Author's Note: Hello there! My name is ZombiePie, and I am a Giant Bomb forum and wiki moderator. Every year, I look at the various sources of entertainment I enjoy and dislike. During my awards show, I pit games, television shows, animes, athletics, albums, board games, and movies in a fight to the death! As such, my awards are more "special commendations" and are open to any medium I consumed during the last year. If you want a more "orthodox" GOTY list from me, here you go!

Additionally, you can expect to see classic and current works of entertainment vying for the top positions of each merit and demerit on this blog. Oh, and one more thing: there are SPOILERS in this blog! Remember that point before reading any of my justifications for each award recipient. Also, prepare your pitchforks as things occasionally get slightly "spicy!"

Also, after struggling with the editing of my capstone GOTY stuff, I decided to break this into two parts.

Best Old Game I Discovered In 2023 For The First Time - Panzer Dragoon Saga

I have already written and published an essay defending Panzer Dragoon Saga as a true gem that never got its due. However, it bears repeating that Panzer Dragoon Saga is a rare feat in gaming wherein the scuttlebutt from a ravenous fanbase that repeatedly claims to be misunderstood and maligned for their love of a thing is almost entirely justified. Panzer Dragoon Saga rightfully earns all of its hype. Its combat system is one of the most dynamic from the fifth generation of console RPGs, and it boots production values that blow peak Squaresoft and Enix Corporation out of the water. Suppose there were a legal version of the game readily available. In that case, it might even shoot to the top of my list of "Top Recommended JRPGs for Newcomers," as the combat is immediately approachable and has some interesting dynamics that set it apart and make for an experience more engaging than the then-standard turn-based alternatives. Not only that, but it manages to be a technical tour de force at under twenty or so hours, a fact that drew criticism at the time of its release, but today, with my growing age, it is a welcomed change from the genre norm. What should be an awkward attempt to merge a rail shooter into a JRPG doesn't just uncannily "work." It's one of the most fun experiences with the genre you can ever have.

Unfortunately, the Sega Saturn continues to be the console Sega wants you to forget about, with its only admission that it existed being a yearly Tweet commemorating its anniversary. What should be a work of art preserved for all to enjoy and experience has unfortunately become something only the most dedicated retro gaming enthusiasts know about. With significant improvements to Mednafen, Saturn emulation is no longer the formidable mile-high brick wall it once was. However, that remains your only out if you wish to see its artistry in person. The re-sale market very often puts this game over the $500 mark, and while I love this game, my love has limits. Does it also lack the sweeping narrative and verbose character work we now accept as established traditions with JRPGs? Sure, there's no denying that the game comes up short in that regard, but it is not a disqualifying attribute. Being able to experience a fully voiced cast of characters in a fully rendered 3D game from 1998 is a true revelation from top to bottom, and if you are willing to engage in some black magic to get it to work on modern technology, I strongly recommend it.

Runner-up: Dragonsphere - Hey, remember when the Civilization team briefly had a go at making point-and-click adventure games? No? Well, let me talk to you about Dragonsphere and Return of the Phantom while forgetting that Rex Nebular exists! Dragonsphere is MicroProse's Parthian Shot in the adventure game arena before they sold their game engine and double-downed on being a preeminent strategy and tactics developer. However, it is an absolute delight. Give it a shot to see what non-Sierra and non-LucasArts point-and-click adventure games were doing to stand out in a crowded field!

Coolest Unexpected Thing I Think Everyone Should Check Out - Thief: The Black Parade Mod

MyHouse and SIGIL II are probably better experiences for the games they are connected to than The Black Parade. MyHouse, in particular, is a technical marvel that layers secrets and alternate paths to the degree that the game feels like something with infinite permutations to keep things fresh between playthroughs. Nonetheless, the Thief franchise remains a dead series despite it being a highly formative one in the arena of stealth-oriented games. Therefore, after seven years of development by a team of fans and Arkane Lyon designers, Thief: The Black Parade breathes new life into Thief: The Dark Project, a game over twenty-five years old. The Black Parade adds ten whole missions to the base campaign of Thief Gold and strikes a masterful balance between new-school stealth mechanics and old-school stylings. The NPCs are still deliciously chunky, but the engine has been updated to make the game run at a decent framerate without the need to run things through a virtual box. Thief is and has been a franchise with a flawless atmosphere, and this mod understands that perfectly. The original game's steampunkian setting and lush dark hues are here with intricate missions that leave players with plenty of outs.

And where I would insist on this edging out the popular Doom WADS of 2023 is the production values of The Dark Parade. I don't want to sound like I am demeaning the craft and care of Doom or Doom II, but Thief has so much more going on than even the most complicated mission or map in Doom. The Black Parade features a whole new prequel storyline with hours upon hours of new, fully voice-acted lines of dialogue. Not only is there a new character for you to control, but they are carefully crafted into the narrative of the Thief franchise in ingenious and artful ways. Likewise, The Black Parade is not the work of a singular person and, instead, is the by-product of the Thief community coming together and wanting to pay tribute to a franchise that means a lot to them on its 25th anniversary. People from across continents worked together to make something that took them years, and their intricate work shows. The franchise's horror and magical themes are here and feel as good as they did the first time, and there's something magical about the fact that it feels like something that came out in 1999.

Runner-up: MyHouse.WAD/SIGIL II - It speaks volumes that even the great John Romero is baffled about how MyHouse got its level transitions and layering to work. The WAD that took the internet by storm deserves all of the attention it got in 2023. It's a true technical marvel that I suspect we still have yet to uncover all of its secrets, which is a hallmark of the amount of love put into it. With SIGIL II, the Doom community finally got a sequel to one of the greatest WADs ever made and miraculously managed to one-up its predecessor. I have yet to find every secret that closes off after thirty seconds. But more importantly, despite its retro engine and architecture, SIGIL II is one of the most thrilling adrenaline-pumping games to grace 2023.

Most "Mid" Thing I Still Managed To Enjoy - Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical

I want to underscore that I am not saying that I dislike Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical, and if you put the game on your GOTY 2023 list, I will not fault you. The songs in Stray Gods are lovingly crafted and often well performed. I give all the credit in the world to the voice acting talent tapped for Stray Gods, as they are the true highlight throughout the game's story. I also think Stray God has a fantastic start, but my issue is that its middle act does not maintain your interest after its inciting action subsides. However, the game's best part, its musical sequences, is ALSO its Achilles' heel. When you get tapped into a sweeping musical bit and feel pulled between two logical and reasonable choices and don't know where to side, the game honestly shines, and the way you can mix disparate musical themes and styles is enchanting. Unfortunately, too often, there are times when the music feels weak, the voice performances straining under the weight of the lyrics and their evolving nature, or your choices are either arbitrary or entirely one-sided. During these musical sequences, you feel like you are forced to grin and bear it for three to five minutes in pure agony. When the game "works," it is a sight to see, but its inconsistency is an absolute game-breaker.

Worse, Stray Gods falls into a trap that the visual novel genre was starting to err away from after Disco Elysium courted so much GOTY attention a few years prior. Yet again, another visual novel puts players on a long ride, convincing them their choices matter during interstitial sequences when things ultimately boil down to a few binary options. It is the cardinal sin of adventure game and RPG storytelling that Telltale's The Walking Dead convinced a whole generation wasn't a big deal despite it being a massive break in video game storytelling immersion. Also, despite the game featuring an incredibly compelling premise and world, it doesn't allow for enough natural exploration. The story challenges you to investigate a murder after its prologue concludes, but you don't feel like an active participant in this investigation. Instead, you feel like a passive viewer that is locked into a movie. I know that sounds rich coming from someone with Paranormasight as their 2023 GOTY. At least Paranormasight forces you to logic out how curses work and has sequences where you feel challenged to explore your surroundings freely, unlike Stray Gods. Lacking any mechanical trappings to make you authentically invested in your character's journey means you are left with a game that primarily works as intended with a handful of awkward hitches and bumps.

Runner-up: Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty - Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty will get its due in a different category next week, but I think there is something to be said by how vocally excited people were in the lead-up to this game and how quickly it fell out of favor when Lies of P came out. During my Stranger of Paradise blog series, I once posited that booms and busts have defined Team Ninja post-Itagaki. Team Ninjas does mercenary work to get passion projects like Nioh and Wo Long off the runway. As someone whose interest was piqued when the game was mere months away from launch, I now accept it as a diet Nioh with some novel mechanical improvements. Nonetheless, it is still a bottle rocket of a game with a world that feels like it never got a chance to shine and fails to compete in an incredibly crowded market.

Flat Out Worst Thing I Saw All The Way Through And Should Have Called A Quits Far Earlier - Squid Game: The Challenge

This admission, on my part, will likely require some explanation. Near the end of 2022, my mother began transitioning into retirement while my father remained a 9 to 5 worker. She has a part-time job at an appliance store, so she's not wholly by herself at all times, but she does have an almost endless amount of free time she's never had before. At some point, whilst streaming Netflix, she somehow discovered anime and Korean live-action dramas. It was never on my lifetime Bingo card that I would publicly admit that I have a sixty-plus-year-old mother who has fallen in love with One Piece and Sailor Moon, but here we are. Her newfound love for Korean live-action television programming has had some high points such as Squid Games, Queenmaker, and Daily Dose of Sunshine. Still, it also led her to this lamentable work of "entertainment" by virtue of its name alone. When she injured her ankle and required help at home, I took some time off to offer that and found myself on a couch with her binge-watching Squid Game: The Challenge while ordering GrubHub. It was a thoroughly miserable experience. This show is not only an absolute nightmare but also irresponsible and actively diminishes what the original Squid Games sought to accomplish.

Squid Game: The Challenge might be, short of comedy routines that stoke transphobia or wave the "woke culture" bloody shirt for cheap rage clicks, one of the most short-sighted and ill-conceived things Netflix has ever sponsored. Yes, even at the time of its release, Squid Games was met with a constant barrage of imitators that advertised themselves as being all about the game show and none of the political commentary. There were even YouTubers and streamers like Mr. Beast who set up their versions of the Squid Games that challenged people to run through their gauntlet sans messaging about modern class societal stratification to further their own ego-driven financial pursuits and monetary coffers. Nonetheless, a mainstream production label making a brand extension of Squid Games, which fundamentally misses the source's point, says so much about the state of media and entertainment literacy in general. There were always signs that Squid Games was becoming a modern-day "The Jungle," where people drew the opposite message intended for them from its author, but here we are. With Netflix announcing that the show drew 85.7 million watching hours globally, this reflects a form of late-stage capitalism we cannot stop.

Runner-up: Velma - I gave Velma a shot only because the initial wave of vitriol directed at it came from some pretty bad online actors that typically leap at any chance to criticize female leads in media or people of color headlining upcoming releases. However, within minutes, I knew Velma was a different type of bad cartoon show. In one of the first scenes, you watch Velma emotionally rip apart Shaggy for having romantic feelings for her and proceeds to list his many failings in life as if he's committed a crime against humanity and was being tried by the Hague. Oh, and Fred's gimmick is that he's a man baby with a small penis, and isn't it funny that the good-looking guy in the cast is as dumb as a sack of potatoes and has a small dick. That's a joke Velma thinks is HILARIOUS and continues to tell you every episode at least twice. Yeah, it is NOT GOOD!

Least Improved - The Detroit Pistons

I warned you that sometimes I delve into the world of athletics, and well, here we go! During the mid-point of the 2023-2024 NBA season, the Detroit Pistons broke a league record no one thought was possible. The Detroit Pistons lost twenty-eight games in a row and are now courting the dubious label of possibly being the worst team ever to grace the NBA. The term "rebuild" is used in sports to refer to when teams that know they can never contend to be league champions tear things down, trade all of their good players for draft picks, and play poorly on purpose to increase the value of their draft capital. The Detroit Pistons are in the fourth year of their rebuilding process and are still losing games like they are just starting. The people in charge of creating a decent basketball team have been doing this for four years and have repeatedly said that they are not purposefully losing games. And while Piston fans rejoiced when their record-setting losing streak stopped, right on cue, the team started and continues to be on a new losing streak that does not appear to be stopping soon.

To give you an idea of how bad the Pistons are right now, here are some "interesting facts" The Athletic's podcast recently highlighted. The Pistons are among year-one expansion teams, which I must underscore, were deliberately trying to lose, in terms of how bad their offense is. They are the worst NBA team in history in "clutch time," which means they are the worst-performing team in the final five to seven minutes of games that are within five points between two teams. During clutch time, they are making their shots 20% of the time and only 15.8% on three-point shot attempts. Their General Manager, the person in charge of drafting new players and making trades, continues to draft big centers and power forwards as if they think the NBA is about to ban the three-pointer. The Pistons have nine former draft lottery picks, and they continue collecting NBA draft disappointments and busts as if they think they are constructing the Infinity Gauntlet. They have the second best-paid coach in the league, Monty Williams, who makes approximately $13 million annually despite being incapable of fostering young talent and righting the ship. Likewise, Williams rejected the Pistons' original offer to coach their team, thus proving that if a person tells you "no," you should probably take the hint and NOT add some extra zeros to get them to join you. It's incredible. This team is terrible, and rather than show some signs of life, they keep getting worse.

Runner-up: The Devil Is a Part-Timer! (Season 2) - This one hurts. The Devil Is a Part-Timer! is one of my all-time favorite fantasy-comedy animes. After almost ten years, a second season finally arrived, and rather than be a return to form, it was a slow, plodding mess that felt like it needed to re-establish its world and ground rules across four to five episodes. And even after the worldbuilding was done, the second season was split into two parts, one airing in 2022 and the other in 2023, and took a decidedly more romantic comedy bent. The show does find itself near the tail end of the second half of its second season in 2023, but it's simply too little too late. What was once a genre pioneer now feels like it can barely tread water in the world of comedy anime.

Best Anime Of 2023 - Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Frieren is a show that some people have kept out of their "2023 Anime of the Year" lists for two understandable reasons. The first and most pressing issue with the show is that it engages in a mid-season action-oriented storyline that attempts clumsily to explain that the demon people in its world should not be treated like genuine people and must be extinguished entirely. It is a story arc that goes on far longer than it should and, worse, justifies in-universe acts of genocide. Sure, one of the most iconic scenes in the entire show and manga (i.e., Aura's final moments) comes from this story arc, but there's no denying that it's far more disquieting than centering on the show's best themes and elements. My point about Aura leads me to the other problem plaguing the show: it is generating memes like crazy, and the goofier moments in the show pulled out of context lead to misconceptions about its heart and core conceit. I cannot deny that I wish the show had Frieren's ass-up while devoured by a mimic much less than it does. However, these are quibbles to what ultimately is a melancholic and enlightening journey about coming to terms with regret and the inevitability of death.

Not since the likes of Mushishi has an anime tackled the subject of death and moving on from a friend's passing quite like Frieren. The show's melancholic moments are the true highlights, not the action or comedic scenes. However, those lamentable action moments are necessary for Frieren's emotional payoffs to work. When the dower moments kick into high gear, you understand that these characters know and love each other. And when you watch them say goodbye, sometimes permanently, those farewells have true emotional weight. The show pins a lot of value on you, buying into its core characters being long-standing friends that have been through thick and thin, and it works miraculously well. Frieren's dry and "straight man" qualities are often played to comedic effect. Still, they also make her a common victim of being an outsider who doesn't adapt quickly to their surroundings, which makes some of her companionships so potent when you reach their conclusions. Given that there are plenty of heavy moments in Frieren, it's not a show I can advise you to watch freely. Honestly, you need to be in the mood for heartache and grief, which the memes from the show circulating on the internet do not prepare you for!

Runner-up: Trigun Stampede - I think Trigun Stampede is a slight victim of coming out at the start of 2023. What many people have forgotten is one of the most energetic and bombastic action animes of the year, with a story with as many joyous characters and twists as the original. I get that some people would not give it a shot due to its 3D art style and animation. However, animation studio Orange is the best at what they do, and this show is another reminder of that fact. Trigun Stampede should not be disqualified because of people's prejudices against certain animation styles. That's doubly the case when the show's frenetic action sequences are as stylish and enjoyable as the ones in the original Trigun. So much of the spirit of Trigun is here that Trigun Stampede remains one of the easier-to-recommend animes from 2023.

Most Surprisingly Good - Twisted Metal (T.V. Series)

When I first saw the Twisted Metal television series trailer, I thought it would necessitate this community collectively penning essays on why it is one of the worst modern live-action video game tie-in projects ever made. And after I completed the first episode, I was left chuckling along with the wacky adventures of its characters. Everything from the trailer made it seem like Anthony Mackie and Stephanie Beatriz were phoning it in and waiting for their checks to cash. And yet, everyone in this show seems like they had a ton of fun making it, and it is infectious. Will Arnett is the voice of Sweet Tooth while wrestler Joe Seanoa (i.e., Samoa Joe) provides the body much like Brendan Fraser and Riley Shanahan's set-up as Robotoman in Doom Patrol. And you can tell Samoa Joe had a blast making this show because his stunts often feel like dream sequences he's wanted to do in the wrestling ring for over a decade. It's loud. It's dumb. But mercifully, it knows it shouldn't take itself too seriously, making it one of my guilty streaming pleasures of 2023.

I also want it known that I have zero love for the Twisted Metal games. I understand they are considered, especially Twisted Metal: Black, forgotten classics for the original PlayStation and PlayStation 2. I was always terrible about performing the more intricate combos and platforming bits in the Twisted Metal games and found the edgy storytelling downright intolerable, even as a kid. Twisted Metal (2012)'s story, especially what it does with Sweet Tooth, is downright impossible to go back to, and I'm glad to report that the Twisted Metal television series gives as little shit about "canon" as I do. Likewise, with David Jaffe unofficially persona non grata in the industry, I wonder if you even want him doing photo ops promoting the show these days. Nonetheless, at ten episodes, Twisted Metal knows to get its shit in and out without any pretensions of being more than a show about silly car combat scenes and the occasional fistfight. When I finished it, I was happy to hear that it had been renewed for a second season, but I wouldn't have been shedding a tear if the opposite were true.

Runner-up: Reborn as a Vending Machine - I take no pleasure in saying this following statement, but the vending machine isekai anime is not bad. I went into it wanting to dunk on it but was moderately impressed. It's exceptionally average regarding looks and often wears its welcome even before its episodes end. Nevertheless, its heart is in the right place. I saw many "it's a deconstruction of the isekai genre!" claims on the internet when it first came out, and I disagree. It's pretty standard in terms of what it brings to the table. That said, it is a deconstruction of harem anime with people in a traditional fantasy setting fawning over a modern vending machine, and that's one of its more genuinely creative storytelling bits. It's an absurdist retelling of the same formula, and that's enough to get me to recommend it if you have nothing better to do and don't mind a bog-standard repeat of familiar isekai tropes and idioms.

Weirdest Game - Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou

Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou was the first game I decided to stream in 2023. As I laid out in my write-up about the game, I continued to see it and LSD: Dream Simulator crop up in the Reddit creepypasta circles and decided to take the plunge on both games. While I was slightly disappointed with LSD, considering it is less of a game and more of a weird visual generator, Eastern Mind entirely delivered. It is the weirdest game I have ever played, and the sheer variety of its bizarre characters and set pieces make it an utterly unique experience. Instead of borrowing cultural landmarks or imagery from one nationality or religion, Eastern Mind takes from several. When you enter its world, a giant disembodied green head that you must enter via its cheeks or ears, you find Daoist, Confucian, and Buddhist traditions intermingling with Jungian psychology. Its world is largely directionless to force you into encounters with demons that look like they were made using pipe cleaners or derelict Bionicle parts. It promises to send you to a dream-like world unlike any you have ever seen before, and it never fails to accomplish that goal.

And that differentiates Eastern Mind from most off-brand adventure games I play. The minute I think I have grappled with what philosophy it is trying to represent in a video game, it hits me with a new canonical rule that seems antithetical to everything else I've experienced. I have said it before elsewhere, but I will officially stake my claim here in writing. If I was ever invited to share a video game with the Giant Bomb staff and guide them through something I knew they would never naturally discover on their own, this would be my top pick, and Commander Blood, a game I will discuss next week, would be my number two. I don't want any of you to interpret that as a steadfast belief that I demand the right to do a video on Eastern Mind and that this website owes me the pleasure because it doesn't. Nonetheless, more people need to see this game in action, and I would leap at the opportunity to guide even ten additional eyes on it. If I were to crumble into a mound of dust after doing so, I would have known that my legacy has been firmly established as the internet's foremost expert on Eastern Mind. That's a legacy worth having.

Runner-up: The Pink Panther: Hokus Pokus Pink - I honestly could include both of Wanderlust Interactive's Pink Panther edutainment adventure games. Both Pink Panther Hocus Pocus Pink AND The Pink Panther Passport to Peril attempt to teach children 90s geopolitics and world conflicts without sugar-coating things. However, it does so in the most bizarre ways and manners. For example, both games have musical songs that teach historical concepts, but this is NOT Schoolhouse Rock! One of the musical numbers teaches the negative legacy of British colonialism in Australia, and another communicates the ills of the caste system that continue to persist in India. Oh, and did I mention that this 1997 educational game attempts to explain the Isreal-Palestine conflict with a very pro-Camp David Accords bias? It's such a weird mixture of a game. It's WILD, and I haven't even gotten to the part where both games have body horror moments, like people ripping out their teeth to reveal their facial plastic surgery or the dramatic reveal that all of the children at a summer camp have been replaced by androids!

Best Ensemble Cast - Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo

Hell yeah! I bet you were expecting to see me pick Baldur's Gate 3 for this award! While I think Baldur's Gate 3's cast is excellent, it only partially solves a characterization-related trope that I feel is becoming tiresome in the RPG genre. Every time you get a new party member, it feels like your interactions become a countdown to a trauma dump. Everyone has a secret past or iffy predilection against a dominant faction in the world, and you need to pick away at their mental facade until they give you the details. In games less well crafted than Baldur's Gate 3, I have admonished such storytelling as "trauma/grief pornography." With Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, the facades the game's significant characters put up are deeply interconnected with the story's overriding theme involving a city-wide mystery. For many of these characters, you think you have a grapple on who they are or what their quirks might be, and as the story progresses, you discover you've only seen the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Also, credit where credit is due: I love how the in-game journal evolves and edits character bios as you progress the story and explore alternate paths and storylines. From top to bottom, the game makes you feel like a detective engaged in a deep research effort to find the truthworthiness of suspects and witnesses.

One of the more underrated aspects of Paranormasight comes in its beginning hours when it engages with other characters that play more prominent roles in later acts in curse-based chess matches. You have to suss them out and pick up on subtle animation cues and mannerisms, which they repeat throughout the game. Despite the game not sporting motion-captured 3D character models or fully voice-acted lines, you feel as invested in seeing these characters to their natural ends as much as you do with Alan Wake II or Baldur's Gate 3. During the second and third movements in the story, the ensemble is creatively forced to cross paths and interact with one another in some deeply evocative and thrilling settings. All the while, you can tell when the stress and stakes of the story begin to chip away at them, sometimes slowly and other times immediately. Furthermore, the underlying lore and use of Japanese folk tales to make each character feel like they are part of a century-long ancestry with a stake in the wellbeing of the game's setting is also part of what makes following its story such a riveting journey. Everyone feels deeply invested in the city Paranormasight takes place in, for better or for worse.

Runner-up: Baldur's Gate 3 - And despite my previous screed, there's no denying that the characters of Baldur's Gate 3 make the experience well worth having. Everyone has their favorites, and the fact people do speaks to Larian's knack for creating casts with a diversity of life experiences and perspectives. Even if one character gets under your skin, you cannot help but wonder if that was the intent. Everyone is well-animated, and the voice acting sets new standards for ensemble RPGs to follow in the future. All I can say is that I'm NOT an Astarion person, and I betrayed his ass the moment I had a chance.

Preamble (i.e., What Does It Take For A Video Game To Be A "Sicko Game?")

What is the "sicko game?" With people flippantly calling Lethal Company 2023's best "meme game" and RoboCop: Rogue City the previous year's best "B-game," fringe gaming terms and labels are starting to shape up and take more definite and absolute qualifications. But one label is also beginning to crop up more and more with the advent of self-publishing platforms like itch.io and the barriers to getting games on Steam, GOG, and EGS at all-time lows. I am talking about "Sicko Games." What are these games? Let's review some examples before a random essayist you've decided to give your time to (i.e., me) rattles off a nebulous and incredibly subjective definition. Kenshi? Absolutely in the "sicko territory!" It's an open-world RPG that continually kicks your teeth in when you least expect it, and its monotonous brown and tan world makes navigation a bore. Fear & Hunger? Despite its unique creative choices, that game actively hates you and looks the part, and you have to be "sick" to play it for more than three hours; it is purely a sicko experience and exercise from top to bottom. Pathologic and Pathologic 2? You have to be a sicko to enjoy those games, and I'm one of them, and if you aren't convinced that's the case from just looking at those games, watch the Pathologic 2 review by MandaloreGaming. However, rest assured, when I call a game something for "sickos," it's a term of endearment as much as a label used to caution others on how they should proceed.

Authentic sicko games are not necessarily bad. Nor are they games that lack creative ambition or artistic merits. They are games with rough edges, sometimes deliberately, that actively make them intended for a small audience. And that audience often requires a part of their brain to fire away on its synapses incorrectly to make even half of the game "work" for them. Something in the game is very wrong, and something is very wrong in you. I would hazard to say that everyone has a sicko game they love. There's at least one video game in your catalog of titles you own that should not work and should not appeal to you, but it does, and it's equally your and the game's fault. There's nothing to worry about if your example immediately comes to mind. Accept it, you are a sicko! Wear that badge with pride! I want to explore that last point more before we continue so you understand where I am coming from for this particular blog. Cruelty Squad was on my 2021 GOTY list as an honorable mention. That game hurt my eyeballs to the point where I could only ever play it in ten to twenty-minute spurts, and I wouldn't say I enjoyed my time. The world of Cruelty Squad is ugly, and the NPCs that litter its vomitous world are equally immoral. Your actions and missions are often vile, and I would struggle to call the game mechanically a good time. Its UI and interface are deliberately designed to be repulsive and unhelpful to the player.

Nevertheless, that's the point, and I admire the game's unabashedly subversive nature. It's a sick game with a subversive arthouse agenda that would make John Waters smile. You look past its MANY repulsive attributes because you see its sicko beauty. It's a marvel. This point leads me to Eternights, the 2023 game I think embodies the sicko label to a tee, even though it might not seem to be the case from the onset. Many dismissed it as a B-Tier attempt at the Persona franchise's visual novel format with bland, repetitious combat. I'm here to tell you that while those criticisms are entirely valid, they are all the more reason to rejoice at the very fact that Eternights exist. Why would I defend a game that errs on creative bankruptcy due to how shamelessly it pulls its designs from other games or the fact that all its characters are walking trash people? Because I'm sick, and I'm not ashamed to say that.

The Sense Of Déjà Vu Is Undeniable

Eternights is a visual novel dating sim action roleplaying game. At its heart, it is a hack-and-slash game, with its story being told chiefly through visual novel-like cutscenes and dialogue choices not too far off from Persona 5 Strikers. Like Atlus' Persona franchise, in-between combat sequences and dungeon-based exploratory efforts, you are expanding your party and furthering relationships with your party members. By spending time with these characters, you increase your protagonist's stats and gain new abilities to use in combat. However, some choices that the story and these side adventures prompt you to make will advance social-based stats, which are crucial to progressing through specific roadblocks and skill checks with some character-based adventures. For example, when trying to further your in-game romance options, one requires you to pass "Courage" skill checks, and another requires you to pass "Confidence" based ones. Sound familiar? Well, I'm just getting started with Eternights's unabashed gameplay mime act! To further highlight how shameless Eternights copies Atlus's homework, it utilizes a calendar-based timeline mechanic that forces you to budget which relationships and social interactions you wish to pursue on any given day. Spending time with a character or advancing their character arc burns a day on this calendar, and you have a finite number of actions per day before your character needs to rest.

Now, let's make something obvious before continuing. I am not accusing Eternights of genuine "plagiarism." First, the dating sim mechanics that have come to define the core identity of the Persona series are not unique systems. They date back to Tokimeki Memorial and further back in time, and Eternights borrowing its formatting is not plagiarism because genre conventions are not copyrightable ideas. Second, Eternights adds some unique twists here and there to mix things up, and it is FAR MORE HONEST about trying to mimic otome or bishōjo dating sim sensibilities. Where Persona wants you to view intimacy as a distant end goal, Eternights wants you to revel in "getting babes" right from the rip. Also, one benefit of Eternights being a comedic adventure is that it is much more forgiving about being able to see and experience everything in a single playthrough. It mercifully limits the feeling of "the fear of missing out" AND clocks in at under fifteen hours in a normal playthrough. Yes, romance options bring something different to color your experience, but there are only four, and the base game isn't that dynamic that you should feel like you need to see everything in it to appreciate its vision.

