayStation shirt underneath. Then Jack Tretton and some cronies storm the stage to announce his return.

Maybe someday I'll keep my predictions to things that might feasibly happen. Maybe.

Metroid Prime 4 shown off, has some bizarre control scheme that is needlessly gimmicky, makes the game worse, and is not accessible to people with disabilities. There's no option to change it.

The game got rebooted, or whatever terminology one might use to describe them starting over in development. So we'll have to wait longer still to see if this becomes true.

EA cancels that Respawn developed Star Wars game that they haven't even shown a logo for yet.

Wrong!

2 Blood 2 Borne announced as a PS5 launch game.

Wrong!

Half-Life 3 announced as a card pack for Artifact.

Given that a new Half-Life game was announced at all, I'm going to say this was...a third correct.

Not a stellar year for me getting predictions correct, but that's why I'm not in the predicting business! What business am I in? Well, none, technically, so I'll just get straight to the top ten, and other awards!

10. Todd Howard Presents the Most Disappointing Game of the Year that I still enjoyed: The Outer Worlds.

By this point I think we all know the drill: Disappointment does not mean the game is bad, or that I didn't like it. What it means is that, amongst all the games I played this year, this is the one that felt like it most missed the mark between what I expected it to be, and what it actually was. There were long stretches of this game where it really felt like what I wanted from this style of game, and it was exciting. There are some really good characters, and some good stories told along the way.

If nothing else, the game gave us Parvati, who is one of my favorite characters of the year, and in the last few years. Who would have thought that having a heartwarming story about a queer character without any sort of tragic or bad twist ending would be so endearing? A lot of people, it was a rhetorical question, and you know it was a good one because I felt the need to explain that. But seriously, between Ashley Burch's performance being as good as ever, the writing (written by someone with actual life experience with the sort of things Parvati experienced (again, who'd have guessed that getting people who actually know about these things results in more authenticity?)), and the time the game gives her story to breathe, it was endearing, and the thing from this game that will stick with me the longest.

It's just a bummer that good smaller stories like that had to be saddled to boring/needless combat, too many uninteresting side quests, and a main story that peters out, and loses steam by the end. Many of the pieces of a truly great game are here, but there's just not quite enough of them, and some of them are just put together wrong.

The game itself is largely at fault for its shortcomings (of course), but really I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up so high. I let years of other people's rose tinted glasses change my opinion of New Vegas (a game I liked but never loved as much as so many do), and let a new game in that style from many of those people elevate itself in my mind to a level it realistically couldn't reach. That, and those early reviews were so positive, they're partly to blame too.

So, in a shorter version, The Outer Worlds gets that not so glamorous position of being my Number 10 game of the year. The game that almost didn't make it onto the list, and maybe in the years to come I'll regret putting it on there at all. Especially when the main reason is that I liked Parvati a lot. But sometimes a single, very bright spot is all it takes to make something worth remembering.

The Outer Worlds also wins:

• Best friend of the year: Parvati.

• Loudest level up noise.

Todd Howard also Presents: The biggest mess of a game that I still enjoyed: Anthem.

A banner year for Todd Howard presenting awards for an awards blog he doesn't even know exists. Gosh, Anthem. This game really is a mess in just about every way a game could be. Technically, design wise, story wise. Which isn't to say every one of those is bad. Or completely bad. Because the game, when everything is working right, is fun! And even if the story is a lot of the same "ancient civilization blah blah blah" stuff that Mass Effect leaned too heavily on, there's still some decent characters in there too (along with one really annoying one (or three, depending on how you look at it)), and there's enough interesting ideas that I don't think the universe is worth abandoning.

But let me tell you, it's frustrating when I try playing with a couple friends and the game is just consistently broken for one of them, for no discernible reason at all. It's frustrating when a solid core of a combat system isn't used to its fullest potential because the majority of the missions might as well have the same fights copy and pasted. It's frustrating when one of the few boss types feels straight up broken, and has attacks that seem almost impossible to avoid. It's frustrating when there's no way to respawn after dying in a lot of missions without waiting to be revived. Frustrating to have to slowly walk around town, etc.

Some of these things were fixed after or around the time I stopped playing. How many though? I don't know! I still have hopes that one day this game might get its Taken King moment, and be revitalized, and live up at least closer to its potential. But those hopes are really low, if I'm being honest. It was still fun, just frustrating at almost every turn.

9. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

Star Wars discourse is one of the most exhausting ones out there (at least in the realm of entertainment), so I don't want to get wrapped up in all of that. That said, Star Wars is one of those things that has its place in my heart. Yes, it's nostalgia. That doesn't make the part of me that lights up when I hear the low hum of a lightsaber any less true. Even without the Star Wars-y-ness, I think Fallen Order would still be a good game, but it really is the Star Wars-y-ness that sparked that inner joy, that nostalgia that so many crave so much.

(Addendum: I wrote the rest of this before having seen Rise of Skywalker, and let me tell you, it takes more than just nostalgia to get me to like a Star Wars thing, and that is ALL I will say about that mess that would make Todd Howard faint.)

Another part of why I enjoyed this game as much as I did is that it's been so long since the last time I played a Star Wars game. At one point in time there were so many that Star Wars might as well have been its own genre. But before Fallen Order, the last Star Wars game I played more than a pre-release beta for was Force Unleashed. In 2008. There have been Star Wars games since then, but an underwhelming sequel to an already underwhelming game (Force Unleashed II), and the new Battlefront games just weren't what I was looking for.

Fallen Order isn't perfect, but it gets the important things right. It gets that excitement Star Wars should bring. It understands that lightsabers are cool, that sword fights are fun. But most importantly, it knows that the things that really makes Star Wars so memorable are the characters. Does Fallen Order have the best cast of characters in any Star Wars thing ever? No, but it at least has story as a main focus, and has a solid cast that does a better job of telling a compelling story than any other Star Wars game I've played. Before you jump down my throat, I've only played an hour or two of KoTOR (YEARS ago), and none of KoTOR II, so I know, I know.

It doesn't do anything revolutionary, but just having a likable lead in Cal helps. Having great side characters like Cere and Greeze made it a story I cared about. When I think back on Force Unleashed, all I remember are silly physics, enemies holding hands and then onto things to resist being pulled away, and bad quick time events. When the inevitable sequel to this game is announced, what's going to excite me is knowing I'll get to go on more fun adventures with characters I like.

That, and it's a fun game too! The swordplay is a good mix between doing cool stuff, but without ever going into the complete over the top territory of something like a Metal Gear Rising. Which, I love games like that, but it is nice to play something a little more grounded, but without quite going into the needing to manage my stamina and be careful about every single move territory of a Dark Souls.

Which is maybe ironic, given the checkpoint system in Fallen Order so closely imitates Dark Souls. Not really to the game's benefit, but not in a way that detracted either. No, that was the technical issues. While not the worst I played this year, there was kind of a pervasiveness to the game's oddities that make them hard to ignore. Too many instances of enemies T-posing their way into position, too many stutters as the game streams in the next part of the level, or physics going wonky on bits of clothing in cutscenes. Or how the low health warning around the edge of the screen and heartbeat played through the credits because I finished the game with low health (thankfully they weren't in the cutscenes, at least).

I list all these things out not because each individual one ruined the game, or that even in totality they ruined it. I list them out because if this game was totally polished in the way that a AAA Star Wars game should be, it might have been a spot or two higher on the list. But at the end of the day, I'm just happy to finally have a new Star Wars game I really like. Happy to have another fun crew, happy to have had more puzzles to solve, and more Stormtroopers to fell in combat.

Oh, and BD-1 is such a delight. I love little robot friends and BD-1 is one of the best.

Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order also wins:

• Best use of Star Wars in a while.

• Best Robot Buddy: BD-1.

• Best enemy banter.

• Most dangerous mountain goats.

• Best wall-running.

• Best surprise cameo.

• The, "In retrospect I appreciate the story even more because it's coherent and good unlike a certain movie" award.

• Best story involving uncovering things relating to an ancient civilization in space.

Best Castletroid Game: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

What a long journey it was for this game to get out to people. And, unlike many a game that went through similarly laborious periods of crowd funding, this one turned out to be good! It doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it does have a few fun spins on memorable things from the games it so lovingly pays homage to, and is just a fun time. Plus, it's the only game I played this year where eating pizza gave me a permanent stat boost.

8. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

Quite a bit lower than my predicted Game of the Year, huh? And yet, I wouldn't say the game is disappointing, aside from maybe the story. In taking a more direct approach than the Dark Souls games, or Bloodborne, and leaning more heavily on characters, Sekiro just didn't stick with me in a lore or story way. Part of that was leaning so heavily on a real world setting, even if there are fantastical things in there. Exploring through semi-realistic depictions of olde timey Japan just aren't as interesting as delving into purely fantastical places like Lordran, or Yharnam. Sure, both Dark Souls and Bloodborne heavily take aesthetic inspiration from a lot of different things, both real and fictional, but those games got me invested in the world in a way that Sekiro never did.

But Sekiro's saving grace, the thing it does better than maybe any other game I've played, is that feeling of dueling. Clashing swords with a foe, rapidly blocking every attack, sparks flying, clanging blades drowning out all other noise, each of us just trying to wear down the other, until their posture is broken, and I get the killing blow in. There's more to it, of course, differences in how enemies behave, the Shinobi Prosthetic's various tools, but really, it's that one thing that stands out the most. The combination of the animations, the effects after a well timed block, the sound, it all comes together just about perfectly, and it's phenomenal.

In a lot of ways, Sekiro is the most fun I've had with the core combat of a From Software game. The feeling of dueling is unparalleled, and there's some great moments in the fights against biggest enemies too. One of my favorite moments of the year, in fact. But, that incredible core comes at the cost of less variety than their previous games, and like I said before, the story just didn't grab me. Or at least whatever grabbing it had back when I played it dissipated over the months, which is a far cry from Dark Souls and Bloodborne, which still excite my imagination to this day.

So, Sekiro, despite being a great game, didn't get any higher on this list than number 8. But still, getting on the list alone is an honor. Unless Todd Howard is involved.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice also wins:

• Best dueling.

• Best metal on metal clanging sounds.

• Best use of monkeys.

• Most monkeys.

• Best feeling: exhaling after defeating a tough boss.

• Best boss fight moment: Guardian Ape.

Best Expansion: Monster Hunter World: Iceborne.

Monster Hunter World was one of those games that I played so much of, it was almost too much. Almost. And in the lead up to Iceborne, I wasn't exactly feeling excited for it, but then I downloaded it anyway. At the moment it was because some friends had, and I thought, "oh, we can do more co-op!" Then of course everyone else got distracted, and I ended up the only one in my circle of friends playing the expansion, so I did the whole thing alone.

But it was fun! And in a year where the only other expansion I played was a limp one for Destiny 2, I can't say this was a difficult award to decide. Even so, between the breadth and quality of this expansion, with a whole slew of new monsters, and new environments in which to hunt them, new tools like a greatly improved grappling hook, and another new animation of somewhat anthropomorphic cats cooking food, what's not to like?

7. Mortal Kombat 11.

I don't play that many fighting games these days. Partly that's because there aren't really a ton of them. At least outside the realm of fan games and ones based on anime, most of which I've not heard of and am not interested in (Dragon Ball FighterZ being the obvious exception). Mortal Kombat, however, is one I can count on. Every four years, like clockwork, a new one comes out, and raises the bar for what I want out of fighting games, at least in terms of the kombat itself and the story mode. Of course, that clockwork schedule, which includes a whole other franchise in between that I didn't get around to playing the second of, does come at a cost. So there, I've now made you remember the crunch that comes along with games, and not just Mortal Kombat.

This game, though, I still really love it! To the point where I didn't buy just one DLC character, I bought the whole season pass thing. It was on sale, sure, but this isn't something I normally do. Usually with fighting games I wait until the game itself is super cheap, play through whatever story mode there is, and if I'm lucky, get in a few matches locally with a friend. But this game? I'm still playing it, both offline and online, and still having a ton of fun.

The issues I have with how the Towers work are still there, and I think it's baffling that there doesn't seem to be a way to mute people when playing online. Sonya's still voiced by a terrible person who gave a terrible performance, and I'm still bugged by the crunch and bad conditions people had to go through to get this game made. All of that said, the core of Mortal Kombat 11 is one of my favorite fighting games of all time, and I think it's just great. That greatness aside, though, seventh really was the highest it could get onto the list this year, given the strength of everything else, and those few shortcomings its has.

Mortal Kombat 11 also wins:

• Best dab in a cutscene.

• Favorite new semi-obscure MK character that became my main and will likely not be in the next one: Frost.

• Best Fatalities: Johnny Cage.

• Best stage: The tournament one with MK machines in the background.

• Best Brutality: Liu Kang summoning an arcade machine.

Best Co-op Game: Remnant: From the Ashes.

This game really came out of nowhere, was the hottest thing for a few weeks, then people forgot about it, huh? Or at least stopped talking about it, I don't know if there's a dedicated group of people still running through it. I hope so, it's a really good game! One that's good enough on your own, but a whole lot of fun with friends. It's a game that's genuinely surprising, at least early on, and despite clearly being of a lower budget than the biggest most polished AAA games, it punches above its weight.

It's super fun, and for anyone looking for a good (online) co-op game, this one gets my seal of approval.

Remnant: From the Ashes also wins:

• Videogame: VIDEOGAME Award for most videogame-y name.

• Best skulls.

• Best dog petting.

• Stargate Game of the Year.

6. Outer Wilds.

What is there to say about this game that hasn't already been said? This game is an adventure, in the purest sense of the word. It's a game built for people who want to poke their noses into every last nook and cranny, looking for every little thing to find, every snippet of story, every little puzzle to solve. It's a game without any upgrades, aside from the knowledge in your head, and some logs kept on the ship. Because even the best space adventurers can't remember everything (I know I can't).

In the early hours of Outer Wilds, it truly feels like anything is possible, and that feeling is magical. So many games are easy to know exactly what they are before you even start them. I could be reductive, tear Outer Wilds apart, investigate every little bit, and analyze it like any other game. But that wouldn't capture the wonder I felt as I first took off, soaring into the sky, and out of the sky, to space. As I looked out, the possibilities felt endless. As I explored, further and further out, I was astonished at how much creativity there was in each place. How they all felt so different, so unique, and everything had a purpose. It was incredible, and those early parts of the game were some of the best hours I've spent with any game, maybe ever.

But sadly, this is where the "analyze it like any other game" part comes. The magic didn't last. At some point I lost interest in the story being told about the ancient civilization. At some point the new discoveries came slower and slower, and I was left with frustration as I tried to figure out how to get to those last handful of things I wanted to find. At some point the imprecise nature of the movement in the game stopped being goofy and fun, and started to feel like a hindrance to my completing certain things. At some point the little glitches, getting stuck in the environment and having to restart the cycle, and even something breaking right before the end of the game, forcing me to restart the cycle and go through all that rigmarole again... It detracts from the game, and I can't just ignore it. And finally, at some point my patience for whatever was going on with the actual ending of the game wore out.

I get why I've seen a lot of people say this is one of their favorite games ever. I can feel the magic there, and at its best I'm right there with them. But the magic didn't last, and all my frustrations, and disappointments with the story drag it down for me. Even if it didn't crack the top five, it's still one of my favorite games of the year, and maybe a decade from now I'll look back on it more fondly than I do now. Or maybe I just need to accept that I didn't love it as much as so many others did, and that's okay. It's still a great game.

Outer Wilds also wins:

• Outer game of the year.

• Best marshmallow roasting.

• Best spaceship flying.

• Most gravity.

• Best time loop.

• Outer game of the year.

• Best marshmallow roasting.

• Best spaceship flying.

• Most gravity.

• Best time loop...

Game I probably should have played: Life is Strange 2.

Every year there's always one game that I didn't play. Well, more than one, but the one that sticks out. For a while, I was really struggling to think of a worthwhile game I missed. Thought about giving this award to Untitled Goose Game, or even Luigi's Mansion 3. For a while I considered Disco Elysium, but something about that game just feels like I would...hate it, even as it sounds mechanically fascinating.

So, instead, Life is Strange 2 is the one that I really feel like I should have played. For all their faults, I've found plenty to enjoy in every Dontnod game I've played, and just about everything I've heard about Life is Strange 2 sounds good. Or at the very least, people whose opinions I (sometimes) trust liked it! I know that's not exactly the most enthusiastic I've ever sounded about a "game I should have played," but I do feel like this is one I should get too, sooner rather than later. Hearing that it attempts to tackle serious topics like racism against Latinx people in modern day America, and doing a good job of it, well, at least in the bigger-ish games space, you don't see much of that.

I've also heard it doesn't have a bad ending, which would be a first for a Dontnod game, so I want to see that. Well, that's not fair, I don't remember the ending of...Remember Me, that might have been okay. It probably wasn't.

Runners up: Disco Elysium, Luigi's Mansion 3.

5. Death Stranding.

A year ago, I was still making jokes about how we wouldn't see this game until sometime in the mid-2020s, and yet here we are. It's out, I played over a hundred hours of it, and I managed to find enough to say about it to fill two separate blogs. Like MGSV before it, this is a game that does really, truly speak to me on a game play and design level. I love traversing big spaces in games, and Death Stranding has some of my favorite traversal ever. It's not anything fancy, or flashy. Just the opposite, in most cases.

But that's what makes the game special. Its dedication to making the journey itself the challenge, making that the core of the game. Trudging along the barren landscapes of a time warped America, lugging along hundreds of kilograms of cargo, doing the dirty work that needs to be done. And in this case, I mean the literal version of dirty work, not the figurative type. So many games default to having the primary means of interacting be big, spectacular, and violent, that it's refreshing to have a game that isn't primarily about that stuff. Even if some of that stuff is still there, and I wish there had been less of it.

I wish more games on the big budget scale were like Death Stranding. More games that are willing to make you do what would be boring busy work in so many other games, but find ways to make them compelling, and yes, fun! Games willing to have empty spaces exist as worthwhile places unto themselves, and not just the pointless filler between the real "content." Games that are about bringing people together, not pushing them apart. Even as corny as it sounds.

And speaking of corny, even the "Strand Game" thing works really well. It manages to both have the best parts of building things in a world alongside other players, and helping everyone out, but also maintain the feeling of lonely melancholy that's so integral to the game's overall mood, and tone. It feels like the world is really being changed, and it can make traversing, and making big deliveries so much faster. But crucially that feeling of being alone, of having to trek across desolate lands is still there, and it is such a big part of what makes Death Stranding the memorable game that it is.

There is a haunting beauty to this game, to this world now devoid of what once was. So much of everything humanity built up, washed away by the rains of time, leaving only remnants left. Deserts, grasslands, mountains, all returned to their natural state, a primordial one. One that almost looks alien, and even if nothing else from this game sticks with me years from now, that will.

All the best parts of Death Stranding are great. But, again, like MGSV before it, the story drags it down. And unlike MGSV, this doesn't even have a couple of returning characters to help keep me invested in what was going on. Even if a subplot ended up being compelling enough by the end, it was only one part of a larger, messier whole. So, despite its best being unlike much else I've ever played, fifth place ended up as high as it could get. The top five of just about any given year are always the hardest to figure out, and this year especially, even if some of them have some flaws (like Death Stranding), they're still all great games that have stuck with me, and will continue to stick for quite some time.

Death Stranding also wins:

• Strand Game of the Year.

• Best hiking.

• Best character names.

• Best corpse delivery.

• Best gadget: The Odradek.

• Best open spaces.

• Most cameos.

• Best baby that ended not being as creepy as I initially thought, but was still kind of creepy.

• Best duo that would've made for a more interesting story rather than the actual A-plot of this game: Cliff (Mads Mikkelsen) and Die-Hardman (Tommie Earl Jenkins).

