Presenting 2024's 12 Days of Retrospectives!
Here's my Christmas present for people who like my game reviews! According to my notes, I've uh... I'm on track to complete 200 video games this calendar year (yeesh). I currently have "reviews" for 79 of them. That's a lot unexplored! For the next 12 days, I'll take an impactful game I played each month that I never wrote on, reflecting on where aesthetically my taste and style have developed (while also giving appreciation to some interesting works)! These are not my Top 12 games, just mindrooms I keep returning to (though I included a ranked list at the bottom for those of you who like that kinda thing and want more recs). I'll also mirror these posts on my Backloggd where I host all my other reviews (but reading 'em here is for the real ones, w sprinklings of extra content >:D)
Day 1 (Dec. 11): JANUARY - Unreal Life
There's something transcendent conveyed through blue monoliths and bit-crushed tears. A heart sitting dormant, floating above the moonlit sea. It felt like it had to be unearthed, buried in the depths of the e-aether as a ROM of Moonlight Sonata for the Atari. It's a discovery, not in the hidden gem sense, but as finding someone person crying in an alley on a cold night. There's trauma in it's midst, sure, but not in the loud, brash, edgy or violent, it's just.... melancholic. Slow. Let the piano keys drip-feed your soul. Walk around in your linen sundress and speak to it's denizens.
Takes some notes from Spirited Away, where people stand in your way, but never because they are "good" or "evil" or any of that bullshit. They're usually concerned for your safety or suffering by the same inconveniences you are. It's world is a shelter that compels you further, but to delve is to gnaw away at the world we've built, the images we've claimed, to make the world gentler. Suika cards pop into being as chainsmoking conductors, a Stoplight meant to coddle you from vehicular manslaughter becomes your gaming bestie. It's a world of symbols, filling in the mysticism of how such a complex machine came to be and how one might conceptualize fixing it. Of course ants do construction. But the deeper you, the more it stabilizes it's way home, Alice in torn-asunderland.
Spatially it's Place, Japan through 50 shades of blue. Aestheticized Feng-Shui hurt. It's painted; a geometrical starry night. It feels cold, but safe. Every screenshot neatly slotting in with Orientalist Steam Profile backgrounds. The vivid colours, ambient flourishes, bloom, blur and RGB shifting further make it pop and elevate it above it's simplicity to feel both comfortable and wrong.
I want to review Unreal Life in conversation with the me who gave it 3.5 stars, but they're now but a dream, living in a memory of a lacrimic town where the trauma unearthed I've since forgotten. One day I'll go back, and hang out again, but maybe it's better off left in the rain.
Day 2 (Dec. 12): FEBRUARY - Nights into Dreams
Amidst a revelation that "Sonic Good" (which exploded in a November where I played 25 consecutive titles), we found ourselves in the Dream between adventures. The Saturn's library, and the Dreamcast to some extent for someone who didn't live through it, is a void generation in video game history (will be honest, heard in a seemingly lost hazel vod). Maybe it's the lack of franchises on it that made entering it's jungles a necessary through-line, but what's so striking is how well Nights embodies that characteristic.
Thesis: Nights into Dreams is the first non-binary video game
Nights is conceptually, aesthetically and spatially intermediary. It's the space between day and night, today and tomorrow, with a protagonist between genders, between a tough past and beautiful future. It's that transcendent moment when all coalesces.
We tend to think of the Sega aesthetic as within the grime and arcade carpets of the Genesis or the sheen, sunny South Americanisms of the Dreamcast, but again, this is some of Sega's sole personality in 32-bit. Lush in the motifs of the Dreamcast, surreal in the motifs of the Genesis. But too it's marble gardens, funhouses, clock towers and golf courses, it's Christmas! We bear witness the testing ground, the dreaming-up of a future that's since passed. You want further proof Nights is the intermediary between epochs? Who got a second title right in between the last Sonic game with soul ('06) and the corpo-corpseness of the Boost era? I rest my case (also see November).
Sonic was too coy to enter the 3rd dimension yet, so Nights stood to bat with their troupe of unconventionalities and little guys. (side-note: This era had such good "little guys", with this, Klonoa, and Kirby 64, for example, having some of the most PFPable sixty-polygon fuck-off enemies + pre-renders.) It's 3D enough to feel detailed and lived in, but 2D enough to broadcast the idea of sprawl where you're really just doing figure-8s around a set of domes. I dream in aggrandized, on-rails explorations of dead or perhaps fabricated spaces. It may just be a wrangling of control-schemes, but at it's core, it plays like a dream, which is just cool as hell.
