I'm the kind of girl who likes Pokémon spin-offs more than the main games. Don't get me wrong, the generations I've played have been some of my all-time favorite experiences: I put 350 hours into Pokémon Diamond, working towards finishing the National Dex (I was 18 off in the end, thanks to an inability to get anything from Johto) and constantly re-battling the Elite 4 for fun. I'm really looking forward to Pokémon Sword (for one reason only) and I just finished trying out a fan-game, Pokémon Insurgence, which was really solid.

But at the end of the day, the Pokémon experiences that I've revisited time and time again have been the offshoots. The weird games that were RPGs in some ways but not the exact catch-em-all that the money-makers are. The big ones for me are easily the first couple of Mystery Dungeon titles; Blue Rescue Team and Explorers of Time formed so much of my early emotional reactions to games as a medium. Blue Rescue Team was heartbreaking to me as a 12 year-old, and the second entry in the series further wrecked me. I've even thought several times about getting a copy of PokéPark for Wii to see what the heck that is.

I could talk a lot about the different spin-offs, but I wanna focus on one specific series within those spin-offs: Ranger.

Pokémon Ranger is a really different kind of game from other Pokémon titles. There are RPG mechanics, but the only thing that levels up is your styler. Pokémon are treated as weaker/stronger than others, but they do not have levels. In fact you don't even catch them; you 'capture' them, which in a way kinda sounds more insidious than it actually is. Capturing involves the player drawing circles around the Pokémon which wanders and attacks on the bottom screen. Completing a circle helps convey feelings of friendship towards the Pokémon, and upon capture it elects to help you either capture other Pokemon or clear targets out in the field, and then it heads back to its native habitat.

Rangers are a weird organization, because they aren't cops; those exist already. They're more like...a catch-all set of do-gooders who do whatever the population of a region requires them to do. Put out a forest fire? They've got it covered. Help an elderly couple solve an argument? They'll be there with bells on. Take on an evil organization trying to build an army of evil Pokémon? Rangers do that before breakfast. There are Area Rangers that are situated in towns, and Top Rangers who roam around their region (or potentially the world) to perform acts for the benefit of people and Pokémon.

There are three Ranger games, and all three came out on the Nintendo DS: the original Pokémon Ranger, Shadows of Almia, and Guardian Signs.

Ranger is easily the worst game in the sub-series. While the two latter games have completed loops fill in a capture bar, Ranger requires the player to complete a set number of loops without lifting the stylus or having the line break. It was very tedious, especially when some of the final bosses required 40+ loops. If you have any interest in checking these games out, I would suggest skipping this one.

Shadows of Almia is my favorite entry. It introduced Generation 4 Pokémon to Ranger, my favorite group of the series. The aforementioned change to the capture bar was very welcome, and the overall story is generally solid: It's a Pokemon game so it's not this grandiose, really dark tale, but it's still competent enough.

So, after loving Shadows of Almia back in 2010 or so and 100%ing it multiple times, it's a wonder it took me nearly a decade to get to Guardian Signs. On face, what I saw of the final installment in the series always looked off-putting; it focused again on the legendary dogs (easily some of my least favorite legendary Pokémon), you were forced to have a specific partner Pokemon instead of the diverse choices in Almia, and the enemy team was called "Pokémon Pinchers."

I forget how I got on this kick, but I glanced at the Wii U Virtual Console listings, and seeing the list of DS games included Guardian Signs was a great surprise, since all those games are now quite expensive, and I was in the mood for more Ranger.

Guardian Signs is really interesting because of where it places you as a Ranger, and the ways it shakes up what you can do. The past two titles had you just starting out, but the player character of this game is a seasoned Ranger, potentially a Top one considering they do technically move between regions and run all around the place. The game lets you skip some tutorials; it feels like this is a game meant for people who played Almia and are here for one last ride. Additionally, you get to use the titular Guardian Signs to summon Pokémon like Entei and Latias at any time to help you clear obstacles.

In previous Ranger games, Pokémon assists came in the form of a one-time move that would help the player capture a Pokémon. In Guardian Signs all of the player's party Pokémon have assists that are on a timer; as long as the Pokémon isn't hit by an attack, their move can be used again. It was really surprising to me at first, and then it helps feed into the narrative of you being more experienced and better at building bonds with Pokémon than past titles. I like this change on principle, but it was implemented awkwardly; activating an assist immediately puts the Pokémon on the field, and they don't always send their attacks towards whatever you're trying to capture. More than once I sent something out only to be frustrated at its ineffectiveness.

Puzzles in Ranger are extremely simple and require the player to capture certain Pokémon to perform a "Target Clear," which can involve destroying a boulder, putting out a fire, or some other task that removes an obstacle to progress. Guardian Signs goes beyond the previous games and lets you utilize several Pokémon at once. It's a small thing that goes a long way. All of this comes together to make you feel like more of a *Ranger* than ever before, albeit with a worse execution.