• Best product placement: Monster® Energy Drink.

• Worst product placement: Ride with Norman Reedus.

Best woolly mammoth: Super Climb Up.

I don't play many indie games. At least not the truly, truly independentest of indie games. The sorts of games that only show up at places like itch . io and you only find out about because they're from someone a friend of yours knows. Anyway, this was one of those, it was a charming little platformer, and there's one thing from it that stuck with me: How adorable this woolly mammoth is!

I wanna hug that mammoth!

4. Resident Evil 2.

What an immaculate, honed to a razor edge of video game Resident Evil 2 is. My experience with the original is barely existent, but that didn't for a second impede my time with the remake. It really is the distillation of everything good about Resident Evil, and so focused in doing that to the best of its ability that it is, in some ways, nearly perfect to whatever the absolute ideal of what it's trying to do.

This game is scary. Games never scare me. The closest that they ever really get is when my heart starts racing at the end of a tough boss in something like Dark Souls or Bloodborne. Even then, that's more stress because I know I can't pause and take a breather (one reason why Sekiro never felt as pulse pounding, despite often being more demanding). The tight corridors of this game, the jerky zombies that actually feel threatening, monstrous creatures lurking just out of sight, and...him...

Mr. X.

I don't have patience for horror games that are solely dedicated to the "big invincible enemy stalking you." That, or what I've experienced of that sub-genre in the past (mostly Outlast, a bad game), were bad, or detracted from what really made the game work (Soma). But here, Mr. X is a walking heart attack. He is the creature that bumps in the night, literally as he moves around, the floor creaking with every step, the incredible audio design never letting me forget that he's out there...searching for me. Relentless. Unstoppable.

He can be slowed down, but is it really worth it when ammo can be sparse? The number of times I finished off a zombie with my last, final bullet are a lot higher than any other game I can think of. And sure, in retrospect, it's fairly obvious the game was fudging the numbers a bit. I'm pretty sure the devs have said as much, but in the moment? What better way to raise the tension?

The mark of a truly, exceptionally great game is that in writing about it, even just thinking about it has got me wanting to load it up and play it again. That, and excited for Resident Evil 3! I know the original isn't as well regarded as the original RE2, but just thinking about an expanded upon version of Mr. X has my heart going a little faster.

Really, the only knock I can make against the game is that whoever you play as, there's a not so great sequence in the middle of the game where you play as someone else. Not game ruining, but in a package that otherwise is near perfect, it stands out. Even the later areas of the game, that so many people seem to dislike, I didn't mind. Not as good as the opening police station, but still good. Then again, when there were this many games in a year that I felt so strongly about, any little thing can end up being the cause of something moving up or down a spot on this (arbitrary) list.

Resident Evil 2 also wins:

• Best nemesis: Mr. X.

• Best sound design.

• Best use of actually making zombies threatening.

• Most actually scary game.

• Best bad credits song.

• Gnarliest looking burger.

Multiplayer moment of the year: Becoming Champion in Apex Legends.

What a roller coaster that was my feelings on this game. Disappointment that it wasn't Titanfall 3, displeased it didn't have the things that I liked so much from Titanfall 2, not enjoying the game at first blush, to rising up like the true gaymer I am, and feeling that rush as I came so, SO close to victory... And then, with my friends at my sides (or more accurate me at their side), Becoming Champion. And we kept playing, having fun, making up our own in jokes (many swamp related), sometimes we won, but often we didn't. One time a friend and I were led to victory by the God of Thunder, Thor himself! Or, you know, someone with Thor in their username.

Sadly, it didn't last. We all kinda fell off from the game. If I had to pin it to one thing, it would probably be that we all felt kinda cruddy with how nickel and dime the game was. Or, more accurately, tenner and twenty-er it was. Because it's expensive. It wasn't really impacting the actual game itself (though seeing more and more characters locked behind paid cash money didn't help), but we all just fell off it. And this was after several of my friends just bought the battle pass. I shouldn't speak for them, but I'm going to speak for them and say they did not get their money's worth out of the battle pass.

But none of that erases the fun that we did have with the game. The battle royale genre is one that I thought was going to pass me by, and nothing of it would grab me, but then Respawn went and proved me wrong. And I'm glad, because we had lots of fun! It'd just be nice if my whole memory of that game was fun, and not of us all slowly losing interest because of the capitalism side of it. Otherwise this might have sneaked onto my top ten, but it couldn't even beat out a Todd Howard Presented game.

Apex Legends also wins:

• Biggest Boi: Gibraltar.

3. Control.

If there is a theme to this year's games, it's that they have excellent, really high highs, but also fall short in some ways. In several cases, it's the technical side that they do, and Control is by far the worst offender. Or maybe the most consistent offender, given Anthem's...well, being Anthem. It doesn't really have the random oddities that Fallen Order does, instead it's very easy to tank the framerate. Big fight? Lots of physics causing the environment to go to pieces? It'll go down. Even opening the map can be trouble. The game's been patched, and hopefully patches since I've played have made it better still, but it was rough.

Which is why it's all the more impressive that the game shines as bright as it does. The aura of mystery that permeates this game, that oozes out of every corner of The Oldest House is phenomenal. The blend of paranatural weirdness and the boring day to day life of bureaucracy make for such a fantastic aesthetic. But it's not just aesthetic, it's in every facet of the game. I read every bit of text in this game that I found, because I was so fascinated by the world Remedy had crafted. Because I wanted to keep digging, keep diving deeper, and just see more of what they dreamed up.

It's a great playing game too. Framerate issues aside, it was still endlessly fun to hurl objects around. Useful against enemies, but sometimes it was just fun to wrench a piece of concrete out of the floor and chuck it through a row of desks. At least when the framerate buckles, I can see why, even if it's still got me bummed that PS4 Amateur was the only way I had to experience this game.

Not that it mattered. I kept diving in, delving deeper into The Oldest House until I got that Platinum Trophy, and had done just about everything I could do. And I want more, in the best possible way. That DLC better be good.

Control also wins:

• Best mood.

• Best colored lighting.

• Live action video of the year.

• Best use of puppets.

• Moment of the year: Take Control.

• Best physics.

• Best destruction.

• Worst framerate as the result of physics and destruction.

• Janitor of the year: Ahti.

• Pyramid of the year: The Board.

Best new Pokémon of the year as decided by someone who hasn't played a Pokémon game since the 90s:

I love Pokémon. Not so much the games, as the Pokémon themselves. They're cute, and they're friends that I want to spend time with and embark on adventures with! Just not the adventures that the games actually involve. So, in honor of my love of Pokémon, I've decided to name the best new Pokémon from the new games. Rather than rank them, I'm just going to list my favorites with my reasoning why. They are all friends. ALL OF THEM.

Wooloo.

Look at this perfect sheep. LOOK HOW ROUND THEY ARE. I would hug a Wooloo. I would spend an entire day with a Wooloo. I would make a Wooloo my faithful friend and love them with all my heart.

Snom.

I love this flawless bug child. This Pokémon is worthy of both memes and legend. Of course deserving of gentle hugs. I would kill for Snom. I would die for Snom.

Falinks.

The power of socialism and unionizing at work. Divided they are weak, but united? Falinks is strong, and real, and my friend! I would hug every individual Fa in the links, and I would group hug them all at once.

Yamper.

Imagine a dog so full of love and joy that it became too powerful, and that power was channeled into electricity. This is Yamper. Science has said that dogs don't like being hugged, but if Yamper was cool with it, I would hug them. Even if I got an electric shock.

Polteageist.

From mummy juice to some other memes, cursed beverages are all the rage. This one is literally cursed by a spirit. The hug might be very wet, but I would hug it.

Greedent.

This squirrel is actually Gimli from Lord of the Rings, but reincarnated as a squirrel. Because all fictional versions of the UK exist in the same universe. Would hug, for sure.

When deciding upon the best new Pokémon, I realized I couldn't keep it at one award. Not when there's also new forms of old Pokémon. So...

Best new form of old Pokémon of the year as decided by someone who hasn't played a Pokémon game since the 90s.

Galarian Meowth.

This cat...has a beard. A BEARD. A very huggable beard.

Galarian Weezing.

The commentary...is not subtle. I would not hug it, or stand near for fear of inhaling fumes.

Galarian Rapidash.

Nintendo has accidentally made another trans pride Pokémon. This time a horse instead of an Eevee. Majestic, and huggable.

AND THAT'S NOT ALL.

Best Gigantamax version of Pokémon as decided by someone who hasn't played a Pokémon game since the 90s.

Landmass Snorlax.

Snorlax...the best Pokémon...is now a landmass...and perfection. I would hug and live on this gentle giant for the rest of my life.

Fat Pikachu.

Pikachu's ultimate and best form!!!! Finally returned to us!!!!! Extremely round, perfect. My hugs might not reach the total circumference, but my love does.

Long Meowth.

Long.

Fluffy Eevee.

FLUFFY. FLUFFY HUGS.

Thank you for indulging me.

2. Judgment.

I had a lot of difficulty deciding between my number one and two games this year. Some years there's a very clear choice, and really the only one, but some I have to really, really think a lot about how to rank them. This is one of those years, and honestly, I almost want to bend the rules and give each of these two games the number one spot. But I won't.

That said, it might not be my number one game of the year, but it's got favorite story of the year, and my favorite new cast of characters. One of the biggest strengths of the Yakuza series is its recurring cast of characters, so dumping all of them in favor of entirely new ones, while setting it in the same city was a bit risky, but it paid off. Yagami is great, Kaito is exactly the sort of gruff but still friendly guy that makes for a great sidekick, and just about everyone else in the main cast is good too. Saori especially, stands out in my memory as another favorite. Give her more screen time in the sequel!

And while Yagami and friends travel down all the twists and turns I could want out of a Yakuza style story (complete with one of my seriously non-ironic favorite things from these games, crooked real estate deals), Judgment went a step farther than the Yakuza games in one crucial way: Making it feel like a real, living space. Not by having any sort of massive upgrade to the detail of Kamurocho, or expanding it in some way, but instead by filling it with more characters.

I'm sure I wrote this months ago in my other blog, but the small touch of giving names to the people who work at all the stores makes it feel more real. Even if Yagami only knows them in passing, only plays a small role in their lives, as they do in his, it makes them feel just real enough. And in turn it makes Yagami feel more like a member of the community, rather than a video game protagonist who shows up one day to start doing video game protagonist things.

That stuff's all strong enough that I'd be happy with it even if that's all the game was. But it's also just about as good of a brawler as the Yakuza games were. Not as much variety as Yakuza 0, but it's still a lot better than 6. Actually, this game's so much better than 6 that it's hard to believe it was the same people that made it. I think, I mean. I dunno, they pump out games fast enough they either have to be crunching real hard or have multiple teams working on multiple games at once, right? Or both.

There is something that I deeply appreciate about the games that this studio makes. Part of it is the storytelling, which at its best is superb (though at its worst is pretty bad, and I'm still mad about the ending of Yakuza 6). But a lot of it is just how much it feels like they've created a true, living space. It's easy to knock the games for reusing Kamurocho so much, I know I have in the past. The thing is, though, I've played so many of these games, and spent so many countless hours in that one little district of Tokyo, that it's started to feel like home. Feel like home in the same way that the Normandy did after a trilogy of Mass Effect games.

It's a place that I know and love. A place that I've gone through good times and bad in. A place that I know like the back of my hand, and could take a stroll down right now, and just enjoy being there. And now, it's a place that holds a strong, positive association with not one, but two different series. I guess assuming that they make a Judgment 2, which I genuinely hope they do. I'm still a little iffy on the direction Yakuza Like a Dragon is taking, but I couldn't be more confident in Yagami as a solid core to build a new series around. Which also isn't me saying they should pump out seven more Judgment games without giving each one the care and time it deserves, but I would love to solve more mysteries with him, and all his friends.

Judgment also wins:

• Best new protagonist: Takayuki Yagami.

• Most interesting sequence where control switches to a woman and she almost instantaneously gets catcalled.

• Best hair: Yagami.

• Best BIGH traffic cones.

• Best credits sequence (cat).

• Most cats.

• Most friends.

• Best arcade games.

Eleventh Annual Moosies Old Game of the Year: Final Fantasy XV: Royal Edition.

In some ways, I feel like I've said all that I can about this game, and in others I feel like I could just go on, and on, and on. This game was a journey, one that I took on a total whim, and one that left a deeper impact than I ever would have guessed. And, if I'm being frank, a deeper impact than any game actually released in 2019. Deeper than most games I've played this generation. I know it's only been a few months since I played it, and part of me does feel like I'm jumping the gun by saying something like this, but it really did find a place in my heart.

And it feels so silly to say, because the parts of the game that I love are just so goofy and clichéd. On paper there really isn't anything that special about this game. But paper doesn't tell the story of all the hours I spent on the road with those characters. Noctis, Prompto, Ignis, and Gladio, each one in their own way, has clung onto me. None of them are perfect, either as people, or as written characters as a part of a story. A story that I still have a lot of issues with, stuck inside a game that also has more flaws that I could list out here.

At the end of the day, I love this game, I love these characters, and this game stands amongst a cherished few to really get so deep into my heart. I cried at the end, and that's not something that happens to me often. So, flaws and all, I love this game. And unlike the journey I took with it, I'll keep this short, because I've already written the long version out.

Runners up:

Soma.

Soma was, for months, the obvious pick for this award. Months until I played FFXV, at least. It suffers a bit from leaning too heavily on the running and hiding from monsters, but at least the devs officially added in a can't die mode, so I could just enjoy the story. Or, perhaps enjoy isn't quite the word given it's very dark, and depressing, but it's a story worth experiencing. Just know going in that that it's pretty dark, and has a lot of fleshy mechanical body horror stuff going on.

Slime Rancher.

If my ranking of Pokémon from a game I haven't played told you anything, it's that I love cute things. And the slimes in Slime Rancher...ARE ADORABLE.

My only disappointment with the game is that at some point there was a patch that completely broke it for me. Any time I try to load my save the game just hard locks, and my only recourse is to close it from the PS4 main menu. I was fine looking past the framerate troubles, but this? No longer being able to get to my ranch...it made me sad. There's been a couple patches lately, so maybe that fixed it, but...I'm doubtful.

Okay! That's a lot of text that I've written, and a lot of reading you've done, but we're almost at the end! So, without further ado, the number one, Eleventh Annual Moosies Video Game Awards Game of the Year, is...

1. Devil May Cry 5.

Some years, what speaks to me most is story, or forming a really, truly deep connection with the characters. Had FFXV actually been released this year, that would've taken the crown. But some years, a game comes along that might not have the best story, but has something else that just elevates it in my mind. Two years ago Breath of the Wild's vast expanses and fantastic "emergent game design" was it, and a handful ago it was the incredible fun of playing Smash Bros. for Wii U with friends.

This year?

It's kicking ass in the best stylish action game ever made. This game is incredible, I don't know how to put into words how this game makes it feel. I was going back and forth between this game and Judgment, so I put the game back in, and played some of it, wondering if it would be as good as I remembered. Would I just fumble around and wonder why I liked it so much months ago?

Nope.

It all came back instantly. All the moves, everything, like I just had played the game yesterday (which technically as of this writing I did play it yesterday, funnily enough). It all flowed out, rippling through my hands to the controller, to Dante ripping and tearing through demons like nobody's business. Doing well too, I swear I was getting SSS ranks more consistently than I did back months ago! That however, I'm going to say is the part where my memory might not be consistent with the reality.

But it's not just that they made a game with one character that's great to play. They made a game starring THREE, all play differently, and all are a lot of fun, but in their own ways. Sure, there's overlap, they all can do an uppercut the same way, but that's just consistency. In the same way that everyone in Mortal Kombat does an uppercut the same way. I really feel like this is some sort of achievement. Seriously, what other games have had this high a quality in the combat for multiple playable characters? Not counting fighting games, that's the entirety of what they do. Then again, also I feel like Dante has SO MUCH going on that it eclipses even a lot of fighting games.

And they made Nero fun to play! I mean, he wasn't terrible in DMC4, but that was the biggest issue dragging that game down. So much of it was spent playing as a character with very little variety in what he could do. Then Dante had way more going on, but he was relegated to backtracking through all the previous levels with weird gimmicks like poison gas.

So the solution? Give Nero a slew of prosthetic arms, each with fun abilities, and at least what feels like more in the realm of sword attacks. That, and the whole energy and mood of this game feels different than DMC4. That game, at least in my memory, is kind of mellow, and too serious for its own good. At least for what it is, it also had some goofs. But here, Nero's theme, Devil Trigger, is one of my favorite songs from any game. Ever. It's just so catchy, and so good at hyping me up, that hearing it during fights just gets me ready and raring to go. And it's not overdone either, that sort of thing can get tiring, even when the song is great.

You know what else they went and did? They took that song, and made a different version of it for the final boss fight, like this was a full on anime, and it's great. I love it.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention V, the Adam Driver lookalike who fights by commanding his critter friends (or captured demon associates, to be more correct to the lore). They went and made a character who semi directly controls other characters, and made it work, in real time, in an action game that can move at such a blistering pace. Also he has a button dedicated to reading poetry mid-fight.

ON TOP OF ALL THAT, there's co-op! Underutilized, but it works.

Just writing about this game, just thinking about it excites me. It's got my blood pumping, got me going, ready to load the game up and just play through it all again for the like, third or fourth time. Or just keep climbing that Bloody Tower, even if I never got better than a C rank, and then only with one character.

Game of the year can mean a lot of things. But ultimately, if a game excites me this much, so many months after playing it, it's hard not to give it the big award. It's phenomenal, and darn near perfect at what it does. If you haven't played it, and you like cutting up enemies in stylish ways, please, do yourself a favor and play this game! It is the pinnacle of the genre, and I need to stop myself from writing more because otherwise I will just ramble forever about it.

Love it. Really do.

Devil May Cry 5 also wins:

• Most stylish action.

• Best original song: "Devil Trigger."

• Best alternate version of an original song: "Silver Bullet."

• Best bad song: "Subhuman."

• Best prosthetic arm: Devil Breaker.

• Best thing I heard all year: Demonic metal voice screaming, "SMOKIN' SEXY STYLE!!!"

• Best sword fighting.

• Best weapon name: Dr. Faust. It's a cowboy hat.

• Best realization of something that should have been in DMC3 but they were too cowardly to do it then: Weaponized motorcycle.

• Most devilishly good game.

• Best dance-taunting.

Thank you for reading! I know a lot of people were down on 2019 as a year for games, and I get it. I felt that way too, at times, but going through and thinking about it, there was a solid group of games that I really liked, and even loved! Sure, I did admit that FFXV was the game that actually left the biggest impact on me, but that's happened before, and doesn't detract from what anything released this year achieved.

Anyway, got off on a tangent there, instead of starting into the yearly tradition of predictions for next year! Will they be right? Almost certainly not! And that's what makes them so much fun to do.

Predictions!

2020 Moosies Video Game Awards Game of the Year: Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise.

Am I allowing my hopes to get too high for a sequel to a game that was deeply flawed in just about every conceivable way, the compelling aspects of which may very well have been lightning only striking once? Yes! But when has that ever stopped me?

Half-Life Alyx delayed at least once more before release.

I'm holding off this year on Half-Life 3 predictions because of an actual Half-Life game coming.

Xbox Series X has a mini-fridge built into it.

That's the real reason for the vertical design.

Nintendo announces the Switch Liter, which is just a slightly smaller version of the Switch Lite. Still does not drop the price on the regular sized Switch.

You know there's people who would buy it, and act like it's exactly what they needed.

The same Mario Kart 8 bundle returns in time for Black Friday at the same price.

My desire to have a Switch but my stubbornness at wanting to save money have been at odds for some time now.