In the cracks between reality and dreams, where Deja Vu signals the manifestation of a past dream, where the images of the night burst into the day, Nights lives on. I swear they make a cameo in every Sega game, bursting through to remind us what was and what lie's just beyond the Sandman's veil. So put on the soundtrack to sleep tonight (or perhaps a longplay to get all it's sound design candies), manifest lucidity, maybe even pop a psychoactive substance, and you too could meet Nights to guide you between eras!
(definitely didn't jokingly try this last night and fail)
Day 3 (Dec. 13): MARCH - Heisei Pistol Show
How do you even go about writing on Heisei Pistol Show, explaining it, recommending it? It may look like an asset-pack orgy with the edgelordisms of a Newgrounds game, but it made me cry! There's too much noise sometimes for people to take each other's words on stuff like this, too much ironic unseasoned positing for any of this to have any value a lot of the time. I got good at writing to cut through all that noise, and I'm still just a nerd with opinions! It's impossible to be heard, to even be your own voice, to do more than languish in the paw of despair. There's a sickness in the zeitgeist, a want for violence and raw expression, yet too a deathly paralysis at even the notion of repercussion. It's by this we are panopticoned, and by this context Heisei Pistol Show speaks to the heart of.
"I can't hold the wine."
"Why? You're buying it."
"In case my more conservative friends see me, they'll tell my-"
"We're at the cash register..."
"Well the surroundings aren't promising."
"And what if these friends saw you practically dating me?"
[He went silent] "Well we aren't really dating."
"It's less gay than a man, but it's still gay. I wouldn't, personally."
It's insane the degree to which we've been co-opted and molded by the other. The self belongs to them. To bear one's heart is violence both risked and sustained. Japan is built on a culture of honour and thus too shame. The Samurai are dead, yet still this doctrine rules, a doctrine of not making too much noise, of preserving your name and the greater good. Every Japanese game talks about this through metaphors and personas (unintentional), suffers by this hand, but it goes outside Japan. We sabotage our own happiness daily to live by order, to deny becoming spectacle without sterilization, to "not be that person". We loathe ourselves into depersonalization, depression and anxiety so often from the inescapable largeness of our own shame. It seems... biological, hormonal... it kills people. Heisei Pistol Show tests the waters, grates it's heart and sprinkles it within it's intimacies, yet too it recoils; it sings about how Love is Rainbow-Coloured, how it transcends categories, goes beyond the physical to make something beautiful, then has the three races of the globe, Indian, "Slum" and Korea echo it back. It's visibly screaming and crying, but too shows us the muffle through comedy, irony and abstraction. The walls are thin enough for whispers to be heard, the windows open enough to track our departure. Who needs law when to be seen is to be oppressed? It's a self-oppressing work for this reason, speaking pretty blatantly from experience while it ties a noose around it's neck before, ring ring, it's George Bush.
"Made me think of how it seems like suffering is if not integral to being trans, at least a big part of it for most people"
"It's sure portrayed that way. I think transness is a spirit of rebellion so deeply internalized that the suffering becomes bodily. Break oneself out."
Here's my western parallel. So much media centered around one's marginalized identity makes it about suffering inherent to it. It's kind of an epidemic that I think has shaped public perception of us in a really shitty way. Empathy is performed, not to rebel against the dominant narrative and oppressions of the machine, but out of pity. 'I support equal rights because I have human decency and feel bad!' Yet it doesn't change, and in fact worsens, the root concern of objectification, of viewing a group as being unable to save themselves. Violence is the answer if we want our demands heard, but too we are moral beings and are we really hurting the right people? Self-inflict, self-inflict. Heisei Pistol Show tonally battles between these two portrayals, between wanting to be seen the same as they are and wanting to be oneself with the full brunt of what it entails. It simulates ultraviolence, at getting back at your own oppression, and ultimately regrets it. It wants to be loved in a way that is no longer accessible. Hell, the whole "Parun killed himself" does exactly this by reducing all their vision and reaction to be viewed through the lens of tragedy. But these aren't tragedies, aren't cries for help, but a want to become without compromise.
