I have completed the catalogue of FromSoftware games (yes, they have games from before the Souls series…I'm not talking about that).
This is no small accomplishment. When I first heard of Dark Souls, I was living in my townhouse, had only two kids, and thought, Nah, I'll pass. I don't want to play the hardest games of all time. Now I've not only beaten that game, I've invested hundreds of dollars into other FromSoftware titles and related items. I have a Bloodborne Hunter figurine on my desk; Bloodborne-based board games (technically, one is a card game and the other is a board game); Bloodborne comics and artbook; Volume 1 of a book of essays about Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls II (with plans to buy Volume 2 shortly); and countless hours watching lore-analysis videos, playthrough tips, art contests related to the FromSoftware library, and more. I also listen to a couple of podcasts about the games every once in a while. I've written a handful of essays about the different titles, and even gone so far as to use Bloodborne as the basis for both an ambitious project of novellas (which I'm still sitting at about halfway through), but also the inspiration for my own tabletop RPG. These games have really made a difference in my life. And it's not like this is a long-term love-affair. I tried playing Bloodborne a couple of times before it stuck with me, which only happened because I listened to the VaatiVidya explanation of the story. I didn't know any of that, I thought as his smooth, soothing voice walked me through the intricacies of the Healing Church, the Vilebloods, and Byrgenwerth College. I didn't realize that people, y'know…actually beat the game. That it wasn't like Overwatch--something that you could pick up and play and then put down infinitely. It had an end-state. That…was revelatory. It also really only happened in the past year or so. After beating Bloodborne on Christmas Eve 2020, I immediately set my sights on Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. However, my retail therapy kicked in during Gayle's first chemotherapy treatment in early January 2021, and I started Dark Souls as well. So, really, between January 2021 and end of May 2021, I have beaten (in order) Dark Souls, Sekiro, Demon's Souls Remake, Dark Souls II, and now Dark Souls III. Not too shabby, considering everything else that's going on in my life. (I want to point out that I've also beaten Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Marvel's Avengers during the same time period, too.) That's a lot of video game time, though I have to confess that a lot of it has been a coping mechanism for the stresses in my day-to-day life. I don't think I would have done this exact thing had it been any other year. And now I'm "done" with these games. Elden Ring is an infinity away from being released; DLC (with the exception of Bloodborne) doesn't necessarily interest me; New Game + is intimidating. I don't know if/when I'll return to these worlds in any meaningful way. I plan on firing up Bloodborne again--that's probably always going to be a given, considering how it was my first entry into the FromSoftware library and is, by almost all counts, the best of all of these kinds of games--but returning to Lordran, Drangleic, or Lothric? I don't know about that. I'm pretty sure that Dark Souls II won't see me revisiting it…of them all, it was my least favorite. But I also have another conundrum: What actually counts as one of these games? See, the original Demon's Souls was made over a decade ago, but its remastered version was a launch title for the PlayStation 5. In the research I did about the game, the new take on it is pretty faithful--some changes here or there, but on the whole a very similar experience--to the original. But there are some differences. What should I do about that? Have I really played Demon's Souls? Both yes and no…I've played a version of it. But not the version of it. The same, as a matter of fact, goes for Dark Souls. I'm playing the PlayStation 4 "Remastered" version, which has some changes and tweaks to it, too. I, for instance, never had the problem of framerates dropping to almost-unplayable levels when I went through Blighttown, as that was an issue with the original PlayStation 3 hardware. The PS4 doesn't struggle with that area at all anyway, and when I play it on my PS5, I haven't had a single issue. Does that mean I haven't really played Dark Souls? My experience with Dark Souls II was exclusively through the Scholar of the First Sin version of the game, which includes the DLC but also has a lot of other changes to the game that have been controversial among the dedicated fan-base. So was my experience less-than-authentic to the true experience of Dark Souls II? (Frankly, I don't care either way about this one: I didn't really like Drangleic very much and while there were some enjoyable moments, on the whole it wasn't my thing. The others, however, give me pause. I don't think I'm hardcore enough to want to try out the earlier versions of these games, frankly. I don't even want to play through the DLC of some of them. So I think I'm probably safe in saying that, for me, I feel as though I've completed the series, despite the technicalities. But what of DSIII? What were my thoughts? Well…pretty positive. Playing a PS4-era game is always preferable to a PS3-era game (unless nostalgia is involved; that's a different story). There were some small tweaks that DSIII took from both Bloodborne and Dark Souls II that I thought were great. After going through Demon's Souls and Dark Souls II and really simply being irritated at the way my life-max was depleted after dying once, I liked how restoring my character's ember--either through using an ember item or defeating a boss--expanded the health bar, rather than simply restoring an amount that had been sitting empty while I was in the "undead form" or whatever. Like, there was a psychological frustration to see that the punishment for my earlier failures were constantly being rubbed in my face due to the inability to have a full health bar. I didn't see how it was being used in any way but that, and it was not something that I wanted to see again. Dark Souls III changes the formula in its effect, despite the fact that it is doing the same thing mechanically. By giving me a larger health-bar after restoring an ember, I feel rewarded for having done well, rather than punished for having made a mistake. And, since the game is designed for me to make lots of mistakes, it got tiresome in those other games to be living under that constant punishment. Another change to the format from DS to DSIII is the inclusion of dual-wielding. It wasn't something I really experimented with in Dark Souls II, but I had a lot of fun swinging around a couple of axes throughout most of my playthrough. I did end up switching over to a more traditional sword-and-shield combo in the late-game, but I don't regret focusing on the two hand-axes throughout most of it. (This was particularly nice, since I'm not very good at parrying, so the shield wasn't used to its best effect with me.) This may be my own ignorance showing, but I was happy to be able to level up a couple of weapons to +9 or even +10 in the course of the one playthrough. That was unexpected: I've always struggled to get my weapons improved quickly enough to justify a mid- to late-game switch from one to another, which means that I'm usually still swinging the same thing around that I started the game with. The ease of improving the weapons made it a lot more viable for me to experiment. In fact, my favorite weapon--perhaps of any of the games in total--would be the Abyss Watchers' sword-and-dagger combo. Two-handing that, with the unexpected moveset of diving low and swinging about wildly, is lots of fun and can make really short work of many enemies. While tried-and-true methods are still utilized, I felt much more comfortable branching out and experimenting with my approach to the game, and that definitely increased my pleasure at playing it. Now, as I already outlined above, I have blazed through these games in less than half a year. I don't have nostalgia connected to any of them (except Bloodborne). That isn't to say that they aren't important; I'm instead saying that I don't have any deeper connections to them that time often will generate. Nevertheless, it was quite the thrill to be back in Anor Londo again. I'd only been away from that iconic Dark Souls location for a few weeks, yet running up the flying buttresses again, knocking back the silver knights (or, more frequently, being smacked around by them), and revisiting the grand cathedral arena where Ornstein and Smough drained hours of my life was a really enjoyable experience. Seeing it with the enhanced graphics and smoothness of the PS4-run engine made it even better. It wasn't