Nonetheless, the fact that it heavily emulates the conventions of a well-known series and franchise makes Eternights's many shortcomings more readily visible. Speaking of Persona 5 Strikers specifically, when examined from an entirely objective lens, this game compares unfavorably to it and even Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, which pre-date it by a year and change. Indeed, comparing Persona 5 and Fire Emblem spin-offs to Eternights is unfair, considering Eternights functions on a fraction of either's budget. Nonetheless, the lack of depth in its mechanics is a solved problem and one wherein developer Studio Sai had plenty of reference material to consult to avoid. The biggest flaw is that Eternights fails to execute Atlus's risk-reward dungeon design. Typically, in games of this sort, you feel pressed to budget your relationship pursuits because there's a challenging dungeon with a completion date breathing down your neck looming in the background, and that limits the amount of time you have to mess around. Unfortunately, because there's a severe issue with the gameplay's power scale, you can blow through the dungeons in a single go and have an almost endless amount of time to fuss about before subsequent combat arenas crop up. The problem is that you see the game so painfully copy another established franchise's whole milieu and essentially fail at it at a fundamental level.

But all of that's part of Eternights's claim to being 2023's "Best Sicko Game." It is a creatively bankrupt game that brings almost nothing new to the table, and there are plenty of better alternatives for you to play instead of it. Instead of improving on a solved formula, it adds unneeded complications that make things more annoying and less mechanically rewarding. It is BUSTED, and the relationships it promises to have these big climaxes ultimately don't pan out as epically as it endeavors. Many of the game's dower and quieter moments are unintentionally funny. However, I found all of that to be part of the game's charm, much like I find Neil Breen films to be an endless source of hilarity. During this game's most incompetent moments, it might be one of the greatest comedies of 2023. Furthermore, considering how often the game and its characters are in on its jokes, it's hard not to find some delight in its messes, at least most of them. Additionally, there are things that Eternights does well that are worthy of praise without an ounce of malice or sarcasm, which we should talk about shortly.

Mechanically, This Game Has Slightly More Depth Than Akiba's Trip, But Not By Much!

The mission structure and the topics the narrative in Eternights addresses are also problematic. The game occurs during an apocalyptic event where your character is unsurprisingly chosen to put an end to the source of destruction. Unfortunately, the issue with this game occurring during a disaster is that you walk through many ruined subway shafts and dilapidated city streets and buildings. As if the game's production values did not already lay the case that this is a "B Game" erring towards C-tier or even Z-tier categories, the missions are usually the same three to four types. You either have to kill enough enemies to rid an area of an evil taint, which inevitably spawns a boss. Sometimes, you hear a call for help and need to rescue someone before a timer expires. And other times, there's a MacGuffin the game's Igor-like tells you to fetch to make the final boss encounter possible. This returns me to the topic of the game's actual structure and formatting. There are two spectral walls in which you need to complete missions, and then there's the final location wherein the end of the game takes place. The two walls subject you to dungeons with culminating events that usually involve boss battles, and you need to bring these down before the calendar triggers the end, or else you reach a failed scenario.

However, do not worry too much because, as I hinted earlier, these dungeons, which are meant to test your potency and competency in combat, can be one shot in a single day, which kneecaps the game's risk-reward stylings. The only real reason for you to return to the dungeons is if a character arc requires it. Otherwise, you can spend most of your time mucking about with people you want to get intimate with. Part of this problem stems from this being a hack-and-slash game, and like most hack-and-slash games, when you find a combo or weapon you feel comfortable with, there's no reason for you ever to give it up until the story forces you to use specific moves or items. Think less Persona 5 Strikers and more Dynasty Warriors or Warriors Orochi when trying to wrap your head around what type of musou this might be. There are combos to try out and a parry mechanic to test out as well. Still, the enemies are generally bog standard, and the window for parrying and blocking enemy attacks is so generous it is hard for me even to count the number of times I ever felt challenged. To that end, the game reminded me of the Akiba's Trip series. Those games knew that they had one gimmick to share to keep you occupied (i.e., stripping people of their clothes to defeat them). At the same time, you went on this over-the-top anime homage of an adventure with Japanese nerd culture bleeding through every part of its narrative. That's precisely the case with Eternights but with dating sim gameplay hooks and a more significant emphasis on pop music and pop music idol culture.

The only thing that keeps your attention going during these missions is the topics of your pursuits and character interactions during them. This is also where the writing most likely will make your toes crawl backward into your feet. The clearest example comes near the start of the game when one of your female companions experiences her period and begs you to find some menstrual pads. You then get thrust into a required in-game fetch quest, and she bleeds to death if you fail to retrieve these before a mission timer expires. I should also mention that during this, the game makes the point that she is grumpy, and all of the male party members act and say exactly what you expect them to say when this situation crops up. Look, I warned you. This game is a "sicko game," and there's a reason why I started this section with a comparison to Akiba's Trip. Like Akiba's Trip, Eternights knows its shelf life is short, and that's part of why there's a beauty to its near ten-hour playtime.

Nonetheless, the game's attempts to give you its best shot during this playtime are inconsistent. Eternights knows what it wants to do but only sometimes understands how. It was primarily written and made by a single individual in their twenties, making a game for other twentysomethings. They wanted to have a go at making their idea of a good Persona-like experience, and they missed the mark more than I'd have liked. Yet, the game gets the job done and does feel like something that would appeal to its intended audience. On that singular note, there's no denying the game is a success, as trashy and repulsive it might be in execution. It only does a little to keep you mechanically invested, and its only recourse is to present you with humor on par with modern-era South Park or Seth MacFarlane, which was a choice. But let's not deny those sophomoric sensibilities do not speak to an almost universal human sentiment or shared worldview, and rest assured, Eternights is a game for sickos. It is NOT a game made for and by scumbags. There's a difference between Eternights and YIIK: A Postmodern RPG, and that difference is the size of a canyon in Eternights's favor.

All Of The Characters Are Trash People And That Works In Eternights's Favor

Don't get me wrong, the characters are far from perfect. Most are stand-ins for the twentysomething experience, and others are cheap anime trope amalgams. To underscore, one of your romanceable options is a pop singer with a sheltered upbringing and doesn't understand how "commoners" live. The protagonist has zero personality as they are your cipher, and they are encouraged in-game to be a bit of a pervert. I want to emphasize that we live in a world where the self-aware and perverted multimedia universe of KonoSuba and its characters have, by hook or by crook, become some of the most immediately recognizable and mainstream in anime circles, especially isekai-based ones. Suppose you want to tell me something about Kazuma's tomfoolery feels compelling, witty, or humorous. In that case, you don't have that much ground to admonish Eternights for doing anything wholly unacceptable. Kazuma's comedic chemistry with his party members and lack of any noble cause guiding his actions are all things Eternights tries very liberally to copy. They are cut from the same "Look at me messing with the people around me as I wink directly into the camera, isn't that funny" cloth. And don't take that to mean that I don't think you are wrong for liking KonoSuba or viewing it as a refreshing inversion of the isekai genre. Nevertheless, let's not pretend that the idea of a comedic story featuring nothing but trash people doing trashy things is a new concept and has never been met with effusive praise and even end-of-the-year awards. Now, don't get me wrong, there's NOTHING in Eternights that even approaches the high marks of KonoSuba's comedic timing, cleverly ad-libbed lines, or meta-humor. Even with this, let's not pretend that the concept guiding Eternights's character progression and style is summarily without merit.

This game empowers you to be a forward-thinking college student on an adventure to lose your virginity during the opening prologue. It never stops reminding you about that goal, BUT even the perverts in Eternights have standards. You must earn your right to go to Bone Town by engaging with its dating sim mechanics; consent is part of the game. Even your Yosuke Hanamura-like (i.e., Chani_, who is a total "dude bro" that is constantly pressuring you to muck up with girls using dating apps, has an almost Austin Powers standard of not being a total and complete scumbag even if their goal is to be having sex all the time. Also, while it certainly isn't "perfect," everything is on the table in Eternights, including a gay relationship, which I was pleasantly surprised to see progress as goofily and KonoSuba-like as the heteronormative relationships. The gay romance option is as much a sex-positive and comedic weirdo as the rest of the cast, but don't let that suggest that they are not free from some incredibly dated anime notions of gay people and the gay experience. Equally interesting is the fact that the female characters are as horny and open-minded about sex as the male ones. There's a female companion who, when the topic of sex toys comes up, says something to the tune of "Of course I masturbate. Did you think we [women] don't enjoy masturbating as much as dudes?" When this happened, I'm not going to lie; I was utterly punching the air. The maker of Eternights gets women above the age of twenty better than 95% of all the writers attached to significant JRPG franchises. His female characters stand up for themselves and even probe the male characters, under the backdrop of an apocalyptic event, about what they expect women to be like in relationships and allow them to call them out when they are full of shit. Likewise, when the female characters feel engaged in a romance they consent to, they are as awkward about getting the ball rolling as the dudes. That and the decision to include a gay romance option that feels earnest are why this isn't some bullshit game like YIIK.

Furthermore, I have to tip my hat to Eternights in another regard. The Persona games put you through these long relationship pursuits, and because they remain committed to tackling the "teen experience," they incidentally address the topic of intimacy. Eternights saw that part of Persona's playbook, scribbled it out, and wrote on top using a Sticky Note, "What if you just kiss the people you want to date in the game, and we showed you that?" That might sound creepy to some of you, but I must clarify that every character in this game is a college student. Mercifully, the lead on Eternights recognized that the Persona formula is less skeevy when you make the characters you are controlling adults. This is an appreciated change of pace, considering your best friend immediately starts things off with you making a fake Tinder account on a mobile dating app. Chani is a lot, but I would be lying if I told you I had not met real-world versions of him. What I will also commend is the fact that everyone in the game has a heart. For example, if you elect to make your protagonist homosexual, Chani still has your back and, without losing a step. Once you have a heart-to-heart with him about being gay, he immediately recommends ways to create a gay harem using a different but gay dating app and even chimes, "More power to you! Go kiss some guys!" He's your bro through thick and thin, and everyone in this world is a lovable goofball, and there's no homophobia or racist bone in anyone to speak of. I get that's not even the slightest bit realistic, but it was a breath of fresh air that a game let me be gay or straight and not have that romantic journey defined by trauma or tragedy. It's a romantic "power fantasy," yes, but I like it all the same.

And therein lies the core heart of Eternights that has virtually every Atlus game beat. The characters are sickos, yes, but they are twenty-year-olds that are midway into their college educations. They are ciphers for a sleazy journey, but one that is, let's be honest, incredibly prescient and familiar. It's that weird moment when you finally realize your sexual orientation and intimate pursuits are finally "yours." You don't need to hold back; you're an adult; go buck wild as long as you treat those around you respectfully and always value the importance of consent. It's a freeing moment, and much like the characters of Eternights, it happens in those opening weeks of leaving your parent's home, and you're finally living away from their influence for the first time. Don't lie for this next part; remember that first party you joined after a dorm or roommate peer pressured you into attending, and during which you realized you didn't need to worry about a curfew for the first time in your life? Remember the people you tried to talk to during those opening moments of your adulthood because you were figuring out who you were and still deciding who you wanted to be around? This game is awkward, sometimes skeevy, and even made my skin crawl. However, that's what that weird period in your life was like! Sure, there are times when Eternights isn't all that well-written or directed. However, it may be the only game or form of media that even attempts to capture an almost universal moment in our lives and have fun with it, and that's worth something.

So, This Game Isn't "Great," But I'm Glad These Sorts Of Games Still Are Being Made

And despite all of this tacit praise, I don't know of a single person on this very website who benefits from playing Eternights. The combat isn't just weak; it is downright dull. The only mechanical high point comes when the game gets slightly more exotic about its buffs, but even that feels like plate spinning, like Final Fantasy XIII. You are mashing away on simple combos for hours upon end, many of which you discover and become comfortable with during the game's prologue. The minute the game gives you a designated healer, you feel ready to slop through almost all of the game, as the enemy variety is pitiful, and the moment-to-moment challenge is even worse. Some of your compatriots have impressive magical abilities, but you often forget to use them because mashing away on buttons with little thought or strategy in mind gets the job done much faster. It's hard to take a game of rock-paper-scissors seriously when rock beats the shit out of paper AND scissors without protest.

The visual and mission variety is as bad as the gameplay variety. This leaves the characters and their weird relationship-based pursuits, which are all determined by you, all that remains to do the heavy lifting. And I have to be honest if I was looking at this from an entirely objective vantage point and I was not afflicted with a brain disease that makes me froth at the mouth when something revels in anime bullshitery, none of that is good enough. It's not, and worse, it's incredibly erratic. There are times when the game feels earnest and authentic, and there are other times when it feels like a bad Family Guy or American Dad skit. It's a mess that feels like something only a college-bound fraternity brother could enjoy because outside of that lone homosexual romance option, it feels like a game for dude bros. You are implored to view sexual intimacy as an end goal of sorts for any male character in life and are even rewarded with new abilities and RPG mechanics in making that power fantasy happen.

And yet, I do have that brain sickness. I'm sick. This game is sick. We are meant for each other. Eternights speaks to an authentic human experience despite how messy its execution might be. It fixes an annoyance I have had with the works of Atlus in that it elects to use young adults, instead of high schoolers, in the early years of their university efforts. It puts all its emotional intentions on the table during its opening and never lets you forget what it is about. It is one of the most emotionally and creatively transparent games of 2023 in that regard. The inciting action happens when the game's protagonist is murdered during a blind date, and even as the world crumbles to ash, both they and the weirdos they meet, both male and female, can't stop thinking about who they'd like to kiss when the dust settles. The game and its characters have zero chill, and it does not care.

It is subversive. Eternights took a formula I think almost everyone knows and somehow made it worse, less fun, more crass, and more perverted. There are dick jokes immediately after deeper conversations about the pressures of living up to one's self-inflicted expectations of how to live one's life. Still, there's not a single malicious bone in this game's body. Eternights is a modern-day video game doujinshi that got its bag and did it with a giant smile. On the issue of it being a derivative work, it's fan fiction that went mainstream, not unlike the Twilight books. But more than that, its messy and uneven structure, style, and writing is an almost perfect tribute to the shameful awkwardness of being a twentysomething. And in that regard, the game is ideal sicko material. No game quite captures those foolhardy days and years quite like Eternights.

WARNING: This blog features some spoilers! You have been warned!

Preamble

A handful of Giant Bomb Game of the Year staples returned with "Best Debut" and "Please Stop!" gracing the site's 2023 roundtable GOTY discussions. A personal favorite of mine, "Best Styyyyyyyyyyle," was not so lucky, but that's not to say what the site and the current staff provided and made wasn't in and of itself tremendous or entertaining; it indisputably was. Nonetheless, many other sites have taken it upon themselves to discuss the best technical and artistic video games of 2023. While these lists and discussions have done a decent to excellent job of bringing some genuine candidates to the forefront, one game has slipped to the wayside. That game, which should be evident from the title of this blog, is Little Goody Two Shoes, a video game outing I have been slightly surprised to see utterly unmentioned by virtually every major publication. Little Goody Two Shoes doesn't just have "style." This game is one of the greatest homages to a myriad of animation and artistic eras.

However, before we get into my "pitch" on why you should give this game a cursory look, let's talk about what Little Goody Two Shoes is on paper and execution. Little Goody Two Shoes is a horror adventure game and visual novel from Portuguese developer AstralShift. The game was published by Square Enix, which likely allowed the indie firm to bolster its budget and nab some incredible art leads and voice-acting talent. In the game, you control Elise, who was found abandoned in a forest by an elderly "maid of all work." Elise lives on the outskirts of a Germanic-inspired township from the post-Reformation. After a lengthy introductory cutscene, WHICH IS INCREDIBLE, the game plays out similarly to a traditional Japanese otome or 5pb/Mages-inspired visual novel. The game takes place over a week, with the town Elise inhabits preparing for a yearly festival. However, as the week progresses, suspicious things start to crop up. Elise realizes she must be careful in interacting with her surroundings or risk being accused of witchery. I want those of you interested in playing this game to know this blog will be mostly spoiler-free, and at most, all I will discuss are the game's thematics and structure, which it reveals to you in its opening act. This game starts as a vivid retro throwback and becomes darker in record time. The fact it is about witchcraft and delves into horror themes is no secret.

The term "vibe game" was thrown around in 2023 to describe major AAA productions and cult indie releases. The term has been applied to Little Goody Two Shoes because as you play it, you feel like you have fallen into a nostalgic time capsule to 90s-era anime (i.e., Slayers, Rurouni Kenshin, City Hunters, et al.). That is true to a certain extent, but it also undersells the absolute creative heights the game reaches and the wide breadth of artistic ambitions developer AstralShift aims for. When you press me about the term "vibe game," I'm more or less inclined to think of a game that doubles down on one singular aesthetical choice or direction rather than seek to represent a kaleidoscope of styles from an entire decade as Little Goody Two Shoes does. Likewise, its ever-evolving story takes some stark turns, and the art direction morphs to communicate that. To me, that thoroughly cements it as more than the year's best "vibes" or a meme game pick for silly laughs. This game achieves so much with such a tiny team, and it is by FAR one of the most underrated new titles from 2023.

The Blending And Mixing Of Style Is The Best Part

The first thing that fans of Little Goody Two Shoes bring up is that the game utilizes over a dozen animation styles and mediums. It is an important point to bring up as the start of the game lays out all of its cards in fantastic fashion. The cutscenes in the game employ an expressionist painterly style meant to evoke memories of childhood storybooks. The character portraits and the in-game story moments use static character portraits, but they are in the style of 90s-era anime and old-school PC-98 visual novels. You complete tasks in the form of minigames, and these use a deliberately retro pixel-based art style. When you collect items, some of them are real-world physical objects or even puppets. There are musical sequences that come out of nowhere, and the game is forced to contend with all of these disparate art styles and aesthetical choices working together, and probably through dark magic or witchcraft, it works. Below, I will link the first of these musical bits when the protagonist discovers shiny red slippers in her garden, which still stands as a fantastic opening salvo.

It's also more than just that the game has attempted to emulate many disparate mediums like traditional animation, fancy digital paint, and even puppetry in a single package. At its heart, the game is an homage to the classic horror visual novels of yesteryear, like Ao Oni and Corpse Party. To make its slow but inevitable descent into lurid horror all the more authentic its cinematic transitions become more stark. If I told you a game from any given year juxtaposed from 90s-era anime homage to Claymation ala Neverhood, I think you get where I am coming from when I say I'm surprised more people are not talking about this game. Every time you go from the pastoral vista shots of the game's standard levels to its terrifying dungeons, it is SOMETHING, and the game manages to make those tonal and artistic shifts surprising and impressive even after the sixth or seventh time. This point highlights why Little Goody Two Shoes is much more than a game about incredible visuals. Its different styles convey narrative shifts and allow the game to make its mood and tone all the more intense. Trust me, as you progress in some of the longer dungeon sequences, Elise's return to "normalcy" doesn't just make Warren Harding happy; it leads to you taking a sigh of relief along with her.

Then there are the dungeons themselves. They represent the lowest point in the game from a purely mechanical sense, but there's no denying that they accomplish several artistic goals. To highlight that Elise is being pulled in several directions by fantastical forces, her follies to meet with these forces feel as if you are transitioning into an entirely different game, and in many ways, you do. Nonetheless, the game tests itself in these dungeons and showcases an even wider breadth of art styles. The second dungeon is done entirely through a claymation-inspired style with enemies and foes that animate like stop-motion figures in a Wallace and Gromit film on acid. After that, the third dungeon utilizes a paper animation-like aesthetic in the style of Terry Gilliam's days during Monty Python with Astor Piazzolla-inspired bandoneon-based music to boot! The one after that has an ice and winter motif and uses an incredible painterly style wherein you can see the brushstrokes to make its background. Many games promise to take you off into alien and foreign worlds, but Little Goody Two Shoes is one of the rare examples wherein doing so furthers both narrative and artistic purposes and doesn't come across as a vain strut.

The Style Makes The Character Relationships Better

When you are not helping Elise harrow through trials to satisfy evil spirits and forces beyond her comprehension, you usually live on the fat of a happy and merry land. Like several games in 2023, a VHS-inspired filter occasionally plays to harken back to when animation was done on film rather than digital paint. I should note that the game's final build uses Unity, and while it emulates traditional animation styles, it does not actually engage in their processes. Nonetheless, your activities in the game's central hub, a quaint Germanic township, are a complete visual treat. There are a handful of minigames to increase Elise's coffers, and these pixel-based microgames harken back to the first few WarioWare titles. The production values are equally impressive when you uncover new locals or explore environments as the game rotates through its day-night cycle. The soundtrack in Little Goody Two Shoes peaks when it breaks into verse or shares a stellar J-Pop dance piece, but the rest of the game's soundtrack is no slouch either. The almost Persona-like day-based progression format means you must be especially careful about what you do and who you spend time with, as there's only a limited amount of time to see what the game offers. If that sounds frustrating, know that this game tops out under twenty hours and actively encourages you to save scum, which is a visual novel tradition at this point.

Little Goody Two Shoes is also unabashedly gay. I probably should have said that during my introduction, but the three relationships you can opt into pursuing are women, and the game is obvious that these relationships are not just hand-holding USA Sailor Moon nonsense. There's no explicit sex in the game, but these girls love each other. Each romance option (i.e., Rozenmarine, Freya, and Lebkuchen) evokes a different crease or subset of gay or, in this case, yuri media. There's something incredibly nostalgic about the innocence of these relationships and seeing them evolve and represented in evocative imagery. The visuals feel entirely earnest, and so are the game's core relationships. Nothing progresses too out of the ordinary, and the emotional heart-to-hearts the datable options have with Elise feel unpretentious. And Lord have mercy on your soul if you opt for the game's bad endings because those are where things get especially emotionally charged. Whether it be acceptance, betrayal, or sadness, they all play into the game's strength of this being a dark journey that you and Elise all understand how to avoid its worst conclusions.

Likewise, as Elise gets pulled between honoring her love interests and the dark forces in the story's background, Little Goody Two Shoes becomes one of the best tragedies of the year. As you uncover more about the story's core mystery, you are presented with heavy choices that unlock even more lurid cinematics and cutscenes, ranging from horrifying to melancholic to joyous. When I concluded the bad ending for Rozenmarine, I was left speechless because the game visually and audibly made me regret my decision. The epilogues you uncover are vivid reflections of your choices, which likely required a lot of planning and foresight on the part of AstralShift. Yes, their previous title, Pocket Mirror, is a prototype of Little Goody Two Shoes, which lends some credence to the claim that there's nothing too out of the ordinary in it. However, Little Goody Two Shoes' scale and production values dwarf AstralShift's past projects, and it is not fair to say it is entirely beholden to their previous works. Unlike The Quiet Man, this is a perfect example of Square Enix helping out a smaller developer to get more funding and better contacts to make their passion project shoot for the stars.

You Can Tell This Was A Pashion Project From A Small Team In A Good (And Bad) Way

We now need to transition to something slightly different, which are some words of caution to those interested in playing Little Goddy Two Shoes. As suggested earlier, this game is part minigame collection, part puzzle game, part adventure game, part visual novel, and part dating sim. That sounds like a lot, and it is. The visual juxtapositions are fantastic and impressive; the gameplay juxtapositions are often clunky and awkward. There are four minigames, two of which are acceptable (i.e., catching apples and chopping wood) as they harken back to WarioWare, but the other two are among the most frustrating things I played in 2023. One of them is like a baseball microgame wherein you need to time your button presses to bat an object between two children, and the timing for it is incredibly punishing. There's another one wherein Elise needs to collect chicken eggs, and it is the worst variant of Tapper I have ever encountered. These minigames are unavoidable as they are your primary source of income, and not having money might cause you to enter a weird fail state where you cannot progress through the game's dungeons. All that aside, the visual presentation of these minigames is outstanding, and how the game cleverly uses them during the story is a real treat.

The traditional visual novel trappings are trickier to assess. Your tolerance of these mechanics will depend on your experience with more orthodox Japanese VNs. Depending on your actions, Elise has three meters for you to worry about that can decline and result in a Game Over. The first is her health, which whittles away during the puzzle dungeons, which are every day's capstone event. Plenty of lethal traps can cause her health bar to drop dramatically when you least expect it. The second is her "Sanity," which you only need to worry about if you choose to interact with looming specters or ghosts that let you in on some of the story's secrets or decide in favor of tackling the game's optional dungeons and puzzles, which unlock a secret ending. Finally, you have her hunger meter, which loses a whole point every time you complete an action during one of the phases of every day (i.e., dawn, morning, afternoon, dusk, and night). Needing to worry about three different item types to guarantee that Elise doesn't meet an untimely demise is undoubtedly overwhelming, but again, one of those three is entirely optional.

The structure of the days is one of the game's best parts, as it allows you to plan your activities and character-based pursuits more freely, but it is also a slight source of frustration. Again, experience with more traditional visual novels might cloud your adventure here, but Little Goody Two Shoes incentivizes and punishes you for exploring its world and interacting with NPCs. Some of the town's citizens suspect, and correctly, for that matter, that Elise is up to witchery, and if you spill the beans, she's toast. As such, attempting to strike up conversations with NPCs will prompt dialogue choices, and either you select the correct option and maintain Elise's low profile, or you pick the wrong option, and her "Suspicion" meter increases. I like this design choice partly because it makes exploring your surroundings a risk-reward proposition, especially during your first playthrough. You want to know the gossip going around town as it clues you into what to expect at the end of the day and what to expect in the future. Likewise, even if you fail a few at the start, you learn the character-specific techniques for brownnosing your way out of these sequences. What is more frustrating is when the game punches above its weight class in structuring multi-day-spanning missions. There's one, on Wednesday, where if you fail to interact with a half dozen NPCs by a barn during three specific day phases, and if you miss even one, you fail that entire day and have to load up a previous save! The game is downright terrible about communicating what you need to do at times and instead keeps its directions and signposting vague to a fault. As I mentioned earlier, there are three romance options. However, somewhat frustratingly, the game doesn't tell you that failing to attend two romantic events for a specific character in a row will lock you out of their relationship entirely.

I also mentioned that this game is interconnected to a previous work of AstralShift, Pocket Mirror. While I would LOVE for this write-up to end with me imploring you to check out not one but TWO high-concept indie titles, that's not the case. While the idea of AstralShift having this related metaverse is quaint, you can play Little Goody Two Shoes and call it a day. Seriously, you're fine. Regardless of the version you play, Pocket Mirror is a fabulous concept that developer AstralShift fails to deliver upon. The bones of a compelling story about generational or shared trauma are there, but more often than not, the game doesn't have all that much to say beyond its spooky visuals and darker moments. Also, lacking Little Goody Two Shoes' respits from the traumatic sequences means it is a much more emotionally draining experience, which I know is not everyone's cup of tea. Likewise, while there are only a few hints of Little Goody Two Shoes starting as an RPG Maker joint from time to time, the telltale signs of that architecture are way more overt in Pocket Mirror. I swear to God, platforming in RPG Maker games has always sucked shit, but people keep trying, and it drives me goddamn up the wall every single time. Nonetheless, my point is that the promise of Little Goody Two Shoes' story triumphantly carrying on elsewhere is not worth the time investment it entails.

Unfortunately, Little Goody Two Shoes Has An Undeniable Achilles' Heel

My previous cautionary criticisms are quibbles compared to the real issue plaguing Little Goody Two Shoes. I already mentioned that Little Goody Two Shoes ends each day with puzzle dungeons. The problem is that almost all of these dungeons are a complete pain in the ass to play. The first one immediately highlights the game's issues of being too obtuse with its clues and overall design. In a royal library, you need to find four keys, and while there are visible blue chests to open, one of them, instead of providing a key, shares a note that says to find something glowing the color gold. The issue for me was that the environment was so visually busy that finding the one shelf with a faint golden hue was challenging. However, things are all downhill from there as the dungeons become even more punishing and trail-and-error based. There are a handful of chase sequences wherein you instantly die if you let a giant lumbering monster or threat catch up to Elise. There are sliding block puzzles that are either poorly mixed or feel impossible.

