Preamble

Back in the spring of 2023, Square Enix announced that they would be doing a remaster of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, and this remaster would feature the first "official" English language release of the game since it first graced the world in 1983. Initially, there was excitement among those in the visual novel enthusiast crowd. Unfortunately, that excitement was immediately dashed upon the reveal that the Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken or The Portopia Serial Murder Case re-release would utilize AI and machine learning to generate art assets and localize the game. Moreover, Square Enix shared that an AI would scan and process player-written sentences in this release instead of the game using an in-game verb-noun parser, as in the original. Square Enix later clarified the technology used for their "AI Tech Preview" was a purely educational endeavor, would be released for free, and would mark the start of a partnership with the French-American company Hugging Face, Inc., to improve a "Natural Language Processing" database. You can check out the game's Steam page to read up on the details of what Square Enix planned, but be warned; it is pretty obvious they had an AI write the game's Steam page.

I won't lie and say I completely understand how this technology works in a perfect world. I can relay what Square Enix promised when they first announced this project and their publicly disclosed intentions. The AI technology Square Enix stated they would be using is categorized as a "Natural Language Process" (i.e., NLP). An NLP is a machine learning system that uses deep learning and text data sets to understand conversational rather than technical language. In this case, the use of an NLP system allows the game to understand player text inputs, parse out standard spelling and grammar mistakes, and permit the game to generate new responses to the player's information that did not exist before. I want everyone to know I wrote that sentence while gritting my teeth, as that's the "promise" in a best-case scenario. What advantages does this system pose to a simple verb-noun parser or an adventure game engine like SCUMM? In theory, players do not have to get specific about their verb-noun agreement and don't need to fuss with lines of logic that need to be location-specific as they need to be in classic adventure games like Zok, Maniac Mansion, and, in this case, Portopia. Likewise, the conjugation of verbs shouldn't pose an issue, with the root of the verb flagging the AI systems as interconnected inputs of equal value. Furthermore, this experiment was to become a series with additional classic titles getting a similar treatment in the future. Square Enix even created a "SQUARE ENIX AI Tech Preview" franchise page on Steam, suggesting as much. Being the early adopters of a lot of "cutting edge technology," Square Enix essentially used Portopia, a game with a short and simple script, as an experiment to see if they could cut out traditional localization third-party sources by opting for AI language systems.

Or, that was the hope. If you check the page for this re-release I linked earlier, you can immediately see that this remains the lowest-reviewed game Square Enix has ever posted on Steam. The game met a massive backlash almost immediately upon its release for what some perceived as a lazy and exploitative use of AI to a classic video game that deserved better. This reaction was a mix of people against the use of AI for game development altogether, and those, like myself, who felt its use in this specific example was clunky, awkward, and led to a vastly inferior experience compared to the original game, which you STILL have to rely on fan translations if you want to play in non-Japanese languages. I played this "Tech Preview" at launch. I quickly grew frustrated with how its language processing worked and its inability to deliver on even some of its promises of detecting conversational language. Eventually, I defaulted to using simple verb-noun phrases as if I were playing a classic Zork text adventure circa the 1980s, and only then would the AI cooperate. I was not alone in this regard, and Square Enix announced shortly after the game's release that it viewed the AI Tech Preview as just that and would be working to improve the game over time. So, against my better judgment, I played the game this week, hoping that the large amounts of text data its AI got in subsequent months would result in a better experience. I hate to spoil things, but I was wrong.

You Need To Understand How Important The Portopia Serial Murder Case Is To The Japanese Games Industry To Appreciate This Tragedy

As I have repeatedly stated on this site and most recently on my blog, speculating about the messy development of Dragon Quest XII, Yuji Horii is a big deal. Though he is most commonly associated with Dragon Quest, it is essential to note that the second game he ever worked on was The Portopia Serial Murder Case (i.e., Portopia). Portopia is a seminal work in the history of video games in several regards. Foremost, it pioneered the visual novel genre and codified a gameplay template that persists today. To suggest that developers such as Spike Chunsoft, Capcom, Idea Factory, Key, Mages/5pb, Type-Moon, and even indie developers outside of Japan owe a debt of gratitude to Portopia and Yuji Horii is an understatement. The genre as it exists today is primarily thanks to Horii and Portopia taking Japan by storm and being a water-cooler conversation piece during the early phases of the Japanese bubble economy. It spawned dozens of cheap imitators, and some of the creators of those imitators are now industry standbys in the realm of visual novels. How we speak of Dune II establishing the template of the RTS game, World of Warcraft cementing the station of MMOs, Minecraft codifying video game crafting mechanics, Street Fighter II paving the way for the rise of fighting games, or Mario Bros pioneering platformers is how people rightfully talk about Portopia's legacy to modern visual novels.

Likewise, the game was groundbreaking at the time of its release. In Portopia, you are a detective in charge of investigating a murder. However, your player character does not collect clues or interrogate suspects directly. Instead, you command an assistant named Yasu to perform tasks by either typing directions into the game's word parser or, in the case of the Famicom release, navigating a verb command menu as you do in early point-and-click adventure games. The game takes place entirely in the first-person perspective and utilizes an early example of a nonlinear open-world gameplay structure. You are free to explore environments and collect clues in whatever order you wish, and the only "grade" or score to speak of is how quickly you can resolve the mystery. There's an in-game calendar; days pass as you travel to new destinations or return to old ones. The story also mimics the game's nonlinear format and provides an early example of a twist ending in video games. There's a reasonably in-depth cast of characters to interact with using Yasu, and each one has specific requirements for you to get their whole story. Oh, and by the way, all of this was conceived in 1981 and released in 1983 on the NEC PC-6000 series of home computers, which only sported a 3.8 MHz CPU and up to 32 KBs of RAM.

It was a highly ambitious title that immediately impacted the Japanese video game industry. It is a game with no "game over" and refused to force players into a losing state when that was standard practice. That design choice stuck with Nintendo's Eiji Aonuma, the current and longstanding figurehead behind the Legend of Zelda franchise. Aonuma has even gone on record saying that Portopia was the first game he ever played and was one of the primary reasons he entered video game development as a career. Hideo Kojima has echoed a similar sentiment in that he has called Portopia one of the three most important games to him and referred to its plot twist as something that helped form his style and voice with the stories he tells in his video games. If you enjoy Snatcher or Metal Gear Solid, understand that Hideo Kojima thinks those games were only possible with the release of Portopia. Its investigative and open-ended gameplay can even be found outside Japan with titles like ICOM's Déjà Vu. Still, the comparisons to Snatcher, 428: Shibuya Scramble, Ace Attorney, and Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors are ones their developers are not coy about. People who know and respect the history of visual novels as a medium and art form have shown their utmost respect to both Horii and Portopia, which makes Square Enix's treatment of the IP all the more heinous.

There Are So Many Examples Of How To Do A Respectful Remaster Of A Classic Visual Novel, And Square Enix Followed None Of Them

I want to throw things back to something I wrote in 2021 to lay out why Square Enix didn't have to take the course they did with Portopia. In 2021, we saw THREE English and European releases of long-demanded visual novels by Nintendo. Those games were The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures and The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve, which were put into a compilation pack titled "The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles," and Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir as well as Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind. Both The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles and the two Switch remasters of Famicom Detective Club took the standard route of traditionally localizing their respective games with caveats and applying a new coat of paint to the original game's visuals. The second of those two steps is less pronounced with The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles than Famicom Detective Club, as it was only five to six years removed from its original release on the 3DS, but both games look leaps better than the first time we saw them. With the Famicom Detective Club Switch games, the remasters did not shy away from the sometimes crusty and antiquated gameplay structures and design of the original and kept them as is, which is both good and bad. Personally, I would leave the games the way they functioned in the past outside of bug fixes because, in the cases of Famicom Detective Club and Portopia, we are so far removed from their initial releases that you can only assume they are primarily going to catch the attention of hardcore fans that know what they are getting into.

And it is not as if this model for remastering a "classic" visual novel is an industry secret. Just this year, everyone in the visual novel community was jumping for joy that Tsukihime: A Piece Of Blue Glass Moon is coming to the West in 2024, and Square Enix, of all developers, published an incredibly well-done localization of Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo. So, what gives? Here's my theory. I think Square Enix took the entire script for Portopia, which is not that much, and then ran that script through an AI language algorithm, proofread what the AI spat out once or twice, and then published the result to see if such an "easy" turnaround could suffice as a game release for an older visual novel. With the message from consumers pretty clear that it is not, I think this "AI Tech Preview" franchise or experiment is dead. Now, why didn't Yuji Horii veto this experiment? Unfortunately, Horii has a personal weakness in this regard. Even when he first worked on the original game, he always wanted the Portopia games to be modeled and processed through an AI with natural language processing. While his primary passion has been fantasy, he is a slight sci-fi nerd regarding the possibilities of AI. On paper, this ill-fated project ticked all the right boxes for his interests, and he probably signed off, hoping for his fantasies related to the technology to come true.

But what makes this game so bad from the onset? Why would someone like myself call it "damaged goods" from the get-go? First, let's talk about the art assets in this game. The backgrounds come from, wait for it, the "Kobe Tourism Bureau!" That's right, the re-release uses stock photo backgrounds licensed from the Japanese equivalent of The Chamber of Commerce! Now, I don't hate photo backgrounds as much as some in the visual novel enthusiast community and think plenty of examples (i.e., 428: Shibuya Scramble) have more than justified their use. The issue with Portopia using them is how the transparencies for the player UI layer on top of the backgrounds, which makes finding clues hidden in the environment a complete pain in the ass. Having the dialogue display in the center of the screen, rather than the bottom, like in the original, makes seeing objects on top of furniture and knowing to pick them up almost impossible. Worse, the backgrounds are muted in terms of their color palette, which means you can easily forget they are a critical part of the game. This version of the game tries to compensate for these problems by having a glowing star for every item you need to pick up. However, that bright star-shaped outline takes over the actual shape of the object, making it challenging to figure out what you need to type to pick it up.

Even if you want to humor the idea that the original Portopia needs some smoothing to its rougher edges, this AI Tech Preview promises as much and delivers on none of that. On the Steam page and in the previous press releases, Square Enix said that the AI they used should allow for natural conversations beyond the original script. And let me tell you, that's complete bullshit! Every time I tried to press Yasu to deviate from the original course of the story, he just acted flummoxed and stared blankly. What happens when you ask Yasu or any named characters how they are doing or feeling? The game doesn't have anything for you. Trying to query Yasu to reveal additional details beyond the original script, like asking him for motives, if victims have relationships, or where he was before the murder investigation started, dole a big old goose egg. I have a reputation for reveling in histrionics, but this re-release is fraudulent. It is neither a respectful homage or remake of the original, nor does it use modern technology to make the original more accessible or entertaining to new prospective audiences. Also, why did they pick the Sharp X1 version of the game from 1983? This port is neither the original game nor the far more popular Famicom version with the verb point-and-click grid. Suppose Square Enix was afraid of people not knowing how to play Portopia because of its parser use. Why didn't they opt for the Famicom versions' more familiar graphic adventure format?

This Game Was SO ROUGH At Launch, But Has The Generative AI Gotten Better Over Time As Promised?

No. Square Enix and their AI partner, Hugging Face, promised that the game would only get better with more data, but my experience suggests otherwise. The same issues with sentence structure and verb-noun agreement that existed when the game launched months ago STILL exist today! Whether this is a sign that Square Enix stopped paying their bills to their partner or this is ANOTHER EXAMPLE of them jumping on new technology and abandoning it in record time is anyone's guess. There are almost too many issues to list. The most significant problem is that using conversational language, which the game encourages you to use, does not work. Instead, you need to limit your vocabulary to virtually the same style of simplified verb-noun sentences that worked in the original game. For example, at the start of the game, saying "Let's go to the crime scene" or "Take me to the crime scene" doesn't work, and Yasu repeats one of five possible dialogue prompts, indicating that he doesn't understand what you want him to do. What does work is "go to crime scene," all in lowercase, WHICH IS WHAT YOU TYPED IN THE ORIGINAL GAME!

If you don't play this game with a guide, you practically must start everything you type with a verb, or the AI won't understand what you are sending. With the original, the game engine checked your included verbs and nouns using a basic word check, but with this AI checking for basic grammar and conjugation, it is shockingly more brutal to work with. Worse, you'd think an AI would help in pruning the often fickle noun selection the original game often relied on, but it doesn't. Sometimes, you need to type "ground" and other times, "floor" to find clues on the surface of new rooms, but you can't use the terms interchangeably, and there's no rhyme or reason when that's the case. To issue one positive takeaway, you no longer need to worry about including character-specific language in your sentences in certain circumstances. The clearest example comes when you attempt to interrogate suspects and need to take photographs of them. You can take these photographs by typing "take a photo" and hitting enter.

However, this point returns me to the issue of how limited the language model in this game feels. Below is a list of "valid" ways to start sentences in the "AI Tech Preview" version of Portopia. To clarify, I recorded notes during my first playthrough when this first launched and during my second playthrough this month of the valid verbs the game understands. I have noted any new words added to the game's databank I experienced by bolding the word. Unbolded words are verbs or sentence starters that existed in the initial release. Full disclosure: There are likely ways to use some of these verbs where they are not the initial part of valid phrases. Also, there's no way for me to experience every possible correct input in this game. Nonetheless, these are the known verbs the AI can process, I was able to find, and, in general, if you deviate from these, you will more than likely end up with a confused Yasu complaining that he doesn't understand what you are saying. So, this modern release can detect:

• Tell me...
• Go to...
• Go... (item retrieval command commonly followed by "get" or "pick up")
• Go back... (location-based command)
• Ask around...
• Call...
• Check...
• Investigate...
• Open...
• Tell...
• Look at...
• Take...
• Read...
• Press...
• Use...
• Unlock...
• Call in...
• Ask about...
• Arrest...
• Dial...
• What is... - (This is the only commonly used or recommended sentence starter I could reliably use that did not start with a verb or character's name).
• Hit...
• Show...
• Search...
• Knock on...
• Shout...
• Take off your shirt.

There are a few things I want to discuss about this list. First, notice how few valid verbs there are in the game. Maybe I missed a few here and there, but even with the power of AI, it is only a handful more than the original game's text parser, which raises the question of why Square Enix went this route even more. If their new technology is not elevating the original script even the slightest bit, why not give people a traditionally localized version of Portopia, warts and all? Second, since playing the game, I could only detect a single example of the game improving its databank of verbs or sentences. Near the end of the game, instead of "investigate the diary," you now need to type "read the diary." So, the one update to the game I found modified a required action to use a single-use or limited-use verb (i.e., "read") when it previously used the more ubiquitous in-game verb "investigate." The one example I could find of the AI changing the game's scripting is an example of it making the game HARDER TO PLAY!

Of All Things, They Did Not Touch Or Change The Ending

Nevertheless, one creative decision by Square Enix related to the 2023 release of Portopia errs ever so closely to respectability. Regardless of how involved the AI language model becomes or has been, Square Enix has left the ending of Portopia entirely untouched. This decision is both a blessing and a curse. For video game historians, it is a triumph as, as I suggested earlier, the game's conclusion is an early example of a twist ending, much like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is to film. Nonetheless, for most, this decision is a curse as getting the game's "true ending" is as inscrutable and unintuitive as it was in 1983. For those with no idea what I am talking about, let's get into it. However, be warned, this next point is a massive spoiler, but at the same time, you need to know this because there's no logical way to complete Portopia. After you reach the end of the game and have collected every clue there is, the story ends on what you at first assume is a cliffhanger. The initial murder case spirals into a serial murder, hence the game's title. Nonetheless, all of your tips and possible suspects lead to dead ends. The case goes "cold," and you are left with an empty feeling that you have failed. Because the game has no fail states or a proper "game over," many people who played the game in the 80s at first thought they needed to replay it and check for mistakes. Unfortunately for them, getting the game's ending is slightly more nefarious.

You see, throughout the game, you interview every named character but one. And it just so happens you learn from an earlier interrogation that one of the few leads you have about the suspect is that they have a scar or birthmark in the shape of a butterfly. You also know the lead suspect is male, and you find nothing if you request the other male characters strip off their shirts. By the time the case appears dead, you have searched everyone except for one character: Yasu. The person who performs all of your tasks is the only one who remains immune to your investigation, and when you reach the end of the game, he is also the one who encourages you to give up. He also knows everything about everyone, even when they shouldn't, and when you request he take off his shirt, he refuses. You have to type "take off your shirt" three times to get him to reveal his butterfly-shaped scar. The game's stand-in for its UI or parser was the villain. When Kojima says this is the game that inspired him to get into game development, this shocking revelation, as rudimentary as it might seem today, is what hooked him. The game's tutorial giver and personification of its gameplay betraying you? It was unbelievable then, and it is still a compelling idea today, considering how many games have utilized a similar plot device.

I love this plot twist, but don't get me wrong; it's still an incredibly contrived gameplay device! There's nothing in-game to direct you toward this solution, and even at the time, Portopia's ending was a source of derision and the butt-end of jokes. As the Giant Bomb wiki page for Portopia so succinctly explains, Portopia's ending was the source of a proto-gaming meme in Japan with people in Otaku and video game hobbyist circles shouting "Yasu is the culprit!" whenever the answer to an adventure game puzzle felt too illogical or weird for much of the 1980s and 1990s. Yasu was, for a moment, referred to as "Japan's most famous criminal," further laying out the indelible mark Portopia had in Japanese culture. The first Portopia was followed by Hokkaidou Rensa Satsujin: Ohotsuku ni Kiyu!!, which moved the setting from Kobe to Hokkaido and stuck with the point-and-click interface instead of the original noun-verb text parser. The second title in the trilogy is a much more fully realized dark and gritty detective story and makes well on many of the promises seen in the first Portopia. Also, depending on which port you play, it is an incredible-looking early 80s adventure game, though you need to rely on fan translations. The third game in the "Yuji Horii Mysteries" franchise is Karuizawa Yuukai Annai, which might go down in history as the weirdest video game Yuji Horii has ever made. It is a soft-core ecchi game with nudity and sexually suggestive content and plays like an action RPG, making it the weakest entry in the franchise.

Nonetheless, please do yourself a favor and find one of the MANY fan translations of the original and have a go at playing it blind. Don't play this new AI-derived abomination Square Enix farted out as an experiment. Square Enix's shitty attempt to cut out the traditional localization channels sucks, and everyone who approved this project should be laughed at for thinking for even one second this would work. While The Portopia Serial Murder Case is not the gold standard for the visual novel genre, you can see so much of its DNA in Poroptia that it is one of the more eye-opening historical exercises you can have in video games. The fact that Horii pioneered not one but TWO genres that still stand as mainstays both in Japan and around the world lays out his case as one of the most influential figures in the industry, regardless of how you may feel about the current malaise with the state of the Dragon Quest franchise. With all that in mind, I hope you will join me in saying Portopia deserves better.

Author's Note: This is Part Two of a two-part series. If you missed the first part a link is provided below. Also, be aware that this series delves in and discusses SPOILERS! You have been warned!

• Finishing Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin [Part 1] - This Blog Is Sponsored By CHAOS!

Part 6: The Middle Act Slog

When you compare it to the field of the Souls genre, the skill floor for Stranger of Paradise is low, and that's often its best attribute. Sure, there are animation priorities, I-frames, and specific bosses that are significantly more manageable if you know how to cancel their finishers. Nevertheless, as long as you put in your time, the likelihood of finishing it is reasonably high. Yes, the comprehensive classes show depth, and even more complex encounters require you to develop and execute specific strategies. Nonetheless, as expressive as the gameplay can be, there is a point near the middle where the moment-to-moment gameplay starts to feel like you are going through the motions. You are free to make the game as complicated as you want, and the cluttered inventory management suggests as much, but you don't need to care about maximal leveling in this game or being 100% on point to get through Stranger of Paradise. Knowing how and when to bounce between the jobs is fun. Still, considering the amount of balance across all of them, it's a task you, as the player, assign yourself rather than the game demanding such organic experimentation. Likewise, as we will review soon, the sense of "specialness" between the jobs ebbs significantly past the game's halfway point.

But that's ignoring the more significant issue with the middle and final acts of Stranger of Paradise. In this game, you become a paper shredder, making most of the preamble leading to the boss battles more of a trudge than a rewarding trek to glory. Indeed, there are spikes in difficulty when you encounter those boss battles and explore optional side content, but most of what you fight is a cakewalk. You can try to address this problem by bumping up the difficulty setting, and I should mention I played this game on "normal" for most of my playthrough. Nonetheless, increasing the gameplay's grit doesn't fix its issues with its lack of level or enemy variety. Especially when you start to narrow your job search, you sure do see the same bats, birds, wolves, and goblins, and considering their gimmicks and attack priorities don't change as the story progresses, the game mechanically loses steam quickly. Even when you swap out jobs or customize special abilities or passives, you watch the same finishing animations and quips to a nauseating degree.

Looking back at my first post, I should have spent more time discussing how little interest this game has in rocking the boat regarding level design and mission structure. Yes, this game's silly nature of Jack wanting to kill everything in front of him matches the game's "Just move forward and break shit" structure, but that's all the game gives you to keep your interest running. If you are starting to grow tired of the fiddly inventory system or the annoying loot management problems, there's a possibility this middle act is when the game breaks for you. The levels are linear corridors that distract you with their nostalgic renditions of Final Fantasy classics, but they aren't "fun." The interactive elements of the environments are few and far between, and there aren't enough examples of the game doing unique things to differentiate them. The vast majority boils down to the most inane switch and level puzzles, which bake a groan-inducing amount of backtracking into every mission. The weather-swapping mechanic with the Final Fantasy XIII level was interesting. Still, it's a pallet swap of the night-day cycle seen in at least two previous environments.

On top of that, the willy-nilly nature of the worlds sometimes makes it a pain in the ass for you to know where you need to go or what you need to do. For example, there are a ton of switch puzzles in the Final Fantasy IV and V levels, and the game fails to clue you into how to use them or where they might be to open up new paths. Worse, some of these levels are outright boring and painfully repetitious. The number of times you explore luscious green forests or damp grey caves is a bummer, and there are occasions, like with the Final Fantasy VIII lava cave, when the developers outright selected the WRONG LEVEL to represent a game. Correspondingly, HOT DAMN is the Final Fantasy XV level DIRE! It's an interior office level and the least compelling level in the game. The graphical fidelity and production values of the game's backdrops and environments are also all over the place. On several occasions, because of the monotonous level design, finding corner exits or passages that lead to necessary quest items or interactable objects is more challenging than it has any right to be. The Final Fantasy XII tomb level is the worst example of this problem, which features repeating sandy brown walls and backgrounds, which can make it visually impossible to figure out where you are without the odd colored light filter. It's one thing to call this game a mechanics-focused experience from Team Ninja, but that should not be an excuse to handwave the enormous amount of copy-paste-level design.

Nevertheless, the real reason I found the middle portion of this game to be a slog stems from it failing to recognize what makes its opening and concluding acts so memorable. After Astos gives Jack the task of beating the Four Fiends, the story, one of the game's best parts, only comes out in spurts, usually at the ends of boss battles. Even then, from Mount Gulg to the fight against the Ur-Dragon King in Vigilia Court, the story is played relatively straight and doesn't do enough to revel in its schlock as it does in its initial chapters. Many people talk about the Sinatra scene in the field or Jack pulling out an iPod to listen to Limp Bizkit, but until we get to the game's concluding two levels, nothing in it even remotely matches those moments. Considering where this game's narrative ends up, it's bananas that it doesn't do more to pre-empt itself. Certainly, there's a recurring story beat about the party members trying to jog Jack's memory, and his rebuffs are a continual source of hilarity. Nonetheless, it's hard to get invested in these moments, considering everyone besides Jack feels like a soulless automaton. What few quips the supporting characters get are, at most, ten to fifteen seconds of witty banter while Jack is either screaming or acting incredulous.

Tangent: ALRIGHT, FINE! Let's Talk About Me Playing This With A Mouse And Keyboard Control Scheme!

I'm about to say something that will either piss you off or immediately cause you to click out of this blog, so get ready. Alright, are you prepared for what I am about to say? I play fighting and Souls games using a mouse and keyboard control scheme. Yeah. Crazy, right? Well, there's a reason why I play a majority of games this way, and part of it stems from a congenital joint issue and also my personal preference for video game controls. I like having things bound to hotkeys when playing action games, as if I am playing Diablo or World of Warcraft. I even have one of those large MMO mice with buttons on its side to make this easier. I also started this weird habit of playing every Final Fantasy game on a mouse and keyboard when this series began as an odd attempt to antagonize long-standing fans. I apologize for the latter; however, with age, this control option remains a lifeline for me. The second series of the Xbox Elite controller remains my favorite console controller today, but sometimes, I still find myself defaulting to old habits.

Playing Souls-like games on a mouse and keyboard is not a great time, but it is also not the worst thing you can do to yourself. With Final Fantasy Origin, I thought the granularity with where I could aim and place spells was better with a mouse than what I found with a traditional controller—similarly, ranged attacks, whether they be bows or spears, are noticeably more effortless with a mouse, compared to a controller, even when factoring in the game's highly generous auto-aim. However, using a mouse and keyboard setup has some pretty big pitfalls. The biggest one comes from the job-specific special abilities and parry mechanics. Moving and using these abilities on a hotkey isn't a great time, leading to frequent awkward finger reaches that remind me of using an Emacs text editor. By default, many hot-swappable passives and alternate abilities require you to use Ctrl or Alt, then slam a numerical number on the Number Pad or the standard array of numbers on your QWERTY keyboard. This layout isn't a problem in low-stakes battles, but with bosses with incredibly unforgiving animation priorities and I-frames, this can often lead to experiences that feel impossible. Or, at least, that's the case in standard Souls games. With Stranger of Paradise, even with my sub-optimal controls, I still felt like a walking murder machine able to level all that stood before me.

Part 7: The Difficulty Drops Off A Cliff Until The Final Battles

The gameplay and job system in Final Fantasy Origin was the priority for Team Ninja from beginning to end. It is the part of the game that feels the most polished, and for the most part, it drives your interest while you explore a handful of bland, meandering, and essentially linear environments. As I discussed in the last episode, there are many ways in which the Job and Affinity Systems opt you into new build paths and playstyles even if you don't immediately enjoy a new job. For example, I could not stand the Paladin, but after spending a few experience orbs (i.e., Anima Shards), I could get what I wanted from it and not have to worry about grinding away at it to keep my version of Jack on his feet during the game's final hours. Mostly, I enjoyed Origin's tech trees and swappable special moves and passives, but these systems have a few consequences. The first involves the breadth of your options and how the game buckles under its weight. With you able to bolt anything onto Jack at the drop of a hat, with zero consequence, none of the level-based elemental or combat gimmicks meant to impede your progress ever amount to much. Whole set pieces and bosses feel like they should be gear checks, and instead, the most superficial prep work can reduce them to dust.

This point of order leads me to another problem that rears its head in the back half of Stranger of Paradise. With so many jobs and gameplay mechanics, there does come a point when Team Ninja triaged their priorities and duplicated some of the design and animations across different job classes. Two jobs with a modified parry mechanic exist. There's the Swordfighter's Interception ability and the Ronin's Shenshin Stance. The difference is that one is easier to pull off but does less damage, and the other is the inverse, but that's it. They both have the same gimmick, and taking the time to level a job only to discover their capstone ability is a palette swap of another you have already seen or used is always a letdown. There is another significant downside with the capstone-ish nature of the job system when you err closer to the end. With so many top-tier jobs being better permutations of earlier jobs, when you start duel-wielding the expert classes, you can often discover broken strategies, which means you have zero reasons to revisit your progress with earlier tech trees. For example, when you unlock the Sage job, there's no real reason to play as a White Mage. Instead of keeping that job marginally in my rotation, I spent a bunch of experience orbs to max it out and move on with my life. There's a very "Thank you for your service, now goodbye" element to this job system, and I'm not suggesting that's a bad thing, as the natural exploration of new options and playstyles is rewarding.

And GOODNESS, are the last handful of jobs in this game outright broken! Assassin, Sage, Liberator, and Tyrant outpace their proceeding jobs, and it is not even a contest. Liberator is an excellent backup job because it can tank even the gnarliest boss moves without you dying. Tyrant's ability to attach any elemental affinity to your base weapon attacks means you can still take advantage of an elemental-based weakness with a melee job even if you are not a fan of magic casting. Sage being able to switch between black and white magic is BUSTED. The minute it becomes available to you, the fact it can do everything means you have virtually no reason to use any of the other magic-based job types. With Sage, I was not in low health at any point until the final levels because I always had the Regen status buff active, which was part of the reason I could pop off the Ultima spell pretty regularly, which you can use after three uses of white and black magic. The Assassin gains the ability to become invisible, which not only directs enemies to your party members but allows you to position yourself better to take advantage of back-attack opportunities, which, in the case of the Assassin, will enable you to stack critical hits and quickly waste away non-boss enemies in one go. Invisible is an ability I still feel like wasn't properly play-tested because being able to make enemy encounters not detect you for about half a minute is insane in a Souls-like game.

With most games of this type, you always feel like the difficulty curve is there, breathing down your neck. Even with Nioh and Nioh 2, there's a gap between what you want to have and what you can have, and that's not the case in Stranger of Paradise. Not only does the game drop shiny trinkets on the floor with every step you take, but every weapon type has something cool it can do that other weapons can't. You use these weapon abilities by either inputting a specific series of button combinations or by using R2 to trigger one you have on tap. And much like the job-specific abilities, the unlockable weapon-based ones are screen-filling super moves that utterly obliterate every non-boss enemy in the game. As a result, I don't think you can make a single character build past the second chapter that doesn't have at least one super move that instantly kills everything on the screen. It sounds odd, but I think this game gives you too many tools to put into your toolbox too soon. There's a campy charm to Jack being the badass he claims to be, but I genuinely feel you kick too much ass in this game for too long.

And I hate to bring up this topic again, but it's such a pain in the ass to synthesize all of the information and options this game gives you at the start and end of every mission. Whenever I finished an assignment, I felt like I spent ten to fifteen minutes alone trashing low-tier items and re-equipping my characters with better costumes and weapons that fit new job affinities or upcoming environments. Then, I would spend another ten minutes leveling up my characters and another seven or eight minutes swapping newly unlocked abilities into obtuse and obscure menus that were a pain to find. I dreaded seeing the pop-op when filling up a core on a job's tech tree, finding it unlocked a new combo, needing to remember the combo before bopping out, and then needing to track it down on a screen two or three removed from where I unlocked it. The entire process is so Byzantine that I never approached fluency whenever I had to engage with it. As much as this game banks on player exploration of its jobs, it is downright SHAMEFUL how poorly designed the menus are in this game. There are many things to use to customize your characters to make them look and feel unique, yet the entire process of doing so completely sucks.