"I'm [I couldn't say the word, but conveyed it somehow across several weeks]."
"Well what does this mean for me?"
"Are you-"
"Er- I mean, what can I do? What do we tell people? What are you changing?"
"I don't know yet... I never thought I'd get here."
Central, too, to it's putting love on trial is approaching familial love. Between father and, er, son? Who are these people we're confined by, who bail us out or authorize our paths? What do we do when that structure is ruptured? When it bars us from every crumb of autonomy? I'm not the one to speak on this, to weep here. My family has been good to me. Yet I see home become both prison and poison, see how expression can transcend the mundane, how one can build new home 'twixt pixels. You're happy here, but at what cost? What if I don't want this to be home? But then where is? Is it where I'm happy or where I'm loved? And what if it can't be either?
I don't know, but I cried. I'm Pistol.
Day 4 (Dec. 14): APRIL - Ape Escape 3
Let me turn evil for a second. Nostalgia is fucking rotten, an overused gluttony that sits twiddling around in the back of our heads. It creates catharsis from inaction and is always instilled in a product because of a) Reagan-era idealizing or b) because idiots start defining themselves solely off the jingling key memes they tie to the identity they had as a child (if not as themself, at least as consumers, but this type of person usually identifies with consumerism). The fourth horseman of damaging human responses alongside shame, regret and the reward pathway.
Ugh, objective language... I ought to wash my mouth out. Hi everyone, you look so pretty today! And that outfit? Stunning! Point being, we love the past to a fault and game makers know this! They aren't themselves immune to it and I think the desire to bring back something you once loved can overpower the want to make something deeply creative and personal.
Ape Escape 3 tows this line with unparalleled finesse. It enlivens the stale playgrounds of 2 with the ambiguous sauce of cultural reference! Narrative consistency tends to kneecap the flow of ideas so they said "fuck it, we'll play with all of fiction and do whatever feels fun today". Is it just because my adoration for the fuck-ass monkeys I give it a pass? No, it's prob more how it's transformative rather than iterative and is just revelling in being itself, dare I say even critiquing nostalgia?
Iterative stuff can be cool, but imo I think it falls under "remake" (better than actual remakes, but still past-bound). Encourage replacing all remakes with iterative games.
No one but Ape Escape (and ig it's spiritual successor Astro Bot) is trying to be Ape Escape, can be Ape Escape. It has too much self-love. Some guy probably said "I want to make more cute outfits for the protagonists" and their request was granted by implementing a underutilized power-up system. It was some guy's job to write the name, thoughts and life story of every monkey and he fucking delivered.
"We should probably promote MGS3, it's coming out soon and we always coincide with eachother."
"Alright, how about a 2 hour melodramatic sub-campaign!"
It's got collectibles not by shitty trends, but because the devs had time to fuck around and have fun. It's anti-crunch and thus bleeds soul! To call it derivative or nostalgia-fodder would imply it's chasing something, using some bygone era as a marketing point, but no.
All this not to mention it's pretty explicitly in critique of how media consumption pacifies us. The Apes, the ones orchestrating these references are literally the problem you are solving. Is it stealing the aesthetics of reference culture to call all that propagate it monkeys? My read is "hell yeah it is". Art is transformative, a sweeping reform to the limits of our conceptualization, an explosion of placidity for motivated thought and feeling. Yet, all these monkeys can do is iterate and imitate. Like the uncreatives of the tech world who buy themselves into creative roles (a phenomemon on full display in almost every game awards trailer), the monkeys know nothing but what is hot. This puts Ape Escape 3 in a weird position where it is profiting and marketing off what it is pushing as harmful.
Also, is Dr. Tomoki Mr. Beast? Someone who willingly supplements the big bad through manipulative science and psychology so consumers engage further by continually upping the stakes, ultimately weaponizing his own image to combat dissent? No, I take that back, Dr. Tomoki has far too much swag, personality and remorse. If there's any uptake in this ramble, let it be that.