quite as powerful as when I returned to Shadow Moses in Metal Gear Solid 4, but it was still pretty great. The bosses were also a highlight of the game. While Dark Souls II tried to overwhelm me with its thirty-plus bosses, Dark Souls III was instead going back to a more Demon's Souls-style of variety. Some bosses simply required some smacking around, yes: Figure out their moveset, use the right weapons, win the day. However, there were more that required some thinking, turning them into hyper-dangerous puzzles rather than just a brute-force experience. I'm thinking of Yhorm the Giant as the best example of this. When I arrived in his fog gate, I was immediately concerned with the size difference…how was I supposed to topple this guy? But, ever the brave warrior, I leaped forward… …and barely even scratched him with my weapon. Uh-oh, I thought. This is bad. Then I died. Going through the process of trying new things--a new weapon, a new armor set, a new load of rings--proved fruitless. Maybe I needed to lure him to the pillars and let the ceiling collapse on him? No, that didn't work. No matter how I tried it, I couldn't get around that fact that he was fast, strong, and didn't take any damage. I noticed, however, an item near his throne at the far end of the arena. I normally avoid picking those up during the boss fight: They're a reward, I figure, or I'll get cut down because I'm busy looting instead of fighting. But I was desperate. Not knowing what else to do, I went ahead and picked it up. A sword. Great. I already have dozens of those. Yet it tickled the back of my mind. Why give me this sword in this place? What might it do? After dying moments past picking it up, I went into the inventory and checked out the equipment. It was a Storm Ruler…the same kind of sword that I picked up in Demon's Souls. One that has a unique moveset… Not only that, but the description says that the sword is particularly useful against giants. Well, that seemed to fit, then, didn't it? I took some time to level up the sword a couple of times, then brought it into the fight. It was a really easy fight after that. Of all the bosses I've beaten in these games, this is the one that gave me the greatest satisfaction. (Orphan of Kos was the one that I'm proudest for having defeated, though.) I had figured it out. I had put together the clues and deduced how to make the weapon work in my favor. Yes, I could have done what I often do--looking online for tips and helps--but I had decided to do this myself. And I'd pulled it off. That's a good feeling. Not all of Dark Souls III was that way, however. I'm getting better at these games--you have to, if you want to beat them--but there are still hiccups, hang-ups, and disappointments. The first that springs to mind is the online-default. A whole other side of these games is the online component, where other players may summon you to fight by their side--or invade your world to do battle. Some players love this component, and thrill at invading or beating back invaders. And while it's been thrilling on the rare occasions that I've been invaded of having actually defeated another player, I haven't put much time or effort into this component. For Dark Souls III, I figured trying out a new part of the series might be fun. I joined a covenant that frequently pulled me into fighting through others' worlds, running around and chopping up whoever I could. It was fun. A bit of a diversion, but still…fun. However, it got tiresome to be in the middle of a fight, only to be suddenly pulled into another's world. Returning, the enemies I was confronting had all healed up while I was gone--though I hadn't--and I sometimes ended up losing my own game's battle because of that. The real issue, however, was that the game kicks you back to the main menu when the internet connection is lost. My home's internet can be immensely frustrating, and it isn't unheard of for it to drop connections often. After being dropped from a boss fight I was on the cusp of winning, I decided to just turn off the online feature entirely. The benefits of the hints left by other players just weren't worth the frustration of losing progress because of buggy internet. In the other titles, losing connectivity simply shifted me to offline mode--a switch that the game notified me of with a text box. No such convenience with DSIII. Despite how much I enjoyed some of the boss fights in the game, I have to say that fighting King of the Storm (and The Nameless King) was so frustrating that I never ended up beating them. Unlike Orphan of Kos or some of the other incredibly hard bosses, KotS and its rider just…bugged me. Maybe it was my particular version of the game, I don't know, but the sound effects wouldn't always load. That put me at a disadvantage in fighting them, as some of the tells for certain attacks have an audio cue to them. I would kill the one snake shaman at the end of the hallway before attacking the boss, pulling in 2,400 souls with each kill. Since the souls were easy to recover, I would slowly pile up more and more souls. After pulling in over 200k souls this way (which tells you how many times I attempted the fight), I gave up. It just wasn't worth it for an optional boss. I similarly struggled with the final boss, losing often because of my own mistakes or--in one particularly frustrating moment--because my character didn't get up when I pushed the corresponding button. So I died. By this point in my experiences with these games, I'm accustomed to having to try a lot to win. I'm used to close calls and tricky fights, to close-calls and one-shot deaths. But being accustomed to them and liking them are two different things. Three consecutive game sessions (each ranging between one and two hours) saw me still struggling to get past the Soul of Cinders. It probably took me more than fifty tries to get past him. That was…a lot of attempts. That means the Orphan of Kos, Lord Isshin, and now Soul of Cinders are the full-stop hardest bosses for me in the entire series. There's nothing wrong with being a hard final boss, though. I mean, these games are supposed to be hard. But sometimes… The last criticism I want to point out is entirely a personal one: This game feels a lot like Bloodborne. I know that they were created almost simultaneously, and it looks like they run on the same sort of game engine. They definitely have a similar feeling as far as the art direction goes, too. More than once I (or even Gayle) observed, "That looks like something from Bloodborne." It isn't really a problem…except it kind of is? Okay, analogy time: A few Christmases ago, Gayle bought me the English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, per my request. It's filled with all of the no-one-outside-an-English-department-has-heard-of hits like Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Arden of Faversham and The Malcontent. I've read only a couple of them thus far (have I mentioned how bad I am at reading stuff? I'm really bad at it), and while they were pretty okay, the entire time I did so I was thinking, I could be reading Shakespeare right now. While not even in the same realm of power or importance as Shakespeare, the impulse is similar. If I'm playing a game that feels, looks, and sounds so much like Bloodborne, why not just play Bloodborne? The answer to that is pretty obvious: Dark Souls III is not Bloodborne. They are different. They are trying to do different things, tell different stories, explore different worlds. While Lothric isn't as engaging to me as Yharnam, by the end of the game, I was pretty fully on board. The quality that I've come to expect from these titles was fully evident, and despite some of my personal disagreements with certain choices (I still hate the "kick" mechanic--it almost never works as well as I want it to), the game is definitely one of the best in the catalogue. So, with them all completed, where do I go from here? I'll probably still be dabbling in Dark Souls, if only because my 11-year-old son is currently trying to beat it. (And can we take a minute to acknowledge two things here? One, I'm a bad dad for letting my young son play an M-rated video game; and two, it's crazy impressive that he's so far into the game--he's defeated Ornstein and Smough, for crying out loud! That is no mean feat.) I really want to go after Sekiro again, because I wasn't really appreciating what that game was trying to do within the FromSoftware formula. And the Old Blood beckons, of course. Yharnam awaits… In my quest for control over something difficult in my life, I've paradoxically landed on playing through the modern Soulsborne catalogue. Thanks to my incredibly-late arrival to the genre, I've been able to pick up almost all of the games for super cheap--with the exception of Sekiro, I think--and that includes my latest victory, Dark Souls II.