Part 8: The Job System Might Keep Your Attention To The End, But Everything Else Is A Mess

But it's not all doom and gloom in Stranger of Paradise! First, I want to thank the developers for including the Anima Shards and giving players a viable way to level up unused or new job classes without grinding. Stacking these resources by refining accessories, which are not rare by any stretch of the word, leads to a relatively smooth experience when finding the high-tier or expert jobs that fit your playstyle. These shards, combined with the brief and straightforward side quests, which are inane, allow you to explore combo moves and new passive abilities more freely than in Nioh. And at least finding all the cool stuff with every job is a helluva time! Your adventure becomes more visually compelling when you get to the latter portions of this game and utilize some of the flashier finishers. Using the kick ability with the Ninja to perform Izuna Drops or spinning around in a whirlwind of death as the Assassin are fun moves that add some much-needed visual variety to any given playthrough. And using these abilities is not an entirely thoughtless process itself. Even popping off Ultima requires strategy and setup, which makes its grandiose enactment all the more gratifying.

Likewise, the Four Fiends and what follows and precedes them are also visual treats. Maybe it was just me, but each Fiend was relatively straightforward as their tells and cues on when to strike and avoid their worst attacks were clearly prompted and signaled in-game. Correspondingly, their unique animations, forms, and gimmicks seamlessly tie into their respective environments. There's one battle against the Dragon Zombie that I thought was a complete annoyance, but that largely stemmed from it burrowing into the ground and only partially revealing its body to you, which makes figuring out its cues and invincibility frames harder than some of the bosses that even succeed it. If there is one thing I want to say as a possible negative, these bosses can go down quickly if you know what you are doing. Of the bosses before Jack's fight against Astos, most topped out at seven minutes or less. The second form of the Four Fiends usually, more often than not, boiled down to how quickly I could trigger a Break Move. Mercifully, your standard array of attacks has unique animations and timings with these fights, making it clear that considerable care was put into them, and these bosses do compelling things in their own right. They have techniques and special abilities no one else has and damage affinities, weaknesses, and resistances to specific weapon types. Much of this comes from Team Ninja's Nioh design playbook, but I'm not complaining.

Unfortunately, Stranger of Paradise feels like a game that knows how to frontload its content and stick its landings but has no idea what needs to exist between those moments. Imagine a gymnastic act that starts with the most impressive flip and pirouette, followed by a solid minute of sauntering with no feats of athletics. But then, in the last fifteen seconds, it ends with a fantastic running flip. That's how Stranger of Paradise feels with its weird interstitial menu-based NPC interactions and vanilla-ass side quests. The side quests especially feel insulting as the game's main story missions lack so much essential worldbuilding. While the side quests address this problem in a rather roundabout manner, all they ever ask you to do is explore reverse routes of pre-existing levels. They culminate with bosses that are more involved versions of enemy types you have previously fought dozens of times. Worse, the worldbuilding they provide is entirely told through audio logs, so obtusely hidden that it's easy to forget they even exist. And I don't care what other people say, but you must do these missions as they are critical in ensuring Jack and his party members are appropriately leveled. On top of that, there are a handful of side quests that add new jobs to the supporting characters.

With the game already side-stepping RPG standbys like memorable merchants or recurring NPCs, a lot of your enjoyment, for hours, rides on your investment with its messy mechanics. Mercifully, things get far more interesting when the game's story lets go of its brakes. After you beat Kraken, Jack doesn't feel satiated with the defeat of the Four Fiends, and the party tags along in his quest to find Astos. Along the way, the party members begin edging Jack about his familiarity with specific enemies and his surroundings, which he initially rejects. Upon meeting Astos on a rendition of the Floating Continent in Final Fantasy VI, one of the most visually striking and involved environments, the dark elf finally peels away the facade. Astos emotionally prompts Jack to answer who he is, and while you battle him, you see flashbacks that establish their long-standing bromance. According to the scene, because Jack is a fist bump guy, going fist-to-fist with Astos jogs his memory, and he realizes he's not from Cornelia. A fist bump causes him to recognize he's living a lie. It's an incredible moment.

Stranger of Paradise hints that it takes place in a time loop, but it is during and in the aftermath of Jack's battle with Astos that it becomes evident. After Jack beats Astos's final form, we discover that this exact battle has played out precisely like this many times prior. This cycle of death and destruction unleashed by Jack is a conspiracy enacted by the Lufenians, who employ Jack to control the people of Cornelia to ensure they can continue experimenting on them like guinea pigs. However, eons ago, Jack devised a plan to break this cycle. After falling in love with Princess Sarah, he decided in a previous life to have Astos guide Jack and his crew to new locations that can create Chaos and summon him and transform Jack into a deity of destruction; only then will the Lufenians no longer be able to control Jack and use him as a pawn. Apparently, Chaos is an evil entity capable of granting one wish, and that wish is burning the system down to the ground, which fits Jack's mission of breaking the cycle. All of this information is told in a four to five-minute cutscene in the third to last level of the game. I suspect the game's story and Nomura's creative ambitions for Stranger of Paradise ended up being far shorter than the game Team Ninja made, hence why so much of it takes place at the start and end of the game. And while I love this revelation for all of the bat-shit crazy implications, there's no denying that it comes out of the ether. If the game had owned up to this being its genuine direction earlier, Stranger of Paradise would have been miles better as an overall experience.

Tangent: Why Is So Much Of The Core Story Told Through Hidden Collectibles? Who Thought That Was A Good Idea?

Those who have played Stranger of Paradise know of and likely applaud the peak insanity that this game reaches with its final three levels. From the moment you battle Astos forward, this game gets nuts. It's a pivot you know is coming, considering how much of this game has been spoiled thanks to the internet, but for those who live a sheltered life, there is the off chance that its narrative pivot takes them by surprise. Or so it seems. If you take the time to explore every avenue and corner in the game, you can get early hints that there is more to Stranger of Paradise than Jack is just an angry man. Astos has dozens of journal entries and data logs that lay out the ulterior motives of the forces guiding Jack's efforts, and it's simply bizarre how little of this information is brought to the forefront until the game's final act. Even tooltips during load times convey text written from the Lufenians' perspective and speak to their experiments and attempts to merge their world with the land of Cornelia. Can you name a single game that has whole swaths of its essential worldbuilding told through load screen tooltips, and that felt like a good idea?

How does the world of Cornelia constantly reset itself? Well, there's a journal entry you can find that details how the energy from the destruction of Cornelia powers the pocket dimension of the Lufenians and allows them to use their advanced technology to revert the universe to its former state. If you miss this data log, you never know this because at no point in-game does the story explain this plot point, and that's just one of many examples of the writing failing to opt players into its wacky universe. The stuff you miss out on isn't small potatoes; in this example, it's a core aspect of the game's narrative frame. And it's not as if all of these are on the main path of your regular route in their respective environments. Some logs have platforming puzzles before you can pick them up or require you to pop off special moves or class-specific abilities that nothing in the level explicitly hints towards. This game's story is a confusing mess, and that does a lot of its magnificent moments near its end an absolute disservice. Lacking an establishing frame, you are left with some stand-in characters that feel only partially told if you didn't do your homework.

Part 9: The Ending Of This Game Sure Is SOMETHING!

Oh, and it turns out the white bats Astos employs to direct Jack on his journey are nefarious Lufenians that Astos has captured and transmogrified into bats. Stranger of Paradise is a dumb game, and unlike previous Nomura outings, I love it. There's an almost brick-like nature to Jack even when he stares directly at the camera and lays out his plan to break the world from its torturous cycle. It's almost as if he's the head scientist in a 1960s monster movie summarizing stuff that makes zero practical sense. This plot twist and your reaction to it largely determine your overall feelings about Stranger of Paradise; if you fall in love with this revelation and the game's mechanics, you can overlook its repetition. As someone who almost entirely bought into what the game was doing, my only complaint was that the game has Jack toil away on two separate gauntlet rushes against swarms of monsters overtaking Cornelia. The first time involves an attack led by an army of pirates, and the second represents the penultimate set piece before you enter Chaos's domain.

I thought the plot twist wherein killing the Four Fiends brings forth violence and instability in the land of Cornelia was a pleasant subversion of your expectations. Also, the story still employs an adequate amount of mystery even after Jack realizes that his mission is to unleash Chaos. He doesn't know that he is the one to become the world's ultimate evil, nor does he understand what it will take to summon the deity of darkness. Nonetheless, when you return to the castle of Cornelia a second time and find Princess Sarah slain, she hands Jack a dark crystal before she expires, and this transitions to our next WTF moment. It turns out that Jack's party members have been messing with him, and they somehow have avoided their Lufenian overlords from wiping their memories. As such, they announce that Jack must become Chaos and that the only way for this to happen is if he experiences even more heartache and agony. Thus, they begin to fight him and encourage him to murder them. Fun fact: while many players consider this four-on-one boss encounter one of the harder ones in the game, you can cheese it by stripping your party members of their clothes in the moments preceding this battle. I did that, and I have to tell you, getting to beat Jed to a pulp in his boxer briefs is something I'm not turning down ten times out of ten.

In one of my favorite moments in the game, while Jack mourns the loss of his friends and is surrounded by their corpses, he fists bumps the air as if he's doing one of his team-building exercises from earlier. While he screams, he absorbs a wave of darkness and recalls that a teleport to the mystical land of Lufenia exists in the Chaos Shrine. After fighting his way alone to the teleport, he returns to the land of his overlords, and when they detect the evil manifesting from him, they encase him in a crystal prison. While attempting to break out, Jack becomes Joker-fied. He screams and cackles about wanting to burn the world of Lufenian down to the ground while he remains isolated in his crystallized jail. It is here when Jack has a battle within himself to subdue Chaos and make them a part of their soul. This represents the game's final boss battle, and as I will review separately, it's a real pain in the ass, but after you beat Chaos, all Hell breaks loose! After Jack absorbs Chaos's essence, he threatens the denizens of Lufenia that if they ever mess with the world of Cornelia, he will end them. Obviously, Jack says so with three or four additional expletives. For reasons I still do not understand, despite Lufenia's ability to manipulate time and inter-dimensional travel, they become frightened of Jack's threat and affirm they will never meddle with Cornelia again.

Then, we watch Jack become the "Jack Garland" of Final Fantasy 1. Now that I have hindsight, Nomura should have vetoed the executives who told him he needed to redo the story and advertising to make it explicit that Jack is Gardland from the start. While Jack embraces his role as a corrupted version of his former self, he kidnaps Princess Sarah, which leads to a fantastic callback to the game's introductory cutscene wherein Garland murders everyone in the Palace of Cornelia while attempting their kidnapping mission. However, with the context of us knowing that it is Jack, the mannerisms take a more comedic bent with Garland's slow and ferocious sword swings, now signifying the man under the armor is a very, very, very tired man done with everyone's bullshit. There's even an incredible scene where he drapes the princess over his shoulder, and it feels like a Curb Your Enthusiasm skit. With that "quest" behind him, Jack sits on the throne at the Chaos Shrine, awaiting the Four Warriors of Light to defeat him. However, before that happens, we watch the Four Fiends assemble around him. While they appear as monsters initially, the game filters their appearance to show that Jack's friends lie beneath the abominations, and he can still see them. And obviously, they celebrate the success of their mission with a fist bump. Would you have it any other way?

Tangent: The Last Boss Sucks!

I know, complaining about the difficulty of a final boss in a Final Fantasy game is petty, but there are a few things about this battle against Chaos that rub me the wrong way. On a positive note, I liked the detail that he has your friends' heads on his necklace. I also like the look of the environment you fight him in and some of his transformations. Chaos's second form, wherein he draws infinite magical power to himself and Jack, is a tremendous empowering moment because it allows you to unleash your full array of abilities at no expense. However, my core issue with Chaos echoes across many Final Fantasy final bosses: it prioritizes specific playstyles and character builds more than others. If you have yet to make a character that errs towards one of those build paths, you must toil away on this fight longer than most. As someone who enjoyed casting magic, the slower and more deliberative attacks I had come to prefer often set me up to be wide open for this boss's unique attacks and lunges. Those lunges are a real pain as Chaos can span across entire fathoms of the battlefield in an instant. This annoyance is widespread in Souls games, but it is not one that I'm doing cartwheels for as a celebration.

The other trick with this battle is that it impels you to be aggressive, which is slightly counterintuitive, with this being the final boss. You can run up on him using the teleport ability and even take advantage of back attacks and critical hit opportunities with melee-oriented jobs. Your best bets are doing so and sending his elemental attacks back at him. As a magic-oriented person, landing spells is tricky because he leaps across vast distances to always be in your maw. Likewise, while the party commands are imperfect and your companion's AI is downright moronic at times, being unable to draw aggro using allies makes some job types completely inert during the final chapter. There's still value in having a Sage or White Mage as a backup to ensure Jack doesn't meet an untimely demise, but your in-depth array of support classes feels utterly impotent during the last two levels without Jed, Neon, and everyone else. Yet again, I have to admit that this is par for the course with this genre, but again, I'm not a fan of this quibble elsewhere, and I'm not a fan of it here.

Part 10: I Want To Talk About Why I Think This Game Is A Self-Plagiarism

Around the time I got to the plot twist with the Lufenians, I started to feel déjà vu. Jack is a man of mystery thrown into a world that, over time, he falls in love with and discovers he can free from a vicious cycle of death and rebirth. It's not exactly a new or novel concept, but it seems fresh enough to the Final Fantasy series that people behind the game saw fit to use to recontextualize Final Fantasy I as we know it. And yet, I still could not shake off that sense of déjà vu. So, I discovered that Kazushige Nojima was the lead writer for the game and has been at Square since the late 1980s. His credits span classic SNES titles to this one and Final Fantasy VII Remake. For the most part, he functions as a scenario writer, but he's also dabbled in writing whole stories for games as well. Unsurprisingly, Nojima was the lead writer behind Dissidia Final Fantasy NT, a game whose universe some theorize Stranger of Paradise might take place in, given some of the implications of Stranger of Paradise's post-release DLC. Nonetheless, he also wrote the story of a game I want you to read the summary of and see if it sounds oddly familiar.

As an amnesiac man arrives in Palamecia on a stream of light, a mysterious voice introduces itself as "Vox" and explains his ties to the past are no longer valid in the world he is arriving. The man lies on a beach in a strange world with a sword in his hand and many others beside him. Monsters emerge, and the disembodied voice of Vox speaks of a law of Palamecia: "None shall remember the names of those who do not fight." After the men fight the monsters, Vox asks their names. The man remembers his name is Wol, but the other men remember having the same name. Vox explains that the name carries a special meaning, as it is the name of a hero foretold to bring hope to Palamecia: the Warrior of Light, and that one of the men will become that hero.

Considering the new arrivals "blank slates," Vox names them Blanks and advises them to go north. An armor-clad man appears to reiterate Vox's words. Vox introduces Wol a new law: "Your mettle is constantly being tested." As Wol continues his journey, he comments on how everything feels like home despite his memory loss.

Now, let's jump forward to this game's STUNNING PLOT TWIST!

After hearing the truth behind his adventure, Wol discovers what the Warrior of Light really is: a warrior who brings hope to the people of Palamecia in a period of crisis by defeating Chaos. Every time Chaos is vanquished, a brief period of light begins, but Palamecia is destined to fall again into darkness. When despair falls, new warriors from different worlds are called, without memory of who they were or where they came from, to Palamecia, in the hopes one of them would become the new Warrior of Light and defeat Chaos. Sensing this, Cid sent Sarah away to a faraway world to protect her with the letters Wol had found belonging to her, as she still sends Cid love letters from another world.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

Making their way to face Chaos, Wol discovers along the way that they all have been following Vox designs from the very beginning, as Palamecia is serving as an engine to send hope for other despairing worlds, as the destroyed form of Chaos becomes a sea of darkness that spreads over the planet and wipe everyone's memories, allowing people to Hope for the destruction of Chaos continuously. Sarah is also not actually human but part of Palamecia, made to fill the role of the princess of prophecy. This extends even through Garland and Meia, even if they thought they acted on their own free will. When Wol realizes this, and seeing all that light channeling to him to defeat Chaos is nothing but another trick, they turn against Wol.

These passages relate to the story of Mobius Final Fantasy, a discontinued episodic mobile game that Kazushige Nojima worked on for five years. You likely have never heard of this game as it only saw a limited release outside of Japan, though it did curiously enough get a Steam release when Valve waived its rules prohibiting free-to-play systems. Now, I need to clarify that I am not accusing Nojima or, anyone at Square Enix or Team Ninja of academic or creative dishonesty. Nor are my suggestions anything more than pure speculation on my part. If there is one prominent rebuttal that you could poke on my assertions, it is that pesky issue of Stranger of Paradise's weird relationship with Dissidia. The Lufenians are already an established concept in Final Fantasy I and Dissidia, and the pocket dimensions that bring the Final Fantasy universe together in Dissidia are a known plot device. Nonetheless, even that suggests a certain degree of narrative self-plagiarism on Nojima's part. Even if you don't buy into my theory that this story is a reskin of Mobius Final Fantasy, whole swaths of it borrow from his work in Dissidia.

Also, I do have to give credit where credit is due. While the core of Stranger of Paradise is not in and of itself novel, its handful of spurts of originality make it distinctly unique. I cannot list a single game where two characters duke it out, and the act of doing so results in a fist bump that triggers a flashback. If you can think of any examples outside of Stranger of Paradise, please chime in because I could use that rush in my life right now. Those goofy-ass bits are another dividing line between whether you enjoyed Stranger of Paradise or consider it a mess not worthy of the effort. Especially if the combat doesn't click, if its zanier moments are putting a smile on your face, I can conceive it is worthwhile as long as you temper your expectations. I have met people who enjoy this game and the act of playing it so much that they are willing to paper over the issues of its being incredibly repetitive, and who am I to judge them for having a good time?

Nonetheless, let's list the odd similarities between Mobius and Stranger of Paradise. Woj and Jack start in dreamlike, ethereal worlds where they don't know where they are or what to do. Both are guided by disillusioned veterans of the lands they are exploring, and these figures are the ones that reveal the truth about the world. Woj learns more about the land he inhabits from Garland, and Jack has Astos. Both Woj and Jack fight an ornately dressed enemy that turns out to be a young woman under hypnosis or some form of brain control. For Woj, it's a heretical witch named Meia; for Jack, it is Neon. In both Mobius and Stranger of Paradise, Chaos is a means by which their protagonists can break a world stuck in a time loop. In both games, an omniscient voice or force attempts to prevent the protagonist from breaking this cycle. In both games, unleashing Chaos spawns a final battle that draws them to a void between two worlds or universes. In both games, the protagonist's implied, but not explicitly stated, relationship with Princess Sarah is what convinces them that they must save the world they inhabit. In both games, the protagonist must relinquish this relationship as part of their quest to set the world in motion again. In both games, their protagonist's heroic efforts result in the citizens of Cornelia having their minds wiped and not understanding their sacrifice for them. In both games, their primary protagonist is not of the world they need to save. In both games, their efforts to break this ouroboros are initially met with cheers and applause, but that transitions to skepticism and outright hostility when the going gets tough. IN BOTH GAMES, we find out this is not their first rodeo trying to do this. IN BOTH GAMES, someone in their party attempts to provide hints that things are not what they seem at first. I have only reached about the halfway point on my list, but I think you get my point. Things are slightly uncanny.

I want to make it abundantly apparent that I have no qualms with what Nojima has done if my hunch is correct. The man spent upwards of FIVE YEARS telling a story to a mobile game few people saw, and is now lost forever. Worse, he not only had the plug pulled from him on Mobius, but he was also the lead writer behind Dragon's Dogma Online, which also shut down while he was still completing its storyline. Oh, and let's not forget that he conceived the original script for Final Fantasy XV and was one of a handful who desperately tried to spearhead the game's ambitious DLC plans, which Square Enix ALSO PULLED THE PLUG ON! My guy rarely gets a break, and many of his more ambitious attempts at scenario writing and storytelling have failed. So, retrying something you did years prior with a company head's golden goose you know won't get canceled (i.e., Stranger of Paradise)? Yeah, I have no problem with that! Like, zero. Working in this industry sounds hazardous to one's health, so someone gaming the system in their favor with a title as big as this one seems like something we should celebrate with a parade rather than excoriate online with angry blog posts.

Post-Mortem: Should You Play Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin?

Answering this question is trickier than it seems on paper. This game is a mess; even those who applaud it and its zanier sensibilities understand that to be a core truth. Whether Stranger of Paradise provides you with a worthwhile experience depends on if you want to see Nomura cook, how much nostalgia you have for the Final Fantasy franchise, and your ability to revel in rough but highly rewarding Souls-lite mechanics. Even though the game comes from Team Ninja and utilizes the same team behind Nioh and now Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, this title is not a perfect fit for fans of From Software's works. There needs to be more environmental storytelling, and its difficulty is utterly out of wack. This point leads us to look at this game's appeal to long-time Final Fantasy fans who may or may not be fans of Souls-like gameplay gimmicks. The good news for them is that the core game provides an accommodating slew of on-ramps, the most prominent being an easy difficulty setting that switches the gameplay to mimic that of a Musou more than that of a Souls game. Yet, for even them, it could be a tough sell because this game lacks many of the series' distinctive long-running aspects and idioms. It's odd to say, but if you go into Stranger of Paradise expecting a Final Fantasy game, you will end up disappointed. It's a Team Ninja game first and a compelling story with in-depth and riveting subplots fifth. When you view it like you do a campy B-Movie, it's an uneven time but one with some novel and unique highs I didn't think was possible in a Nomura-led project.

If ever there was a game, I wish I could apply the adage "it's a mixed bag" and then move on with my life, it is this one. It's an ugly game with a dumb story, and it doesn't always respect your time with its middle act, which feels more like a death march than an adventurous wind sprint. But HOT DAMN, when this game gets good, it gets GOOD! That moment when you see Jack Garland surrounded by his friends, having transformed into the Four Fiends, is one of the most magical moments modern Square Enix has made since Final Fantasy VII Remake. This game has dumb and earnest moments that are impossible not to smile at, and you know it was made with people who didn't have a single malicious bone in their bodies. Stranger of Paradise is far from Team Ninja's best outing, but there are decent to great ideas here that I hope they don't throw into the garbage can as they move on to other projects. I found the job system in this game far more rewarding than the blacksmithing in Nioh or the "Genuine Qi" system in Wo Long. While I spent a while giving this game a hard time for having a difficulty curve to that of a tomato can, if someone came to me and asked where to start with Souls-like games and had concerns about their endurance, this might end up on my shortlist for them.

Do you enjoy dumb diamond in the rough video games? And by "dumb," I mean incredibly dumb. As I have posited, everyone in the video game hobby has at least one game they will defend with their life because its stupidity appeals to their base senses so much that it "works" for them. We all have one "stupid" game that we love because it makes us smile. Suppose you can immediately think of your example of this phenomenon and the story of why that game sticks with you after countless years. In that case, consider playing Stranger of Paradise. It embodies the textbook definition of "low art" to a T, what with its shameless attempt to provide a mainstream action roleplaying game experience from a label that immediately caught people's attention. It errs towards craft rather than "fine art" and draws no contemplation from its audience. And yet, it is more than the sum of its parts because of its weird gaps, odd creative decisions, and absurd narrative.

Final Fantasy Origin is a perfect fit for Nomura. I would prefer to see him work on weird spin-off side projects and run the Kingdom Hearts franchise into the ground than be the Lord Protector of the Final Fantasy franchise until his death. The franchise got lucky that Sakaguchi could maintain that role for as long as he was in it, but putting that burden on anyone else is a delusion. Nomura has been an "idea guy" similar to George Lucas, and much like Lucas, Nomura shouldn't be the one calling the shots 100% of the time with the franchise he's associated with. If you are going to keep him around, minimize his known shortcomings by giving him mini-projects like Stranger of Paradise, where he can provide the world with endless entertainment. Also, his stylistic and aesthetical preferences make way more sense when they are grafted onto a game with a more freeform and customizable structure. If Nomura makes a costume with three hundred belts, it doesn't feel all that egregious, considering there are plenty of others that don't look like that.

There is one camp of Final Fantasy fans that have decried this title that I wish to address. It is the cadre of people saying Stranger of Paradise somehow "ruins" Final Fantasy I. It's an absurd mindset to maintain. First, no one is taking your childhood memories of the first Final Fantasy away from you, and at the very least, this title putting a new spin on that game's universe might encourage more people to give one of its many remasters a shot. The game you love is NOT going away, and Square Enix, to its credit, provides ample opportunity for you to play it as you did decades ago. Second, what part of Final Fantasy I's story is the sacred cow? Is it the plot twist at the end wherein Garland reveals himself as the villain? Even the team behind the original game has made no qualms about how it was an experiment wherein they didn't exactly know what they were doing or how to tell a coherent story. They were going through the roleplaying motions they observed from Dragon Quest, Wizardry, and Ultima and, in doing so, created something that appealed to millions of people who had yet to experience a full-scale RPG from top to bottom.

Nonetheless, there's nothing truly unique or even novel with its ideas, and it's far from the wholeness of storytelling and worldbuilding we now associate with the series. Let the people new to the series have fun, and those making these games have even more fun. And with that, I'll call an end to this series. Thanks for tuning in, and here's to a new Final Fantasy retrospective in the future!

Doesn't The Name "Square-Enix" Imply Two Companies Under One House?

Square-Enix has been back in the news for all the wrong reasons again. As reported by Bloomberg and then repeated by our very own Jeff Grubb, the company's gross revenue was in the green, but overall profits dropped approximately 65% this last fiscal quarter. In response to this news, the company's stock price on the Tokyo Stock Exchange at one point fell by nearly ¥‎1,000, its worst intraday drop in almost three years. Bloomberg's report included three anonymous testimonials from company shareholders that attended Square-Enix's post-earnings call, and the details that have come forward are shocking. Firstly, one of Bloomberg's sources claims company president, Takashi Kiryu, stated verbatim, "[Final Fantasy 16] did not meet the high end of the company's expectations." Curiously, not four weeks ago, Kiryu told the press that the game had sold three million copies during launch week, and this was an "extremely strong" performance by a game presently locked to the PS5. Regardless, during the most recent post-earnings call, Kiryu stated to shareholders that Final Fantasy XVI's struggles are due to what he believes to be the "slow adoption [rate] of the PS5," which does not align with what Sony has reported about the console's sales trajectory.

Admittedly, three million units is an impressive amount. So, let's explain why Square-Enix's upper management might view Final Fantasy XVI's performance as "disappointing." First, the company's upper management placed a sales estimate for the game described as "high-end," but no number is attached to that label. Still, as reported during Game Mess Mornings on 08/07/23, Square-Enix shared Marvel's Spider-Man, one of the best-selling games on the PS4, as an example of what they expected Final Fantasy XVI's sales to emulate. Likewise, corporate leaders at the shareholder meeting expressed shock and disappointment that Final Fantasy XVI did not echo the massive success seen with Final Fantasy XV's launch, which remains the fastest-selling Final Fantasy game with 5 million units shipped and sold digitally in its first 24 hours. It is important to note that the presentation reportedly did not mention that Final Fantasy XV was a multiplatform release. This point is vital to consider when you recognize that Final Fantasy XVI remains a platform exclusive, at the time of this blog's original publishing date, to the PS5. And much like the rest of the Japanese video game industry, the meeting shared that mobile sales and revenue have experienced a stark decline compared to Pandemic-era peaks. Overall, the conference featured a lot of corporate equivocation and further evidence that Square-Enix is the worst company in the games industry at setting realistic game sales targets.

I could spend an entire blog talking about why Square-Enix being off its rocker isn't breaking news and why they are a fortunate company to have money-making apparatuses like Final Fantasy XIV and Kingdom Hearts to keep them afloat. However, if Bloomberg's sources and report about the recent shareholder's meeting are accurate, a different storyline is more interesting to remark about. The conference made few mentions about Enix, half of the company, its projects, the current state of Dragon Quest XII, possible leadership changes with the Dragon Quest Team, and Dragon Quest Treasures being a severe underperformer. These tidbits are undoubtedly odd, considering Dragon Quest has been previously one of the most consistent earners for the company throughout its history. When you remember the last we saw a mainline Dragon Quest title was Dragon Quest XI in 2017, and its MANY re-releases, Square-Enix putting all its hopes on Final Fantasy XVI, seems especially cruel. That's particularly true when you recognize that Dragon Quest XII's development cycle continues to progress at a snail's pace AND the Octopath-styled remake of Dragon Quest III continues to be MIA. So, what's going on with Enix, and why isn't Square-Enix putting more pressure on it to get its act together?

Isn't Enix Supposed To Be The "Normal" Branch Of The Company? (Answer: No, And It Never Was!)

Let's go back in time for a bit. The year is 2001, and Enix Corporation has a problem. The transition from the PlayStation to the PlayStation 2 isn't going great, and there's been a mass exodus with the company's manga and anime division, Gangan Comics, after writers, editors, and artists felt Enix's management was putting too much emphasis on making Dragon Quest-based content and focusing entirely on the shōnen demographic. Fun fact, that mass departure resulted in the formation of Mag Garden, which later merged with Production I.G. Many of those Mag Garden employees have spearheaded many of the I.G. shows you know and love today. No matter, beset with chronic issues, Enix is entertaining the idea of joining forces with another Japanese developer, and it limited its search to Namco and its then-rival, Squaresoft. Enix eventually preferred merging with Squaresoft partly because Namco wanted a deal where the two brands would be equals.

In contrast, Squaresoft, lacking money at the time, was willing to give the advantage to Enix. Nonetheless, the proposed merger was put on hiatus until Squaresoft could get its ducks in a row after The Spirits Within nearly bankrupted them. When they forced much of its old leadership to leave and then released Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts, Enix agreed to the merger with caveats. Squaresoft was permitted to be the first name on the label and call the resulting union a combination of two developers "at their height." Still, the paperwork showed that most of the company's shares fell into Enix's hands. After Squaresoft founder Masafumi Miyamoto threw a fit, the final ratio was that one Square share resulted in 0.85 shares of Enix. Furthermore, while several of Squaresoft's founders and original financiers were given golden parachutes, virtually every corporate executive from Enix was given the green light to stick around and maintain their leadership positions.