Day 5 (Dec. 15): MAY - Zelle
Probably this year's SWOLLEN TO BURSTING for how bafflingly far it stretches RPGMaker. Every hallway intoxicated with eery tension before the myriad demonry that makes it's home in every lamp, pot and fixture. The castle molds the horror genre in it's own image, your spine shivering with every turned corner. Got my jaded ass a couple times while generally avoiding fight-or-flight scares, it's atmosphere making weighty each click. It manages a lot of very different tones and imagery, often within seconds, while never feeling incongruous (a strength of a lot of the mixed-media I've encountered). Gave me a fierce hunger for dungeon-crawlers that's sitting dormant in my aesthetic gut until I inevitably blitz the SMT games.
For today's broader philosophical claim, I'd like to call Zelle "neo-satanic". A lot of the art that gets talked about, I'm going to equate to Christianity. By the books, immediately apparent as "well made", or even saying something, no matter one's literacy. It's the 8/10s you won't really fight for, sweetening life a little bit and getting it's praise sung while operating within a set of canons. To call something satanic is to say that it is threatens all that's holy and is demonized for it, a 'do not speak it's name at our civil table' affair!
I rewatched Pink Flamingoes with a straight friend yesterday and the experience of hearing their thoughts on it so cleanly aligned with what the film was saying in it's subtext. "I respect it, but what the fuck? I can't tell anyone I even watched this, they'll think I'm a freak if I show them." The film embraces being called satanic, throws block parties on all avenues of degeneracy. It's not a "shock movie", but reflective of how one is simultaneously othered and pilfered for their aesthetics (which it, sadly but not unpredictably, became a part of). What my friend said, it felt at some instinctual level, was what they thought of queer defiance, viewing it only as a label and not something subject to suffering by one's own positionality that could only fight by undermining the status quo.
Fuming, knowingly or not, flips the tables, pilfering the aesthetics of Christianity, Buddhism and their idols as framing. I think this is a feature of multimedia works where one takes and reclaims that which is created in absence of them. Games are art, but a product of industry is not art. A factory-built car is not an artwork. Having a "game industry" is antithetical to this point, yet by it's own power, it's all the incurious eyes are directed towards. Just you and a handful of friends to fill your blindspots, that's the artistic process. Not to say this process can't occur in an industrial setting, but it requires a loosening of guard rails and trust in creatives that, with ballooning budgets, we see less and less.
Authentic individualism is growing deeply oppressed as industries approach market caps and begin squeezing our necks to keep the line going up. I don't mean individualism in the dumb-ass libertarian way, but in terms of psychological autonomy, the ability to give ourselves time to think, visualize and actualize under mounting pressures of work harder and spend more. The industrial notion that makes games products has begun to permeate even these smaller processes. We must be skeptical of that which is accepted into industrial concession/exception, for it ought bear the marks of holiness to be lifted from hell's rabble. Money can buy up talent, but it can't buy out all the talented. Minds sharp enough, hearts bloody enough to make ill the neo-Christian. The grand machine fears works like Zelle who create skyscrapers out of the crumbling bricks of the establishment. They fear the lost eyes, the lost loyalty of a dropped franchise, to the side of "evil", or so they call the side which they are not and could never be. I love Zelle's little intricacies, it's revolution and it's ponderances and will always sing the praise of it and it's bold kin. This is their stranglehold so let's gobble it whole!
Side-Note: Thought of this during the Heisei Pistol Show review, but similar to the discourse about whether using "it" to refer to nature, I wonder about using "it" pronouns for the works of single artists. In a way, it's part of them, painfully human yet almost autonomous in how we interact with it. Seems appropriate for the homogeneous, but things with a painfully human core? It feels reductive to objectify them. Think there's an interesting conversation here if anyone wants to have it :)
Day 6 (Dec. 16): JUNE - Lunacid
To write a review is a daunting task. One must encapsulate hours of emotion, thoughts and individual experience into something temporally bound. Yet, too, it's an archive to where once beauty was and now decays. It's by this want to perpetuate beauty and feeling we reimagine and reflect on what was.
I played the souls games loosely in reverse (3, BB, 1, 2, DS) and I can't help but to feel going back was in some way intended. Falling through the rising difficulty floor, worlds growing increasingly quaint, visionary and spiritual. Moving closer to a singular, vague light at the heart of what it's doing, why the series is so enamouring. Going forward to Elden Ring sucked, I didn't like it; the challenge, the spectacle, the scope grew overwhelming, has lost the subtextual spark to become a mountainous chore. Lunacid is the sequel in my reading order, a pathstone to further prequels. My legs were not yet long enough to find footing in King's Fields games of attrition and opacity.