Bayonetta 3 finally shown for real. She has a new hairdo.

Still can't believe Platinum announced and released another entirely separate game before showing us literally anything for Bayonetta 3 after that teaser. Also that teaser still has me worried she'll be going back to her Bayonetta 1 era hair, which I don't like. Her Bayonetta 2 hair is much better, but they should probably give her a new look each game.

Still no F-Zero.

I'm so tired.

Halo Infinite is, in fact, finite.

It'll be quite funny if this Halo game tries to be a forever game like Destiny.

Whatever attempt is made to get people interested in Anthem again...does not work.

I hope I'm wrong. I'd like that game to be good. I'd like BioWare to be good.

Bluepoint Games' remaster is not, as people suspect, Demon's Souls, but instead...Tokyo Jungle.

In actuality I'm not sure how I'd feel about them remastering Demon's Souls. It's a very interesting game, at least aesthetically, but it's also the only From Software game in that "style" that I don't like playing, for a variety of reasons ranging from level design, to needless inventory restrictions.

Wait, what? The prediction was about Tokyo Jungle? Well, you know.

Thank you for reading. I enjoy doing this every year, and so much so this year that I also intend to, in the not so distant future, do something in honor of the decade of video games that came and went. Or is still going depending on how one wants to define decades, but shush. Don't be a fun spoiler. Keep your eyes peeled if you want to read exciting things like me ranking every year (in games) from the decade, or finding new reasons to keep thinking about Tokyo Jungle.

So, I really intended to just write about the game part of Death Stranding. That was what compelled me, and that was what I felt I had interesting things to say about. Now, do I have interesting things to say about Death Stranding? Does Death Stranding itself have interesting things to say? I'm still not sure about either! But I kept trying to wrangle my thoughts around what happened in that game, so I decided that writing them out might help me. And if I did that, I might as well put them up here.

Just be warned, I don't have a coherent overall thought on the game. This is just me trying to work my way through it. This is a blog, after all, not a professional write up analyzing the story. I'm sure those exist, written by people who are much better at that sort of writing than I am.

Also, of course, I'm gonna SPOIL as much of the game as I can remember, so, you know.

I think Death Stranding's story gives a fairly good first impression. It establishes how frightening the world can be, how dangerous the BTs are, and the stakes around screwing up with corpses can be (entire cities get destroyed in Voidouts, after an anti-matter/matter like reaction between the living and the dead coming into contact). Then it goes straight into, "Your mother, the President" needs you for this mission mode, and I was cackling. Sam's mother, Bridget, wants him to build bridges, figurative and literal, across America. I laughed so hard I think I missed a line of a dialog after I heard Die-Hardman say "President Strand." Was this stuff good? Eh. What it well written? Probably not. But was I enjoying it?

Absolutely!

Then you deliver President Mom's corpse, literally carrying her on your back, to an incinerator, and have to activate the semi-undead BB to detect ghost monsters, which didn't really work out for me because they grabbed me anyway, and I just had to run away. After that, President Mom's daughter (Sam's sister, Amelie (AKA Samantha America Strand (who looks identical to President Mom, just younger))) is appointed President (rather than, you know, elected), even though she's trapped on the other side of the country (yet can still transmit her hologram despite ostensibly being stuck in a city controlled by terrorists).

Which is the first thing the game confused me about, and having finished it, I'm still a little caught up on it. At this point in the game, they made it sound like Edge Knot City (where President Sister resided) was still a functioning, populated city, just one that didn't want part of the United Cities of America (I maintain that not using "United Strands of America" is a missed opportunity). But, and this is much later in the game, when Sam gets to Edge Knot City, it's completely destroyed, and no one is there aside from President Sister. I don't know if I just missed something, misinterpreted something, or if the game was just lying and/or plot holing.

Anyway, with the help of Guillermo Del Toro and Monster® Energy Drink, Sam Porter Bridges and BB set off to reconnect America, one Distribution Center and Prepper House at a time. This is when the game introduces MULEs, who got so addicted to the high of Likes after delivering packages, will assault anyone carrying cargo, supposedly to deliver it themselves. Sadly there's no way to reason with them, as I certainly could have used their help to expedite some of these deliveries. Or, you know, maybe after I cleared out a camp some people from Bridges could've come and collected the MULEs or something.

Not that I like prisons, they're BAD, and given the world of Death Stranding is (sort of) beyond capitalism (there's no money, only Likes (which have no monetary value) and resources with which to fabricate), I'd also like if it was beyond that sort of criminal "justice" system. ALL THAT SAID, if I can knock out an entire camp of MULEs in a few minutes, I think it'd be nice if Bridges could get off their asses and send some people out to talk some sense into the MULEs so I wouldn't have to keep going around their camps (or sprinting through) when I make deliveries.

But I digress.

So, Sam and BB set off through the tutorial area, and get to Port Knot City, which is a nice moment, going down a long hill while one of the few not Low Roar songs in the game plays (I don't think I like Low Roar, a band I'd never heard of but there must be like two albums worth of their music in the game). I forget what band did this song, but it's the one piece of licensed music in the game I remember liking, so it made the moment nice. Sam makes the delivery, takes a nap and a shower, and then Troy "Two Masks" Baker (Higgs) shows up and hams it up before a boss fight.

So, Higgs is a character. But not really a good one, as the game waits until basically the end before actually making any of his, or the other terrorists (who are never actually seen with him, they just replace the MULEs in the later areas of the game) motivations clear. He just shows up, spouts some lines that didn't make any sense until I rewatched this cutscene after finishing the game (via the Quick Look), and disappears.

Then Fragile (a lady with a rad jacket that I would wear in real life, and a French accent that I don't understand how she has it given she lives in post apocalyptic America (I know the reason is the actress is French, don't @ me)), who owns a boat, takes Sam across a big lake, and the Real Death Stranding starts. Which is to say that the actual story goes on the back burner for a while as Sam does the compelling part of the game, and just traverses desolate landscapes, delivering cargo reconnecting people, etc.

Amongst the many deliveries, Sam gets flashbacks of a baby inside some sort of life support thing. These are the Mads Mikkelsen portions of the game, and eventually result in multiple sequences where Sam gets thrown through time (or universes?) to World War II and (I think?) the Vietnam War to fight against Mads and his squad of skeleton soldiers. But like the rest of the story, none of the answers come until much later, so I'll get to that then.

The main narrative follows Sam as he gets a delivery to South Knot City, which includes a character (who is clearly Higgs) giving Sam a portable nuclear bomb, that the game explicitly says is that, yet Sam doesn't seem to realize it unless he rests at a specific Distribution Center and Fragile finds it. If you don't (I didn't realize I had to rest there to get the cutscene (the game said to meet Fragile at that center, but I didn't see her, so I dunno, I just kept going)), the bomb explodes as Sam enters South Knot City, and the game reloads a save.

Otherwise, Sam has to bring the bomb to a tar pit and throw it in, because it's Death Stranding supernatural tar that connects to other universes. I think.

Then there's a flashback where Higgs is creepy and mean to Fragile, and the story moves on to the other creatively named woman character, Mama. Her baby is a ghost, but a harmless one, aside from making it perpetually rain around the area. After more deliveries and such, it's revealed that Mama has an actual name that I can't remember, and a twin sister named Lockne. Also the baby was supposed to be Lockne's, but Lockne had health issues that prevented her from having a baby, but the two drifted apart after the whole ghost baby thing.

So Mama has to cut the tie with her Ghost Baby, and go with Sam to Lockne, so Lockne and Mountain Knot city will the UCA. Mama dies immediately upon arrival, and her soul fuses with Lockne? Or they were originally the same soul, but split at birth? I'm not sure, but they become one, Lockne joins the UCA, and fills the same role Mama did as the person who explains new gadgets because she's portrayed by the same actress (because again, twins).

More deliveries happen, eventually leading Sam to deliver Mama's corpse (which hasn't decayed or shown any signs of Voidout exploding) to Heartman. Heartman stops his heart every 21 minutes so he can search for his dead family, because there's a lot of guys longing for lost wives/children in this game (at some point it was revealed Sam's wife, who was either pregnant or had already given birth, I forget, died).

There's also a subplot going on where Guillermo and Heartman don't trust Die-Hardman (who is later revealed his real name is literally John McClane), and that subplot is something that feels a little Metal Gear-ish, and I wish the game had more of that sort of intrigue in general. Anyway, Heartman sends Sam off to do more deliveries, and this part of the game centers around people trying to figure out what the Death Stranding actually is, and I found that part interesting!

No, really! For a while there, I was into them trying to solve that, and all the stuff about them trying to say every major extinction event in the history of the world was a Death Stranding was interesting, and I was hoping it'd lead to something...well, better than what happened, but I'll get there.

Because it's after this that Sam eventually gets to Edge Knot City, and the story goes into overdrive.

He gets to the city, has a boss fight with Higgs and a giant BT, then goes to the Beach (oh gosh I forgot to mention the Beach), and has another boss fight, but this time he didn't bring any weapons, so it was actually a fight that involved more thinking than just shooting rockets at the BT. Okay, I'm being harsh, I didn't hate that fight, but I do think the space was too small for how big the BT was. But the fight with Higgs where you need to sneak around and such was fun, felt more like an MGS boss fight. Especially when it ended with a redo of the MGS4 fistfight atop the submarine. Just with less nostalgia and more slow motion shots of Troy Baker's face contorting as he gets punched.

That was fun.

Fragile shows up to deal with Higgs while Sam and President Sister Amelie reunite, and Sam mentions Mario and Princess Peach by name. I'm still shaken by this happening in a Sony published game. I also laughed at the Princess Beach line, which I dunno how most people felt (I assume this is the infamous line people kept mentioning), but I think it was supposed to be funny.

Even though Higgs said it was a final boss and game over, the game isn't over, because now the Die-Hardman might be up to something sneaky plotline and the ghost Mads plotline intersect, and form up with the main plotline of rescuing Amelie who, also, I forgot to mention, is an Extinction Entity.

And, this game is a lot. Sam has to travel back across the country, things are getting messed up with more and bigger BTs everywhere, it's revealed that Higgs was secretly making me deliver pizza to him the entire time, and everyone thinks Mads was the mastermind behind everything until Sam figures out that Mads was just another sad dad (sad dad Mads) all along.

IN FACT, it was Amelie (her name a French play on words) who was pulling all the strings, because she was actually President Mom's soul, and also behind the BB experiments (which were morally wrong but also not just used to find BTs, but also literally what the Chiral Network connecting everyone is made out of), and also trying to cause the extinction of humanity because she thinks it'd be better to just end it swiftly than drag it all out.

Now that I've thought about it, I think the game might have been better off focusing on just one of these things. I'll say the conspiracy to cover up the truth of the BB experiments, their relation to sad dad Mads, and Die-Hardman, because that's the one that works best, and also has the best (sort of) pay off. There's a solid story in there about America being the cause of its own undoing (the BB experiments coincided with the Death Stranding in a way that couldn't have been coincidental), and then trying to cover it up while just continuing to do literally the same thing it had been. That, as a contrast to the "rebuild America" story sold to Sam could have really worked! It's got intrigue, double crossing, mystery, conspiracies! It feels like a Metal Gear story, and I like those. Mostly.

But instead we get a lot of Sam convincing Amelie not to destroy humanity, including a sequence where the player has to unequip a gun and hug her, which would've worked better if I realized I could do that on my first try, and didn't have to reload, haha. Then there's a very long sequence where Amelie keeps explaining stuff to Sam, but only between sequences of wandering around a Beach with no direction, and not even full freedom because it just resets Sam if he gets too far away.

Eventually that ends, Sam returns to the land of the living, everything is rosy, and Die-Hardman is appointed (again with no mention of an election) President. But the game still isn't over yet, because there's more to be revealed about Die-Hardman's involvement in the sad dad Mads storyline, and we learn that the actor playing Die-Hardman is actually pretty decent, he just hadn't been given the opportunity to do much until now.

Then Guillermo says that the BB (who Sam named Lou at some point) is basically dead, and needs to be decommissioned (incinerated). But he also does a "wink wink" to Sam about disconnecting when he does it, so Sam goes off on one last delivery, and another song plays.

When he gets to the very same incinerator he brought President Mom to, he tries plugging into Lou's pod one last time, and gets the final flashback to sad dad Mads, where... Okay, there's a fair amount of the science of what's going on in this game that I don't understand, but I don't understand what happened here.

So the scene plays out, and again this is some of the best acting and whatnot in the game. I would have rather played a whole game about sad dad Mads and John "Die-Hardman" McClane than Extinction Entity President Mom/Sister. I mean, I would also rather a game with women who aren't braindead and kept on life support so undead babies can see ghosts, and where sad dad Mads has to kill his life support wife, but I digress.

Sad dad Mads is trying to escape the facility with his BB, and Die-Hardman tried helping him, but eventually sad dad Mads is caught, and cornered. That's all fine and dandy, but then... Sam shows up? And first I thought this was just like, a visual metaphor for Sam watching this, because unlike the flashbacks through the rest of the game, this wasn't from the literal point of view of the baby. A bit on the nose to actually show him watching it, but whatever, it was still better than Sam literally sitting on the beach as Amelie explained everything to him.

But then Mads talks to Sam??? But Sam isn't really there, none of the other characters see him, or acknowledge his presence in any way. Anyway, it's revealed that Mads (whose name in game is Cliff, and he makes a comment about cliffs and bridges, which got a laugh out of me) is actually Sam's dad, and the BB from the flashbacks was not actually Lou, but Sam. Sam who died, and was brought back to life by President Mom/Sister.

Then it's back to the present, where Sam takes Lou out of the pod, Lou is alive, and the two leave to start a new life, and there's some rain that doesn't seem to be Timefall.

And Death Stranding ends.

Whoof.

I know I said this was going to be just me stream of consciousness-ing, but if you actually read all that, I commend you. Having now laid it all out like that, at least as best as I can remember... I think it's kind of a mess. Or really a lot of a mess. It reminds me of MGSV, just with the opposite problem. MGSV's biggest problem (outside of its terrible treatment of women characters) was underdevelopment. The foundation of a good Metal Gear story is in there, but there's barely anything to it. Whether that was the result of purely creative choices, or cuts having to be made (at least one full cut mission that would've resolved and otherwise dangling plot thread is known to exist) is unknown.

Death Stranding, however, feels like it has the same problem until the end, at which point it crams it all in, and keeps cramming until there's too much. And I get it, I get the impulse to keep cramming in story. I also don't have an editor, but in my case it's because I can't afford one, so we end up with blogs like this, or my fiction writing (which I think is good, but I'm not gonna lie, no one's finished reading my books, and I know the length isn't helping).

The problem is Hideo Kojima isn't me, he's one of the best known game directors in the world. If he really wanted to, he could've had more people around him to try to reign in these ideas, and cut it down to just what actually works. (Unless of course we're all wrong, and THIS is the edited down version of Kojima's vision).

A story about rebuilding a flawed nation that brought about its own destruction, and instead vowing to build something new, something better, something that won't make the same mistakes could have been really good! A story about coming together to rebuild is a good one, especially given how divided the world is. The pieces of something good are in this game's story, and it's disappointing that they didn't come together in a way that was...better.

I wrote way more about this game's story than I wanted to, and I did it without really saying much of importance. Appropriate, I guess.

If you read all that, or even more than a paragraph or two, thank you. Truly. This may end up the last blog I write before GOTY season starts, and I do my usual Moosies stuff. Depending on when I get around to the succinctly named Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order.

I step out, and the desert stretches before me. Sand and rocks, undulating, going and going, eventually turning into grassy hills, rivers, more deserts, and far off, way in the distance, snowy mountains looming on the horizon. But I don't focus on that, I just pay attention to what's ahead of me. Take it slow down this hill, walk around these rocks, force myself through this river, one laborious footstep after another.

I keep going. Nothing else to do, just need to keep moving forward. Moving toward my goal, just me, the BB on my front, the packages piled high on my back (digging into my shoulders), and the world around me.

So I keep going.

I've played a lot of Death Stranding. I mean, a lot. Over 100 hours of it. I know I could have beaten the game is less than half that, but there is something about it that compels me to keep going, keep making deliveries, forging new paths, seeing new sights, discovering new things. To keep walking until I have nowhere else to go. Part of that is the design of the game itself, it's incredibly easy to think, "just one more delivery," and then go, "but I might as well take all this stuff too, it's right on the way," and spend another hour with the game.

But it's not just that. This game compels me in a way only a handful of other games really have over the years. I've long found something fascinating about empty spaces in games. About games that are willing to put me in giant open spaces with basically nothing to do in them. Except move through them. Spaces that exist unto themselves, rather than as just filler between the game's "real content," or set dressing for said content.

For years I've thought about writing why it is that these compel me so, but I never really got around to it. I had the perfect opportunity when I played the remake of Shadow of the Colossus (an all time favorite of mine), but instead that just got relegated to a quick paragraph between two newer games I played at the time. The last time a game evoked similar feelings in me was Breath of the Wild, which had so much other stuff going on that it wasn't just that sort of thing.

Death Stranding is the next best opportunity to write about this, and I'm not letting it go to waste this time. It's not as dedicated to that concept as Shadow of the Colossus was, there are camps of human enemies to sneak around/fight, swathes of ghostly BTs to sneak around/fight, and lost packages to find along the way. That stuff is all fine, and I do quite appreciate the creepiness of the BTs (perhaps a leftover idea from Silent Hills?), even if they lose their bite as the game can't help but unlock access to bigger and bigger weapons. But this game at its purest, and arguably at its best, is when it's about a lone person, trudging through the world, just trying to get from point A to point B.

At least mostly alone, as the Strands that bind players tighten, and more traces of them connect us together. A lost package here or there becomes a new bridge, a well placed generator, a shelter from the time advancing rain, a Zipline just out of reach, or a vehicle placed in front of a Prepper's house in just the wrong way to make me wonder if they did it to annoy others, or just out of carelessness. The vast majority of the time it's helpful stuff, and I can't really blame people for trying to be funny with it. A strategically placed, "No peeing" sign is harmless fun, after all. And it's all a reminder that I'm not really alone, that we're all in this together, as these barren lands become fuller and fuller, and the path from point A to B becomes easier and easier.

As much as I do genuinely love the feeling of lonely camaraderie the game creates, as much as it is a genuine relief to find a bridge right where I need it when I'm rushing to deliver a pizza and bottle of extremely fragile wine, this game was compelling to me from the word go. I'd seen so many people saying that the opening hours are a slog, that it really takes a lot of time for the game to get "fun." Even Kojima himself said it, but I was having fun right from the start.

This game makes me think, really think about the spaces around me in ways that I sincerely think no other game ever has (which may be on me for not playing the right sorts of games). I don't think I've ever played a game where a steep slope was as much of a challenge, but specifically, a surmountable challenge as in Death Stranding. I don't just mean going up, I mean going down. Going up places is challenging in a great many games, countless platformers are just about that challenge. But how many games are there where you need to be just as mindful going down? Not jumping down, but just walking down a steep incline?

Run down a hill with your back loaded up with cargo, especially if it's too top heavy, and you'll probably lose balance and fall. Move too fast over a pile of rocks, and the same will happen. Push yourself too far too fast in a river, and you'll be swept away. It sounds punishing when I just say it outright like this, but it's what compelled me to keep playing this game for so long. Compelled me to keep going when the story didn't, at least not until very far in.

I told myself I wasn't going to write about the story, and originally I just had a single sentence here saying I wasn't sure how I felt about the story. Well, I had to go and ruin it for myself by thinking about it until I wrote a whole other blog about it, which you can find here. Read that one at your own risk, it's full of spoilers and also a mess. Not unlike the game's story.