To this day, and this is a fact Square-Enix wants you to pretend isn't real when it is, the Enix faction owns a more significant share of Square-Enix than the Square faction, and over time, they have in fact, increased their control on the company. Yasuhiro Fukushima, Enix Corporation's founder, is the company's largest individual shareholder, with an approximately 20% stake. That solitary fact is one of the reasons why rumors of the company shedding assets to make itself attractive to the likes of Sony are wishful thinking on the part of people with a superficial stake in this current console war. Enix prefers working with Nintendo and has benefited from re-releasing its games on non-Sony platforms. Given that AND the company's track record of misjudging sales estimates and constant mismanagement of non-Japanese studios, all signs don't point to a conspiracy and suggest Square-Enix is simply dysfunctional. They have a handful of tentpole properties that keep the lights on and further internal projects the company can set unrealistic expectations for in the future. Thus, the crappy corporate feedback loop becomes a perpetual ouroboros. Likewise, while Squaresoft purged its old guard after the company almost filed for bankruptcy following The Spirits Within, the old guard of Enix is still in the company and STILL holds the reigns they were given when the two merged over twenty years ago. Even if Enix needs to clean house, the people who would most likely be impacted still have massive shares in the company to thwart those reform efforts. Therefore, even though there were legitimate concerns about the state of Dragon Quest XII and Enix's investments in internal development, no one was going to bring that up during the share-holders meeting because everyone taking those questions were the very Enix head-honchos that block any attempts at changing the status quo or putting pressure on Enix.

To Enix's defense, their old guard has, until recently, had one of the surest touches on the pulse of the domestic Japanese video game market. That's largely thanks to the tireless work and leadership of Yuji Horii, who gave the world Portopia and Dragon Quest. Now, when people rank all-time most essential figures in the Japanese video game industry, Miyamoto is the rightful taker of the #1 position. Nonetheless, Yuji Horii is #2, and for some reason, I always get pushback for saying what should be a widely accepted fact. Kojima, Yuji Naka, Sakaguchi, Satoshi Tajiri, Yoshi-P, and Masaya Matsuura do not rank above Yuji Horii's overall legacy and importance. They don't. That's because they all live in an industry whose foundation exists thanks to Horii's massive commercial and critical successes. Say all you want about Dragon Quest being "the same thing, every game," but Horii directed and designed what is now a cultural landmark in Japan that has persisted for over thirty years. And guess what? It wasn't easy sanding off the rough edges of CRPGs like Wizardry and Ultima to make roleplaying games that appeal to children and general audiences, and many of the gameplay tropes and idioms we expect as guarantees when playing an RPG draw their lineage to Dragon Quest. And if you're going to respond by saying, "Has Horii made games other than Dragon Quest?" like a Metal Gear Solid stan once posited on my Tumblr, let's not forget that the man created Portopia and practically invented the modern Japanese visual novel. And speaking of Portopia, if you are a Kojima defender, we should discuss how Portopia is one of the primary reasons why Kojima was inspired to make video games in the first place.

Yuji Horii is an untouchable in Japan, and he's earned that status. He's headlined some of the best-selling video games in Japanese history. As such, he has all the possible blank checks and final-cut privileges one can imagine a person having after working his ass off for over thirty years in the industry. And therein lies a problem. Horii is nearing 70, and even before the announcement of Dragon Quest XII, he revealed he would be transitioning from working full-time at Square-Enix to operating as a contractor; ergo, he signaled a transition toward retirement. And with him pushing 70, who can blame him? However, the announcement of Dragon Quest XII dates to 2021, and there has yet to be much of a sign as to who is taking up Horii's role as the forward-facing figure representing the new blood in charge of the franchise. The game's consistent absence at TGS is also undoubtedly a red flag. Furthermore, Japanese sources call the development of Dragon Quest XII so problematic that it is rumored the team working on the game has asked Horii to return to the project to right the ship. Your "Get Out Of Jail" card being dragging a septuagenarian back to the office, if true, is not a good look.

All Signs Point To Dragon Quest XII Being A Messy Development Cycle, And The State Of The Series Is Weird

Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate was the headline announcement of the series' 35th-anniversary celebration event. Horii even got on stage to introduce the game's director, Takeshi Uchikawa, who directed Dragon Quest XI and had nominal responsibilities with the development of Dragon Quest Treasures. Though details were scant, the few that were shared spoke to a desire to try out new things with the game. The game's public relations team enthusiastically announced that it would use Unreal Engine 5 to assist the development team in getting it presentable in record time, and there were murmurs it would be a reaction to Breath of the Wild. I must acknowledge that fans have often disputed that last part as a possible mistranslation or an off-the-record statement with little factual basis. However, the few times Horii has talked about the game, he has echoed that "this is a big game" and that "the traditional command battles will also be revamped." Therefore, something is happening to make Dragon Quest XII a reflection of some of the popular trends in the industry, even if the details as to what that may be are few and far between.

Even at the time of Dragon Quest XII's announcement, Horii made it clear that the game had begun development years prior. So, it's safe to assume that after Dragon Quest XI launched in 2017, a small portion of the Dragon Quest team began planning the next entry around 2019 to 2020. I don't think the team started the planning process for a new title immediately, considering how much time and care was put into re-releases of 11, especially the Switch port, and how many spin-off games also came out between 11's release and the announcement of 12. Regardless, this situation is erring toward one of the most extended sessions of radio silence on the mainline franchise since the gap between Dragon Quest VII and Dragon Quest VIII. However, considering how long it takes you to complete Dragon Quest VII and that gap was due to a not-insignificant console generation transition, it is vastly more understandable than the current gap. That's partly why some suspect Enix is smarting over the release of Dragon Quest Treasures and its anemic sales and reviews. The game features a relatively open world and action-based gameplay some thought could serve as a template for the mainline series. However, the key here is that the game wasn't the barn burner anyone was hoping for, and the freedom to experiment with Dragon Quest XII might have been dampened by its producers. We will never know how much backtracking has happened, but games that have been in development for more than three years and only have one teaser trailer to show for it always have their reasonable share. Also, it is safe to assume the release and reception of Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is something Enix will be watching closely.

And we have to talk about Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake that got as much buzz as the announcement of Dragon Quest XII. That game was all the talk on Japanese Twitter for a week, and it has been MIA for over two years. It is not a simple remaster, and a lot of time and effort is required to make a version of Dragon Quest III that looks like it is running on the Octopath game engine. However, Dragon Quest III's core mechanics and structure are relatively simple, though incredibly novel and groundbreaking at the time of its release, meaning the graphics should be the lion's share of its development time. Normally, remasters above running a new filter over the original don't take over three years before we see the fruits of their labor. What could be happening behind the scenes to cause this highly anticipated remake to progress like it is a mainline entry in the series? I have no idea, but I also fear Enix doesn't realize how much this game needs to come out as soon as possible. If the DQ12 team is still planning to rock the boat, having a game that evokes retro and throwback sensibilities should mute some pushback. I don't know about you, but I remember the protests online and in Japan when there was a slight suggestion Dragon Quest IX could POSSIBLY be an action roleplaying game. One of the leaders of those protesters in the streets of Japan was a Giant Bomb forum poster in the middle of their study abroad program. And when it was revealed that the game would still be turn-based, did things improve? NOPE! People kept protesting because they thought it being a DS game meant the Dragon Quest franchise was starting to turn its backs on its fans. It was one of the dumbest video game controversies I have ever seen.

Recently, the Dragon Quest series has increasingly relied on smaller-scale spin-offs to keep its torch and audience feedback loop intact. This year will see the free-to-play mobile game Dragon Quest Champions and the return of the Dragon Quest Monsters sub-series with The Dark Prince. These spin-offs do relatively well outside of a few exceptions, generally selling one million to half a million copies in Japan alone. Nonetheless, let's not beat around the bush and deny that a mainline Dragon Quest game wouldn't sell ten million copies if it were a deliberately retro turn-based RPG. The gaps between mainline entries are usually deliberative to court a sense of specialness with each subsequent release and to guarantee the series never overstays its welcome with each console generation. Enix keeps interest alive by revealing secrets to the game currently in development in Shonen Jump or similar-minded magazines. This gets to a topic that sometimes draws battle lines, but the Dragon Quest series doesn't age with its audience. It delivers on a slightly different permutation of a similar formula, drawing in people trying to rekindle their nostalgia and opting in new people into the Dragon Quest multi-media culture thanks to its information blitz. With children's media and the games associated with younger audiences changing massively by the year and Japan's declining birthrate, there's something to be said about if that incredibly reliable playbook will draw the same results it has before. I'm not counting Dragon Quest out, but 12 will be the hardest the franchise will need to work to reach the meteoric heights of its predecessors.

It Shouldn't Be This Hard To Make A Mainline Dragon Quest Game

Let's take a few steps back to return to what little we know about Enix's twelfth planned golden goose. "Revamps" to the franchise's traditional command-based battles are supposedly in the works. All that sounds interesting, but I have to be a slight jerk and chime in and ask, "Do you honestly need to do that?" What are the core mechanics of Dragon Quest? If you ask me, the series can be boiled down into five words: Attack, Magic, Defend, Item, and Flee. Maybe, you also want to throw in the series' reliance on art originating from Akira Toriyama, but even that doesn't change the fact that Dragon Quest isn't a recipe with a secret ingredient. It's a simple franchise, and while some of you might call it too simple and grognard, it's a formula that has been rewarded with millions of sales over thirty years. From a design perspective, Horii believes that roleplaying games should never cease to reward the player's in-game work. As such, his idea that all RPGs should allow users to reach the end as long as they put in their time has been at the heart of the Dragon Quest series since its inception. And guess what? People like that part of Dragon Quest. So, why put extra development time on your plate when it's unnecessary? Related, the plan for Dragon Quest XII to be notably darker in tone sounds like the dumbest idea ever. People like the power fantasy and escapist elements of Dragon Quest, and removing that and trying to do something deeper is bound to piss people off.

And I and others continue to talk about the "Dragon Quest Team" as if it is a monolith that has existed as old as time, but it's a relatively new development. Most forget this fact, but the Dragon Quest "Team" that develops Dragon Quest games internally at Enix didn't exist until Dragon Quest X. Previously, Dragon Quest titles were contracted to other studios with Horii's crew and himself functioning as directors and creative leads. As such, I recognize that the team reportedly struggling with Dragon Quest XII is only on its third proper Dragon Quest title. Even then, it's pretty ridiculous that they need a Dragon Quest savant, like Horii, to help them out of the weeds when they have over twenty years of work to review and utilize that others have done for them. Since VII set the bar for long games that take hundreds of hours to complete if you are not careful, the development of these games has borrowed structural motifs and gameplay design from previous titles, which has alleviated the amount of asset generation the Dragon Quest Team has needed to conduct with their last two games. And let's be honest, Dragon Quest XI looks like a game that took years to build, but it definitely isn't a game that took years to conceptualize or write.

To return to me actively questioning if the early hints of the game's tone and structure are for the best, does the Dragon Quest franchise need to get even more open and vast than it already has? Is that really what people are asking for these days? If the Dragon Quest franchise owned up to its reputation as a tired-and-true formula that serves as a universal time capsule into retro-styled RPGs, it would still sell like hotcakes and likely make future titles easier to produce. For goodness sake, could you imagine how excited people would get if the Enix team announced they were partnering with Tokyo RPG Factory? However, with Enix still going through the expected growing pains any developer goes through when trying to establish an internal development footprint, they are likely gun shy about working with partners that would create competing products they feel could take away the shine from mainline titles. That's why the only partners they are working with these days, as they continue trying to fit square pegs into round holes, have to piddle with spin-offs like Treasures or Dragon Quest Monsters. Nonetheless, every possible problem they are experiencing with Dragon Quest XII has a studio that likely has the answer to that problem. The "secret sauce" to what makes a Dragon Quest game popular or a critical success is NOT a secret soup recipe that gets forgotten when a Polish lunch lady dies.

What is unfair is how we hold the Final Fantasy franchise and the people working on it to one metric of accountability, and that bar doesn't apply to the struggles and problems that crop up with Dragon Quest. Again, on Square-Enix's end, that's on purpose because the Enix people are calling the shots, and everyone follows their thinking. That's because everyone, whether it be the corporate overlords at Square-Enix or fans of the series, treats the inevitability of Dragon Quest being an establishment that makes money as a given. They're probably right, but plenty of bumps and bruises along the way should have been seen as clear red flags that Enix is NOT a normalizing factor in the Square-Enix marriage. Remember Enix burning its bridges with Chunsoft and Level-5? Speaking of Level-5, would you be surprised to know that they had to fight tooth and nail for YEARS to convince everyone at Enix that the DS was a legitimate platform, even though it had a massive attachment rate that even the most basic research could have surfaced? That should have been a red flag! Wow, Enix failed to localize Dragon Quest VI and VII because their developer, Heartbeat, felt so burnt out they took a year-long sabbatical and didn't think they had the support or resources to make it happen even after they made one of the best-selling games in Japanese history? That's another red flag, and it sure sounds like Enix treats its development partners like cows en route to slaughter!

Enix Needs To Clean House And Do Some Torch Passing

The old guard of Enix has overstayed their welcome. That statement doesn't apply to Yuji Horii, but the most I want to see him these days is doing the interview circuit and talking about how much he loves Wizardry and why he programmed and designed things in the old games the way he did. As suggested earlier, relying on him to bail out the series and its development teams isn't healthy. Likewise, while the management of Enix was decent to great at their jobs two decades ago, their expertise isn't what it once was. People need to remember this, but how Enix ended its relationship with Chunsoft and Level-5 was less than amicable. And that's the thing about Enix that sometimes gets lost in the mix. Enix Corporation was originally a publishing house that relied on third parties to develop games. Even at the onset of the Dragon Quest series, they weren't making stuff; they were a label that printed discs, paid for advertising, and shipped boxes. Until Dragon Quest X, the Dragon Quest games were never developed internally at Enix. Instead, each Dragon Quest game used external developers handpicked by Horii, with him and a select group from Enix acting as directors. It's a business strategy similar to Take-Two Interactive's, but one Enix was forced to shirk away from recently. With the current landscape emphasizing internal development, those Enix directors are managing scenarios they are only partially accustomed to or suited to handle.

But here's the deal, when you look at the documents annotating the leadership at Square-Enix, you realize the people making boneheaded decisions like letting IO Interactive walk for nothing or selling Eidos for pennies are NOT the internet's favorite targets. I'm sorry to break this to you and the rest of the internet; it's not Nomura and Kitase making these decisions. The people running Square-Enix "into the ground" are a small collection of Enix Corporation millionaires that have been around since the 1980s and are still holding out that their bubble economy business strategies will keep the money train going. Yes, Nomura and Kitase deserve some share of the blame for Square-Enix's mismanagement and played a role in creatively stunting the company's leading studios for a whole console generation. But who were the people in charge of the company that could have ended that? It was the old guard of Enix Corp! Which faction in the company repeatedly treated non-Japanese studios with a different barometer of success? It was the Enix faction. Which group set the bar for Final Fantasy XVI, a PS5 exclusive, to that of Marvel's Spider-Man and Final Fantasy XV? It was the Enix-dominated company leaders pushing into their seventies.

And the habit of every company leader at Square-Enix plugging their ears and pretending everyone who made the company work well during the PS2 era will continue to stick around and grind away for the next decade isn't from Squaresoft. They're from Enix! And while Enix had gobs of cash on standby, an asset Squaresoft lacked in 2001, let's return to the issue of Enix struggling in the twilight of its independence. I already reviewed that their manga and anime label shed some of the most talented names associated with it because Enix dropped the hammer and mandated that everyone make either Dragon Quest comics or shonen-adjacent products. That sounds incredibly shortsighted, and it caused that entire half of the company to bleed money until they struck gold by nabbing the rights to Full Metal Alchemist. Until the release of Dragon Quest VII, Enix was wallowing during the technological shift to the PS1, and they also struggled with the transition to the PS2. In doing so, they let various smaller labels technologically and creatively pass them up. Also, Dragon Quest VII had a HUGELY problematic development and was beset by multiple delays, primarily of Enix's making. As a result, Dragon Quest VII set the standard for the series' "safe" reputation that persists to this day despite it being a genre pioneer for literal decades. Did they care or reinvest in R&D? No. If a game sells well, especially in Japan, then it gets the thumbs up, and that's a mindset that not so curiously seems to permeate throughout the Square-Enix of today. Huh, I wonder where that came from!

But the biggest crime that Enix's company stalwarts have committed is one Squaresoft avoided in the lead-up to its merger with Enix. Making Sakaguchi's team bow out after The Spirits Within wasn't justified. Still, it led to a new generation within the company getting shots at helming major projects and getting opportunities they never would have gotten if such a changing of the guard hadn't happened. Enix can pretend this next point of mine is not an issue for as long as they want, but no human wins their war against Father Time. Horii won't be around forever, so they must find someone who can act as a face for the series like Yoshi-P advocates for Final Fantasy XIV. And is it time to throw in the towel when it comes to rocking the boat and aging with your core Dragon Quest fans instead of trying to pull younger audiences into the ecosystem? Someone must make that call quickly instead of pretending it's not a problem. Even if Dragon Quest becomes the "safe retro game," it will still make a massive amount of cash. Nonetheless, there are a TON of dragons that need slaying before that can happen, and it's still unclear which hero is willing to accept that call to adventure at Enix.

Everyone Wants To Talk About Ripper Because It Has Christopher Walken, But I Want To Talk About Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller Because It Has An Unhinged Dennis Hopper!

Presently, Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. stands as a too-big-to-fail monolith in the video game industry. Not only do they own and operate the Rockstar Games and 2K labels, but they also own an eclectic portfolio of publishing outfits and development studios. With Microsoft's purchase of Activision-Blizzard looming like a proverbial sword of Damocles, Take-Two Interactive is moving to become the second-largest publicly traded independent game studio in the Americas and Europe, behind only their sworn sports rival, Electronics Arts. Now, some of you may wish to dispute that, considering Take-Two's current business model is that of a holding company and doesn't itself engage in internal development, but that's ignoring the fact that when the projects they fund launch, for better or worse, whole subsets of the gaming industry and community come to a standstill.

They are also very good at making money in this industry and getting their name out there, whether you approve of their business tactics or not. Their 50% stake in NBA 2K League and partnership with the NBA has cemented it as one of the more stable fixtures in e-sports, along with the Madden NFL Championship Series and EVO. Rockstar needs no introduction and 2K as well. 2K's many branches and subsidiaries are far more multifarious than its critics sometimes contend and are more than just a bunch of sports game-making factory mills. Firaxis Games is a division of 2K, and the BioShock, Borderlands, and Mafia franchises also fall under their umbrella. Take-Two Interactive is a big deal in this industry, but if we were to go back to when the company was first founded, there weren't telltale signs it would achieve such monumental heights. Sure, the company got started by Ryan Ashley Brant, who was, in turn, the son of a millionaire magazine magnate. However, it is interesting that Ryan could have inherited his father's media empire and instead decided, "Hey, I want to make video games!" His life was ripe for a real-life version of Succession. Instead, at twenty-one, he surprised everyone in his family and those following the print business by saying, "Nah!" after independently raising $1.5 million to form a company named Take-Two. Oh, and before you get too impressed, Ryan's father, Peter Brant, paid his son enough cash to buy 25% of the company to help it get off the runway. Special note, Peter Brant has a cozy relationship with Donald Trump and, in the 90s, was found guilty of tax evasion.

But rather than make this a blog about the necessity of eating the rich, let's return to the topic of Take-Two Interactive's less-than-orthodox introduction to the video game industry. The company started with Star Crusader, a 3D space combat simulation game. Like many in the PC gaming world at the time, the company started things off with a Wing Commander clone but without any of the over-the-top FMV cutscenes! The game was a modest success, but with investors and his father breathing down his neck looking for a juicy payday, owner Ryan Brant observed the PC video game landscape while planning Take-Two's next project. What he landed on was The Daedalus Encounter by developer Mechadeus. The Daedalus Encounter is an interactive movie starring Tia Carrere, and its surprise success inspired Take-Two to fund their own actor-headlining point-and-click adventure game. However, this would have Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, Stephanie Seymour, and Geoffrey Holder and mix FMV with in-game 3D-rendered character models and environments! That game, Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, was so successful it convinced Take-Two that the "gravy train" to success in the video game industry was FMV adventure games. That's how you get magnificent projects like Ripper and Black Dahlia, two far better-known games from the early days of Take-Two's history.

I cannot emphasize this point enough, but these FMV adventure games, while lampooned for their poor gameplay and decried for their exorbitant budgets, made a lot of money. Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller sold 300,000 units within six months of its release. Joke all you want about the cheesy acting in Ripper or at the notion that Take-Two spent $625,000 of its $2.5 million budget to hire Christopher Walken, Karen Allen, and Burgess Meredith. Ripper made back its entire budget plus a one million dollar surplus by the eighth-month mark from its release. Ripper was such a financial success that Take-Two reported to its shareholders that it amounted to 28.7% of all company revenue during that fiscal year. Scoff all you want at the FMV CD-ROM era of adventure games, but this was the "golden goose" in the PC game market, with Myst and Riven still setting the entire industry on fire. And as I have said before, contrary to popular belief, Myst outsold Diablo II, Half-Life, Command & Conquer, Doom, Doom II, and Baldur's Gate by a considerable margin and stood as the best-selling PC game of all time until The Sims.

What's notable is how Take-Two used their FMV-derived mother lode: they pivoted as a business and left the market they helped steamroll. Unlike others banking on the continued success of FMV adventure games, Take-Two saw the writing on the wall as 3D technology improved and used its revenue to forge a publishing deal with Acclaim Entertainment to achieve better distribution, especially overseas. They also completed a licensing deal with Sony to bring its games to the PlayStation. Less than three years after Ripper, the company would purchase DMA Design, which would later go on to become Rockstar, and gave a project by Sam and Dan Houser called Grand Theft Auto the greenlight using this treasure trove of adventure game money. And, as we often say in these parts, the rest is history.

What Exactly Is Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller?

Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller is in the weird middle ground between being a multi-media game and an adventure game. Like Myst, your tasks are often basic as they involve navigating between two locations and affixing something you picked up or learned from a prior one to a new one. Unlike Myst, Hell relies heavily on password and cipher-based word problems rather than environmental-based ones. There's one incredibly terrible dexterity puzzle I need to review on its own, but it is the only part of this game that deviates even slightly from the conventions of a SCUMM-based point-and-click adventure game. Everything you do in this game involves going from one environment to the next, hearing someone out, and getting them a random trinket so they hand over an item necessary to progress the story. Sometimes you get a hint about a new location instead of a physical object. It's simply riveting stuff. The one novel idea that this game has is its party management system, and it is one of MANY parts of the game that feel tacked on and partially realized. Throughout the story, you will encounter various possible teammates with the tools and resources to complete puzzles or overcome barriers. The problem is that you have a limited number of party slots, which requires you to dismiss some members to make way for others, and, as we will discuss, if you are not following a guide, you can screw yourself.

The development of Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller is notable and worth reviewing as well. Take-Two was still an upstart label when it was interested in getting in on the PC adventure game boom during the 90s. So, they did what anyone seeking to burn millions of media mogul money: they bought an entire development team from a rival! However, in this case, they purchased the team behind MicroProse Software, Inc.'s 1993 cyberpunk RPG, BloodNet. But Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller isn't an RPG, and as a result, you get a tale as old as time: a development team entirely out of its element because its producers are looking for a specific type of game they are not accustomed to making! Also, the demands of Take-Two to make a game with Hollywood actors limited the story and world the Bloodnet team was capable of producing. As I mentioned, the game stars Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, Stephanie Seymour, and Geoffrey Holder. Fully rendered 3D characters represent Hopper and Jones, while Seymour and Holder appear in FMV cutscenes. Was this a technical limitation of early CD-ROM technology, or was the Bloodnet team uncomfortable with their mandate? I don't know the answer to that, but the live-action FMV is used sparingly, which makes the game a weird contrast with Take-Two's next two 90s adventure games (i.e., Ripper and Black Dhalia).

And if you are looking for actors going over the top with their line reads, you don't get that in Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller like you do in Ripper and Black Dahlia. Dennis Hopper is in two scenes where you feel like he's in his most potent form, but his scenes amount to about ten to twelve minutes of the game's playtime. Stephanie Seymour plays Cynna Stone, a virtual reality assistant that chimes in whenever she has something to add to what's happening to the story. However, her lines and dialogue must have gotten thrown into a paper shredder because her presence is only felt for about ten to fifteen minutes during the first half of the story. Geoffrey Holder speaks to you in a monotone voice while reading encyclopedia articles. Grace Jones has her moments as the story's primary antagonist, Solene Solux. However, considering she's one of the most vivid and explosive personalities in the entertainment industry, having her be a cackling pro-fascist villain seems like a waste. Instead of striking Hollywood actors chewing through scenery like their lives depend on it, you instead get primarily dry and dull line deliveries by Gideon and Rachel, the game's two playable characters, one of which you select as the primary character, though you often need to switch between the two to complete tasks. And let me tell you, their voice acting IS NOT GOOD!

Production unevenness is a common issue with this game. From the handful of screencaps I posted, you might have noticed that Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller is a hideous-looking game. Running the game on modern technology allows for some shader options, but even they cannot stop the pre-rendered backgrounds from looking like shit and being incredibly dark. You see a lot of random 90s PC game design stand-ins that add to the game's inconsistent tone. For example, there are a TON of giant skeleton statues that resemble the ones from the Halloween-themed fixtures in Rollercoaster Tycoon. This issue leads me to the point that every single environment in this game is garish and over-the-top. The game attempts to convey a cyberpunk dystopian future but does so with levels like a bar that tries so hard to emulate 90s-era grunge sensibilities it's embarrassing. Things get worse when you enter the environments in Hell, which eschew the game's ordinarily mature tone of needing to topple a totalitarian state. For example, at one point, you find yourself in a classroom with a hellish teacher barking quiz questions at you and, on another occasion, a dentist in an operating room that would be fit for a nu-metal music video circa 1999. I almost want to say that it is a case of the development team getting new state-of-the-art design and programming tools and not knowing what to do, but then why does the game's framerate, especially during FMV cutscenes, drop to the single digits? And before you ask, running the game on an emulator or with modern processors doesn't help because they were programmed that way! If you want things to speed up and play at an average framerate, the game directs you to click the left mouse button, and only then will cutscenes play at 30 FPS. WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THAT?!

You Need To Play Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller Using A Guide

Playing Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller sucks. The inventory system is clunky, especially when you need to use one object from a supporting party member with an item in your primary character's inventory. The map you use to navigate the world is endlessly frustrating as it is hard to look at, and various environments have multiple layers or alternate locations in the same spot. To highlight, the Federal Triangle is a location, and there's a part where you need to hop back and forth between the Bureau of Records and Transgressions Entrance. Each time, because the game doesn't connect its environments, you must complete a task, pick the "dcmap" part of the screen to select the Federal Triangle AGAIN and then scroll to the sublocation you require next. That might sound par for the course in an old-school adventure game, but by the mid to late 90s, that was falling out of favor. Likewise, Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller has the added "bonus" of having hundreds of possible ways to get a "game over." Not solving a puzzle within a finite amount of time? Your game is done. Did you pick the wrong location to go to next? You're dead. Did you select the wrong NPC from a party of five in a bar or interact with patrons in a club in the incorrect order? I hope you saved your game recently because you hard-locked yourself to get the bad ending! Most of your interactions in this game involve you thinking about where you need to go and praying that you picked the correct location, and that's not exactly "fun."

These game-overs mask the fact that everything Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller wants you to do is relatively simple. Here's a convenient guide that saved my attempt to play and complete this game. Notice how many steps or puzzles the guide writer summarizes in a sentence or two. Worse, the game has a time limit that it doesn't tell you. Mark my words, if you attempt to explore the ridiculous world in this game and all of its larger-than-life NPCs, you will end up in a fail state where you will not have enough time, or in this case, fast travel warps to complete the game. Again, this is a core mechanic the game outright NEVER TELLS YOU! To compound the punishing time limit, you need to be precise and careful about your mouse clicks, and this being an adventure game in the 90s, many of the objects you need to find are almost impossible to notice without some third-party help. It also doesn't help that the game's production values are everywhere. I can excuse the pre-rendered backgrounds, considering Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller was made in the 90s, and 3D modeling was a daunting enterprise at the time. The FMV cutscenes were an industry norm, and you just had to "be there" to understand why they weren't a big surprise. But for the vast majority of your time, dialogue scenes are presented flatly with close-up shots of characters repeating one of three possible canned animations, with the most common ones being simple hand gestures and head tilts that lead to frowns or scowls. Furthermore, none of these shots or dialogue scenes takes up the entirety of the screen. Outside of the star power, this game feels like a budget title.

More alarming, there are so many concepts and mechanics the game forgets about. Collecting party members is a big deal during the first hour. There's even a bit with that virtual reality FMV companion expressing shock that you can recruit "Scub Stevens" into your ranks, and ultimately, you use his hacking abilities thrice. A telepath also joins your team, and after a cheesy introduction wherein his girlfriend tells him to beat it after he kills her corrupt teacher, you only use him twice. The core problem here is that because the game has a mountain of one-off mechanics, it becomes impossible for you to develop fluency when it expects you to explore new environments or get through roadblocks. You have a hacker AND demolition expert in your team, and the game is incredibly inconsistent about which of those two you need to use to unlock security panels or chained doors. Likewise, the game's combat is nonexistent. What it does is tell you that you need to fight someone at a specific location, and your success depends on if you have all of the required items in your inventory to complete a combat skill check. The issue here is that the game provides no clues as to what any of these items are, and when you do pass them, they are in-game cinematics where you don't have any control over the action. You sit back and watch the goofiest action sequences I have seen in a long while.

All of this grousing suggests you must play this game with a guide. The game engages in virtually zero signposting and piggybacking, which, if you attempt to solve by playing it blind, can result in you falling into traps and red herrings. As I said, you might have insufficient turns to reach the final location if you are not careful. What can also happen is quest critical NPCs can die if you fail to find them quickly enough. In one case, the main characters overhear a gang discussing a plan to murder an older man who happens to be connected to the government conspiracy your characters are trying to unravel. If you hop to even one disconnected environment or level that is NOT this guy's apartment where you warn him about the assassination attempt, he dies. However, if you forget to do this or misclick, the game continues as if you haven't screwed yourself over. It's like when you fail a primary mission objective in Perfect Dark or Goldeneye, and the game continues to let you mess around for a bit. Nevertheless, in this case, you continue exploring plot threads, not knowing an unsolvable roadblock will present itself five to six hours after the fact. Oh, and did I mention that the game has broken puzzles that are impossible to solve because this game wasn't adequately play-tested? Do you want to learn more about that juicy tidbit? Well, I'm more than happy to regale you with tales about why this game is straight-up BUSTED!