Yet still Lunacid goes unspoken of; I can't posit any argument for why it's in my top 5 of the year. I found it incredibly meditative and tasteful, and perhaps that's all I can put on paper. I cooked up the ideas for more than one essay in it's halls. Again, I return to the swelling spirituality. Peck, step back, peck, step back, breathe in, breathe out, the rhythm by which we continually grasp onto life. Gaze to the horizon, find patterns as light filters through the branches, where light and shadow waltz. Wander through the rot and fog for no meaning but a beckoning forth. The world unfurls by our own mental map, is defined by how we unpack it and where we find home. For me it was the library, the colliseum, the basin. And where do you fear yet face all the same? The sewers, the tomb, the meat lockers beneath the castle. Every area had a story in it's sprawl which I reread in my dreams.
This is what I want from games. Spaces to dream in, an oppressive ambience yet within it a legible flow, room to think without growing lost in the whats and wheres. It's ennui AND an ambient geoscape, two of my most valued aesthetic tenants! I swapped builds each play session and found solace in making new adventures of what lay beyond each closed door. Check every corner from raw curiosity. Understand it, reconstruct it in context, it's all a spiral to the heart. Lunacid made sense, had meaning defined, by slowly, methodically, making itself understood. This is it's art, not in replicating the corpus of KF/ST, but it's heart and lungs. I looked in my monitor and what I value in life, yet don't appreciate stared back. Listen to the clockwork song of your lungs and your heart, steady your position, put weight on the momentary decisions, and wander on through the vistas, corpses and ruins. Pay close enough attention and you'll find treasures at every stop.
We'll call it the art style. Fuckin' vibes!
Day 7 (Dec. 17): JULY - Jumping Flash
Polygonal playgrounds, perpetual grins,
before whom all others sink to chagrin:
a jumping jack rabbit 'tween all of our dreams,
tears open the skies by leaps, bounds and beams!
The fabric of space-time, you've torn up to shreds,
for formidable quilt that blankets our beds,
meaning repurposed, repackaged for fun,
from island to island, adventure's begun!
Your triangle creatures and monsters galore,
a zoo told in patterns and charming decor,
layer on layer of texture-mapped gaiety,
and to darling kiwi, I swear forth my piety!
Glow-stick space stations, sleet clouds that careen,
cities in fog void of anthropocene,
'cross carnivals, snow temples, hot air balloons,
it's cold and it's warmth spill out scan-line cocoon.
Your cutscenes sweet camp, and your UI's a treat,
and such a short runtime calls back to your streets!
Jump once, twice, thrice, Rabbot, shake hands with the stars,
then fall to the landing strip paved in our hearts!
Day 8 (Dec. 18): AUGUST - Pentiment
There's something off in the heart of Pentiment.
On the surface, it grapples with the question of who deserves to be valorized in the annals of history, allows you to nip hegemony in the bud or choose it all over again. Someone, some culture, some self becomes emblematic of an era, of the forgotten and remembered. Pentiment is a litmus test that begs reflection on what you value at the heart of society and why, using the past narratively to show how little has change at the heart of it all. It's near-perfect in execution, in tracking it's complex web of engaging, diverse characters and granting autonomy. It's analysis of how religion interacts with people interact with class, education, community, gender roles, stations, time, systems... it's all nuanced and delectable, no notes. Yet I have some literary criticism I hope to articulate on how it handles Act 3, history and ultimately it's ending.
My Judero review was framed with "We live in a time of horrible stories none of us wrote, but still we can define and live by our stories of love". It's a sentiment core to how I read Judero, and I agree with it. It speaks simultaneously to the past, present and future. The past is someone else's, and that's alright. We remember it's sweet whisperings, ourselves and our values, can carry them on to create our futures from what we share in as inspiring faith, beauty and movement. We'll build a community of values through art and conversation, be the only song in our lives unsung in the broader schema, and the future will follow from love-drunk stumbles forth. I don't believe Pentiment follows this belief. It takes a much more conservative approach to asking the question that, I feel, hampers it's message in a few ways.