Death Stranding makes me think about moving through spaces more like real life than any other game I've played. It's not exact, I could never have the stamina of Sam Porter Bridges, the fortitude to lug so much around, the strength to pull myself up so many ropes, or even just the will to keep going in such a desolate world. That need to really think about my every step drove me forward, it made the simple act of walking engaging like no other game I'd played. Even Shadow of the Colossus, still the reigning champ in Big Desolate Games, is a game with very little thought needed for any movement, other than ascending and navigating the Colossi (which is a huge part of the game, I know, but none of that factors into navigating the world itself).

I reach the top of the hill, as much as it felt more like a small mountain than a hill, and realize I just need to go back down again. I probably could have gone around the whole thing, but I had to see what was up here. The view is nice, and I take a moment to sit, drink some Monster® Energy Drink, and just collect my thoughts. But before too long the rain starts again, so I get up, and go down. Not the way I came, on the other side, still moving forward. Step by step, gripping my backpack tight, weaving around the rocks, taking it slow. The last thing I need is to slip on some mud and careen down, losing all my cargo, and making the BB cry. No one wants to make their BB cry.

It's really hard to convey in text exactly how this game makes me feel. I thought about just writing a short story, as you could see, but even there I kinda fudge some of the details. There's tons of videos out there of people messing up comically. Falling down mountains, ladders not supporting the weight of vehicles, cargo just falling off when someone walked under an overhang. Tripping and all their cargo falls off a bridge while they stay on, and it all just...floats...away... I had a few mishaps, a bad descent off a Zipline, misjudging how much damage a truck would take when I drove off a cliff, or thinking I could out drive BTs when not on a paved road. But none of them funny enough to warrant being put in a video. Especially when it just ends with the BB crying.

Most of my time spent with the game was just moving through the world. Walking from point A to B, making paths, or taking other people's paths. Setting up a generator or post box where I think people might need them, or taking breaks where other people had. Spending hours lugging materials to and fro so I could repave the roads, and make travel easier for us all. Trucking back and forth, cruising along the highway, it felt like progress. Every upgrade to my gear, or Sam's stats, every little change to the world I, or another player made, it was real, tangible progress to connecting every little corner together. It felt like I, and the other people playing the game, had really come together, as indirect as it was, and started rebuilding the country. Tomorrow is in our hands, and we did our best to get it in as good a shape as we could for the next generation.

Even if a part of me, any time the stuff got a bit easier, started to miss the trudging. Missed having to be really, really careful walking down steep slopes, because my exoskeleton helped me keep my balance, and my better boots kept their grip so much more. Missed needing to plan out a journey every step of the way, instead of just loading up as much cargo as I could carry, and taking a path of Ziplines directly between locations. Missed preparing for a long journey that just became a short drive.

I missed the idyllic, desolate beauty of the land. The paved roads made travel to and fro so, so much easier. An hour long trek up and around arduous terrain, weaving around enemy camps and BT zones, became a few minutes of driving. Just cruising past human enemies, or BTs without a care in the world (aside from one time when the "BTs are near so you lose control of your truck" animation left me with one wheel dangling off the edge of a highway, almost toppling off to an explosion-y death below). But the more progress we all made, the more the world changed. Even just footpaths, the same paths that sincerely make it easier to walk through the world, they cut across the landscapes, filling beautiful grasslands with tracts of lifeless dirt. The highways snake up and around, with insidious looking tendrils hanging below any time they go upward, over rivers, ravines, etc. They look cool, but in an evil sort of way, that again, detracts from the natural beauty of a world trying to wash away the remnants of what once was.

But that's progress, I guess.

Even so, progress still feels good. Helping others does too. But those moments in Death Stranding of forging a path into a new area, where it really is just me, the BB, and the world, are my favorites. Where the simple act of moving through a space is a challenge, and knowing I found my way through is enough of a reward on its own. This is what's going to stick with me for years to come. When I think back on Death Stranding, I'll remember the joy, the simple pleasure of walking, of making my way through the world, and wishing I had another game that made me feel that way again.

Because the world in the game has changed. I'm happy to have helped everyone I did along the way (my four hundred thousand plus Likes are a testament to that), and grateful for everyone who helped me, whether they realized it or not. But in the end, I did it for the journey, not the destination.

Thank you for reading.

The Outer Worlds, the second in the "Outer W(x)lds" franchise released this year, after Outer Wilds is... Okay, sorry, I had to get at least one last of those jokes in. But I do think it's funny that, handful of MK 11 matches here and there aside, I went directly from Outer Wilds to The Outer Worlds. Wouldn't have happened if Outer Wilds released on PS4 at the same time as PC and Xbox One, so clearly some sort of conspiracy is afoot.

Okay, all jokes aside for real this time. The Outer Worlds is the spiritual successor to Obsidian's Fallout New Vegas, and I think like New Vegas at the time, it's left me with a feeling of having enjoyed the game, but also thinking it could've been a lot better. Which, is interesting, because over the years, and it's been a long nine years since 2010, New Vegas has developed this sort of legendary aura around itself. It's the one people point to when they talk about the modern era of Fallout. Up until the announcement of The Outer Worlds, people were still hoping Obsidian would return one day to make New Vegas 2, but instead they went and made a new thing in that same mold.

The thing about New Vegas is, I certainly liked it at the time, but I don't remember revering it in the way that so many do now. (Sadly I don't seem to have written a blog about it back in the day, which is probably just as well, a lot of my blog writing then was bad for a myriad of reasons, but anyway the point is I don't have a written record of my thoughts.) But over all these years, the ways I talk about and think about New Vegas have changed, not because I went and replayed it, just because so many people talked about how great it was that I eventually started doing the same. That, and Fallout 4 happened, which was a bummer for so many reasons that it did a lot to retroactively make me appreciate New Vegas more.

Anyway, the point is that while I did enjoy Outer Worlds, and I think it's a pretty good game overall, I don't think it's the great, amazing game it's been made out to be in some of the reviews. That, and I feel like it's reminded me of how I actually felt about New Vegas at the time I played it, which is that it's a pretty good game overall, but not the great, amazing game it's been made out to be over the years.

So why is it that Outer Worlds is good but not great? It's kind of a lot of things, really. The biggest one being that the main story isn't really that compelling. I'm the sort of person who always ends up doing lots of side stuff between each main story mission, but that's because I like to explore, and run into these things. And when a game like this specifically has a "Botched Quests" section, it gives me the impression that it's possible to lose out on quests forever by progressing the story, so obviously I need to go and do all the side stuff first!

Beyond that, in Outer Worlds, there were multiple times where after spending an afternoon doing side quests, when I loaded the game up the next day, I honestly didn't remember what the main thrust of the story was. Luckily the quest log had sufficient info to remind me. And this isn't to say that the main story is bad, it's still better than Fallout 4's (by a lot), but at no point did I feel compelled to push it forward, or feel like I just had to see what was going to happen next. Instead it just felt like another quest I had to do, and one that wasn't really as interesting as some of the other stuff.

But even those other more interesting quests often don't have interesting conclusions. There was one moment where I got so, SO excited when I was walking down the street in Stellar Bay, and saw a man run out of a building, yelling about a murder! This was the moment when I knew the game was all coming together, when I was getting to the "solve this murder" side quest. This is the sort of quest I love these games for. I'd have to search around, talk to people, go investigate some stuff, and it'd be great.

Problem is the quest itself was short, didn't involve any real investigating, and none of it was even a tenth as interesting as what I imagined when I first saw that guy running out. This, I think, is perhaps the true biggest flaw in The Outer Worlds. It has a lot of potential that it squanders by not taking things as far as it should. Yes, it's a much smaller, more focused game than the modern era Fallouts, but it's not small or focused enough. It's neither grand enough in scale to make up for shortcomings through sheer quantity, nor good enough at most things to rise up to being truly great.

It's still pretty good, though, and there's stuff I really liked in there. Like Parvati, who is not only my favorite companion, but probably my favorite character out of any game I've played this year. She's just so wholesome and nice. And in a game that feels very much like it was made by "the straights," it was refreshing to have someone whose storyline/quests involved her budding queer relationship with another character. Not the main one, there's no player romancing to be had, for better or worse (I'd lean toward better). But definitely for better is that this quest didn't involve any sort of tragic ending.

Sadly, not all the companions or their quests are as good as that. There's six companions total, and of them I liked three. Parvati, Nyoka, and Ellie. Even Ellie tested my patience in a few spots, with her "you should only look out for yourself" attitude, but I think she came around in the end. Problem is that of the others, Felix felt like the most forgettable character in the (outer) world, which is a real bummer after his introduction was pretty funny. And Vicar Max, who professes to a space religion but is trying to find answers to questions about it through heretical texts, is an interesting idea for a character that I think isn't executed well, and ends with a flop. The last one is SAM, a cleaning robot that isn't even a character, just a single joke repeated every time he talks (that joke being that he says things about cleaning while spraying acid at enemies).

If I'm being fair, not every game with companions is going to have them all be hits, and not misses. Look at Mass Effect (Outer Worlds clearly did, with its companion selection screen). It's easy to just think about Mass Effect as a whole franchise (all three of the three and only three Mass Effect games), but there was really only one truly great companion in Mass Effect 1, and that was Wrex. Garrus, Tali, and Liara were all good, and interesting enough, but came into their own in 2 and 3. Never mind that Kaidan was a snooze-fest and Ashley a space-racist.

Bear in mind, Mass Effect 1 is still my favorite game ever, even if a lot of that is nostalgia. It's just that when the expressed goal is a tighter focus than previous games in the genre, to have two of the companions be basically nothing (Felix has a quest but it ain't great), and one be a disappointing execution of a good idea is, well, indicative of the game as a whole, again.

Without getting into direct spoilers, it's difficult to give examples of why some of the quests feel so disappointing. Part of it is that it feels like there's little consequence for anything the player does, part is that any time there's some sort of twist, I saw it coming a mile away, but I think it's that a lot of this game just ends limply. One planet had quests that feel like they should end in something big, a fight between two factions, but there's a way to find a peaceful resolution, which I went for because I like finding ways to solve problems without fighting, but then it just ends.

Not the end of the game, but the end of that quest line. You broker a settlement between the factions (easily), and then everything returns to normal. Even if you go talk to the faction leaders, all you get are a couple sentences from one (as opposed to the LONG dialog I had when I first met him), and the other I couldn't even find! I'm sure she was in the world somewhere, but I dunno where!

This game doesn't do follow ups well. It was very heartwarming to help Parvati along, but after her quests end, that's it for that subplot, aside from a bit during the game's Fallout style ending where a man who isn't Ron Perlman (or even trying to be) narrates what happened to everyone and all the factions. I keep saying this game was supposed to be "smaller" and "more focused" than something like Bethesda Fallout, but that's like saying something is smaller than Canada. Sure, it can be smaller, but still pretty big, and it's a lot to ask that a game have as many quests as this does, and then have stuff that keeps going after the fact. But this game really doesn't do that, and I wish it had.

A thing I keep thinking about, entirely because other people keep mentioning it around The Outer Worlds, is Disco Elysium. A game I haven't played, but sounds like, on paper, is doing the thing I wish Outer Worlds did. Which is to say doing these much deeper dives into everything, and making every choice actually matter. At least that's what the people say when they mention it in relation to Outer Worlds. Personally, everything I've seen about Disco Elysium seems absolutely insufferable, especially the writing. Which, you know, would be a problem in a game that looks to be about 90% written text. Sorry for that aside, but I wanted to head that off before someone recommended I try that game.

That's just the story/quest stuff (of Outer Worlds, this segue worked better before I added the Disco aside), without even getting into the game itself. Or, the design of the game. Here is where it makes even more mistakes, and I think these are almost all in service of the game aping something it shouldn't in the first place. In almost every way it can (aside from technical issues, of which I had none), The Outer Worlds tries to replicate the act of playing Bethesda era Fallout, and this is one hundred percent to a fault.

This didn't need to be a game with so much inventory management. This didn't need to be a game with weapon and armor durability that serves as nothing more than a resource sink. This didn't need to be a game with three different dialog specific skills that almost all of the time, can be used interchangeably and all achieve the same goal. This didn't need to be a game with mediocre combat that while better than Fallout 3/New Vegas, I still think wasn't as good as 4's, and lacks the thing that actually made combat fun and goofy in all those games.

For everything The Outer Worlds copies from Fallout, the thing it neglected, despite presenting itself as a somewhat goofy game, is the tone. Where's the jaunty music that plays over the radios of Fallout? Outer Worlds copies the stoic, downbeat original soundtracks of the Fallout games, which I never listened to in those, because so much of what I think about Fallout is the juxtaposition of that goofy, ridiculous tone with the dark post apocalypse.

And where's the interesting perks like Mysterious Stranger, or Bloody Mess? This game has perks (only gotten every other level like in New Vegas, which I didn't like then either), but none of them are the slightest bit interesting. They're all stuff like extra carrying weight, or better prices at vendors. Some of the ones in the third/final tier get almost interesting, with abilities that need to be activated by doing stuff. Like, get a kill and the next hit on an enemy will be a guaranteed critical hit. But things like that are still boring compared to guaranteeing that enemies explode into blood and limbs, or getting a bonus to dialog skills when talking to someone of the gender of your choosing (if I recall in the Bethesda ones it was very hetero/for the 'opposite sex,' but New Vegas had ones for 'same sex' bonuses).

Perhaps even more disappointing than the perks are the Flaws that tie into them. The idea is that over the course of the game, certain things you do, or happen to you will cause the game to offer a Flaw in exchange for a perk point. For example, jump off a lot of things, and your character's legs will be permanently injured, and they'll move slower. They're optional, and bad. Not bad in the sense that the trade offs aren't worth it (though that is exactly the case with a lot of them), bad in that it's another wasted opportunity. Most of them are things like, "you've become afraid of this type of enemy from fighting them so often, so take a bunch of debuffs when around them." The problem being that the combat is so not difficult that every fight ends in victory, so it makes absolutely no sense at all that you'd become afraid of them!

That, and all you get for these debuffs are points to spend on the boring perks. What would have been more interesting was if each Flaw/perk was something specific. Like with the fall damage one, maybe the trade off could have been that you move slower, but no longer take fall damage. That would be interesting, make sense, and could allow for a level of role playing that "I move slower but in exchange I got the perk that improves vendor prices" doesn't. I mean, if I really tried, I could tell myself that the reason I got the better prices was because the vendors took pity on me for limping in. But I'd be really stretching it there, and doing a lot of the work the game should have done in the first place. That's just an example, the only Flaw I took was to receive extra plasma damage, and I don't remember which perk I picked because they're all so generic.

The closest thing to personality in the combat are the science weapons, but in my experience they didn't seem all that useful. A shrink ray should just shrink an enemy, and then I can run over them or something silly like that. If the majority of the combat on the default setting is going to be a cakewalk anyway (even with me putting literally ZERO points into any attack related skills through the entire game, and I hit the level cap), then make the weird weapons comically overpowered. I would have had more fun if I could be doing wacky nonsense the entire game.

But really the thing I wish this game had was more ways to circumvent combat in the first place. High enough speech skills will cause enemies to cower during fights, but they don't run away. They just stand there cowering, waiting for you to shoot them while they're defenseless. You know, despite having those skills maxed out, I didn't see that very often, and frankly I'm glad, because it felt BAD.

What I wish this game had far fewer nameless enemies (or maybe even none at all), and instead had options to talk through any potential combat. Again, I'm sure not within the scope of what Obsidian was going for, but when a game is sold on player choice, etc, I wish I could choose to play the game without killing anyone. Or at least not having to go around killing marauders who exist for no reason other than to make NPCs scared, and provide XP and quest objectives.

There's other stuff that I just don't understand why it's in the game. Why is this a game where the default state is gun drawn, even in towns, or my own ship? Why does it automatically draw after climbing a ladder, or activating an elevator? I don't ask for much, but if I'm in a peaceful area, I at least want to walk around NOT POINTING A GUN AT PEOPLE.

Why is there a character creator when the only time you see them is in the (BAD!) inventory screen? The character doesn't speak either, which I get, but also one thing I think Fallout 4 did right was give a voice to the player. From what I've heard the male voice was kinda junky, but I played with a lady, and I thought her performance was good, and frankly one of the highlights of that game. Giving her a voice added a lot more character to a game that was in need of a lot of things, and I think it would've also helped The Outer Worlds.

The more I think about it, the more I wish this game had been aping Mass Effect instead of Fallout. I mean, it is also doing that, in some ways, but the clear inspiration is Fallout. But also really what I think this is getting at...is that I just want a new Mass Effect game.

Alas.

Thinking about what I've written here, it sounds pretty negative. But not so negative that I felt the need to go and re-write it, and give this a different tone. On the whole I still think I enjoyed the game, because most of the time I was into it. I was for a long stretch there, really into this game, and I still think it's good. I'd still recommend it to anyone who has been waiting for a good Fallout style game.

I'd just warn them that this isn't the great Fallout style game we've been waiting for.

Thank you, as always, for reading. I do enjoy writing these, and while it's taken time away from my other writing, I'm happy I've had so much to write about these last few weeks. And, well, with a certain game coming out soon, you bet your britches I'll be writing again...

Fighting games! It's a genre I've long enjoyed, but usually in the context of just playing through the single player content, whether that be a story, challenge modes, or what have you, and then if I'm lucky, playing a decent amount with friends, locally. At least that was the case when I was young. I had a small circle of friends, but we all loved playing stuff like SoulCalibur II, Smash Bros. Melee, and, well, it was really just those two. Because these things change, and at some point the friends who I played these sorts of games with drifted away, and my interest in fighting games kinda waned along with it.

SoulClibur IV didn't hold my interest for long, I enjoyed playing Brawl more than I did Melee, but I didn't have the friends to give it the longevity, and Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was a game I enjoyed, but in the end probably didn't play nearly enough of to justify buying it for full price. That's why I ended up waiting for a heavy discount on Dragonball FighterZ last year, because I knew I was buying it for the novelty of the licensed characters I love, and less because I expected a long term game play experience.

But then there's Mortal Kombat. For whatever reason, whether it's the kombat itself, or the appeal of the gruesome fatalities, this ended up being one franchise I could count on to give me a lot of fun with people I'm still friends with outside the scope of the internet. Now granted, it's not just this, we did also have a lot of fun with Smash Bros. for Wii U, at least until one person (not me) got so good at it, and refused to play any other character than the one he was best with, that the rest of us stopped having fun, and we stopped playing altogether. But Mortal Kombat, again, it just clicked with us, and continued to do so over the last few games.

Three games, specifically, as the 2011 reboot was where I jumped on. I did play, and enjoy Injustice 1, but never got around to playing the sequel. But now, as one might guess, I've been playing Mortal Kombat 11. Like the last two, it still has the best in fighting game story modes, and plenty of challenge towers (though I have some gripes with those). It even has an incredibly detailed series of tutorials, but unlike the last two, I took a step into almost unknown territory for me...

I played online.

A lot.

But first, let me describe the events that led to this, when I hadn't played a fighting game online (outside of free public betas for a couple games, or slight dabbling in Smash Bros. for Wii U) since MvC 3 in 2011. And that was a case where I only did it a couple times, and still managed to get someone upset enough to send me a mildly racist message after the match (no slurs in it, but it was still racist). I remember it distinctly because of how absurd and unwarranted it was, especially considering there's nothing at all in my username to indicate race in any manner, and neither of us were on voice chat. That person had to go find me after the match, and type up a message using a PS3 controller. That's dedication to your heated gamer moment.

Back to the present. I bought MK 11 just before my birthday, alongside Control, and a new controller (one of the transparent plastic ones). MK 11 was sort of on a whim, I'd really only intended to get Control and the controller (which I badly needed), but I like these games a lot, and I figured I could probably get some playing in with friends on my birthday. So I started playing it, jumping back and forth between the story and the tutorials. Some of those tutorials get pretty difficult (unless you're like, Sonic Fox levels of good with inputs, which I'm not), but it's definitely the most in depth fighting game tutorial I've ever seen. Very good at explaining concepts, even if I don't remember all of them.