The story of Guardian Signs is an odd one. The ideas here are neat and the stakes get really high towards the end, but it feels like a step-down from Almia for most of the ride. The whole thing feels like it could have been a DLC campaign for Almia, until the last hour-and-a-half when things ratchet up to 'fate of the world' stakes are put into play. There are some returning characters that are a welcome presence, but their role feels too minimal in the grand scheme of things, and I was left a bit disappointed by how the whole thing shook out.

Guardian Signs introduces a co-op multiplayer mode, which you access from the main story. A couple of times near the beginning, Celebi sends you back in time and tries to recruit you to help with trouble in the past: Once the game is all "Hey this is the co-op mode! Go here when you wanna engage with it!" you can ignore it, and it's really strange that it's never acknowledged as part of the main plot. There are allusions to a past conflict that I assume is what you engage with in that multiplayer, but it's still awkward and I really wish it was just part of the main story.

While it has its missteps, as a sequel it is admirable. The most apt comparison I can make is the Ace Attorney series; each game progressively starts a bit harder I find, and the *tutorial* cases of each game get better and more elaborate. They still are accessible to newcomers, but ramping things up right off the bat really helps me get into a sequel, especially when I've just played the predecessor. More recent Pokémon spin-offs, like mobile offerings, the Rumble games, and Quest, have done very little for me to be honest, but I'm hopeful that the Switch will perhaps get something that fills the void that's been left behind.

It's been nine years this week since Guardian Signs released, so I think it's safe to say that Ranger as a series has been shelved. It is understandable; I don't know anyone else who's played these games, even among my friends who are die-hard fans of the Mystery Dungeon games. In some ways, I'm OK with this: the transition to 3DS might not have been great, and the series would certainly not work as well on a system that doesn't have a stylus. At the same time, I would play a new one in heartbeat right now; I love Pokémon as a world, and seeing it from an angle that isn't "time to beat the League again" is refreshing each time.

People shouldn't get sad at the leaders of large corporation announcing their retirement. Fundamentally, we should not care about these people; they are executives who lead these companies and make boatloads of money. We should be suspicious of them and the decisions they make that are often in favor of them having a better relationship with their shareholders instead of the wellbeing of their employees.

And yet, I cannot deny the fact that I love Nintendo and trust them. I certainly really like lots of developers across the industry and have a high amount of respect for the visions of people such as Phil Spencer, but Nintendo is in a camp of its own. From the likes of Bill Trinen to the always smiling Shigeru Miyamoto, I feel OK about saying that Nintendo's higher ups seem like fantastic people.

Reggie Fils-Aime just announced that he is stepping down as president of Nintendo of America, and is retiring. It's an event that shocked me and has left me feeling very sad and odd. Even though I'm 23 and had ample opportunity to play video games a bit before Reggie came onto the scene, I didn't start playing pretty often until I was about 9 or 10, and started to follow the industry more around 13 or 14. He's been a major face of Nintendo since I started playing, and his absence will be noticeable for me. Sure, he hasn't appeared in as many Directs as he used to, but his presence, his unwavering commitment to the Brand has always been felt and knowing he isn't there is going to change things.

Nintendo as a company is special in so many ways. They're the ones who were around when things more or less started for this industry, and they've been a constant since. Atari is just a brand name nowadays. Sega still makes (great!) video games but is far less of a presence than they were in the 90s and doesn't make consoles anymore. Nintendo is still here. Every two years or so conversation crops up again of Nintendo's imminent demise for one reason or another, but the company is still here, and for the first time in awhile I actually do feel more confident in their ability to stick around and adapt to the changing landscape. Their ability to endure and mostly maintain that mysterious quality that only they have over multiple decades is astounding.

What other company has put their executives in the positions that Nintendo has? Shawn Layden may come out wearing a Crash Bandicoot shirt and Phil Spencer is generally an awesome person, but Nintendo had Reggie and Iwata trying to punch each other in a Smash promotion. One of the developers of Splatoon 2 gives updates on the game wearing a labcoat and being a bit wacky. A gag for the video where Nintendo revealed its plans for E3 2015 involved Reggie firing Bill Trinen.

That Smash bit is probably the peak of the whole thing. The reveal that Miis were playing in Smash 4 was handled by first showcasing Reggie and Iwata competing in over-the-top hand-to-hand combat, with Iwata even having moves referencing his "Direct" pose. Some people at the time noted that the executives had become characters just as much as Mario or Link had to the world at large, which is accurate, but it all still feels genuine.

Although, it only is some select individuals that Nintendo elevates to these positions. Tatsumi Kimishima, Iwata's brief successor, was a much more serious individual and never appeared in a Direct wearing Mario gloves or having Bowser spray fire at him. Shuntaro Furukawa, the current president, is young like Iwata was when he took the position, but has failed to make any major sort of impact in the company's Directs or presentations. Instead, Yoshiaki Koizumi, a longtime developer of both the Mario and Zelda series has risen up to be the company's main face, thanks to his involvement with the development of the Switch. It does bum me out that the bigwigs of the company aren't the ones doing the fun, cute things anymore (well, we'll see how much Doug Bowser gets involved. He's off to an OK start), but I'm happy that the company still feels like this place of wonder, and that its developers feel genuinely enthusiastic about sharing their creations with the world.