The most notorious puzzle in the game comes near its end, wherein Elise finds herself in a predominantly black room with statues and broken checkerboard tiles. It is an incredible-looking environment, but the puzzle requires you to know moon phases, and if you don't know the difference between a waxing and a waning gibbous moon because you forgot that part of middle school science, you need to look up the answers. Also, in that environment are evil specters that will hit Elise, thus draining her health, but more distressingly, respawn her in a location sometimes far away from where she got hit, which makes establishing her bearings a chore. There are not a ton of boss fights in the game, and two of the three that come to mind involve you completing the minigames that typically reward cash but, in their cases, have a more demented bent. The game's only "true" boss is an absolute piece of shit. It is one of those bosses that reverses your controls from your established preferences for shits and giggles and even will invert the screen and camera while you need to complete precise dodging and platforming. It's a complete dick move by the design team.

It's weird to praise a game when almost one-third of it is not fun. The worst part about many of these puzzles and dungeons is that they are a cinch once you figure things out. These dungeons are not dynamic, which makes the repeat playthroughs the game actively encourages a complete slog. Playing the puzzle dungeons a second time made me realize how irrelevant Elise's health meter becomes when you "solve" these puzzles and know precisely where all the traps are. The problem, as I highlighted with the moon phase puzzle, is that the game gives you almost none of the tools necessary to figure things out naturally. On top of that, it ramps up the instant death bullshit, which is infinitely not cool. However, there's more to these dungeons than just eye candy that makes me slightly understand their sometimes punishing design. When you reach the end of the game and are presented with its ultimate choice, you hate these dungeons. So, when the game offers two paths for Elise to take, one of them opts you into ANOTHER punishing dungeon that is a complete chore to complete. There's a narrative reason for that: the game wants you to know that path is THE BAD ONE! It is a clever inversion of the visual novel standard of the good paths and endings always being arbitrarily challenging to unlock.

Even here, I must concede that AstralShift is not technically committing a grave sin in the arena of visual novels with its dungeon design. This topic is ultimately one for a different blog. Still, AstralShift is one of MANY horror outfits that pay homage and pull notes from indie self-published horror classics like Ao Oni and Corpse Party. While those games continue to be profoundly influential and still direct hundreds into game design and horror storytelling, they were never good. They are both terrible games. Corpse Party might be the video game industry's closest equivalent to Leni Riefenstahl. It is a profoundly problematic work that depicts certain groups of people heinously and has led to some nasty habits from indie developers who should know better. Nonetheless, it is a game that proves less is more and that you don't need the best engine or biggest name to make something that gets the internet buzzing. It was also an early pioneer of a work that taught people interested in game development that self-publishing was an entirely worthy and worthwhile route to take one's game.

To Little Goody Two Shoes' credit, nothing in it is deeply problematic. It is a game with wholesome and naturally evolving lesbian relationships that are a true highlight. The game is packed to the gills with style and utilizes many disparate artistic mediums and aesthetical choices to create a picture book-inspired world. It promises to transport you to far-off and alien worlds and does so magnificently. If the tax I need to pay is some crappy dungeons for heartwarming lesbian witches in the style of 90s anime with puppets, then so be it. I will gladly pay that tax.

Preamble

Despite me inching ever so closely to writing four blogs about my thoughts about Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 and its future, I have been relatively mum about my impressions about the rest of the series. As I laid out in my essay on the difficulty of returning to Portable via its Game Pass release, I maintain everyone's favorite Persona game is the first one they end up sinking in over fifty hours. For some of you, it is Persona 3; for many of you, it is Persona 4, largely thanks to Giant Bomb's Endurance Run feature; for millions more, it is Persona 5. To each their own, but I think it is safe to say there's no "correct" answer in this regard. Likewise, almost everyone with a definitive favorite game in the series can also explain how it caught them at the right moment of their socio-emotional upbringing, wherein its cast and world especially felt prescient. Despite its evolving storytelling aspirations and aesthetical choices, it's as if the series always manages to throttle people through the same loops and banks on its emotional rollercoaster rides. It is odd, but the Persona series has become a collective social experience for anyone who plays even a single entry, with its weird blend of visual novel dating sim elements with JRPG gameplay standbys.

For the two to three of you who have seen me talk about my thoughts related to Persona 5, I have slightly criticized the game and have some pointed issues with its storytelling and direction. I will maintain to my deathbed that the original game's utilization of Momentos slows the story to a painful crawl. While its narrative peaks are commendable, its herky-jerky final act, wherein it ends three to four times and yet keeps going, is excessive to a fault. Likewise, with age, many series hallmarks I considered acceptable in the past do not pass muster today. I get on my hands and knees and beg that we NEVER need to stomach another game wherein Atlus thinks it is acceptable to depict a teen-adult relationship as no big deal. They also should stop getting excused by their vocal and die-hard fans about their inability to reflect on their depictions of LGBTQ+ people. Finally, I don't think it would hurt if the actual dungeon-crawling portion of a Persona game did not suck eggs during its back half, as TO THIS DAY, Atlus still seems to derive a sense of glee in kicking your teeth in when you least expect it.

And yet, I still played Royal and Strikers and had a fine enough time with both. So, when Atlus announced Persona 5 Tactica, I was all on board with what they offered. I love turn-based tactics games and thought the art style was popping. Also, in Strikers' case, Atlus was starting to perfect their craft in creating adult characters that felt as relatable and believable as the teens we usually control. Zenkichi Hasegawa is possibly one of the most underrated characters in the Persona 5 mythos, and HOT DAMN is the ending of Persona 5 Strikers, something worth getting misty about. It's weird to say, but my opinion of Persona 5 has improved over time thanks to its supporting spin-offs and expansions adding new perspectives and characters that resonated with me as strongly as the starting slate of characters the first game introduced. All this hopefully clarifies that I went into Tactica in high spirits. I did not go into it wanting to end up with an essay bound to rub some Persona fans the wrong way. To the game's credit, it starts well enough. However, about twelve hours in, I threw in the towel and wanted to discuss my reasons for doing so.

I'm Not Going To Sit Here And Say Persona 5 Tactica Is Bad

Persona 5 Tactica is a breezy tactics experience that fits with what it attempts from a purely narrative perspective. For the most part, Tactica feels like a lore bible with character portraits acting out lines of world-building-focused dialogue for as much time as they fight goons on the battlefield. Unfortunately, Tactica is too much of a cakewalk. Still, with its design and storytelling aspirations set in dolling out what feels like reams of dialogue, the design and programming team knew their audience wasn't looking for something mechanically challenging. That said, the stages rewarding you with incentives should you complete missions within a determinate number of moves was a pleasant surprise. Because the game motivates you to beat each of its battles at a breakneck speed, you rarely go a turn without one of its flashier special moves or animations playing at least two times per turn. This is an essential point because seeing those special attacks and synergies differentiates your battles, as there sure are a lot of the same monotonous red box-like battle arenas in Tactica. The game has an uptempo pace, and using the Persona elements and status effects is equally seamless, but it is a mechanically "safe" tactics game. It only adds a few novelties to the genre, but it does make a series with none of those genre hallmarks work with its own unshakable tropes and idioms.

Atlus wanted this game to be a storytelling vehicle while also trying to build their SRPG chops on new hardware. Also, they are cognizant that a new generation of Persona fans, thanks to Persona 5, likely don't have a frame of reference on what a tactics RPG is outside of the modern Fire Emblem games and maybe the Firaxis-era XCOM series. As a result, they made Tactica's difficulty curve gradual and limited the number of mechanics you need to grapple to a minimum. My favorite was Tactica giving you bonus attacks for free whenever you knocked enemies out of cover. There's a satisfying snowballing effect when you can chain these knockbacks one after another. The fusion mechanic also fits the game perfectly, as it helps fill gaps in your roster without too much fuss. However, being limited to three playable characters during battles is far too limiting. Because you have so few usable slots, and the battles themselves are so small in scope and scale, you don't feel as motivated to try out some of the game's more support-oriented characters or unit types, even if they have plenty of uses.

And for a game series that revolves around characters and their self-actualizing journeys, the game mostly delivers on that front. Due to how late Haru is introduced and how half-baked her characterization felt the first time around, Persona 5 Tactica is the first time Haru feels like a worthy member of the Phantom Thieves. The best character work in the game involves a three to four-hour mini-campaign with Sumire and Akechi, and I think it is DOWNRIGHT CRIMINAL that this storyline is locked behind day one DLC. If, unlike me, you play Tactica and fully commit to finishing it, I strongly recommend you check that thing out, as it is NOT a simple cosmetic unit package as it appears on digital marketplaces. Tactica also largely avoids an issue I have with previous Persona spin-off games. With most Persona spin-offs, the character arcs in the original game are largely resolved, and the spin-off storytelling relies on one-off characters that sometimes feel completely shoehorned. Likewise, with the main characters no longer undergoing stages of introspection, they instead devolve into wisecrackers or become victims of I'm not saying that is NOT the case in Tactica, but it could have been worse.

Persona 5 Tactica is NOT my 2023 "bounce-off game" because it is terrible. Persona 5 Tactica is my bounce-off game because I am thoroughly done with these characters. I'm done with this world and messing around in Cafe LeBlanc. I'm done with Momentos. I'm done with the Persona 5 font. I'm done with the royalty motif with the enemies. I'm done with the color red. I'm done, and I want the franchise to move on now. I know that's not happening for a while, but this fourth or fifth rodeo feels TIRED! What was once novel or new is now starting to get old. Every numbered Persona game presents a unique style and even a theme for character exploration. Persona 3 is about personal traumas; Persona 4 is about confronting shadows; Persona 5 is about understanding the person you want to be and accepting the person you can't be via momentos. To do the same shit in the same format for the seventh year is exhausting, and I'm done. And the fact that the game is unwilling to rock the boat with a genre already inundated with quality titles doesn't help, either. With Tactica, it seems like Atlus thinks they can employ the same tricks and storytelling mechanisms they have used for seven years straight but with even more side dish-like characters, which is disappointing. I don't know how much more of this I can take, and I wonder if I will even bother to finish Tactica, which breaks my heart.

That Unmistakable Feeling of "Here We Go Again"

Part of my issue is that I have seen the main cast from Persona 5 take a step back to allow new one-off characters to assume the front stage of a game before. Seeing Makoto, Futuba, and Yusuke take a back seat for yet another batch of one-offs is something I wasn't excited about the first time, and it feels even worse now. Worse, the new character additions feel even less daring or memorable this time than in previous games. Toshiro Kasukabe is a worse version of Zenkichi in almost every single regard, and it is ridiculous how much of his character development feels like Atlus going through the motions rather than trying something new. The writing staff for Tactica feels like they pulled notes from a character reference sheet because there's nothing attempted with Toshiro's character arc that feels refreshing. Playing Tactica reminds me that each numbered Persona isn't simply the introduction of a new visual filter. Each generation of the Persona series also has its own unique mechanism for unlocking character pieces through the veneer of Jungian psychology. Despite the genre shift, the steps and style of unlocking backstories are the same from the first game, and it doesn't have the same impact it did even one game ago. Would it surprise you that one of the new characters summons their Persona via a mental breakdown during a battle? I get that's a bit of a series trope, but trust me when I say that I was getting flashbacks to the character set pieces for Ann and Yusuke when it happened here.

There was something comforting seeing the main Persona 5 cast using their previous experiences to help new characters undergo the phases of recognizing their true selves. But shit, having the villainous fulcrum be ANOTHER tyrannical monarch that wants to establish a new world order? After we had done this four times prior, with these exact characters, it made everything in Tactica feel like piddly shit. I liked how this game had the Phantom Thieves working with resistance fighters and how that manifested in the game's tactical parts. Nonetheless, the fact it creatively isn't doing much makes the fact that almost every single battle map is a moderate-sized red box with your characters starting on one side and the enemies spawning on the other all the more obvious. I don't hate the toy horse look of the game, but with its chibi-inspired art being all it is doing to mix up the Persona 5 aesthetic, Tactica feels like an example of the sub-series reaching its Peak Oil moment artistically. If this low-fi chibi art is the best idea Atlus's B-Team has with a full-priced title, then it is time to hunker down and assess how many more spin-offs this sub-series can justify further. I know a lot of people burned out on Fire Emblem Engage because its story is a mess when it tries, and rote anime horseshit when it doesn't. However, at least that game mixes things up occasionally with some missions depicting ambushes or covert ops. Despite these characters being "Phantom Thieves," they sure do burst into the scene with all the grace of the United States Marine Corps.

And GODDAMN is the balance between the dialogue sequences and tactics missions entirely out of whack. The game makes way for you to get that Toshiro Kasukabe is a young and up-and-coming politician who could be the one to break Japan from its corrupt cycle. The Persona games haven't exactly been deep about their metaphors, which makes the great lengths at which its characters explain things to Toshiro all the more groan-inducing. Yet again, we need to have the whole cast explain how the world of Persona 5 works, and yet again, the fish out of water character asks the same questions the previous ones asked. That's part of why I sped through more text in this game than I ever have before in a Persona 5 game, but it also did not grab me for other reasons. Narratively, the game is as unconfrontational as its combat. Because the stakes are largely held in the hands of everyone but the prominent party members, no one you care about feels like they are ever at risk. And worse, with everyone from the first game entirely satisfied with their current state and position in the world, they are above evolving or changing in any significant ways. You're not exploring new relationships or discovering new ways these characters have bonded with one another. They just stand there in the war room and spew funny jokes from time to time.

"Tactics Fatigue" Is Real But Not The Entire Reason I Bounced Off

Playing Tactica less than two months after I wrapped up Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew was a significant mistake on my part. I get that's an unfair comparison, given that each game is going for entirely different demographics, but I can't help it. This game is vanilla to a fault, and seeing long-standing characters pantomime emotions when I know they are far better than that makes it tough to stomach. This complaint leads me to one way Tactica fails to merge one of the core characteristics of the main games with a strategy RPG. While there is some downtime between battles, the world exploration and dating-sim aspects of the Persona franchise take a massive backseat, and how they are represented here feels inauthentic. The story develops with little agency on your part, and the extended dialogue sequences rarely require you to do much beyond sitting back and listening. Sure, that's been a complaint with the series for a while, but when you know there's nothing around the corner other than more bland-ass box-like battle arenas that you sometimes blow through south of ten minutes, that issue stings even more.

But here's the deal: Persona 5 Tactica being in a crowded tactics market is only part of the problem. If you were to swap Tactica's story with Strikers' but kept their respective gameplay intact, this conversation would completely change. The genre in question has a more negligible impact on my enjoyment than others have expressed in their reviews. As someone who has never been especially enthused by the Persona franchise's approach to dungeon crawling, I ignore those issues because I know there are in-depth life-sim gameplay hooks and sweeping character arcs that take months of in-game time to unlock waiting for me. Because the main characters take an even greater back seat compared to previous games, the protagonist is no longer an empowering cipher and more an absent-minded dweeb. Lacking the in-depth social link mechanics of yesteryear, which most of the spin-offs cut out, admittedly, your character barely feels like an active participant in what the game desperately wants you to believe is a revolution you are enacting. And yet, most of the dialogue sequences involve them passively sitting in the background while others have long, uninterrupted soliloquies.

One of my other main issues with Tactica, in particular, stems from how clunky its cast feels. Part of this problem is a natural result of needing an army of recruitable soldiers with duplicates of every possible job or unit type. However, the game sometimes doesn't know what to do with its massive cast. When you enter a dialogue or story sequence, it drags in part because so many characters are in line, ready to chime in with a sentence or two. The Persona 5 cast has ballooned to the point where, in Tactica, it feels like characters pop off two or three lines to remind you they exist. And the game's priorities regarding when to give characters more speaking time are all over the place and bound to piss some people off. Many of the characters I care about had nothing new to add besides a few witticisms here and there. And this problem isn't breaking news. As much as I appreciated Royal's twist and unique contributions to the world of Persona 5, there's something incredibly cheap about how nothing about its twist came from the original cast of characters. And because this series no longer wants to rely on the characters they have sold to us in multiple fifty to seventy-hour epics, it is hitching its post on surface-level one-offs that get half that love and attention.

How Many Times Is Atlus Honestly Going To Have These Characters Speak About Leading "A Revolution?"

To me, this point of order is "the big one." I get that the characters calling on a "revolution" to shake modern Japan to its core is mainly symbolic, but it feels incredibly empty now. As I contemplated dropping Tactica, I reviewed a handful of reviews for the game and was shocked to see several mention the game's overt themes of rebelling against oppression as the best part. I find myself on the opposite side of this spectrum. As I said before, seeing the forces of the "rebellion" manifested as units on a map that you can recruit is quaint. Similarly, seeing your resistance force go from being a scrappy rag-tag group to a looming professional army is one of the few times the game's narrative themes coherently connect with its gameplay. It's a mechanical representation of an overarching theme, and it works. That said, we are now four spin-offs deep, and this series still hasn't given us a clear idea of what these minor conflicts or rebellions are building toward, which makes Tactica feel incredibly vacuous. Likewise, with so many games in the Persona 5 sub-series revolving around the concept of a more significant conflict looming in the background, the scope and sequence of that conflict still being a giant question mark is a massive detracting point impacting the narrative accomplishments of previous games.

With Tactica, things are even worse because it doles out these long speeches that get us no closer to what this series is lurching toward. When interacting with the rebel forces, you get Spark Notes-esque summations about why authoritarianism is terrible and why empowering everyday people is good. These are admirable lessons to impart to your audience. Still, it feels incredibly inauthentic considering the characters Atlus have had us follow for nearly seven years have been teaching us this EXACT LESSON ad infinitum. I felt so bad seeing characters like Futaba say lines of dialogue that felt like retreads of things they heart-wrenchingly brought to the table two games ago. Worse, it does not seem like the Persona 5 characters are heading towards any actionable or tangible conclusions other than they are getting older. So, Tactica feels like a side quest from top to bottom, and similar to the arrow on the FedEx logo, I don't know if this is a problem I can unsee moving forward. To Atlus's defense, what more is there to do with these characters? Until a Persona version of Thanos arrives and forces all of these disparate one-off adventures to congeal into something corporeal, what more is there to do with characters like Ann and Ryuji? They've been through Hell and back again more than once and have spilled their hearts out just as many times. This well is dry. The udders on this cow are spouting SAND!

The sad reality is that this phenomenon is familiar to Atlus. The modern Persona 3 universe has been teasing the prospect of returning its protagonist from the dead. Yet, instead of getting it over with, Atlus keeps doing half-measured steps that delay what we all know is what they really want. The fact remains that Atlus is gun-shy about delivering on big post-game climaxes, even though they love building them up. There was a moment while I was playing my sixteenth mission in Tactica and I was listening to Toshiro Kasukabe talk to the Persona 5 cast about what he thought their next steps should be, while they just stood there in the background as if they don't know how to handle their shit already. It sucked, but I realized something. Beyond the initial novelty of the cascading cover-based attack system, the chibi art is all this game has going for it that feels unique from everything we have seen in previous Persona 5-based outings. And I have to be honest, while I don't hate it, it isn't enough to carry the entire game when the dialogue feels flat and often saccharine, and the gameplay quickly becomes repetitious. I have to emphasize that this title is being sold at $59.99, and as charming as it might look, it's flat, lacks depth, and, worse, feels like a "Best Hits" compilation pack. With the enemies, environments, UI, and characters just being moderate changes of what we have seen before, it is incredible to say this, but Persona 5's style is old shit. It's time to move on to a new color or vision before I can return to being excited about a Persona game.

Again, I don't want my pessimism to be interpreted as "anti-spin-off" propaganda. The pieces are here for Tactica to shine, given that it has a welcoming difficulty curve and has all of the characters you want to see in a new Persona 5-based game. If Tactica was more fully committed to its art style or took as many creative risks with its unique characters as Strikers, this blog is probably about Final Fantasy XVI instead. What? Did I say something even more controversial than the title of this blog?

Author's Note: SPOILER WARNING! This is a two-part series looking at Final Fantasy III. 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 Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins 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

Part 1: No Seriously, Why Does This Game Have Its Reputation Of Being "Bad?"

Goodness, how time can fly by. Despite retrospectives about the Final Fantasy franchise and works of Squaresoft/Square Enix being my initial blogging bread-and-butter, it has been over two months since I last had a stab at covering anything in the franchise and over one year since I covered a non-sequel numbered Final Fantasy game. That changes today, but I will warn you that I do not suspect Final Fantasy III will require the deep closed reading into complex storytelling, intricate mechanics, or its legacy on games that succeeded it as much as some of the other games I have covered. Certainly, Final Fantasy III deserves all of the credit in the world for "righting the ship" after the wild experimentation in Final Fantasy II and pioneering the job system that would go on to become perfected in Final Fantasy V. Beyond that, it's kind of a weird first step that more or less errs towards Squaresoft "figuring things out" before they shot for the stars with Final Fantasy IV. I will use the words "quaint" and "cute" a lot when talking about this game, and I feel that's especially apt, considering this came out two years AFTER Dragon Quest III and the same year in Japan as Dragon Quest IV.

And yet, I'm still astonished to see it near the bottom of everyone's rankings of games in the Final Fantasy franchise. It's by no means perfect, but come on now. Ranking it along with The After Years, OG Final Fantasy XIV, Final Fantasy II, and Final Fantasy XIII is bonkers! Is Final Fantasy III hard? Sure, but let's not pretend that was not the norm with the genre or not the case with the games that preceded it. Final Fantasy I gets and deserves a lot of credit for starting things and being a weird pseudo-step into roleplaying games and Dungeons & Dragons for those who grew up with it. Still, it gets a mountain of "reviewer's tilt" because of nostalgia. It might have the most messed up assortment of main-story dungeons (i.e., the Earth Dungeon and Chaos Shrine) of the 8-bit era, making it occasionally as rough an experience to return to as Final Fantasy III. Also, the issue of frequent grinding and the game's supposed "legendary" difficulty? I want this statement to come across as something other than a flex, but those parts of the game's reputation are overrated. When examined within the context of the era it inhabited, the amount of grinding Final Fantasy III expects of you is not that heinous or out of the ordinary, especially compared to its contemporary Dragon Quest, Ys, and Fire Emblem rivals.

Regarding its punishing nature, Final Fantasy III earns that portion of its reputation, but only in a handful of specific dungeons and bosses. For the most part, the game progresses at a decent clip, and the completion of optional missions and side quests ensures you are near where the game wants you to be to go further. Unless you actively avoid random encounters, which is an option until the final act, Final Fantasy III does a decent job of keeping you in synch with the town-overworld-dungeon-boss template that defines the franchise even to this day. Also, look me in the eyes and tell me if there's anything in this game on par with Dark Fact from OG Ys or the more complex battles in Fire Emblem: Thracia 776. Yeah, the Cloud of Darkness is BULLSHIT, but that's kind of how final bosses in every JRPG worked! JRPGs of the 8 and 16-bit era were chores to complete, and Final Fantasy III is no more or less out of that mold. What comes up a lot that I can agree with is the rigidity of Final Fantasy III's job system and the fact that there's a lot of cruft when it presents all of its options. A handful of jobs can carry you for most of the game (i.e., White Mage, Black Mage, and Knight), which you unlock at the start; unfortunately, others are only useful in specific levels or dungeons (i.e., Dark Night and Dragoon); while many more are ones you should avoid outright (i.e., Bard, Evoker, and Viking). And the fun jobs, unfortunately, don't level up as quickly as you would like, with many of their more extraordinary abilities tucked away until the final few chapters.

Yet, I still see very little to fault the game, even with those quibbles in mind. That is the cost of experimentation, and we have to remember that in the late 80s and early 90s, the JRPG genre and label were still a work in progress. After Final Fantasy II, Squaresoft and its soon-to-be marquee franchise required a shake-up, at least mechanically speaking. If they threw things back to the first game, then Final Fantasy III would have been laughed out of Japan for being well behind Dragon Quest regarding mechanics and gameplay. Considering how much of the Final Fantasy "template" started in some way, shape, or form in this game, I think its faults become immediately more understandable. This game has the series' first "true" side quests, a transforming world map, and the foremost incarnation of a swappable job system, all admirable experiments. When the game first came out, it was one of the most massive games ever to be released on the Famicom, needing a custom 512 KB cartridge, the second-highest capacity cartridge on the platform. The storytelling in Final Fantasy III is also a step in the right direction. There are guest party members, subplots, and a driving antagonist, with motivations that get clearer as the story progresses. Again, it's quaint by modern standards but a sign of progress for one of the most important franchises in the entire video game industry. To get to the epic storytelling of Final Fantasy IV or VI or the freeing gameplay of Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy III needed to take some baby steps to feel things out. While some of that feels awkward, it still was a vital part of the process for this franchise and the people who worked on it to get to where they are now.

Part 2: But Wait, Should You Play The Pixel Remaster Version Or The 3D Remake? The Answer Is Not That Straightforward

But before we delve into the game itself, we must revive one of the most significant debates clouding Final Fantasy III: should you play the Pixel Remaster or the 3D Remake? When I played Final Fantasy VI, the production values and graphical improvements made by the Pixel Remaster were far and beyond enough to forgive some minor quibbles about it lacking optional dungeons exclusive to the GBA or iOS ports of the game. The same sentiment applies to Final Fantasy I and II, and a bonus goes to the Pixel Remaster for preserving each game's unique magic and leveling systems instead of attempting to redo or rebalance them. With Final Fantasy III, IV, and V, things are not so decisively in the Pixel Remaster's favor. I'm not suggesting anyone go out and track down ROMs for the Android and iOS versions of those games, as whatever gameplay or content improvements they may have are not enough to outweigh the fact they look like complete and utter trash. Square Enix erased them from all marketplaces, and for good reason, in favor of the Pixel Remaster games.

However, in a rare victory to game preservation, Square Enix has never pulled the 3D DS remakes of Final Fantasy III and IV from mobile or PC marketplaces. Mercifully, and there's a solid foundation to support this sentiment, Square Enix views the 3D Remakes of III and IV as entirely distinct and different games from the originals they sought to adapt. When you include the fully-voiced cutscenes, new 3D character models, rebalancing of bosses and character leveling, and, in the case of Final Fantasy III, the introduction of entirely new mechanics to make the game more engaging, it is hard not to agree with this viewpoint. It will get me into heaps of trouble when I eventually decide to tackle Final Fantasy IV, but I prefer the 3D Remake to the Pixel Remaster even to this day. Weird pronunciations of Cecil's name and the 3D character models erring too closely to a cutesy chibi style aside; it's a better game than playing any version of vanilla Final Fantasy IV. The characters getting new plotlines, the world having side stories that add more context, and the accompanying cutscenes to every boss fight add so much to the game's world and storytelling that I don't want to play it again without those. Also, the 3D Remake of IV is more fun to play, thanks to it having way more meat on the bone.

The same sentiment applies to the 3D Remake of Final Fantasy III, but to a far lesser degree. Let's jump into the positives and reasons why you should consider the 3D Remake of Final Fantasy III instead of the Pixel Remaster version. First, the 3D Remake re-writes the characters so they have entirely new backstories and mountains of new dialogue, which, unlike the Final Fantasy IV 3D Remake, is NOT voice acted. Nonetheless, the storylines you encounter in the game do enough to put faces on your party members who otherwise don't have any in the original game or Pixel Remaster version. Final Fantasy III sees a return of the guest party system from Final Fantasy II, and it is an entirely superficial mechanic unless you are playing the 3D Remake. Only there do the guests provide special attacks during battles, much like a Capcom Vs. fighting game. The cruft I mentioned during the introduction is less of an issue in the 3D Remake. The 3D Remake rebalances the weaker jobs and gives them new abilities that make them far more compelling and exciting to play. And some of these class changes are not something to scoff at either. In the 3D Remake, the Scholar can use up to Level 3 White Magic when it could not do so in the original, and the Remake's Viking has an improved "Provoke" ability, dramatically enhancing its job of drawing damage during boss encounters.

And yet, the advantage is still in the favor of the Pixel Remaster of Final Fantasy III for two VERY BIG reasons! First, the 3D Remake rebalanced every boss and enemy because it was designed for the Nintendo DS, and the handheld struggled to display large swarms of enemies during random encounters. As a result of the game only being able to show a limited number of enemies, Square Enix compensated for this by giving most enemies stronger attacks and additional HP or, especially during bosses, more actions per turn. That results in the 3D Remake being even GNARLIER than the original game in some spots, especially during encounters emphasizing status effects or instant KO-ing abilities. With individual enemies taking more time to kill, but with the turn order the same and you are still stuck with four party members, the odds of you meeting an untimely demise or getting stuck with an immobilized character are greater. However, the most immense annoyance when playing the 3D Remake comes when you switch your character's jobs. For reasons I don't entirely understand, while the 3D Remake rebalances the game's jobs and even gives them some cooler options, it PUNISHES YOU whenever you decide to swap one character's previous job for a new one. This system, called the "Job Adjustment Phase," generally lowers your character's primary stats by 12.5% when they change an old job to a new one until your character survives an uncommunicated number of battles. Considering you still need to worry about losing spell slots when switching a magic caster to a physical attacking class, this new mechanic is a complete pain. All it does is force you into even more grinding than you already have done, and when getting the last crystal, that penalty is especially lethal.