And the story, aside from the blemish of one particular casting mistake both from a moral and quality of acting position, is as good as it ever is. It doesn't really do anything new, but it's fun, the story takes the Mortal Kombat lore in some interesting places, and it leaves truly endless possibilities for whatever is next in the series. Given the last eight years, I'm going to guess that's MK 12 in 2023, after Injustice 3 in 2021. I hope that's not the case because I'd like if that studio could get off the every other year cycle, stop crunching, and treat all its employees (freelance, or otherwise) well, but I digress. Sorry, I couldn't help but at least mention the cost that comes from getting these games, as much as I do love the games.

So, I finished the story, and started poking around in the towers, while also trying some of the character specific tutorials. All working under the thought of trying to figure out who my 'main' would be, to use the fighting game lingo. I'm not usually the sort of person to pick a fighter and only play them, but in the last two MKs, I did find myself gravitating to a character, at least in terms of who I was best with. In MK (2011) it was Smoke, in MKX it was Kenshi, and in MK 11 it's Frost. I didn't think it'd be her at first. First I was trying to learn Cassie Cage, as she's both good, and the first character in the story mode.

But then, to use the words I have used before, I was drawn to Frost because she, "looks like a cyborg lesbian." And while the game has really nothing other than her hair to indicate any sort of lesbian-ness (and also the game seems very hetero in what little relationships or pre-fight banter/flirting there is, aside from a 'pride' jacket for Jacqui that has a slight rainbow on it), she is at least a lot of fun to play. And in playing against friends, I quickly realized that Frost was the one I was doing best with, not Cassie. Cassie's still fun, and good, don't get me wrong, but Frost is my main.

And Frost? Pardon the pun, but she's cool as heck! Good mix of ranged and close up, and some moves that are just plain silly in a way I truly love. She's a cyborg, and in her default intro, her head and cyber-spine are inserted onto her body, just making the robotic nature of her physical being clear (even if that's not consistent with the Fatalities in the game, which I think is a disappointing oversight, especially when they didn't overlook that with The Terminator, but I digress, again). And some of her moves involve her physically removing her head! She'll shoot it up in the air to knock jumping opponents down, pull it off and use it as a bludgeon, or even let it flop on the ground as an icy explosive (but that's an equippable move I didn't lean into).

She just clicked with my style, and had moves I was able to do consistently, which is always a plus. So I had my main, my character that I wanted to play a lot more with, and master as best I could. My first thought was the towers, but those I think can get frustrating. Like in MKX, MK 11 leans more toward towers that cycle in and out, rather that one really big tower with a bespoke series of several hundred challenges. On one hand it's good for just popping in and out, but on the other, some of these are downright infuriating at times.

The reason being the new consumables, and the Towers of Time are built with them in mind...but not really in a good way. The way they sometimes (but not always) feel is that some weird thing is put into play that just makes the fights aggravating when playing normally. I'm over here just trying to play Mortal Kombat, but the game is healing the AI with every punch they land on me while missiles and some other garbage are flying in.

The intended counter to this is spending consumables, but even then, the ideal route seems to be just countering the game's garbage with your own, so instead of fighting a match of Mortal Kombat, I'm just flicking the right stick in different directions to summon meteors and heal myself. If these had been a bit more curated, and were more puzzling in nature than just feeling like a consumable resource sink, I think it still could've been fun. I like when MK gets wacky, I used to have a lot of fun with the Test your Luck mode in MK (2011), and that was entirely just random garbage. But it was quick, fun random garbage, and often funny just to see what bizarre combos of garbage would appear next.

This just feels like a system designed with spending money for consumables...but with the ability to spend that money removed. Which I guess is still probably better than spending money for consumables, and I certainly have plenty of them, but the whole system just feels like it could have been so much better.

Yet I still have found myself doing the Towers of Time, because some are fun, and there's decent rewards. Skins, other stuff. I got a Johnny Cage announcer voice that I like a lot, because he quips about characters and stages. And it was definitely more fun to work to unlock him, than to download the bad mobile app and connect it to this game for Kronika's announcer voice (which I also did). (Side note, I didn't do ALL of this before touching online modes, I only unlocked the Cage announcer the other day.)

So, still having fun with the core kombat, but the towers weren't quite doing it for me. And now, is the funny part. I had an inkling of trying to play online, thinking that it would probably be a better way to hone my skills, but didn't actually go in there until I saw a daily challenge for doing something like playing multiple king of the hill matches. So, I went into the menu, tried king of the hill, but didn't stick with it, because if you don't win, you just end up having to wait and watch other people play. Watching others play can be fun if it's a tournament or something, or maybe if it was all friends in voice chat, but I'm not really interested in watching randos fight each other.

So, I poke around in the menus, and see a ranked season was going on, that was about a month away from ending. I dunno how long the seasons are, if that was close to a full one, if it was like half over, or what. I do know that a new one didn't start immediately when it ended, but that was still this week (as of writing this). I look in even closer, and see the rewards for ranking up, which included a cool skin...for Frost.

I just had to get to Champion Rank, the fourth of nine ranks. So, I dip my toe in. And lose, but it wasn't the floor mopping I expected to receive. So I kept playing, and playing, slowly getting better, winning some matches, losing some (sometimes very badly), but I kept at it. Because no matter what, aside from a few particular cases (people just spamming the same move), I was having fun! Sure, it was the allure of kosmetics that got me in there in the first place, but it was the kombat itself, and that gradual feeling of honing my skills, learning the best strategies for what to do when, and the thrill of victory after a hard fought match that kept me coming back for more.

And then, after days of hard work, I did it. I got to Champion Rank...Only to see a message about losing ranking points if I didn't play once every few days! That, and the knowledge that I could rank down from that, or from losing enough got me frightened, but after looking into it, I learned that even if you do rank down, you get whatever rewards from the highest rank achieved. Which is smart, that's the right thing to do.

So I could have stopped. But I didn't. I wanted to see how high I could get. And that height...was Master Rank. Which sounds much more impressive than it really is, because that's only one rank above Champion. Though, I feel like if I kept at it even more than I did, I might have gotten to Grandmaster. Maybe not the ranks above that, but I had other games to play. MK 11 is definitely one of the most fun games I've played in a good while, but there's been other great games to play too!

Which is another thing I like so much about MK 11. It's a great game to just hop in and play an hour or so of, before switching off and playing the more deep-dive-y stuff I've also been working on (see my recent blogs on Control and Outer Wilds!). It's fun enough that I'd keep playing it just for the act of play itself, but it's also got the usual slew of near countless things to unlock.

Namely, in the Krypt, which to my recollection, is bigger and more involved than ever. Now it features a physical space to run around in, using some generic nameless character. I wish I could pick a character to run around with, whether that would be one of the fighters from the game, or just some more variety in nameless video game people, either way. It's just a bit odd to me to have generic video game man be the person you run around with in the Krypt when the game has so many memorable and more appealing characters already in it.

But the Krypt, as much as I enjoy its bigger scale, and its incorporation of some light puzzle-solving elements, isn't perfect. While I have a bounty of Koins that I'll never run out of, the other two kurrencies needed to open things, Soul Fragments and Hearts, and just low enough in how they're handed out after matches that it feels like I'm just scraping by with them. That, and some of the things in the Krypt are...grindy.

Maybe this is a spoiler for unlocking stuff in the Krypt, but I had to look this up online to figure it out, so I don't feel bad saying it. There's this row of engravings of the heads of all the (non-DLC) characters in the game, and each just gives a number out of 25 when you walk up to them. According to the internet, that means the number of Fatalities/Brutalities done against each character in the Towers. Apparently online ones don't count, which is a bummer because if they did, I'd have gotten some of them by now. As it is, I don't have a single one yet, and apparently all of them are needed to get a medallion needed on the way to the final section of the Krypt.

So I gotta keep playing the Towers if I want to see everything in the Krypt. And I do! This game's so much fun, it's kinda become my de facto 'podcast game.' Which does mean I've played almost none of the Shadowkeep Destiny 2 expansion. Okay, that's a lie, I played through all the story missions, and did a bit of the Vex Incursion with friends. But that's it, and I'm sure the stars will align such that I'll stop playing MK so much, and gravitate back to Destiny 2, but for now...

Also, I've never done this before, but I bought the DLC characters. Like, all of them. The Kombat Pack was on sale, so I bought it. And Shao Kahn, because for whatever reason (greed/capitalism), he's not included with that. At first I was just going to buy Shang Tsung, because I love the ninja morphing, and think that's a really creative way to incorporate his shapeshifting without being able to stream in every character fast enough (though I bet that will return in MK 12 on next gen). But then I thought Nightwolf was cool too, and I might as well buy The Terminator because, I mean, he's The Terminator, even if the voice is just a bad Arnold impression. And...

I just bought the Kombat Pack because that was on sale, and individual characters weren't. On the plus side, I also got a bunch of skins, so I can play as Ninja Mime Johnny Cage, and Harley Quinn Cassie. Yes, there's something a bit ironic about playing this with that skin instead of the actual fighting game with Harley in it, I know.

Anyway, the DLC characters are all neat. Terminator really feels like more neat gimmick than an actually fun character to play, but it is what it is. On the flip side, after buying all this stuff, I had a moment where I realized I just spent money for Spawn in the year 2019 (though I guess he won't be out until next year). Now, I'm not too high and mighty to lie and say I was never a fan of Spawn. I'm not too good to say I didn't like that 90s movie and play a Spawn game on Gamecube that was mediocre. But also I was thirteen. At least I played the version of SoulCalibur II with Link, and never read the actual comics.

Whatever, he's voiced by Keith David, and I bet Netherrealm have found ways to make him interesting and fun to play. I sure hope so with how overworked they are.

Okay, if I'm circling back around to labor practices, I've probably run out of meaningful things to say about the game. But I do really love playing it, and I'm going to keep at it for the time being. Even if I fall off, I'll definitely check back in with each of the DLC characters. I already bought them, after all. Just hope they find ways to make Sindel and Joker fun to play. And maybe have some better alternate skins for Joker.

Anyway, thanks for reading! I've been writing a lot in the last few weeks, and while I refuse to commit to continuing at this rate, I do always appreciate when people read my words! I might write something about Outer Worlds once I finish that (I'm enjoying it!), and if I play Death Stranding, you know I'll have thoughts.

Until then, see ya next time!

Expectations are a hell of a thing. As I sit here, the day after finishing Outer Wilds, trying to wrap my head around the game, and my thoughts, I just keep going back to one thing: How did everything I've read and heard about the game in the months between its initial release (only on PC and Xbox One) and my actually playing it impact my time with it? Did it really have that big of an impact, or would my feelings as the credits rolled have been the same either way?

It's one of those things that doesn't really matter, but once it sneaks into my brain, it's in there. Either way, I'm going to guess that you follow the opinions of professional video game players and talk-about-ers like I do, thus you know how highly acclaimed this game is, and you can thus piece together where I'm going if I started this talking about expectations. Funnily enough, that's appropriate given this game, how much it's built around discovery, and piecing things together.

Anyway, I'll stop beating around the bush and get to it: I like Outer Wilds, but I don't love it. It has some fantastic moments, and the early hours especially it feels like truly anything is possible, and only the stars are the limits. That's a magical feeling that many games don't even come close to doing at all, so part of me thinks achieving it in the first place is an accomplishment. Only trouble is keeping that feeling throughout the game, and the further in I got, that feeling waned. The slower the big discoveries came, and the more I uncovered of the game's story, the less interested I became. I still had those great "aha" moments, but fewer and farther between, and the game's ending left me cold.

It's a weird game to put my thoughts into words for. Those early hours were incredible, they really were. I had a whole star system of planets and moons to explore, ruins of an ancient alien civilization to comb through, fun physics to play around with in the spaceship (plenty of gravity related mishaps that ensued), other weird gadgets, and a cool time loop premise. Every new place I landed was another mystery to unravel. How do I get into this building? What's the purpose of this structure? Does it even have a purpose in the first place, and does that help me in any way, or just flesh out the universe? How do I get past this seemingly impossible natural barrier? Can I get this one thing done before the "end of time loop" music finishes, and I have to go back to the beginning?

And almost every time I had that moment of discovery, whether it was through my own trial and error, or finding some key piece of information from a translated document, it felt great.

At least at first.

There were points where I had only half the information I needed, and it turned out to be the wrong half, which led to me banging my head against something until I got so frustrated I gave up, and went elsewhere. At least until I eventually found that other piece of information, which revealed how simple the thing I was supposed to be doing was all along.

As much as I did get a laugh and a "D'oh!" at myself in a few key moments as I had those revelations about what I'd been doing wrong, it didn't undo the frustrations I'd already had. Partly because those revelations didn't come from me having a flash of inspiration, they came from me translating something that just spelled out what to do exactly, or bumbling my way into it. Telling myself, "This is a bad idea" before doing something anyway, doing it, having the idea not work but show me how obvious the real answer was...again, laugh worthy, but didn't leave me feeling smart. I'm not saying a game needs to do that, or that my bumbling here was the game's fault, necessarily.

But it was my experience with the game, and that can't be undone. No time loop in real life. Then again, even if there was, I'd still remember the bumbling. That's what the game is, honestly. Bumbling your way through discoveries, slowly optimizing routes, and eventually getting things down. That part was enjoyable in a "this seems adjacent to what speedrunners do" kind of way. I'm curious what the record for a speedrun of this game is. I bet it's fast.

Then there's the story itself, which is probably the thing I liked the least in the game. This feels like a weird thing to say, but if I had to put my finger on the one thing I'd say is wrong with it, there's too much of it? Or rather, this is a game where the story is told both through the physical environments, but more directly through text left behind by the Nomai (ancient aliens). At first finding their texts was exciting, it was a new insight to what happened before, and I ate it all up. I stopped and read every last bit of it that I could find, ravenous for more.

But the deeper I got, the more I unearthed about what was going on, I just lost interest. Part of it was the narrative itself, especially after I developed a theory about what the ending of the game was going to be (and given the somewhat abstract ending, I think there's still reason to believe my theory wasn't wrong), but part of it was just the writing itself. This isn't something I usually critique about games, especially as a writer myself (even though no one seems to ever read my fiction stuff), because I know writing takes a lot of time and effort. But something about some (not all) of the writing style just felt off to me. Not off in an intentional way. Just... I dunno, especially when contrasted with the writing for the Hearthians (the nameless main character's people) felt good. Lots of jokes about explosions and fire.

So maybe it was intentional, trying to make the writing feel a little stilted, like it got translated (which it was). But I dunno. Part of it was definitely the weirdness between the Hearthians always using 'they/them' pronouns and then the Nomai text using 'he or she,' just odd stuff like that.

Then there's the ending itself, which... I'm not going to spoil. I even went and watched a video about the game to try to understand what happened, but I think that just made me like it even less. I'd say that maybe it was just too abstract for me, but I also found out this year that I liked the end of Evangelion (but not The End of Evangelion, that movie is trash, don't @ me), and that's certainly abstract in its ways. I need to stop myself there before this turns into a blog about Eva because literally no one wants that from this.

But I think the larger point I'm trying to get to about the story (in Outer Wilds) is I would've liked it better if instead of unsatisfying answers, it'd left me with more mysteries. The act of uncovering what was going on was so much more intriguing and fun than what I actually uncovered. As I write this, I think about some of the other games I've played this year. I think Sekiro suffered in its story for being more explicit about what was going on than the Dark Souls games, or Bloodborne. And Control, which I just recently played and wrote about, left me wondering and pondering about so much, and so excited for what's to come in that universe, whereas Outer Wilds just left me...cold.

What I'm writing here is intentionally obtuse, because as much as I was frustrated with parts of the game, as much as I didn't like the ending, and much as I do feel kinda disappointed relative to my expectations, I still think it's a great game that's worth playing. So I don't want to spoil anything for anyone who hasn't played it yet, or even tempt them by tucking it away in a spoiler zone. I'd just recommend going in telling yourself it probably won't be "one of the greatest games of all time" for you, like I've heard people say it is for them. That way you'll either avoid disappointment like me, or if you do truly fall in love with it, you might just end up loving it that much more because of lower expectations.

Unless most other people don't put so much into expectations.

But I don't want to end this on such a downer note. So instead I'll end by writing about the mood of the game, which is something I think it generally got right, throughout. The game opens by a campfire, staring up at a starry sky (never mind the neighboring planet and odd blue explosion in space), and one of the very first things presented to interact with...is roasting a marshmallow.

In this game, you have INFINITE MARSHMALLOWS.

Sure, your space suit might only hold a handful of minutes worth of oxygen, and only so much jetpack fuel, but marshmallows? It's got enough of those to last until the end of days... Which might only be twenty-two minutes from now, but hey, that's more than enough time to enjoy some nice, burned to a crisp marshmallows. Just sitting beside the fire with an old friend, letting the time drift by as that warm music plays in the background, and you ponder the universe, your place in it...

As always, thanks for reading.

There is an atmosphere to Control. Not literally. It has a mood that soaks out of almost every pore, a mood that at once kept me with a feeling of unease, yet made it hard for me to stop playing, or thinking about Control. Control is a game about a space, and a space that feels as alien as it does pedestrian. Stark concrete that shifts and moves, plain walls that go up farther than the eye can see, desks and paperwork beside a containment cell designed to hold a rubber duck with a life of its own. Ordinary life juxtaposed with the extraordinary in The Oldest House.

I love Control. It's got a few, fairly serious issues, but on the whole, I think it does what it sets out to do extremely well. This game has captivated me from the very first trailer, and the fact that it continues to do so not only after I finished it, but got the Platinum Trophy is remarkable. Granted I only had a single Trophy left after credits rolled, and that only took a few minutes to get, but still.

There is something about this game that has captured my imagination like few have in recent memory.

I could break down Control in ways that make it sound ordinary. It's an action game with a linear story and some side quests that usually involve returning to earlier areas, or to new locations adjacent to old ones. There's a lot of enemies with guns to be shot back at with a gun. There's some abilities to be upgraded, weapon/character mods to be equipped, and plenty of secrets to find. Lots of the world building is through redacted notes, audio recordings, or if you're lucky, full motion videos made with live action footage of real people.

But that would be selling the game short. Control is about a woman, Jesse, diving into an impossible place trying to find answers about an organization that "doesn't exist." It's a game about taking Control over her new powers, her new shapeshifting Service Weapon, her new life as Director of the Federal Bureau of Control. It's about fighting back against impossible odds, about fighting to get to the truth, and digging through no matter how many levels of paranatural bureaucratic BS is in the way to get there.

It helps that on top of the incredible mood and tone that permeates every little corner of the game, it's also a really fun action game. Yes, even with the performance issues on the PS4 Amateur version, which faithful readers will know is about the only thing I have to play games on. It gets rough, but they have patched it to improve it. It never ruined the game for me, but I have a high tolerance for this stuff, and it's definitely rough if I felt the need to mention it at all. But it's fine far more often than it's rough.

Part of both what makes Control so much fun, and so taxing to the hardware (I assume given there tends to be a correlation) is how much of the world feels like a part of the action. How much of it can be damaged during fights. Tables, desks, lamps, statues, forklifts, anything that isn't nailed down, and even large chunks of walls, floors, or pillars can be ripped and blown apart both by weapons, and more often: telekinesis.

Whipping objects at enemies, or enemies into objects is one of the most fun things I've done in a game in quite a while. It sounds so simple on paper, but there's just something satisfying about hurling a corpse with paranatural force and having it fly through four desks, tearing them apart, sending splinters and paperwork flying everything. So few games these days have this level of destruction in the environments, and the objects within them that it really stuck out to me. Not only does the destruction look good, but it just feels good, and sounds good too. The audio design in general is great, but the specific noise when holding something with telekinesis just sounds so good.