In the past I've definitely thought about how Nintendo's leads differ from their competitors, but recent events have made them stand out even more. Anthem released (in several ways) this past week, and has been receiving a lot of criticism. This resulted in Mike Ybarra, a higher-up dude on the Xbox team, calling out reviewers for whining about the game failing to explain an aspect of its combat. It felt really gross and also like a suggestion that streamers were the only ones worth paying attention to for coverage, not game critics. Sony also appointed Jim Ryan to be the new head of PlayStation a few weeks ago, which has been viewed questionably given his opinions on backwards compatibility and other consumer-friendly practices.

And then of course there's Bobby Kotick. The Activision-Blizzard layoffs are terrible for lots of reasons, but unlike some other recent massive layoffs (i.e. Telltale), the company actually reported record revenue; they just didn't meet their projections. Kotick is still making millions, and when the company hired a new CFO at the start of the year they gave him $15M up front. It is infuriating to see thousands of jobs lost around the industry, but executives make a tidy profit.

In contrast, the late Satoru Iwata is noted as taking two(!) cuts to his personal salary (along with members of Nintendo's board of directors) when the 3DS had its major price cut and when the Wii U showed that it was not going to be the success that its predecessor was. Yes, Japanese businesses operate differently from North American ones, but it's still worth comparing the two because of the drastic difference in what happened I feel. Satoru Iwata respected his employees, and valued them and their views. We saw this time and time again with him personally sitting down with many developers to talk about their games in Iwata Asks features. He felt like he cared about everyone and what they were doing, while Reggie was over there being the larger-than-life powerhouse that he is.

Having this sort of relationship with an international entity like Nintendo can be problematic. It can! It's still a company that exists for the purpose of making money. Corporations want their consumers to view their leads as personable, charismatic, and worth admiring. Sometimes that admiration is for their vision, or their effort, their quirkiness, or just that they're real people and they too like listening to the music you do and all that jazz. The way that social media brands are now tweeting about weirdly specific fanbases or how they're super depressed like you too. It's cute in some ways but comes off as trying too hard, even when it's part of that brand's industry at times. When it comes to Nintendo, it doesn't feel like PR managers trying to make their company look good. OK, that's wrong, it kinda does. I know that Reggie doesn't write every speech he has, and that the company controls how their employees are portrayed; there's the infamous example of Shigeru Miyamoto getting very angry after the awkward Skyward Sword E3 demo. But I don't doubt that they enjoy the way they present themselves; I don't believe they're wearing heavily crafted masks. Maybe that's me being naive, but I can't ignore my willingness to trust Nintendo and its people with their messaging and sincerity. I just trust the people that they put forward to speak on their company's behalf, like they've earned my trust. It's rad.

Nintendo isn't perfect. Reggie isn't perfect. Even Iwata wasn't perfect. Their games have had representations I'm not thrilled with, and they are, again, a corporation attempting to make a profit. I still can't help but respect and love them, even as I let my Switch collect dust, because it's Nintendo, and they're not like other companies. I hope Reggie has an amazing retirement, and that the Japanese giant continues to show a commitment to being the way they have been for years.

It's easy to point at all the games that Apex Legends is comparable to. There's the militaristic, attachment-focused gunplay seen in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, the more fast-paced style of battle royale that Fortnite has, and Overwatch's choice to feature specific characters with certain abilities. Then there's of course the fact that it plays like Respawn's own Titanfall (it is from the same universe, anyway). All of it blends together to create a package I've been having an extremely great time with. My favorite part is definitely how solid the gunplay feels (Titanfall 2 was a great game for a reason!) but one of the things that's stood out to me the most is how much it feels like I've gotten a successor to Left 4 Dead 2.

Yeah, that probably sounds wrong.

Left 4 Dead 2 is a heavily linear game in a lot of ways. Every time you play a level, you go from the same beginning to the same end, perform the same objectives, shoot the same enemies, and utilize the same weapons. The thing that's different is where those weapons are placed, and when the enemies appear. Chances are a Tank will show up in one of Dead Center's four levels, but it could be any of them; you could fight one right at the beginning in the burning hotel, or out near the gun store during the crescendo event. Then there are Witches; how many of them will you encounter? Will a Hunter interrupt your attempt to crown them, or could a Boomer conveniently stand next to one, preventing you from dealing with either to avoid causing the horde to appear?

Battle Royales are similar in a lot of ways. You start with no items (you do start with a pistol in Left 4 Dead though), finding them in the environment as you go along towards the final encounter. Along the way you may meet your end to an enemy, and it'll probably be a different scenario then the last time you played, with them emerging from different places or targeting someone specifically, when you and your team are spread out in a slightly different way. The toolset is the same, but what the games do with them varies. Apex Legends obviously has more variety in this department due to being a Battle Royale, with dozens of possible starting locations, and having character abilities, and multiplayer (Left 4 Dead does have Versus, but that's not exactly what I'm referring to here), yet the general feel has stuck with me at times of how they evoke the same "let's do a run together."

But the biggest correlation between Respawn's latest title and Valve's best game is how the characters interact with the environment, other players, and enemies.