Ultimately, this choice is going to come down to personal preference. Was your first exposure to Final Fantasy III the DS Remake, and as a result, you have personal nostalgia for that version of the game? If "No," you are likely better off starting with the Pixel Remaster version. Likewise, the look and sound of the Final Fantasy III Pixel Remaster is downright better. Like everything from the Pixel Remaster initiative, bad default launch era fonts aside, it looks incredible, and the merging of new-generation particle effects and shadows with old-school pixel graphics is nothing short of stunning. Final Fantasy III is not at the top of my list of games you should go out of your way to play, but if you are in the mood for a retro-styled JRPG on modern hardware, you could do worse.

Tangent: The Pixel Remaster Minimap Ruins Part Of The Game

I won't spend too much belaboring this point because I covered it during my Final Fantasy VI retrospective. Nonetheless, with the Pixel Remaster editions, Square Enix has added many quality-of-life improvements that make playing Final Fantasy III a far better time than ever. You can save on the fly, speed up combat, boost your party's amount of Gil, and review cutscenes and musical tracks individually after they are over. These are universal player assists that exist in EVERY Pixel Remaster re-packaging of a classic Final Fantasy game, and I understand that, for the most part, you can opt out of these if you don't like them. However, one feature in these Pixel Remaster games always rubs me the wrong way, and that has to be the omnipotent minimap on the upper-right portion of your screen. Admittedly, this feature is a godsend. It allows you to avoid needing to go to GameFAQs and pull up crude renditions of maps for these games and realize their dungeons have awful dead-ends and loops that only exist to make you miserable. Again, there's a reason to support these games having a minimap, especially in Final Fantasy I and II, which have some BRUTAL dungeons with odd design choices that can take hours to parse.

Nonetheless, by Final Fantasy III, Squaresoft learned from the two games that preceded it, and there is a specific class in the game that makes secret passages and tunnels visible to the player. With the minimap right there by default, and displaying ALL secret passages in a level the moment you bump into one, there's no reason for you to opt into that subsystem or character class build path anymore. Likewise, this minimap shows you EVERYTHING right from the get-go! When you enter a new environment, the buildings with items or equipment to sell are immediately marked, and the stairs to lower or higher levels in tombs or dungeons are easy to identify and plot a path toward. Now, Final Fantasy III is far more rudimentary when compared to Final Fantasy VI. Still, a worry I expressed when discussing this minimap feature in the Pixel Remaster of Final Fantasy VI applies here. People playing Final Fantasy III for the first time will likely use this signposting to avoid or opt out of interacting with non-story critical buildings and NPCs, which does a disservice to the genuine worldbuilding attempted in the game. Finally, with Final Fantasy III being a partial reaction to the negative input Square got from Final Fantasy II, the dungeons in Final Fantasy III feel incredibly small, and having that minimap and following it makes you realize how linear the dungeons in this game usually are. There are few complex puzzles to solve, and yes, the game does the mini-status stuff to mix things up, but for the most part, these are bog standard treks through clearly communicated elementally-themed dungeons. This shortcoming becomes incredibly cogent when you have a cheat sheet like a minimap on standby.

Part 3: The Job System And Its Design Aren't That Bad Or Punishing For The First Half Of The Game (But There Are Plenty Of Annoyances)

Let's go back to me saying "quaint" seven million times because it is time to get into the nitty gritty of Final Fantasy III's story and job system. Unless you are playing the 3D remake, this game stars four unnamed characters thrust into an adventure to save the world using the power of four elementally-themed crystals. Unlike the first Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy III locks your characters into being Onion Knights until you quickly encounter the Wind Crystal, which unlocks the Warrior, Monk, White Mage, Black Mage, and Red Mage jobs, an obvious callback to the job classes of the past. The Vancian Magic system from the first game is also back with the Pixel Remaster version, meaning you need to worry about spell slots rather than using a pool of MP, and you can only load three spells per spell level before battles. As your magic casters level up, they get more spell slots and higher-tier magic abilities. Similar to Final Fantasy I, you need to buy spells from magic merchants just like you purchase equipment for your physical attackers. As much of an annoyance as the Vancian Magic System might be at its worst, it is a novel mechanic that adds strategy to the magic classes and is intertwined with how those jobs function. The 3D Remake and iOS/Android ports, which opt for pools of MP, are worse off for not using this system.

The physical and martial classes also have their quirks that make them distinct from one another. There are different weapon types, and certain classes of weapons can only be utilized by specific jobs. Each of them also sports a unique ability only they have. Seeing new garb on your characters and finding unique attack animations is fun and massively improved in the Pixel Remaster. Nonetheless, the Affinity System with Final Fantasy III is where some of those non-magic-based classes shine. As you level up, you don't just level up your characters' HP and main stats but also their affinities with their presently equipped jobs. A level one Dragoon isn't going to fumble the ball on the onset, but with a higher affinity, its regular attacks might hit twice rather than once, or it will have a higher likelihood of doing critical damage when using its unique Leap ability. Most of your first dozen dungeons direct you down specific party compositions or character jobs. While it requires hours of work and prep, that exact satisfying moment in Final Fantasy V when you get the gimmick of a dungeon and wipe an entire field of enemies in one turn is here and as gratifying. Warts and all, it is a system that works far better than its loudest critics might have you believe.

Nonetheless, Final Fantasy III's job mechanic is far from perfect, and I will be the first to admit that. How the game forces you into using some of its jobs is immensely annoying. A lot of people pick on the game's several dungeons that require you to use the "Mini" status to progress through miniaturized dungeons, and for a good reason, these sequences suck. They also are incredibly debilitating during the initial phases of the game when you have limited magical-casting options. Needing to burn a high-tier spell slot to waltz through story-required dungeons is NOT COOL, and that's doubly the case when you realize many of these Mini-based dungeons force you into encounters where only magic will do damage. If, like me, you made your party an equitable split of physical attackers and magic casters, you feel like the game is actively punishing you for exploring its options. This problem persists far longer than you would like, as there is a sequence and dungeon that incentivizes you to use the Dragoon and one that incentivizes you to use the Dark Knight. What annoyed me was that swapping all your characters to these classes seemed impossible. Even when you designate one character to be a healer, one of your other three characters is virtually handicapped because the cost of having everyone in the best equipment and using the best weapons is prohibitively too high. And the levels you get into the voluntold classes before you swap back to your preferences are not all that impressive either. Some of the character's base stats grow in unique ways, but the passive ability system in Final Fantasy V is absent here, which makes spending hours using jobs you don't like feel utterly pointless.

Beyond the unassailable charge of the jobs progressing slowly and opting you into hours of grinding, another shortcoming rears its ugly head as you get further into the game. Upon netting the game's penultimate crystal and unlocking the jobs hidden inside it, you realize that most of Final Fantasy III's jobs are improvements of the ones you started with. For example, the Evoker is a lesser version of the Summoner, the Warrior is a lesser version of the Knight, and the White Mage is a lesser version of the Devout. Once you unlock these advanced versions of your previous classes, there's no reason to return to your old ones. The immediate result is that you need to tread carefully when entering a new environment with a party decked in new and novel job assignments. In extreme cases, you may need to stomp around a previous environment before progressing. That's NOT a great feeling, especially considering your job level is far more important than your character's individual level. Having more HP and better stats is nice, but needing to start all over again to get more spell slots with a magic casting job is never fun. Holding on to older classes out of stubbornness is not a viable strategy either, as late-game enemies will require you to use strategies locked behind specific jobs.

The clearest example comes when you explore a kingdom that a monstrous bird is attacking. You can use the classes and party composition you have enjoyed up to this point, avoiding the cue to use Dragoons. Still, you would be willingly tracking yourself into an inferior experience that is endlessly aggravating. Many unique classes fall into the same tired trope of having one or two scenarios where they make your life in a climactic boss battle easier, and it is up to you to think if these accommodations are something you want further. There's a specific boss battle where the Scholar is a virtual necessity, and it does a decent enough job of showcasing its upsides. Still, it falls to the wayside when you get the capstone classes that do gobs of damage regardless of an enemy's elemental affinities or weaknesses. Even with the unique classes that are not tracked to be superseded by direct replacements, the meteor that is Final Fantasy III's planned obsolesce comes for everyone and is not merciful. The sad thing is the game has a relatively breezy start wherein it actively encourages you to recreate your favorite parties from Final Fantasy I, sans Thief, and have a blast. The dungeons are relatively short, and the progression of those starting Wind Crystal jobs is straightforward and doesn't need a ton of interaction with the fiddly equipment system.

Tangent: Final Fantasy III's Pre-3D Remake Worldwide Releases Were Always Cursed

The release of Final Fantasy III outside of Japan before the 3D Remake, was cursed. The original game came out six to seven months before the Super Famicom came out in Japan, and while Squaresoft started the process of localizing it for markets outside of Japan, that seemed doomed from the start. The game was an unofficial last hurrah for the Famicom in terms of its size and scope. There are mountains of lines of dialogue to translate, and the size of its world dwarfed everything in the series that preceded it. Localizing the game was always going to be a Herculean task, and with people switching to the SNES and Genesis from the NES in the United States faster than anticipated, the diminishing returns on the effort seemed unavoidable. This is a weird fact to consider when you recognize that most of its programming was completed in Sacramento, California, a story we will discuss shortly. Correspondingly, the game was one of the earliest targets of the English-speaking fan translation community. When Final Fantasy III was released on the SNES, an active group of people was ready to correct you upon calling it the third Final Fantasy game on Usenet servers or BBSs. Fan translations of Famicom games took off with the release of the Windows-based emulator NESticle. The first fan-based effort to translate Final Fantasy III dates back to 1997, and the first "complete" translation dates back to March 1999. They are interesting to look at, but many of them represent the then-usual literal vs. figurative translation foibles of the era.

Yet, the rightful hesitancy of Squaresoft translating Final Fantasy III is not the end of the game's incredibly cursed localization history. The game was supposed to get a Wonderswan Color remake that Bandai, the manufacturer of the Wonderswan, spent a considerable amount of money to get. However, Squaresoft bit off more than it could chew and realized halfway into the project that the programming and coding for Final Fantasy III was far too complex and demanding for the handheld. Nonetheless, Final Fantasy I, II, and IV got Wonderswan Color remasters, which again speaks to how much of a creative and technical leap Final Fantasy III was compared to its predecessors and successors. Luckily for Squaresoft, Bandai pulled the plug on the platform before they could ding them for failing to follow through on their exclusivity deal. The game is also notably absent in the PlayStation's Final Fantasy Origins and Anthology releases, likely because the Wonderswan releases proved problematic. No one felt married to keeping its traditions and legacy alive, and it would be a tough cookie to crack. Luckily, that unfortunate trend has since come to an end.

Part 4: The Pieces Of What Makes The Final Fantasy Series Special Are Here

Final Fantasy III's story is not a riveting affair, but the blueprint for what we most like about the "classic" Final Fantasy games is undeniably here. Having played titles like V, VI, VII, and IX before playing III made me realize that Final Fantasy III set the stage for their meteoric heights. The lineage of games that owe a debt of gratitude to Final Fantasy III is more than Final Fantasy V. Jobs like Monk, Samurai, Dragoon, and Summoner are long-standing Final Fantasy icons, and even how they mechanically work can point to Final Fantasy III as an ancestor. How Eidolons work in Final Fantasy IX is a tradition with strong roots pointing to Final Fantasy III. That this game's legacy has been overshadowed by its reputation of being difficult or grind-heavy does a massive disservice to it AND the games influenced by it. Final Fantasy III is not the game that started the Town-Merchant-Overworld-Dungeon-Boss template, but it feels codified as part of the series' DNA by this point. There's a forced-loss boss battle against Bahamut that tutorials the "Run" command, and there's a Cid that helps you rebuild an airship after you crash and ruin it. There's even a moment when a companion heroically sacrifices themselves to save the lives of your characters. The broad vinegar strokes of the franchise are here, and the bones in this steak are not rotten.

There are also meaningful improvements to what the Final Fantasy team attempted regarding characterization and storytelling. I won't sit here and tell you the default guest character system adds an extra layer to an already in-depth story. Nonetheless, characters like Princess Sara or Prince Alus have character arcs. They are a massive step in the right direction from characters like Chaos in Final Fantasy I or Josef (i.e., the guy who gets crushed by a boulder) in Final Fantasy II. When you encounter this game's version of Cid and lift a curse on his village to use his airship, you find that's not the complete end of his story. You can choose to spend an Elixir, which is not easy or cheap to come by at this point in the game, to save Cid's wife from a soon-to-be terminal illness. You want to do this, but you don't have to, and it leads to one of the first examples of the Final Fantasy games presenting a "moral dilemma" and divergent story point. Elixirs are handy items, and Cid's treasure has practical uses, but only if you value the jobs they connect to and his companionship in the rest of the game. It's a rudimentary choice but a novel and admirable one at that. It may have driven me crazy, but some jobs, such as the Bard and Summoner, are works in progress when you get them, and to collect their full utility, you'll have to explore optional locations, dungeons, and bosses. This is precisely how Mog's Dance-based system functions in Final Fantasy VI. Complimenting an RPG for having side quests and exploratory content might sound weird. However, this is the Famicom/NES we are discussing, wherein developers planned around a CPU with access to 2 kilobytes of onboard working RAM!

And this is the game when Squaresoft's Final Fantasy team feels like they finally decided to care about the storytelling aspect of roleplaying games. The towns represent the jobs in the game you can use and convey differing cultures and ways of life. Some NPCs do more than talk about far-off mythological evils that are bound to bring the world into disrepute. There are even optional towns and side quests to complete, which certainly did not start here, but Final Fantasy III is the game that pushed the original Final Fantasy team to do things differently from the rest of the RPG developer field. One of the earliest examples of this comes from a kid who challenges you to find a Chocobo and use it to circumnavigate the game's initial continent. There are no trash mobs to off nor an epic boss battle to process. It's an entirely non-violent challenge that makes you realize they were already starting to think outside of the box with their game design, an early sign of what was to come with the design ambitions of Final Fantasy IV and VI in particular.

However, the most prominent narrative accomplishment in Final Fantasy III is one that several future entries would emulate to great results. When your characters begin exploring the Tower of Owen, they realize they live on a floating continent suspended in the air by a field of magic and are a small piece of a larger world. When you beat the evil Medusa boss on the top of this tower, your characters are throttled off this continent and forced to explore the vast wastes of the remaining world. That's right, this is one of the first times a Final Fantasy game utilizes shifting worlds, and the result is incredible. While you start to doubt the game's claims of using extra memory on its cartridge, it pulls the rug from underneath you and forces you to pick up the pieces. It is BY FAR the best individual moment in the game. Sure, Final Fantasy I messes with you to a degree with its dimensional shifting tomfoolery at the end of its story. Nonetheless, there's no denying that the multi-world shifts in Final Fantasy IV, V, and even VI are all permutations of a trope that Final Fantasy III pioneered. When we think about the series's penchant for mid-game plot twists and thematic pivots, it sounds weird, but that tradition became a staple thanks to Final Fantasy III repeating it with production values that far exceeded Final Fantasy I.

And the overworld exploratory stuff in Final Fantasy III is a significant improvement from the first two games. The overworld is not just more extensive but also more dynamic and detailed. The game's use of overworld-based cutscenes and establishing shots showcases Squaresoft's knack for high-tier production values. Before I go on a mini-rant on why the game's habit of using a stick rather than a carrot to force you into checking out its alternate jobs blows, let's give the design team some credit where it is due. The first crystal bestows what are essentially the jobs you had in Final Fantasy I, and they have enough combat efficacy that you can use them for almost half of the game. Had they not had tailor-made scenarios that force you to break away from your preferences, there would have been a real risk of their hard work programming some intricate and creative combat options going entirely ignored. I'm usually not a fan of the Thief class in these games, but being able to open locks and doors without needing to spend precious resources on keys led me to realize they had plenty of other uses, especially in combat. Likewise, seeing the Scholar use the "Libra" command to look up a boss's HP and abilities made me realize that the Libra command has been baked into the series far longer than I initially thought. Equally revelatory is when your characters crash and destroy their first airship; they are prompted to use an alternate vehicle instead. It's the first example of a Final Fantasy game giving you multiple vehicles, even some that transform on command.

But HOT DAMN, am I grateful the old guard of the Final Fantasy team did not look at what they accomplished in Final Fantasy III and think their work was done. As someone who will bat for Final Fantasy V as a top-eight game in the series, what Final Fantasy III lacks in comparison to the games that came after it is nothing to equivocate. Relatively seamlessly swapping jobs in and out in Final Fantasy V is what allows that game to continue to be revived by enthusiasts when the Four Job Fiesta event rolls around. That malleability is completely lacking in Final Fantasy III, and any community-oriented initiative is impossible. While I respect the Squaresoft team for trying new ideas to make players feel like they should check out all the classes at least once, the result is annoying and frustrating. They didn't know how to create organic in-game incentives to check out the jobs they designed, and what you are left with are the Mini-based dungeons, which act as incredibly arbitrary gates. In these dungeons, you must have members of your party inflicted with the "Mini" status, which renders all physical attacks inert and thus requires parties of entirely magic casters. Now, these dungeons are one of the most hated aspects of Final Fantasy III, and while I agree, they are not that big of a deal because the majority are incredibly short. Nonetheless, they are half-assed as the game drops the mechanic entirely by its third act, and you are left with a half dozen environments where you spend spell slots to miniaturize your party members and then again to reverse that effect. You may have the foresight to buy four items that either bestow or lift the status effect, but even that presents an early impediment as the items are not easy to find or cheap. However, yet again, the Final Fantasy team slightly stumbled, but let's not act like the experience didn't help them find a better alternative. Future games did not give you a square hole and bludgeon you over the head to put a square peg in that hole as Final Fantasy III does.

Part 5: Final Fantasy III Was Still Of The Era When Yuji Horii And Dragon Quest Were Running Laps Around Squaresoft

So imagine for a bit, but we are in Japan in the year of our lord, 1987; Wizardry, Dungeons & Dragons, and this little thing called Dragon Quest were all the rage. Out of this primordial soup came Final Fantasy I, which did well enough in a crowded field that Squaresoft moved forward with a sequel, Final Fantasy II in 1988 and Final Fantasy III in 1990. It's hard to imagine, especially from a non-Japanese perspective, but even well into Final Fantasy V, the series lived in the shadow of the Dragon Quest series. To say Final Fantasy III's development and programming team did not pay Dragon Quest/Warrior III's job system, even a cursory look, is a joke. The ubiquity of job systems in JRPGs was all the rage thanks to Dragon Quest III's stab at it, and for nearly three whole years, it was one of the most commonly emulated mechanics in the entire JRPG field. While you can continue to point to the early 8-bit era Final Fantasy games as pulling more from D&D all you want, I would push the theory that if Dragon Quest III doesn't have a swappable job system, then Final Fantasy III's notions of jobs would likely have been a retread of what we saw in the first game.

Please don't take this preamble to suggest I am not aware or cognizant of the fact that Dragon Quest in and of itself wasn't lifting its ideas from outside sources as liberally as the early Final Fantasy games. The JRPG formula of the 1980s and '90s essentially boiled down to sanding off the rougher edges of Wizardry and Ultima. Hence, one of the most heartwarming things you can watch from 2023 is Dragon Quest's creator, Yuji Horii, nerding out in his first face-to-face interaction with Robert Woodhead, and he repeatedly refers to Woodhead as the more substantial figure of the two. Nonetheless, with Final Fantasy III, Squaresoft steered the series back to what made the first game popular in a proper "sequel" after Final Fantasy II was decidedly not that. The difference, as I have already reviewed, is that the game expands upon the storytelling experiments of Final Fantasy II and the broad concepts of a job system already extant in Final Fantasy I. However, those improvements largely came from an unofficial industry-shared blueprint following the release of Dragon Quest III. And the issue here is that Final Fantasy III is not the game where Squaresoft was ready to challenge the conventions of Dragon Quest.

And for those of you who would attack me in suggesting that the Dragon Quest franchise still had Final Fantasy beat past Final Fantasy II, I beg you to play Dragon Quest III. Dragon Quest IV deserves credit for breaking its story into five distinct acts, a structure Squaresoft would borrow from HEAVILY when making Final Fantasy IV and VI. It also made the overworld navigational aspects of JRPGs mechanically engaging with its caravan system. That said, Dragon Quest III is the quintessential 8-bit JRPG. Like Final Fantasy III, it has a class/job system. Still, with Dragon Quest III, you hire characters to fill up the remaining slots, and whatever your party composition may be, that influences the core stats of the game's primary hero. These jobs progress linearly but coherently and can be promoted upon reaching level twenty. Dragon Quest III allows you to swap different characters in and out freely and doesn't dally about the size of its open world, either. All of this suggests that the rough edges in Final Fantasy III weren't a secret recipe that hadn't been discovered yet. The answers were there.

And I can hear the usual choir of readers ready to send me comments and rebuttals about how Dragon Quest has never been about storytelling and never will be. To that, I again ask you to return to Dragon Quest III. With the game being the third in a series, it presents itself as "another one of those," with a king tasking your character to off a much-ballyhooed legendary evil. For the first TEN HOURS, it plays as you expect, repeating the series' undercurrent of familial ties to destiny, with this one framing the protagonist as the son or daughter of the most famous hero up to that point. You go through multiple dungeons collecting articles of their father's legendary equipment before going to the Underworld. While there, you find them in tatters, having all but failed to complete their last mission to fend off one last great evil from taking over the world. As your character approaches their beloved father, they shockingly ask you to apologize to their child for their failure, with the message being that your character's father doesn't even know who you are. But that's not even close to the plot twist I want to discuss most. After your father directs you to save the world from Zoma, you do, and the world heralds you as the greatest hero ever and bestows you the title of Erdrick, the title of the main characters in Dragon Quest I and II. That's right, Dragon Quest III's plot twist is that it isn't a sequel. In its final moments, it subverts your expectations and shows you its hand. It reveals that it is actually a prequel, and at the end of its credits, directs you to continue the story and carry on the legacy of its character by playing Dragon Quest I and II. That's ballsy, and you know what? The ending plot twist of Dragon Quest III might have the storytelling highs of the Final Fantasy franchise beat even up to Final Fantasy IV.

I fought Djinn, Medusa, Gutsco, and Hein in the first half of my playthrough of Final Fantasy III, and I couldn't tell you a thing about who they were or why they wanted to see the world burn. The game takes you across distant lands and shows a diverse and often beautiful plethora of environments. And yet, it feels empty. You trudge through narrow corridors in caves and temples, and even when they lead to a big cinematic boss battle, you can't help but feel like something is missing. As I will discuss next time, the game does make some honorable efforts at building a mythos, but you can tell the Final Fantasy team did not have the experience or confidence to take substantial risks with how they structured or told a story. The most significant risks in this game come from improvements to established series and genre conventions and scale. The game dwarfs most of its contemporaries in size and scale, but again, much of that is very literally empty space, and when it isn't cluttered with annoyances meant to force you to engage in grind-based feedback loops, something still feels "off." And yet, even that isn't a grave sin that should condemn this game to the bottom of the series' rankings. If it helped a team "get there," can it be as bad as the internet wants you to believe?

Tangent: Nasir Gebelli - The Most Important Person To The Success Of Final Fantasy You've (Likely) Never Heard Of

It is slightly amusing to think that Final Fantasy III never got a North American release until the 3D Remake, considering most of it was programmed in Sacramento, California. There's a fun and forgotten story about why that's the case. For the first three Final Fantasy games, while Hironobu Sakaguchi was the series' director and Hiromichi Tanaka was its lead designer, the early Final Fantasy figureheads had a slight Achilles' heel: none of the company's hometown boys were great programmers. To fill that void, Squaresoft ended up scouting an Iranian-American programmer who had already made a name for themselves in computer games named Nasir Gebelli. Gebelli was the lead and primary programmer for the first three Final Fantasy games and made major contributions to Secret of Mana/Seiken Densetsu 2. How vital was Gebelli to Squaresoft's early success? When Gebelli's work visa expired before production on Final Fantasy III ended, rather than let him go, Squaresoft took the unprecedented step of relocating its entire programming staff to Sacramento to complete the game with Gebelli still part of the team. He was THAT IMPORTANT to Final Fantasy III.

Gebelli "solved" a lot of the issues the Final Fantasy team encountered throughout its first three games. Final Fantasy I's side-view battles and transportation by canoe, boat, and airship? Yeah, Gebelli was the one who programmed them into the game after pitching them to Sakaguchi and others. Final Fantasy II's activity-based progression system and dialogue choices? Gebelli was the one who made the raw ideas of Akitoshi Kawazu work. And for Final Fantasy III, Gebelli was the one who programmed the game engine that made the game's job system work. Those guts came from him, and as they are the same guts that inspired dozens of Final Fantasy games since, he's by far one of the most essential figureheads to the international cache of the franchise. And his impact does not simply stop with Final Fantasy. He returned to Squaresoft to work on Secret of Mana and was instrumental in programming its pausable real-time combat system, Ring Command menu, cooperative multiplayer, and programmable AI. And suppose you are still skeptical that Gebelli is a figure worth celebrating. In that case, consider the fact that John Romero credits him as his favorite programmer, Mark Turmell cites him as an inspiration for getting into game development, and Jordan Mechner has referred to him as his ultimate role model. Gebelli deserves so much more credit, not just among Final Fantasy enthusiasts but also throughout the entire gaming hobby.

The Neo Geo Pocket Color Is A Cool Thing (And So Is/Was Portable Gaming)

We live in a new era of gaming where dedicated handhelds are all but dead, with the Switch, smartphones, and portable PCs taking up their mantle. What sometimes gets lost with time is how handhelds and the games developed for them had their own unique style and feel to take advantage of the preferred setting in which most handhelds were used, which was during quick breaks between work sessions or while on the go and outside of home entertainment settings. The traditional handheld games of yesteryear could be things you could pick up and play for a few hours and then walk away from for days and not feel like you were completely lost when you eventually returned to them. That's something that is critically missing about today's "portable" games, and partly why I'm unconvinced the Switch is a proper replacement for handhelds and why I haven't taken the plunge on the Steam Deck. When I'm in a mobile or outdoor setting and want to kill some time, I'm usually not in the mood to continue a single-player game I put on stasis a few hours back, nor am I interested in starting a console-lite experience that still requires my undying attention every second, which is how most mobile or gacha games operate. Speaking of mobile games, following updates, balance patches, and story expansions puts them on par with console experiences. With the Switch, and I know I get people in my mentions angry at me when I say this, but playing undocked feels like a scam. I do not enjoy playing Switch games meant for home entertainment set-ups on a paltry screen with a questionable refresh rate and a lack of real estate to display most game UIs legibly. And with the Steam Deck, I don't know how some of you are getting away with holding that thing for more than two hours and not feeling like your wrists are about to turn to dust. I miss devices like the Game Boy, PSP, Nintendo DS, 3DS, and Neo Geo Pocket Color. One of those things might not seem like the others, but let me explain, and you'll understand where I'm coming from.

In 1996, Nintendo unleashed a video game and multimedia effort called Pocket Monsters, and the world has never been the same since. The franchise/brand has come to define and set worldwide standards for video games and television media marketed for children. At its core is a role-playing game, initially inspired by Dragon Quest II, mixed with the Japanese approach to pet culture. In Pokémon's shadow came hundreds of imitators and knock-offs that are too many to list or annotate on any given blog or list. Nonetheless, what often gets forgotten is how Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow carried the Game Boy for an additional two to three years before Nintendo transitioned its handheld division to the Game Boy Color. And even then, Red/Blue/Yellow still couldn't dethrone Tetris as the best-selling game on the device, and Nintendo classified it as a "surprise success" at best. Equally funny is that the original Game Boy got mixed reviews from most hardware and software publications when it first came out. Many publications, like EGM, advised people to buy Sega's Game Gear or NEC's TurboExpress instead of the OG Game Boy, citing the device's lack of a backlight, inferior graphics, bulky design, and limited control inputs as being significant deal-breakers. But none of that mattered because it had Tetris.