Plus, Jesse doesn't have to pull the object over to herself before launching it to an enemy. Once it's in the air, just let go of the button and it flies at the targeted enemy, and bopping them from behind was sometimes even more fun. It reminded me of recalling the Leviathan Axe in God of War, and having it kill enemies on the way back to Kratos, which is always a good thing to be reminded of.

One of the most brilliant things about this power is that while it highlights whatever object in the environment you'll pick up if you hit the button, if there's nothing in view to grab, it doesn't just whiff. Instead it tears a piece of concrete out of a wall, or a floor, and that gets thrown instead. It sounds so simple, but it goes so far to making this power feel useful literally all of the time, and to making the levels feel like they aren't just static level geometry, but a part of a world that reacts to everything you do.

Of course there's still limits, aside from a couple of explicitly breakable walls leading to secret rooms, damage to walls and floors is superficial. This isn't suddenly Minecraft. The Oldest House is resilient, after all, and while it accommodates the humans inside it, they are very much visitors within what is likely a living thing.

Or at least that's my brief, not spoiler-y take on it. When dealing with mysteries in fiction, there is something I've realized over the years, that isn't really that shocking. It's fairly rare when big mysteries actually have satisfying answers, and in some cases, it's maybe better to just leave things as mysterious. It's a tough line to walk, a tricky needle to thread, but I think Control does it well. It keeps things mysterious, has just enough answers, but ends with all the right mysteries still mysterious. It's left me wanting more in all the right ways.

As I think about it, it reminds me of Bloodborne, in a way. Another game with absolutely tremendous atmosphere, and tone, but very different in most respects. Especially in how the story was told, Control is much more like regular AAA level western games, whereas Bloodborne is FromSoftware's Dark Souls formula through and through. But both go on a journey of discovery, of trying to get to the truth, and in the end only getting some of the answers, even if that remaining mystery is part of what made it so compelling, made it stick with me.

At least with Bloodborne, I literally finished Control the day before I wrote this, and a few days before I got around to putting it up. I obviously can't know how this game will or won't stick with me over time, but I do know that I'm looking forward to the DLC, mostly with excitement, but also a little trepidation. Is it going to be as good as the main game? Is it going to continue the story, or just be side quests? Is it going to answer some of the questions I have left? Should it?

Like, I want to know more about The Board, but I don't know if I should. Would I like Control more if I knew the truth about that inverted pyramid that speaks through garbled modem sounds and subtitles? If they're really just [SPOILER-ISH STUFF] an entity/entities from the Astral Plane, why are they helping humans/The Oldest House in the first place? Are they the mind/intelligence of The Oldest House/game itself? And what about The Former? What was up with that? And The Hiss, and Hedron, and Darling? Is Darling actually dead, or just gone? What about The Oceanview Motel? What was Ahti's real role in all of this? What even is Ahti?

And where the heck does Alan Wake fit into any of this?!

They've got a tight line to walk. I want more, but I don't know if what I want is what they'll give, or what I really want out of Control. And I'd say it's possibly a bit suspect how much more we'll get, if Control hasn't sold well, which is the vibe I've gotten. Maybe the DLC will be the end of it, maybe there will be a Control II, or maybe Remedy will finally give Alan Wake the sequel/conclusion to his story that he deserves.

Maybe all/none of the above/below. Only time will tell, and until we get there, all I know is that Control is a really cool game, with some of the best atmosphere and tone that I've experienced in quite some time. It's also a game with still disappointing technical issues and some baffling decisions around checkpoints (why does this game have Dark Souls style Bonfires/Control Points but not the rest of that Souls style design? Why have this instead of regular checkpoints?).

But it's also a game with hidden puppet shows and live action videos of scientists.

You should play it.

And thank you for reading!

I've played a lot of video games, and over all these years, I've played a pretty decent variety of them. And as of the year 2019, there weren't many big names in the realm of video games that I'd never touched at all. But, there was at least one, one huge presence that I'd never had any direct contact with. At least not unless you count a certain movie I saw in the theater back in 2001 (I was ten), now better known for being a flop than anything else. And even as someone who saw it, now I think of it more through that one bit in Life is Strange than anything else.

I'm of course talking about Final Fantasy. I'd never played any of them, but something about XV had caught my eye, ever since it was rebranded from "Versus XIII" to XV back in 2013. But, I heard a lot of mixed things when it released in 2016, so I didn't play it, but for whatever reason, every once in a while I'd think about playing it, and finally, a chance impulse to pick up a copy I saw in a store resulted in me finally playing a Final Fantasy. And...

Before I get into the meat of this, because I have a lot to say, I need to say three things about this game.

1. The combat was much more enjoyable than I expected, and helped me through a lot of the rougher parts of the game.

2. This game is, even in the "Royal Edition," and its various changes and additions, still kind of a ramshackle mess. Not necessarily technically, it ran fine and I didn't run into any major issues on that front, more, well, kind of in every aspect of the game's design, from its open world, to the core story, just has some amount of issues. But I'll get to that later, because-

3. For all this game's many faults, by the time the credits were rolling...I was tearing up. I had become so emotionally attached to the main characters, to wayward prince turned king Noctis, to the ever cheery Prompto, to steadfast Ignis, and even the stoic Gladio...that I felt it all welling up, and spilling out of me. That puts this game in rare company for me, to elicit such a strong reaction in that way.

So in other words, I have complicated feelings about the game as a whole.

But let me start from the start. Just know that at some point I'm going to get into spoilers, but I'll mark them.

I became, more or less, aware of this game when it was rebranded, but by all accounts, it'd been in some form of development for years prior to that, and even in the time after, from what little I've read, it sounds like FFXV had a rocky development, to put it lightly. And it shows in the game itself, because FFXV often feels like it doesn't know what it wants to be. Even in the opening minutes of the game, there's three scenes feel at odds with each other. A flash forward to the end, with the main four going against some demon looking guy, then a scene with Noctis and friends speaking briefly with the king (Noct's dad) before setting out, and finally a sequence where their car has broken down, and they have to push it along the highway while a cover of "Stand By Me" plays.

These three scenes perfectly encapsulate my feelings on the story. The first, a confusing mess that the game never explains as well as it should, the second is close to working, and the third is almost pitch perfect. A group of close friends, albeit with some differences and tensions, put into a rough situation, but still staying upbeat and joking along as they work together to push that car to a mechanic.

THAT'S the heart of this game, and the part that works. There's nothing especially original, or groundbreaking here. You could, if you were cynical enough, break down each one of them into their respective tropes and clichés, but I instead chose to tag along with them, and this story resonated with me. For me, characters are almost always the thing when it comes to stories. You could have the most amazing plot, full of twists and turns, and keep the audience guessing the whole way through, but if none of the characters are likable, or "good unlikable," or whatever, then it's not going to stick with me. But in this case, the opposite is true, and a strong cast kept me going through to the end.

Because it definitely wasn't the story about the war between the Kingdom of Lucis and the Empire of Niflheim that did it. The game doesn't even do a good job of explaining that there even was a war, I assume because someone had the bright idea to create a feature length animated movie to accompany the release of FFXV. I went and watched Kingsglaive, but not until I was very far into FFXV the game, and it's amazing how much extra context opening with a quick bit of a narration explaining the state of the world can give. Granted, by that point I'd already managed to piece together most of the state of the world through the game, but I just don't understand the thought process that leads to including that narration in the movie, but not the game!

And the other thing is that, even if Kingsglaive was included with the game, and thus it was guaranteed that everyone had access to it, I don't think it even works as something to watch prior to the game, because there's multiple plot things that are treated as surprising or shocking in the game, that were shown in the movie. Specifically (early game spoilers, I guess) the destruction of the city of Insomnia (good name for a city, also the game didn't explain that Insomnia was the name of the city and I got confused at first), and Ardyn (the game's main antagonist) being imperial chancellor. Never mind the fact that two characters in Kingsglaive (King Regis and Lunafreya) are voiced by famous actors (Sean Bean and Lena Headey, respectively), which in turn makes it a jarring shift from the game, at least for Luna, who has more appearances of the two.

These sorts of problems persist throughout the game, too. Aspects of the story that aren't fully explained (I'm still not sure why that demon guy from the intro was where he was), and even when I have all the pieces, it's just not that great. An evil empire trying to conquer the world, and along with it (I guess more spoilers) a vengeful immortal trying to bring about eternal darkness upon the world. Literally. It's, to be frank, typical JRPG stuff, which is fair given this series' roots, but I never got all that invested in it.

The same with the romance between the betrothed Noctis and Luna, who the game frequently says are in love with each other (despite them not being in contact aside from quick messages sent via magic dog since they were of middle school age), but get almost no on screen time together. Even when they do, I don't especially feel like there's a ton of chemistry between them. There's more of that between Noctis and Prompto, but that might just be me thinking about the queer ships I'd write into fan-fiction if that was ever a thing I would feel good about dedicating time to (there's no money in it, as opposed to the fiction writing I actually do, which has almost no money in it). Sadly there's no actual queer text or subtext here.

Perhaps part of why the story doesn't exactly work is the general design of the game. I like open worlds, and I really like having spaces to explore, but if a game lets me wander around for hours and hours on end without touching the story, chances are I'll do that, even if I would've been better off not doing that, as getting sidetracked only made the story that much harder to follow.

And the world itself, like a lot of the game, feels like it doesn't know what it wants to be. It's certainly big enough to feel big (even if the actual size in real world units isn't that large), and it's very pretty to watch go by as you drive along the countryside (or more often let Ignis drive you along). But there's not that much to actually do in it. There's enemies to encounter along the way, the occasional items to pick up, and some tiny outposts here and there, but it feels barren at times. I can't tell how much of that is intentional, and how much is just a result of the game's rocky development.

Like, aside from the city of Insomnia (which isn't really a location you can access for the majority of the game), there's only one town (Lestallum) in the game's main/open world landmass, and it left me wondering, where do all the people live? Is it just in Lestallum? There's broken down barns and other odd abandoned buildings rarely in the world, but mostly it's just wilderness. The outposts aren't big enough for anyone to really live in most of them. People drive around the world, but I never got the impression that they were real people driving to real places, just filler cars so the roads wouldn't be completely empty.

And it's a shame, because I actually like the world's aesthetic a lot. The mix of weirdo sci-fi Final Fantasy trappings with modern American dilapidated western is strange in a way that I love. I truly love the image of these Tetsuya Nomura designed JRPG goofballs walking into roadside diners and cramped convenience stores. It's like seeing images from conventions of the people in cosplay off site from the convention, doing stuff in regular areas, but done without that meta layer in the game. I love the mix of the ultra-fancy Regalia and rustic American cars. In a game that was more focused, or maybe had a less rough development, there could be something really interesting to say about the state of the world, about the crown city of Insomnia, which has been walled off for decades, and the outside areas. This is something the game starts to dig into, but it never goes very deep, and I would have loved it to go deeper.

A game where the sheltered Noctis and friends have to contend with the reality that life may have been good for them, but not so good for the people left to fend for themselves outside the city could have been so much more interesting than the actual main story of this game. Though alternatively I do like that life is still presented as being pretty all right for most people outside, I wouldn't want it to turn into rich people doing misery tourism amongst poor people.

Back to what you do in this world, most of the side quests aren't even that good, or are outright bad! Like, there's one guy who keeps asking Noctis and friends to go do farming for him. But this isn't a case where there's a fun minigame, this involves talking to a guy in the Lestallum market, then driving out to his farm miles away, picking up some glowing dots on the ground (how the game portrays items to pick up), driving back, then repeating a couple times. It's tedious and bad!

But I kept doing it anyway, because it's hard for me not to accept quests when I see a ? on the map, and it's hard for me to not then do the quests when they're in my log. And so I ended up doing a lot of stuff like that, and plenty of more fun hunting quests that aren't necessarily "better" designed, because they just involve going to a spot and fighting enemies, but like I said before, at least the combat is fun.

It's not as deep as something like a Devil May Cry 5, but it's fast paced and fun. The camera isn't great, and combined with Noctis' warping abilities, I can see how it might be a bit too disorienting for some, but I had a lot of fun with it, and expect to continue to have fun, because I've still got plenty of stuff left to do in the game, ranging from more side quests of highly varying quality, to that multiplayer mode that got spun off into its own game (I get why they did that, but having to download a separate executable and take up that extra hard drive space was, a bit irksome).

And like the rest of the game, I think the combat is at its most joyful when the characters are interacting with each other. Noctis doesn't fight alone (usually), and I mean that both in the sense that all four are in your party (unless for story reasons at various points), and that they can do team-up attacks. Hitting enemies in their backs for "Blindside" attacks do extra damage on their own, and if a friend is nearby, they team-up for a special attack. These aren't just the two of them doing an attack at the same time, they're different animations, depending on who the other is, and what weapon Noctis has equipped. Sometimes they'll even high-five or something similar after the attack, and it, like many things, fills the game with so much personality, and that's the thing I love most about the game.

Each of the four has a special interest of theirs, which can be leveled up. For Noctis, it's fishing, and I found myself fishing a lot. Both for what you can get from the fishing, but mainly because it's a fun minigame. I don't like fishing in real life (I think it's pretty cruel, even if you let the fish go (please don't @ me I don't want to get into an argument/fishing is fine if you need to for food)) nor do I have any interest in games dedicated to fishing, but when it's a part of a larger whole? I'll race down to the nearest spot and make my fishing gear appear in midair like Noctis!!

But, what to do with all these dozens of fish I've caught? Well, cook them, of course! And Ignis, the most responsible and orderly of the group, also happens to be a master chef, and more than happy to cook up five star meals whilst the group is camping out in the wilderness. In the mood for cheese pizza? No problem! Gourmet sauté sea bass? Done! Karlabos Cream Croquettes? I'm not entirely sure what all of those words mean, but cooked it shall be! The absurdity of what Ignis can prepare in the wilderness (even with branded Coleman camping gear) and the stunning detail of every dish is funny on its own, but the various foods provide stat buffs, which can mean the difference between success and failure in some cases.

Gladio's interest, perhaps reflecting my feelings on him as a whole, seems a bit underdeveloped compared to the others. His is...survival? Which I think comes down to him just finding more useful items after fights, which is nice, but it would've been nicer if he'd been a bit more fleshed out. But I've got other issues with Gladio, and how he can be kinda mean, especially toward Prompto, though perhaps that's just a reflection of friend groups as a whole. There's often that one that, you still like, you just like a bit less than everyone else. I just wish the game had given me a chance to tell him to be nicer to Prompto, and stop saying things like "quit bitching" that definitely are way over the "playful teasing" line that Noctis and Ignis never cross.

But Prompto, his interest is very well...developed, because he loves photography! Get it? Developed? Does that not play in the era of digital photography? No, who am I kidding, no kids read this.

Ahem.

Anyway, Prompto takes pictures throughout the journey, and every time the group stops to rest, whether at a campsite, motel, or wherever, they all relax, and take a gander at the photos (or at least they're presented to the player and sometimes you hear dialog from the others about them), and you can save however many, or few as you want. The quality of the pictures can vary a lot, from clearly scripted ones that everyone gets, to ones that are a bit procedural, like selfies with Noctis or the others. These have a variety of differences in the poses, and can show up anywhere, including in spots where the lighting makes it look kinda bad, or someone's face might be partially obscured by someone else's hair, or in at least one case I saw, someone's arm getting in the way. And, Prompto will take pictures during fights (he even has a command you can give him to take a photo during fights, which I'm pretty sure does zero damage and serves no other purpose, aside from leveling his photography skill faster), and those can range from looking really cool, to garbled messes.

I'll be honest, there being crappy photos in there too makes it that much more endearing to me. No, I didn't save them all, just because I couldn't. There's a hard limit of 200 photos, which might sound like a lot, but it's not when you spend 60 hours playing, and need to rest frequently because nights are scary at first/resting is the only way to tally XP and level up. Several times throughout the game, I had to go and delete a bunch to make more space (thankfully I thought to hit the Share button to save some record of them, even if that resulted in borders around the pictures that I could've removed, but that would've been a lot of work for this many).

And those photos, they're such a simple thing at first. In the beginning, I'd just look at them and laugh, save the ones I liked, and move on. But the further in I got, and as the story was getting more serious (both in the larger "war" plot line, and in the interactions between the characters I cared about), the photos started taking on a different meaning. They weren't just funny poses, or that one time Prompto actually captured a glitch with airborne shrubberies, they became a reminder of everything we'd been through. The fun adventures, the death-defying escapes from dungeons I was way under-leveled for, the quiet moments, the Chocobos (I love them), interactions with other characters, everything.

And it turns out, if you spend enough time with people, even if they're characters in a game, you can get pretty attached to them. That's one thing when it's Prompto complaining about Noctis continuing to fish even after saying the previous one was the "last one," or when it's Ignis shouting about devising a new recipe, but it's another thing entirely when the game pulls the metaphorical trigger and things get serious.

Which is when SERIOUS SPOILER MODE activates. Right after this image:

The main thrust of the first "half" of the game (it's actually much more than half of the total game, but whatever) is about Noctis meeting up with Luna, initially because their marriage will bring about an end to the war, but eventually just because they love each other (again supposedly). But, in typical fashion, Luna gets killed really just to drive Noctis' emotional state (fridged, if you will), and along with her the beautiful seaside city of Altissia is destroyed, and Ignis...is blinded.

Now, aside from the game not being at all subtle with doing this to the character who wears glasses and has the metaphorical "vision" of the group, by this point I was 40-50 hours into the game. I was well beyond the point of being attached to the characters, and now they were as much my friends in game as a character in a Mass Effect, or any other similar game would be after this much time spent. I felt terrible for him, and terrible because I (Noctis) hadn't been there with him when it happened (later playing the Episode Ignis DLC to learn how this happened, I only feel worse for him because of how much he was willing to sacrifice for Noctis, and again, how I (Noctis) was powerless to help). I wanted to help him, but he, of course, played it like it was nothing, and seemed to be doing well enough. Acting like it was just a matter of time before it'd heal, and he'd be back to how he was before.

But that doesn't happen, not exactly. This is a world of fantasy, a world of great sci-fi technology and literal magic, so I wouldn't have been the least bit surprised if his eyes had been repaired, or replaced with robot eyes or something, but instead there's a section of the game where tensions are at their worst between the characters.

Gladio's patience is gone, and replaced with more mean words, but unlike his "bitching" comments at Prompto, these don't feel completely out of place. I can't blame him for chastising Noctis (me) for rushing ahead while Ignis is moving along so much more slowly, as he's feeling his way around with a cane now. Meanwhile Noctis is just continuing to be torn up at the death of Luna, and the four of them are just moving along, now gone from the free-wheeling car and in a train down a linear path to the end of the game (unless you take some time via magic dog to relive the past (which really is just an excuse to keep doing side stuff, and contrived though it is, I'm glad it exists)).

Eventually, after the group struggles to keep working together, with Ignis barely keeping up, and stumbling his way through fights (aside from his tactician side providing the trick to defeat a boss), he admits the truth to the rest. His eyes aren't going to heal (even as his combat prowess eventually returns), but he doesn't want that to break the friends apart forever. And so, the team steels their resolve, and learns to work together again, as they move forward toward the end of the game.

And I wish the rest of the game was more like those moments than what we get. Not literally, I'd be devastated if the ending hours of the game were just sequence after sequence of them being badly injured again and again like that. What I mean is more focused on their relationships, with each other and the other characters who are basically forgotten, than on the war, and Ardyn's nefarious plans.

END OF SERIOUS SPOILER ZONE.