The Left 4 Dead series has eight playable characters; Louis, Zoey, Francis, and Bill in 1, and Coach, Nick, Rochelle, and Ellis in 2. Each has a defined personality and relationship with their fellow survivors. They'll joke with one another about things they see, their lives, and other things. Despite appearances, Left 4 Dead does have a defined narrative. The characters just react slightly differently each time because of minute changes in the environment and enemy placement. The biggest thing about this though is that they talk about things they see and find. If Francis approaches a place where a gun is stashed, he might yell "We got weapons over here!" and if Louis sees some pills...well, you know. You rely on these people telling you they found things, and that doesn't require a human player typing it out or mentioning it in voice chat. Sure those options exist, but they aren't explicitly necessary. This system isn't perfect by any means, but it's there and it makes such a difference, especially when Nick calls out "Boomer!" to alert his comrades about a threat.

Apex Legends operates in a really similar (though different) way. Apex's legends are constantly talking about a variety of things; where to go next, what ammo they could use more of, that attachment they found sitting on the floor of some dusty shack...the difference is that it's initiated by the player. The player decides what information is worth communicating, which is then voiced by the in-game character, along with a pop-up that will display an icon of whatever that person is trying to get across to their squad. Unless someone spams the functionality (and even when they do), the lines feel natural, and being able to respond with confirmations is a great way to make it feel as though you can communicate with others without voice chat, and also have the characters react to their environment.

Fortnite, by comparison, has none of this. The only communications that exist are either text-based or emotes, which aren't really useful in the heat of battle. If I ever found myself playing squads with randoms, I had to go to the house they had looted to see if they left anything I could use. Sure, I do that in Apex too, but there's at least an indication of whether I absolutely need to or not at times, if say someone else finds a really good armor piece they have a duplicate of already. The tagging enemies part is something that other games can't match though; I have so much more awareness of where both my teammates and enemies are in Apex, and the game feels better because of it. Fortnite requires that I run towards where I hear the shots, but that sometimes isn't enough as I run through doors, or mishear which floor an enemy is on, resulting in inefficiency.

Apex does suffer from the fact that, as of this writing, there's no actual banter. Wraith doesn't scoff at Mirage's bad jokes (they're good jokes, I just mean the good-bad kind. Uh. Right), Pathfinder isn't running up to Caustic and going "You're a scientist! Are you friends with my creator?" or anything silly like that. It makes all the characters feel a bit distant from each other in this regard. Even though they actually respond in conversations initiated by the player, Bangalore isn't actually talking to Lifeline about anything in particular; the "thanks" is non-specific and is only usable when the game deems it so. Apex is a battle royale though; the game can't just have the characters start talking to each other, because an enemy could suddenly appear out of nowhere and interrupt the flow of dialogue. I don't think it's necessary to have them talk to one another, but it would be nice to help make them feel more like people: Even having character specific-reactions would be nice (i.e. someone being a bit hesitant with their confirmations on Mirage's lines since he's...well, he's Mirage).

You may be asking at this point: what about Overwatch? That game's situational writing is similar, but it feels different to me. It certainly accomplishes a lot of what Left 4 Dead 2 does, but it's a different game; you don't go around picking stuff up in Overwatch, and you don't call out new areas to head to really. Additionally, Apex being a game where everyone can use all the same guns/healing items/etc makes it feel a lot closer to Left 4 Dead for me, since I liked that Left 4 Dead was a multiplayer game where everyone could essentially fill the same role. When I chose a character in Left 4 Dead, it was because I felt like playing as them then and having their voice represent me. The same is true now for Apex...except I only use Wraith because she's my favorite and none of the others stand out as ones I want to hear as my voice. Both Apex and Overwatch fulfill various aspects of what I liked about Valve's zombie shooter, but Apex comes closer to capturing the feel of the game I spent most of my high school afternoons playing.

Hey, while you're here, if you want to, check out my montage of my first week with Apex!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go play some more of this game, and hope I land near a house that has a Flatline.

Kingdom Hearts is...important to me. The games are fun to play, the story is fantastic, and I love almost every character a great deal (except like, Vexen. ew). If one thing has formed me into the person I am today, Kingdom Hearts is it; once it came into my life, it infiltrated my being and...well, maybe I should start at the beginning.

My first introduction to the series came when I found a volume of one of the manga on a friend's shelf. I can't recall which one it was or from which game, but that's where it all started. They didn't have all of them either, so I read disjointed bits from the first three games in the series (and became very confused in the process), thinking that parts of II happened during the original. Weeks (months?) later, while on vacation with my family, I stumbled across something at one of the many generic airport stores that have snacks, books, and weird curiosities; the May 2009 issue of Nintendo Power, the one that had Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days on the cover. Suddenly I had something to look forward to, and as a young teen with only Nintendo systems, a game I could actually play.

358/2 Days released in September 2009 in North America, during the middle of the swine flu pandemic. I came down with something during that (doctors said it was just a normal flu, but the swine flu stands out in my mind as being a current event at the time so I always frame it that way), and ended up being at home for about two weeks. Just before that illness hit me, my family had taken a trip to Blockbuster (R.I.P.) and I found something that had haunted my conscious since summer; a copy of 358/2 Days. Yes, Blockbuster let you rent DS games. That was a weird thing.