I have to admit, I entered into the world of Drangleic with a hefty host of reservation. Within the Soulsborne community, Dark Souls II has an at-best-mixed reputation. There are lots of reasons for that, including creator-worship (since the creator of the series, Hidetaka Miyazaki, was not in the driver's seat for this entry), disliked changes to the formula, and a fair amount of hate for the hit boxes of the game. In fact, I watched a couple of YouTube videos under the search terms "Should I play Dark Souls 2?" because I wasn't sure if I wanted to spend time in a game that wasn't scratching the itch that FromSoftware games (alone, perhaps) seem to make in me. Still, at sub-twenty dollars, it didn't seem like a huge financial investment. If I didn't like the game after twenty hours or so of playing, no big deal, right? Well, I ended up dropping fifty hours into the game before beating it last night, and I have to say…I definitely see why people like it the least of the Soulsborne games. That does not equal hating it (I wouldn't have beaten it if I hated it). It means that, in the pantheon of Soulsborne games, my current ranking is as follows: 5. Dark Souls II 4. Dark Souls 3. Demon's Souls 2. Sekiro 1. Bloodborne (We'll have to see, in a few weeks, where I feel Dark Souls III lands. And, in a few months/years (?) where Elden Ring fits in.) I feel like the greatest controversy in this is where Dark Souls goes, as it's the originator in the series and has a special, nostalgic place in the hearts of a lot of gamers. Many have been involved with Souls games since its inception during the early PS3 generation, so there's a lot that factors into one's feelings about these games. For me, that nostalgic devotion is centered on Bloodborne (though it seems that most of the community agrees with me that it is the best of all, regardless). Nevertheless, I put Dark Souls where I did in part because while its formula is better implemented than in Demon's Souls, I played the Demon's Souls PS5 remake, which has so many nice features to it--up to and including the superior haptic feedback of the PS5 controllers--that it just barely edges out Dark Souls from the top three. It bears emphasizing that these are all good games. If I have to put them into a hierarchy, then that's how it currently shakes out. And why do I put Dark Souls II on the bottom of the list? Well, just like how I put Demon's Souls higher because of a collection of small-but-adds-up-to-a-lot features, Dark Souls II has the same-but-opposite effect: The tiny changes diminished my preference for the game. The Cons
The Pros
In sum, the game is good. It's great, in fact, though it fails to live up to the high standards of the others in its pedigree…which is basically what the community told me when I did my original due-diligence. Okay. Next up…Dark Souls III. I've been talking a lot about FromSoftware games lately. This is because I've been playing a lot of FromSoftware games lately. (If you missed it, I talked about Dark Souls--and my interest in this style of game more broadly--and Sekiro, with some preliminary thoughts on Bloodborne from a few years ago.) So it is surprising to no one to learn that when I got my PlayStation 5, I purchased it in a bundle with both Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Demon's Souls.
This means that I've been playing FromSoftware games very much out of order. The original version of Demon's Souls came out <<checks internet>> in 2009. I definitely missed the boat on that one, and who knows? I may not have had the drive to learn the punishing mechanics back then. Anyway, after FromSoftware released Demon's Souls, they created a spiritual successor that would've felt like a carbon copy had it come from a different studio: Dark Souls, which came out in 2011. The two sequels to Dark Souls were released in the subsequent years. The apotheosis of the form came in 2015 with the PlayStation 4 exclusive of Bloodborne. Four years later, Sekiro dropped. At the time of this writing, the "Soulsborne" community is eagerly awaiting Elden Ring, about which I have purposefully remained almost completely ignorant. That timeline is interesting to me, because it creates an evolutionary map, with components from different games manifesting in other areas--sometimes multiple games apart. For instance, one of the few flaws in Bloodborne is the healing method: blood vials are a limited resource that must be "farmed" off of fallen enemies, discovered in the world, or purchased from the creepy Messengers. This process of finding healing items in-world was abandoned in the three Dark Souls games, yet is a component of Demon's Souls, the first of its kind. In Demon's Souls, you find different types of grasses that heal different amounts, with the rarer, more powerful healing items being (unsurprisingly) much more difficult to find. In Dark Souls, you are given an "Estus flask", a small bottle in which the Fire from bonfires is contained. Your character has a limited number of uses--starting at 5, though a crafty player can get that cranked up to 20 by the end of the game--but the flask refills upon every interaction with the bonfires. Bloodborne streamlines the healing process by only having one major healing item--the blood vial--that is quantity-capped at 20, yet must be found or purchased…a mixture between Dark Souls efficiency and Demon's Souls resource management. It's interesting to see how some components of these games remains the same: Difficulty, of course, as well as environmental- and minimalistic storytelling. There is always a grim tone, endings that range between "well, that was depressing" to "well, that was super depressing", and brilliant game mechanics. Yet there are also inventive lateral steps, aspects of one game that are abandoned, refined, or reskinned in subsequent games. Which is what makes the PS5 remake of Demon's Souls so interesting. I know that it is a very faithful adaptation of the original. Unlike the recent Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII remakes, this isn't a retelling or reimagining--it's an updating. Yet it kept some of the components of the original game (which, again, I haven't played) that aren't very good. And I think that they're not very good because we don't see them repeated in any of the future games. (I say that with a very large caveat that, though I'm playing through Dark Souls II right now, I can't speak about what's in Dark Souls III, since I've never even loaded up the game.) So here are three gripes about Demon's Souls. #1) The Archstones. The layout of this game world is significantly less linear than any of the other FromSoftware titles. In Demon's Souls, the player is dropped into the Nexus, a central hub that allows the character to teleport to any of the five sections of the world where the adventure takes place. After the introductory components of the game are done, the player can choose any pathway through any of the levels. I approached it in a rotating form, getting further in the first map (Archstone of the Small King) before moving over to, say, the fifth map (Archstone of the Chieftain), and so on. If a player wished to only push through one Archstone entirely before moving on to another, that would be a possibility. That isn't my beef with the system. I like it well enough, though it feels significantly less connected than all of the other games. The world feels cohesive enough, thanks to the tone and art style. But you can't run from Boletarian Place to the Ritual Path, for example, as they're in different Archstones. That in and of itself isn't a huge deal; its effect is minimal, and it really does help make the game be more organized. No, what bothers me is the limited number of archstones (as opposed to Archstones) within each map. The only way to get these crucial checkpoints is by defeating a boss. And while the level designs are sharp enough that, once you've explored the area well enough, you'll be able to activate a shortcut of some sort between where you're respawning and where you need to be, the amount of time spent running between archstone checkpoint and boss fight gets really tedious. Now, all FromSoftware games have this to an extent. There's the gauntlet of Black Knights you have to slalom through to get through the Kiln of the First Flame in Dark Souls, for example. But when you consider how far you have to run from your respawn point to the last fight in Bloodborne or Sekiro, you can see that long sprints aren't really necessary to maintaining the vision of the game. And it got tedious on some of these runs. The last major one, going through the remnants of the Boletarian castle to challenge Old King Allant again and again was the main reason I decided to cheese* him rather than try to defeat him in combat. (That and because he had robbed me of over 10 soul levels with his stupid soul-sucker move and I was done having to regain those levels.) I died more often on the way to the boss than from the boss himself. And that ends up being a really frustrating component of the game. Again, that isn't to say that these later titles don't suffer from the same problem, but all of the subsequent games have checkpoints in places besides just where you've defeated a boss. As Bluepoint (the company that remade this game) was remaking it, why not tweak this super annoying aspect? #2) Soul Form In Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Dark Souls (the three FromSoftware games I'd beaten before taking down Demon's Souls), dying meant some sort of punishment, usually in the form of losing experience points. But that was it. That was the punishment. In Demon's Souls, the character's mortal body is lost upon death. Defeating one of the bosses gives you your body back--or you can use a consumable item for the same effect--but here's the rub: If you die with your human body in a level, you actually make the game harder. This is a broader criticism of the game, but there are some pretty important behind-the-scenes mechanics that are at play which definitely change the way a player chooses to go about playing the game. In Demon's Souls, dying with your body in any part of the world (except the Nexus) will cause the world to have a darker "tendency". Defeating a boss will create a lighter "tendency". Certain areas of the maps will become accessible, NPCs will appear, and other consequences stem from what kind of tendency you've created in each of the worlds. That is an interesting idea, but it is not clear at all that that's what's happening. And, since a dark tendency actually increases the difficulty of the enemies, it means that dying in human form is a great way to make the game harder, which will lead to a greater chance of dying in human form again, which only makes the game harder. But my biggest gripe on this front is the fact that a soul form body has only half the total HP. It's more of a psychological thing, really, but seeing half of the HP bar permanently empty feels dispiriting. Why even have it available? Being human means that you have more HP, yes, but the game is designed to make you die. A lot. So that means that particularly trying areas--you