What I really want is a game that's entirely focused on them, and on the road trip. Just a group of friends going through adventures and hijinks, slaying monsters, and getting up to some fun as they travel along, and all grow alongside each other. If that was the game we got, this might be an all time favorite game of mine. Not number one, but close to the top ten, if not in it.

Instead, what we've got is kind of a mess. A mess that resonated with me more than most games I've ever played. But it's still a mess, and a mess with a dozen other baffling things I could go on and on about. Like, why is the Cup Noodle product placement quest with intentionally hammy dialog (at least in English) in the game forever, but stuff like the Moogle Chocobo Festival the Assassin's Creed crossover quest are just...gone? Yeah, it's marketing BS, and a friend told me it was, "the worst DLC I've ever played in my life," but I like Assassin's Creed and it's the type of marketing BS I'd eat up (certainly more so than Cup Noodles).

Why is there a level 50 dungeon (populated almost entirely by low level enemies except for the level 53 samurai boss at the end that killed me (level 7 at the time) in one hit, and I lost all progress in the dungeon) in the beginning area, but multiple level 30 dungeons on the opposite side of the map? Why do I have to go through an involved quest to unlock the ability to use Chocobos, and then still have to rent them by the day for prices so low I might as well just have permanent access to them? Why are the crossover quests for a mobile game (still in there despite the Assassin's Creed one being gone!) and FFXIV more developed and interesting than the majority of the regular side quests in the game?

Final Fantasy XV is a strange game. But, as time goes on, I know these complaints will fade away, and I'll be left with the good memories. Watching the countryside roll by as Ignis drove us along. Talking with Prompto late into the night at that motel, and hell, even Gladio's ridiculous love of Cup Noodles. Traveling down the coast with Gladio's sister Iris (who deserved more screen time than she got), pulling into the garage at Hammerhead to put have Cindy some more ridiculous decals on the Regalia. Running into the mercenary of ever changing allegiances Aranea. Poking around at the Chocobo ranch, just having fun with bigh birds.

These bonds of friendship, even if they're with fictional characters, are going to be what sticks with me. For all the rest of the faults, this is still a game I deeply love, and I'm so, so glad I played it.

I'll always remember that moment, right before the final boss, when they all stopped to go through the photos, and reminisce about the good old days. Because that was the moment, the moment where it all welled up inside me, and I realized just how much this game, how much Noctis, Prompto, Ignis, and Gladio really mean to me.

I'll miss them.

Gallery

There are a lot of things that I could write about Judgment, the latest game from Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, the people best known for making the Yakuza games. I could ramble on comparing and contrasting it to the Yakuza games, I could spend paragraphs talking about all sorts of stuff, but I want to try to keep this one a bit shorter, and more focused than my usual fare.

I really enjoyed Judgment, both because it's a further refinement of the Yakuza style of game, and also because it's just a great game, with an engaging story and set of characters all its own. It doesn't nail everything it tries to do, and often feels more like a game where the main character is solving the mystery, rather than feeling like me (the player) was the one actually solving it. But that's true of a lot of mystery-y games, so that is what it is.

That said, this is still one of my favorite games from this studio. I'd say my second favorite, after Yakuza 0. That game still has the best mix of a gripping story and enough variety in the combat to stay fresh throughout, but Judgment is the closest any other game from them has come to matching it in either department. I'd say it's really close in the story department, but a little less so game play wise. One character with two fighting styles just isn't going to be as diverse as two characters with three styles each, unless a TON of more depth was added to those two styles. Which there wasn't, but new protagonist Takayuki Yagami is still fun in fights, and a great lead for this game.

Like the Yakuza games, this isn't just about fighting, and it's not just about the story, it's about inhabiting the "world" of Kamurocho. These games have long been great at making Kamurocho (and to a lesser extent the other areas in some games) feel like real, living places. And at a glance, walking through them, they've felt like they could be real for a long time.

But something I hadn't thought about until playing Judgment, was that something was missing from them. Sure, they looked like they could be real, but they were just filled with generic NPCs. Whether the people walking the streets, or the people working in the stores, they were all just filler, there to simulate life without actually living.

Now, Judgment isn't suddenly The Sims, or even Shenmue (as the time of day still moves along with the story, rather than the other way around in Shenmue), but it has taken steps to fill out Kamurocho with more characters. Stores aren't just manned with a nameless body, now they're all (or at least almost all) run by people with names, that you can befriend. They have their own little stories, and Yagami can get to know them, help them with their troubles, and eventually become friends.

It seems like such a little thing, and these aren't ever super deep. They're no deeper than some of the quicker of the sub stories from the Yakuza games, but they go a long way to making Kamurocho feel like even more of a real place. Now when I leave Yagami's office/apartment to stock up on energy drinks, I'm not just walking into a store and talking to what might as well be a machine, I'm going to the local PoPo and buying from Dwayne (yes, Dwayne, not everyone is Japanese in the game). Again, it's a small thing, but it helps give the game a greater sense of community than the Yakuza games have ever had.

And given that Yagami is a detective, and the sort of trudging the streets keeping his eyes open detective, him having connections everywhere makes sense, and helps make that aspect of the game feel more realistic too. Again, it never goes super deep into this stuff, but there are points in the story where Yagami needs to find something out about something, and rather than just saying "go here talk to this person," he'll say, "I think I know someone who can help," and leave it up to me. And you know what? Whenever that happened, I did know of who to go to, and it worked

In true video game fashion, it's not just about making friends for the sake of friendship, there are also benefits. Like getting odd items from them, discounts, or access to secret items on menus. Probably the biggest thing is that each new friend levels up Yagami's reputation meter, and a lot of the side cases (he is still a detective) are locked behind getting to certain levels. I think 50 is the cap, which is a lot of friends.

Of course, the side cases vary wildly in tone, often inside of themselves. But I mean that in a good way, as the game often had me cackling at the nonsense going on in them. If you've ever enjoyed the wackier side of Yakuza, I don't know that this game tops the stuff from 0 for example, but it's still great.

Judgment retains all the good stuff from the Yakuza games, but sadly it also retains some of the less good stuff. BUT! Not all of it, because in my time at least, I didn't encounter anything queer-phobic, which long time readers of this blog may remember I knocked 0 down a few spots in The Moosies that year because its transphobia was so bad. It seems like the statements around the removal of transphobic stuff from the Yakuza 3 remaster because the team "didn't think it represented what the series was" (paraphrasing) seems to have been genuine after all. Assuming I didn't just miss it.

But also this game is still extremely cis-hetero (that one trans bartender is still in her bar, but she's the only instance of anything queer I encountered in the game), and still feels kind of old fashioned with how it treats women. It's not as bad as 6 was, but this is still a game where, in the main story at least, the 2 (two) women important to the story (three if you count one who was murdered as a part of the basic premise of the game) exist to either be damsels in distress, or objects of male desire.

Then again, this is where it gets...a little interesting? And, moderate spoiler warning, I'll hide it inside a spoiler block if you really don't want to know. In all sincerity, play this game, it's really great, and if you've never played a Yakuza game, like 0, it's a perfect place to jump in, and you need to know nothing about the other games to enjoy it. Even more so than 0, because this only has like, one reference to another Yakuza game.

Anyway, onto the point. Spoilers.

That's about all I have to say on the story without delving into super spoilers, but just take my word for it. It's real good.

The game isn't perfect, though. Some of the new stuff, like the tailing missions, are exactly what you think they are. Thankfully, there was only one for the main story that got frustrating, and even then, it was just because it was long, rather than hard. None of the ones in side cases I encountered were that hard, but it's still a thing you'll have to put up with if you play the game.

The lockpicking minigames fair better, but bizarrely, there's a key-ring "minigame?" Like, sometimes the door to Yagami's office is locked, and you need to literally pick the right key on his keychain! There's other locked doors and keys of course, but this one is just so strange that I found it funny. It was supposed to be funny, right? If you pick the wrong key, Yagami says things like, "Why do I suck?!"

Elsewhere, aside from the omission of bowling and karaoke (I assume because of the English dub (which I really like, it's a great dub!)), Judgment has the best assortment of minigames yet. Virtua Fighter 5, Fighting Vipers, Puyo Puyo, Motor Raid, Space Harrier, and a bizarre VR single player Mario Party rip-off????? That, and more await you in Judgment! There's even a pinball table that has a "Made with Unity" screen every time you load it up.

I was a little leery that Judgment might have been the tipping point of too much of this style of game for me, given that I played both Kiwamis this year, never mind 6, 0, and 5 in the years before, but thankfully I was wrong. Judgment's not only one of the best games from this studio, but it's just different enough to keep it feeling fresh enough throughout, while maintaining all the quirky charm I know and love.

Now if only they would get some more women and queer people working on the story side of these games! But even if these games are never going to be exactly what I want, they're still (generally) close enough, and if I sound like a broken record, sorry, but you should play Judgment. It's great.

That time of year has come and gone, that one week of the year we all wait for, excitedly, and then it just comes and goes before you know it's over. I am, of course, talking about Devil May Cry week, which I... Haha, just kidding, I meant E3! Though, if you were to ask me which one was more exciting, well...

Devil May Cry 5.

Kind of a weird trajectory this series has taken, huh? What started as a version of a Resident Evil reboot(?) that was too different became one of the first (if not the first) in what could be called the "stylish action game" genre. Then it got a few sequels, at least one of which was really good (3), and the others, well, I never played DMC2, but I've heard universally negative things about it, whereas 4 had its moments, but a lot of junk weighing it down. Then there was the reboot, which originally looked too grimedgy (my combination of "grim" and "edgy"), but ended up being a fun game, and at the time, my favorite in the series.

But with the reboot not being the success it needed to in order to survive, Devil May Cry seemed to just fade away, and be gone for good, at least until DMC5 was announced. A return to the main universe, over a decade after 4, and six years after the reboot didn't exactly fill me with confidence, and then I played the demo, which was not a good demo! And thus, despite it getting so much praise, I kept putting off buying it, until just recently.

Turns out this game is hella rad.

So, the thing that turned me off from the demo, and from what I'd heard about the game (aside from the rad-ness), was the continued focus on Nero. It'd been so long since I played 4, that in my head, the issue I had with 4 was that Nero wasn't fun to play, and most of the game was focused on him. Seeing him at the forefront of everything about 5, and him being the character in the demo (and said demo not really doing a good job of demonstrating what's fun about 5), just made me remember that aspect of 4, and I managed to convince myself that if I played 5, I'd come away from it enjoying the Dante sections of the game, but not the other characters.

(An aside I added in later: Another poor thing about the demo was that it doesn't really convey how you're supposed to play Devil May Cry in general. It'd been long enough that I forgot about things like some of the combos including pauses between attacks, and things like that. But between that demo and the game proper, I played the Definitive Edition of DmC, which did remind me of that stuff, and in perhaps a weird way, helped prime me to really enjoy DMC5 out of the box, thus saving me from flailing around to remember what to do during its opening hours.)

Thankfully, it turns out that this time, not only are all three characters in DMC5 a lot of fun, but also unlike probably the real problem with DMC4 (the levels, backtracking, etc), there's no bad levels or sections of 5. There's one part of one mission that feels like an unnecessary boss-rush, but even then, it's still fun, and it's fighting bosses with a different character, so it's not an exact retread.

But what is different this time, that got me to really enjoy playing as Nero? There's one concrete thing, and one thing that I'm a bit more nebulous about, because it's been at least a decade since I actually played 4. The nebulous part, is that I think (though who knows for sure!) they've added some new moves for Nero and/or re-tuned him to be a bit faster, or more...fun, for lack of a better word, to just swing a sword at enemies. I could've turned on my PS3 and replayed some of 4 to be sure, but I think I'm good.

The more concrete change is the addition of the Devil Breakers. Nero's demon arm is gone (through story reasons), and to replace it, his friend Nico has constructed a series of bionic arms, each with different abilities. Big electric shocks, a pulse that tackles Nero into enemies, a sweeping whip, time slowing orbs, and my favorite, rocket punching (including the ability to surf on the rocket punch) are just some of what's available. And they're super fun! Nero may only have access to one sword and projectile weapon for the game (I still wish he'd get at least one more sword or something), but the Devil Breakers add some much needed variety to the devil hunting.

Which isn't to say they're perfect. A lot of moves across the DMC games (aside from the reboot) rely on specific control stick moves made in junction with locking on. This is truer than ever in 5, but the Devil Breakers can't be used while locked on. Instead, that button switches to Nero's grappling hook hand, which replicates what he was able to do in DMC4. Still a useful ability, but having to consciously remove my finger from R1 to unlock, then use the Devil Breaker, then re-lock on to do whatever other moves I want to do was pretty awkward at first. But I'm emphasizing "at first," because I absolutely got used to it after a while, and again, it became one of the keys to me enjoying Nero more than I ever had before.

Another thing that helped me really like playing as Nero was the music. The game has some pretty good music in general (or at the very least it accomplishes what it tries to do), but each character has his own battle theme (and some variations of them throughout). Nero's, in particular, is just the absolute most jam-est of jams that I've heard in a long time. It's so good, and I can't stop listening to it.

Which, in some ways mirrors how I played this game, as I couldn't stop playing it. Not literally, but after finishing it, despite having other games to get to, I dove into the Bloody Palace mode, and went back and started the game again on the higher Son of Sparda difficulty. And I spent a lot of time over E3 week playing that, and maybe even more so in Bloody Palace while listening to E3 related podcasts and the like. Definitely more the Palace during that, because even on playthrough 2, I wanted to pay attention to the story again.

The story was better than I was expecting, and what I want out of this sort of game. Without getting into spoilers, I'll say it has at least one twist I never saw coming (much to the amusement of a friend of mine who said it was somewhat foreshadowed in DMC4), and it's left me really excited for what could be to come in a theoretical DMC6.

I will say, as it gives me a segue, a lot of the story revolves around the new playable character, V, "The Mysterious One" (taken from that screen that was going around showing Nero as "The Devil Hunter" and Dante as "The Legendary Devil Hunter"). He was the biggest question mark for me before I started playing, because his fighting style appears so different than anything else in the series at a glance. Rather than fighting himself, V instead commands his critter companions to fight for him. A bird (Griffon) for projectile attacks, a panther (Shadow) for melee, and a giant goop man (Nightmare) for the Devil Trigger super move.

But the reality is that the actual controlling of all this is pretty similar to playing as Nero or Dante, it just comes with a bit of an abstraction. Shadow's moves use the same control stick motions as the others (ie, hold back and hit Triangle to do the uppercut equivalent), and every attack from both is directly controlled. There is an auto-attack mode (which is very effective!), but it comes at the cost of draining the Devil Trigger gauge, which of course is also used by Nightmare.

So playing as V becomes this dual layer thing of managing this menagerie, while also keeping V out of harm's way. He can just run around, but the various dodging moves he has will pull either Griffon or Shadow out and to him, which can be good at saving their hides as well (since they can be knocked out, and need time to recover). Also, while V can't directly hurt enemies, his animal companions can't kill them, so getting him in and out of fights while the enemies are stunned becomes the final piece of his combat puzzle.

Also he can read poetry from his book during fights to refill the Devil Trigger gauge faster, which is just such an amazing thing. It's the exact right amount of ridiculous silliness that makes me love this game in particular, but also the series as a whole. The sort of thing that's both a good risk/reward during fights (because V slows down while reading (but can still dodge out to cancel the move)), but also just so ridiculous.

And then of course there's The Legendary Devil Hunter himself, Dante. Like DMC4, he doesn't become playable until fairly late in the game (maybe about halfway-ish?), but unlike that game, 5 has plenty of variety to keep it interesting until that point (three protagonists in general is a great boon to variety), and the Dante sections aren't just backtracking through the earlier levels again. But like that game, Dante's still my favorite to play, and definitely the character with the most depth to his moves, and weapons.

It'd be hard not to, given he still has four fighting styles, can have four melee weapons equipped at once (including three variations on one of them that can be swapped between at the buying moves menu (though they're really more like upgrades and I just use the final one)), and four projectile weapons at once (and again, one of them has some variations (again more akin to upgrades)). That's a whole lot to remember, and there's even more stuff going on with him mechanically, like a second type of Devil Trigger, and it's honestly more than I can keep track of at once.

Like in the fighting styles, I really only use Swordmaster (extra melee attack button) and Trickmaster (dodge button). Occasionally I'll use Gunslinger (extra gun button) for a specific move I like, but I've finished this game twice, and I'm still not entirely sure how Royal Guard works. I know it blocks stuff if you time it right, but there's a meter that builds up, and I don't know what it does. Listen, I know I could either go digging through the menus and see if there was a tutorial I missed/forgot, or look up a YouTube video explaining it. And I probably will, I just haven't gotten to it yet.

Even aside from the styles, there's just a lot going on in the weapons themselves. The second melee weapon, Balrog, has stances. It starts in punching mode, but holding back while attacking switches to kicking mode, and it'll go back again with the same move. It's not just two stances to switch between, though, because attacking in punch mode charges up Balrog, and after ten hits (which the game keeps track of via a demonic voice counting up (along with a visible glowing effect)) it's fully charged, and time to switch to the more powerful kick attacks, some of which include breakdance style spinning, and it's so good

Most of the projectile weapons are fairly straightforward, but one in particular is perhaps the single most specific instance of this game's silly sensibilities: A weaponized cowboy hat. Named Dr. Faust. It uses Red Orbs (the game's money) as ammo, but if done correctly, enemies will drop more orbs than were used as ammo, so it's a net bonus. Plus, you can stick cowboy hats on any enemy in the game, even the final boss, and while I don't think I got any good screenshots of it, it's very good. I didn't really use Dr. Faust that much in normal fights (or the projectile weapons much in general), but just conceptually it's very funny.

And I couldn't write this without mentioning that they finally made good on the motorcycle fighting that was teased in DMC3, but nonexistent beyond that one cutscene. DMC5 is just such ridiculous fun, and I love it. I love it so much.

While I might not be using every single tool at Dante's disposal, he's still a total delight to play, and I could absolutely just sit down and play through dozens of levels in the Bloody Palace with him right now if I wanted to, and have a blast. I've not actually finished the Bloody Palace, though. The farthest I got was the boss at level 60, at which point I died. But I got a C rank, which is the highest I've gotten in that mode. If I had to guess, I assume there's at least a hundo levels, so I'm far from done.

Honestly, that pure delight in the act of playing this game is the thing I love about it most. Sure, it's not perfect. The level design is pretty static, and uninspired compared to something like the DmC reboot (but to be fair, in all the years since I played it the first time, I can't think of another game I've played with levels that do the cool things they do there). And as terrific as the combat is, that really is just about all there is to the game (aside from the story). Just running through linear levels, and fighting. Occasionally there's hidden stuff to find, and some small challenge missions to complete, but otherwise it's an entirely straightforward game, perhaps to its detriment, if only a little.

Despite the game being co-op, and occasionally connecting to other players, most of the time you and they are in separate parts of the levels, and can't actually interact. There's a couple moments (literally two that I can think of) where you do actually get into the same physical space as another player, and fight together. And it's cool! I wish there was a co-op mode for the Bloody Palace, because then maybe I could get to the top if I was playing with a friend.

Alas, that's probably not going to be.

If you like melee action games with a terrific sense of Smokin' Sexy Style (I cracked up the first time I got a SSS rank and heard the demonic voice yell that phrase), I can't think of a game I'd recommend over this one. At least not ones on PS4, as the other other games of this ilk I might (might) say I like more are Metal Gear Rising REVENGEANCE (not actually a better game, but I love its Metal Gear-ness), and Bayonetta 2 (which I'd have to replay and reevaluate). Play this game, it's super rad and bound to put a smile on your face.

Also, it has the best graffiti I've ever seen in a game:

E3 Thoughts.