There Aren't A Lot Of Puzzles In Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, But The Ones That Are Here Are AWFUL OR BROKEN!

When the puzzles in Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller work as intended and don't have a horrible bug or design flaw, they are overwhelmingly vanilla-ass password or cipher-based puzzles. Often, an NPC shouts a line or drops a note with clues on how to process computer code or shift alien scripts to translate them into discernable English. For example, when you break into the Federal Triangle, and your characters attempt to piece together why the current dictator decided to burn them, a critical data entry requires the password "Foggy Bottom," and a nearby note on a desk reads "ggyttom." That's fine and dandy, but there are also times when the game relies on esoteric riddles as the crux of its puzzles. On one occasion, you must rescue a freedom fighter from a demon torturing them in a music room. When you talk to them about how to proceed, they say, "Murder the dumb, torture the meek with the scent of death and the gnashing of teeth." That's your cue to have your character click panels on a musical device but only the silent ones. Unfortunately, that hint doesn't tell you the correct order, which is a problem. Also, the five muted keys are found on a 4x4 grid!

There are plenty of other occasions when the game needs to give you more information to reach its intended conclusions, but it doesn't. One that threw me for a loop was its final puzzle, wherein the game presents ten candles, and you need to light them in a specific order. That order is untold, and with ten candles, there are thousands of possible combinations to input. The password-based riddles also suffer from massive inconsistencies, and I must emphasize they are the lion's share of puzzles in the game. When inputting a password, you don't fan through a menu of possible options and instead need to type an answer into the game's parser. Using a parser isn't a weird choice in and of itself, considering Infocom was still making Zork games around the time of Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller. What drove me batty with this game is that sometimes the passwords are case-sensitive, and other times they aren't. And this issue doesn't necessarily stem from whether the password is based on a proper noun, as some passwords need sentence casing, others require proper casing, and some none at all.

When people give me a hard time that my adventure game blogs and videos occasionally use guides, I have to roll my eyes when I get to games like this. Plain and simple, you can only complete this game using a guide because several puzzles are broken. This statement is not hyperbole. The first example of a bug that shouldn't exist occurs shortly after your second visit to Hell. The game wants you to return to Mr. Beautiful's (i.e., Dennis Hopper) office and pick up a random pool cue. Next, you need to talk to a goon named Seceddine Marto, who gives you a hint indicating "R=23." Under normal circumstances, you would use this to apply to a series of phrases you earlier encountered to translate them into "Fruit Death," "Hell Road," and "Oil." This series of terms would, IN NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, inspire you to click on a jukebox and know to locate the albums or music groups named "Orange Martyrdom," "Damnation Avenue," and "Viscous Fluid" and select them in that order. Doing this action would NORMALLY allow you to enter their corresponding codes, E3, E8, and D9, into a computer to unlock the door to a secret room to receive a new device and continue the game. There's one problem. The programmer responsible for this puzzle spelled "Fruit Death" as "Friut Death" and "Oil" as "Oiv." The first of those spelling mistakes is no big deal, but the second one results in a nonsense word, and with hundreds of albums to select from, the puzzle quickly becomes impossible to solve. If your game relies on password-based puzzles, having game-breaking typos is an unconscionable error.

However, the most notorious mistake in this game happens when you reach "Hell's Schoolroom" near the end of the story. While there, a demonic schoolteacher demands that you complete a pop quiz where all of the questions are in a code. The exam topic is state capitols in the United States of America. Translating the questions is easy, but if you input the state capitals for their matching states, you'll STILL fail the puzzle! That's because the answers are programmed to be case-sensitive AND require the name of the city AND the name of the state they are located in. However, the teacher states in-game that they only want the name of the cities and for you to omit the names of their respective states! So, whoever programmed this puzzle did not talk to the person who wrote its directions and script. For example, after you translate the text in the quiz, the first question asks, "What is the capital of Iowa?" the correct answer in-game is "Des Moines Iowa." Still, if you type "Des Moines," which is the answer that follows the in-game directions, that is detected as an incorrect answer! That design flaw should have failed the game during the certification process and sent it back to the development team. However, with Take-Two still getting its feet wet, it's unlikely they had any formalized Q&A process within their ranks. Also, a fun fact for Borgmaster, there are no commas in answers for the MS-DOS version, but they are required with the 3DO port!

I Need To Talk To You About A Single Minigame

Complaining about a single minigame in a video game sounds petty and childish. And you know what? It is petty and childish, but I'm still going to do it! This single arcade game sequence took me damn near two hours to complete, and I'm still fuming about it. Near the middle of the game's second act, you learn about different factions unrelated to the religious dictatorship running the United States. One of these factions is a club of telepaths, another is addicted to neural implants, and another is obsessed with plastic surgery and body modification. You know, the usual stuff you see in a cyberpunk game! One of these factions tasks your intrepid duo with breaking into a morgue they suspect is improperly processing the bodies of recently departed group members. The issue is that the only entrance to this crematorium is guarded by a series of oscillating laser grids that will immediately alert the police. Oh, and the ground is mined, but the mines hop across the playing field you need to navigate while avoiding the laser grids! It's a goddamn NIGHTMARE!

The spawn positions of the mines are randomly generated each time you attempt this puzzle. The fact they move means that when you think you have found a safe place to try and gauge when to time your hops between the lasers, a mine could spawn underneath your character and immediately result in a "Game Over." The default camera angle could be better as it doesn't provide a great vantage point to determine where the laser grids bottom out. The edges between the puzzle's parts are hard to figure out, and the lighting makes seeing the mines a pain. Worse, the laser grid's speed makes it an almost impossible task to complete. And it's not as if they move in an easy-to-notice pattern where you can time yourself or do a countdown to finish it. I do not know how I got past this puzzle, but I did. If you want to see what this minigame looks like in motion, here's a quick ten-minute video clip of me explaining and showing what the game wants you to do.

This Story GOES PLACES!

Why would I play a questionable FMV-based adventure game that is not fun in any way, shape, or form? Well, for the same reasons I played MTV's Club Dead! Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller is a magical snapshot into 90s Americana. When you review it as a time capsule, you realize it is a work of art worthy of inclusion in the National Archives. The characters engage in a tech speak that crosses Star Trek's technobabble with leetspeak and forms a potent 90s-era linguistic baby. As you can already likely tell from my screenshots, this game is an artistic disaster, but it embodies a specific era of the 1990s to a T. And have I mentioned what some of the names are for the characters in this game? I don't think you're ready for this, but here's a list of some of the most notable, and be aware this is not a joke. These are actual names for NPCs in Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller!

• Solene Solux
• Scub Stevens
• Brett Carew
• Thomas Meaculp
• Wicked Stick
• Cyber Schmyber
• Drip (no last name)
• Electric Sex
• Barbara Bacchus
• Dr Clean (no period on the title)
• Aldous Xenon
• Derek Literati
• Senator Erin Burr
• Professor Coronary
• Suzy Toast
• Columbus Spatola
• Steele Jack
• Chastity Bene
• Milwaukee Jack
• Splits Magnola
• Eddy Commerce
• Grinda Dove
• Conklin Danforth
• Phyllis Dancing-till-Daybreak

But what's the story like in Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller? Well, it's a hot mess in the best way possible. The game starts with your two playable characters, Gideon Eshanti and Rachel Braque, being attacked by elite commandos from the current government of the United States of America, even though they are officers in the military in good standing. If you read the manual, you will discover during a previous election cycle, after a portal to Hell appeared and unleashed havoc on the world, American voters elected a far-right religious government that promised to guarantee people's safety. However, this government suspended all future elections and installed Imperator Solene Solux as ruler for life. Yeah, that part of the game hits differently these days. While our protagonists investigate why they have been burned, they encounter an underground resistance front trying to topple the current dictatorship and the forces of Hell. When Gideon and Rachel hack into the Pentagon and uncover files on how the government operates, they toss their lot in with the resistance group.

But what about the demons of Hell? Well, they have a pseudo-peace treaty with the far-right government of the USA. When someone breaks the puritanical rules and laws of the government, police from the dictatorship research the offending person's worst fear and then match them with a demon or devil that tortures them to their heart's delight. You also have monsters like Dennis Hopper's character, Mr. Beautiful, who carve out slices of the United States and act like gangsters protecting their turf. Or that's what we think at the start of the game. As you begin to investigate Hell and the government, your characters sign up to participate in an adult film directed by Asmodeus, who is styled to talk and look like Ron Jeremy. When an undercover marine from the resistance comes to the rescue and shoots Asmodeus, we find out he's an android. You then warp to a secret pocket dimension to talk to a man named "Deep Throat" because even in the 90s, it was cool to reference Watergate. Deep Throat reveals that Hell is a simulation operated by the far-right government to cement its power and justify subverting democracy. This plot twist is completely bananas. The demons scaring people into supporting the evil government, including Satan, are androids. How did the far-right nutjobs make this happen? Well, they blew up a big hole in the ground, claimed it to be Hell, and had all the demon androids ready to scare people into voting for them on standby!

There's a second plot twist almost as crazy as the one about Hell. As Gideon and Rachel try to investigate why the government wants to kill them, they notice that they mutter Latin phrases randomly or in their sleep. They find a leader of one of the factions in the world that can read Latin, leading them to an archive in the Pentagon. In this game, you hack and break into the Pentagon and Federal Triangle about four or five times, and it's no big deal. The future sure seems safer and more secure. Regardless, Gideon and Rachel find a record that explains that everyone on the scrub list, including themselves, were targets of an earlier government operation named "The Night of the Re-entombment." This operation snatched dozens of freedom fighters and then mindwiped them before redesigning their bodies and programming them to think they were law-abiding officers in the government. Despite early successes, the government fell into a Blade Runner issue of some early recipients breaking from their programming and causing chaos, so an order was sent to terminate everyone. I find it hilarious that the game says all this to you and then fobs it off almost immediately. Rachel declares that the report doesn't make sense and, if true, seems like a waste of time compared to simply killing them upon their first capture. Gideon ends up agreeing with her, and they shrug the entire matter off, and nothing more is said about the topic.

Then you fight the forces of Satan. Much like the earlier combat sequences, these boil down to skill checks wherein the game sees if you have all the materials in your inventory to beat a demon. If you do, you watch a cheap in-game action scene where the characters kill the monster, and if you don't, you get a "Game Over." The same thing happens when you fight Satan himself. You need an odd assortment of trinkets to beat him, and there's a fun puzzle where you need to write the words "God is dead" on a wall to summon him. After defeating the forces of Hell, Gideon and Rachel turn their attention to the evil dictatorship and try to hack into the server operating the androids to cause the program to break and reveal the ruse to everyone else. This event is the one time when your choice of who the primary character is plays a role in your playthrough as the volunteer to complete this task is the character you did not select, and after things don't pan out and Solene Solux breaks their mind, they die. With your remaining character, you break into the Pentagon and then fight Solene Solux in a fist fight which is the goofiest-looking thing in the world. Please don't take my word for it; here's an archive of me experiencing the end of this game!

This game is a rollercoaster, and you shouldn't play it. However, with Take-Two Interactive set to become one of the world's biggest independent video game companies, it's fun to look back at their rocky and wild start. It would be a licensing issue to bring these games back to the forefront, considering they all feature the likeness of huge names in the entertainment industry. Still, their trio of FMV adventure games (i.e., Hell, Ripper, and Black Dahlia) set them up for their meteoric rise to prominence, and they deserve more recognition than they presently have. At the very least, Take-Two should openly acknowledge that they would not exist without their early success in making these cheesy-ass adventure games. So, if anyone from Take-Two is reading this blog, I WANT YOU COWARDS TO ADMIT YOUR PAST! ACCEPT YOU MADE THIS GAME BEFORE TRICKING TEENS INTO SPENDING HUNDREDS ON NBA 2K LOOTBOXES! And one more time, here's the game's INCREDIBLE introductory cutscene!

If you enjoy this blog and would like to read my other adventure game retrospectives, here's a list of my previous episodes of this series:

• Episode 1: The Dig
• Episode 2: Atlantis: The Lost Tales
• Episode 3: Loom
• Episode 4: Drowned God
• Episode 5a: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Part 1 & Episode 5b: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - Part 2
• Episode 6: The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime
• Episode 7a: The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time (Part 1)& Episode 7b: The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time (Part 2)
• Episode 8a: The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time (Part 1) & Episode 8B: The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time (Part 2)
• Episode 9a: The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One [Part 1] & Episode 9b: The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One [Part 2]
• Episode 10: D (The Game)
• Episode 11a: The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate [Part 1]& Episode 11b: The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate [Part 2]
• Episode 12a: The Legend of Kyrandia - Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge [Part 1] & Episode 12b: The Legend of Kyrandia - Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge [Part 2]
• Episode 13: Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb
• Episode 14a: MTV's Club Dead [Part 1] & Episode 14b: MTV's Club Dead [Part 2]
• Episode 15: A.D. 2044

Preamble

I'm going to start things off with a hot take. I've never been the biggest fan of Full Throttle. I respect the game and LucasArts being a preeminent studio willing to think outside the box, but the game is nowhere near my top five or even top ten list of the best adventure games of all time, which is how some rank Full Throttle. Now, I know I have been on record as saying I was in "Team Sierra" when the "Golden Age of Adventure Games" was happening, but that's not to say that I am so oblivious to the gameplay advances and quality writing found from LucasArts during its glory days. Nonetheless, with Full Throttle, a bunch of niggling issues about it have always rubbed me the wrong way. Some appreciate it taking the risk of moving away from LucasArts's SCUMM engine, though Loom beat it by a handful of years. Nonetheless, the skull-based interface is just as obtuse as the SCUMM engine, with its disparate parts fiddly and annoying to click on. I love the game's aesthetics and sense of style. Still, with the scope of the game far more narrow than previous LucasArts titles that preceded it, the game lacks the depth you usually associate with classic adventure games from LucasArts.

However, the most fundamental issue with Full Throttle has always been one that even its more ardent fans have to concede. Just as the game starts to open up and get interesting, it ends. Full Throttle was lambasted even at the time of its release as being short, and while my advancing age has made me more open-minded to quick games, Full Throttle is one that still feels like it demands an extra hour or two. Worse, the entire back half of Full Throttle feels incomplete. The opening chapter at Melonweed bleeds character, but unfortunately, the handful of set pieces that follow it do not continue that tradition. The highway sequence, especially the part where you must collect different weapons, feels like filler. It also remains the worst-looking level with a disorienting parallax effect that remains terrible regardless of which version of the game you play. The arena is a quick, mindless puzzle with a souvenir stall and a terrible demolition derby sequence. The penultimate level at the Corley factory is the most annoying in the game and lacks environmental style and a sense of exploration.

However, to avoid anyone accusing me of dogpiling on Full Throttle, rest assured that I still think people should play it. No game has ever captured the mood and tone of Full Throttle in the nearly thirty years since its release, and while limited, it shares a unique and compelling enough world that is worth exploring if you have never played it. The game's production values and voice acting are still a gold standard for the genre. Likewise, with Full Throttle boiling out the SCUMM engine and featuring a brisk playtime, the barrier to entry is so low it's hard to advise anyone not to seek it out if they haven't done so already. The latter of those positives also make Full Throttle an excellent game to recommend to anyone interested in exploring retro or older point-and-click adventure games. I'd still stick with The Secret of Monkey Island as my top recommendation for adventure game newbies. Still, Full Throttle deserves to be in the conversation if someone you are shepherding looks at the number of verbs they need to process with SCUMM-based or parser-based games and becomes overwhelmed.

So I Played The Remaster, And We Need To Talk About That

Now that I have diffused the handful of you who may have wanted my head after my first hot take, I will kick the hornet's nest again. I'm not too fond of the look of the remastered versions of the classic LucasArts games. They are the definitive versions of their respective games, and a toggle allows you to switch between the original pixel-based graphics and the modern cel-shaded or digital paint-based ones. But HOT DAMN, I think the remastered versions of The Secret of Monkey Island and Full Throttle look like absolute garbage. With Full Throttle, the game's original shading and deep shadows get pulverized in the remaster, which immediately mutes many moody environments at the start and end of the game. Conversely, processing environmental clues and detecting objects and items you must collect on various screens is a thousand times easier in the remaster. However, I think there was a better middle ground that could have been attempted here, given how good modern pixel graphics have gotten in the indie game sphere of today. Call me old-fashioned, but the original graphics just look better than the smoother and brighter pastels in the remaster!

The Intro Cutscene In The Original Version	The Intro Cutscene In The Remaster

Mercifully, the act of playing Full Throttle Remastered is considerably better than it is with The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. As many of you know, when you play the Special Edition of The Secret of Monkey Island, you must bring up a utility wheel that functions similarly to the SCUMM verb-based engine in the original. While this was done as a necessary compromise to get the game to work on consoles, it is a clunky and unenjoyable way to play the game and, in my case, is the primary reason why I played the game entirely on the retro setting. Because Full Throttle always had a radial UI system that guides your exploration of the world and its many objects, it fares considerably better than The Secret of Monkey Island. Also, Full Throttle Remastered makes a handful of puzzles and sequences markedly easier than they were in the original game. For example, the brick wall puzzle is far more doable as the brick you need to kick with Ben has a noticeable backlight that immediately gives it away. I'll make a special note when we get to other significantly easier puzzles, but rest assured, there aren't that many.

However, there's one last thing I must mention about Full Throttle Remastered that bothered me to no end. A LOT of people enjoy the director's commentary with these remasters, and there's no denying that Tim Schaffer and the cadre of people he recorded with are funny and great storytellers. However, Tim Schafer is full of himself in this specific director's commentary. In particular, there's a point near the end of the game where Schafer says he feels that the story of Full Throttle is "complete" and that a sequel never got traction with the original team. That's outright historical revisionism, as we know that the LucasArts of old put considerable time, money, and staffing into making a 3D sequel to Full Throttle. Full Throttle 2, or Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels, was in development for three years and even had teaser trailers hyping it up at E3. Suggesting that a sequel was never a serious idea is disrespectful to those who worked on that project, even if it got canceled and never saw the light of day. There was even that awkward moment when Duncan Jones tried to get social media to convince Disney to greenlight his idea for a Full Throttle Disney+ T.V. series. Tim Schaffer is wrong, but let's get into puzzles rather than another soapbox of mine.

Puzzle Rankings

Prologue & Melonweed

Getting Out of The Dumpster And Getting Ben's Keys - [Rating: 2/10] - Man, the start of this game sure is fantastic! After a series of cutscenes perfectly set up the story, our protagonist, Ben, ends up in a dumpster and needs to find his way out. You accomplish this by selecting the hatch to kick it open and then moving Ben to the right of the dumpster. When he enters the bar, he'll notice the bartender and need to be aggressive with his dialogue options to get the keys to his motorcycle back. It's a perfect tutorial that decouples you from any parser or SCUMM-based preconceptions you might have going into a classic LucasArts game. The only reason why I'm bumping this up by one extra point is because the dialogue system in Full Throttle can be a pain. If you fail a dialogue check, in some cases, like this one, you have to reselect the person you need to talk to and pick a different option a second or third time before you can continue with the story.

Your First Bike Fight - [Rating 3/10] - I know some people like the motorcycle combat in Full Throttle, but I'm not one of them. Mostly, they are quick and painless, with you always knowing what you need to do to get past these combat sequences. The fights are utterly mindless despite having a basic notion of rock-paper-scissors as you get further into the story. My issue is that it's an awful feeling when we get to that highway level, and you don't have the tools to beat the person you have been matched up against. Also, when it comes to your first fight, I always need to remember that you need to worry about your left and right movements before you start mashing away with your hits. I have consistently maintained that I think Full Throttle should automatically center you with your opponent before the combat begins, and as you take hits, then you worry about your movements. It's not impossible to figure out, but it plays like nothing else you've ever experienced in a LucasArts adventure game, and there are only a limited number of times when you interact with this combat system. It always takes time and practice to get accustomed to, which will likely be the case with most people playing Full Throttle for the first time. However, the game's limited use of this system makes it hard for new players to develop proficiency with its mechanics.

Getting Stuff From Todd's Trailer - [Rating For The Original Puzzle: 6/10; Rating For The Remastered Version: 5/10] - After driving on the highway for a bit, Ben's motorcycle will eventually lose its wheel and result in him getting into an accident. Luckily for Ben, a newspaper reporter named Miranda transports him to a repair shop, and the mechanic, Maureen (i.e., Mo), relays to Ben the tools and parts she needs to fix his bike. While the town of Melonweed presents itself as an open world, there is a correct order in which you explore the city. The first tool you can get, which happens to be a blow torch, comes from a nearby trailer occupied by a grumpy man named Todd. To "borrow" his torch, knock on the door of his trailer, and when he is near the entrance, kick it in to knock Todd out and be able to search his trailer for objects and quest items. From the first floor, you must collect a lockpick from a cabinet and a slab of meat from Todd's refrigerator. You can find a torch on a workbench when you use a lift to navigate to Todd's basement.

The timing for knocking Todd out isn't impossible to figure out, and if you elect to have Todd blow off Ben without kicking the door out, Ben will make a quip about needing to teach him some manners, which is your clue to get physical. I am less enthused about the lockpick and steak in the first level of the trailer. Again, the remaster is slightly more generous about making these objects visible to the player, but knowing you need to open the fridge errs close to hidden object gameplay. In the original game, finding the lockpick is a frustrating pixel hunt. I understand that was a standard gameplay hook in adventure games of this era; trust me, I know that. Nonetheless, for people playing Full Throttle for the first time, I can imagine the sequence of steps at Melonweed tripping them up. Also, making the walk of shame back to the trailer to get the steak or lockpick, if you forget to pick them up the first time, sucks.

Stealing Gas From The Cops [Rating For The Original Puzzle: 5/10; Rating For The Remastered Version: 6/10] - What drives me somewhat crazy is how the game automatically transports you whenever you pick up an item Mo needs. I feel the game should only send you to Mo once you have all three things she requires, but being reminded of what you need to do next after completing one part of this sequence is a gimmie to the player by the designers. A nearby petrol tower has the gas Mo needs to get Ben's bike running again. When Ben approaches the building, there's a gate with a lock he can quickly unlock using the lockpick he found in Todd's trailer. Also, don't forget to pick up that padlock before leaving the tower. Unfortunately, when Ben attempts to climb the tower to "borrow" some gas, it sets off an alarm that sends a police hovercraft his way. You must re-attempt this sequence if you are not quick about moving Ben to a shady spot behind a pillar. While Ben hides in the shadows, the police attempt to find him and leave their hovercraft unattended. This turn of events allows you to open the gas cap on their vehicle, and you can use a hose on the gas cap to funnel gas to the can after using the mouth portion of the skull icon on the hose.

The Gas Tower Hiding Spot In The Original	The Gas Tower Hiding Spot In the Remaster

This puzzle exemplifies how the remaster's art style can make solving puzzles harder. Because the shadows in the remaster are far less pronounced than in the original, it is more challenging to figure out the correct positioning of where Ben needs to be behind the pillar. In the original pixel-based art, the shading pops out far better, and the shadow effect while Ben hides is far more apparent. The part of this sequence involving the gas can is easy to figure out, and in fact, it reminded me of a similar puzzle in Fate of Atlantis, which predates this game by about three years. My only quibble is that this is one of the few times you must use the mouth/taste command to solve a puzzle. Otherwise, that command is reserved for providing flavor text when exploring new environments and is rarely necessary.

Getting The Forks From The Junkyard - [Rating: 3/10] -There's one last environment to explore in Melonweed before beating a hasty retreat: the junkyard. Unfortunately for Ben, the entrance to the junkyard is locked. However, he can get past this problem by using the padlock you remembered to pick up when first entering the gas tower to lock a sliding door, allowing Ben to climb a chain to get into the junkyard. In the center of the junkyard are a car magnet crane, a ton of derelict cars, and a vicious guard dog, which makes exploring the yard all but impossible. To deal with the dog, put the meat from Todd's fridge in a blue car below the magnet crane to trap the dog. Then, move Ben up a ladder to operate the crane to drag its magnet down three times and up three times. This action allows Ben to search a pile of rubble that contains the forks Mo needs to fix Ben's bike. This puzzle is a last "gear check" before you leave Melonweed, and as long as you have the tools necessary for success, I think it is a clever and fun sequence. My only complaint stems from the perspective the game forces you into when you operate the crane. It's a terrible angle that makes knowing where to move the magnet harder than it needs to be.

Getting Past The Police Blockade - [Rating: 2/10] - After Mo repairs Ben's bike, the game transitions to a cutscene that shows that a police blockade exists on the only exit out of Melonweed. To break this police entourage, return to the gas tower and have Ben touch the same ladder that triggered the alarm the last time he visited there. The police will then leave their blockade, and Ben automatically leaves town without additional input. There's a quick transitional sequence in which Ben returns to Mo's repair shop to find it abandoned. While there, he needs to check a pile of junk to figure out he needs to go to the long derelict Mink Ranch. I'm bumping this entire sequence up one extra point because backtracking to the tower is a weird design choice. Again, Full Throttle is guilty of a lot of copy-paste gameplay that its fans sometimes overlook, and this set piece is an early example.

Mink Ranch, The Highway, & Mine Road

This part of the game is STILL UGLY!

Investigating Mink Ranch - [Rating: 1/10] - Before Ben goes to Mink Ranch, he first needs to return to the Kickstand Bar to find Miranda, the reporter from earlier, to get a summary of what has happened to Ben's biker gang. The Polecats, Ben's pose, are being framed for the murder of Malcolm Corley by Adrian Ripburger as part of Ripburger's ploy to gain control of the legendary Corley Motors, the last domestic motorcycle manufacturer. Believing Ben when he says he's being set up, Miranda gives Ben a fake ID he needs to show a truck driver in the bar to get past another police blockade. Also, while in the bar, we watch a news report that relays the status of Ben's biker gang. When you arrive at the ranch, enter a cabin and locate some pictures to find clues about Mo's past. Next, move some pillows to find a tire iron that you then use to open a trunk underneath a bed. Everything here is straight and to the point. I'd hazard to call this more of an extended cutscene than anything else, but it fills in some gaps about the worldbuilding and main story and does so with the same spectacular voice acting that graced the start of the game. I have no complaints.

Dealing With Nestor and Bolus On The Highway - [Rating: 5/10] - Well, it's time for the worst part of Full Throttle: the highway. The highway is not the most challenging part of the game. Instead, I find it the most tedious and monotonous part, with you needing to repeatedly loop around the same dull highway sections before you find the area you want to explore. When you first drive through the highway, Ben stands next to a crashed semi-truck full of fertilizer. It would be best if you had Ben use the tire iron on a wheel on the semi-truck, which causes it to move slightly. Grab some of the green fertilizer, and upon using Ben's bike, you should trigger a short chase sequence with Nestor and Bolus, two of Ripburger's goons. The solution is to dart back to the overturned semi-truck, and if you remembered to use the tire iron on the truck, they crash their car. When you investigate the crash site, use the tire iron on the fender of the wrecked vehicle, and lift a hover unit.

This part is far from the worst segment of the highway section of the game. Nonetheless, the sequencing can get tricky, especially if you forget to turnabout to the semi-truck when Nestor and Bolus chase after Ben. There's no "fail state" to worry about in this game, but re-engaging with this puzzle is annoying because every part and level in the highway is miles away from the other parts. The entire road is stretched to a painful degree, and with it being the worst-looking part of the game, regardless of which version you decide to play, it's not exactly the most exciting level to deal with. If you miss one exit, looping around to get back to it results in aimless backtracking sessions that feel like a waste of time.

Getting The Necessary Weapons On The Highway - [Rating: 7/10] - This part of the game sucks. I was not too fond of it in the 90s and still hate it today. I'm sorry if you like the style and presentation of the motorcycle fights, but praying to the RNG goddess to be nice to you as you play one of the worst versions of rock-paper-scissors wasn't fun when this game first hit the shelves, and it still sucks today. When you explore one of the ends of the highway, you find out that the bridge to the Corley Motors factory is in ruins. When you explore one of the highway exits, Ben should come across the former leader of The Polecats, Father Torque, who gives you the rundown on what you need to do to get over the bridge. Ben will need a hover unit, booster pack, and ramp. Unfortunately, the ramp is currently in the secret lair of the Cavefish gang, and locating this lair requires a set of goggles from one of their gang members. However, Ben can't simply go up to a Cavefish gang member and hope to nab their goggles. Instead, he needs one of two possible weapons to position himself correctly to attack any given Cavefish gang member. With Full Throttle being an adventure game from the 90s, all this is easier said than done.

To get to the goggles, you need to find bikers with a mace, chain, booster pack, chainsaw, and board, hopefully in that order. As I suggested earlier, there's a light element of rock-paper-scissors with only the biker with the mace beatable with Ben's fists or starting tire iron, with the other bikers remaining unbeatable until you get additional weapons. The issue with this puzzle is immediate. The game randomly spawns the bikers Ben confronts, and it's very likely at the start of this sequence, he ends up in a fight he cannot win. The game also does not eliminate bikers you have already beaten from its rotation, and the jerk with the chain can steal weapons you try to use on him and are not careful. Of the many ways the remastered version of the game has been designed to make playing Full Throttle easier and more enjoyable, the fact it still fails to de-dupe the instancing of the bikers on the highway is aggravating. During this playthrough, I got the mace and chain without much difficulty, but the game spawned an unbeatable confrontation with a Cavefish biker three times in a row. On top of that, the timing and positioning with some of the biker fights, the Cavefish one being the most evident example, is far tighter than it needs to be, with you often needing to re-attempt the same battles more than once before you figure things out. There's the female biker with the chainsaw, whom you can only beat if you use the fertilizer on her, but you must be close enough to use this item. Overall, I'm not too fond of this part of the game. It's an incredibly tedious affair that overstays its welcome and becomes tiresome.

Finding And Robbing The Cavefish Lair - [Rating: 5/10] - When you finally manage to grab a pair of goggles, use them in Ben's inventory, and when an icon pops up on the screen, click it to enter the Cavefish lair. While in the cave, move right to find the ramp Father Torque mentioned. Have Ben hop off his bike and then have him hook the ramp to the back of his motorcycle by clicking on it. Move to the left once, but before attempting to exit the cave, have Ben leave his bike to unhook the ramp to block a set of reflectors which causes chasing Cavefish gang members to veer off course and crash into a cave wall. If you forget to do this step, Ben ends up out of the cave without the ramp and needs to find the lair using the goggles again. Even after all these years, the extra step with the reflectors always gets me. The point of the Cavefish using special visors to know which direction to turn is one Father Torque makes when you talk to him. Still, it is not a hint that immediately helps you figure out why Ben can't steal the ramp without redirecting the reflectors. Besides that point, this puzzle is relatively short and painless.