So, those two weeks were my first real time playing a Kingdom Hearts game, and my world became warped. I cried for a long time after beating 358/2. Within a few months, I had saved up money and gotten a PlayStation 2 along with a copy of 1 and re: Chain of Memories. II would happen with a year or so, but my memory is a bit hazy of when this all goes down. The point is that Kingdom Hearts quickly became everything I cared about.

A year before 358/2 Days came out, my family and I moved countries. It was a really hard change for me, as someone who has just turned 13 and had to adjust to a new middle school where everyone already knew everyone. Looking back I don't think I ever truly fit in. Sure, there were lots of people I considered my friends, but it feels foreign in hindsight, even though I spent six school years with all of them. The introduction of Kingdom Hearts gave me a safe place, something to rely on. I certainly played and experienced numerous other properties during high school, but Kingdom Hearts was a constant. A neverending thing I could return to when I needed it. This was especially true once I realized how much more time I could invest in just reading fanfiction. In my lifetime, I would not be surprised if I have devoted as much time to reading Kingdom Hearts fanfiction as playing Kingdom Hearts games. That's what I came home and did after school sometimes; they gave me comfort in a world where friends didn't respond to my messages and I had a hard time being social in any capacity.

The years that followed saw me continually chasing an understanding of what the series was. I spent copious amounts of time reading wikis, finding weird old quotes from Nomura, and reading more fanfiction. Sure that last thing wasn't about the actual canonical timeline, but it helped me just...continue to take it all in. Have somewhere for my thoughts to go. To get who Sora and Roxas were. Maybe it was all to try and comprehend what a heart was, because my naive little brain had a tough time understanding life and relationships, and reasoned that this series that had "Heart" in its name could give me answers.

New trailers for Kingdom Hearts titles were like a drug for me. Seeing low-res uploads of stuff like the first bits of footage for Birth by Sleep were mesmerizing, and in time I put them on to function more like music than something to inform me about the product or story. Lines like "You can't save Aqua or Ventus!" tore at me, and were enough to stand out years before I got the chance to even play the games they were from. It was as if I lived in this weird dreamscape where I couldn't properly experience the series yet, but absorbed it in every little way I could.

When people speak about the first Kingdom Hearts game, it seems like they talk about the series being this special collaboration between Disney and Final Fantasy. That that's the main thrust of the series, and they'll sometimes express disappointment in how little those factor into the actual story. For me, though, the series is it's own thing. It borrows from both of those a lot, but it's so unique. It's cliche in its themes of light and darkness, but the way it explores them has always fascinated me, and it was never about Disney. Those are just ways to explore the light and darkness of the series; Beast fighting his own darkness inside him, how falling to darkness could corrupt a person, make them lose their memories, or tear apart families. The Disney stuff was really cool, but it was never the first thing I thought of when I thought of "Kingdom Hearts:" I thought of Sora, of Master Xehanort, of people fighting to get back the peace that had been disrupted, and save their loved ones. Or to discover themselves.

But at the same time, Kingdom Hearts is the only lenses I can properly view most Disney properties now. Seeing Donald Duck and Goofy in their KH attire is normal: Those incarnations of them stand out much more than the others to the point where they're defined by KH to me, despite existing for decades prior to the series. Even Tron, a series I love deeply (and consider Legacy to be my possibly favorite Western film) is marked by a really weird and fun inclusion in II and DDD, with 3DS-level polygon Jeff Bridges, which is...rad? Really rad.

There are still several old[er] Disney films I've never seen: Hercules, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Pinnochio...those worlds exist for me in Kingdom Hearts. The idea of finally seeing them is one that's been on my mind forever, but at the same time I don't feel as if I need to. They have their place in my heart already.

So, to get to an actual point: what am I supposed to do now? Kingdom Hearts III is a week away. Less than a week away! How do I reconcile with that fact, when my life feels like it's been building to this for a decade now? When the thing that captured my heart and held it together while I struggled to stay afloat is about to have a definitive end to the arc that they've been building towards the whole time? Yes, it isn't the actual end to the series, but at this point we have no idea what a theoretical IV would hold. Will it still have Heartless? Nobodies? Will it still have Sora? None of that is known at this point, and neither of those scenarios would (likely) change that this is the end of Kingdom Hearts as we all know it. What do I do once I beat it? How much will I be able to revisit older entries, knowing this is the end?

I have so many questions that are forming around this experience, and the idea of this ending still hasn't set in. I'm this worried already but I feel like I could be so much more. There's no telling what this conclusion will bring, both in terms of the actual story (...OK no there're lots of hints to that, but I feel like there'll be surprises too) and the closure to me as a fan who will almost definitely be left feeling some sort of emptiness at the end. That emptiness would still be there it III had come out years ago, or in a decade; it's just how much the series means to me. Any ending will cause sort of gap. I absorbed all of Yakuza in about a year and a half, and all of Mass Effect in a month: the endings of those series both greatly affected me, but I took them in in a relatively short time frame. Kingdom Hearts has dominated by thought processes for a decade...and now it's about to come to an end.