When the Game Boy Color came out, while it launched with a decent enough horde of software, one of its key selling points was its backward compatibility with all existing Game Boy software. This feature allowed it to launch with a starting library no competitor could match in the handheld market. With the fifth generation of video game hardware, Sega's Game Gear and Atari's Lynx were all but out of the picture. Sega would attempt to remain in the handheld arena with their ill-fated Nomad device, but it failed. If you were patient and lived in Japan, 1999 would mark the release of the Wonderswan, the only pre-PSP handheld to make Nintendo sweat as it competed aggressively on its home turf and had Gunpei Yokoi, the former head of Nintendo's handheld division, spearheading it. What often needs to be remembered is the OTHER competitor to the Game Boy Color, the Neo Geo Pocket, and its reboot, the Neo Geo Pocket Color. I can hardly blame you if this is a platform you hadn't heard of until now because non-Game Boy or DS handheld alternatives out in the wild, pre-PSP, were and are not easy to come by. Despite starting with a launch portfolio of fourteen games, sporting a forty-hour battery life, and featuring an incredibly satisfying arcade-style "clicky stick" joystick, the Neo Geo Pocket Color lacked retail support and launched when SNK was in its late 90s death throes.

The Neo Geo Pocket Color did not have a chance, especially when Nintendo had already secured a virtual monopoly in handheld gaming when Pokémon Gold/Silver came out. This fate for the device is unfortunate because the Neo Geo Pocket Color is an incredible piece of hardware with some true gems worth checking out. I have never touched or seen a Game Gear or Lynx, but I did have the honor of playing SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium on a Neo Geo Pocket Color, thanks to a neighborhood friend of mine. The microswitched analog stick was perfect for the bevy of MVS and AES SNK arcade ports that were released on the device and made it one of the few handhelds that emulated the fighting game experience without the end product sucking complete shit. Need I remind you of the Mortal Kombat Game Boy game? Other SNK properties like Samurai Shodown and Metal Slug have NGPC ports and are total blasts. Also, not wanting to give its competition ammunition, Sega made a Sonic Neo Geo Pocket Color game, and it's pretty much on par with the first few Sonic Advance games. And then there's the platform's attempt at a Pokémon stand-in, Biomotor Unitron, which is by no means a failure or without merits.

Biomotor Unitron Is What Pokémon Would Be If It Was Way More Honest About Its Dragon Quest And CRPG Roots

SNK jumped into the handheld gaming field in 1999, while Nintendo maintained a complete grip on the market. Though it came out a solid year before Pokémon Silver/Gold, children of the late 90s and early 2000s were already amid "Pokémon Fever." Thus, it made sense for SNK to fund a game that allowed their fledgling handheld to claim it had "one of those." Third-party developers were already hard to come by for the Neo Geo Pocket Color. Still, SNK did have its share of stalwarts in Japan willing to work with them thanks to their MVS and AES work, and therein comes developer Yumekobo Co., Ltd., previously known as Aicom Corporation. For those familiar with second and third-tier NES and TurboGrafx-16 games, Aicom is commonly associated with having zero consistency with its development quality. On the one hand, they made Polestar, Viewpoint, and Blazing Star. On the other hand, they also made that godawful Golgo 13 NES game (i.e., The Mafat Conspiracy), the TG-16 home port of P-47 Thunderbolt: The Freedom Fighter, and Vice: Project Doom. However, by the time the fifth generation of consoles and handhelds came around, they tied themselves to SNK at the worst possible time a developer could do so. SNK's arcade fortunes were already regressing, their home console efforts were going nowhere, and they were bleeding money on the Neo Geo Pocket Color. Thus, when SNK went bankrupt, so did they.

However, one of the odd things to come from the partnership between SNK and Yumekobo, beyond a half dozen amazing handheld fighting games, was Biomotor Unitron, a Pokémon-like that also saw fit to try its hand at traditional CRPG tropes. Biomotor Unitron and Pokémon have light RPG mechanics, dueling other monsters or creatures as the focal point of combat, sprite-based navigable overworlds, and collecting new abilities or things as a core mechanic. There are rock-paper-scissor weaknesses, and Biomotor Unitron's battle screen feels directly lifted from Pokémon Red/Blue. However, Biomotor Unitron makes some significant deviations from the Pokémon formula that most Pokémon-likes rarely do. First, it embraces Wizardry-lite dungeon crawling with dungeons that are procedurally generated, which makes grinding for resources and experience points differ between game sessions and playthroughs. It might get ever so slightly annoying later as you go, but having dungeons throw different floorplans and mazes at you every time you enter them spices things up and adds some variety. Likewise, you are only ever in control of one robot avatar in combat, and your combat options are limited to two to three choices, discounting items. The way Yumekobo adds differentiation with such a limited combat system is through a novel and in-depth kitbashing mechanic. Unlocking new abilities stems not from the simple process of gaining new levels but from combining different robot parts with others and seeing what emerges from your experiments. The game provides you with an in-game list of abilities and robot parts, and if you are smart enough, you can deduce how to unlock things based on your prior mechanical ventures and gaps in your records.

The first example of Biomotor Unitron being far more honest about its RPG roots stems from these collection and item-refining-based mechanics. To allow players to see stat growth better or the benefits of these sub-systems, Biomotor Unitron opts for a classic paper doll inventory system wherein you bolt different body parts onto your mech's opposing arms, legs, and head. The story's structure also resembles a compromise between classic CRPGs and the kid-to-tween demographic courted by Pokémon. The story plays out entirely in a single city or hub, like the early Wizardry or Diablo games, and as you progress in the game, different NPCs will unlock, and your interactions with them will depend on your actions in the story. You pilot a single mech suit when tackling arena fights or exploring the surrounding dungeons, and your pilot is one of many different races, with male and female options as well. And though superficial in the long run, your initial choice impacts your starting stats and elemental affinities. For example, I opted for a mermaid man in a sailor outfit who was doubly effective against fire-type enemies. To progress the story, you must opt into a series of arena tournament battles that pit your mech suit against a gauntlet of boss battles. Predictably, the accompanying dungeons near the hub world provide drops for items and raw materials associated with different stages of the arena and the affinities of the bosses therein.

There are four dungeons, each with an elemental affinity to which you must pay attention. Similar to Pokémon, the penalties for failure are minimal, and you are actively encouraged to check out different evolutionary branches for your mech suit, as most, if not all, will assist in at least one boss rush or dungeon. Here's the one thing that Biomotor Unitron has Pokémon beat: the speed at which you can respond to changes in circumstance. In Pokémon, when you move from one gym or environment to the next, the changes of circumstances can force you to opt into hours worth of grinding. First, you need to catch new sets of Pokémon that can handle new elemental proficiencies and weaknesses. Next, you'll need to level them up to deal with their upcoming foes by unlocking their best abilities. In Biomotor Unitron, when you figure out the gimmick for a new environment or set of bosses, even if they off you, being able to swap out an ineffective part for a new one is pretty seamless and can be done on the fly, provided you have the appropriate materials. It's not an entirely painless affair, considering the random drops feel even more random thanks to the procedurally generated nature of the dungeons, and refining new parts can only be done in a single location. Nevertheless, it was a faster process than the hustle-grind in the Pokémon games that were contemporary to Biomotor Unitron.

Biomotor Unitron Is Far Breezier Than Pokémon, Which Is Its Best Attribute

I played Biomotor Unitron with Giant Bomb users ArbitraryWater and JeffRud, the latter of which called it a "video game shoggoth." It is a heaping mass of disparate parts, and it's easy to see where Yumekobo pulled its references as you play it. The kitbashing part-swapping nature of the robot means your in-game levels are less critical than they are in most RPGs, which is a very Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna approach to character progression. However, Biomotor Unitorn is far more generous to its players, which shows its Dragon Quest I and II spirit. The game also employs CRPG-inspired "Gear Check" bosses that immediately bash you into oblivion when you least expect it if you have not planned accordingly. However, with most bosses tied to specific dungeons, you have more than one way to opt into the in-game clues on how to beat them. That is not to say this game is challenging, as I was able to beat the game in about nine hours and can count on one hand the number of times I got a total KO during combat. The only real challenge comes if you take it upon yourself to discover everything in the game and refine or craft every discoverable part or ability. However, if you are like me and wish to see what Biomotor Unitron's best shot is, be it its anime sprites and visuals or Skinner Box mechanical trappings, you can blast through it, see those parts, and feel good about your investment in less than ten hours. That's right, Yumekobo made their Pokémon-like a ten-hour experience, and it is a goddamn revelation.

The fact you are only building a single mech suit is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing of this design choice is that it opts you out of needing to scrutinize optimal party compositions and lineups. The primary curse stems from the impact on variety when you engage with the longer dungeon spelunking sessions and see the same two moves for over twenty minutes. As I said, your mech's attacks are limited to only two options as they are connected to their two arms. And like my previous point, this too has pros and cons. There's minimal downtime in Biomotor Unitron, as you almost always know which attack is better and rarely need to consider buffs and debuffs. In this game, you should constantly attack and not stop for nothing. Yes, this makes the combat simpler, and that might not be what some of you want, but with the game having a bunch of wild and bananas Neo Geo Pocket Color art to share, being able to run through combat quickly is a key. When I say this game has "good art," I mean it. One major positive about the art is that when you initiate the arena fights and battle against opposing mech bosses, you can identify new impressive robot parts and their strengths and weaknesses based on how they perform and animate in combat. The hub world features a diverse assortment of fantasy stand-bys, but the enemies you encounter in the wild are certainly "something." My jaw dropped when I discovered one of the enemies was called "Pengun," and it was nothing more than a penguin carrying a Glock aimed at the screen.

There's not much wandering around in worlds, and the game's primary local, its hub world, is nothing more than an abstraction of a menu-based inventory system. There are no long treks around a town to find a Pokecenter or market. Instead, you shift left or right to click on NPCs and locate vendors, and when you have exhausted all of your options, you know it is time to jump into combat. Biomotor Unitron throws you into your first tournament the minute you talk to the person in charge of the arena. The tournaments and going up the arena's ranks are the story's focal point for the first half of the game. If you explore the dungeons, you'll find that the game's power curve places roadblocks that require you to reinvest time into discovering the next level of robot parts before going further. The same goes for the arena combat. Meeting all the NPCs and starting a new batch of bosses in the arena is occasionally slower than I would like. Still, I appreciated how there was no mystery about what I needed to do or where I needed to go. There are six tournaments, and the game gently encourages you to explore the dungeons between tournaments to nab new resources and boost your mech's base stats. When you finish the starting tournaments, you initiate the game's ending, which prompts you to defeat four legendary god-like entities found at the end points of each dungeon to beat the ultimate evil plaguing the world. It's simple, but with plenty of bizarre visuals and robot parts to discover, the game's snappiness ensures you never tire of its rigamarole.

I'm getting older with time. I know this is a crazy idea, but I have finally come to terms with the notion that I will not be the "chosen one" to beat Father Time. With this admission in mind, the grind-based feedback loops of Pokémon do not hold as much weight on me as they once did. The franchise, even with its new accommodations like the Wild Area in Sword and Shield, expects a level of free time I can only partially commit to for a handful of weeks or a few months at best, and that still only results in me experiencing what feels like the tip of the iceberg. Don't get me wrong. I played a ton of Generations I through IV of the Pokémon series, but that was because the multimedia fever got me good, and I didn't know any better. With hindsight, I'm prepared to admit that Dragon Warriors Monsters is mechanically better designed than Silver and Gold, and Biomotor Unitron respects your time more than 90% of the series. I'm old enough to remember how the first two Dragon Quest games ended south of twenty hours, and I miss that. So, getting the same mechanical thrills of a classic-era Pokémon game in less than twenty hours certainly speaks to me.

But That's Not To Say It Is Free From Some Rough Edges

There's a cost to Biomotor Unitron's more straightforward approach to the Pokémon formula, and that is its lack of depth, especially by the standards of Silver and Gold. The dungeons might have randomization to spice things up, but inevitably, there's a basic template of "this is the ice area, this is the fire area, this is the earth area, etc." that is unmistakable. I would also point out that the legibility of its symbols and visual indicators, especially those for its elements and affinities, is poor, and there were times when I felt as if I was punting in the dark when trying out a new weapon because I didn't know what its icon translated to. The item list that the game encourages you to review also has legibility issues, but the real problem is the game's repetition. With its heart essentially in the CRPG arena circa the 90s, the steps it wants you to follow are:

1. Grind in a dungeon.
2. Buy new parts from a merchant.
3. Kitbash new parts in a menu-based garage.
4. Talk to NPCs.
5. Buy healing items.
6. Fight in an arena.
7. Repeat until you get to the end.

Again, this structure is what Pokémon expects you to do, but with monsters and overworld-based exploration. Nonetheless, I was disappointed at the lack of authentic variability between the mech parts and the animations for the unique abilities and attacks, and with this game limiting you to two attacks per battle, cool animations would have gone a long way.

And the Wizardry and Rogue DNA in the game has some stark downsides as well. Biomotor Unitron is a crafting-based Pokémon-adjacent experience, and while it does fudge its numbers in your favor a bit, it's less than you'd like. There was a point in my playthrough when I knew what materials I needed to assemble a new robot arm to make the next arena gauntlet a breeze. Still, the randomized drops were not in my favor for a whole day, and I spent HOURS trying to get one unit of Platinum and two units of Tungsten. Some merchants can provide these resources, but bizarrely, the one that has the rarest minerals was programmed to have a randomized inventory. When I could not get the Random Number Goddess on my side in the dungeons, I found myself bopping in and out of the hub world and overworld six or seven times until finally, the gnome that sold rare-earth minerals had the piddly single unit of Mithril I needed. The good news is that when the drops do work in your favor, finding a winning combination of parts is seamless, but that results in a different problem. The power curve in Biomotor Unitron is non-existent if you do even surface-level research or investment in its mechanics. At one point, I had one shield that blocked virtually all elemental damage at 85% and an attack that wasted most random encounters in a single move. Until the final bosses, the game simply had nothing up its sleeve to throw me for a loop for upwards of one-third of my playtime.

While I loved it for the most part, there's one part about the game's kitbashing gameplay that I am mixed about. The issue stems from Biomotor Unitron's use of evolutionary deadends. There are a lot of items, raw materials, and robot parts for you to play around with, but only some combinations are helpful. Whether you are attempting to bash together two things with conflicting affinities or opposing animal robot types, Biomotor Unitron has the gall to present you with weak final evolutions or only slight improvements of what you started with. I respect the game trying to subvert the player's expectation that every evolution or weapon combination should be good. Still, when you consider how its drops work or that there is a failure rate with any kitbash attempt, this design choice gets incredibly annoying. So much so I recommend you consult a guide on what you should make. Even when accepted at face value, there are a lot of weapons that end up being palette swaps of ones you have already encountered. If you play the game blindly and authentically, taking the time to scour dungeons for minutes upon end and having that hard work result in a palette swap, in my case, getting a spiked fist that did 40 damage when I already had a spiked fist from an other kitbash attempt with different parts that also did 40 damage, is undeniably disagreeable.

But the big thing I can predict some of you pushing back on involves the game's dungeons. If you do not like the idea of procedurally generated and randomized dungeons, this game is likely not for you. Every time you exit a dungeon, it will reset and provide a different floorplan with different treasure chest placements than your previous exploratory effort. The dungeons also speak to an era of CRPG and JRPG level design where you likely could piss straighter lines in the snow than the routes you walk in Biomotor Unitron. The camera, which you have no control over, is honestly too zoomed in for you to get a good gauge of where corners or exits are, and with things being randomized, circling to find exits takes way more work than it should. That's doubly the case when you get near the end of the game, and the objective becomes "Just get to the bottom." The random encounter rate also increases as you progress into the dungeons, which certainly does not help. And you end up spending a disproportionate amount of your time in these dungeons because they are not proccing the one thing you need or want when you enter them, even when it employs random encounters every three paces.

Hey, This Game Is On Switch & Steam, And So Are A Ton Of Great Neo Geo Pocket Color Games!

Again, my big takeaway from playing Biomotor Unitron was my innate nostalgia for "classic" handheld gaming. There was something about my ability to play Biomotor Unitron for two days and then take a break from it for three and jump back into it without needing to read up on a refresher course that I genuinely loved. The game speaks to the uniqueness of portable gaming. During this period, and for two decades more, handheld gaming development outfits knew that they had to design games that used limited resources and needed to be playable in short bursts. Biomotor Unitron leans into this even further by fully embracing an up-tempo structure that constantly has you thinking about how to move forward. Taking the heart of Pokémon and classic CRPGs and stewing them into a ten to fifteen-hour experience is the game's true stroke of genius. If I had this game to keep me busy during my elementary days or during long and lazy Summer Breaks, I would have loved it even more.

If you share my nostalgia for those relaxed bygone years, consider this: Biomotor Unitron is relatively easy to come by these days! In fact, the best titles on the Neo Geo Pocket Color are shockingly well-supported on the Nintendo Switch and Steam! The revitalized SNK has spearheaded a new emulation effort called "Neo Geo Pocket Color Selection," which takes a note from Sega's Genesis Collection. There are two "seasons" to buy, and the first one provides the notable fighting games and Metal Slug titles on the handheld. The second gives you arcade sports games, Biomotor Unitron, SNK v Capcom Card Fighters Clash, and the Mega Man fighting game I mentioned during the introduction! The second volume has a lot of variety for those of you, like me, who might not be colossal fighting game fans. All of these games are lovingly emulated, play at excellent framerates, and, most importantly, take handheld games and adapt them for modern monitors or hardware so they do not look like pixelated nightmares. The asking price of $40 for each package or season is steep, but at least you can buy Biomotor Unitron as a standalone game on the Switch for $8.

Absent in this collection is Biomotor Unitron's sequel, which never saw a proper Western release as the Neo Geo Pocket Color's international support was discontinued before its release in Japan. I have checked Kikou Seiki Unitron's fan translation fairly regularly over the past few months and have been disappointed to discover it has likely been abandoned in a partial state. While shop menus and battle screens remain completely localized, the game's dialogue, item descriptions, fighting prompts, and weapon bios are 50% translated or less. This problem is undeniably disappointing, as Kikou Seiki Unitron sounds like an improvement over the first game in every regard. The sequel, to the best of my knowledge, has even more weapon variety and enemy types, a far more in-depth story and cast of characters, as well as better attack animations for your mech and foes. Maybe in the coming years, things will change, and SNK's non-fighting game projects and efforts will begin to get their due, but I'm not holding my breath.

Also, it would behoove me not to mention that Mohammed bin Salman currently funds and practically owns SNK. He is an authoritarian who murders dissident journalists, ordered a crackdown on feminist protests in his own nation, and is the architect of Saudi Arabia's military intervention in Yemen, which has caused a famine resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians.

The Sega Saturn Sure Is A Weird Console But At Least Emulation Is Finally "Solved"

For as long as I have been alive and playing games, the Sega Saturn has had a "reputation." During my early years, I accepted that reputation as fact and brandished it as a "failed" console that only weirdos on specific game boards or Usenet servers would discuss. It was a narrative I maintained into my adulthood that only changed thanks to the written and podcast works of Borgmaster and Jeffrud. In the past few years, I have since come to understand it to be, yes, a commercial failure, but one also largely victimized by System Wars or Console Wars hyperbole, and maybe the most of any video game console ever made. It's not THAT BAD and has an artistic and aesthetical identity severely lacking with the current slate of video game consoles and ecosystems. And if you think the Staurn should be brandished as a "failure," and that's all that needs to be said, I have to pose one fact to you. Foremost, and this next point is going to hurt, and I'm not sorry if I am the one who needs to break this news to you. But Japan and MOST of Europe did not give a SHIT about the Nintendo 64, and the Saturn outsold the N64 by a decent margin in Japan. The reputation of the N64 as a legendary platform that kept things competitive with Sony and was responsible for sunsetting Sega as a console figurehead is genuine fake news. "Saturnday" being a disaster and "299" standing as the single most significant E3 moment ever aside, the notion that the Sega Saturn was dead on arrival is primarily an American narrative that has since been grafted onto the console's whole reputation worldwide. As Borgmaster covered on his blog series, after the first year the PS1 and Saturn were in the midst of their "war," it was still not a foregone conclusion that the Playstation would win, which speaks to the quality of software carrying the Saturn as Sega's management continually kneecapped its viability.

What gets lost in the mix is a catalog of video games that pushed the technical envelope and a fairly dedicated team of programmers and designers that genuinely do not get the credit they deserve. The topic of this particular blog, Panzer Dragoon Saga, is a console JRPG with an almost fully 3D game world with full voice acting a whole three years before Squaresoft attempted as much with Final Fantasy X. And the Saturn itself is both at the core of why many of those games were able to achieve such impressive technical highs as well as the primary reason why those achievements got so little attention. What impresses me, jokes at the expense of Nights into Dreams aside, is that people could do outstanding 3D work on the Sega Saturn in the first place. If your frame of reference for good rail shooters is Rez or Star Fox, you owe it to yourself to at least play Panzer Dragoon II Zwei. Zwei utilizing fully 3D characters, enemies, particle effects, and worlds at 30 FPS with alternate paths and high-fidelity audio is astounding. The intricate animations of enemies and bosses are a sight to see if the game is a complete black void in your gaming knowledge. Similarly, Virtua Fight and Virtua Fighter 2 maintained a stable cadre of fighting game fans until Tekken 3 finally ripped that away from the Saturn.

Unfortunately, those historical landmarks went underreported even in the emulation and historical gaming crowd, thanks to the Sega Saturn being a peculiar thing. Originally envisioned as a console that would handle 2D sprites, mainly 2D sprites based on arcade hardware, Sega never planned for it to take on Sony's best shot. That's partly because Sony's best shot was still a big "known unknown" in the industry. However, midway through development, the advent of 3D graphics was starting to emerge, and rather than discard the progress they had made with their 2D processor, the Saturn development team decided to put two in-house video display processors into a single console. One would be better for handling 2D graphics and sprites, the other for 3D polygons. However, making these processors work together took a lot of work. I want you to imagine your computer or laptop that you are using right now having TWO GPUs, and it's not an SLI setup. Instead, each GPU works to accomplish entirely different things, and you have to enable one to do streaming or web surfing and the other for multimedia work or gaming. Likewise, at the end of the day, the Saturn really just wanted to spit out arcade-quality sprites, and Sega wasn't exactly clear about that. More alarming, Sega wasn't precisely forthcoming to third-party developers about strategies on how to use the Saturn's hardware to its fullest potential. Panzer Dragoon Saga, a fully 3D RPG experience on hardware that does not want to cooperate with such an endeavor, is nothing short of a miracle. On top of that, Panzer Dragoon Saga has about 90 minutes of full-motion video, which the Saturn was okay at handling but could have been better, especially if we are concerned about framerate. And yet, Sega was pitiful about getting out dev kits and creating developer networks that shared tips and advice like Sony did with the PS1. So, their lessons and accomplishments often, as is the case with Saga, became lamentable one-offs. Seriously, look at this real-time morphing they crammed into this game! How was Sega NOT sharing this knowledge with everyone that still cared about its hardware?

Those parallel processors are one of the MANY reasons why the Sega Saturn was, for ages, the Loch Ness Monster in the emulation community. Needing to translate not one or two processors but EIGHT, because I did not talk about the Saturn having multiple CPUs to support its dual GPU setup, has led to many emulator projects getting abandoned after showing initial promise. Yabause, one of the better options four or five years ago, was an acronym for "Yet Another Broken And Unfinished Saturn Emulator," and it only reached about a 70% compatibility rate before becoming abandoned. Another thorn in the emulation community's side is that the Saturn uses quadrilaterals rather than triangles as polygons. If you are an art or design major, that creative decision alone is an immediate "deal breaker." The sprites and 3D polygons warp and wobble much like they do on the N64 and PS1, but differently ever so slightly. Also, capturing how games like Panzer Dragoon Saga would oscillate between the Saturn's competing processors to complete different computational tasks takes a lot of work to translate on modern hardware. Finally, Panzer Dragoon Saga is sometimes one of the games many Saturn emulators outright avoid because it spans four discs, and disc swapping is a pain for emulators to handle.

Nonetheless, Mednafen, an open-source, multi-system emulator, has reached almost complete compatibility with the Sega Saturn. It is followed by SSF, a closed-source Windows-only emulator, and Kronos, a fork of Yabause, as decent alternatives. Solved are the weird framerate inconsistencies with older emulators and, in Saga's case, disc swapping, with the advent of Mednafen. All that remains now is the thorny issue of Sega Titan Video-oriented hardware and software, which is only partially "solved," but that's a topic for another blog. Discussing emulation is usually a thorny issue for some. Still, in the case of Panzer Dragoon Saga, it is a necessity, given playing the game as God intended will cost you over $2,000. Trust me, I scanned eBay for over two months, and the cheapest I saw Panzer Dragoon Saga go for was $575, which only had the discs and no game box. It remains one of the most coveted video games in the retro gaming collection hobby, and that was the case even before prices on old games exploded. I love you all, but I don't love you THAT MUCH. Finally, Fandom's Panzer Dragoon Wiki even has a guide on troubleshooting common issues with the most popular emulators with the Saturn Panzer Dragoon games. So, I will hazard a guess and say this topic isn't a big deal with Panzer Dragoon Saga fans.

The Panzer Dragoon Franchise Sure Is Confusing

To understand Panzer Dragoon Saga properly, you must understand the studio that created it: Team Andromeda. Team Andromeda was an internal branch of Sega, or Sega Consumer Research and Development Dept. #1 (i.e., Sega CS1), to be exact. Team Andromeda ballooned to slightly over forty people when development on Panzer Dragoon Saga peaked, a considerable number in the 1990s. As a comparison, the Virtua Cop port to the Sega Saturn had a team of five people. Sega and Team Andromeda preferred small and nimble groups, but they were signing up for a genre and type of game that would not allow that. Worse, Andromeda split its stretched team into two groups, with one half working on Panzer Dragoon II Zwei and the other on Saga. As if the stress levels couldn't get worse, Saga's prime directive from the CEO of Sega was to create "an RPG to outsell Final Fantasy and help the Saturn compete against the PlayStation." Talk about pressure. Still, Team Andromeda had a strong leader who was initially up for the challenge, and that man was Yukio Futatsugi. When Sega signaled to all of its internal teams that the Saturn was a real thing and it was taking pitches, Futatsugi emerged as someone willing to fill the corporate identified void for a shooting game after his pitch for a racing game lost out to a different Sega internal team offering to port Rad Mobile to the Saturn. However, being an art student with an appreciation for film, Futatsugi elected not to make a traditional shooting game. Instead, he pulled ideas from Space Harrier and decided for Panzer Dragoon that the shooting would take place on a dragon because he thought the articulation of the dragon would be a better showcase of the Saturn's power. And that's how Panzer Dragoon and Panzer Dragoon II Zwei came to be.

Panzer Dragoon was a decent enough success for the Saturn that Sega's corporate leaders saw Futatsugi as a possible figurehead for the company along with the likes of Yu Suzuki and Yuji Naka, and as a result, afforded Futatsugi and Team Andromeda more creative freedom than other divisions of Sega. Called "avant-garde and anti-establishment," Team Andromeda was at first a moderate-sized team of strong-willed artists not accustomed to needing to moderate ideas and concepts that were sometimes impractical or beholden to the laws of diminishing returns. Nonetheless, seeing their rival, Sony, successfully foster internal and third-party partners like Naughty Dog, Squaresoft, and Psygnosis, Sega's leaders encouraged Team Andromeda to think outside the box and aim creatively for the stars practically for their entire existence. Sega put twenty-plus art grads in the same room and expected everyone to get along, and even when things got messy with Panzer Dragoon Saga's development, they refused to get hands-on with its management. As such, when the team grew, Futatsugi and Sega got worse at managing personality clashes and conflicts during Saga's production. Saga's development quickly became a mess, with the game being delayed several times and its budget ballooning monthly and yearly. By the time it neared completion, the Dreamcast was already a talking point within Sega, which further gutted its team's spirits and led to calls from within its ranks for Sega's corporate administration to pull the plug. And here's an exciting part of the story. The game likely would have been canceled had it been in the hands of any other console manufacturer. However, Sega's CEO and Bernie Stolar were so impressed by the technical demos of Panzer Dragoon Saga they saw that they refused to cancel the game. Is Stolar somewhat to blame for the game's minimal software run? Sure, but he's also part of why we can play the game in the first place. This point leads us to the unfortunate fate of Team Andromeda. After Panzer Dragoon Saga underperformed and failed to turn the fortunes of the Saturn, Team Andromeda was subsumed with the Sega PC team to form Smilebit. If that name sounds familiar, you might know it better by its current name, Sega Sports R&D (i.e., the Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games team).