know, the places where you need extra hit points--you're disincentivized to do the thing that would give you the greatest advantage: Be in human form. Because if you do, then you're running the risk of dying in that area and making it even harder. To mitigate this a little, you can equip a "Cling Ring" that increases the amount of total HP in soul form. I definitely appreciated that--I probably wouldn't have been able to beat the game without it--but it also meant that, for all intents and purposes, I only had one ring that I could equip. There wasn't any way to have the extra health and multiple buffs or perks from two different rings, which severely limited my ability to explore different combinations of rings and weapons. I can see some pointing out that the purpose of the game is to be difficult. It's supposed to be hard. And I get that. But the difficulty level is pleasurable only in proportion to how fair the game is. It would make the game much harder if your character randomly exploded, but that wouldn't make it better, because you can't control random moments. Skill and commitment are what takes you through the game, but you are going to die. Unless you're a speedrunner or someone who never takes damage--meaning that the mechanic doesn't matter to you either way--this specific design choice is merely a source of irritation at best and downright frustration at worst. #3) Inventory Management One thing that all FromSoftware games seem to struggle with is how to navigate the inventory. It makes sense why it's difficult: Much of the storytelling and worldbuilding is located inside the items and their descriptions. And these games have a lot of items in them, so there's a lot to keep track of. What Demon's Souls does that really rather baffles me is that it makes your inventory limited. All of the other games avoid this, letting the magical logic of video game inventory screens contain thousands of different items, weapons, knickknacks, and armor types without explaining how the character really accesses them. Now, I'm down for greater realism in video games. I like it when a character's hand gun is replaced in the hip holster while the rifle is slung across the back. I also like it when you press a button and a sword bigger than your body suddenly appears in your hand. That isn't the problem. Since Demon's Souls isn't interested in any sort of realistic fealty on that front, it's so strange when I'm harvesting items from fallen foes only to have the game let me know that I don't have enough space to collect the item. "However," the game tells me, "you may send this item directly to storage if you press the Menu button." Um. Okay. One, why not make it be the X button? You know, the one that I use to clear almost every other piece of on-screen information? And two, why bother? Just let me carry all of the things. I know, I know: They want to have an encumbrance mechanic going on. And you know what? The one that actually matters to how the game is played is a great one. How much you have equipped to the character as a type of encumbrance is a wonderful way of having the player carefully choose what they think will be most useful in the next run. It's a good way of creating consequences for what you place on your avatar. So, since that's where material weight matters, where encumbrance comes into play, I don't see the need to place a limit on how many items the player can carry. It doesn't help that, despite their best efforts and years of iteration on this idea, the storage system is still clunky. Being unable to unequip while in the storage box means that you have to strip your character before interacting with Stockpile Thomas (who chats with you every time and has precious little to say), and though the individual types (consumables, keys, crafting items, armor types, and more) are easily flipped through, there are different buttons used in different situations. This is a pet peeve of mine that has been growing over the past few years, and that's when the same button does different things in different situations. For the most part, this game doesn't fall into this trap. When I press X, it's to interact with the world and that's about all. (This is one of the benefits of mapping the attack buttons onto the shoulders: Circle can always be dodge/run, X can always be interact, etc.) It isn't the same button that I normally use for jumping or what have you. In the case of the menu, however, there's this one thing that FromSoftware (and, in this case, Bluepoint) tends to do that I forget about constantly: Square doesn't always bring up the item description. When you're in the equipping screen, pressing Square will unequip the item. But when you're in any other screen, Square will pull up the item description--a necessary component of the game if you're going to learn anything about the lore of the world (especially in the PS5 version, where loading screens average less than 5 seconds). I can't tell you how often I pressed Square so that I could look at the details of my item, only to realize that I had unequipped it instead. And, without a quick scroll option (other games use Left or Right on the D-Pad; in Dark and Demon's Souls, that's how you swap through the menu tabs), there's a lot of scrolling up and down while looking for a necessary item. It just seems clunky to me. Sekiro does a marginally better job in this case, but that's mostly because it at least allowed for quick scrolling. I don't know if there is a better way to deal with this--and its close cousin, not knowing how an item compares to your current stats when you're looking at it in the storage box--but I feel like there must be. It's just so…inelegant. The Good Stuff The thing about all of the stuff I just said, is that it's all pretty minor. Annoying? Yes. Worth ignoring for the overall excellence of the game? Absolutely. I don't know how faithfully Demon's Souls on the PlayStation 5 recreates its predecessor from a couple of console generations ago, but I don't really care: This game is amazing. It will probably go without saying from now on that the graphics of the game are simply stunning. Dazzling lighting effects, incredibly detailed environments, intricacies in areas that are likely overlooked--it's all a visual feast. I played the entire thing in "Cinematic" mode (rather than the "Performance" mode, which reallocates computing resources to increase the smoothness of gameplay) and I was in awe almost the entire time. Though my surround sound system isn't particularly impressive, the sound design was excellent. The echoing of certain effects coming from the controller's speaker was immersive and appreciated. I loved the way a spell felt like a massive blast of power, even if it only did middling damage, thanks to the way the sound design augmented the play. The PS5's advanced haptic feedback means that there are all sorts of tactile telltales, subtle physical communications that pull you into the game more fully. For example, one of my favorite late-game spells is Warding, which ups your defense without cutting down on your agility. When you cast it, there is a very soft pulsing of the controller as long as the spell is active. Once the spell ends, the pulsation stops. If you're in the middle of a fight, you're not likely to notice when the spell ends--too many other things to keep track of--but it's a cool way of informing the player of important stuff that's only there for those who are looking for it. Additionally, the loading speeds are such a nice change. As much as I love Bloodborne, I'm not looking forward to the interminable load times. Yes, they give a chance to read the item descriptions, but since you can't scroll through them, you end up rereading stuff that you've already seen dozens--if not hundreds--of times. And in the case of Sekiro, I think that I sometimes had more than half a minute waiting for the game to load after a death. The feedback loop of "death leads to learning to avoid dying the same way" is shortened when the load screen incorporates fog billowing about for a few seconds and then the game beginning again. It helps immensely in feeling like you're still playing the game, even though you died and have to start that section over again. Plus, this is a FromSoftware game, carefully and lovingly recreated for current-gen systems. That means that it's automatically a worthwhile purchase. There will be times when you have to look up some help on the internet, but that's a feature, not a bug. Being able to see what others have discovered and learning from them is a great way to feel like you're part of the community, even if you are like me and don't actively participate in it. Seeing different strategies, funny stories, great builds, and watching endless lore videos makes the game less a single-session experience and more a multimedia one. Like everything else (except Bloodborne), I don't know when/if I will return to this game. So far, I've spent about 100 hours in Bloodborne, 70 in Sekiro, 60 in Dark Souls, and 45 in Demon's Souls. That is a fair amount of time, now that I look at it. But it's also the order in which I played them, so it shows that there are transferable skills and understanding that goes into each one. I'm working through Dark Souls II and will probably pick up III (if I don't get it for my birthday), and it'll be interesting to see how long I spend in those other worlds. The idea of returning to any of them fills me with uncertainty; they all have robust New Game Plus options--each time through is harder than the first time, but you maintain your levels and gear--but I don't know if I want to expand my experience with the metagame of NG+ or be content to start over from scratch and try it in an entirely new way. Since I don't know which to do, I defer my decision by buying up the other games from the company. So, if you've read these 3,400 or so words thus far and feel uncertain about whether or not I recommend the game, I want to be unequivocal and clear: Demon's Souls is an incredible game and I highly recommend it. Easily the best thing I've played on the PS5 which, considering the age of the system, isn't really saying a lot. That does, however, include Spider-Man: Miles Morales, though…so take that into account, too. --- * "Cheesing" is when you find out some cheap trick to help simplify the fight and make it easier to defeat the boss. Sometimes it can be an accidental glitch: While fighting the Dragon God, I was accidentally picked up by his beefy hand and dropped into the second level of the area. The AI couldn't follow me there, so I ended up beating him without him ever really knowing that I existed. In the case of Old King Allant, I snuck up behind him and poisoned him. It took ten minutes or more for the poison attacks to whittle off his life to the point that a quick attack took him down, but I didn't feel bad about it at all. Around the beginning of October 2020, I decided that I would play a "spooky" game for the month of Halloween. I spent an inordinate amount of time playing Resident Evil: Resistance, the asymmetrical multiplayer mode bundled in with the (too short, sadly) remake of Resident Evil 3.