God, I'm gonna need to read more fanfiction this weekend to hold me over.

Hello! Aside from a couple images that are from the very end of Mass Effect 3, I will not be discussing spoilers in the text for anything. Just the images!

The 7th generation of consoles introduced something that hadn't really existed for mainstream audiences in the past; capturing screenshots and footage. Early on I recognized that the Share button on the DualShock 4 was going to be important in the coming years, but I never expected it to become important to me and my time playing games. That cataloging my time with certain titles could be incredibly rewarding, that it would transform the experiences I had.

My first forays into using capture tools were simply playing games on Steam and hitting F12 at certain moments, and then uploading the ones I was fond of along with silly, dumb captions that a 14 year-old would think was funny. Time progressed, and then we see me uploading matches that I had in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. That system was incredibly limited, because you could only upload from the game itself, and it had to be shorter than a certain length, so I often chose to do highlights so that a longer match would make the cut. It was crude and had no real creative input or control from me as a player. Those highlights often skipped the moments I loved most in those matches, but that was I all I could do as a teen with no way of recording a console (and not really willing to invest in the tech to do so).

Overwatch is sorta where things really change.

I got really into Overwatch. Like, "1500 hours of playing as just D.Va, sometimes top 500 on PS4" level. I am good at playing the gay mech pilot. The PlayStation 4's Share functionality that I could save footage of all my great D.Va bombs, and the system's ShareFactory app meant that I later ended up making montages of those bombs. I've made maybe three dozen D.Va montages? And then there are a couple offshoots, like Hanzo, and I ended up loving Wrecking Ball so much last summer that I started a series of making ones for him too. Making those montages meant I was combing through hours of footage looking for those sweet moments where Deevs yelled "I'm on FIRE!", and thus that I relived a fair amount of my time with that game. It helped reinforce those memories, and while I've (finally) fallen off the game recently, I can recall a lot of moments both because the game is great and because I got to watch them again and again.

But that's a multiplayer game. For single-player titles, it feels like it took until 2018 for me to really try and capture good moments. I did take a fair number in Fallout 4 in 2015, but that was still using Steam's clunky architecture. The first real story-focused game that I spent time taking some nice photos in was Assassin's Creed: Origins, partially because that game actually had a photo mode for me to use. This carried over to Odyssey, a game I decided to keep my thoughts on contained to a Twitter thread. I'd certainly done short threads about a number of games before Odyssey, but having one that I returned to over multiple weeks helped with a number of things; it felt like I was easily able to revisit my memories and also share them with others, something I had been doing with Smash, Overwatch, and other games before, but never in a way that worked super well. I could share moments from Odyssey, but the ones I did were usually vista shots; capturing dialogue was harder on a console with the way the PS4's functionality was built, so the small bits of story that ended up in my feed either had no accompanying image or were from my phone's camera.

About a month after finishing Odyssey, I decided to replay Mass Effect 1, which launched an obsession that I've been unable to shake. I didn't really record my thoughts on 1 or 2 in any special way like I did Odyssey, but 3 was a different beast.

If you read the piece I wrote about Commander Shepard in December, you saw that I utilized a few personal captures from that first run I did of Mass Effect 3. The only reason I can recall that I started taking them at all was because ME3 was actually pretty damn good looking still, while the first two entries were a bit...eh. I started taking them a couple hours into the game proper, when I arrived at the Citadel for the first time. The ones I took were mostly random; even though I adored the Sur'Kesh mission, I didn't end up taking any pictures during it, and my capture rate only really ramped up when I started the Citadel DLC and played that and the final two missions in one sitting. That ended up being about 500 files, which at the time felt like a lot.

A couple weeks after that, in the twilight days of 2018, I finally succumbed to keep playing the series and returned to Mass Effect 1. That game has cool art and design in a number of places, but the obviously dated graphics kept me from going a bit crazy, so that folder ended with 300 screenshots. A lot, but way less than my first time with 3. Upon restarting 2, I found myself taking many more, both because 2 was still the game I was least familiar with (when I played 2 last year, I ran through it in two days, and missed a fair amount of content. I also didn't have the DLC at the time, so that added some interest), which ran up to 850 captures. That's a lot; more than double 1, and 1.5x my first run of 3.

Then I return to Mass Effect 3.

By the time I leave Earth, there are eighty pictures in the folder. That number will double before I reach the Citadel. I keep taking more and more, and eventually there are 6GB worth of images sitting in that thing. My run ended up being about 36 hours or so, which means I was taking around 97 an hour...more than one a minute. When my left hand wasn't in the typical WASD position, it moved to have Windows + Print Screen ready for any instance that I deemed worthy of saving for later. What made those instances worthy? Pretty much any time that Shepard was on the screen either saying a cool line or doing something neat.