One of two possible reactions greets you when you mention "Panzer Dragoon Saga" on the internet. The first is from the Panzer Dragoon fandom, which maintains a pseudo-fanatical tenor with the game and its legacy. When you check Wikipedia's painfully long "List of video games considered the best" page, you'll notice that it is on there and most likely was added thanks to rigorous wrangling from the small subset of people who even got a chance to play it when it came out. The Panzer Dragoon fanbase is a small subset of people, but they are ravenous and are one of those sub-communities in the gaming hobby that always find their way to new discussions about their favored games. The other reputation is that this game is costly on the re-sale market, and there's a reason for that. Only 20,000 copies of the game were sold in North America, and only approximately 1,000 copies graced the entire continent of Europe. It did not help that its several delays placed it further on the fringes of the Saturn's lifespan. Hilariously, and there are two versions of this story, but one of the reasons why Panzer Dragoon Saga was delayed was to avoid having it released against Grandia. For one version of this story, it is claimed that Team Andromeda lacked confidence in their project, and they viewed Grandia as a threat. The other version holds management moved Saga's release away from Grandia because getting GameArts to side with Sega hardware was considered a "get," and management wanted to do them a solid. Nonetheless, the fact that it has good art, novel gameplay, or experienced a tortured production cycle falls to the wayside of the previous two reputations.

But what is Panzer Dragoon Saga? At its heart, Panzer Dragoon Saga attempts to marry a rail shooter with a JRPG with a design and programming team that had never made an RPG. It was also Team Andromeda's attempt to use the Saturn's 3D processor to set new gold standards of what fully 3D game worlds could look like. It was ALSO Sega's pet project meant to nab bragging rights from Sony and Squaresoft in light of Final Fantasy VII, while the two were at the zenith of their cultural and financial power. It might sound unbelievable, but the latter is the only actual "failure" of the game, as the end product is one of the most visually stunning and technically impressive games from the fifth generation of game consoles. And while we have seen teams that are not familiar with RPG conventions and then try their hands at repeating them in a new title to disastrous results ad infinitum, that's not the case here, either. The movement-based combat and 3D environmental exploration all lead to an experience that is welcoming to those who want a JRPG without the usual massive time investment. It is also an incredible experience for those who love getting into the nitty-gritty of the genre for hours upon end.

Panzer Dragoon Saga's Development Was Painful And Deeply Problematic

The center of why Panzer Dragoon Saga's development was so deeply problematic was the hardware it was attempting to work with, but also to blame was Team Andromeda constantly wanting to one-up what they were seeing around them. Though the game's initial target was to make a Saturn JRPG experience that matched and exceeded Final Fantasy VI on the SNES, as that was Team Andromeda's initial frame of reference, upon the release of Final Fantasy VII, they kept moving their personal goal posts to push the Saturn's hardware to its limits. As mentioned, the game features a staggering amount of voice acting, mainly in Japanese with English subtitles, and even in the era, the voice acting exceeded all standards for the medium in 1998. Likewise, Team Andromeda didn't take the easy route of programming its voice acting that close contemporaries like Metal Gear Solid took. It features facial animations and lip flap that matches the characters' words. Speaking of the game's audio design, we must discuss its musical score. The score is done entirely through pulse-code modulation and uses ZERO prerecorded music, an ABSURD creative decision to make from top to bottom. The result is that every track slaps and has a sharpness you usually don't experience in games of this era. The game's score is a mix of South American, African, Celtic, classical, and new age, and while that might sound confusing on paper, the final product is digital bliss to your ears. Admittedly, Zwei did the same in opting against using prerecorded music, but Zwei is a rail shooter where everything progresses at a break-neck speed. In an RPG with a semi-open world, doing so limits the number of usable loops for every track, hence why most cap out below the four to five-minute mark. Nonetheless, one exception is the game's final song that plays when you reach the credits, and this song, though done in the game's in-universe language of Panzerese, is the single best vocal piece to grace a fifth-generation console. It's better than the song at the end of Chrono Cross, and it is better than "Eyes on Me" and "Melodies of Life."

The artistic elitism that led to Team Andromeda becoming a premier branch of CS1 was a blessing and a curse. There's no doubting the talent and creative ambition that define everything the studio touched. Still, they committed so many unforced errors that caused Saga's development to progress painfully. First, the team used no graphics libraries and programmed everything from scratch, a decision that is simply unconscionable today. On top of that, Yukio Futatsugi convinced Sega's leadership to open up the checkbook to buy dozens of full commercial licenses of Softimage to assist in making an RPG with fully 3D worlds and real-time morphing effects. When Tomohiro Kondo, the producer of Zwei, admitted they were not the right person to design an RPG combat system, Team Andromeda convinced Sega leadership to let them "borrow" Akihiko Mukaiyama, the lead game and combat designer behind Sakura Wars/Sakura Taisen on the Saturn. Mukaiyama and Futatsugi have both admitted that because Team Andromeda felt the need to make things from scratch and not emulate Enix or Square's menu-based combat systems, merging the shooting gameplay of the Panzer Dragoon series into an RPG took a year of design and programming time alone.

More absurd is how the programming and design team shaded Panzer Dragoon Saga's 3D worlds. Panzer Dragoon Saga is one of the purest examples of a 3D game that utilizes Gouraud shading instead of flat or Phong shading techniques. Flat shading is the easiest, but upon inputting lighting sources creates an incredibly blocky look. During the early days of 3D graphics, there emerged two dominant styles that addressed that issue: Gouraud and Phong shading. Gouraud provides a standard vector to each vertex of a 3D object's surface and then calculates the light source and the vector for each vertex. In more complicated terms, it interpolates an in-engined light source for each vertex or interpolates colors across polygons to make the shading appear smooth. If you enjoy the 3D graphics of mid to late-era N64 games, you are more familiar with Phong shading. Phong shading is a significant improvement over Gouraud shading as it interpolates normal vectors across rasterized polygons, and for reflections, that normal vector is interpolated and normalized at each pixel. That might be too technical for most of you, but understand that Gouraud shading struggles with light sources that occur in the middle of large polygons, and when that light source attempts to spread across a surface, it extends unnaturally. If a programming and design team is stuck using Gouraud shading techniques, the only workaround is to increase the number of vertices in the object to make surfaces smoother. That last point is the kicker with Panzer Dragoon Saga's art team. They did not care about those diminishing returns for reasons that have never been made apparent. They kept banging their head on this very well-known shortcoming and did not stop. As costs ratcheted up, they kept at it, manually adding more pixel depth to everything in the game they could touch.

Now that we all appreciate that Team Andromeda was willing to go to technical extremes to make Panzer Dragoon Saga, we need to discuss the human cost of its development. Right off the bat, two people died during the production of Panzer Dragoon Saga. The first death was a motorcycle accident that Futatsugi still attributes to stress and lack of sleep stemming from overwork. The second death was a suicide directly attributed to the tensions and infighting experienced in Team Andromeda. Futatsugi has admitted that the deaths deeply impacted him and, to push the game across the finish line took on a "bad cop" persona or role in pushing out the factionalism in Team Andromeda but, in doing so, domineered over those who joined the team for its reputation of valuing creative freedom. Futatsugi has apologized for some of his authoritarian management during Saga's development but has primarily characterized it as "a necessary evil," which I must add some, but not all of his former co-workers, have accepted. With that in mind, it shouldn't be too surprising for you to know that when pressed on which game he considers his favorite project, Futatsugi has continually responded with "Phantom Dust." In a retrospective about the game, The Ringer put it best in saying that Panzer Dragoon Saga was "a game about a world in ruins, produced by a disintegrating development team haunted by heartbreak at a company in decline."

The First Disc Of Panzer Dragoon Saga Matches The Heights Of Final Fantasy VII's First Disc

But what about the game itself? As mentioned earlier, Panzer Dragoon Saga is a weird marriage between a rail shooter and an RPG, and the fact that this marriage works is a miracle. The fully 3D environments certainly have draw distance issues. Still, the first five to six levels provide sandboxes where you freely fly around with verticality (i.e., it uses an x, y, and z-axis). At the same time, random encounters pop off at rates dependent on the environment. While piloting the dragon, you can pick up hidden goodies and often solve an environment-based puzzle at least once per level. Even when out of combat, you can use your dragon's laser attack to take down enemy towers or defensive embattlements or blow up storage units to find new equipment. You accomplish this by pulling up the reticle, scanning for targets, and then unleashing a volley of lasers from the dragon, though the number of volleys you have depends on your level. The exploration bits in between the starts and ends of chapters essentially play precisely like the mainline Panzer Dragoon games and, as a result, are immensely more entertaining and more interactive than the standard overworld-based interludes found in anything Enix Corp. or Squaresoft made contemporaneously to Saga. And the levels are smartly designed, with the development team turning off random encounters entirely in levels they know you want to fly around and explore and do your usual Panzer Dragoon stuff.

The battle system follows the trend of Team Andromeda wanting to follow in the footsteps of the then titans of the JRPG landscape but with a twist or two. This next point will sound odd, but in Panzer Dragoon Saga, you only have three types of attacks. You can use a gun with the main character, Edge, your dragon's laser, and unique magical abilities. Specific enemy types will sometimes be immune to one of these attacks, prompting you to experiment with different strategies. When you unlock the dragon morphing mechanic, you will often enter a new level or dungeon, immediately tell what the gimmick is with its encounters, and then, on the fly, swap your dragon to a different alignment. The screen where you do this is incredible. However, the combat is where Team Andromeda's self-poaching of the director of Sakura Wars draws the most extraordinary dividends. In tapping a strategy/tactics designer to rehaul its combat system, Panzer Dragoon Saga utilizes a pseudo-real-time combat system where you rotate and fly around enemy groups and bosses to find weak points and vulnerabilities to deal extra or critical damage as you would with a back attack in Sakura Wars or Final Fantasy Tactics. It's an advantageous system and never ceases to make you feel good when you finally "get" the gimmick to any encounters, especially bosses. Yet, this combat system is still primarily turn-based, as your attacks depend on a bar that mimics the ATB meter in the Final Fantasy franchise. Nonetheless, you can still rotate around what you are attacking and use a compass with cardinal coordinates to move Edge and his dragon companion into red areas to deal double damage or green areas to avoid KO-dealing super moves.

Having the player dynamically manage their placement and position while thinking about their menu-based attacks leads to an experience that feels like a real-time combat system, even if it isn't. Each battle's a sweeping affair that's both pleasing to the eyes and an impressive technical display of what the Saturn was capable of. Also, Panzer Dragoon Saga essentially takes the sometimes dull and sluggish non-boss combat of JRPGs of this era and turns them into rhythm games wherein the specific encounter you are up against can be wasted in under twenty seconds, as long as you understand where you need to position yourself and which attacks work best against those enemies. A common issue with Final Fantasy VII and Dragon Quest VII is when you know you need to grind and are conscious that the battles you are in will take two to three minutes to complete, even though they are foregone conclusions. With Panzer Dragoon Saga, you use the radial indicator to immediately identify danger zones and safe areas to place your avatar. There's also a scoring/grading mechanic, and it rewards you for determining how to finish battles quickly and with as little taken damage as possible. Thanks to that, the battles become races with you trying to one-up yourself in beating them faster than last time. Speed is the name of the game with every Panzer Dragoon title, and the fact that Team Andromeda captured that in a genre that is notorious for bogging things down with menus and player-based analysis paralysis makes it worth playing even if you have grievances against the excesses of the JRPG genre. Likewise, every enemy encounter has unique animations that provide context clues on when you should rotate in and out of different zones to complete battles even faster, and that is nothing to scoff at.

If you still have hesitations about playing Panzer Dragoon Saga or think I have once again delved into histrionics, I at least implore you to get to the capstone of the first disc. In the levels leading up to the end of the first disc, you have sandbox-like environments teeming with fauna you can interact with however you see fit. You start in a snow-capped mountain before transitioning into a desert, and it is here when you experience the game's first "true" boss battle. Yes, there is a mini-boss in one of the previous interstitial environments that is equally impressive from a technical standpoint. However, after breaking apart some debris and entering a new cave system, you encounter a hulking behemoth named Gigra. I'm not a complete moron. I know boss transformations are not a new or novel concept in the land of JRPGs, but Panzer Dragoon Saga handles them far better than some still coming out today. When bosses transform or take new shapes, which was no small technical feat at the time of the game's release, you have new rhythms and tempos to discover. Bobbing and weaving replace needing to use whole turns to select the "Defend" prompt in more traditional JRPGs. Saga avoids that lamentable feeling of thinking you are wasting turns waiting for a boss to pop off their big laser beams or AOE attacks. You are never not thinking about where you should be next in Panzer Dragoon Saga, and employing the perfect strategy or sequence of moves on a massive boss like Gigra provides everything you need to know about what makes Saga so unique from a gameplay perspective. And its Disc 1 conclusion, wherein much of its pomp and circumstance come together with a sense of scale you seldom see in video games, does match the energy of the concluding moments at Midgar on Disc 1 of Final Fantasy VII. It conveys an epic scale that only by a hair misses the best works of Squaresoft. I only say that because Panzer Dragoon Saga lacks wholeness in its worldbuilding.

The Game Runs Out Of Ideas By The Start Of Its Third Disc (But It Isn't Alone In That Regard)

Panzer Dragoon Saga's sense of scale is still incomparable among console RPGs. Final Fantasy didn't make you feel like a pea in a larger world like Panzer Dragoon did until Final Fantasy X did so with some of the later Sin battles. After you get past the desert levels, Panzer Dragoon opens up its world and takes a stab at more orthodox JRPG stand-bys. There's a city that serves as the game's hub world for a good portion of the story, where you encounter merchants and NPCs. While the sign-posting and format of the city aren't great, the fact that every NPC has fully voiced lines of dialogue, even if it is irrelevant gossip, genuinely surprised me. A nearby caravan also showcases Panzer Dragoon Saga's attempt at conveying different types of cultures and societies. While your interactions are limited in that they feel very one-note, there's enough worldbuilding to at least keep you interested and invested in wanting to see what happens next. But there's no denying that this game is mainly about the gameplay. With the game's rail-shooter roots and world exploration almost entirely focused on cardinal coordinate-based movement, its transitions into its battles feel altogether seamless. That weird transition from freeform overworlds to turn-based combat that some groan about, a silly criticism if you ask me, doesn't exist here.

Nevertheless, there's nothing quite as effective as Midgar in Final Fantasy VII, and Panzer Dragoon Saga has no proper response or clap-back to Alexandria's dynamism in Final Fantasy IX. Team Andromeda set its sights on one-upping Squaresoft in the realm of gameplay and artistic ambition. And you know what? They met that goal. Still, being a team that barely cared about writing and worldbuilding from its inception, even at the peaks of Panzer Dragoon and Zwei, Team Andromeda missed the call regarding the RPG trend towards epic stories and dramatic characterization. On the flip side, there is a positive here: Panzer Dragoon Saga clocks in at around twenty hours and is even shorter if you avoid its side quest trappings and stay on its main path entirely. While there are some fun character-based interactions to be had, this route is probably the one I recommend. You want to run through this game quickly to enjoy the textures and kaleidoscope of 3D environments it has to share. I forgot to mention this point earlier, but the 3D-dominant processor in the Saturn had an unusual feature wherein it could take any texture and stretch it infinitely. The environments where you are hovering over oceans and large bodies of water are incredible because they stretch out into eternity, which adds to the game's themes of being isolated or far from civilization.

Edge is a fine protagonist; the person who voiced him also did an admirable job. There is a weird moment when the game suddenly transitions from using the fake in-universe "Panzerese" language the previous two games used to Japanese. Still, the inflections and intonations avoid anime dramatics I sometimes abhor, at least for the most part. The odd thing to note is that Team Andromeda did play Final Fantasy VII and the works of others and indicated that they wanted to avoid a spiky-haired anime trope like Cloud while avoiding a silent protagonist as well. With Edge, you end up with a JRPG with a remarkably "normal" character. Edge is a mercenary who wants revenge against someone who killed his father figure, and upon being chosen by a dragon to be their companion, he initially views their steed as a means to get to his end goal. However, he comes to warm up to the dragon over time, and the game does a neat thing where it manifests this budding relationship by having the dragon play with Edge whenever you use a camp to rest. It was refreshing to have a JRPG protagonist who almost entirely avoided big dramatic anime soliloquies or didn't get grafted to a ham-fisted romance angle. Edge is just a guy and remains so from the game's start to finish. That said, if you like ensemble casts with character arcs that convey personal growth, you must temper your expectations. Edge is one of maybe six characters the game gives more than seven minutes of speaking time.

The awe-inspiring set pieces and encounter designs carry Panzer Dragoon Saga, especially when you butt against some of its design quibbles. While Team Andromeda deserves reasonable credit for making 3D world exploration fun in the context of a roleplaying game and modifying the traditional menu-based combat of typical JRPGs to be more authentic, they only solved some qualms with the genre and, in some areas, came up short. Firstly, there are only a handful of side quests in the game, and I can count the number of times you should go back to explore previous environments on a single hand. But more distressingly, when the game repeats certain RPG hallmarks, it does so, not knowing how awkward and out of place they feel. By the third disc, many dungeons remove your sense of scale, force you down narrow corridors, and feature no exploration. There's even a level where you temporarily lose the ability to ride the dragon, and it is one of the worst levels in the game because its enemy battles take forever, and you don't get anything out of the combat because it doesn't net experience points. I do not want my following claim to come off as shameless apologism. Still, it's not like the PS1 Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games were not free from similar mid-game slogs that ran antithetical to epic introductions or climaxes. Final Fantasy VII's Temple of the Ancients is an absolute low point with its Byzantine optical illusion-level design. Final Fantasy VIII's D-District Prison and IX's Oeilvert sequences are also total pains in the ass.

Nonetheless, there does come the point where the game feels like it runs out of ideas. By the tail-end of the third disc, I found dropping an endless supply of AOE spells would off practically everything the game presented to me short of bosses. The balance with the game's leveling also reeks of a team not accustomed to making an RPG, as your MP pool will likely max out before the third disc's end. The in-game economy is also out of whack in that there are only a few things to buy and equip onto Edge or their dragon, which results in at least three-quarters of your in-game purchases being healing items, which the game also gives you fairly regularly. I only died four times during my blind playthrough, which is my way of saying that this game is piss easy outside of a few set pieces, but that might be an asset to those that hate punishing JRPG boss design. Even the epic final boss in this game feels immediately "doable." But the one thing that might frustrate some that end up giving this game a shot is that after presenting its novel combat system, most of its bosses and late-game encounters boil down to "Oh, hey, good job in nailing the correct pattern. Now do that twenty more times." A handful of environments are oriented around status effects, which are more debilitating than usual, considering you only have three possible combat options, and losing even one of those is crushing.

The Ending Of The Game Is INCREDIBLE! (This Is The Only Section With Story Spoilers)

I spent a good portion of the previous section talking about the "normalcy" of Panzer Dragoon Saga's protagonist as a point of praise and a word of caution. I used the word "practically" in the title of this blog for a reason when comparing Saga to Final Fantasy VII and IX or Dragon Quest VII. There are indeed "epic" moments in Saga, such as when the proverbial evil empire levels your starting hub world, which leaves you scrambling to find alternative sources of equipment and materials. That's an incredible moment, but when the game only has two cities, and what it accomplishes with them is about as by the numbers as you can get in an RPG, you can't help but feel like the game is missing something at times. Likewise, Team Andromeda approached their first JRPG with a sense of wanting to do things differently from the norm, but they were still guilty of copying Square and Enix's homework in their game. The final two levels of the game provide the expected point of no return and boss rush but with several mechanical complications that end up muddying the waters.

The final dungeon in Panzer Dragoon Saga is not good. While studying Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, Team Andromeda must have noticed that the last dungeons in RPGs tend to put players through the rigors of needing to tie all of their respective game's mechanics together before getting to the finish line. Their notion of mixing things up includes putting in 3D teleport mazes and laser grids that instantly trigger security alarms and spawn waves of random encounters if you are not careful. On top of that, the dungeon is built vertically rather than horizontally, which leads to you needing to struggle with the game's lousy draw distance and FOV. Worse, the level is a repeat of one you have explored prior. I should have mentioned this earlier, but when Team Andromeda wanted to be done with Saga after years of misery, they decided to recycle levels from previous Panzer Dragoon games and ones you have already tackled in Saga. And if you attempt to get the "secret" ultimate dragon form, you need to stomach even more backtracking for odd trinkets and obscure lever puzzles that are impossible to find and solve if you are not following a guide.

And yet, there is one example of Team Andromeda lifting from the works of Squaresoft to its benefit in Panzer Dragoon Saga. After you attempt and fail to stop an evil emperor from unlocking a portal to an alternate dimension, said villain ends up offing himself after he unwittingly unleashes a wave of uncontrollable monsters on the world. The person Edge has been chasing after as part of their revenge campaign reveals that he was trying to prevent this exact outcome from happening. He has a sudden mini-redemption arc as he expires in Edge's clutches. Also, if you Google Panzer Dragoon Saga, you might come across a female android with a skeletal and monochromatic look. She's named Azel and is the key to stopping the horrible monsters from wrecking the world of Panzer Dragoon Saga. After Edge hooks her up to a mechanical device, she unlocks a portal to a dimension called "Sestren," which turns out to be a neural-based worldwide web. Yeah, the internet is EVIL in this game! Likewise, as Edge explores the internet, he comes across a legendary dragon who calls Edge a pretender and says that the actual "hero of legend" is watching Edge's actions right now. That's right, this game breaks the fourth wall and reveals that you and I are the heroes the Panzer Dragoon Saturn trilogy has been waiting for all along. Team Andromeda must have played some of Squaresoft's Final Fantasy games, and their most significant takeaway from them, narratively speaking, is that they needed a big plot twist that came out of nowhere. But here's the thing: they take this twist to such an extreme it's downright magical. For example, when the legendary dragon drops this whopper on you, he says that the "true hero" must "push a button to show they are there," in response, the game cuts to black and stays that way until you hit a controller input. Then, as Edge walks into a portal, he turns to the camera and thanks you for your hard work as he dematerializes as the world of Panzer Dragoon Saga no longer needs him; it needs YOU!

The ending of Panzer Dragoon Saga is a rushed mess. One sign of that is that the game's credits are in Japanese and entirely untranslated. If you read that piece by The Ringer I linked to earlier, you'll learn that only two people translated the game, and their experience was as miserable as those who made it. One contracted a lung disease midway into the game's localization and continued working, fearing losing their job, while coughing blood in a hospital bed. On top of that, Sega never provided them with a complete script, and they had to translate the game while playing it. Both translators also took an approach to localization that errs towards the methods of Working Designs (i.e., they translated things incredibly liberally). There's a reference to John Woo when you examine an ornamental gun in a hunter's shack and a South Park reference in one of the bars in the first city. More controversially, the localization team decided to have Azel's final words to Edge be "I love you." While I am by no means fluent in Japanese, that is NOT what she says in her audio or script. The franchise has seemingly decided to live with that recontextualization with the release of Panzer Dragoon Orta. For those who have played Orta, you know that Azel is the mother of the game's protagonist, and there's an audio log where she admits to failing to find Edge, though the meaning of which is left ambiguous.

Me mentioning Orta in proximity to the conclusion of Saga leads me to a fun but wild tangent I cannot avoid talking about here. First, you should know that some Panzer Dragoon purists out there do not view Orta as being "canon," as it was not developed by the core members who started the series. They also claim that certain portions of Orta's story seemingly conflict with moments from the Saturn trilogy. I will come forward and say I think these people are crazy. Imagine, if you could humor me for a moment, people on the internet claiming BioShock 2 wasn't canon because Ken Levine didn't direct it or that any post-9 Final Fantasy games weren't "true" entries in the series because they lacked Sakaguchi. It's pure bananas, but that's not even the wildest theory these Panzer Dragoon fanatics, whom I love, put forth. While I do not entirely understand where this started, Panzer Dragoon Saga has its version of the "Squall is Dead" fan theory. The theory for Saga posits that when the game prompts you to click a button, the correct answer is to walk away from the game and not do anything. The reasoning is that when you do as the legendary dragon requests, there's a cataclysmic event that destroys the series of towers that serve as the world's source of technology. By complying with the dragon's words, you are enacting the game's "bad ending." It's a water cooler head cannon that would have deserved a second gander had this game not shipped 20,000 units in North America. Still, if anything, it serves as a reminder of how "thirsty" fans of the series are for another game that follows in Saga's footsteps and addresses its MANY loose ends.

Don't Pay $1,000 For This Game! (i.e., Sega Should Do More With Its Saturn Catalog)

I pose this question that famed Gaint Bomb essayist Borgmaster once posed to me while I was playing Panzer Dragoon Saga. Is there any other video game franchise that achieved less than the Panzer Dragoon series while being as consistently good as the Panzer Dragoon games? There is no terrible Panzer Dragoon game, yet no one ever talks about it as an all-time franchise or series. Part of this stems from Sega's continual disservice it does with its catalog of games on the Saturn outside of a few exceptions. With its utterly messed up launch, Panzer Dragoon Saga never got the proper release it deserves, and several people and companies have had to pay the price for that. Futatsugi has an underrated legacy in the games industry, with their most remarkable work primarily underappreciated by most video game editorialists and historians because of Saga's limited printing and availability. His tenure with Microsoft, wherein he was the Xbox's point guy in Japan, is where more people will likely recall his name. Magatama and Phantom Dust were all early Japan-made OG Xbox projects that he had a hand in and spearheaded. Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey were also game projects he managed. He's still kicking around in the game scene, having helped Swery manage The Good Life and founded his own studio, Grounding Inc., which the board gaming community knows as the source of Machi Koro. Yeah, the people who made Panzer Dragoon went on to make one of the most well-known and ubiquitous modern board games.

Boiling the sometimes overwhelming menu-based systems of Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy into a bite-sized chunk was an admirable endeavor that feels authentic and entirely warranted in Panzer Dragoon Saga. The game starts with a ten-minute FMV CG cutscene that definitively initiated Team Andromeda's nearly twenty-hour treaty on why they thought they should have been spoken in the same breath as other titans in the JRPG market. It was wedged between Final Fantasy VII and VIII, and I dare you to tell me that Panzer Dragoon Saga doesn't look better than either at times. Having a morphing 3D dragon be something your player can engage with at the drop of a hat was a power move and another example of Team Andromeda wanting to strut in a crowded field. Scoring the player's performance during battles and bosses and encouraging them to lean into the game's value in speed results in a JRPG that feels immediately manageable for all player types. Short of Vagrant Story, which relies on 2D sprites and shading trickery more than Panzer Dragoon Saga, the technical prowess of Saga is one of the best across an entire generation of console games.

When I look at the normalization of Shenmue fans and their almost fetishistic relationship with their game obsession with the advent and rise of the Yakuza games, I come to another disappointing realization. While the ideas of Shenmue would go on to become more or less fully realized with the Yakuza series, the exciting experiments in Panzer Dragoon Saga have yet to be similarly refined in subsequent RPGs in Japan or worldwide. No game employs Saga's fast-paced positional-based combat system because rail shooters are essentially a forgotten genre in the medium of games. No game scratches the same itch as Saga, and few games have comparably challenged the hardware they were designed to use like it as well. Considering the trials and tribulations of the development team, it is understandable that no person or team is willing to subject itself to what Team Andomeda had to endure to make Panzer Dragoon Saga. Yet, with this game being one with a reputation that holds it to be an all-time experience, and in my opinion, that reputation is well-earned, it is downright immoral that Sega has done nothing with it since its heartbreaking limited release.

As the price for loose copies ticks upwards, thanks to expanding prices in the retro gaming scene, the time and place for a remaster or port of Saga continues to be "as soon as possible." Sega is familiar with treating their classic catalog of games with the respect they deserve. Their Mega Drive and Genesis Classics program continues to be an incredible deal, even after they delisted the Sonic games to re-release them as part of a separate package. Yet again, this frustration points to a disappointing unwillingness by Sega to look at the Saturn and bring its gems and notable titles to the forefront. With them having recently signed off on Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom and Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX, you can even claim that they treat the Master System with more respect than the Saturn, even if not a single title on the Master System reaches the meteoric heights of Panzer Dragoon Saga. It's a shame. With Sea of Stars and other indie titles taking the RPG scene by storm, there is a growing appetite for Saga's up-tempo pace, manageable difficulty, and comfortable playtime.