I should've played Bloodborne instead. As the end of the month neared and my scratch for something spooky still unitched, I pulled out Bloodborne. There was a good chunk of time during November 2020 that I spent shivering in bed as COVID ran through 4/5 of my house, so I didn't put a great deal of time into the beast until around December. But then I hit it hard, with an obsession that I don't normally experience with video games. (Case in point: I own not only the video game and its DLC, but I also purchased the card game and the newly-released, more-money-than-I-care-to-confess Kickstarter board game, as well as three of the four comics and an overpriced-because-it-was-rare artbook. Plus an action figure and some 3-D printed pieces, too. It's…unhealthy.) Because I had finally cracked the code on how FromSoftware games work, I started to expand my repertoire. I asked for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice for Christmas, and was thumping my way through that when January came. The first day of Gayle's chemo, I sat in my car feeling immensely out of sorts. Because of COVID (BoC), I couldn't be with her during her treatment: I had to settle her in a chair and then say goodbye (it's hard to give goodbye kisses with masks on). At that particular moment of me waiting for her to go through her first (as it turned out, horrible) treatment, I felt rather powerless and in need of some retail therapy. Of course, BoC I couldn't really go hang out at a store and just browse. (I have tried that a couple of times, but I find myself so anxious and stressed out about being somewhere I don't have to be that it ends up not really doing very much for me.) So, instead, I jumped onto the PlayStation store on my phone, logged in, and browsed through the Dark Souls titles. As I was planning--at some point--to pick up a PlayStation 5 and the remake of Demon's Souls, I focused only on the trilogy. At that moment, they were having a sale on all three of them, but I decided to have some modicum of restraint and only purchased the first one. I had bought it for the PlayStation 3 back at the tail-end of that generation's lifecycle (and at a pretty low price, I seem to recall), but had only gotten an hour or two into it before setting it aside. Now I could buy the remastered version of the game for the PS4 and have my PlayStation download it while I was away. By the time I got home with Gayle, I had a new game waiting for me. I had Sekiro, Ghost of Tsushima, and now Dark Souls to play with. All three of them helped me to cope with what ended up being a pretty miserable couple of months, at least as far as my non-work life. Seeing Gayle get ravaged by the chemotherapy every couple of weeks was no easy thing, and so, paradoxically, I wanted to play games that were similarly no easy thing. I know that it's sort of twisted. After all, the FromSoftware games have a well-earned reputation of being immensely punishing. It takes me over 60 hours to beat one of them (which does mean that I get a lot of gaming for my dollar bills), and it can be immensely frustrating to die again and again as I strive to beat a boss or a single section of the game. In other words, these games are ruthless and hard and why should I bother going through something so hard in the digital world when my real-world difficulties are weighing me down? That's a fair question, and I think it boils down to the fact that these games--Bloodborne, Sekiro, and now Dark Souls--have shown me that, with enough resolution, study, help, and effort I can defeat hard things. Gayle still has nine treatments to go before we're done with chemotherapy, then over a month of daily radiation after that. We have a ruthless and hard journey still to go. The only way to overcome it is to go through it, which is a lesson that these games help me to internalize. It's more than just a platitude of "this game shows me I can do hard things", too. In the case of Gayle's treatment, there's nothing that I can do to control it. We have steps we take, of course, to help mitigate some of the harder aspects (for example, we shifted her treatments to Fridays so that neither of us has to find a substitute to take our classes). However, it's simply a matter of endurance at this point. We make and keep the appointments; the chemicals do their hellacious thing; we mitigate all we can. That's how we interact with the treatment. But in the video game world, I am again confronted with an enormous, almost insurmountable task--and then I do something about it. Yes, I sometimes have to look up maps, walkthroughs, or guides on how to beat a particular part (I didn't do that nearly as often in DS as I did in BB and S:SDT, though). Much like the chemotherapy, I'm not going through the experience alone. I don't know how else to explain it: I play these games almost as if I want to be able to confront difficult things and beat them; since I can't take Gayle's treatment into myself for her, these games act as a kind of surrogate. It's strange, I know, and I'm not declaring any sort of real equivalency in terms of what she's going through (physical illness and exhaustion, emotional strain, baldness, and much more) and playing a video game. Instead, I think of it as the most fundamental purpose of play, which is to gain vicarious experience. It isn't about Dark Souls somehow competing with cancer as though one is harder than the other--that is a foolish kind of comparison at best and insulting at worst. No, it's more about coping via strain. These games have a formula that is clear to anyone who's played them thoroughly that I think helps to explain why FromSoftware is now so highly regarded. In my view, these games (in general) and Dark Souls (in particular) succeed because of story, environment, and improvement. Story I'd be hard pressed to tell you the ins-and-outs of Dark Souls. (I'm mildly better at explaining Bloodborne, but that isn't because I've played the game enough; I've just watched more videos on YouTube.) I know that there is something about darkness, a dwindling flame, and the need to defeat Gwyn, Lord of Cinders. It's a glum, gloomy world, filled with monsters and darkness, but it's a story about that world. Yes, you play as the Undead Chosen, the one who can--perhaps--defeat Gwyn, but on the whole, there isn't a lot of character-based narrative that's going on in the game. Instead, the narrative is told via the deliberate design of the levels, very brief cutscenes, occasional conversations with NPCs, and the descriptions inside of the items. This is a minimalist way of telling a highly complex and complicated story, which is--from what I can see--the best example of what makes video game storytelling unique from all other media in the past. I've long wondered what the video game storytelling mode is, how it can excel in ways that no other media could. I mean, each major medium has an advantage that's a part of the appeal of it. Cinema has a strong visual component (which, obviously, video games share) and the ability to communicate setting more easily than almost any other medium. Also, naturalistic dialogue--especially crosstalking--is so wonderfully contained within the medium that I view it as the greatest boon of cinema. Theater has the ability of creating intimacy and immediacy because of the proximity between audience and story. Novels can delve into the inner feelings and desires of a human soul. Comics allow for intense control over the speed at which information is communicated. But when it came to video games, I couldn't see what the medium could do that wasn't already done by another (particularly film), and usually better. Then I started to understand what FromSoftware had