Jumping Over The Gorge - [Rating: 1/10] - When Ben leaves the cave, he automatically sets up the ramp to the correct position. However, Ben needs to learn how fast or what angle he needs to be at to make the jump successfully. To help him, find a plaque to review the items required to make the jump and when to time the booster pack. As long as you have the needed motorcycle upgrades, the game triggers the cutscene wherein Ben makes the jump without breaking a sweat. This puzzle is another gear check puzzle wherein the only thing preventing you from solving it is if you are missing something. If you examine the plaque and neglect a trinket, Ben will chime in what he needs and even posits where to find it. For that helpful game design, I'm giving this my lowest mark.

The Stadium & Corley Motors

Stealing Your First Bunny Toy And Getting Its Battery - [Rating: 3/10] - After Ben pilots his motorcycle over the gorge, he ends up in an arena nearby a canyon that he believes leads to the headquarters of Mo's biker gang. Unfortunately for Ben, the entrance to this lair appears to be mined. When you enter the stadium, you find an older man named Horace running a souvenir store. After some introductions, Horace welcomes Ben to try out one of his best-selling toys, a remote-controlled race car. When Ben uses this device, the batteries run out, and Horace turns to try and get his toy working. With his back turned, observe the stand and then have Ben steal one of the yellow rabbit toys for sale. Have Ben return to the canyon and use the toy rabbit on the ground, which causes it to trigger one of the land mines. Luckily for Ben, a battery survives the explosion, and he can pick that up and add it to his inventory. The signposting that the yellow rabbits are vital has always been poor, and the communication of the game's expectations for using them is even worse. Nonetheless, with this act limiting you to just a few explorable locations, it's pretty easy to put two and two together here.

Stealing A Box Of Bunny Toys And Using Them To Get Past The Minefield - [Rating: 5/10] - Return to the souvenir stand and use the battery on the spent toy car. Have Ben use the toy car to make it veer through the turnstile leading to the arena, which Horace notices and becomes upset about. When Horace runs after the toy car, have Ben steal a box of toy rabbits. Return to the canyon entrance again and use the box of toys on the minefield, but be very careful to pick the rabbits up before they trigger any of the landmines. The trick with this puzzle is to use the toy rabbits one at a time until they trip a landmine. After starting an explosion, move Ben to the location of the blast, and then use another toy until it triggers another landmine, and repeat this process until Ben ends up at the Vulture's hideout. Using too many of the toys inefficiently will result in you needing to steal an additional box. When I first played the game, I thought you just used the box, and if you got lucky, you would only need to use two or three of them before Ben got to the next cutscene. The fact you can do that feels like a red herring the programming team should have designed out of the game. That and frantically collecting the toy rabbits after using the box on the minefield doesn't feel good. Correspondingly, tone-wise, this puzzle feels entirely out of place.

The Demolition Derby Puzzle - [Rating: 5/10] - First, when Ben ends up in the Vulture's headquarters, have him call Mo "Diapered Dynamo" to prove he didn't kill Malcolm Corley. After an extended mission brief, I can only imagine was purposefully directed and written to resemble the Death Star mission brief during the climax of Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, Ben ends up in a demolition derby. As Mo's assistant explained earlier, Ben needs to use a ramp to bounce on top of an orange car to cause it to stall. Then he needs to push it to the right and over the ramp. The position of the orange vehicle causes Ben's car to land on top of a blue one, which results in a massive explosion. While Ben is enflamed, have him run to the box seats in the arena to cause the whole stadium to catch fire. To deal with Nestor and Bolus, hop on the orange car and when the blue car rams it, jump on it. When the blue car is positioned next to a fire pit, run into it to cause the two goons to drive into the fire. The game automatically triggers a new cutscene once the demolition derby is complete.

This statement will be another occasion where I diverge from the consensus on Full Throttle, but I HATE THIS SEQUENCE! It's so incredibly fiddly, as positioning the orange car is a complete pain in the ass. Bumping it to the bottom right corner of the arena and then through the ramp never feels good. There's also a slight timing element to when you should use the ramp, and missing your cue or window is endlessly frustrating. Worse, the game constantly interjects with cutaways taunting you to work quicker, despite there being no actual timer. Waiting for the various cars to get in the correct position during the second half of the puzzle is zero fun, though with this being more of a waiting game, it's far from being an unattainable chore.

The Brick Wall Puzzle In The Original	The Brick Wall Puzzle In The Remaster

The Brick Wall Puzzle [Rating For The Original Puzzle: 10/10; Rating For The Remastered Version: 5/10] - This is the "big one." When Full Throttle was first released, this one puzzle resulted in more people calling into the LucasArts hotline than any other part and was one of the most common calls made to the service short of The Dig and the stump disc swapping joke in The Secret of Monkey Island. It's also something the remaster deliberately makes considerably easier. Before we get to that, after the demolition derby, it is CRUCIAL you examine the floor of Mo's hideout to notice a six-digit code. Afterward, when Ben exits the hideout, he must find a secret entrance to the Corley Motors factory. To locate this tunnel, Ben must kick a brick wall in the right place AND at the right time. The rock he needs to kick is slightly above the left-most post where you start. To time things correctly, wait until all of the meters on the screen are no longer moving or shaking and kick the rock. Sounds easy, right? Well, it sure is in the remaster, but this task was downright impossible in the original game!

As I said earlier, the remaster has the common courtesy of having a backlight to the rock you need to kick. That alone cuts the difficulty of this puzzle in half. Finding the stone in the original game was nearly impossible because it perfectly blended into the brown wall texture. The other problem with this puzzle was that finding the correct position to kick the rock could take you so long that you could forget about the timing aspect of the puzzle. Mo's assistant makes one quip about needing to time Ben's kick to the rock, but that's far from enough piggybacking the game should have done before throwing this puzzle at you. Likewise, the remaster is far more generous about where you need to click because I remember feeling like the clickable area for the rock in the original game was five to ten pixels big. If ANY of you remember how bad this puzzle was in the original game, please, drop a comment so I don't feel like I am going senile.

Unlocking The Floor Safe [Rating: 4/10] - Remember that six-digit code I mentioned earlier? When Ben finally enters the Corley factory through the secret entrance, he'll quickly find a safe in a nearby desk. The combination to this safe is 154492, and after you input this code, Ben picks up a film reel and pass card. Normally, I have erred towards the generous side when it comes to password-based puzzles. Most of these are simple fetch quests as long as no dexterity-based minigames are involved. The issue with this puzzle is that there are a variety of six-digit codes in Mo's hideout, and none of them are especially well-labeled to suggest which one applies to the safe. It's also a slight leap of logic to return to the hideout to find this passcode, as your first reaction is to search the factory and desk for clues on how to open the safe. Nonetheless, opening the safe is straightforward once you figure things out.

Ruining Ripburger's Presentation - [Rating: 2/10] - After Ben nabs the film reel and keycard, he must find a hallway to the right of the desk. To enter, he needs to use the card on a card reader and then find a room with a projection system, and you can witness Ripburger droning about his vision for Corley Motors. While in this room, pull the motor lever and then the lamp lever twice to break the projector. If you are not quick enough, security will cause Ben to leave the room and result in you needing to try again. After Ripburger's speech comes to a standstill, exit the projector room and find a middle space that allows Ben to use photos that prove Ripburger murdered Malcolm Corley. Doing this causes a new cutscene to trigger, which transitions the game to a chase sequence on the highway. The timing element of using the lever on the lamp for the projector is a bit quirky, but for the most part, this is an easy task to pull off and is meant to transition the player to the game's climax. It's a fun and cinematic moment that quickly juxtaposes to the highlight of the whole game: the final chase sequence.

The Grand Finale

Getting Into The Airplane While Ripburger Pilots His Semi-Truck - [Rating: 3/10] - This is the best part of the game! While the game meanders a bit in the middle, its conclusion is fantastic, and the final battle against Ripburger has an almost Mad Max 2 vibe. When Ben ends up on Ripburger's semi-truck, click on a panel below a window and snatch Ripburger's cane the moment he sticks it out. Open a different panel below the window and use this cane on a fan; eventually, Ben will end up in an engine compartment. Use Ben's tire iron on a fuel line to cause Ripburger's truck to stop moving and end up inside Mo's airplane. Again, everything you need to do here is simple and more about providing a visual spectacle. You needing to mess around with the two panels, and the game calling back to the tire iron after an extended hiatus is slightly contrived. Nonetheless, with the final result as cinematic as it is, it's hard to complain.

Inputting The Correct Commands On The Airplane Monitor - [Rating: 2/10] - While inside the airplane, Ripburger turns on the defensive batteries on his truck to try and kill Ben and Mo. Deciding to boot Ripburger from the plane, one of Mo's gang members directs Ben to use the plane's control panel to push him out. You can accomplish this by climbing a ladder and then selecting the "Take-off," "Post Take-off," "Gear," and "Raise Gear" commands, and in that order. These commands cause Ripburger to jolt out of his truck and become stuck on one of its gun batteries. Getting to the panel is easy enough, and with only four possible commands on the monitor and their order being reasonably easy to figure out, it's hard to find too much fault in this puzzle.

Dropping Ripburger To His Death - [Rating: 3/10] - It's time to get Ripburger his just deserts! With him hanging onto a lone gun turret, enter the cockpit of his truck and then use a monitor there. After selecting the monitor, click "Main Menu," "Defense Menu," "Machine Guns," "Control," and finally, "System Off." With that, you drop Ripburger to his death, but if you want to see a slightly humorous optional scene consider selecting "Fire" before you drop Ripburger. Nevertheless, having one monitor-based puzzle was fine, but having two in a row feels like the design team ran out of ideas. I will also boost this score by one point compared to the previous one because there are more inputs to select, and their order isn't as apparent as in the last puzzle. But a minor complaint if I do say so myself.

Correctly Leaving The Airplane So Ben Doesn't Die - [Rating: 4/10] - Hey, will you look at that? You can die in this game! Most people I know screw this sequence up on their first try, and I'm one of them. When you reach the final puzzle in the game, Ben finds himself inside the airplane moments before it falls into a gorge. However, if you try to run out of the airplane, he'll shift the plane's balance resulting in his death. Instead, the game wants you to have Ben use his motorcycle to quickly drive out of the teetering plane before it falls over and explodes. This scene is excellent, but not having the bike visible enough on this final screen was the wrong call. Ben ducks away to the left as if he's Bugs Bunny putting on a new outfit to out-wit Elmer Fudd. I also feel like the point of Ben's bike being in the plane is not clear enough in general. As I said, this puzzle is designed in a way that guarantees you mess up at least once when playing the game your first time, and that doesn't sit well with me.

Should You Play Full Throttle? (Answer: Sure, Go For It!)

All my grousing aside, I still think people should give this game a shot if they haven't checked it out already. No other game looks and feels like Full Throttle and the creativity that guides its world design and setting is undeniable. And while the game has its share of gameplay-based hiccups here and there, the absence of the SCUMM system and its short playtime make this game an incredibly welcoming experience for adventure game newcomers. For those of you who played Full Throttle years ago and want to test your nostalgia, there's something to gain from buying the remaster. I strongly recommend you play the game with the original pixel-based art, but hearing Tim Schaffer chat with others who worked on the game is a delight, even if you must take his word with a grain of salt. Also, the skull-based interface holds up remarkably well, and the same applies to the game's voice acting.

I caution that you go into Full Throttle with realistic expectations. Its brief story has some lulls that cause it to feel like a partially completed idea. Some levels feel like "filler," and the game sports some downright infuriating puzzles. While I respect the people who present this game as an all-time highlight of LucasArts's "Golden Age," I cannot support that mindset. LucasArts had other titles that are more fully realized and played better than Full Throttle years before its release, and that's not up for dispute. When you compare this game to the peaks of Monkey Island, Fate of Atlantis, or even the Sam & Max series, Full Throttle feels like a fun but aberrant experiment one or two steps above Loom. I give it all the credit it deserves for doing something different and weaning LucasArts away from the SCUMM Engine, but that's where I stand when it comes to deliberating its historical legacy. It's a great game that gave Tim Schaffer the commercial industry clout he needed to go out and make bigger and better games.

Also, here's an archive of me playing Full Throttle live on Twitch!

A Brief Primer On Pendulo

Pendulo is a studio I never thought I would cover with my "Quest for the Worst Adventure Game" series on Giant Bomb, and there's no specific malice behind my reasoning. As I will discuss shortly, their games today have strayed away from traditional adventure game conventions to resemble more the dialogue-based action-adventure-oriented aspects of L.A. Noire or the latter titles from Telltale Games. Even if I was to go back to their earlier titles like the Runaway series, The Next Big Thing, or Yesterday, Pendulo's point-and-click interface always felt rudimentary, with their item combination puzzles rarely amounting to anything that required deep thought or constant head bashing. That said, The Next Big Thing and Yesterday continue to be two works of theirs that I will defend as worthwhile experiences, even if the latter can't quite stick its landing.

Suppose you haven't heard of Pendulo at all. In that case, you either have missed their games constantly being on sale for a buck whenever a Steam or GOG sale rolls around, though they are not nearly as egregious about that as Daedelic's Deponia games. Alternatively, like most, you might have stayed away from the turn-of-the-century European PC adventure games that were keeping the genre "alive" in the early 2000s. When people ask me what I mean by "modern European PC adventure game," I either point them at the Deponia series, The Runaway games, possibly Deck13's Jack Keane or Ankh series, or Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes games, and by then, they get the milieux. I'm talking about that weird gap when North American studios turned their back on the genre, but right before TellTale took the world by storm with The Walking Dead or Kickstarter made retro-styled point-and-click games cool again. It was a weird time, but what sometimes gets lost is how many of those interstitial games came from studios with storied histories and decades of experience.

Pendulo stands as "Spain's longest-running active game development company," and within the borders of its homeland, it has become a point of national pride. Nonetheless, the studio has weathered multiple cases of nearly filing for bankruptcy, even after putting out quality games and titles. For those unaware, while the original Runaway proved to be a monumental critical and financial success, after the game completed development, its producers had to pink slip virtually everyone, including themselves, after it finished production. Not only had the game's initial distributor filed for bankruptcy right as it was ready for an English release, but they had also struggled to transition from 2D pixel-based art to fully rendered 3D models without professional training. Pendulo started as a group of college friends who decided to make video games after graduating. Their team started with just a handful of personnel before expanding to the mid-thirties. The whole fiasco of how the first Runaway saved the studio has an essay on Wikipedia I strongly recommend you check out if you want to do a deep dive into the studio.

Pendulo has also made its fair share of mistakes, the clearest example being when it took five years to make Runaway 2. After having a bite at the critical success apple, they made the same mistake we have seen all too many times with smaller outfits. They tried to put too many recent gaming trends in their sequel in hopes of broadening their potential audience. It is a tale as old as time. Following the Runaway sequels, Pendulo hit it out of the park with The Next Big Thing. Still, the issue was that they misjudged the market and didn't realize that the demand for a comedic point-and-click adventure game with B-tier stylings and production values wasn't what it once was, and the game was a financial disaster. This was even after Pendulo cut its staff to fifteen people and limited the game's development time to 18 months. That means they learned from the experience and observed recent developments in the genre to plan their next title, right? Well, no. With Yesterday, Pendulo viewed the financial struggles of The Next Big Thing as an indictment against comedic point-and-click games and decided the solution was to make something gritty but keep the same game engine and core gameplay intact. Unsurprisingly, Yesterday also was a flop, and with two titles that did not perform, the studio was on the brink of failure before they decided to throw in the towel and leave the genre they had rested their laurels on for over twenty years.

But Wait, What About The Puzzles?

After Yesterday commercially failed, Pendulo went through a two-year period where they resorted to keeping the lights on by porting all of their games to mobile instead of spearheading new game projects. The strategy is incredibly similar to the "lost years" of Revolution Software, which courted a burgeoning network of fans through its Remastered Broken Sword titles and mobile ports. With Revolution, their new fanbase allowed them to fund new game ideas like Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse and Beyond a Steel Sky. Pendulo's mobile years were less successful, but they kept the studio alive during its darkest period. Still, they eventually came into contact with Microids, a French publisher with a penchant for buying the IP rights to classic PC adventure games from defunct European developers. They are also behind the modern Syberia games. The deal with Microids was simple, Pendulo didn't have to worry about its finances as long as Microids picked what games and IPs they worked on, and their first task was a video game adaptation of the European comic series, Blacksad.

Comic books are a black void in my nerd knowledge. As a result, I can't tell you if Blacksad: Under the Skin is an authentic representation of the source material. I thought the game's attempt to convey a noir-heavy story with dialogue choices and open-world exploration was incredibly awkward at times. Pendulo, by hook or by crook, made a narrative game driven by quick time events and BioWare-inspired dialogue choices. It's not a complete failure, but Pendulo was slightly out of their element as the stitching between major scenes and set pieces is virtually nonexistent. For example, after pursuing a lead for the story's core murder investigation, there was a moment when I was left with Blackksad and didn't know that to trigger the next cutscene, I needed to use a telephone. Instead, I spent about twenty minutes scouring for clues and talking to NPCs until I had exhausted their dialogue options. The game's piggybacking and signposting are nonexistent; in an open-world adventure game, that's a problem. There are also some highly awkward and out-of-place minigame and platforming sequences, but that's a problem with virtually every modern adventure game these days. Nonetheless, there are plenty of times when Pendulo works through its issues and struggles to convey some genuinely riveting scenes. For example, there's a scene at a high-stakes poker table where Blacksad needs to maintain his cover, and upon realizing a nearby opponent is cheating, the cheater gets called out and promptly popped in the gut with a sawed-off shotgun. It's a fantastic scene, and there are plenty of others like it sprinkled throughout the game!

Either by the cache of the IP in Europe or people looking to try something different, Blacksad did well enough for Microids to continue its strategic partnership with Pendulo. However, Microids' next task for Pendulo would be far more bizarre. Microids bought the rights to use director Alfred Hitchcock's "name and likeness" in 2018 for reasons no one fully understands. The studio tasked with utilizing this newly acquired IP was none other than Pendulo. Like Blacksad, Vertigo would sidestep familiar point-and-click gameplay in favor of simple object interactions and dialogue choices. And with this, we can now jump into our featured event. Nonetheless, there is something that I need you to understand before we jump into the insanity that is Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo. As the previous two sections of this blog hopefully lay out, Pendulo was, and to a certain degree today, a studio in crisis. They relinquished their creative freedom for financial stability after the market rejected multiple projects they had spent years toiling away at. If you're still looking at this blog perplexed that there's a video game adaptation of Vertigo that came out in 2021, of all things, you need to understand that was likely not their call.

We Need To Talk About The Story In Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo

First and foremost, this game is not a faithful reinterpretation of the film. It takes some of the film's key ideas and plot elements and then adds a few modern twists here and there. The game starts with a bang where the main character, author Ed Miller, emerges from the wreck of a car accident and then sees what he thinks to be his father about to leap to his death from the ledge of a nearby bridge. As he clambers to what he believes to be his father, he watches in horror as they jump to their death. During this sequence, you run into the awkward QTEs that litter the entire game and the shortcoming of its dialogue-based choices not feeling valuable. For example, you can choose to either sneak up on Miller's father or run after him, but both options do not impact the overall content of the scene. After the game cuts to black, we juxtapose to the second protagonist in the game, Dr. Lomas, who has been tasked by a friend of Miller to try and help him with his vertigo and psychological trauma. Miller claims the car accident killed his wife and child, but no records exist of these two individuals.

Dr. Lomas is the single most frustrating part of this game. She's an incredibly well-written character with impeccable voice acting, especially in the English translation. She's a strong, older African-American character that has the option of using their job as a clinical psychologist to make people stand down from their positions to listen to her, and I loved those options. Unfortunately, Pendulo's notions of modern cognitive behavior therapy include thinking that hypnosis is the most common form of treatment of PTSD, and Dr. Lomas delves into the tenuous world of dream analysis. Every possible trope you can think about a Hollywood-written psychologist or therapist is here. However, considering a core aspect of the game involves Dr. Lomas forcing Miller to relive suppressed memories, I don't know what more to expect. What I think is less forgivable is how the game has Dr. Lomas oscillate between providing therapy and collecting evidence to exonerate Miller from the current criminal investigation targeting him. In the first meeting between the two, Dr. Lomas asks Miller about the day of the accident instead of treating his vertigo, which was the whole point of her being assigned to Miller in the first place. Then, when you control Lomas, you fan through notes to create a Phoenix Wright-like dossier as if she is leading his defense case.

It is time to discuss flashbacks as a core storytelling device because that's 70% of this game! When Dr. Lomas turns on a panel to induce hypnosis in Miller, he recalls his first meeting with his presumed former wife, Faye. As he recalls, Miller was attempting to make headway with his latest novel when an injured hiker knocked on his door asking for help. She conveniently tells him that she doesn't want him to call for an ambulance because she doesn't have health insurance. She also immediately comes onto Miller, which doesn't render a red flag to him, and they have a one-night stand before he awakens to discover she's no longer beside him in bed post-coitus. I want to say the scene with the two coming closer to intimacy is creepy and incredibly awkward, and I don't ever want Pendulo to do another sex scene ever again. When the original recollection is over, we experience the main gameplay gimmick of Vertigo, reliving memories to remove Miller's gaslighting. Dr. Lomas directs Miller to return to memories, which involves you taking control of Miller and then exploring specific moments in the previous set piece to show the "true scene." In this case, we get early signs that Faye isn't the plucky kind-hearted youngster we thought she was.

After a quick scene wherein you review notes from the first session with Dr. Lomas, we transition to the game's THIRD PROTAGONIST! THIS GAME HAS THREE DRIVING CHARACTER STORIES, which it introduces within the first hour! Our third character is Sheriff Reyes, who enters what appears to be a long-derelict farm with a poorly attended horse and moldy food festering on a dining table. Reyes knew the house's owners personally, as they are the aunt and uncle of his partner, and is investigating the premises after getting a tip of possible foul play. As he enters the building's basement, he discovers the corpse of an older white male with a gunshot wound to the head. We then jump cut to Dr. Lomas as she starts her second session with Miller, and this time, we get a flashback to his childhood. I have no idea who voiced the kid in this game, but they did a great job. The conceit with the flashbacks to Miller's childhood is that he enjoys living in fantasies, with pirates being his childhood fixation. There's a fun bit wherein he hops in and out of frame to pretend to be his imaginary friend, and the way the game animates and transitions to make way for his imaginary playground is the single strongest part of the game, narratively speaking.

I also found the subplot involving Miller's traumatic childhood to be evocative. As you might expect, our initial memories about Miller's childhood are largely rosy and paint a positive light on Miller's father. When we relive those memories, we discover that Miller's father was an alcoholic, and his mother was planning to leave him after she conceived a second child. The issue is that it was a revelatory moment the first time, but the game makes you do this same song and dance three more times, wherein you get a fun little scene with Miller being a kid and going on adventures, and we need to bring Miller back to Earth that he was a victim of child abuse. For example, there's a scene wherein his father drunkenly calls him worthless and doomed to be a failure. And these scenes aren't exactly quick. The first takes about thirty minutes, the second twenty, and the final two about ten to twelve, respectively. Pendulo had an exciting premise and ran it directly into the ground with repetition and what I can only call "padding." It's wild to think, but this game is about twenty hours long, and it would have been far better if it was half that amount.

We Need To Talk About The Plot Twist

After another quick interstitial moment wherein Dr. Lomas reviews her notes from her session with Miller, we transition back to Sherrif Reyes. Reyes finds incriminating evidence, such as a handgun and bottle of whiskey, in the glove box of Miller's recently crashed car. The game then jumps back to Lomas about to start another session with Miller, and this time she asks him to recall the car accident that killed his mother and younger sibling. The original memory involves Miller's father attempting to save him after his car's tire pops, and it teeters on the edge of a cliff before falling, taking Miller's mother and baby sister. The real dream reveals that Miller's father deliberately crashed the car and pushed it over the ridge to prevent his mother from leaving him with the kids.

After achieving this revelation, the sheriff bursts into the scene and claims Miller is the lead suspect in the murder of Samuel Franklin, the dead farmer in the basement. The sheriff attempts to interrogate Miller but makes little headway and storms out shortly after. When Dr. Lomas returns to her hotel room, the sheriff appears at her door, and it is here that we get another sub-plot. Sheriff Reyes likes strong-willed women and is falling in love with Dr. Lomas. Yup, that's something that happens in this game. Suppose you think it represents a massive conflict of interest on Dr. Lomas' part to date the person seeking to throw her patient into jail. In that case, you have to understand that while her professional life is in order, her personal life is a mess, and she's 100% down to date an older man that understands her for who she is and respects her opinion. That may make sense to you on paper, but it's a mess mechanically and narratively. The two are in the middle of a murder investigation, and part of what you do with them is go on dates. You do this two more times!

Oh, and Reyes is the person that was having an extramarital affair with Miller's mother and was the father of Miller's younger sister before her death. There's even a scene where Reyes reveals the scars on his face come from a botched suicide attempt, and instead of viewing all of this as problematic, Lomas canonically agrees to a second date. But that's not the plot twist I'm hinting at here. After Reyes and Lomas engage in their little social, the game transitions to a short gameplay session where we control Faye, Miller's presumed missing wife. During this sequence, we discover that she deliberately injured her ankle to get into Miller's house and had a complex scheme to get into his pants, including lacing a glass of wine with boner pills. In the next scene, she comes up to Miller's door with a baby, and Miller accepts them into his life without asking a question! I have no idea why Pendulo thought it was a good idea to reveal to the player that Faye is a femme fatale and an unreliable character less than halfway into the story. I understand that the movie reveals that Judy Barton/Madeleine Elster is not the character we thought she was, but that reveal happens in the film's climax. In this case, it is PAINFUL needing to go through long investigation scenes with Reyes and Lomas when you already know the answer and are simply waiting for them to connect the dots.

While Faye lived in a guest room with Miller's child, we discover that she was drugging Miller to induce vertigo and sleepless nights so she could dress up as Miller's mother and attempt to haunt him in his sleep. For what we presume to be months, she's been lording over him, telling him to kill himself and asking him, "Why did you do it? Why did you kill your wife and child?" Now, you might be wondering why she's doing this. Well, it turns out that when Miller first got into writing, his manager was Faye's adoptive father. Being mentally unstable, Faye perceived Miller as taking her father's attention away from her. So, many years ago, she tried to frame Miller for pedophilia by uploading compromising pictures of herself on his phone while dressed as a schoolgirl. She gained access to his cellphone after drugging him, but the subsequent police investigation uncovered the truth and found Faye to be the one that staged the entire thing. In response, Faye's adoptive father decided to have her committed to a psychiatric ward. So, yeah, a core part of the story involves a false rape accusation. OH, BUT IT GETS WORSE!

Dr. Lomas suspects there's something more to the bridge and decides to hire a drone pilot to investigate parts that the police investigation may have missed. By the way, this scene is after the nephew of the murdered farmer stormed Miller's house on the verge of murdering him. While using the drone, she finds a backpack, costumes, and a bungee cord, which proves that the scene Miller saw on the bridge at the time of his accident was staged by Faye. On top of that, they even find her body when they notice a cropping of damaged and bent trees in the distance. After Reyes and Lomas review clues and evidence, they learn about a trucker who assisted Faye in setting up Miller's car accident and get to see the entire scene as it happened. Faye dressed up as Miller's father and jumped off the same bridge that took the life of his mother and little sister in hopes of inducing Miller into killing himself. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! Well, you see, Faye isn't Faye.

Faye is Veronica Carrigan. You may recall that point when I said that her adoptive father was Miller's former publicist and manager, and he had her committed when she falsely tried to accuse Miller of sexual exploitation. So, how did she get out? Well, first, Veronica made friends with her roommate at the psychiatric hospital, knowing her "friend," Lisa, was only a few days removed from being released. After gaining Lisa's trust, she manipulates her into celebrating her upcoming release on the hospital rooftop over a bottle of vodka. They also decide to swap clothes as a sign of their friendship. After getting Lisa incredibly drunk, Veronica/Faye has Lisa walk on the edge of the roof. Then she pushes her over so that she can assume her identity to secure her release from the hospital, somehow guaranteeing the body on the ground would be identified as Veronica. Apparently, this occurs in a world where DNA evidence doesn't exist, and performing autopsies is unheard of. Nonetheless, Veronica's scheme somehow works, and she assumes the identity of Lisa for the rest of her life until dying at the bridge. Dr. Lomas correctly identifies the dead body below the bridge as Veronica because it has a scar on her bottom. We learn that this scar originates from when Veronica deliberately sat on broken glass to get her babysitter fired so she could spend more time with her adoptive father. Likewise, Faye/Veronica/Lisa seemingly spent ten-plus years planning her scheme to get revenge on Miller while being raised by a family that never noticed she wasn't their daughter.

Oh My God, We Need To Talk About The Endings

So, the game's over, right? We know why Faye/Veronica/Lisa wanted to ruin Miller's life and how the car accident was a setup. Well, there's just one problem, the game also decides to resolve all of its sub-plots AFTER it gives you the conclusion to its main story! That's right; the game persists for five hours after settling its core story! The first issue is the location of the dead farmer's wife and Miller's daughter. But before we can solve that mystery, Miller decides to conquer his vertigo by defeating a mental representation of his drunk father, which you beat by clicking the correct dialogue choices when they appear. After vanquishing this specter, Miller confronts his aunt, whom we discover is responsible for gaslighting him into thinking he had a good childhood. She proceeds to disappear for the rest of the game after she admits her brother was a bastard.

After that scene, Miller recalls an earlier conversation with Samuel Franklin, the man that got shot, about how he has a bomb shelter hidden underneath his farm. This clue inspires Miller to head for the farm. Unfortunately, as he attempts to find the bunker, Adam Franklin, Reyes' partner and the nephew of the murdered farmer, attacks him and is convinced that Miller is the man who murdered his uncle, even though all of the evidence we have collected proves it was Faye/Veronica/Lisa. Miller convinces Adam that he can prove his aunt is still alive by locating a bunker on the farm. After finding the bunker, Reyes arrives to help the two, but instead of finding a happy Aunt Esther, they see her brandishing a knife and covered in blood. Delirious, she attempts to kill everyone around her before running to the roof of the barn, which I think is one of the few visual callbacks to the movie. When Miller attempts to comfort Esther on the rooftop, there's a moment when his legs give out, and it mimics one of the most iconic scenes in the film. Nonetheless, after you click the correct options to break Aunt Esther from her stupor, she returns to her senses and surrenders the baby to Miller.