If I could, I would go for getting one during those very short bits between the camera cuts between characters, where there would be no subtitles (I could have just turned them off, but subtitles are nice and also good for some captures). So sometimes I was taking three within five seconds or so, trying to get a good shot, without awkward lighting or facial expressions. That's led to this folder with 3000 pictures in it (I have actually whittled it down to 3306 so far, but 3436 is what I ended the game at) and...it's kinda surreal. Taking them became a reflex at some point, pressing away. If I ever accidentally hit just the Windows key and exited out of the game, I would quit out and load a save to make sure I could keep taking shots (exiting out of a program stops your from taking screens of it). I wanted to capture as much as possible.

Like Odyssey, I ended up having a thread dedicated to the Mass Effect games, but unlike Odyssey most of the tweets in them contained at least one (if not four) captures, because I had the ability to yoink ones from any bit of the game easily. I took so many of them, and for every one I didn't like there were three or four that were acceptable, if not really rad. I constantly wanted to share what I was feeling, and when I did manage to restrain myself from just posting a dozen screens at once, I could just check out the files and reminisce.

I can't say there's a real pattern or progression with how I've experienced and share my time with games, based on all this. Sure, it's gotten more open and at times more...extensive? It's hard to point at my attempt to capture every frame of Mass Effect 3 as being this new step because I played that on PC, where I always had the ability to take good, clean, uninterrupted screens. I guess it took me figuring out about using Windows and Print Screen to actually go the distance (and I only looked that up because Origin didn't have one that I could find!), but there is something with how I've spent more and more of my game time devoted to this over the years.

There are actually quite a few moments in the game where my grabs from my first run ended up being better than the ones in my second. Even though this is a bummer for when I scroll through, they still exist as reminders of what Mass Effect is to me and are extremely evocative. When I eventually return to the series at some point, I know I'll have to take lots of pictures again, even though I've done so before. It's become a part of the experience; despite the fact that my first and second run of Mass Effect 3 involved making almost all of the same decisions (the only difference being the Ashley/Kaidan choice from 1), I want to keep those playthroughs preserved in some way. It feels...right, for Mass Effect. Or maybe just Commander Shepard; maybe I've done all this for Shepard. She is in almost every screenshot I take, after all.

Am I going to catalog every game I play in the future? Of course not. In fact for most games I play (especially on PC) I don't anticipate capturing nearly as many images as I did with the Mass Effect series. But I cannot deny how nice it has been to be able to share the ones I took of Riley Shepard in her fight against the Reapers, and how wonderful it is to scroll through the now thousands of ones I hold, seeing the story progress and remembering the small, heartwarming sequences that are in that trilogy. It's a series that's held my attention for weeks now, and I just want to spend more time thinking about it.

To close this out, I do feel like I should include some of my favorite grabs from my second run of Mass Effect 3. <3

Hey! There are unmarked spoilers for the Mass Effect Trilogy below! Doesn't really make sense to hide them since they're kinda major parts of this.

Video games tend to make me really emotional. Most of the games that hover around being in my "top ten" have at the very least made me tear up if not outright breakdown sobbing. They've ranged from great epics like Kingdom Hearts, to small experiences like To the Moon. Even things like Super Mario Odyssey and Assassin's Creed Odyssey pulled at my heartstrings in certain ways. When I finished Yakuza 6: The Song of Life earlier this year, I played the last stretch in one sitting that took about six or seven hours, and most of that had tears streaming down my face as I participated in Kazuma Kiryu's final battle. This has been how I respond to media since I was a kid, and if my reaction to Mass Effect is any indication, it's going to continue as I get older.

I beat Mass Effect 1 in I think December 2011, or 2012, I'm not sure. I bought 1 & 2 on sale for $5 each on the Steam sale, because of course I did. I played as the default John Shepard, had a decent time, and then bounced off 2 almost immediately for a few reasons. It took Alex and Vinny playing through the first game to inspire me to finally give the trilogy a second chance. I expected to have a decent time, seeing more of Garrus, Wrex and Liara, but now...now I'm just thinking about Shepard. The custom protagonist who became someone I cared about immensely, just about as much as I ever have for a fictional character.

Let's back up for a second.

Mass Effects 1 & 2 feel more about their parties than their shared protagonist. 1 involves copious amounts of exposition, and it's all really good, but Shepard feels like the vessel that you as the player is using to understand this world. This is evident in how much her dialogue revolves around questioning the nature of various races of Citadel space and the functionality of everything from governments to religion. In contrast, 2 is more more about the personalities you encounter, each having a loyalty mission meant to flesh out their place in the galaxy (1 actually does have loyalty missions in some fashion, but they're fairly short sequences, and aren't required to increase a character's chances of surviving the final mission). Shepard emerges more in 2, but like 1 is more a conduit for the player to experience things. Then 3 comes along, and things change. Commander Shepard feels like she's dealing with the consequences of war, and that the losses she's had are coming back to haunt her. The spark of change makes sense; the sense of danger is greatly enhanced in 3 due to the Reaper invasion, and this has the effect of making Shepard the focal point of the resistance, of the galaxy's efforts to survive genocide.