done in creating the Soulsborne games and I saw it: Video games excel at providing audience-chosen levels of interaction with the text. In other words, you can choose how much--or how little--you learn about the story when you're in a video game. Because the player has the choice in how long to spend reading descriptions, looking at environmental details, or seeking out conversations with NPCs, the amount of story told is within the control of the player. Overwatch came close to this, I think, but nothing that I've played has come close to the skill with which FromSoftware tells its stories. Environment Not only is the environment a major component of FromSoftware's storytelling toolbox, it is also a captivating place to be. Lordran is a mysterious place, filled with an immense diversity of locales. From Firelink Shrine to Undead Parish to Anor Londo, each major area of the game feels integral to the world, yet is distinct within it. When I was in the poisonous pits that comprise Blighttown, I once spun the camera up…and saw the flying buttresses of Firelink Shrine. I could see where I had originated from. I saw how far I'd come. Because the game is so tightly tied together, it feels as if everything is a logical extension of what came before it. And the environment has its own internal consistency, too. No, I don't know the reason why the Tomb of the Giants was made, necessarily, but I'm not surprised to see that most of the enemies in this area are gigantic--big ape/dog skeletons, giant skeletons, enormous tombs…it all makes sense that they're there. And the mystery is compelling. Why are there ruins beneath? Why is Anor Londo pristine, a land of perpetual sunset, without even a speck of dust or debris to clutter its marbled halls? How does Sif, a gigantic wolf that wields a massive sword, tie into the flood that killed thousands--perhaps millions--in order to keep the Four Kings locked into the Abyss? I don't know the answers. Some of them are, as a matter of fact, unanswerable. Yet that only serves to strengthen the allure of the game. Just like the player is allowed to choose how she goes about playing and in what order she approaches the challenges, she's also allowed a great deal of interpretive choice. The game has some clear boundaries--obviously, there is a giant wolf that swings about a massive sword and no amount of interpretive arguments undoes that reality--but also an immense amount of room to play within, too. Not only that, but there's always so much to explore. Admittedly, some of the ways one gets from place to place is…rather opaque. I mean, how was I supposed to know to associate the Peculiar Doll (found by returning to the Undead Asylum by climbing to the top of the Firelink Shrine and curling up into a ball in a bird's nest) with the massive painting at the far end of the cathedral in Anor Londo? Yet the thrill of discovering a new place--usually after the thrill of defeating a boss who's been giving you grief for the past hour or so--is intense. Popping open a secret passageway, discovering a shortcut that allows you to circumvent some previous difficulty, or just the excitement of hearing the ominous tolling noise and seeing the new location's name spread over the screen…it's all satisfying and almost addictive in its pleasure. Improvement The game is an action-RPG, but the role you play in the game isn't particularly well defined. Yes, you can level up and choose how your character advances within the stats. The point isn't, however, to come to some great understanding of the past of the character or why she's involved. No, what matters here is that you as a player--the human being holding the controller--will grow and improve. Your growth is commensurate with how much time and effort you put into learning about the game, its mechanics, and how the world works. At the outset, you will die. A lot. And by the ending, you will also die a lot. In between, however, is a massive amount of change. The enemies that gave you so much grief in the early hours of the game will, by the time you're running through on your way to another section of the world, provide almost no difficulty to you at all. You will be able to breeze through the Undead Parish so rapidly that the knights who slaughtered you so often when you first encountered them will barely have time to react to you. And if they do manage to attack, well, you have gained the skills necessary to easily dispatch them. Your character levels up but you also level up. That is something that happens in other games, of course: I'm much better at playing Final Fantasy VII Remake at the end of the game than I was at the beginning. Nevertheless, there's something more tangible in how I improved through Dark Souls. As I mentioned before, I arrived at Dark Souls after defeating Bloodborne, but also as I was tackling Sekiro. Bloodborne has a lot more in common with the mechanics of Dark Souls than Sekiro does, but there were still a lot of things about the originator of the series that I had to learn. The parry mechanic was a crucial thing to understand (one that I still don't have a lot of proficiency in), as well as things like managing the stamina bar. Not only that, but I was trained by Bloodborne to play more aggressively, to jump into the fights and let the rally system help me survive encounters. Dark Souls' reliance on shields makes battles more ponderous and careful, trying to learn how and when to react to the attacks of enemies in a studious, cautious way. Not having the rally system was something that took time to understand--yet I learned. And that's the thing: I learned. I genuinely feel like I'm a better player of video games having beaten three FromSoftware titles. It gives me confidence to keep playing these punishing games--I have Demon's Souls for the PS5 and I'm planning on picking up a copy of Dark Souls II soon--and that is encouraging. Not only does it mean that I feel as though a purchase of more FromSoftware games won't be a waste of money, but it also invites me to think about the games much more than some of the other enjoyable-but-forgettable titles that clutter my hard drive. In Sum In case it was unclear, I do highly recommend Dark Souls. They aren't for everyone (obviously), but there is so much to commend them. I didn't even talk about the dopamine rush you get when you finally beat something that's been your bane for X number of hours, nor the intricacies of the souls economy work. In other words, there's much more to enjoy and explore and learn about in this game than I touched on in this weird review. I'm excited to play more of these games, and I'm glad that there's this back-catalogue for me to enjoy before I, like the rest of the "Souls community", have to wait for Elden Rings to come to pass. (All right, so the title is misleading: Technically, Jin is a samurai, not a shinobi. But I thought it was clever, so I went with it. Okay, moving on…) During Fall 2020, a lot of really rotten things hit me and my family, not the least of which was an infection of COVID that narrowly avoided hitting my heart-warrior son. Due to this (and a host of other things), Gayle obliged me by letting me buy a new video game. I wanted Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Ghost of Tsushima. As the latter was on sale, I bought that. Christmas was around the corner, so Sekiro arrived on my PlayStation 4 shortly thereafter. Suddenly, I had two games set in feudal Japan that required a lot of sword swinging to get things done. Playing the games concurrently--sometimes switching from one to another in a single evening--led to a unique juxtaposition, an insight into how wildly different developers approach a similar concept.