Aunt Esther recalls what happened when Faye/Veronica/Lisa stormed her home and held her and her husband at gunpoint before murdering her husband. With that plot point resolved, the game transitions to Miller busy typing away on his computer, with his vertigo and writer's block entirely beneath him, while his publicist, who is now his father-in-law, is caring for his child in the background and calling for him to take some time from his work to play with his child. The last these two met in person, the other charged the other with rape, but now the two get along perfectly and have joint custody of the baby that only exists because someone wanted to drive Miller to suicide. Likewise, despite discovering that his happy childhood was the byproduct of decades of gaslighting, Miller has no signs of PTSD or long-term psychological trauma.

Oh, and Reyes and Lomas decide to become a couple if you allow them to. They fell in love during a murder investigation where Dr. Lomas decided to make a world record of how many doctor-patient confidentiality rules a single person could break in a week. Still, before the two can officially tie the knot, Lomas drops the whopper that Faye/Veronica/Lisa was sexually molested by her biological father before being put into foster care. This plot development is a one-off line that Lomas makes before kissing Reyes. It's a line the game fobs off minutes after it shares it. I have no words.

Finally, as one last Parthian Shot, the game gives you an idea of what happened to Faye/Veronica/Lisa on the bridge. After pulling off the initial jump from the bridge, she attempted to climb down the bridge safely. However, as she was packing her things, Miller's pet cat, a recipient of Veronica's torture throughout the game, jumps on her back before leaping off her and back on the bridge. The act causes Veronica to become confused and results in her falling to her death, and there's even a moment where you can pick a dialogue option for Veronica to compliment the cat for its scheme. It's the best scene in the entire game, and it's not even a contest.

Regrettably, the game ends with an audio-only flashback to Faye recalling when she got sexually molested by her biological father. This game makes you listen to simulated child abuse. I'm not lying. That's a thing Pendulo put in this game, and you have to let it happen. You can't skip it.

Don't play this game.

Author's Note: SPOILER WARNING! This is a two-part series looking at Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. While this episode primarily discusses mechanics and gameplay, it is not entirely free from story spoilers. You have been warned.

Also, if you enjoyed this episode, here's a directory to the first episodes of every Final Fantasy game I have covered on this site thus far:

• Part 1 of Final Fantasy I series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy II series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy V series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy VI series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy VII series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy VIII series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy IX series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy X series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy X-2 series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy XI series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy XII series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy XIII series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy XIII-2 series
• Part 1 of Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII series

Preamble: I Hate Souls Games! There, I Said It!

Stop the press, people are talking about Final Fantasy games, and it's not entirely negative! Many of you are playing and enjoying Final Fantasy XVI and waiting in anticipation for more details about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Oh, and Final Fantasy XIV continues to deliver life-long experiences every day! Undoubtedly, it's an excellent time to be a fan of the series, as the present and future sure seems bright. However, instead of tapping into the games leading the zeitgeist surrounding the newfound enthusiasm for the series, I am flipping things back to something from last year: Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin! It's a game I mentioned in passing during my 2022 GOTY blog as being the "Most 'Mid' Thing I Enjoyed" last year. As I said then, the game feels like a platypus. It simply should not exist, and yet it does. It has one of the most rewarding job systems to grace the Souls-like genre while having the worst inventory and smithy mechanics I have ever seen. It's an oddball, but that makes it endearing.

Unfortunately, some people took that to mean that I was not too fond of the game or even hated it when I thought I made it clear that was not the case. Stranger of Paradise is an incredibly messy and inconsistent game that works despite its problems. However, when you compare its highest of highs to its technical rough edges, bizarre presentation, and mid-game slog, I think it all averages out to a game that is perfectly serviceable to die-hard fans of Final Fantasy looking for a goofy Tetsuya Nomura side hustle and nothing more. Souls-like purists will likely get annoyed by its lack of depth or thematic inconsistency unless they turn their brains off to accept its schlock. While it gets close to being one of the better "baby's first Souls-like," several design quibbles prevent it from fully earning that title. The game came out the same year as Elden Ring, and while I will never call it a better game in a million years, I ended up having more fun with Stranger of Paradise than Elden Ring. Undoubtedly, it made me smile and laugh more, and considering I went into it thinking I would hate it, there's no denying my final assessment is anything but negative.

Yet, I should come clean about my feelings regarding Souls games: I don't like them. My dislike of From's Souls series is one of four video game "hot takes" that I know immediately disqualifies me from ever having a job covering video games professionally. The other three are:

1. I'm not fond of Castlevania or Metroid games because I have a personal aversion to backtracking as a core mechanic.
2. Final Fantasy Tactics is a mediocre tactic and strategy game carried by an excellent story.
3. Fire Emblem got ruined during the handheld era when it prioritized the visual novel aspects over tactical strategy, and even Three Houses only partially eliminated the waifu garbage that makes Fates completely intolerable.

When it comes to From and their current approach to game design. It's okay if everything I am about to say doesn't matter or detract from your ability to enjoy their works, especially Bloodborne or Elden Ring. You do you. Nonetheless, I'm not waiting for them to give a shit about basic quality-of-life designs in their games. It's obnoxious that, to this day, From's narrative storytelling and worldbuilding rely on you reading in-game tomes and descriptions for weapons. I'm done with the clipping issues in their games, especially when a gigantic golem boss swings a massive axe, and it clips through my cover and kills me. They have had over a decade to fix their collision detection issues and make weapons or actions not cut through parts of the environment. Their platforming has always been awful, yet they continue to put in the most frustrating and harebrained platforming sequences into their games. Those leaps of fate you need to take where you don't know if you are jumping into immediate death or entering a new location weren't even cute the first time, and they have aged as finely as a carton of milk. Finally, am I the asshole for wanting them to make a camera that can snap into place correctly whenever I fight a large-scale boss? Why the HELL do From cameras still struggle to show you more than 50% of the gigantic boss character models? That shit was a problem in Kings Field, and it still drives me up the wall in Elden Ring!

It's perfectly okay if none of that matters to you. You'll never see me, with my biases, come out and pen massive essays on why people are wrong to name Elden Ring their Game of the Year or why From is "ruining video games!" I have reached that stage in my life where I know what I like and can understand that not everyone will agree with me, and that's why the video game industry we live in today is so interesting. With the barriers to entry at an all-time low, there's something on Steam, Humble Bundle, the Xbox Series S/X, the PS5, the Switch, or itch for everyone! Oh, wait, what am I talking about? Did I lose my train of thought while grousing about From Software? Damn, I'm sorry about that. This blog is supposed to be about Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. Without further ado, let's jump into it.

Part 1: Man, The Start Of This Game Sure Is Something!

The staff working on Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin deserve massive commendations for making a game that knows what it is and what it wants to do. That much is certain when you start its opening salvo of cinematics and set pieces. Never before have I seen a Final Fantasy title so perfectly communicate its tone and mood, since maybe Final Fantasy IX, as succinctly as Stranger of Paradise. The minute you boot up a new game, you watch a roughly two-minute cutscene in which Garland rips through the halls of the royal palace of Corneria as they snatch a princess. The viscera and frightened looks of the soldiers attempting to block his progress perfectly relay what Nomura meant when he said he wanted to make a game about an angry man. And then the game drops you into a boss battle against Tiamat, with two supporting companions, with zero context on what's happening or who any of the characters are that you are controlling. It's utterly strange, but given the game promises to provide a "strange" journey, it is a fitting introduction.

Unfortunately, that tutorial battle with Tiamat does not teach you the core mechanics well. I know Team Ninja has done the "drop the player into the middle of a boss battle to learn the ropes" trope before, but it doesn't work here for various reasons. First, with the appeal of Stranger of Paradise being your investment in a wide breadth of jobs and their respective tech trees, you are in no position to figure out which playstyles work best for you. Likewise, with the starting tutorial involving a boss, you suddenly have to worry about high-stakes, game-over-inducing attacks, which you are equally unprepared for at this stage. Yes, the context and animation cues on when to pull off the special moves to end this battle are not impossible to figure out, but there's enough nuance to the combat of Stranger of Paradise that this does a horrible disservice to the game. The tutorial environment in which you fight an endless stream of goblins as you perform a series of class-specific moves works far better than this sudden confrontation. And before you counter that this is a ridiculous suggestion, that field tutorial level, with a series of combat trials for the Warrior class, is the next goddamn scene, so I think I'm not off base in saying the order of levels here is weird.

Speaking of sudden and disorienting juxtapositions, after you whittle away at Tiamat's health bar until it reaches the halfway point, the game smash cuts to black and then transitions to Jack in an empty field, and it is here we get the legendary scene where he listens to Frank Sinatra's "My Way." We still need to find out who Jack is, but instead, we have a contextless cutscene in which he's faffing around in a field with none of the other characters we saw in the two last scenes. One quick problem, if you played the demo when this game was officially announced, you know this scene uses the closest thing there is to a "Fair Use" sampling of Frank Sinatra. For reasons unknown to man, Square and Team Ninja only sample approximately twenty-ish seconds of the song and don't even get to its refrain, "I did it my way!" That was the case in the demo, and it's still the case in the game's full release, and as a result, the scene feels broken. On top of that, after completing the combat trials in the field, the game abruptly jumps to a new environment in which the party, all together now, talks about needing to help the King of Corneria before you seek audience with him. However, instead of that task being the next time you give the combat a whirl, the game cuts to the characters on a boat having completed whatever they set out to do. You see them beaten up and bruised and never learn what they did or fought.

Upon their return, they meet with the King of Corneria and get a basic explanation about Garland and the forces of Chaos running amock in the wildlands surrounding the kingdom. In a brief scene after that, you get a hint of a relationship between the princess and Jack. Why does the princess like Jack? I don't know, and the entire prologue feels like a fever dream. Maybe if the game had stayed with Jack in the field for a bit longer with the full version of "My Way," or there was an interstitial combat sequence wherein you fight a goblin king after boarding the boat the first time, this would all work better. However, that's not the case, and what you have is a game that reeks of "Peak Nomura" in that it is far more interested in giving you fanciful epic set pieces with exquisitely dressed characters than carefully stitched introductory characterization sequences. Admittedly, this game shows you its cards within the first hour, whereas other Nomura-led projects, especially the Kingdom Hearts games, take whole acts and upwards of tens of hours to relay even a smidge of what you should expect. Stranger of Paradise is a mess before you start your first "real" mission, and that's an accomplishment if I do say so myself.

This game has three listed directors, none of which are Nomura, but you wouldn't know it while playing it. The story's complete lack of a filter, reliance on inopportune lore dumps, and lack of context-building lead me to believe that the lead writer isn't the only carryover from the Kingdom Hearts team. However, all of the checks and balances that were in place to prevent this game from being a nightmare either did not function or were so preoccupied with other obligations that they couldn't stop the Kingdom Hearts schlock from bleeding into this project, and I think we are all the better for it. Again, the only time things break for me is the utter lack of stitching between the many disparate set pieces you interact with and the long pauses between any progress with the main plot or Jack's backstory. If ever there was a game that warranted the "Start-Stop Storytelling" label, it's this one. And yet, when you get to those punctuated story moments, they are incredible, and the odd and unevenness of its structure end up making it more unique. Can you think of any modern video game that burns through four CG cinematics, a licensed song from Frank Sinatra, and a boss battle that is a baptism by fire in a single hour? I think not!

Part 2: You Sure Can Tell This Was Never A Top Priority!

Discussing some of the context surrounding Stranger of Paradise's creation seems appropriate. The game stands as a reimagining of the first Final Fantasy game. It is a collaboration between Square-Enix, particularly Tetsuya Nomura, and Team Ninja, a division of Koei Tecmo. This project is neither the first nor the last collaboration between the two, as Team Ninja also led the development of Dissidia Final Fantasy NT and Dissidia: Final Fantasy Opera Omnia. While Team Ninja took the lion's share of the programming and design of the game, the direction was a collaborative effort with Square-Enix's Daisuke Inoue, the lead battle design planner of the Final Fantasy XIII series, working alongside Team Ninja's Hiroya Usuda and Nobumichi Kumabe. Kazushige Nojima, the lead behind Advent Children, Crisis Core, Final Fantasy X, and the Kingdom Hearts franchise, assumes most of the writing duties, but more on him in the next episode. The game was a passion project of Tetsuya Nomura, and he, predictably, became the game's lead character designer and creative producer after it finally got the green light. If that sounds like too many names to process, consider the game sports three composers, directors, and producers. This game should suffer from having too many cooks in the kitchen, and while it does, it's not to the extent I would have predicted.

When Nomura first conceived the game following the release of Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy, Team Ninja was in a sizable transitional period. They were less than five years removed from founder Tomonobu Itagaki getting kicked out of Koei Tecmo following sexual assault allegations. Also happening was Dead or Alive 5's cratering with the fighting game community as well as the problematic development cycles and releases of Ninja Gaiden 3 and Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z. To call Nioh a "course correction" for the studio is an understatement. Before Nioh, it was shedding talent following every game release and had a revolving door of leaders. This fact is incredible when you consider Nioh fell into considerable development hell after being one of the earliest games demoed for the PS3 in 2004. The eventual leader that strongarmed the studio and Nioh to the finish line was Yosuke Hayashi, who would eventually get a promotion to Executive Producer following Nioh 2. Nonetheless, before Nioh came out, to support its development and completion, Hayashi changed the core business strategy of Team Ninja to pivot away from its portfolio of original IPs to contract work and collaborations.

This strategy is far from alien, even in Japan, with PlatinumGames being one of the clearest examples of it put to good use. However, there's no denying that Team Ninja is guilty of one of Platinum's common pitfalls with this project direction style. The goal is always to have a big project funded by all your contract-based projects, and the arrangements come in as quickly and plentiful as possible. For Platinum, it is the Bayonetta franchise, whereas, for Team Ninja, it is Nioh and Wo Long. Nevertheless, none of this mercenary work is ever allowed to rise above a certain level of quality, and there's no denying that you can tell which contracts were better funded than others. For every gem like Astral Chain or Fire Emblem Warriors, you get something like The Legend of Korra or Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order. In the case of Stranger of Paradise, the project is caught somewhere in the middle of Team Ninja's quality assurance. The input from Square-Enix assisted them in devising a wholly novel and pleasurable job system. Still, there's no denying that it never got the funding or time to transform into something that felt like a proper spin-off in the Final Fantasy series. Say what you will about Dirge or Crisis Core, but you can tell those games were valued by more than a small slice of Square-Enix internal.

While I can't deny being impressed by some of Stranger of Paradise's levels or re-imaginings of legacy backdrops, the game is sometimes downright ugly. While Jack's grimace certainly seems well-animated, all of the NPCs come across as auto-generated models you'd get from a default license with Unreal Engine. The jobs are fun, but you quickly notice how most are permutations of a core set of five, and as such, end up seeing the same finishing moves and animations more than you'd like. Compounding that problem is the lack of enemy variety, another arrant reflection of the game's lack of budget and development time. Every new environment introduces one to two enemy types after the first two levels. However, you still see enemies from the game's first act throughout your adventure with Jack, even into the game's penultimate level. The side quest system feels like a complete afterthought, and the same sentiment applies to the UI/UX of the menu-based overworld. The option to interact with NPCs to learn about their daily goings-on is one of the most bizarre inclusions in the game. Then there are the technical issues! Despite not being a beauty, the game struggles when you get into some more complex and particle-based attacks or finishers. Also, some of the more enormous bosses not only have derpy animations and AI but cause the game to dip well below 30 FPS.

All of this is not entirely Team Ninja's fault. As you play Stranger of Paradise, you understand that the game was a fun side-project, not a priority, even for Square-Enix. Nomura loved the damn thing, but even his clout only gave the game a mid-tier budget and about two years to bake in the oven. Somewhat hilariously, while some like to call the game "Nomura's baby," with the "story of an angry man" quote as evidence, all signs point to him having an incredibly tight leash. When Square-Enix first announced the game, Jack being Garland was a closely guarded secret, but when everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, called it, Nomura's higher-up convinced him to rewrite that plot element. When the game's first playable demo launched and people got their asses handed to themselves, we didn't see the typical heel digging we generally see from him. Instead, they rebalanced abilities, classes, and companion commands to make everything more manageable. The big shots at Square-Enix wanted this game's development to cycle quickly before it bled money. Stranger of Paradise was undoubtedly a "team effort," but one no one working on it wanted to last more than a few years.

Tangent: THE PC PORT OF THIS GAME IS STILL ATROCIOUS!

Okay, let's say you read this mini-series for Stranger of Paradise and come away confident you want to try it. My advice is to avoid the game's PC version like the plague. While I know the console versions have their share of issues and lack mod support, the PC port is so compromised I have difficulty recommending it under any circumstances. For those who have played the game, be mindful that whatever framerate issues you encountered on PS5 or Xbox Series X are significantly worse on PC. There's constant hitching with every finisher, and some environments are so poorly optimized the game can never go above thirty frames per second. Sure, the godawful menu for the inventory system, which we will discuss shortly, is slightly better on PC. Still, the menu generally reeks of something designed for a console set-up and a living room television, as the real estate on a computer monitor feels incredibly cramped and busy, and I played it on a 27-inch monitor.

The reason for these technical issues is comical. With the PC version, sleuthing players discovered that the game has a multitude of unoptimized shaders and textures, which lead to some characters, NPCs, and enemies having approximately or more than 30 MB of geometry. In the non-patched version, you could be dealing with a single enemy with 300,000 unoptimized polygons, with a party of three having twice as much each. The game's console versions received immediate patches to address this problem, whereas the PC port had to wait months before seeing any improvements. To add insult to injury, some patches and updates for the PC version are less comprehensive than the console versions. The bitrate on the pre-rendered cutscenes was partially fixed on PS5 and Xbox shortly after its release, while that remains a problem on PC. One of the most common workarounds, I shit you not, is downloading a mod that makes all the characters bald. I gave this a whirl and was shocked to discover it worked. Things may have improved in the half year since its release, but judging from the user reviews for the Steam release, which came out in April of 2023 after its timed exclusivity contract with Epic expired, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Part 3: GOD DAMN, Is The Inventory System THE WORST! THE. WORST.

Nioh and Nioh 2 went on to influence a lot of the design in Stranger of Paradise. Most of these influences are positive, like the job system and the varying playstyles you can explore therein. Unfortunately, not all design carryovers work. The most problematic one involves inventory management. In the Nioh games, you have a proper Souls-like smithy and armor and weapon creation suite, which allows you to improve your character by giving them new tools and garb. I'll admit the blacksmith mechanic in Nioh is by far one of the most intimidating mechanics in the entire game, but Team Ninja mercifully improved it in Nioh 2. Nonetheless, your progression in both games is tied to managing scarce resources that can lead you to pivot how you play and approach upcoming combat scenarios. With Stranger of Paradise, Team Ninja decided to open the floodgates and give you almost everything worth using whenever moving from Point A to Point B in each environment, and that seems like a far worse alternative to every possible struggle you'd have trying to parse out the blacksmith in Nioh.

The issue here is simple. Stranger in Paradise gives you way too much shit whenever you traverse through and complete a level. The number of times I needed to spend upwards of ten minutes between main story missions junking redundant or useless armor sets or weapons upon finishing a quest was ridiculous. Worse, because the game constantly inundates you with random tat, you often find yourself never becoming attached to articles you affix to your characters for too long. Anything you gain at the end of one level will be replaced by something you pick up in the next. Even if you find a fun or creative outfit, there's a high likelihood you'll need to junk it after one level. That's not entirely antithetical to the core design of Nioh or Souls-likes. Still, the immediacy of Stranger of Paradise's planned obsolescence rubs me the wrong way. In Nioh or Elden Ring, a massive climactic boss might force you to switch things up and try a different build. With Stranger in Paradise, because almost every job class is viable, but the game is still programmed to bestow trinkets for every one of its core class types, you feel overwhelmed with your upgrades within hours of playing it.

Even worse is the interface and menu you must interact with when you play around with the cosmetic and combat upgrades. Someone at Square-Enix told Team Ninja that menu-based inventory and combat systems were a must in this game, and it sucks. There are so many menus and sub-menus. Worse, the game's "Auto" button is not nearly as helpful as it should be. That button does not consider the job affinity mechanic, wherein if you equip characters with clothing attached to a job, they will gain new abilities and buffs. Additionally, clicking the "Auto" choice on the equipment screen applies a pure DPS build to ALL OF YOUR CHARACTERS and not simply the one on the screen when you select that option. I found that last part out the hard way after spending about ten or so minutes trying to find the best pieces of equipment for a magic build for Jack and then a tank build for Ash, and by the time I got to Jed, I was tired enough that I thought about letting the computer do its wonders with him. To my horror, all of my work on Jack and Ash went down the drain after I clicked the auto-equip button, and I found them dressed in pop-punk garb as if they had walked through a Hot Topic circa 2005.

The point here is the one way the game tries to make your interactions with the fiddly inventory and equipment systems more efficient does more damage than good. Yes, there's a menu where you can select an assortment of modifiers to cull your loot trash, but it is thoroughly buried in the Overworld, and the game makes one marginal passing remark about its existence. Even then, the game gives you six hundred slots, and they fill up fast when random mooks pop out two to three trinkets by default. While there is overlap with the different "flavors" of jobs, the weapons and equipment are each classified to individual jobs, meaning the game is likely programmed to provide an even distribution of everything rather than for the jobs you commonly use. There are a few positives about that, though. Because you always have so many tools in your toolbox, trying out a class for the first time at level one is easier than you'd expect. Also, the variety of the weapons and the wildly different ways they control do wonders to communicate the nuances between every job. However, those are small hollow victories compared to the systematized drudgery in Stranger of Paradise.

Tied to the fiddly menu system is the smithy, which might as well not exist at all. Refining useless inventory items into raw materials and then using those raw materials to improve pieces of equipment is not only time-consuming and frustrating but also pointless. Because the game keeps you littered with leveled equipment, the incremental improvements you get by interacting with the blacksmith almost always become fruitless exercises. All of the issues with the inventory system lead to the single worst problem with Stranger of Paradise: downtime. Even if you opt out of one or two of the systems or menus I described, you'll likely spend ten to twelve minutes on the overworld fanning through trinkets and figuring out your builds for upcoming environments. This rigmarole is neither fun nor rewarding because every screen is so dense with information and stats, and you do it constantly. Even if you enjoy one or two jobs, opting out of experience points or class progress while trucking through bosses with maxed-out jobs removes you from the gameplay feedback loops that feel rewarding. Likewise, if you have any issues with analysis paralysis, you should stay as far away from this game as possible. Because comparing the stats between two articles isn't the most user-friendly experience, you often need to squint for minutes upon end at random decimal places to determine which sword or battleaxe is the best.

Part 4: But Hey, The Job System Is AMAZING!

No, seriously, the job system in this game is amazing! If there is one thing worth mentioning, it is that Team Ninja designed Stranger of Paradise not to be wholly representative of the Souls-like genre. Sure, when you go to a save point, stuff respawns, and if you die before reaching a save point, you lose out on class progress. The roll has I-frames, and you need to pay attention to enemy animation cues during boss confrontations, but that's where the similarities end. One of the most significant differentiators between Stranger of Paradise and the Dark Souls series comes with its job system. While most traditional Souls-likes lock you into a job selection from the start, Stranger of Paradise actively encourages you to swap Jack and his compatriots' classes however you see fit before starting a mission. And there isn't even the slightest penalty for retooling your characters! If you want to give a job a whirl for the first time, have at it, and if you end up hating it, the experience you put into that job is NOT wasted time. Part of that stems from the tech trees assigned to every possible job assignment. If you want to unlock every tool or combat resource, especially the advanced and expert ones, you must find branches and nodes in every job. To highlight, the starting mage will unlock the white and black mage jobs, which lead to the Sage.

These tech trees might seem like the most lizard-brain, B.F. Skinner-approved things imaginable when you first look at them, and that's undoubtedly true. There are too many options to process, and some unlockables, like new moves, are too obtuse or esoteric for their own good. Nonetheless, the game synthesizing the myriad of raw materials and pool of resources indicative of the Souls genre into one collection of experience points lessens the blow. It's also one of the most compelling gameplay feedback loops I have ever experienced. The minute you unlock your first new ability or advanced class, you start to pan over all of the game's options and engage with a slightly heady calculus on what to sport for your next mission so you get more fun goodies and job assignments. This design, in turn, forces you to engage with playstyles and mechanics you usually wouldn't, and as I suggested earlier, a lot of effort was put into the game to ensure virtually every job is viable. What's more, even if you encounter a job type you dislike, Stranger of Paradise has the decency to provide spendable resources that allow you to level up unused jobs immediately so you can continue exploring its options.

Even if you have your steady preferences, Jack can have up to two classes, which means you can still assign him a maxed-out job that you love, along with a new one you want to try for the first time. Moreover, the game's passive buffs ensure you don't immediately discard even its starting classes. Every passive buff stacks, and even if you feel hesitant about reusing an older job, if you unlock the affinity spheres on its tech trees or use affinity-raising weapons or equipment, you can send a nominal amount of experience points to that job. In my case, while playing the fourth level while controlling a Lancer, which was getting 100% of my experience points, my Duelist was getting about fifteen percent of my experience points. By the time the mission was over, I had a few pips to spend even though it hadn't been in my rotation for hours. Nothing associated with the game's job system ever feels entirely out of the loop, and that's doubly the case with the affinity system I just mentioned. Investing in a single job's weapon and equipment type will unlock passive and active buffs Jack can use on tap. What's fun is you can have one active job and spec Jack's equipment to open a different job's affinity bonuses.

One thing related to the Job System is the game's parry mechanic. This mechanic is a universal system wherein Jack can trigger a parry while an enemy attacks. If you time it right before the attack lands, you interrupt the enemy and immediately initiate a new combination of attacks against that target. I loved this mechanic for three reasons. First, it is snappy and incredibly responsive, with the windows for the parry being more and less generous depending on your enemy. For example, parrying a bat is far easier than a dragon. When you pull off a full parry, the immediacy of the transition into your combo is an absolute delight and can be all the difference between victory and defeat in the more pivotal battles. Second, there's a slight risk-reward mechanic as you cannot infinitely be in parry mode, or else enemies will simply doge Jack or attack him differently. Jack's Soul Shield ability has a tighter window to pull off, but it allows him to absorb enemy attacks and either bank them or immediately throw them back. Banking spells and enemy specials are a fun way to circumnavigate the magic limitations of some of the non-Mage classes. Finally, the parry system is variable across certain classes and weapon types. For example, the Swordfighter can initiate a full parry without worrying about timing, but at the cost of magic points, and Maces and Katanas have even trickier parry windows but deal massive damage when you pull them off.

Nonetheless, nothing in the world of video games is perfect. I've already said my piece about the equipment and inventory system, but the game's unintelligible iconography bears repeating. There's a use of overlapping colors to indicate when jobs are connected, but the icons start to blur when you get closer to the end. Costume sets and what they lock away aren't clearly signposted. Playing around with Jack's jobs is entertaining, but fiddling with his co-conspirators is far less rewarding. It also does not help that the commands you give them are so basic it's easy to forget they're even there. Correspondingly, the limited nature of your commands for your party members further compounds the feigning sense of investment you have with them. More problematic is the menu for editing your finishers and command abilities. I tried to edit my finishers and combos whenever I unlocked new job abilities on the tech trees, but bopping out of the tech tree to the move list is a challenging process, and the menu for editing those combos is unintuitive. The Command Ability system is even more tucked away and annoying. When you level up a job enough, you'll get its unique command ability, and Jack can have up to four of these. However, some of these abilities are incompatible with specific jobs or weapon types. For example, the Swordfighter's Shield Bash requires a shield on hand. And again, retooling your character, needing to go back and review your command abilities, and identifying incompatibilities add to the game's issues with downtime.

Tangent: I Need To Talk About The Lowest Difficulty Setting

There is another way that the previous works of Team Ninja went on to inform the development and design of Stranger of Paradise. One odd way is how the mindless musou sensibilities of Hyrule and Fire Emblem Warriors helped Team Ninja devise ways to opt non-Souls fans into Stranger of Paradise. When you first start the game, you are presented with three playable difficulty options: Story, Action, and Hard. The fourth, "Chaos" difficulty, is unlocked after beating the game, and there are newer and more difficult settings for the DLC. Unlike other Square-Enix products or Souls-likes, you can switch these settings whenever you like; you just have to remember to do it in the overworld before starting a mission. That alone is a godsend to anyone unfamiliar with the genre or isn't sold on it, like me. I played the game almost entirely on the default Action setting before trying the Hard and Story ones. Predictably, the harder setting results in enemies doing more damage and taking longer to beat, and it makes the game's parry mechanic all but a necessity. However, the "easy" Story setting does a few things I thought were incredibly interesting.

For one thing, the Story setting makes all the player's guards and blocks unbreakable. That means there are no ultimate attacks from bosses to worry about dodging or parrying. Even when Chaos belts out bolts of plasma or is rearing to kick you in the face, you can block everything by simply putting up Jack's dukes. Likewise, enemies don't have invincibility frames. There are no terrifying moments when you see a giant baddie powering up their next big AOE spell, and you can't wail away on them. Combining these two things gives you a significantly different experience in Stranger of Paradise that mimes a Musou more than a Souls-like. The lowest difficulty setting might as well be called "Warriors Mode" because Team Ninja designed it to play and feel like Hyrule and Fire Emblem Warriors. This modification is something only some Souls-like developers should consider, and, obviously, not all of them. Still, I commend the developers at Team Ninja for opting more people into their game and its systems by recognizing that some people going into Stranger of Paradise want to see its silly nonsense and don't have time to bother with its core mechanics. You still get more out of the game by opting into its standard and higher-difficulty settings, which better tie into the game's job system. However, there's no denying that the Musou-lite Story Mode fits the game's storytelling aspirations better. So, if you liked Fire Emblem Warriors, this game might be for you!

Part 5: I Wish The Storytelling Were More Consistent

Investing in the job system and finding new playstyles or build paths was my primary motivator to finish Stranger of Paradise. After showing so much promise from the onset, the story halts to a standstill until you initiate its final act. You have stilted exposition with the king and princess and some of the most worthless NPC interactions in Final Fantasy history to hold you over. What's bizarre is how the game tries to sell you on the idea of Jack being a person of mystery. Not revealing all the answers to that quandary is all you get to keep you narratively invested in seeing Jack's adventure continue. Jack's stern attitude certainly is meme-worthy, but it also stunts his and his companions' character growth and development. In one such case, Jed attempts to recollect a dream he's been having, and rather than let him finish, Jack replies, "No one cares about your dreams!" Banter is almost entirely superficial and generally connected with the most surface-level observations about your surroundings. Instead of discovering why everyone likes Jack organically, you listen to the most barebones joshing between your companions during long contextless combat sessions. Sure, the first few times when Jed and Ash announced the presence of cubes to indicate an upcoming save point was adorable, but that keeps happening.