First, it lacks the same forward-thinking ambiguity. It seems to be more reflective, less prospective in deciding the path forward. What if we could have it our way? What if, by creating art and history now, we had the power to build a better future. The future, to Pentiment's end product, is a future that plays out "correctly" in how the player decided it ought to be. It is determinist no matter your choice through making just and codifying one's own rationale in the same way actual history has done. It doesn't question the institution of preservation, how there is always a selective bias inherent in it, and thus distracts from how we might go about breaking this cycle of remembering the wrong people. There was poetic justice in my choice to give the peasants their due, but there's still a sense of saviourism, having the resources to remember a group on their behalf, tell their story for them that similarly operates under this notion of selective bias.
Second, it is bound by the idea of a historical canon. To many players of Pentiment, they will come to a "right answer"; who are the guilty ones, the "great men" of this age, the ones names blazed in paint. Time here flows linearly, and given our revisions, the liberal narrative arc of continual betterment is, in the players head, what will always stem from their choices. It fights hard to not fall into binaries, which I give it credit for, but at the end of the day, there is still a determinist betterment, time flowing from time before upward, that stops the player from engaging with the question further after credits roll. All is tied up neatly, we've found, through close investigation, the right way to remember. Even if we thought with more nuance, it doesn't matter, for going back to my first point, the mural itself may very well be all that is remembered, nuance melted away. You can't portray everyone, but you can't portray some people either. You have to look forward, think forward, look back to learn but not to learn all. Ideas are never defeated, nor is now the finalized version of all that was. Getting placid is an issue. I also don't feel it does enough to meaningfully challenge the player out of their present axiomatic biases, so the end result is a beautiful game that doesn't quite stick the narrative landing.
So let's open the conversation back up, help poor ol' Penty out. Let's think critically beyond where the game ends and make communal the choices we made, our reasons, our hopes. Let's talk about community and history in a way that confronts the broader implications of approaching it this way.
...Or maybe you disagree, you want to critique this in the comments, consider my analysis haphazard or a misread.
...Or maybe you read this and never think about it again.
The next step is yours to make that, while placed behind us, ought never be packed away. Let's create not history, but our time, our stories, and remember them in all the same sanctity, in all the same smokin' hot subjectivity!
Day 9 (Dec. 19): SEPTEMBER - The Works of Porpentine
Because I'm grossly obsessed with matching stylings to content and have too much time on my hands, today's review is in the form of a Twine, now hosted on my itch.io!
Fuckin'... enjoy, I guess!
Day 10 (Dec. 20): OCTOBER - Thief Gold
Thief is a baroque carnival told through it's attactions. Subversion and spectacle are the driving force paving it's twirling halls, creaking floorboards and archaeological plunders. Takes a magic-hat approach to world-building where every level is a fucking surprise that bears some new synonym of fun. Thus far my darling child of Looking Glass's five hulking twunks.
Going into Thief and even thinking back, it's awesome to remember just how weird it is, how ambiguously it oscillates between myriad styles. It's really an irreplicable ballroom, a scene so pristinely itself and insular that I want to throw back a glass of champagne, wear my Sunday's best and join in on the fun. Purloining around the walled city, leaping around the lost ruins, puzzling out the mage towers, blackjacking my way through the madhouse, even beelining it through Xen's pagan brother were all such a plate of snacks bearing their own distinct taste and footing, bursting boundaries of what could be done in this sweet treat of an engine we just cobbled together.
Such a bodily experience too. I don't know why this son of a bitch Garrett performs stunning heists in tap-dancing shoes, but he's slaying! Piloting his fat ass across genres makes you so in tune with your senses. Watch for every faltering of light, every rogue sunbeam that stands between melting into blackmilk and getting your head bashed in with a sledgehammer. It's designed like a noir film, guiding your eye exactly where it needs to be to pull shit off. You always know where enemies are and how fucking amped they are to gobble you up. You're always rewarded for getting somewhere bizarre, always given just enough to signpost while keeping everything labyrinthine. Your eyes, feet, ears, spine, sticky little fingers and salivating mouth will stay tingling throughout.
Anyone who sheds even a thought to Thief sees and knows it's special! My zoomer ass doesn't need to pretend I made some profound discovery. Thanks to the oldheads who proffered up little dog treats like this and keep it bubbling around in the zeitgeist. Y'all fucking rock. Will be getting around to it's sexy sequel very soon, so look forward to hearing about it!
Day 11 (Dec. 21): NOVEMBER - Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) / Sonic Unleashed
(thought this youtube thumbnail was funny as hell)
I believe Sonic '06 is the last (good) Sonic game.