What's the Same The setting: Both games take place during a historical moment of Japan--GoT during the Mongolian invasions of the late-13th century, S:SDT during the Sengoku period in the 15th century--and each relies on getting many details right. I'm no expert on this, but my brother (a Japanese teacher and translator) assures me that GoT has a pretty faithful adherence to historical accuracy. There are some liberties taken, of course, but on the whole, it's a faithful adaptation. Sekiro takes place in the fictional nation of Ashina, so there's a lot more room for flexibility. Still, the lightning-angled paper streamers known as shide abound in Ashina as much as Tsushima (perhaps a bit more in Sekiro), and sake features in both games fairly heavily. Pagodas dot the landscapes, miscanthus grass covers the ground, and inspiring vistas of a cloud-capped mountains and foggy valleys add depth to both worlds. Obviously, with both games set in Japan, the characters speak Japanese (though there are English tracks) and approach their duties with a strong sense of duty, honor, and loyalty. The gameplay: Smacking bad guys with swords, throwing alternative weapons to distract or kill enemies from a distance, hiding in shadows to stealth-kill thoughtless guards, and navigating what ought to be unnavigable terrain feature heavily in both games. There are ways to distract guards, manipulate the environment, and even light enemies on fire, regardless of which title you pick to play. Fast traveling, leveling up the character, and even alternative costumes are available, albeit in very different ways from each. Oh, and they're third-person action RPGs, so even genre-wise they're playing in the same sandbox. As is typical for video games, there are also a number of mini-bosses that can be defeated, which helps improve the character's stats, plus a number of larger bosses to defeat. In such high-stakes, one-on-one battles, the enemy has a stamina bar in addition to health bars. Deflecting enough damage--or meting out enough of your own--can lead to the stamina bar dropping low enough to deal major health damage to the boss. The story: In order to save his part of the world, the hero must embark on a quest to resist the influence of an evil usurper who wishes to harm someone the hero loves. By using his skills with the sword--and a trusty grappling hook--he will traverse a wild and dangerous world, filled with enemies in enclosed fortresses and vicious animals who will attack him at a moment's notice. In the end, the hero must confront the man he always considered his father, the man who trained him in the ways of the warrior. The life of the father will then be decided by the hero. This confrontation comes about because the hero has chosen to betray his family and the demands of tradition. Also, both have ghosts. What's Different The setting: Both games are stunning in their executions, albeit in different ways. There's no doubt, though, that Ghost of Tsushima has a superior graphical and visual delivery. Sucker Punch's game is jaw-droppingly beautiful, having taken massive inspiration from Akira Kurosawa's cinematic language to create engaging, powerful cut scenes. Top-notch performance capture work, along with subtle facial animations to match the nuances of the acting all combine with the eye-candy of a late-stage PlayStation 4 game. The world feels almost tangible, with wind whistling through the leaves of grass (and the controller's speaker) and stirring the cloth of the characters. A day/night cycle, as well as weather effects work together to make Tsushima variegated, engaging, and enjoyable to traverse. Not only that, but GoT is an open-world game, allowing the player to explore many nooks and crannies, rivers and streams, mountaintops and valleys. Light platforming mechanics gives Jin--the player character--a chance to clamber around, swinging from branches to boulders in well-designed side-missions. Indeed, discovering the shrines was one of my favorite parts of the game, as I've always reveled in well-made platforming sections (I think the early Prince of Persia titles were superb examples of this). The melding of strictly linear approaches in these mini-missions versus the otherwise open-ended options of the main game is a seamless and logical construction. By contrast, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is an amalgamation of open-world philosophy and conscientious, deliberate "level" design. As is almost always the case with FromSoftware games, Sekiro has a progression of areas of the map that is ideal for certain levels of skill. At the beginning, Sekiro must fight through a memory at Hirata Estate. When I first played this section, it took a solid hour (or more…probably more) to learn the pathways through the streets, the best order to attack enemies, and doing my best not to engage with the soldiers in anything less than the ideal situation. As I beat my head against the final boss fight of the game, some seventy hours later, I chose to return to Hirata Estate and slew my way through without hardly even taking any damage. This is what I mean by deliberate design: Ashina has many places to explore, but they're all within the "tracks" of the main pathways. There are shortcuts--crucial to find if you want to play through without going crazy having to fight your way through the same areas three dozen times--and secrets, but the design is recursive, bringing you back to earlier areas. This creates a really cohesive but small world, one that is finely tuned for its purpose. There are hints to a broader world beyond the conflict in Ashina, but that's all they are: Hints. Yet, I also mean that it's "open-world" because you don't have to play through the game in any specific, set way. There are some required early-game areas, of course--as is the case with Ghost and most every game--where options are highly limited. However, once you reach a certain point, progress can be done in any way you wish. I got stuck on mini-bosses a number of times, so I would go elsewhere and shinobi-stab some fools for a while. It would help me level up, get me better at the game, and sometimes lead to other boss/mini-boss fights that I could challenge myself with. The freedom to choose how to explore the world is contracted compared to GoT, but it still gives the impression of being in control of when and where I fought. Graphically, I have to say that it was always a bit jarring to switch from GoT to S:SDT. The former was always rich with color, its HDR10 color palate expansive and crisp. By comparison, the latter always felt a bit dingy, with washed out colors and a grimy feeling. (This may be a PlayStation 4 issue: I've seen some breathtaking footage of Sekrio on YouTube, which I assume was captured with a high-end PC.) The game is still pretty--mostly in the way that video games are now, with the sharp details that look as good close up as they do at a distance--but not the gasp-inducing beauty that GoT pulled off. The gameplay: Of the two, I vastly prefer playing as Sekiro. That isn't to say that Jin wasn't fun; on the contrary, I had a great time playing as the Ghost of Tsushima--especially when I played the online mode with my brother. It was always satisfying to get a fifty-meter headshot with my longbow (Sekrio doesn't use any bows at all) and watch the enemy rag-doll to the ground. And the way that I could easily flow from one fighting style to another was a brilliant bit of design on Sucker Punch's part. Part of this is because FromSoftware's sense of how to use the controller is so good. It doesn't sound like there'd be a lot of variability in this--there are limited number of buttons, after all, so how could one game's use of the controller matter so much? Yet there is. In the case of Sekiro, the shoulder buttons being the attack buttons means that running and jumping can be done without having to reset my thumb to switch to an attack if necessary. This game moves quickly (not in terms of story…that's a different thing altogether), so the slightest advantage I can have, I want. By way of (yet another) comparison, I recently started playing Marvel's Avengers. I remapped the controls as much as I could to be like a FromSoftware game. I use my right fingers to attack, leaving my thumb open for dodging and jumping. But because the game isn't designed for that level of finesse, it doesn't have the same feeling. Like, at all. In fact, I'm planning on switching back to the defaults, because it simply isn't satisfying. It's sort of like trying to run an HDR10 game on a TV that only outputs 1080i: The higher quality stuff isn't really doing anything for the experience. Sekiro moves like a shadow, practically gliding over the earth, stealth-killing and slashing his way through Ashina. Because of the sound-design, animation sequences, and controller interaction are so well welded, kills feel substantial and satisfying. Flying out of the air to land on an unsuspecting monster's neck is a frequent thrill. And, with the ability to stealth-kill or deathblow an enemy being the same button as my basic attack, I almost never flubbed one. I can't say the same for Ghost of Tsushima. It was always clear when I played Sekiro before Ghost: In the latter game, the R1 button throws a kunai at the bad guys. I can't tell you how many times I thought I was about to chop my opponents down, only to find myself throwing some small knives at them, staggering them backwards. The muscle-memory took rewiring each time. More than any of these specific components, the reality is that nobody can touch FromSoftware when it comes to boss fights. (The closest would be Hideo Kojima during his prime years on Metal Gear Solid, and maybe a couple of times in Bayonetta and Devil May Cry.) The common refrain on FromSoftware games is that they're punishingly hard. That is true, but it isn't about being hard that makes the game worth playing; it's how satisfying it is when you finally make that last deathblow and defeat the enemy that has sent you back to the checkpoint countless times. There's a thrill not unlike going on a rollercoaster when you're squaring off