But at the same time that everyone finally knows to rely on Shepard (and thus acknowledge that the fate of everyone rests on her shoulders), she is also really dealing with the ramifications of war. Mass Effect 1 and 2 largely amounted to kinda covert missions. They were events that the public could see but weren't always looking at (see: Feros). 3 is plain war. You run through cities that civilians perished in, and constantly hear about the growing numbers of casualties on many fronts. During the Menae mission, Garrus points towards a large orange spot on Palaven and mentions that it's where he was born. A lot of Mass Effect 3 is gut punches as you run around and try to prepare for the final fight; every moment thousands, if not millions, are dying, and while you can go save some people, that isn't your overt focus.

You spend a lot of time in Mass Effect 3 on the Citadel running around doing busywork. For a lot of people that's going to be this weird anomaly, but for me it did feel purposeful. It fits into both actively building up your military strength and also makes the characters more human. With the struggles of war so apparent, they need that time off the battlefield more than ever to stop themselves from succumbing to its effects. The Normandy's crew (and the friends you pick up along the way) are pushing themselves to the limit and branching out to do everything and anything to prepare for battle. That means Shepard is stretching herself thin enough to start having nightmares about the war. I feel like I've seen a lot of skepticism around her focusing on the boy who dies on Earth (i.e. why she suddenly has nightmares about loss now considering Virmire, the suicide mission), but to me it felt like that event was a major event for her because of his innocence and youth. In my playthrough, it felt like she was finally there firsthand to see the Reapers' work on normal people, and that got to her. It represented her not having any real rest anymore, as even her dreams aren't safe; that goes back to her needing to withdraw from battle at times and simply be diplomatic, to take the edge off.

Even though she is having some downtime (arguably more than the first two games) Shepard feels like she is pouring her entire being into the war effort. She throws herself at challenges, confronts any adversary and meets any ally she can to make any difference possible. I felt like I really saw this in how combat worked in this game; in Mass Effect 1, Shepard is damn near silent during most gameplay (even when performing things like biotic attacks), which was fine at the time, but when 3 rolls around she is yelling in anger when she unleashes a Nova; she calls for allies to get to cover. It feels like her personal stakes have been elevated, and it just hounded in her sacrifices even more.

I chose to spend time with Liara and Garrus for most of the series. Wrex's absence as a party member in 3 helped with this, and while I like Kaidan, EDI, and Tali decently enough (James SUCKS though), they aren't Shepard's lover nor her best friend, respectively. The moments between Shepard and her asari girlfriend grew some awkward flirting to real love, to something that made me feel like Shepard absolutely had to survive just to get back to Liara. Garrus had had my back almost since the beginning, always feeling like I could trust him with anything. Running with them across No Man's Land and in the final push to the Citadel beam was heart-wrenching. Having to send them back to the Normandy after Harbinger's attack was painful but absolutely necessary; they couldn't follow Shepard, even if she was ultimately going to live. This was her fight to finish.

From when the Alliance and all the assembled forces began the counterattack above Earth to Shepard crawling across the joined Crucible/Citadel towards the final choice, I was a mess. I was unconscionable. Despite everything, she, one small person, was going to defy reality. Her will was strong enough to do that, and that broke me even more. Everything was coming to a close because she gave her everything. I spent about five hours going from the beginning of the Citadel DLC to the end of the game, and it had me crying from laughter, happiness, and despair at varying instances. Days later I am still feeling the effects of it all, breaking out into sobs many times thinking about Shepard and her journey.

Then comes the choice. I'd known about the choice and the repercussions of the choice for years, since I was a teen who decided that they weren't likely going to get around to 3 and wanted to know why everyone was in a tizzy at the time. There's Control, which has Shepard's consciousness get uploaded to be the new Reaper overseer, or something, and could be argued is the best ending since nobody dies (except her) and the Reapers help rebuild the galaxy. Merge is a similar ending except every being becomes synthetic, which is...weird and kinda invasive in a lot of ways? That one feels wrong to me (at the very least, in the context of my Shepard). And then comes Destroy, which sacrifices synthetic life and is the only ending where one critical thing happens; it is the only one where Commander Shepard can live. If your EMS is high enough, there's a shot at the end that shows her taking a breath, and gives a canon possibility of her surviving the war. That little sliver gave me all the hope I needed.

I knew what I would choose years ago. I knew when I finally committed to playing the trilogy in its entirety a couple weeks ago that things could only go one way.

I couldn't choose anything other than Destroy. There was no way I was going to let Commander Riley Shepard fade away in service of the galaxy. She deserves to live with those she loves, those she fought with and for. I cried for hours not only because she had to give up nearly everything, but because there was the small chance that she would survive, that everything she had done for the galaxy would lead to her possibly living a happy life with Liara. I couldn't condemn her to fully sacrificing everything at the end of the day. I wanted a fluffy happy ending (OK, yea, it's not all sunshine and rainbows, but that's beside the point. Also I'm allowing myself some headcanons) where Shepard saves the damn galaxy, and trillions of lives to come in the future from Reaper threats. She did it with help, but she's the catalyst for everything.. She put on a brave face and held the galaxy on her shoulders. She is the one who fought for others, who gathered allies, made amends, and fought like hell. And she deserves to properly rest.