So, if you want to play this game, and I think you should, all I can say is "Go with God." Sega has hinted that they viewed the remaster of the original Panzer Dragoon as a "success" but have experienced development difficulties with their remaster of Zwei. Somewhat frustratingly, while affirming the Zwei remaster is still upcoming, its creative director has hinted that they would be willing to tackle Saga next, but only if the Zwei remaster sells well. This blackmail act is not new to fans of Sega as they did the same thing when they announced Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown, an enhanced remaster of Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown with rollback netcode. When the team in charge of Ultimate Showdown was pressed on the possibility of a sixth game in the series, its project lead said it would only be possible if Ultimate Showdown sold well—the radio silence in the years since speaks for itself. I avoid claiming that any studio or developer owes its fans or audience anything. Still, for the sake of game preservation and, understanding the legacy of a long-forgotten development team and director and putting more respect to a misunderstood console, I believe Sega owes people a modern re-release of Panzer Dragoon Saga. And Sega stands to benefit as doing so will harken back to when they had a unifying identity of always wanting to be at the forefront of conversations in the industry. Budgets and development time be damned.

The Foamstars Open Beta Was A Good Time

Recently, from September 29th until October 1st, Foamstars hosted an open beta. The event allowed people to get through the game's tutorial, review its cast of characters and their unique abilities, and have a trial run with its slew of multiplayer match types and modes. When the beta closed, Square Enix, the developer and publisher of the project, announced that the next we would see the game would be its release in 2024. Were there occasional server issues or matchmaking downtime problems? Sure, but those problems are par for the course when joining or participating in a free open beta. A common complaint from those who played the game stemmed from some people feeling that certain characters were more powerful or felt unbalanced than others, resulting in a fair amount of repetition or monotony during competitive matches. While I have my fair share of concerns about the game's long-term viability, I also do not think this is an issue that cannot be fixed and would add that this is a common issue with EVERY GAME that hosts a public beta, regardless of genre. Even fighting games from Namco, Capcom, and NetherRealm pull data and input from open betas to rebalance moves and character power levels before a game's official release.

And before I start my screed about why I have zero faith in the game, I must admit it is fun. What impressed me most was how easy it was for people to get the game's core gimmick of needing to build walls and heaps of different colored foams to complete tasks and edge out opposing teams. The various playable characters had unique synergies, and even though you were largely forced to work with random players during the beta, that did not stunt the ability for people to get highly competitive or pick up on team tasks as much as I initially worried it would. Foamstars has drawn obvious comparisons to Splatoon, but it stands reasonably well as its own thing. There are slight modifications on how foam works in contrast to Splatoon's paint-based system, which addresses some of my skill gap quibbles with the latter. Because the foam in Foamstars is three-dimensional, there's more wiggle room for strategy and team-oriented cooperation rather than brute forcing things through min-maxery or "pro-moves" only a handful of ultra-serious players can perform that still have their youthful dexterity on their side. I don't want anyone to interpret that last sentence to mean I don't currently have fun with Splatoon 2 or that you can't. Regardless, the game's ravenous online community takes things too seriously. It also maintains a sizable skill gap between those who want to have mindless fun and those who want to see their numbers go up on the global leaderboard. To Splatoon's defense, this issue develops with any online-focused multiplayer game that lasts more than two to three months.

Foamstar's foam-based system allows you to move around more freely and readily because there are more opportunities for intermixing opposing colors, thanks to its 3D nature. Rarely, if ever, will there not be at least one smidge of your team's colors on any quadrant of a map, which allows you to perform impressive surfboard-based tricks or pop off special moves whenever you need them. Rarely was I blocked from unleashing an ability to surf into the sky to pivot and rain death upon my foes. There's a Lego-like sensibility with the mechanic as well. You can immediately build walls to protect yourself when surrounded or create ramps to allow surfing teammates to throttle themselves into enemy bases or territory. When looking at the game's preview coverage, some modes require teams to attack or protect VIPs, and in these modes, the use of abilities is far more critical than the free-form movement. But the core of the game, which involves offing opponents by dousing them in foam, is equally fun. I found it novel that you cannot kill enemies with your foam. Instead, you must ram your surfboard into them after immobilizing them. It addresses the issue of getting sniped and that never feeling great when you are the recipient and adds a risk-reward element to those that usually engage in turtling or keep-away tactics.

Also, the game's style is impeccable. Many people thought the game looked terrible in its first trailer, and I was one of them. Having played it, it makes much more sense when you see it up close and in person. The synth-pop music and the way the surrounding visuals seem to mimic the action make it feel like an early-phase Harmonix rhythm game (i.e., Frequency and Amplitude). The characters available during the beta felt different enough that the game provided me with multiple ways to solve problems on the battlefield using alternate tactics or strategies. You can have the same problem or scenario in front of you a dozen times, but how you solve it depends entirely on who you control. Likewise, the maps and match types show promise and already seem like they have been modified from the standard array of multiplayer team-based shooter match types to ensure they take advantage of the foam-based mechanics and each character's unique abilities. And again, it was magical playing Foamstars and having people you were playing with and against knowing their role or niche in real-time, even if you had no idea who they were. I thought the open beta was a blast, but more than the game's promise is needed to ensure its success in a cramped and brutal market.

This Game Seems Doomed

I'm going to shoot my shot right from the start. If Foamstars is going to be a PlayStation console exclusive, whether it be a timed exclusivity deal or a permanent one, the game's launch needs to have a PlayStation Plus release like Fall Guys. Without some version of this that is readily available as part of a subscription service, especially if Square Enix is going to continue to be mum about whether or not it will have a PC release with cross-play support later down the line, this game seems to be edging towards one of three possible doomed pathways. In scenario one, the game launches with an initial $60 price tag, and upon booting it up, there are additional microtransactions for skin packs, decals, and possibly new characters that you can "save" money on if you buy a season pass at or near launch (i.e., the NBA 2K model). In scenario two, the game launches for free but is way more blunt about its microtransactions and season pass (i.e., the traditional F2P model). In scenario three, the game launches with a price tag but immediately starts as a "games as a service" or "living game" affair and, upon launching with a small package of features and content, it morphs and expands over time (i.e., the modern Tom Clancy/Ubisoft Shooter model). Regardless of which of these three models you prefer, and this blog isn't about discussing the merits of any of them, Foamstars is pitting itself against insurmountable odds and competition.

Foamstars needs to get a stable online community right from the rip. Otherwise, it is dead on arrival. Suppose it is not a PlayStation Plus freebie the month it launches. In that case, the only way for that to happen is if Square Enix has Sony as a partner in promoting it, which might be the case given its console exclusivity, which, might I add, will only make things more challenging. Games of these type are dying left and right when they simultaneously release on Xbox, PlayStation, and Windows; how does Square Enix think limiting Foamstars to just two Sony consoles will allow them to avoid this same fate? This game is not Splatoon. Yes, I understand Splatoon is also an online-focused console exclusive, and there might be room in this universe for a derivative of it to exist on non-Nintendo platforms. Nonetheless, Foamstars will not inherit Splatoon's advantage of being absent of competition on its platform of choice. Even if you enjoy the game's visual charm, style, and gameplay, if you are stuck waiting for matchmaking or struggling to find people to play with, there are other alternatives to turn to and play on PlayStation, and that's something I think everyone knows.

And then there's the Square Enix element to this puzzle. Square Enix doesn't have a stellar track record when launching and supporting its online-focused video game projects. We are, of course, talking about the publisher of Babylon's Fall, which was released on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Windows and had cross-play support, which did not move the needle on that game at all. Oh, and let's recall how dated their notions are of structuring "games as a service" projects when we look back at their management of Marvel's Avengers, which just got delisted on all marketplaces this year. In both cases, despite repeat promises that they were invested in a road map to right the ship, everyone knew Square Enix would shit can the games after incredibly problematic launches. And guess what? They did in SIX MONTHS! When you include their gacha games, their record becomes even more wishy-washy. There might be games like Opera Omnia and Brave Exvius that are still printing money years after release, but you also have games like First Soldier, which flamed out in record time. No one knows how long Square Enix is ever committed to an online-focused game, even if it comes from one of their internal outfits. Square Enix continues to invest in the "games as a service" model, but they have yet to hit it out of the park with one of their investments in this field, and they know that. Hence, they have a tendency to cut bait when they see the writing on the wall instead of sticking it out to see if a roadmap can do a proper course correction. And no, I'm not going to count Final Fantasy XIV as a counter-narrative because I have zero confidence the current leaders in charge of Square Enix understand why Final Fantasy XIV's roadmap worked. And with the company just now ushering in a new President whose entire mantra is to emphasize profitability, remasters of classic titles, and exploring pre-existing properties that can become AAA in the immediate future, Foamstars feels like it doesn't have the corporate confidence to weather any of the expected storms associated with new multiplayer-focused game launches.

The Online-only Team-Based Shooter Market Is DIRE

Even if you want to push back on my qualms that this genre's unstableness is a problem that clouds any excitement one could have for Foamstars, the lifespan for most of these games outside the big ones (i.e., Fortnite, Destiny 2, Apex, Call of Duty, and Splatoon) is under one year. That's not a lot of time to have a fun romp with Foamstars. Speaking of which, not only does Foamstars need to compete against a slurry of cheap knock-offs and clones of pre-existing team-based shooters, but it also is going to pit itself against the likes of Apex, Fortnite, and Call of Duty because its target audience is the PlayStation 4 and 5 online demographic. That will take a lot of work, underscoring why so few of these games surpass the one-year mark. They are not just competing against each other; they are also competing against unmovable titans that have massive coin purses and coffers to throw at any problems they might face. Rocket Arena, Knockout City, Rumbleverse, Bleeding Edge, Destruction AllStars, Breach, Disintegration, Crucible, Lemnis Gate, Babylon's Fall, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt, Rogue Company, Hyper Scape, and CrossfireX all currently reside in the multiplayer team-based shooter graveyard, and all of them either shuttered their doors or ceased updates within one year of their release. You may want to contend that the failure of some of these games stems from extenuating circumstances beyond the crowded market, but even that highlights another issue that is bound to plague Foamstars. Even after a successful public beta, these games always have rough launches beset by the same server or community-related issues, which are nigh impossible to recover from unless you have a massive war chest or fresh bodies to throw at the problem. Square Enix is already in the middle of completing multiple AAA projects, meaning that when Foamstars has the inevitable issues with overwhelmed servers, it will unlikely get the fast development response to keep its community together.

And I hate to sound like a broken record, but I'm simply not buying the promise that Foamstars can surmount all its challenges because it looks good and has unique gameplay ideas and mechanics. I love Jeff Gerstamnn, like many of you, and continue to follow his podcasts and content. However, it was ROUGH last year listening as he was doing his 2022 GOTY podcasts to hear him glow about Rumbleverse, only for that game to die less than a month after his podcast dropped. Following the team-based shooter genre news cycle, even from a distant vantage point, only to watch games that seem even remotely appealing or attractive die within months is emotionally draining. The result is that I don't get excited about any of these games because I know whatever effort I put into them will be for naught at the drop of a hat. Sure, there has always been an element of that in the games industry, what with Madden and FIFA requiring you to upgrade every year and other multiplayer games like Call of Duty and Halo expecting you to start from scratch with each subsequent release. However, at least with those examples, I have something to return to, whereas games like Rumbleverse or Babylon's Fall disappear into the ether. I still have nothing to point to for all of my time and attendance in Lawbreakers and Marvel Heroes Omega, whereas I can do that with NBA 2K16 even if its online servers are down.

I mention this in a blog about Foamstars because consumer confidence in this genre is at an all-time low. When most of us hear about a new "one of these," I think our immediate reaction is to groan because not only is the sub-genre itself getting tiresome, but we have been through this song and dance before. We have seen games with unique attributes meant to spice things up in the online team-based shooter scene, only to have these novelties snatched away because the game in question was shut down in less than a year. Likewise, unless a game like Destiny 2 or Warframe thoroughly shits the bed, there's no slot for Foamstars to inhabit to guarantee it can court a long-term audience that sustains it. And it is not like this part of the industry is getting bigger. One of the primary reasons why Epic announced its recent batch of layoffs stemmed from Fortnite failing to meet growth targets. Sega reportedly is taking a $100 million hit after canceling Hyenas, even though the game was practically finished. Likewise, I have yet to learn what the post-release budget is to keep Foamstars running and active post-release, but with Nexon pushing The Finals hard, it's not like this market is getting less competitive in 2024.

Indeed, there were other reasons for those Epic layoffs. Epic's rationale was far from consistent when you looked at the facts, especially Fortnite's 2022 daily user peaks reaching 34.3 million people. Nonetheless, there's no denying that the market for another multiplayer team-based shooter is not getting bigger, and there is the odd feeling that, once again, Square Enix is about a year or two behind on catching or mimicking a popular trend in gaming. Fortnite is one of many games struggling to maintain large online communities or meet growth targets post-pandemic. Call of Duty and Halo have recently struggled to implement multiplayer-based content roadmaps, and the situation with Destiny 2 is equally controversial. It's almost admirable that Foamstars is jumping into this market, knowing that the audience for these games can be fickle, brimming with enthusiasm. Still, admiration will only take things so far.

How Many Of These Sorts Of Games Do We All Have Room For?

Let's be generous in a world where the Xbox One/PC MOBA Gigantic is eyeing a re-release and imagine a scenario where Foamstars launches without a single technical hiccup, and there's plenty of content in it to enjoy. Where is its player base coming from? How many disgruntled Destiny 2 or Overwatch 2 fans can you reasonably bank on to support Foamstars in the scant amount of time they need to migrate, given that Square Enix likely isn't giving Foamstars a ton of time to prove itself? And it might sound weird talking about a game needing to poach its audience to sustain itself, but that's how things are working these days in the multiplayer scene. Games like Destiny 2, Overwatch 2, Fortnite, Warframe, et al. provide you with an inundation of content and options that require you to have them be the only games in your rotation to get everything they offer. The news cycle for any of these games and following updates, new map announcements, character additions, and cosmetic and mechanical upgrades and how to unlock them feels like a full-time job at times, which speaks to the challenge of most of us only having the mental capacity to play one or two of these "games as a service" or "living games" within our wheelhouse.

I tried my best to follow Destiny and Warframe, but I enjoy playing new and old games on the side. When I took a reasonable break from both for about a month and a half, I needed to spend upwards of ten minutes processing what was new and what I needed to do to get back into their current meta. If you want to be in the good graces of any of the games of this type, you need them to be your top priority. Even in the open beta, I could see how Foamstars would likely follow that template rather than mimic Splatoon's "Just have as much fun as you can for as long as you want" model. My solution to this struggle for the past two years has been to avoid every single one of these games as they always fall to my periphery due to life obligations or other games coming out, and that means I am the target demographic to adopt and jump into Foamstars when it launches. However, I'm not excited because unless I see that the game isn't going to require those steep expectations, then I don't know if it's worth my time only being partially invested in it.

If you honestly pushed me to hazard a scenario where Foamstars crosses the one-year mark, it would be if it launched with stable servers, was included in PlayStation Plus, and seriously curtailed the barrier to re-entry, not just the barrier to adopting the game at the start. Specific changes and balance reforms are necessary to keep any multiplayer-focused game healthy and enjoyable. I'm not advising against those sorts of content updates. Nonetheless, suppose this game hits you with microtransactions for new skins and character packs on day one. In that case, especially if it charges money for the initial game, I think Foamstars will immediately become flagged as "another one of those," and that would be the kiss of death because it has zero goodwill to spend. It's going to die a death by a thousand cuts after that. If they make it known soon how the game will be monetized and how things will be different from the norm, there's a chance. Unfortunately, the window of opportunity and Square Enix's runway to release this game and not have it flounder is scant, and I wonder if they even know that. It doesn't seem very certain when you consider they are still confident they can release their NFT game despite all signs pointing to NFTs being a boondoggle across the board. I want to root for Foamstars, don't get me wrong, but that seems nigh untenable at this point.

SPOILER WARNING!!! If you have not played Final Fantasy VII Remake, you should not read this blog as it contains massive spoilers! You have been warned!

TGS 2023 Showed Some AWESOME Preview Stuff Of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, But There's A Sword Of Damocles Looming

It's been about two weeks since Square Enix shared the release date trailer for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and I have withheld discussing or analyzing that trailer for a couple of reasons. First, I'm not too fond of close reading game trailers as they are in and of themselves advertising compositions that are often non-indicative of the final product. Instead, they feature hand-picked set pieces and vignettes to get people buzzing about them online. Second, Square Enix stated in subsequent press releases that more details would commence at the 2023 Tokyo Game Show (i.e., TGS). I suspected then and was proven correct that many expected "burning questions" streamers or online talking heads had about what Rebirth would entail or involve would be hinted at or clarified during this convention. And goodness, between Sony's September State of Play and TGS, does Rebirth look good, and I mean, REALLY GOOD! I sometimes come across as a critic of the company's modern trajectory, but HOT DAMN, does it seem like they know what people want from Rebirth and how to deliver on that. People on social media sure got excited when they saw Cosmo Canyon and got in a tizzy when Vincent emerged from his coffin to greet Cloud. Something that caught me off guard was the modernized version of the Materia Keeper because that boss battle was an absolute pain in the ass during my first playthrough.

When looking at the game from a technical and gameplay perspective, Square Enix is doing everything right with fans and the goodwill they built with Remake. Square Enix has stated on several occasions that while the game is linear, once your transportation is settled, you can travel between all the game's continents to your heart's delight. Instead of what I suspected would be segregated zones or set pieces between interstitial ones (i.e., Final Fantasy XII or XIII), Square Enix's directors promise one seamless map, with some sections cordoned off depending on your progress with the story. And then there are the small details that many people online are buzzing about. Yuffie and Vincent are required characters you cannot miss. Although some are disappointed

in that you don't directly control him, his inclusion does confirm that his plotlines and relationship with the supporting world of Final Fantasy VII are baked into the world Square Enix is crafting with the Remake games. The traditional JRPG turn-based combat option is still here, Cait Sith is promised not to suck shit in combat, and goddamn, does it sound like they entirely own up to how goofy and zany the original Final Fantasy VII got after you leave Midgar. Every minigame or wacky visual harkens to the many beats of levity OG Final Fantasy VII has that it sometimes doesn't get credit for, including its appreciated quiet moments between its more dramatic moments. Rebirth has Chocobos, the Tiny Bronco, the military marching scene, arena fights, crane games, a card game, Costa del Sol, Segways, and more. It has been pleasantly surprising to see a team that I would typically say should operate on a short leash working with complete creative freedom in all the right ways.

And it is at this point that my cynical side kicks in ever so slightly. Those who have already played Final Fantasy VII Remake and its Intergrade "expansion" can likely recall how Remake was initially demoed and promoted. You know that we have seen this song and dance from Square Enix before. Even though both originally were promoted as fun reinterpretations of their source material, both Remake AND Intergrade not only actively pulled the rug from underneath fan expectations for a shot-for-shot remake of OG Final Fantasy VII, but they even had stand-in ghosts meant to personify literal FFVII fans as narrowminded wraiths that cannot fathom a world where Cloud and Aerith deviate from their destinies even one iota. That's a thing that happened, and we need to talk about it as we continue to consume all of Square Enix's media blitz regarding Rebirth. Those ghosts and the plot whopper they were involved were meant to give creative leaders like Yoshinori Kitase and Tetsuya Nomura the blank slate with the Final Fantasy VII cast they have wanted for decades. And Rebirth is going to have to clarify how buck wild the future will get. It's something Square Enix can't avoid, even if it was the lifeblood that drove Rebirth's development. And yet, they have been mum, and so have people drumming up excitement for Rebirth. Currently, many streamers and YouTube essayists are reviewing the preview coverage coming out of TGS and subsequent demo events at face value, and who can blame them? Square Enix has a game that everyone wants to play, and right now, all they are saying is that things will be a fun HD trip down memory lane.

Nonetheless, looming in the background as the game's release draws near is a specter no one is talking about, including even the most die-hard Remake fans. That Sword of Damocles is the simple fact that there's no goddamn way in the world this upcoming game avoids pulling employing another bait and switch like its predecessor. It will happen, and I don't think anyone expects it NOT to happen. Zack's possibly still alive, so I imagine there will be an increasing plot divergence at some point, and where that starts is a point of massive speculation. Will it happen immediately after a possible flashback to Cloud's recollection of the "Nibelheim Incident," or do you think the game suckers everyone into a slow burn like in Remake? In an interview, Rebirth's director and creative leads stated that the game ends at the Forgotten Capital / Forgotten City, which is "a choice." I'm going to tell you right here, and now, I need to live to see how the internet reacts to Rebirth's possible reimaging of the conclusion of the Forgotten Capital, especially if Square Enix deviates from the norm and doesn't kill Aerith. I am not religious, but I am on my hands and knees, praying that I live to see how the internet reacts to that. And with Nomura and Kitase being on record that they are still over the moon about their more flamboyant and eccentric Compilation of Final Fantasy VII characters, sudden appearances of figures we haven't seen in decades seem all but guaranteed. But how quickly does Square Enix drop characters like Angeal and Genesis on an audience with no idea what those names mean?

Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis Is Already The Second Most Important Game You Need To Play Before Rebirth

Creative design lead Tetsuya Nomura and executive producer Yoshinori Kitase are simple people. Their intentions with the Remake continuity are not exactly a secret. While they both recognize they cannot scrap the foundation of Final Fantasy VII, the game's creative team has been wanting to take their ancillary character designs and stories from the fringes of the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII and give them the AAA budget they think they deserve. They have been at this since Advent Children, and while I certainly do not feel all of their characters or creative ideas are worthy of that investment, you have to give it to both of them; they have been dedicated to enacting their "master plan" over literal decades. And the thing is, it worked. Compilation characters like Kyrie Canaan, Leslie Kyle, and even Weiss adapted to the world of Remake relatively quickly without too much protest from fans. To clarify, the "Compilation of Final Fantasy VII" is a massive multimedia endeavor that includes console games, books, mobile games, and original video animations (i.e., OVAs). The "peak" of this effort took place between 2004 and 2009. As always, you have to commend Square Enix for their ambition. That they thought they could make a console game, handheld game, mobile game, full-length feature film, and two animes, all within FIVE YEARS, is astounding! But the mad bastards at Square Enix managed to pull it off, though the results were often questionable. Nonetheless, Remake pulled A LOT of its content and secondary characters from this initiative, and they weren't all immediate disasters.

However, some of these characters will rub people the wrong way, and introducing them is going to involve Rebirth's story diverging from the path set by the original Final Fantasy VII. When do we think this rug-pulling act is happening? Do you think Square Enix plants its flag immediately into the ground and says, "Screw your hopes and dreams; this game is ours!" Or, conversely, do you think they try to string everyone along another slow burn where things seem like a "normal" nostalgic tour, and then BOOM, shit gets weird when you least expect it? I already joked about Genesis waltzing through this game when we least expect it. Still, if this game is going to have Zack and Vincent play prominent or at least visible roles, then the characters associated with their backgrounds, which we know Nomura and Kitase love, have to reappear. If Vincent gets Yuffie's Intergrade treatment, which many people speculate is the most logical thing to happen, I expect to see Shelke. However, things are more complicated with Zack, as there's still a stunning lack of clarity about where he is chronologically with his appearances up to this point. The thing about Zack and Rebirth is that the preview summary about his role says, "Cloud and co. are leaving Midgar while Zack is traveling back across the desert to Midgar with Cloud in tow." So, it's ambiguous if all of these cutscenes and appearances thus far are a collection of flashbacks and his fate as seen in OG FFVII or, more likely, Crisis Core, is still on the table OR if he's thoroughly alive in the Remake continuity. Honestly, it would be idiotic to tease his return FOR LITERAL YEARS and the Remake games being their own thing, only for them to revert to the original continuity in this regard. That's doubly so if dozens of characters only make sense or can be effectively grafted into Rebirth and onward if Zack is present and alive. And with Ever Crisis making large swaths of Crisis Core canon in the Remake games, Zack being dead after all of this pomp and circumstance would be an incredibly dumb revelation.

And opting these Nomura and Kitase "favorites" into the current lore isn't new. Some are even playing a prominent role in the events seen in Ever Crisis and even popped into First Soldier before its discontinuation. One scene in particular from the Rebirth story trailer caught my attention. Here's a screen capture of the moment that took me by surprise and was my primary source of inspiration for writing this blog.

Unless you played First Soldier or are toiling away at Ever Crisis, you might not know that someone here says a lot about the "grand plan" for Rebirth's scope and sequence. Those who have played either game might have noticed Glenn Lodbrok, first introduced in First Soldier and a central playable character in Ever Crisis. Now, I'm not entirely jumping for joy about this, but I fully expect characters from the mobile game to get rammed down our throats. Nonetheless, if Glenn is on the table, then that means Rebirth is going to get incredibly weird and likely going to address some of the plot threads introduced in Ever Crisis. For those unaware, Glenn's significant culminating moment in Ever Crisis involves him finding Sephiroth around a circle of recently slain Behemoths, while attempting to use his cell phone to call Genesis. Yeah. Genesis is already fair game. He's coming and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Even though Dirge and Crisis Core might not be wholesale "canon," Nomura and Kitase have sent repeat signals that every character from the original spin-offs and tie-ins is indeed inhabiting this world and will factor into the future at some point. And yet, I have to question how you accomplish that.

On top of that, how do you deal with people who only play the mainline console games and never the spin-offs or mobile tie-ins? If all they do is plop a character as murky and convoluted as Genesis in front of the main party and have them fight, as they did with Nero in Intergrade, I think it's safe to say "mistakes were made." Likewise, the Remake team is starting to shoot themselves in the foot because fundamental parts of these characters they likely are holding back on with their preview footage continue to have all their backstories and supporting adventures locked behind mobile games and spin-offs. Square can continue to cite attachment numbers and download rates for their latest mobile game all they want. Regardless, thousands will likely not touch it due to its gacha DNA, which raises the issue of how and when to foreshadow and scaffold some of these zanier and less-known Final Fantasy VII characters. The world of Rebirth is massive to their benefit, allowing them to space out character and antagonist introductions at a steady pace. However, the story still needs to address the fact that their motivations and aims remain ambiguous until someone in the writing team bites the bullet and gives them air to breathe. Is there going to be a fundamentally different call to adventure that unites all these conflicting antagonistic forces and figures to work together? All Genesis wants to do is kill Hojo, and the Tsviets aren't entirely complimentary to the aims and goals of the Turks and Rufus. How is this game going to manage having almost a dozen different antagonists? Unless people and organizations get rewritten, it will be a mess.

The References To Crisis Core And Dirge of Cerberus Are Becoming Far More Blatant

Let's return to Rebirth's most recent story trailer to discuss some points of controversy. One of the most significant sticking points has to be Zack taking center and front stage for a substantial amount of time. Something that stuck out to me is when Zack hands over an unconscious Cloud to Kyrie Canaan, a character most people assume is a Remake original but instead originates from an Advent Children novel tie-in. It's a neat moment, but when you have Zack stomping around parts of the world he should not be inhabiting AND ALSO have Sephiroth utter, "It's upon us—the Reunion. When worlds merge," I think it is safe to say Crisis Core and Dirge of Cerberus content and characters are going to be in Rebirth. They already broke the seal with Deepground and the Tsviets, in particular, being in the first game, and they even had Yuffie's Intergrade companion sacrifice their life to protect her from Nero the Sable. There is no way in the world those characters continue being fun little "goofs" you only see in passing near the end. Instead, they will be against your party's efforts throughout your journey. The Hell with it; I'm putting down two pennies and willing to gamble Genesis and Angeal are in Rebirth. Why am I so confident? Because you don't have a moment like this feature prominently in your preview coverage and NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!

And what are we doing with Zack? Are we getting a series of flashbacks that have us reliving Crisis Core but with better visuals and controls? Or is he alive, and we need to help him catch up with Aerith and Cloud, and along the way, he fights his old enemies from Crisis Core? With Zack being right there on the box art, any swerves in Rebirth largely depend on whatever happens on his timeline. And I have to go back to this point, but we are already name-dropping Genesis in Ever Crisis. In that case, that must mean Angeal is right around the corner, especially if the Zack story bits go even one step away from the original game's narrative. Doing that is almost necessary because people forget how little of a factor Zack is in the original Final Fantasy VII. His primary purpose is to allow Cloud to recognize his memories are rooted in falsehoods, be a name Aerith says to establish she is already in a relationship, and be a spikey-haired hero figure in a missable cutscene that lasts less than three minutes. Crisis Core, not the source material, made Zack into a character worth following, and lament the game's wacky story all you want, but it ends miraculously. Crisis Core gets enough of its characterization right that people are generally open-minded at the prospect that it might be a frame of reference with characters fundamental to Rebirth. However, considering Crisis Core Reunion is still fresh, why would anyone expect Zack's adventures in Rebirth to be a repeat of familiar territory? Considering how much Remake revels in subverting fan expectations, I don't trust for a minute that anything about Crisis Core's ending will happen in Rebirth. Mark my words; something weird is going to happen to Zack.