Not really surprisingly, but it felt like an off year for E3. Not much in the way of newly announced games, even less in the way of said games that interest me, and some less than stellar showings for games I'd been hoping to really get excited for. However, that makes it sound totally negative, which isn't the vibe I want to give. Absolutely games coming in the next year or so that I'm really excited for, but also a couple in particular that I've left E3 either really skeptical of, or outright disappointed to be thinking it'll be bad.

But I'll get to those later, first, the (hopefully) good games!'

Death Stranding.

Okay, I know, this wasn't actually at E3. But Sony putting that trailer up so close to E3 was them clearly trying to capitalize on it, so you know.

Anyway, I'm excited. It looks weird, and maybe it'll end up being too weird for its own good, or maybe it won't be nearly as weird as the trailers make it seem. But, I'm a sucker for games with a large emphasis on exploring big worlds without there being a clutter of typical open world game style side activities to do, and it sounds like this is that. So, combine that with the (for better or worse) storytelling we've come to know and (at best) love from Kojima and company (and at worst feel disappointed in, if I'm being honest with how MGSV (particularly Ground Zeroes) went), and it's certainly interesting to me.

That said, the more combative stuff shown (like punching those dudes and shooting someone in the trench) didn't look so hot, especially compared to the CQC and shooting from MGSV. But, this probably isn't supposed to be a tactical espionage power fantasy like that game, so it's not going for that. I assume.

Of the games this year (assuming it's not delayed), this is the one I'm most interested in seeing what it actually is. Again, I suspect that's a lot of simulated walking, but I'm down for that.

Destiny 2 Free to play/Shadowkeep.

Bungie are now removed from Activision, and it's going to be intriguing, and hopefully cool to see what they do now that they have full control over the game. Making it free to play in time for the next big expansion is a bold move, and one that I hope pays off for them. I have one friend in particular who (despite my trying to warn them away (jokingly)) could get into it specifically because of this. I'm sure there's plenty more out there that'll do just the same. And adding cross-save support for all platforms is another great step toward making the game that unified ecosystem I suspect they want it to be (certainly the one I want it to be, so I could actually get enough people together to do a Raid). Will the game ever have actual cross-play? Who knows. I'm sure there's two big hurdles to cross there, one being the technical difficulty in engineering all that, and the other being convincing Sony, since they seem to be only allowing true cross-play for Epic Games games.

And what of the new expansion? Well, just about all it takes to excite me is a piece of fiction going to the Moon, or back to the Moon in this case, so I'm down. Always the potential for it to be bad, but typically the end of year big expansions in Destiny are the best ones, so if history is anything to go by, it should be good. But, Bungie are masters at defying expectations in every possible way, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was bad!

Nintendo!

Breath of the Wild 2.

Of all the games announced, or really shown at all at E3 this year, this is the one I've got the highest hopes for. Breath of the Wild is, after thinking about it for these last couple years, absolutely one of my favorite games of all time. Definitely a top five game. So, a direct sequel, with a darker, more mysterious tone, and hopefully with some lessons learned from the previous game (namely that the forced stealth sequences were horrible/the game was at its best when it allowed players to create their own solutions (also transphobia is bad)), this one has the potential to be even better.

But with not even a title given (it probably won't be "Breath of the Wild 2"), I'm not expecting the game any time soon. Which is good, because that gives me more time to get a Switch. Assuming this one doesn't get delayed so much it ends up a launch game for whatever Nintendo's next system is. Surely by then I'd have a Switch, right? Unless they go and remaster all the Switch games on the next thing (because I have no confidence in Nintendo to do anything other than repackage and charge $60 for it all, again), and I end up the one person who had a Wii U but never a Switch.

I'll probably get a Switch. I'd like to say this or next year, but I can't commit to that when there's at least one other new console I'll probably want more coming then. Not unless I can get more money.

No More Heroes III.

I am at once, so excited for a return of No More Heroes, and also a bit worried. Worried because, well, this is a series I love more for its tone and style than the actual game play...and I worry that perhaps that stuff might not hold up so well. Or be done as well as it was back when I was seventeen (I feel old), because even No More Heroes 2 wasn't as great as I'd have liked it to be. Sure, it was a better game on paper, but in practice, it just wasn't the same.

Maybe nostalgia will be enough. Or maybe it'll be great! We'll just have to wait and see.

And no, I probably won't play that side game from last year.

Luigi's Mansion 3.

The extent of my time with this series was playing a small amount of the first one at a friend's house, way back in the day, and not liking it enough to want to buy it myself. But I was eleven at the time (I feel so old), and this new one looks cool! Plus, it has...

Gooigi.

Daemon X Machina.

It's that mech game that Nintendo is publishing. Or at least I think they are (I kinda wish they weren't so I could play it on something I already own, but alas, the reality is I'm just going to have to gather the money for a Switch, somehow). Anyway, I don't know that this game will actually be all that good, but with my reborn love of mechs (via watching a lot of Gundam over the last year), I want this game.

BANJO AND KAZOOIE IN SMASH BROS!

Self explanatory. About time, too.

Animal Crossing New Horizons.

I've never played an Animal Crossing, but this one looks intriguing? Not like, spend $60 on it intriguing, but intriguing. I hate not having much money.

I think that's about it for stuff that caught my eye with Nintendo, who, I'd say had the best showing overall. I guess there's that other Zelda game, which looks very pretty, but I'm much less of an overhead Zelda fan than I am a 3D Zelda fan. They did show that Marvel game that would not get my attention were it not for...something else, but more on that later, and that Platinum game that isn't Bayonetta 3. That certainly looks cool, but also very cop-y in a way that rubs me the wrong...way. But, it certainly won't be the only game I mention here that I would very much like to be excited for, but certain things make me not excited. Again, more on that later.

Also, I know this is to be expected, but still no F-Zero. The Captain may very well be dead and gone at this point, were he not at least still in Smash Bros. They're never going to give us what we want.

Bethesda?

Bethesda, in between people screaming in the crowd and updates for existing games, showed some very interesting stuff. Part of it was more DOOM ETERNAL, which still looks rad. Can't wait to play it. But they also had a pair of newly announced games without any game play to show, but very interesting trailers, and from interesting studios.

I'm of course talking about Tango Gameworks' Ghostwire Tokyo, and Arkane's Deathloop. Basically nothing is known about how they actually play, but those two are on my radar now. Hopefully they end up good.

Microsoft...

Every year, Microsoft is the one I go into with the weirdest feelings. It's a mix of hope, and trepidation. The hope is that part is me is hopeful that they can someday get out of their lack of games that interest me hole, and the trepidation is that said getting out of a hole could lead me to want to buy a console that would cost money.

Unlike Nintendo making me want a Switch, Microsoft did not make me want an Xbox One.

Nor did they really make me want an Xbox Two (Scarlett). Again, I'd still like to think that all their acquisitions will lead to them publishing more interesting games, but just having a limp Halo trailer as the thing to show it off? Especially when, I mean, I'm no tech expert (techxpert), but if they had said that trailer was running on an Xbox One X, I'd have believed them. Never mind that it did nothing to get me excited for Halo, which is a bummer. I used to love Halo. But, it is what it is (and what it is will save me money I need for a PS5, honestly).

So, Microsoft went the way it usually does. Good third party games, some first party stuff that I'm sure will be fine (like Gears 5 (despite them not showing any game play)), but not nearly enough to get me to spend the money on it. There was a certain cameo at this showing, but I'll get to that later.

Ubisoft...?

Aside from Jon Bernthal's dog, the only Ubisoft thing that got my attention is Watch Dogs Legion. Not really what I was expecting (leaks notwithstanding), and also not leaning into the stuff that I really liked about Watch_Dogs 2. I really liked the characters in there, especially the main guy, Marcus. So, a game with no main character is a bit disappointing, but also potentially really interesting. Some really cool ideas, but time will tell if they end up working or not.

Though, there's no dogs in the game, which is a definite disappointment. The dog petting in Watch_Dogs 2 was great! Let us pet and play as the dogs, you cowards!!!!

Other stuff!

Elden Ring!

The rumored collaboration between From Software and George R.R. Martin ended up being true after all. It was a rumor that I wasn't thrilled about at first, because I've no direct experience with Martin's work, and a lot of the things I've heard about Game of Thrones (like how much incest and sexual assault is in it (which is probably exaggerated, but I wouldn't know)) didn't exactly make me want to watch it, or read any of his written works.

But hearing a quote from Miyazaki on a podcast (thanks Austin Walker for reading that on Waypoint), and how much Miyazaki respects Martin as a writer, that has gotten my attention. I really respect, and love the worlds that Miyazaki and crew have created, and when he is excited to have worked closely with Martin to create the world and backstory for this game, that's got me excited.

Problem is we still don't know much about the game. Some vague things about it being open world, and bigger than anything From has done before. But I forget how much of that was from leaks/rumors, and how much has been directly stated. So who knows! But with From's recent track record, I'm on board.

Final Fantasy VII Remake....?????

So, I've never played a Final Fantasy game (unless a demo for XV counts), but this one...looks kinda cool? And fun? But knowing it's only part one of a series kinda turns me off from wanting to dive in. I dunno. But like XV, it's at least caught my attention, so who knows! Maybe it'll be the first Final Fantasy I play. That, or maybe the stars will align and I'll finally play XV one of these days.

Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order.

After a pretty mediocre showing at EA's live stream, it was really encouraging to hear the people who actually played it think it's fun. I love Star Wars, and Respawn's made some really great games, so I really want this one to be good!

Some other games that have been shown before, and I continue to be excited for: The Outer Worlds (the Obsidian game, not The Outer Wilds, which is out now and I can't play because I don't have an Xbox One or suitable PC), Dying Light 2, Control, Wolfenstein Young Bloods, etc. Those last two are out in the next couple months too!

Probably other stuff too, but even these I don't have anything to say about, so... It's time to get to the two games I'm feeling pretty disappointed in how their E3 went:

Marvel's Avengers.

We've known about this game for what feels like forever. Remember when Square Enix just randomly said Crystal Dynamics was making an Avengers game? It feels like it was forever ago, though a brief search makes it sound like it was only in 2017 when this news first came to light. If it was earlier than that, please let me know, because now I'm just feeling like time is distorted even more than usual.

Anyway, I've been waiting for some sort of showing for this game for quite a while, and given how much I like Marvel in general (I saw Endgame twice (the second time in IMAX!)), and how great last year's Spider-Man was, I understandably had pretty high hopes for this one. I really liked those two Tomb Raider games Crystal Dynamics made in the reboot trilogy, and I thought they could make a great Avengers game.

Who knows, maybe the game still will end up being good. But as of right now, it feels like they would have been hard pressed to flub up the reveal of an Avengers game more than they have. Like, nothing of what they've shown looks good? They showed a story focused trailer featuring a story that sounds like a rip-off of Watchmen (which Overwatch already did in the video game space a few years ago), and starring who may be the four more distractingly recognizable voices in video games.

Listen, I like Nolan North, but frankly I would rather they get a cheap Robert Downey Jr knock-off than have Tony Stark just sound like Nathan Drake. Same for the rest of the cast, rather than being distracted by hearing the same people I hear in every other game as it is, and not doing enough to sound different than what they usually do!

Aside from the voices, the whole vibe of that game's aesthetic is aping the movies. Just close enough to them to remind me why the movies look good and this doesn't. It's fine that they don't look like the actors, they probably shouldn't if this isn't a direct adaptation of those. That's not the issue, the issue is that the costumes look like cheap knock-offs (or way too cop-ified in the case of Captain America), and the faces just look bad. Like, below what I've come to expect from faces in big budget AAA games.

Which would be fine if this game had a comic book-y stylized style. That'd certainly be a way to convey personality and stuff in faces without having to spend the resources making them super detailed and realistic. Spiderverse last year (granted, a movie) was a fantastic example of this. Not trying to be realistic, but such an astounding level of style and personality in everything, especially the people.

Sadly no, they just went with "realism" (I'm sure because that's what they think sells best), but without what appears to be the technical force to make it look good. Or maybe it's just bad designs, I don't know. I'm talking about stuff I don't really know enough about to do so, forgive me. All I know is, the characters look bad in a way that they don't in most big budget games these days, and I've spent paragraphs griping about it.

Of course, you know me, you know I'm more than willing to overlook a lackluster story and production values if the core of the game is solid. But, for a game that's coming out in less than a year, they had shockingly little to show the public, and didn't even let people at E3 itself play it, which isn't a great sign. Especially when what we have to go on makes it sound like there is not a ton of depth to the characters (only three abilities per?), and that the game itself sounds split.

Both a story focused AAA game, and an endless loot game? I mean, sure, it's not impossible, and games like Destiny 2 kinda try to do that, but not in the way that the trailer makes it out to be. That trailer sells it as an Uncharted style linear action game. Which I'd be fine with if it was really good, but also saying it's a game they want people playing for years to come (with the implication being loot as the driving force) makes it sound like the people trying to sell the game don't know what to sell it as.

And that leads me to what I think might be the reason why this game could (possibly likely to) end up being bad. My theory is that the people working on it wanted to make a big story focused game, not unlike what they've done in the past with those Tomb Raider games. But the higher ups at Square wanted an endless money sink, so it also became a loot game. Then the public turned against loot boxes pretty hard in that Star Wars game and others (though Star Wars is owned by Disney, as is Marvel), and thus this loot game they'd been working on would suddenly not have the paid loot boxes, and I dunno.

I'm probably wrong. Maybe it was the other way around, they wanted to make a big loot game, and Square forced them to do the story stuff. Maybe it's neither, and I'm just pulling garbage out of the air. We won't know until the game is a disaster, and someone like Jason Schreier does their magic (investigative journalism), and we get the scoop on what happened during development.

At this point, I'm much more interested in that than the actual game.

Hopefully I'm wrong and it ends up being good. But my hopes are about as low as they could be, right now. Sadly.

Cyberpunk 2077.

So, Cyberpunk. After it wowed almost everyone at E3 last year, it feels like for every step forward it takes in getting me excited, it takes two back in some sort of misstep around the game. Whether it's transphobic jokes on the official social media account (or others associated with CD Projekt Red), or word about crunch at the studio being bad (though I don't know if that's bad in the way that I suspect almost all AAA studios have bad crunch, or bad by even that standard), it feels like there's always something rearing it head to trample over my potential excitement.

So then there's E3 2019, where it was revealed that Keanu Reeves is in the game, accompanied with him appearing on stage at Microsoft. As breathtaking as he is, and as tantalizing as him having the second highest number of lines in the game is (the player character having the most), we couldn't even get out of E3 without those two steps back happening.

First, word out of the demo being shown made it sound like the game is leaning pretty heavily into racial stereotypes (and you can see some of that in the trailer this year, or even the long game play demo they showed last year). Would it be the first game to do that? No, but does that mean that I want to play a game where most of it is killing racial stereotype gangs? Also no! Will it be just that? Hopefully not, and even in what was shown, I don't want to make it sound like it was all bad, because at least according to Austin Walker (my best source of E3 takes this year, haha), the Creole spoken by some of the NPCs in the game sounds as authentic as it could be, so clearly some amount of effort and thought is being put into this stuff, I guess? (Go listen to Waypoint's podcasts for longer/more nuanced discussion that just me in this blog, seriously).

And then there was that transphobic ad. I'm not going to show it here, you can find it yourself, but basically it shows a sexualized depiction of a trans woman with the very clear (and "comically" large) outline of her genitals under her tight outfit, along with the text "mix it up." Now, according to the artist at the studio who drew it, she says it's "supposed" to be sexualized in a bad way, in the same way that happens all the time in the real world with advertising, and particularly women (usually cis, not trans, though).

I want to believe that artist believes that, and that was the intent. But the problem with intent is that it's going to go over most people's heads if that intent isn't more clearly stated. It's like that meme with the MS Paint Gundam shooting the "war is bad" shot over the "wow cool robots" person. At least in the mainline Gundam shows, the "war is bad" message could not be any clearer, and yet people still miss it, I guess. It's like playing all the Metal Gear games and just completely missing that there's a political message, you'd have to really be missing a whole lot, or not thinking about anything at all to not get it.

But those people exist, and if they can miss the really obvious stuff, they're going to miss the "subtle" things too. So even if the intent was, "we're making a statement about over sexualized bodies and corporations trying to profit off people in any way they can," that's not enough unless even a little more work is done to convey that. And that could be as simple as having a couple trans characters in the story who make a few offhand remarks about all the demeaning ads they see across town during a story mission.

Problem is, we didn't get that, we got people zooming in ray-tracing screenshots and seeing the soda ads with the big-dick lady. And given how this stuff has gone over the last year, I don't think there's going to be those trans characters in the game that will get the chance to make those remarks about the ads, and show that they're supposed to be commentary, and not just there for a laugh. What we've seen right now looks as bad as the worst GTA in game advertising, and that's about as low a bar as I can think of.

As it stands, I don't blame anyone at all that looks at this, looks at the studio's handling of these things over the last year, and is just done with the game. No more desire to play it.

I'm not there yet. And I'm not there yet, because I was just saying earlier in this blog that Breath of the Wild is a top five game of all time for me, despite that being really, truly transphobic. If a game that features a quest where Link has to disguise himself as a woman to sneak into a women only space, which has super bad parallels with what transphobes say trans women are/do, then it feels hypocritical of me to write off Cyberpunk. Now, does that speak ill of me to let things like that slide?

Maybe.

I want to be excited for the game. I loved The Witcher III (and Witcher II, for that matter), and on paper this game sounds great. Sprawling open world with a heavy emphasis on player choice in both game systems and the story? Those are things I love! Having Keanu as a cyber-ghost tagging along most of the game? SIGN ME UP!

I just wish they would get some trans and/or nonbinary people in there, and help them clean up this stuff so it's not something that I have to spend pages writing about how it screwed up once I write about the game next year. You know, like I just did. And maybe they already are, because they did put out some halfhearted statement about adjusting the character creator to allow for more trans or nonbinary characters, but what form will that take? Will I be able to make a nonbinary character that gets referred to as such in the game? I really doubt they're going to re-record every line where the main character is referred to as "she" or "he" and write a "they" version. Unless the whole game was already written in a gender neutral way (which would save time over having two gendered versions, just saying!). But I doubt that.

And of course, do the same consulting thing about those potential racial stereotypes, just with appropriate people for that.

Because you know, all this said, I'm probably still going to play the game. Unless it runs disastrously bad on consoles, is just a bad game in general, or crosses some line where it's too transphobic, too racist, too whatever for me to put up with, I'm going to play it. Just a question of if I get it close to release and can feel good about it, or if I wait for a healthy price drop, and play it just to know. You know, sort of like why I played Anthem (despite getting that on a whim on literal launch day). Of course, I still enjoyed Anthem as best as I could (despite it running disastrously bad, or close to it), so...

I really hope they can make a game I can feel good about liking. I don't want to have to go through all this. Again.

Other stuff (briefly!)?

I spent way too many words of this blog griping about Marvel's Avengers and Cyberpunk 2077 (for very different reasons!). If you read them all, then thank you. If all you did was read what I wrote about DMC5 (a fantastic game I cannot recommend enough), then skipped to the end, that's fair. Either way, thanks for spending some of your time reading this.

As for other things, between the last blog as this, I played at least half-ish of the way through Dragon's Dogma remastered, and if anything, that game holds up even better than I hoped. The only reason I stopped was because I got caught up in DMC5, and I fully intend to get back to it.

That, and I'm finally playing Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. I haven't finished it yet, but I think I'm nearing the end, and I like it a whole lot. Makes me wish the series had kept going in this ridiculous space opera direction, rather than the grim and dark "realism" of the Modern Warfare reboot.

I've got Sonic Mania downloaded from PS+, and Judgment is out soon. So, more games to play!

Maybe I'll give those games a bigger write up once I'm done with them, but in the meantime, see ya!