Yet, when the story does kick in and doles out the schlock, I'm back in it. After accepting the king's mission to save the Kingdom of Corneria from the looming threat of Chaos, you can talk to the princess and other NPCs about life in the kingdom and their initial impressions of Jack. These NPC interactions are surrealist art. All the faces that are not the player characters err toward the uncanny valley. The environments that own their source material certainly pop, but this game is generally hard to look at when you are not in motion. The settings are linear, with vanilla-ass switch puzzles that become tiresome after the third level, and the ones that take place inside building interiors don't stand out all that well. Whenever the game tries to engage in essential worldbuilding, you can tell that's not where the money went. Even worse is how core points of worldbuilding are contained in tooltips and load screens at the start and end of levels. When you first load up the pirate bay with Bikke, the load screen mentions it comes from "Dimension XIV," which is your hint it's a recreation of a level from the massively popular and critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV. That's crappy storytelling! If you don't read those tooltips, then the plot twist near the end of the game hits you like a sack of bricks!

The recreations of Final Fantasy levels certainly help, and I will not sit here and lie to you that I didn't smile when I went through the Mount Gagazet or Pandemonium Castle levels and didn't nostalgically think about my previous encounters with those backdrops. However, even the best environments feel incredibly limited in their scope because of their stark linearity, and what few bespoke corners there are always lead to treasure chests or, worst, data logs that fill in critical gaps in the narrative. It's a storytelling crutch as old as time but with the base game only partially interested in giving you broad vinegar strokes on who the characters of the game are and why they're doing what they're doing, relying on data logs and journals that need to be collected seems like malfeasance. Understanding Astos and how he figures into Jack's journey is almost exclusively conveyed through these collectibles, and it sucks. Also, the team that made this game made the wrong choice for some of the levels they picked to express their respective games. The Fire Cavern is one of the most generic levels they could have tapped to represent Final Fantasy VIII, and the endless office spaces of Insomnia are the last thing I would have picked for Final Fantasy XV.

Nonetheless, your first mission to beat Garland goes smoothly until you find a silver-haired young woman in a Japanese schoolgirl sailor outfit inside Garland's armor. The task after that is when the game finally breaks from its formula of adapting the first Final Fantasy game shot for shot. The mission after Garland involves fighting a pirate king named Bikke. Here, we discover that the crystals our four heroes are collecting are jet black instead of colorful representations of the four core elements. Likewise, when Neon tries to talk to make a point to Jack, he responds by saying, "Bullshit!" and then plugs in earbuds connected to a music player and starts listening to Limp Bizkit. This scene is what I mean by Stranger of Paradise doesn't understand how to pace itself. It drops that whopper with Jack's MP3 player and then doesn't follow it up with any subsequent weirdness until you watch a short cutscene after beating Bikke. The fight against Bikke points the party to Astos, who, after getting a thrashing, promptly gives Jack his mission objective for most of the game: kill the Four Fiends. After this, the game follows the same template of you accepting a mission in a new environment, 90% of that environment being slogs through mooks and random enemies, and the finale of the environment being a boss encounter that introduces a new puzzle piece to the story. It sounds normal, but I must stress that over ninety percent of your experience with any given level does jack to progress the story and characters, and that's why I refer to the middle of Stranger of Paradise as a "slog." It also does not help that it is here when you notice the repeating finishing animations or the game's scant ten different enemy types.

But again, right when I want to dismiss this game, it makes me laugh. There's a moment when your characters are ascending the highest peak of Mount Gagazet, and Jack's peers ask him why anyone would go on such a pilgrimage, and his exact words are, "Who fucking cares? We have a mission!" When you get to the Final Fantasy IV level, where everyone is in space, there is a moment when Neon says, "Wow! We're really high up!" and Jack's immediate response is, "Don't worry about it!" It's pure camp, and I love it! Watching multiple characters treat what they were experiencing with deft seriousness only to be greeted by Jack saying "whatever" is endearing. Nonetheless, when you meet Astos, it is around that point when you realize things are "weird" in the Kingdom of Corneria. Starting with our friendly dark elf, and during every lead-up to a Fiend, we see flashbacks to Jack and company's previous attempts to beat the Four Fiends, all of which failed. These flashbacks are a mess as they don't happen with enough frequency or coincide with character progress to make them significant until the climax, and when they do, they're so short it's hard even to understand what you've seen. Luckily, the game is so heavy-handed with its message that it's impossible not to know there's a time loop happening, and your friends know more about it than they're letting on to Jack. Again, it's immensely stupid, but I wish the game were dumber. I think it would be better if Stranger of Paradise fully reveled in its schlock from start to finish. Yet, the fact it doesn't makes it a more uneven experience, and that unevenness is part of the reason why I enjoy watching it. So, what do you think? Would this game be more satisfactory if it were better, or is it best when it doesn't know what it is doing? The next time you see me writing about Stranger of Paradise, we will discuss its ending and a Final Fantasy-based conspiracy theory I have.

Hey, Steam Got A New Update That Makes Playing Games On Steam Better!

Recently, Steam hosted another edition of its Next Fest event. During this promotion, developers, primarily smaller indie outfits, paraded various demos and prototypes for projects they have been toiling away on for years. Outside of Steam's seasonal sale events, Next Fest is one of the most valuable and beloved promotions Steam hosts, short of the handful of lotteries they run where you have the off-chance to nab a Steam Deck or free games. And why wouldn't you like Next Fest? It's one of the best opportunities to explore new games and interact with developers as they probe you and others for input on how to go about the development process with their passion projects. The motive is to place you in a positive feedback loop on a marketplace that sends you deluges of notifications and updates about sales and games you might have on your wishlist, and if something during Next Fest catches your attention, then you're going to add into that feedback loop.

However, before we get into the existential, let's also commend Valve for not only hosting an event to ring up some much-needed positivity in this industry but also for introducing a new and appreciated update to their marketplace. Whether or not they timed this update to coincide closely with Next Fest or the Summer Sale is a matter of pure speculation. Still, considering how several of these new features, like user notes and reliability improvements to Big Picture Mode, have been asked for, for quite some time, I don't think it's a matter of pure coincidence. Nonetheless, this update proves that everything I will complain about shortly is fixable. Unifying the code to the desktop client, Big Picture Mode, and Steam Deck? That's no easy task, yet the minds at Valve did it on top of introducing other UI/UX improvements that make searching for and finding new and upcoming games far easier. They are also showing signs of listening to the input of their audience as they have mercifully finally addressed the issue all of us once had with Steam Notifications popping off every goddamn minute. Now the default is for these notifications to trigger if something about a game is genuinely new. Likewise, the notification feed is vastly improved and far easier to process than it once was.

Nonetheless, the most significant additions to Steam, beyond the front page just being far easier on the eyes, involve the introduction of user-made notes for all games. By allowing users to create custom notes or pinned windows, you can navigate games and the Steam marketplace client without fear of losing your train of thought. With notes, imagine, if you will, a life or work obligation breaking up your recent game session with a two- to three-day break. With this feature, you can write a quick note pinned to the corner of your game about what you were doing at the time and where you need to go next; it's a game changer if I say so myself. There's also no denying that the new custom features related to font size, window opacity, and color will make the readability of Steam better for those with vision issues or other general disabilities.

Unfortunately, while all of this is positive in terms of the direction of Steam, there's been an annoying precedent Valve has set regarding their Next Fest event. Every year, Valve introduces new search parameters, modifiers, and demo aggregation tools that only appear when there's a Next Fest event for reasons still unknown to anyone following the industry. This quandary is far from breaking news and even something I have written about before on the site. Next Fest started after Valve decided to rebrand their Steam Game Festival after their brief partnership with Geoff Keighley ended in 2019. It remains an excellent idea, but it also annoyingly continues to be the only time when you can use the desktop client to show you the most played demos on Steam or provide you with handy easy-to-click green buttons to download free playable builds of games. I'm not joking here. Being able to search for new or the most popular demos? That's gone now that Next Fest is over, and so are hundreds of helpful sub-genre filters that make filtering out exploitative trash on Steam all the easier. Likewise, with Steam placing a greater emphasis on user streams by the minute, pinning or notifying users when developers are hosting streams or providing handy VODs on any game's page after those streams end remains an endlessly frustrating issue. But again, this is all familiar territory, so let's jump into it.

Seriously Valve, All Of These Handy Search Tools And Modifiers Would Be Great On The Main Storefront!

Let's slay the giant dragon right from the get-go. If someone from Valve reads my weird opinion editorials, which is highly unlikely, and they want me to stop complaining about their post-Next Fest decision-making, make following and tracking new and popular demos on the desktop client a permanent feature. I'm not asking for anything unreasonable here, as dozens of other dropdown menus and lists already exist. What will one more of those titled "Most Popular Demos" or "New Demos" do? You may be worried that having that one extra tab will cause the processor on the Steam Deck to short-circuit. Okay, but HOT DAMN, every time a Next Fest rolls around, simply modifying the genre settings and search parameters for what I am looking for and then seeing which top demos fit has led me to discover new and exciting games more often than using the Discovery Queue. You may appreciate the Discovery Queue, and my blog last year saw a non-zero number of you chiming in that you enjoy using it. Still, there's no denying that it requires a much higher time investment than simply clicking a genre tab and then seeing what the most played demos for that selection might be.

And I know that some of you are wondering why it's such a sore point to me when I can do that on the current page with new and recent releases and even recently discounted games. My counter-argument to that is two-fold. First, Next Fest sees countless "exclusive" sub-genre search modifiers that never get added to the main store's search engine. As a result, if you find a winning combination of search modifiers that consistently draw in big and small games that tickle your fancy, there's a chance you can't repeat that formula the minute Next Fest is over. To highlight how annoying that can be, let me give you a common situation when Next Fest ends. Let's say you find a demo, something outside your wheelhouse, or even a genre you don't usually play. If you make this discovery during Next Fest, Steam shows you the more specific sub-genre modifiers you can use to find similar titles, and its custom search engine will even allow you to search by tone, mood, and game length on top of all pre-existing ones. Many of those usability features disappear when Next Fest ends, and it's baffling.

Yes, this loss is not the end of the world, as the current search tools get the job done, and there are other ways to find new and emerging game projects on Steam beyond Next Fest. Nevertheless, what harm is there in merely adding the ability to search for demos? Steam Next Fest is the only time that ability exists, and the only workaround when the event is over is to search for new games or ones listed as "Upcoming" and pray they have free playable builds on their store page. However, that becomes problematic because it inevitably leads to you finding an endless list of "Early Access" games that may or may not have game demos. This point opens up my other grievance about Steam automatically deleting the demos you downloaded during Next Fest. I understand that the developers often ask that the demos they design for Next Fest not stay up in perpetuity. However, the consequence is that if you read about games during the event after the fact, there's a chance that you are shit out of luck when it comes to giving that title a whirl. It also would help if I could search for demos using the general Steam search engine. There are enough modifiers that I can often cobble together a template that provides the same rewarding discoveries I experience during Next Fest. Still, until Steam allows me to add a "Demo" tag, I always end up with games with no free playable content to test before making a purchase or have paywalled Early Access pages with no demo available. Even if you consider some of my requests unreasonable, we can all agree having a list of popular demos or allowing people to search for them doesn't present Valve with a massive engineering task.

The Helpful UI/UX Features Steam Next Fest Gets STILL Have No Reason To Disappear When The Event Is Over

At the time of the initial publishing of this blog, we are amid another yearly Summer Steam Sale. Like last year's summer sale, I wonder how better navigating the Steam storefront would be if some of the features or standards showcased during Next Fest were permanent. For example, a few games caught my attention when the sale started, and after clicking their pages, I had to re-remind myself where to find developer-led livestreams that showcase how to utilize game-specific mechanics. A similar but distinct issue involves the inordinate number of games that I discovered while fanning through the "On Sale" portal but found out that the only playable build the developer had available was gated through Early Access. In those cases, there often wasn't a freely accessible demo. Steam has to allow for some of these scenarios, as each developer's situation will differ. Still, my issue is that I can't filter these games out of my queue or feeds because there are NO demo-related search modifiers.

And I must return to how arbitrarily hidden demos are on Steam's currently formatted game pages. Why Steam doesn't let you toggle Next Fest's helpful green "Download Demo" button the minute you pan to a game portrait shown on the front page is a mystery. Again, I understand that not all developers should be expected to take the time to develop or edit a game build to fit the desired format of a standard game demo. However, for the many developers that put in the time and effort to do that, they should be allowed to have an option that seamlessly helps interested consumers to download and interact with a free game build if one exists. Part of the reason why so few people download demos on Steam is that they either don't know where to find them, don't know how to determine if one exists in the first place, or there is so little buy-in by the developers of their genres of preference to create demos in the first place. My proposals don't remedy the last of those, but they would make the first two immediately less of an annoyance.

As endlessly silly sorting games by mood may have felt during Next Fest, the reactive nature of that search experience is still immensely better than scrolling through pillars of games highlighted through the default "On Sale" or "Upcoming" dropdown lists. While the revision made carousels snappier, the fact that you still need to hope and pray that Steam surfaces valuable items into those carousels inevitably leads to disappointment. I get that using the Discovery Queue can help fill those carousels and change which ones you see, but do you know what would be faster? Me being able to customize which ones are there in the first place. On top of that, while the dropdown lists are likely one of the most common ways the average Steam user discovers new games and titles on sale outside of Wishlist notifications, they are getting increasingly clunkier and less valuable as Steam becomes inundated with games. Again, overall, I like the new Steam revision and especially the direction Valve is taking with unified OS updates, but putting a shiny coat of paint on the storefront will only work for so long. At some point, there needs to be a fundamental re-assessment of how to best surface recommendations and new and emerging titles.

Steam's Growing (And Sometimes Annoying) Emphasis On Livestreaming

Let's not beat around the bush. During Next Fest, the number of streams Valve put on the welcome screen to the event caused it to chug to a crawl at times. The current Summer Sale also has its share of performance issues, but that's likely not something that can be squarely pegged on streaming. In fact, the number of streamers seen playing around with massively discounted games or much-ballyhooed releases is significantly less than what we experienced during Next Fest. Nonetheless, both events had the same two fundamental problems when it came to surfacing streamers: 1) the notifications/reminders for developer streams are awful, and the visibility of their VODs is even worse, and 2) unless you are part of the streaming zeitgeist from morning to night for every possible genre, you have no idea who to trust or why the people streaming on Valve's platform are people you should care about. The first has the most straightforward solution: developer stream archives should be pinned in either a "Streams" tab on a game's store page or in the image and trailer carousel.

Compared to others, I am okay with the pre-recorded stream videos at the top of many store pages. While I agree it is annoying that they auto-play by default, those videos do an admirable job of showing you what a game looks like when it's in motion. They need to be better integrated on their associated pages, and with developers sometimes streaming upwards of ten to twenty snapshots of their game's core mechanics and gimmicks, the default carousel is starting to feel clunky, and accessing that information after the fact needs to be more intuitive. Some developers break from the standard format of having one auto-playing video and then an assortment of contextless screenshots on a game's top carousel, but that is far from the norm. If developer-led videos and streams had their own visibly marked tab or portal, Valve wouldn't have to rely so heavily on Next Fest to opt them into their burgeoning streaming ecosystem. The game store pages' default video and image carousel also show their age. They consistently chug whenever you attempt to display higher-resolution media or play HD videos, and this issue is not new.

However, the situation with developer videos and streams seems secondary to the growing initiative from Valve to push user streams on game pages and their desktop client. During Next Fest, and this problem exists even today on the main storefront, you must scroll through five or six user streams to explore game-specific community hubs or pages. The first issue is that Valve and Steam do nothing to filter these streams, making it difficult to figure out who to trust or which streamers even fit your style. Say what you will about Twitch and YouTube, but their bank of search modifiers and tags makes locating streamers that aren't yelling at you from beginning to end, if that's not your thing, a possible task, but that's far from the case on Steam. Likewise, the streamer biography pages are so rudimentary on Steam you usually end up making more leaps of faith than on any other modern streaming platform.

Then, there are the technical issues that crop up whenever Steam tries to show you more than five streams on the same page. Twitch is currently in its weakest state regarding its community's confidence in its leadership. Even then, we have seen this before where Valve tries to opt big names into streaming directly on Steam, but those efforts prove fleeting. With Next Fest and the current Summer Sale, you get the sense that Valve wants Steam to be more integrated with a streaming future, but if that's the case, the architecture currently isn't there for that to happen. And if Valve goes that route, how much of a distraction would that pose to the expected functions of Steam being a place to buy games? It does seem likely that we will all be migrating to watch streamers there from time to time because it seems inevitable that there will be a big name there who is handing away free game codes after securing a contract with Valve. Nonetheless, I've been wrong about this stuff before, so what do you think?

If you enjoy this blog and would like to read my other adventure game retrospectives, here's a list of my previous episodes of this series:

• Episode 1: The Dig
• Episode 2: Atlantis: The Lost Tales
• Episode 3: Loom
• Episode 4: Drowned God
• Episode 5a: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Part 1 & Episode 5b: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - Part 2
• Episode 6: The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime
• Episode 7a: The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time (Part 1)& Episode 7b: The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time (Part 2)
• Episode 8a: The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time (Part 1) & Episode 8B: The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time (Part 2)
• Episode 9a: The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One [Part 1] & Episode 9b: The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One [Part 2]
• Episode 10: D (The Game)
• Episode 11a: The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate [Part 1]& Episode 11b: The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate [Part 2]
• Episode 12a: The Legend of Kyrandia - Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge [Part 1] & Episode 12b: The Legend of Kyrandia - Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge [Part 2]
• Episode 13: Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb
• Episode 14a: The Quest For The Worst Adventure Game Puzzles - MTV's Club Dead [Part 1] & Episode 14b: The Quest For The Worst Adventure Game Puzzles - MTV's Club Dead [Part 2]

Preamble

No one was asking me to play this game. I'd be surprised if this nigh 7,000-word write-up got even a single comment. Unsurprisingly, there's no groundswell for coverage of A.D. 2044 here or on any video game website. Playing this pile of crap falls entirely on me. While site-friend Relkin spitballed this game to me months ago, I already had a copy due to my morbid curiosity about experiencing one of the lowest-reviewed games on GOG. And with the game having virtually no coverage in the English-speaking gaming community, I was signing up for an authentic blind playthrough. Pre-2000s European adventure games have always been a giant void in my knowledge of the genre, especially regarding the Eastern Bloc of adventure games following the fall of the Soviet Union. For example, I understand Metropolis Software exists and completed Teenagent, but that's where I tap out.

This week I was in the mood to broaden my horizons, and BOY did A.D. 2044 lead me down a wild rabbit hole! I mentioned this when doing a grab-bag special on the free games available on GOG. I talked about Teenagent there and how the adventure game genre, even when LucasArts and Sierra tapped out, was incredibly active in Europe. While Myst deserves a ton of credit for keeping the genre going, Infogrames, Revolution Software, Cryo Interactive, Psygnosis, and Gremlin Interactive were churning out widely-praised works that were also financially successful. With the fall of the Society Union, many up-and-coming game developers from Eastern Europe only had adventure games as their point of reference for what a video game could be or play like.

When you play something like A.D. 2044 and consider that it was its developer's first go at making a Windows NT-based game, you have to play a fun game of figuring out its point of reference. After thinking about it, Myst might have been in the programmer's wheelhouse, but A.D. 2044 certainly feels like a Cryo Interactive clone. The shiny, fully rendered 3D models in 2044 and its heavy reliance on hidden objects reek of Cryo's Atlantis franchise. It's also a screen-based graphic adventure game like Myst in that you navigate using arrow-based directional inputs, and there's no camera movement once you enter a new screen. However, this game being a cheap Myst clone, only explains part of a big question I had when I first encountered it.

Why Is This One Of The Lowest Reviewed Games On GOG?

Before I answer that question, I must concede that we can go "darker" on GOG. There are worse games and even worse adventure games on the digital marketplace. There's the fraudulent Simon the Sorcerer anniversary game that promised fans a proper remaster and did not deliver on that even the slightest bit. The 3D-era Leisure Suit Larry games are on GOG, and the equally tacky Les Manley franchise accompanies them in the "adult-themed adventure game" arena. There are bad FMV games, poorly curated indie titles, and that dog-dick ugly LotR Gollum game. Yet, even with all of that competition, A.D. 2044 feels like a "contender" for the worst game on GOG's marketplace. Before we explore why, I need to provide some context on why this game exists. First, the game on GOG is a remaster of an Atari 8-bit computer game that was adapting a Polish cult film titled "Sexmission" or "Seksmisja." Poland was still a part of the Soviet Union when the film and original Atari 8-bit computer game were made, whereas the Windows remaster came out in 1996. However, that source material is vital because it gets to the heart of what makes A.D. 2044 a purely putrid experience.

Seksmisja is a 1984 science-fiction film that depicts an alternate future wherein women rule the world and a lone male that volunteered to be cryogenically frozen before a nuclear apocalypse discovers the female-led New World Order has installed an all-encompassing totalitarian state on the planet in the aftermath. Post-apocalyptic androcide-focused science fiction is a well-known sub-genre, with Y: The Last Man as the gold standard. Some in Poland praise Seksmisja for being a satire of life under the Soviet Union, but it also has highly problematic depictions of women and is incredibly anti-feminist. As you might expect, the film and its game adaptations make the false assumption that a world run by women would immediately become totalitarian. The movie also depicts gender reassignment as a punishment for anyone with male physical characteristics, views feminism as deeply connected with Puritanism, and that feminism's ultimate goals are to develop a sexless society that admonishes masculinity. It's pretty horrid shit if I do say so myself.

Yet, this game isn't well-loved by the anti-woke grifters on GOG or the internet! The reasons for that are self-explanatory. As you probably can tell from the handful of screen captures I have shared up to this point, the game is butt ugly. Sure, you must commend the developers for having a decent stab at 3D models and environments, with not the best technology at their disposal. Even then, understanding what you're looking at is a chore, and character models are bizarre without feeling charming or in the spirit of the game's themes. Related to the game's often indecipherable environments and textures is its bunk-ass game design. A LOT of the puzzles, as you will see shortly, boil down to you needing to find and track down one-off items that are hidden under random pieces of furniture or locked away in secret desk compartments. The pacing is also atrocious. There are three acts to the game. The second, which involves you needing to operate an elevator to explore different rooms you cannot enter any other way, is one of the worst things I have played this year. There are many occasions wherein you need to navigate labyrinths, and the repeating wall textures make tracking your direction impossible. The item combinations you must complete make no sense, and the game has far too many cipher or password-based puzzles. Do you get the feeling I don't like this game yet? Well, buckle up because it's time for me to review some puzzles! But be warned; this game is a doozy!

Let's Rank Some AWFUL Puzzles!

The Starting Building

Getting Everything You Need From The Starting Chamber Room/Prison - [Rating: 5/10] - I mentioned already that this game often plays like a hidden object game, and that's very much the case when you boot it up and gain control the first time. Your character finds themselves in a two-story apartment complex, and any attempt they make to leave results in them getting the shit kicked out of them. Also, all you have on your person is an electronic device the game's translation calls an "electronic goaler." While in this environment, there are a few screens and objects you can interact with that are entirely optional but provide a fleeting sense of worldbuilding. You need to mosey down to a cryogenic tube and click a button that opens the encasing around a bed and pick up a pack of cigarettes. Across from here is a scanner that refuses to let you use a nearby room because your stomach is empty. However, if you examine a table with a plate of apples, while the apples are fake, there's a breakfast pellet your character can eat and a box of matches, an essential item for several future puzzles. Under this table is a spoon, a critical quest item you use to eat a bowl of soup. When you approach the scanner, it opens the previously locked door, revealing a toilet. Surprise, the culmination of this puzzle is you taking a shit. I wish I were joking.

I don't hate this game's starting level. It's small, and because it is a self-contained circular environment without any dead-ends, it's a decent enough start to get your feet wet. Likewise, the number of collectible items and necessary actions aren't out of the realm of possibility because there aren't many. And yet, it's still an incredibly frustrating affair. That spoon took me forever to find because there's no sign that you need to look underneath the table in the first place. Much like Myst and the works of Cryo Interactive, you use the arrow keys to move in predetermined directions. However, the same pitfall with the games of Cyan and Cryo presents itself in A.D. 2044. There are times when you might know where you need to go, but you need to find the one screen that leads to that location, and being next to or near a piece of furniture only sometimes leads you to it. For example, after eating the soup, to unlock the gate to the stairs, you can't simply move to the right of the table, even though it's right next to the stairs. Instead, you need to back away from the table, approach the cryogenic tube, move right to face a pillar, and click a button to unlock the stairs.

The Puzzle In The Bathroom - [Rating: 4/10] - Upon entering the bathroom, it's time for a collect-a-thon! Behind a pair of boots is a button with the letter "A." Under the toilet is a newspaper, which is HILARIOUSLY dated to 1984. Do you get it? It's a reference! Above the sink is a mirror, which is the only tricky part of this sequence. The mirror looks like a fixture of the environment, not an object you can pick up and tuck away in your inventory slots. The good news is that the puzzle that requires its use is right around the corner, and that puzzle does piggyback the solution requiring a mirror. As such, I can't get that angry about this level, especially with it being so small and brief.

Exiting The Starting Room - [Rating: 6/10] - It's time to deal with the guard that will not allow your character to leave their apartment, and it is here that the game and its creators show their true colors. A fire alarm is above the door to a corridor out of the room. To trigger it, click the cigarette box to get a single cigarette and light it by connecting it to the matches. It's now time to review how the use of items works in A.D. 2044. When you wish to use anything from your inventory, place it in a slot above an eyeball. However, to use or combine items, you must click that eye to zoom in on them. In this case, you need to place the carton in the slot, examine it, click on the box to get a single cigarette, place the cigarette in an inventory slot, back out of the zoomed-in screen, swap the box with the individual cigarette, zoom in on the cigarette, and use the box of matches to light the cigarette. Does that sound fun and intuitive to you? Oh, you have no clue what's in store for us next!

When you apply the smoking cigar to the alarm, it starts blaring, and the guard, wearing a thong leotard police outfit you'd expect out of a strip club's Halloween night party, will run into the room. You need to then move your mouse cursor over their mouth until it turns into a pair of lips and kiss her directly on her mouth to cause her to fall back, land spread-eagle, and blow up into millions of pieces. As disgusting and absurd as that might sound, it's a time sequence and a frustrating one at that. If you aren't quick enough to figure out what to do with the guard, she beats you up and resets the puzzle. There's also nothing in the game to suggest kissing her is the solution. That and the awful inventory system leads me to bump up the score of this puzzle by a few extra points.

Entering And Exiting The First Corridor - [Rating: 4/10] - The room immediately following the bedroom is a corridor that parts at the end to the left and right. With the left turn, a laser grid prevents you from moving further. To deal with the laser grid, find the mirror, click it, and then drag it directly onto any part of the laser. This action causes it to short circuit and allows you to collect a gas mask and first aid kit. Past the gas mask and kit, you must move left again to enter a waste disposal area. As I said when discussing the mirror, this puzzle is a simple "gear check." Either you have the item the puzzle asks for, or you don't. Because I have experienced my fair share of laser grid puzzles before, I didn't find this an outrageous ask. Also, I was delighted you didn't have to position the mirror in a specific place or direction to destroy the grid.

Exploring The Waste Disposal Room - [Rating: 7/10] - This waste disposal area is the first environment where you can get lost or fall into annoying loops without knowing it. Worse, you have to come back to this area more than once. The gimmick with your first exploration effort in the waste disposal area is that you must find a secret exit out of it, but only after collecting a single story-required item. When I first played this game, I forgot to pick this up, and it took me a while to figure out how to return to the disposal area because everything during the back half of the first act takes place in a series of interlocking corridors. Nonetheless, all you need to do right now is open a box labeled "Litter" to pick up a spool of thread; that's it. It's a single marked container in a room with at least twenty, and the only way to know that is to brute force this whole level and click on everything. If you interact with the containers in this room long enough, you should find one covered in graffiti, and upon opening it, discover the secret exit. However, it would help if you remembered to wear the mask before using it or risk dying. This sequence is a needle in a haystack puzzle, and it's not even a good one.

Moving The Mine Cart In The Incinerator - [Rating: 5/10] - The next area is an incinerator room. The incinerator is filling the room with smoke, but the compartment fueling it is too hot to touch. To the left of the incinerator is a mine cart, and if you look inside it, you'll find a poker you can collect. If you move to the back of the cart, you'll also note that it can shift before it returns to its normal position. The game needs you to swing to the front of the cart, flick a switch to adjust its brake, and push it again to move it to the end of the track. However, the real key to this puzzle is a unique-looking rock under the cart, which provides you with a tiny mouse upon clicking it. Again, the game relies on a hidden object gameplay hook for the culmination of a level, and it's easy to miss as the rock is the same color as the background and foreground. Even then, this level is short, and knowing you need to move the mine cart isn't too much of a leap of logic.

Exploring The Workshop - [Rating: 6/10] - Mercifully, while the levels with the first act aren't exactly the most visually pleasing in the world, at the very least, they are quick and to the point. After exiting the incinerator room, you find yourself in a workshop. Annoyingly, the door you entered becomes locked, so if you need to return to something you missed, you must complete the rest of this loop before being able to backtrack. The workshop has a bench with tools, but you can only use a drill for now. Find the button with the letter "A" and use the tool to puncture a hole. Here's the kicker: you must put the button into the slot above the eye and apply the green thread. Again, the spool is a missable item from a previous screen, and if you don't have it, it's a royal pain in the ass to track down.

Likewise, there are TWO easy-to-miss items here! A drawer is under the bench, and you must click it to open it to find a hammer that you must put into an inventory slot. From here, you need to pivot or turn at a 180-degree angle to locate a bucket. The screen looking at the drawer is the only one that leads to this bucket. When you find the bucket, you must look into it to find a metal rod. After collecting this, you can ascend a set of stairs. The game has two items you can miss, AND it locks the door behind you, forcing you into repeat loops to try and find random crap! As a wise man once said, "It stinks!"