That same sentiment applies to Vincent. Dirge is the weird ugly duckling of the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII games, outside of it having the single best final level in all video games. Like Crisis Core, it has some oddball characters I can only imagine Kitase and Nomura are pouncing on the opportunity to include in Rebirth. Deepground is already a factor, but adding more characters originating from Dirge into Rebirth isn't precisely something fans are pining for. With Vincent and Cid confirmed to be getting the treatment Red XIII got in Remake (i.e., they are AI-controlled), Rebirth has different priorities than providing either in-depth backgrounds or wholesome character moments. Nonetheless, the prognosis seems clear that something is changing with either of these party members. If Yuffie was a segue to reintroducing some of the Deepground characters as being intertwined with the world of the Remake continuity, what does Vincent unlock? The choices are endless with Dirge as a fallback, but where are Square's creative and narrative priorities? Which Dirge or Compilation characters allow them to continue to open the floodgates? That is the question at hand when we debate what the future holds for Vincent in Rebirth.

And there are possible issues with character redundancies and conflicting priorities that still need to be solved if everything is on the table like it seems. One problem I have with a lot of subsequent Final Fantasy VII media is that they make Professor Hojo seem like a massive threat to the world when, in the original, he's a comical goon. He's a crazy, mad professor who does science experiments, and at one point, he turns himself into Frankenstein's monster. In the original game, he's far from being this monolithic threat that Shinra considers on par with Sephiroth as they do in Remake. Yet, characters like Angeal and Vincent make him seem like a master schemer despite the fact there's a scene in the original game where you see him in a speedo slurping down mojitos and banana daiquiris while surrounded by bikini babes. We are probably not getting that version of Hojo in Rebirth unless Square wants to own the narrative unevenness of the original the same way Remake wholly owned its Honeybee Inn sequence. Yet, Hojo is not alone in being a character attempting to serve more than one narrative role in the original and needing to be reframed in Remake. The Turks certainly have their goofy moments, but will Reno and Rude be absolute jokes when you fight them in Cid's town? Considering that would conflict with the air of "coolness" Nomura prefers with the Turks and Tsviets, I'd cast some doubt on that, but things will be different with our many encounters with the Turks in the future.

Here We Go Again? No, Let Square-Enix Go HAM And Hook Whatever Comes Out Directly Into My Veins!

Let's be honest. Referencing games like Crisis Core and Dirge isn't a big deal. Many people get up in their feelings because some character designs are a bit too much. Still, with the original game already anime nonsense, I don't view either game, even in their original forms, as being these narrative liabilities. Take Crisis Core as an example. The first half of that game involves Zack listening to Genesis and Angeal bicker like an elderly married couple before they finally cut each other out of their lives and move to kill each other in big Dragon Ball Z anime-ass fight scenes. They spend most of the game saying random anime quips at one another before departing for different parts of the world, with Zack needing to figure out why they aren't playing nice with Shinra. However, Final Fantasy VII has always been a profoundly dumb and, at times, convoluted narrative with several heart-rending moments that have become burned into the lexicon of the video game hobby. Suppose you are concerned about Rebirth "ruining" the sanctity of Final Fantasy VII; I challenge you to tell me anything that happens in Costa del Sol that is significant to the story. Also, summarize the plot revelations at the Crater and convince me none of it is anime nonsense. However, the idea that the current Remake team doesn't feel obligated to follow that and instead views nothing in the original game as holy has me on the edge of my seat.

While characters like Vincent have plenty of material Nomura and Kitase can bring to the fold, I'm curious how they handle someone like Cid. As I said with Zack, people need to remember how little the non-major party members add to the story or even talk, and the segment where Cid is the party leader is well beyond the stopping point Square has indicated. In their defense, they've done well with character writing in the Remake series. The Tifa-Aerith relationship/dynamic is a Remake novelty, and it's the most believable and rewarding relationship in the entire game. But, hopefully, with modern hardware, they can make Cid less of an asshole to his not-wife. Look, I get it. Some people think Cid's bit with his rocket is endearing and like to point out that his relationship with Shera gets better. All I'm trying to say is a character that is a walking Honeymooner's reference that makes light of domestic abuse as a punchline isn't going to fly in 2024! Nonetheless, if there is a character that Square has full permission to be liberal with their rewriting, it's Cid. And for all I know, Shera might be dead, considering the plot ghosts are not here to protect her during possible life-ending experiments by Cid.

There are a lot of characters for the creative team to micromanage, and they seem to be aiming to make the world of Rebirth massive as a result. With the ghosts of Remake busted, everyone's destined fate is wide open, and people like Nomura and Kitase will not pass on an opportunity to get wild with a canvas as significant as Rebirth. And you know what? I want to see it. I want Square to hit me in their most potent form. Seriously, let's summon Satan. Have Sephiroth kiss Cloud square on the lips, or have Zack come in and take Aerith's Sepiroth chest stab. If things are going to get weird, let's do it. They already had ghosts aggressively put fans in their place, and those fan stand-ins were meant to free up the creative possibilities with the subsequent Remake games. So, Square, prove it. Prove you knew how to use this carte blanche opportunity you created for yourself. Go ham, have Cloud be the one who dies, and then people have to play as Zack in the third game. Rock our socks off at this point, and don't listen to any fan outcry because why would you when you didn't care the first time?

If I don't think fans getting pre-emptively upset that Square Enix isn't going to serve them a game they were never going to make in the first place, what do I think is grounds for concern? Throughout their preview interviews at TGS, the producers for Rebirth expressed a deep level of affection for the Horizon games. This statement is a possible cause for apprehension because moments before you reach the point of no return in Remake, that game dumps a bunch of fiddly ancillary bullshit that makes you go back and forth between the same locals. Here, it has this rapid-fire pace where the stakes continue to ratchet up, and then the game tosses that out the window so you can talk to random NPCs about their problems and complete Fort Condor missions for Chadley. This issue might become a non-factor in Rebirth, considering that you are free from Midgar and have whole continents and townships to explore. Still, if there's something Assassin's Creed Valhalla taught me, it is that the fear of missing out bogs down these sorts of epic open-world games. Likewise, the consistency and quality of the side quests drop dramatically in the name of content creation. Whenever they have teased any significant news about the possible story paths for the game, the game's directors are quick to point to minigames and Chadley as ways they are making improvements to provide a more in-depth experience. Nonetheless, with their hands possibly tied to reams of clunky source material and a creative lead and producer struggling to have any semblance of self-discipline, I have legitimate fears Rebirth will be bloated. However, there would be an almost poetic nature to that, considering the original Final Fantasy VII had a similar problem with mid-game bloat.

WARNING: THIS BLOG CONTAINS SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS PERTAINING TO PERSONA 3! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

A Little Backstory

I have now played Persona 3 and seen its ending twice in the year of our Lord, 2023. The first and more understandable time was done as preparation for my blog about Persona 3 Portable's Game Pass release. To better put me in the shoes of those heralding the game's re-release on modern platforms, I gave P3P a shot and was largely satisfied, though still bummed that more effort wasn't put into smoothing off its rough edges. My second rodeo requires more context to justify. I have been following the developing story that is Persona 3 Reload since its initial reveal. Since the game's announcement, more details have emerged about how Atlus plans to modernize Persona 3 for contemporary audiences while preserving the heart and core of the original. One of the main sticking points by fans about Reload has been Atlus' insistence that certain relationships and social links from FES and Portable be present in Reload even though the female protagonist and certain FES additions (i.e., The Answer) will be absent. Atlus is doing a weird tightrope balancing act wherein they want to have the best parts of Persona 3's ancillary releases without committing to emulating either shot-for-shot.

The first of those has become a constant rallying cry for fans. It has generated the expected petitions and online essays professing a desire to see both the female protagonist and core elements from Persona 3 Portable in Persona 3 Reload. Things are notably different when it comes to The Answer. No one, and I mean NO ONE, wants Atlus to bring back The Answer, and its omission from the re-release of Persona 3 Portable on Game Pass and other non-Sony platforms was a broadly welcomed decision. And before any of you chime in that The Answer wasn't part of Portable in the first place, I'm aware of that, but you get my point nonetheless. Regardless, The Answer has a reputation. It is known for one of two things. First, it is a single expert-level dungeon that eliminates the social link dynamics and typical character progression trappings that make most of the games in the Persona franchise uniquely Persona. By lacking those trappings, it is a reminder of how little hook there is in the act of playing the Persona games when they are not connected with the expected character-oriented feedback loops that have since come to define the series. Second, it makes some highly questionable worldbuilding and narrative decisions that some have described as erring on character assassination or the outright ruination of Persona 3's best asset: its ending.

So, why did I play this thing? First, I have a penchant for torturing myself for everyone's entertainment, a fact my adventure game puzzle reviews all but prove. Second, with Persona 3 Reload looming right around the corner, I wanted to give The Answer a shot to see if there was even a fraction of it worth salvaging for Reload's purposes. Is there a way to re-write The Answer to make it fit the scope and sequence of Reload? Likewise, some in the Persona community have characterized The Answer as the worst official Persona product ever made. I wanted to test that theory by giving it a whirl. Finally, I wanted to return to FES to remind myself of ways Reload could modernize its source material for the better. And BOY was playing FES in 2023, a friendly reminder of how far Atlus has come regarding dungeon design and pacing. I complain about Persona 5 dragging when you get to the Momentos a lot. Still, vanilla Persona 3 and FES have some real slogs that weigh down their bright spots. For example, the evocative aesthetical choices and the audacity of the dark and moody narrative cannot entirely make up for the slog that is navigating Tartarus every goddamn night.

What Exactly Is "The Answer?"

Before I can answer that question, we have to review what Persona 3 FES was because there's some slight blurring between what people remember it added to Persona 3 versus Portable. FES was a glorified "Director's Cut" re-release of Persona 3 with some new Social Links and mechanical differences in how they work. In FES, you could now take Koromaru on walks, invade the privacy of your social links by spying on them using the security cameras in a control room, play the story in a hard mode, tackle new quests, and explore new Personas. FES also introduced improvements to the Naganaki Shrine in that interacting with the shrine would allow you to alter Tartarus. Yes, there's a new scene in FES that some people gravitate towards as a significant improvement from the original game. Still, FES was only a moderate deviation from the initial release. Portable, not FES, was the version that mercifully allowed you to control party members directly and made more than cosmetic changes to who you could romance and how they would connect to the ending. This issue leads me to an essential point of clarification, and I cannot make this point any more explicit. At the time, The Answer was FES' big selling point for people who had already played Persona 3. Atlus PR consistently presented it as a significant enough standalone expansion to justify people buying FES regardless of whether they played the original game. Atlus sold people a bill of goods, and they underdelivered by a wide margin.

The Answer is an epilogue in FES and has not been present in any subsequent releases of Persona 3 thus far. In my case, I had to find my FES disc and run it through a PS2 I borrowed from a friend. The Answer does NOT require transferring any saved data from the main story to play it. Instead, upon starting The Answer, the game gives you the remaining SEES team members at level twenty-five. This point will be one that I belabor continually throughout this blog, but The Answer is designed as a proper expansion pack, with most playthroughs clocking in around twenty-five to thirty-five hours. For reference, my playthrough just barely crested the thirty-hour mark. The story picks up immediately where Persona 3 ends on March 31st. However, let's review a few other nuts and blots before summarizing the game's introduction. The Answer entirely occurs in a single dungeon named the "Abyss of Time." This dungeon and all the enemies you encounter in it are locked to the game's "Hard" difficulty setting. Because the whole expansion takes place in this dungeon, there are no social links, and your exploratory efforts are combat-oriented. If you are someone who got into the Persona games thanks to Giant Bomb's Persona 4 Endurance Run or maybe even Persona 5, imagine playing a Persona game that is oriented around a single dungeon and doesn't have any Social Link mechanics. The story's progression is contingent on your in-game progress, but because this is an expert-level dungeon, every inch of it wants to kick your teeth in. That is how The Answer works.

While watching The Answer's opening cutscene, we discover the Protagonist is dead, and the remaining SEES members are in different stages of coping and mourning. Speaking of SEES, the team has disbanded, and their former dorms are moments away from demolition. With graduation complete, the school year is officially over, and everyone is about to leave to begin Summer Break. However, everyone discovers they are trapped in the dorms and stuck in a time loop wherein they appear to exist in a perpetual bubble that repeats March 31st. Eventually, everyone is attacked by an anti-shadow android named Metis, who later introduces herself as Aigis's sister. After Aigis finds the strength to perform her evoker, she discovers the Persona 3 Protagonist's Orpheus Persona has replaced her previous Persona, Athena, and finds she also has their Wild Card ability. After Aigis subdues Metis, we find out that underneath the dorms is a labyrinth similar to Tartarus, and Metis posits that it is the key to ending the time loop. She also starts calling Aigis "sister" and initiates a b-plot wherein Aigis teaches her how to control her human emotions. Most of these scenes are intolerable!

And therein lies the basic structure of The Answer. There is a dungeon grind in front of you, and you have to beat that grind to get some character-based vignettes. These character-oriented cinematics provide extraneous details about party members you have thoroughly explored in the base game. There are seven doors, and each time you complete the gauntlet it contains, something pops off with the main cast and their inherent traumas, which I should remind you we already dealt with in the previous game. Also important are their present emotional states following the death of the Protagonist. Because the structure of the game is frictionless outside of its often BRUTAL difficulty that is thanks in no part to the companion AI still sucking complete and total shit (i.e., Mitsuru still thinks Marin Karin is the most fantastic spell on God's Earth), the characters we know and love are not exactly how they once were. When they discover the Protagonist is not exactly dead but instead chained to eternal torment to fight back against the Apocalypse, and DO NOT WORRY MY SWEET SUMMER CHILD, WE WILL GET TO THAT, they break into cliques and begin picking apart each other's stances on whether they should free the Protagonist or move on and respect their sacrifice. What ensues next are either characters showing signs of maturation since we first saw them in Persona 3 (i.e., Ken and Akihiko) OR massive character breaks that make no sense whatsoever (i.e., GOD JESUS, WHAT DID THEY DO TO YUKARI IN THIS THING?!).

Now, if there is one part of The Answer that I want to defend, it's the fraying of the party's relationships as they navigate further into the dungeon. Watching the characters struggle to form teams and develop a consensus works for me. Most people dislike seeing characters they recall shirking away their recurring phobias or insecurities suddenly devolving backward in this expansion pack. However, I find that to be one of the more defensible creative decisions in The Answer. Seeing Mitsuru try and assert herself as the party leader and butt heads against Akihiko and Junpei, who do not put up with her alpha bitch attitude at all, makes perfect sense to me. While they did accomplish a lot during Persona 3, it was all on the shoulders of the Protagonist, and the in-fighting you see proves that had it not been for the Protagonist, none of these characters would have put up with each other in the first place. The Protagonist was the glue that kept them all together, and The Answer doubling down on that was clever. Unfortunately, that's about fifteen to twenty minutes of what The Answer accomplishes in its boorish twenty to thirty hours. Beyond that and the boss battle against Erebus being cool, that's all I have to say as positive aspects of The Answer. I know some people like Metis, but I'm not one of them. At its heart, The Answer is a dungeon grind where the likelihood of you needing to restart your progress from scratch is high and a given.

Why Is It So Bad?

Summarizing why The Answer is an awful playing experience is the easiest part of this blog. Maybe you read my brief biography of The Answer and thought, "Oh, a series of challenge dungeons with a few character revelations here and there sounds like what From Software or Team Ninja do with their post-game epilogues or DLC!" And that attitude is what many people thought, though they did not have From or Team Ninja as a reference, going into The Answer when they first started it. There's just one massive problem. The Answer is twenty-five to thirty-five hours long. Each sub-dungeon you complete is as long, and sometimes longer, than the main story dungeons in the base game. Worse, without the social link trappings or non-dungeon-based world exploration, you usually would have to break up the combat's monotony; the dungeons, while visually diverse, quickly become tiresome. And The Answer LOVES kicking you in your teeth in the cheapest ways possible. Even the basic enemies have one-shotting potential right from the rip, and the entire epilogue locks its difficulty setting to "Hard." Battles that would typically only take two to three minutes take double that because the jump in difficulty is that noticeable. I get that it is designed to be a series of "expert-level challenges." Still, characters leave and re-enter your rotation without warning, making planning and preparing for some of the combat scenarios The Answer puts your way a complete pain in the ass. If there are certain characters in the main party you dislike using, tough, because there's no way you can avoid them in The Answer, as there are whole sections where you have no agency over your party composition! And did I mention you cannot control your companion's actions during combat? Because that SUCKS, especially when you get to the final few stages of The Answer, wherein everything is capable of murdering you in two moves.

I might get into trouble with some Persona die-hards, but I'm not too fond of most of the character work in The Answer. I obviously cannot speak for every Persona 3 fan, but it's not that some of these new character traumas and neuroses are bad or poorly written. The real issue is that we have already played a fifty-plus hour experience that previously purported to have surfaced everything worth addressing with these characters. There's something profoundly "cheap" about Mitsuru having EVEN MORE CHILDHOOD drama with her father or Junpei having an alcoholic father who abused him that you learn about for the first time in The Answer. No, the Hell with that, that's bullshit! These character-defining traumas are massive pipe bombs that should have come up during the original game, especially if each character is going to pine about the Persona 3 Protagonist being the most essential person in their lives. And a lot of these revelations feel incredibly "convenient." It's a bigger problem with Persona 4 Arena, but I have never liked the convenience of Aigis having her memory wiped, which permits her to forget that she has sisters. Ken's flashback provides the most vivid first-hand account of his mother's murder by a shadow. Why is this the first time we have heard this story? Also, some of the party members are complete afterthoughts. Surprise, Akihiko got scouted to join SEES by Mitsuru after a boxing tournament! It's a total nothing burger, but it's at least something compared to The Answer doing JACK SHIT with FUUKA!

Nonetheless, one creative decision related to The Answer always comes up when people talk about why they hate it: Yukari's character transformation. They do her so dirty in this game. Because the structure of The Answer is barebones, it desperately needs friction and a driving wedge between the characters, and for whatever reason, Yukari was selected to get that task done. Because I guess Atlus thought what Persona 3 fans wanted to see in The Answer was watching one of the funnier and more upbeat characters become "punished." Again, part of this works, and at the start of the game, she's not the only character that isn't jumping for joy at the prospect of SEES resuming its activities, and if it was just that, I think her being a darker and moodier character could have worked. Nonetheless, as written, her character transformation into someone who expresses jealousy towards Aigis and outright hostility to anyone who disagrees with her viewpoint of wanting to go back to the past to save the protagonist is a vicious character assassination. Watching her become envious of Aigis after the latter gains the ability to use the Protagonist's Persona isn't simply weird; it's uncomfortable. Yukari's jealousy reeks of "girl drama," which these games only make you stomach when you get caught philandering with others in your spare time. Even then, with The Answer not utilizing your Persona 3 save data, Yukari acting out as if she was the default romance for the Protagonist, which goes against my playthrough, feels disrespectful of the player's choices. Also, in the case of Yukari, her whole plot thread in the base game is helping her develop coping mechanisms related to loss. Her not knowing how to deal with the death of the Protagonist is a complete betrayal of everything we went through with her in the original game!

So, the plot twist in The Answer. It's something. Obviously, the Ken Amada romance option in Portable was terrible, but has there ever been a narrative thread or plot element in a Persona game as universally hated as finding out the Protagonist from Persona 3 isn't dead but instead chained up to a door to prevent the end of the world? Did that catch you off guard? If so, let's engage in another lore dump. After you watch all of the character flashbacks, which are sparingly spread across hours of grueling dungeon crawls, the party deduces that the doors connect them to events that establish their association with their Persona. As they make their way to the end of the dungeon, they fight the Shadow version of the Protagonist and obtain a key that can open a portal out of the cursed dorm. However, Metis reveals that they can use the key to travel back to when they fought Nyx and prevent the death of the Protagonist. This reveal is when Yukari suddenly gets up in her feelings and declares that the party must go back in time, and those who disagree with her are traitors. No one can agree on what to do, and the characters battle one another to determine what to do with the keys. When Yukari loses, you must deal with an incredibly discomforting scene where she sobs her eyes out and cements her "sisterhood" with Mitsuru. It's a scene that practically ruins her entire character. When Metis and Aigis win, they unlock a door that leads to a boss room and fight Erebus, who is the personification of humanity's malice. While they are victorious, they learn that Erebus will likely come back, and the seal the Protagonist has formed on the gate between Erebus and reality is all that is preventing the end of the world. So, in pure Disney logic, the Protagonist isn't dead. He's sleeping on a gate!

I have said it before, but Atlus back peddling the death of the Persona 3 Protagonist sucks. There's no better way to say it. It downright sucks. Persona 3 is a game about death and its inevitability, and it makes you come to terms with that, regardless of how many hours you spend fusing the best Personas. It outright refusing to give you the shiny happy ending you were expecting still stands as one of the series' most daring and audacious creative decisions. And with The Answer, we see the first attempt at chipping away at that emotional and narrative impact. Yes, it gets worse, especially with the spin-offs, but this trend started with The Answer. Likewise, the party-wide strife about how to respond to the revelation about the Protagonist is the most frustrating stuff in the entire game. Characters boil into two arbitrary camps, and for whatever reason, you, as the player, have no agency over how the party progresses. Mitsuru makes a choice, and then you have to live with the consequences. Despite the promise of this being a narrative journey where Aigis becomes an empowering figure, it only provides her with a few opportunities to assert herself. And people get shitty towards each other after they spent practically a year acclimating and learning how to compromise with one another. All that community building that took you hundreds of hours to develop is gone for the story's convenience!

Is It Good Atlus Continues To Pretend This Doesn't Exist?

Well, except they haven't. Not to completely undercut an eye-catching sub-headline meant to generate clicks and comments, but while Atlus has made playing The Answer virtually impossible, they haven't shown any signs of de-canonizing it. In fact, at this point, the idea of erasing The Answer from existence and sticking with the "original" ending is all but impossible, even if Atlus plans to use Reload to create an alternate canonical timeline, something that remains unconfirmed, considering core aspects of The Answer and Portable serve as the basis of the Arena games. Elizabeth's storyline in Persona 4 Arena does not work in a world where The Answer doesn't exist. So, the idea that, as some Persona 3 fans posit, the Persona 3 sub-franchise can march on as if it never happened is a falsehood. It is still a factor in the series' current steps and direction. Whenever we have seen Aigis outside of Persona 3 or heard about the Persona 3 Protagonist, the canonicity of The Answer has never been questioned. To return to the topic of Persona 4 Arena, Aigis openly references Metis and her sister's true origins. Metis was the manifestation of Aigis' emotions after she decided to separate them from her body. It is a story pivot you can see coming from a mile away, but it gets the job done and completes Aigis' story arc on a mostly positive note, and it is something that has been reinforced several times afterward.

The core issue here goes beyond dunking on The Answer for shits and giggles. Does Atlus plan for Persona 3 Reload to be the "definitive" Persona 3 experience, and if so, will this create a new "canon?" We already know they are being selective about which parts of FES and Portable they want to use without definitively locking themselves into either build or release. Nonetheless, at some point, Atlus will have to figure out and then communicate how Reload connects to everything else in the Persona 3 series. Only crazy people like myself give a shit about the Persona canon, but I feel safe in saying Atlus knows they have to be careful about their tightrope act. They could take a note from Square Enix and Final Fantasy VII Remake, opt for this new game being its own thing, and treat it like a fun on-ramp for people unfamiliar with the original. As much as I love the original Persona 3 and FES, that's likely the healthiest option.

But to return to the question I pose in this sub-section, it is telling that Atlus opted for Portable instead of FES for the Game Pass release of Persona 3. Trust me, I understand people like the female protagonist and rest assured, I'm one of them. I also can attest playing Persona 3 without direct control of your companions is an awful time. Nonetheless, the environmental exploration bits and the new anime cutscenes they added to FES are much better than not having them. Unfortunately, The Answer is so bad that I think Atlus will never again touch FES. They don't want to talk about it. They don't want you to talk about it. In many ways, FES is the superior experience, but simply cutting out one-third of it because it sucked shit isn't something that Atlus is ever going to do. The version of FES most people want is one that has some quality-of-life additions seen in Portable but without The Answer, and that would require a MASSIVE admission of creative failure on the part of Atlus with their Golden Goose IP. Few AAA studios would be willing to do that, let alone Atlus.

Is This The Worst Thing In The World Of Persona?

Goodness, this question is tricky. Regarding the mainline Persona games, I don't like the first game and its first-person dungeon crawling. The localization of the first Persona game has also seen a variety of questionable translation choices, even with the PSP release. I will be the first to say Persona 2 is one of the more underrated games in the series because it avoids the innate creepiness of needing to experience teenage romance from the vantage point of adult writers. That game opting for adult characters for half of its story makes way more sense than most people give it credit for and would be a welcomed change if Atlus ever decided to go with college students instead of high school ones in Persona 6. I'm not fond of anime fighting games and always disliked the Persona rhythm games. Furthermore, Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight made some incredibly bizarre imaginative choices with the Persona 3 cast.

However, do any of these early games or questionable spin-offs compare to the frustration I and many others feel towards The Answer? I don't think so. When a spin-off game makes a few dubious creative choices, I have a far easier time yada yada-ing it out of my consciousness than with a siloed epilogue of a mainline entry in the franchise. There are few examples of the Persona writing team missing the mark from top to bottom, like in The Answer. Undoubtedly, the people tapped to write the stories for the Persona franchise have consistently been terrible at conveying LGBTQ+ life experiences with a modern lens. I don't want to diminish criticisms rightfully directed at them for that recurring issue. Nevertheless, almost everything attempted in The Answer is either a failure or a net negative. Characters like Yukari remain recontextualized because The Answer still exists. On top of that, Atlus has been teasing that there's some end goal for the Persona 3 characters since the conclusion of The Answer, and they continue to be gun-shy about what that will represent and when. They have been building toward Elizabeth and Aigis, finding a way to bring back the Persona 3 Protagonist, and as awful as that sounds, I want them to get it over with and close the book on this fiasco.

But, could I interest you in discussing a dogshit Persona anime Atlus greenlighted years ago? Now, I know what you're thinking, and no, I'm not about to make fun of the endless stream of Persona 3 movies Atlus has produced. While stunningly uncreative in how they engage the source material, those films are wholly well-made and have relatively impressive production values. The Persona 4 anime adaptation was a fun time outside of its inability to treat queerness with any semblance of tact or responsibility. However, to the show's defense, neither did the game. No, if we want to talk about something horrible, let's talk about Persona: Trinity Soul. It was a show that missed the mark so severely because Atlus didn't monitor the project during its production that it almost immediately had to be de-canonized. A point the Persona 3 Portable fanbook had to explain in fine print. Oh, and do you like the music in the Persona franchise? If you said "Yes," I need you to stop everything you are doing and listen to the song "Burning Men's Soul" from Persona: Trinity Soul.

This thing is twenty-six episodes of pure torture. It is an anime tie-in to Persona 3 that came out around the time of FES's North American release. Trinity Soul was animated and written by A-1 Pictures, a studio that was at the time still in its infancy and a few months from their first breakout hit, the anime adaptation of Black Butler. As questionable as I might find Trinity Souls, I have to recognize that A-1 Pictures learned from the experience and have since gone on to do the Persona 3 movies as well as bigger productions like Fairy Tail, Sword Art Online, Working!!, and Kaguya-sama: Love Is War. With Trinity Soul, they got very little guidance from Atlus, and that led to a twenty-six-episode show that is a Persona product in name only. Trinity Soul takes place ten years after the events of Persona 3 and is a murder investigation mystery wherein the Personas help the characters find clues and beat up bad guys. Does this show address any of the unresolved plot threads in Persona 3? NO, and there are few hallmarks from the game as well! It doesn't feel like a Persona product, what with its excessive amounts of gore and none of the iconic stylings of the franchise. Also, while I wouldn't say it outright plagiarizes Darker than Black, Trinity Souls GENEROUSLY borrows thematic ideas from that show, and the use of Personas in it more closely resembles the abilities of Contractors in Darker in Black. Oh, and instead of people falling into portals into alternate dimensions, people are randomly dying from their bodies turning inside out like that one classic Treehouse of Horror dancing scene. And the characters could be more enjoyable and interesting, but they are not. The Answer is frustrating and disrespectful, but Trinity Souls is a complete waste of time. Which of these two sounds worse to you probably nets the distinction of being the "Worst Persona Thing Ever Made."