I know no other way to say it than this. The last one with a heart, a mind, a vision, the last one with that quintessential Sonic philosophy. Crazy that people daily choose to beat this dead horse of "Worst game ever made contender". There's a dozen Sonic games I found more grating than this, let alone this objectivity bullshit. My goal here isn't to defend '06, to say it's "good, actually?", but to say it isn't here that began the decline of Sonic, but the response to it which served as catalyst of the blue blur's prolonged butchering.
I grinned every time the word "Iblis" was said, every time Eggman was on screen, every time Silver spoke, every time Sonic princess-carried his babe, every minute with Tails and his illegible attacks, every time I got cheeky with clippery, met locales of conniptery. (lot of moments of "that's what reactionary let's players lost their minds over? lmao." Playing with Silver's balls? Second try.) How do you go into a game knowing it's bad, then take it seriously? How are there people that think critiquing and defending it's story from plot holes is a worthwhile pastime? Eat your slop and sit down! It pristinely bears that adventure camp, begging to be made fun of as Sonic stands still upside down or zips into the void, as Rouge skips her entire levels, as Shadow rides vehicles slower than him, as Blaze and Sonic fucking die. Everything is an untested risk that gives the game so much character in it's unpredictability. No two playthroughs will ever play out the same. Some new asshole will be torn. There's a unique joy in a derelict playground, in rusted-chain swings, rotted-wood structures and unmuzzled merry-go-rounds for those attuned to it. Sonic's badass, and what's more badass than a crumbling roller coaster?
I believe Sonic Unleashed is the worst mainline Sonic game.
It learned all the wrong lessons from '06's failure by sterilizing Sonic a la Mario but lacking the same surrealist design sauce that makes those games whimsical. It turns from Shonen schlock too-edgy-for-it's-own shoes into a kids show. Every character besides Sonic and Eggman is OBLITERATED here on out. They become set-dressing. Tails gets done the dirtiest as here, Colours, Generations, Forces, he feels like an incompetent damsel-in-distress. That's my goat, what the hell! The levels feel like artless, cultureless sets, uninspired and fleeting. Boost is dysfunctional here and does little to add to the game despite being so fundamental to it's design. I hate the trend of forced side-missions that starts here, for I hate how every time Sonic leaves his core format, it's just unfun. Worst of all, it's exuding "corporation", exuding chasing the incentives of market trends rather than defining it's own market, exuding dead-fishery and only existing because of the onus of it's past and legacy. Look to Boom, 4, Lost World! The start of it's floundering mendicant arc started here!
In transparency, I played the PS2 version, but I think my critiques are a bit more fundamental. Colours, Generations and Forces are a bit better, but still they live under this accursed era, still are bound in what was. Generations is easily the most blatant offender, as it has nothing to offer but self-indulgence. They get the vibes back, but they aren't Sonic vibes, Sega vibes, new vibes. Adult complains about tepid kids games, you love to see it. I also think it's really funny that Crisis City in Generations is so much worse than the original, by far the worst pair of levels in that game. I don't know... I like the gloves Ian Flynn treats the franchise with and I think it's helping give it something back, but I don't think anything has yet matched the pre-06 stylings. Maybe I, too, am succumbing to the "better-days"isms of nostalgia (despite playing them all in the last 9 months, but who knows...)
Day 12 (Dec. 22): DECEMBER - Tales from Off-Peak City
[TO BE UNLOCKED]
And since I mentioned it, here's an overall Top 12 favourites for extra snacking! Don't stress the ordering too much.
12 - Interior Worlds
11 - Cat Lady
10 - Final Fantasy 9
9 - Hello Charlotte Ep. 3 (here!)
8 - The Last Guardian
7 - Madotsuki's Closet (free here!)
6 - Crypt Underworld (free here!)
5 - Sonic Adventure
4 - Beeswing (here!)
3 - Lunacid (scroll back up!)
2 - Anthology of the Killer (here!)
1 - Collective Unconscious (free here!)
(any of the top 7 could take the top spot off the mood I'm in)
Honourable Mentions not covered above:
Yakuza 0
Judero
Final Fantasy X-2
Knuckles Chaotix
System Shock 2
Class of '09
That Night, Steeped by Blood River (free here!)