Opening The Gate At The Top Floor To Get Back To The Incinerator Room - [Rating: 5/10] - Once you reach the top of the stairs, the game immediately greets you with a steel gate blocking the next entryway. This gate, if opened, provides a quick access point to the waste disposal room. Luckily, to the left of the entrance is a cupboard that initiates a new round of item collection. The lowest rung of the closet has a protective glove that you can pick up and eventually use on the latch to the furnace from earlier. The only game design dick move here comes from the next item you must pick up: a key below the cupboard. You can only pick this key up if you go to the final level of the cupboard and click to move down. I missed this in my first playthrough and ran around in circles for about fifteen minutes. The key promptly unlocks the gate near the stairs when you apply it. As much as I want to get angry about that key, I can't. It's one item, and with the insane dexterity and luck puzzles coming up, I would feel bad if I ranked this part of the game too high because I got stuck for a bit.

Gaining Access To The Interrogation Room - [Rating: 3/10] - Once you open the gate, it's time to do your second official circuit in the hallway. Your first objective is to return to the incinerator and use the glove to open the latch to the fire powering the waste disposal room. You can throw your electronic goaler into the flames. That's all you need to do before exiting and returning to the corridor in front of the apartment room. This time, turn right and find a wall that leads to a police station. When you try to enter, another scantily clad officer blocks your progress. To remove her, use the mouse from the mine cart on a crack under the door to the station to scare the officer away. You know, because women don't like "icky" animals. Get it? This sequence is about as easy as they get in A.D. 2044. There's not much to say other than missing the mouse is a bit of a doozy.

Opening The Safe In The Interrogation Room - [Rating: 3/10] - While you explore the police station, you'll eventually find an interrogation room. From the entrance, find a desk and observe files labeled "Top Secret" and the female names in the dossier. When you move down the desk, you'll move to the drawers, but only one, the leftmost, will open. This drawer provides a key that unlocks a nearby prison cell. When you look inside the cell, you should see a stray piece of paper you can pick up using the poker. The note says, "She pressed 3871," which happens to be the combination to a safe to the left of the desk. When you locate this safe and the control pad for inputting these numbers, the safe opens to reveal two control bars. When you pull both bars up, they unlock the door to the elevator and the game's second act. Maybe I have been irony poisoned, but I enjoyed this almost escape-the-room-like level. Again, the best parts of this game, which are fleeting, involve small explorable environments with minimal backtracking and require you to pick up on subtle, but not impossible, environmental context clues. That's the case here, so nothing in the interrogation room feels outright impossible. Let's remember that while we transition into the worst part of the game!

The Elevator Lobby

Repairing The Elevator - [Rating: 5/10] - Unfortunately, the elevator is broken, and you must fix it. Find a control panel to the left of the elevator door and use the button attached to the thread to insert it into a coin slot without losing anything. When you press the unmarked button on the panel, one at a time, you discover they correspond to the letters "O," "D," "A," and "N." If you recall the list of names from the police station, you should remember one of the names on the list was "Dona," which is the solution. When you gain access to the elevator, there's a screwdriver hidden on a panel you can only pick up if you move forward and then forward again. When examining the numerical board inside the elevator, there are four floors in the next act, but it would be best if you tackled them in an unspoken order the game doesn't tell you, and you would only know if you were consulting a guide. This second act is BY FAR the worst level in this game, but this part is by no means a terrible puzzle or sequence. The panel to turn on the elevator is right there, and it is relatively easy to figure out what you need to do. The only tricky parts involve having the button on the string as the drill is at least three screens removed from this location and remembering the screwdriver in the elevator.

Teleportation Chamber Room - [Rating: 4/10] - The first floor is a teleportation chamber. Despite the promise of sci-fi action, this level boils down to hidden object collection and gear checks. To access the teleportation chamber, fiddle with a control box by clicking every button. There's no correct order; you click the buttons until the door opens. When you enter the chamber, you only need to pick up a rope and turn left to find another control box. You must use the screwdriver on this box to nab another button with a letter. If you continue exploring this level, which is not necessary, you should be able to find another guard that asks for a pass and cannot be defeated by kissing her. Yup, this entire second act boils down to you making a passport. Similar to the previous puzzle, getting upset here is hard because the level itself is compact, and there are only a few possibilities of getting lost. At least here, the item you need to pick up, the rope, isn't tucked away on an impossible-to-find screen.

Unlocking The Department of Archeology - [Rating: 7/10] - It's time to return to the elevator to explore the third floor of this building. The second level returns you to the police station, by the way. The third floor involves a "Department of Archeology" and various museum exhibits and doors along a corridor. Only a few of these open, and if you try to move forward, a female homage to ED-209 knocks you on your ass. You defeat this robot by connecting the green thread to two columns and then goading it to chase after you. Defeating a clunky and unwieldy robot by tying a rope to two columns? Tell me where you've heard that idea before! With that out of the way, you move forward to a door in the hallway. Unfortunately, this door has a lock, and how you solve this problem is downright stupid. There's a chair next to the door that, upon standing on it, leads you to its key. However, you can only stand on this chair if you apply the newspaper on it. I still don't understand why you need to do this. Not a single clue in the game hints that the chair is only usable if there's a newspaper on the seat. But the real problem is that you need to pick the newspaper back up or risk screwing yourself over in a puzzle during the game's final act. That's not hyperbole; that's something that can happen.

Collecting A Bunch Of Crap In The Archeological Institute - [Rating: 5/10] - It's time for ANOTHER hidden object sequence. When you enter the lab, you find various relics being prepared for future exhibits. Some are "funny" window-dressing, while others are critical to completing the game. A mini-temple has a chisel, a nearby mechanical stamping device is needed for the passport, and on a wall is a safe with a unique detector. When you go to the desk with the stamping device and move down to look at its drawers, you must use the chisel to open the first drawer to collect a blank copy of a membership card. The second drawer holds a blank, unstamped passport, and you can resolve that by applying it to the nearby stamping machine. You also need a second stamp by finding a manual press on the desk and using it on the passport. Oh, and the third drawer has a paper clip! It's time to return to the elevator and use it so you can present this to the guard on the first floor. Mercifully, the lab in the institute is short and straightforward, with only a few hidden objects. Also, the two stamps for the passport are next to each other, and by this point, you know to check the drawers in any desks in this game. This game might be gaslighting me into thinking it's not bad. Oh, wait, the following four sections are abject dog shit!

Entering And Exploring The Storeroom - [Rating: 5/10] - When you walk past the guard, you eventually find yourself in a storeroom. You can open a few containers with the poker; one should have a blue glove. Across from the containers are space suits, and one has a pocket to use the blue glove to nab a remote control. You can't use your non-gloved hands because the outfits have radiation or some shit. To the left of these suits is a metal door, and YET AGAIN, you open these doors by fiddling around with control boxes. But the gimmick here is that this control box puzzle has TWO parts! First, you need to use the remote on the left chest to open it, and once it is opened, grab two switches and place them in the unlocked rightmost box. The second part of this puzzle involves pressing buttons in ascending order based on how many sides are on the shapes below the buttons. The pocket on that spacesuit is a real middle finger to the player. There is more than one spacesuit, and the left pocket is hard to peg down from the rest of the screen. Knowing basic geometry isn't that hard of an ask, but I have to say putting shapes in order of how many sides they have is the laziest shit you can put in an adventure game.

Fixing And Using The Cage Lift - [Rating: 9/10] - The next room involves a cage lift, which is the worst part of the game. The cage lift lacks power, and the power box is locked. When you approach the power box, move down to pick up a rock and socket wrench. Return to the power box and open it using the wrench, and you can turn it on when you apply the blue glove to its two buttons. Now, you need to return to the cage lift and discover it's meant to be a two-person operation, as the cage lift is to the left of the station with the button to move it upwards. As a result, you must throw the rock from the cage to hit the controls to move it. Unfortunately, you need to be pixel-perfect with your aim, and if you miss, you need to walk back and pick up the rock, return to the cage, and throw it again! Getting this down took me about ten or twelve tries! At the top of the building is a maintenance hole you can pry open using the metal rod you picked up ages ago. Figuring out this item combination is no easy task, as there's nothing to guide your efforts, but the real annoyance here is the part involving the lever and rock! What if I told you you must do this at least once more?

The Painting Room Puzzle - [Rating: 9/10] - Past the maintenance hole, you enter a pitch-black room that you can illuminate by lighting a match. And guess what? Yet again, you must find ANOTHER control box to push a button to start a puzzle! This time a green button on a control panel permanently turns on the lights in the room. In the middle of this room is a mechanical device that has a camera on top of it. On the back of this machine is ANOTHER panel you need to pry open to solve a mini-puzzle. There are two vials, one with radioactive waste and another with white phosphorous. You must use the blue glove to knock over the radioactive water and pick up the white phosphorous. But here's the most significant dick move in the game short of the rock-throwing minigame. In this room is a random prop rock. You must crush this rock using your hammer to pick up a cockroach. This rock is in a room filled with similar-looking objects! What you have here is another mean-spirited needle-in-a-haystack pixel hunt! It's a wholly screwed-up affair with you wailing away on random rocks until you find the correct one. If we are being generous, the stone you need to find is slightly larger than the rest, but that's pushing it. It's a monstrous ask of the player if they are not using a guide, as it could take twenty to thirty minutes to go through every rock without help.

Exiting The Elevator Complex - [Rating: 7/10] - Now that you have the cockroach, you must drag your ass back to the police officer you used the mouse on! That's right, we have FORCED BACKTRACKING! The "best" part is that many of the puzzles I already explained, such as throwing a rock, must be completed again when you need to return to the painting room to finish the second act! But I'm getting ahead of myself! First, you must return to the elevator and revisit the second floor to scare the police officer using the cockroach. In her room is a desk with an unlocked drawer with a knife. Return to the elevator and explore the archaeology institute on the first floor. Go back to the lab and find a painting with a safe. Use the phosphorous to open the safe, and then grab a lighter. Finally, return to the third floor, do that rock-throwing shit again, and return to the painting room. In this room is a single screen wherein you can use the knife to cut a hole to exit the entire starting complex. Finding this screen is a complete pain in the ass, and it's not like there is an imperfection or clue on where to use the knife. It's another case of you needing to have an item active and clicking randomly on everything until something happens; my least favorite design quirk of early adventure games.

The Outside Level & Final Mansion

Getting Past The Gate And Entering The Mansion - [Rating: 7/10] - Finally, a change of scenery! When you first exit the starting building, you butt up against an electrified fence. To the left of the electrified gate entrance is a set of spikes on top of a cement wall. Depending on your monitor's aspect ratio, these are incredibly hard to see. Throw the rope you picked up from the teleportation chamber at the spikes and summit the wall. On the other side should be a gazebo. Push a sundial to climb to the top of the pavilion and pick up a new spool of rope. Now, there's something in the villa's front yard that you need to pick up, and it might be the most fiddly individual part of the game. Like many Myst clones, the pathways to mission-critical screens with essential items start five to six screens prior. In this case, you need to find a bench, move to the left of it and then move forward to get near a moat and then turn around to look at the mansion. Next, you must walk under a bridge to swim through a creek to face a green fern-like plant. From the fern, back up, do not move forward, to find an alcove to pick up some twigs and fire kindling. There is no other way to reach these twigs, even if they are plopped next to the mansion's door. I am, by all definitions, a Myst apologist, but even I hate it when adventure games have obtuse and hard-to-parse-out pathways you could only ever know if you were the designer or were using a guide.

Picking Up Crap In The Mansion Foyer - [Rating: 6/10] - It is now safe to enter the mansion. The entrance has a fountain full of radioactive waste you must deal with sooner rather than later. When approaching the fountain, pick away at a metal nut to drain the fountain. When examining the trough of the fountain, pick up a shotgun shell. In the villa's foyer and surrounding rooms, it's time for another collect-a-thon! Approach a set of shields hanging on a wall and then move left to pick up a flashlight. The rightmost shield reveals a fuse box; you can nab a burnt fuse from there. In the study, to the left should be a piece of moldy bread on a footstool, and if you stand on the footstool, you can pick up a shotgun. The mansion requires you to explore rooms and interact with almost every piece of furniture until you find the correct screen to pick something up. Luckily the left double doors are locked, so the number of areas you need to search is minimal. Nonetheless, at least the previous two environments had marked control boxes to fiddle with, whereas this one requires you to fan through paintings and chairs until you find a secret compartment or hidden screen. The issue is that the control boxes were a repeating motif, whereas the furniture in this environment is an endless stream of one-offs. The game's third act is its finale, but when A.D. 2044 most feels like a hidden object game.

Turning On The Fireplace And Drying The Shotgun Shells - [Rating: 8/10] - To the right of the building entrance is a fireplace, and this fixture is critical to the next puzzle. First, hopefully, you remembered to pick up the newspaper from the chair when you first needed to enter the archaeology institute because it's an essential item for starting the fire. If you forgot it, as I did, you are in for an incredibly long backtracking session. Place it and the twigs in the fireplace and then apply a match to the kindling to start a fire. Now, the game is incredibly picky about the order of your steps for the next part of this puzzle. First, you need to note that the shotgun shell from earlier is wet and useless as a result. To dry it, you need to back away from the fireplace, move forward to the mantle above it, place the shotgun shell behind a picture frame, back away from the mantle, wait for a short audio cue, and then move forward to the mantle to pick up a "dry shotgun shell." After that Byzantine process, you can load the shell into the shotgun.

Theoretically, the game wants you to complete a few other puzzles after placing the shotgun shell on the mantle, but the timing for that audio cue seems immediate. Nonetheless, the granularity of what you need to do here rarely happens in the rest of this game. The shotgun shell will stay wet if you deviate even one step from my description. In that case, you need to pick it up while it is still wet and try again. For reasons I don't entirely understand, the design for the mission complete on this puzzle doesn't just include the final position of the shotgun shell but also a specific series of steps leading up to its placement on the mantle. That right there is terrible game design.

The Hidden Bookshelf Puzzle In The Study - [Rating: 9/10] - The game does not indicate what it wants you to do next. In theory, it wants you to continue exploring new sets of wall fixtures and pieces of furniture until you encounter a clock with what appears to be a dial. However, nothing about the clock seems too out of the ordinary, and how you solve this puzzle is downright insane. First, around where you dry the shotgun shell is a sofa, and near it is a wire that allows you to repair the blown fuse from the shield. When you place the repaired fuse back into the box it came from, the mansion should suddenly regain its power. This allows you to use the double doors to the study, which has several bookcases filled with novels and encyclopedias. One of these shelves has a book titled "Orbium Solestium," which has a loose page you can remove and place in your inventory. Taking the book reveals the dial, and the page appears empty, but obviously, it has invisible ink that requires heat. Here's my issue, you need to be near, but not directly in front of, the fireplace to make the ink appear. There's precisely one screen where you can place the page in your examination slot to read the instructions "five right, seven left, and three right." Unfortunately, the correct position to read these instructions is a chore to find, and the fireplace is viewable from several logical places that seem like they should accomplish this task. Worse, you need to reset the dial to the noon position because it doesn't start there! In fact, the secret hint doesn't even tell you the starting position for inputting the code in the first place! WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THAT IN THEIR ADVENTURE GAME?!

Entering The Genetics Laboratory - [Rating: 4/10] - The bookshelf reveals a false wall when you input the code into the dial. Before you enter, go to a bar and find a button that you can only see if you use the flashlight under the bar. The switch turns off a security gate that allows you to pick up another spool of rope. When you finally enter the secret entrance and hitch a ride on a lift, you meet a final security guard that you need to blow away into bits using the loaded shotgun. The hidden button is a slight annoyance, but nothing you haven't already experienced in this game. The animation for murdering the security guard, on the other hand, is otherworldly and worth seeking out if you want to have your mind blown.

Restoring "MANkind" - [Rating: 6/10] - Past the guard is a wall that can only be opened if you depress two switches simultaneously. You accomplish this by using the two ropes you should already have in your inventory. Gear checks in adventure games; I love them! Inside a lab, you'll find a birthing machine that needs new settings to give birth to males and females, not exclusively females. The X/Y Chromosomes gauge needs to be at 50%, Garbage Control to 100%, and a third gauge I couldn't read to 0%. With that, you now get to watch the ending cinematic of this "wonderful" video game. It's logical to assume you need to set the gauge involving X/Y Chromosomes to halfway, but the other two are wild guesses or involve pure luck. Ending your bullshit adventure game with a brute force puzzle so I can watch a cutscene furthering your anti-feminist propaganda? That's what I call poetry!

Should You Play This Game? (Answer: No.)

It would be best if you did not play this game. I ended up paying five whole dollars to play A.D. 2044, and that was ten dollars too much. In writing this blog, I hope my scathing review generates some SEO to where it's a top result for A.D. 2044, and it helps dissuade people from buying it even when it is on sale. If you are one such hapless consumer and bought this thinking you were getting a wacky multimedia adventure game from the 1990s, request a refund. This game is neither worth the patience nor effort to get what little modicum of joy derives from it. That someone took the time to modernize this remaster of a bad Atari 8-Bit computer game for modern systems is immensely depressing. A handful of classic and obscure adventure games and Myst clones warranted the care and attention A.D. 2044 got with its current GOG release. There may be someone from Poland reading this right now that can demystify what the appeal is here or why this mini-franchise speaks to the most basic anti-woke grifter sensibilities. Otherwise, please send it back from whence it came and pretend it never existed. Only some things from over twenty years ago need or deserve a modern platform. A.D. 2044 is not one of them.

Preamble

Before we get into the premise and inspiration of this blog, let me say I think Tears of the Kingdom is a masterpiece. It's a technical marvel, and I have enjoyed almost all I have played of it. Its seamless transitions from the underworld and sky environments provide one of the most satisfying gameplay loops I have experienced in a modern game. Accidentally stumbling upon new mechanical creations or unorthodox solutions to missions or puzzles has been endlessly gratifying. And at the end of the day, exploring its rendition of Hyrule is profoundly moving and awe-inspiring at times, which is no easy task considering it is a sequel and parts of what you seek out are retreads of environments and themes from Breath of the Wild. Tears of the Kingdom provides you with a sandbox where you honestly feel that no single playthrough will ever be the same as your mindset when approaching its tools and situations is always bound to be unique. By all means, it is a work of art and a testament to the creative prowess of those working in Nintendo's internal studios.

Nonetheless, I want to posit a slightly negative takeaway that has been abscessing inside me since I reach the game's midpoint. Again, I want to relay a slight disclaimer that I don't want what I am about to postulate to take away from whatever joy you or others have derived from Tears of the Kingdom. However, while I relish the game, it represents, to me, the best possible endnote one could make for the Nintendo Switch as a console. And before anyone thinks this is going to be a long scree about the game's lack of graphical progress compared to Breath of the Wild or a series of grousings about the usual open-world bugs or framerate issues, rest assured, I am an invidious individual, but I respect your time. While some of that factors into my belief that Nintendo shouldn't dedicate further resources to development affixed to the platform's original SKU, something beyond that has been bugging me. For example, I would like to know how this hardware and controller allow Nintendo to continue to innovate and refine its core portfolio. Nintendo can only make a word larger or denser than in Tears of the Kingdom if they have new hardware that allows them that privilege. That is unless they want that game to be a flaming dumpster fire.

You Get The Sense The Switch Is Buckling At This Point

Most Switch devices in households are the original SKU dating to 2017. The critical issue is that the Switch's system-on-chip (i.e., SoC) is a first-generation Nvidia Tegra X1, with the OLED model sporting a modified update. I'm not DigitalFoundry, but we are now five generations removed from the Tegra X1 based on Nvidia's mobile SoC development timeline. Furthermore, everything you play on your Switch uses a CPU operating below 2 GHz, runs on 4 GB of RAM, and utilizes MultiMediaCard memory. I speak for everyone that it is a technical miracle that Tears of the Kingdom looks and runs as well as it does, considering it runs on six-year-old hardware. The game's issues with maintaining a stable framerate whenever there is a lot of water or significant fire effects on the screen become more understandable when you recognize it's using the guts of old mobile phone or tablet technology. The other issue with the Switch stems from its baseline memory. The original Switch still only sports 32 GB of SD Card-based memory with a slight bump to 64 GB if you have the OLED model. Yes, affordable memory cards are out there. Nevertheless, that doesn't change the fact that Nintendo and ANYONE developing a title for the Switch by decree must assume that whoever is purchasing their titles has 32 to 64 GB at their disposal. With Tears of the Kingdom crossing the halfway mark regarding memory requirements, the idea that Nintendo can continue to avoid memory inflation is utterly ridiculous.

More importantly, there's no denying that, as beautiful as Tears of the Kingdom is at times, the Switch shows its age. Everyone I have talked to who has played the game has at least one story of a vehicle or gadget they created phasing out of existence, without warning, before their eyes. Some might dismiss this as a graphical glitch, but after it happened to me a second time, I feel it is more a sign the game and its hardware cannot process past a certain number of objects or actions before you start seeing the game experience brain farts. And there's no denying that there are performance impacts to Tears of the Kingdom having a larger world with more complicated tools at the disposal of its players. More elaborate fights consistently dip below twenty frames per second. Nintendo had those same performance issues with Breath of the Wild, but they continued to trudge on with their enormous sandboxes with lush forests and intricate seas and lakes. Their creative aspirations are not in line with the hardware they were working with, but this is not a new phenomenon. Virtually every prior Nintendo or third-party title on the Switch has similar issues at times. If the Zelda team couldn't find an outright solution to these issues with a game sequel that got six years to bake, then no one is finding these solutions.

And yet, series director Eiji Aonuma has reiterated that Tears of the Kingdom's format will likely be the blueprint for the series' future. Let's be honest for a minute. A new Zelda doesn't come out before we see a hardware revision or successor to the Switch. Nintendo knows that; I know that; you know that. Flat out, the worlds the Zelda team wants to create cannot get bigger or denser with this technology. It will be challenging for its design leads or directors to explore alternate art styles or aesthetics if Nintendo continues to drag its feet regarding hardware. Furthermore, the buzz in the industry is that other divisions and branches in Nintendo are privy to many of the ideas and successes that Nintendo EPD and Aonuma's team experienced with Tears of the Kingdom. However, I have a hard time imagining other development teams, Nintendo or otherwise, being able to replicate the dark magic Nintendo EPD did in getting the world of Hyrule we see in Tears of the Kingdom to work on the Switch. How many other third-party studios have six years to spare and the collective brainpower Nintendo has? As I will discuss in another point, most development studios love the Switch's massive user base, but there are signs that many more are tired of working around the Switch's limitations. So, the likelihood of anything coming close to topping Tears of the Kingdom is slim.

The Esoteric Design Of Tears of The Kingdom Highlights A Need For A New Controller

I must be careful how I word this because my previous attempts at expressing my feelings about Tears of the Kingdom's control scheme were met with instant hostility elsewhere. Certainly, Tears of the Kingdom is a fun game, and I'm not disputing that. Nonetheless, I do feel like its esoteric design and open-ended gameplay butt up against the Switch's default controller. First and foremost, there are plenty of examples in Tears of the Kingdom where there are not enough buttons on the controller when you dock the console. The "wiggle the right stick to un-fuse something" is the first example that jumps to mind regarding something the game asks you to do repeatedly that I desperately wish you could do by pressing a button. However, when I look at what every single input on that controller already does, I have no idea how you would map that without jeopardizing the player experience with another similarly necessary and repetitious action. Then there are the critical player actions that must be mapped to alternate positions because of gameplay triage. I cannot begin to list the number of times I kept hitting L to try and switch to a different weapon when I needed to use the D-Pad instead, but it drove me crazy even though I understood why that was made the way it was.

Yet, there are other times when the game's controls are broken apart with granularity when they probably shouldn't. I am still trying to understand why the default control scheme has Link's sprinting and horse sprinting on different buttons, but that was the wrong call. Similarly, it annoyed me to no end when I would be holding an item in the menu, and while navigating my fingers, I accidentally tapped B, which exited me from the menu and caused me to redo everything I was doing. To the design and programming team's defense, there were few viable answers or solutions to avoid this problem. When the Switch first launched, it was focused on micro-games and titles that still valued Nintendo's love for waggling shit. Also, at that time, we all thought it was incredibly "cute" to break apart the default controller and have friends play with you using just a Joy-Con, but that got old real quick, and now more ambitious titles like Tears of the Kingdom are paying the price. Even then, the controller still feels unwieldy at times, with you needing to reconcile that sometimes, you're just bound to hit the wrong thing while your hands navigate the big hunk of plastic that is the Switch.

No matter, there are other more pressing occasions when the controls feel unwieldy, and the Switch's controller is the prime culprit. Sure, there are times when the game's clunkiness can be squarely pegged on Nintendo being Nintendo. The best example of that has to be Nintendo continuing to be the last stalwart of the right-face button being "accept." However, there are plenty of times when the game needs you to go to the menu to follow Byzantine steps to complete straightforward actions that feel like they should be simple button presses. To highlight, throwing weapons sucks. There are only a few times when you are outright forced to do this, but I need to look up the proper steps every time. The fact it is NOT just Select Menu -> Select the item you want to throw-> Hold the item -> Use R drives me crazy. Instead, as most of you know, you need to have the article you want to throw at the ready, hold the throw button, hold UP to select the item you want to throw, and finally wait for Link to switch to that item so you can throw it. Bopping in and out of menus needs to be done in this game because there are few alternatives. Every button on the Switch Controller already has a purpose, and if you want to fix one command, it must come at the cost of another.

Nintendo Needs To Figure Things Out When It Comes To Its Relationship With Touchscreens

This section will be the briefest of this blog because I'm confident I can get my point across in record time. For those of you who are younger, I want to take you back to when Nintendo made video game devices with good touchscreens. I know it sounds unbelievable, but hear me out on this one. The year is 2012, and Nintendo releases the Wii U, a pretty mediocre platform. It's not terrible, and it even had some memorable gems. Still, it was poorly marketed, and Nintendo's communication on what it was and how it was an upgrade from its predecessor was awful. It also never had good third-party support. But, it had an incredibly high-quality touchscreen that made menu-based games a seamless affair (e.g., Mario Maker). Nintendo also had the 3DS in its portfolio, which had an even better, more importantly, responsive touchscreen. Flashforward to today, and Nintendo, and everyone for that matter, has completely stopped giving a shit about using the touchscreen on the Switch. The reason for that is simple. The touchscreen on the Switch is dog shit, and playing docked is preferred for more substantial titles like Tears of the Kingdom.

These points are not a secret, hence, why so few developers use the touchscreen in any capacity. I have had resistive touch screens on PDAs that felt more responsive and intuitive to use than the Switch's touchscreen. The consequence is that there are a LOT of fiddly menus and inventory management that honestly would have been a lot better and more intuitive to butt up against if I could tap on the screen and get things done. When I think of things I wish I could tap on a screen to complete, the radial menus for picking whichever tool you want to use come to mind. It's wild to believe this is an issue because Breath of the Wild was a Wii U title that did not have this problem. Nevertheless, I know 90% of the people reading this are bound to chime in that they only ever play this game docked. Fine, but that's ignoring the reckoning Nintendo needs to face about which direction they wish to go in the future with their Switch successor. Will they try to split the difference and make another portable console hybrid? Probably. But then you have to consider how that impacts your development ambitions in the future. Likewise, an entire SKU (i.e., the Switch Lite) is all handheld. Are only one out of five Switch users going to play Tears of the Kingdom undocked? Sure, but that's still 20 to 30 million people, and leaving them behind is shitty.

There Will Be TotK Imitators, But Developers, Especially Small Indie Outfits, Are Already Skipping Switch Ports

For my final point, I want to emphasize how Nintendo cannot plan a better console swan song than Tears of the Kingdom. With this game having thoroughly pushed the hardware to its limits, I desperately hope the company has made a selection for its next generation of hardware. If any of its core development studios are busy working on four to five-year projects on the Switch hardware, then that's all but a waste of their time. Furthermore, what more is there to do with the console at this point regarding innovation? Ring Fit Adventure rejuvenated the world of fitness games; Splatoon 2 and 3 rocked the multiplayer front; Fire Emblem: Three Houses spearheaded innovations in the tactics genre where even Firaxis is taking notes from it; Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the greatest Pandemic pick-me-up; Super Mario Odyssey was a masterclass in modern 3D platforming while finding innovative ways to honor its progeny; Super Smash Bros. Ultimate continues to dominate the genre its franchise pioneered and spawned countless cheap imitators; Breath of the Wild practically redefined modern open-world game design. When you also consider the console has ELEVEN Pokemon games, including spin-offs, what more is there to do or prove? In that regard, Tears of the Kingdom feels like a victory lap more than anything else.

And other development outfits are aware of that last note. Review the number of canceled Switch games on Wikipedia; you might be shocked at how few titles are on the list. Nonetheless, there are some notable games on Wikipedia's state-sanctioned list, like Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Final Fantasy XV, and Marvel's Midnight Suns. Looking at that list, you'll notice some commonalities with each canceled title. For one thing, you'll see a growing number of developers that are actively following tech, software, and hardware improvements in the world of video game development. The Switch's comparatively ancient architecture often makes adapting products from developers following recent tech and software innovations daunting, especially for smaller indie outfits. You might look at some of the games I listed and chime in, "But ZombiePie! Most of those games are PC games!" First, everything I listed, besides Final Fantasy XV, has an Xbox or PlayStation port that is very much comparable to the PC version. Second, let's also not forget that several upcoming titles are simply skipping having Switch releases even if the console has a massive customer base. Our very own Jeff Grubb has said that the rumored Final Fantasy IX Remaster will not have a Switch release due to its development team not believing there's a viable way to make their game work on the platform. The Switch deserves credit for fostering greater indie game representation than its predecessors. With the console, Nintendo dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for its digital storefront, but these technical limitations are courting a very particular style and type of indie game.

It's not just prominent studios with big AAA titles that aren't excited to grease their gears to work on Nintendo's highly successful but aging console. As odd as it might sound, the most requested Switch release continues to be Genshin Impact, and if it doesn't happen in 2023, it's not happening. And think about that one. If Epic can find a way to make Fortnite work on the Switch, what's miHoYo's excuse? Part of it is a reluctance to work with the Switch hardware knowing there's likely something new coming around the corner, and a belief that the compromises made to get something to work on the Switch aren't easy. Vampire Survivors was the most heralded indie game of 2022, and there's no sign it will ever come to the Switch. While the game employs a simple 2D art style, I think we all understand it's a resource-intensive game that would take considerable work to run satisfactorily on 4 GBs of RAM. I get that Nintendo EPD got a game far more complex and ambitious to run on the Switch, but again, not everyone making games has the time and brainpower Nintendo is willing to burn. And even if they have people still excited to work with the console, I don't know that I want them to. I'd rather their big pie-in-the-sky ideas go unimpeded without butting against as many technical limitations as they are running into right now. So, let Tears of the Kingdom be how we say goodbye to the Switch. The present and future are bright; here's to more cool things like it!