against the Blazing Bull for the fifth or sixth time and you've finally got him on the ropes. Finally putting down a boss (or, as happened so much more often with me, a mini-boss) after so many attempts feels so good. It's honestly addicting, and part of the reason that, after beating Bloodborne a few months ago, I've been flirting with the idea of replaying it. (I have a couple of other games to knock out before I do that, however.) And while I was always satisfied when I defeated a difficult boss in Ghost of Tsushima, they didn't provide the same level of satisfaction as when I defeated someone who had given me grief for a solid hour in Sekiro. All that being said, both gameplay styles are good. Not just good, but really top notch. The designers brought their A-game (I honestly don't know what that phrase is supposed to mean) to the products, and it shows. I thoroughly enjoyed both offerings and had fun while I was there. The story: Despite my earlier, glib way of pointing out plot similarities, the two games are drastically different. And while both have "ghosts", the supernatural is pretty muted in Ghost of Tsushima, while it's crucial to the story of Sekiro. Ghost of Tsushima is a story about revenge and fury, about repelling invaders and unifying a fighting force to stop a great wrong from happening. Its scope is large, yet it remains tightly focused on Jin. He is an interesting character, one who struggles with what he has to do in order to save his island home, an exploration of what happens when one gives up morality for Machiavellian advantage. More than that, the story really resonates because of the aforementioned performances. By being able to see the characters' faces, their emotional responses to the different subjects they discuss, and even seeing the changes in the costumes to match the new moments in the story, I was pulled into Jin's journey much more fully. Video games are unique in their interactivity, but their ability to use cinematic language can't be overlooked. I felt a gentle give-and-pull of being in control of a character but willing to let him go when the story intervened. Sekiro, on the other hand, has very few cutscenes, and though there are lots of conversations, they feel like puppets delivering dialogue. There isn't any emotion in the body language, as the interlocutors remain stiff as they run through their lines. The camera remains free, allowing me to spin around and try to see Sekiro's face to try to gauge his emotional reaction. Unfortunately, this tends to distract me, making it hard for me to pay attention to what's being said, as well as failing in the point of drawing me more into their world. Sekiro takes all information in with the same stoic resolve as he would if someone pointed out that he has a nose. I know why game designers do this (they're trying to get the players to more fully invest themselves into the avatar, and don't want the character's personality to interfere with it), but I really wish they'd stop trying. It doesn't make sense. It didn't work for Solid Snake, it doesn't work for the Hunter in Bloodborne, and it won't work for Sekiro. Blank-canvas characters aren't interesting (I'm looking at you, Bella Swan), no matter the medium. Of course, one thing that video games can do in ways that no other medium can, is tell a non-linear story based on the amount that the audience wants to hear. Sekiro's story is told through small "remnants" of memories that you find as you explore, as well as item descriptions, notes found in the world, conversations over sake with other NPCs, details in the environment, and--occasionally--a cutscene. It's a fantastic way to tell a story, because a player gets as much as she puts into it. For me, this is the great strength of interactive storytelling: Giving the player choice and control, not over narrative trees, but over quantity and detail of the story. That's the other ingredient to FromSoftware's secret sauce, and it's used to perfection in this game. Except for one thing: Sekiro is an actual character, not solely an avatar. Neither of these games allows for character creation--all people who play Ghost will play as Jin; there is only one Sekiro in Sekiro--and that means that the story can be focused on the character qua character, rather than inciting incident for the events of the world. In other FromSoftware games, you can create what your avatar looks like--skin color, gender, height, and more--and pilot that avatar throughout the dark world. And it is that world wherein the story happens. Bloodborne, for example, is about a Hunter who seeks the paleblood. However, it isn't about the Hunter. That is, the player may interact with the world, but that character is in something much bigger than herself. The characters with names, motivations, and backstory are those who create the tapestry and world that the player explores. It's highly enjoyable, but it mostly works because it isn't about the way the player character changes through the course of the journey. Sekiro tries to blend the two, and I don't think it fully succeeds. It tells Sekiro's story competently enough, inasmuch as the plot points are clear (-ish) and give strong motivation for what your objectives are. However, there isn't a lot of emotional grounding. When it comes time to decide whom to betray, there isn't any sort of background to rely on for an emotional feeling. I could pick one of four options in how I got to the end of the story (and then watch the others on YouTube) without having any sort of character-based reason for choosing the way I thought Sekiro might. Since he's such a stoic character, I wasn't able to "read" him in any significant way. This is, perhaps, the biggest flaw of this game. Ghost is replete with emotional moments. There's genuine pathos when a friend dies horribly, and I really wanted to help Yuna whenever her missions popped up, as I viewed her as a great ally. Jin grows and learns as a person through the course of the story, and with the superior cinematography and editing of the frequent cutscenes, I felt much more connected to him. Sitting and composing haikus in the forest, giving time over to watch his naked self contemplate important thoughts while in a hot spring, listening to him discuss ideas and stratagems with his friends--these are the components of a strong connection with a character. There's an emotional vulnerability to Jin that Sekiro simply doesn't have. There's nothing wrong with a stoic, resolute character--but they certainly aren't one that I would want to watch a movie about. I like Sekiro because I can play as Sekiro; I like Jin because I feel for him and see parts of myself in his struggles. Final Thoughts It shouldn't surprise you to know that I don't recommend one game over another. They're both incredible, and they both do their jobs with stunning aplomb. Neither is perfect, and I think both should be played by anyone interested. Perhaps the supernatural dive into Japanese mythology (complete with an eventual slaying of a dragon by the end) is more interesting to you: In which case, Sekiro is the better choice. But maybe historical fiction with a bit of ancestor-help-as-gameplay-mechanic intrigues you more: Take Ghost of Tsushima, then. Either way, you'll have an enjoyable experience. Despite how many times I died because I hit the wrong button thanks to the control scheme of the other game, I'm really glad that I played them this way. Where one lacks, the other shines, and vice versa--though I must emphasize again they are both superb games--and I think anyone interested in spending some more time in the Land of the Rising Sun could do worse than playing one of them. Or why not both? In the past year and a bit, there have been three notable video game releases--Resident Evil 2 Remake, Resident Evil 3 Remake, and Final Fantasy VII Remake. I wrote about Resident Evil 2 Remake back in January 2019 when I finished it for the first time. I have since replayed it a good three or four times, still enjoying it quite thoroughly. In fact, in anticipation for RE3 coming out at the beginning of April, I replayed RE2 and had a great time blasting my way through the infected of Racoon City yet again.
But what I was really waiting for was Final Fantasy VII Remake. I have an enormous soft-spot in my heart for Cloud and his colorful crew--enough that I should maybe expand on some of what I talked about back in January of 2018--and I have been waiting and hoping for this game for over a decade. Really, ever since Advent Children came out, I wanted to see LEGO-style Cloud remade with newer graphics and video game mechanics. When Square Enix announced that FFVII Remake would be a reality and that we need only wait a bit longer, I was skeptical. After a certain amount of time, anticipation far outstrips what can be delivered. (This is the problem with Half Life 3, though there are stirrings about that actually coming to pass…) It's hard not to be excited about something that you're, you know, excited about. But the more I focus on wanting a thing, the less impressive it tends to be when I finally get it. So, I specifically avoided watching trailers (except for a couple of times, when the temptation was too great), and I did my best to think on other things. However, as it got closer, the demo dropped, and I was immediately excited--I played through the demo twice the day I downloaded it. Suffice to say, I have been a rather-pampered gamer in the past little while. In fact, that's what I wanted to talk about (I will try to write a review of both RE3 and FFVII in the near future, while the experience playing the games is still fresh): The strange way iterations in the video game medium differ from other media. Make vs. Remake Films are notorious for this: We have classic films that Hollywood knows contain a lot of quality, and they get remade with modern sensibilities, acting styles, costumes, and special effects. Almost always, they are an inferior product. I'm not a huge film nerd, but I can, off the top of my head, list a handful of movie "reboots" or remakes that failed to make a lasting impression. The Mummy, Godzilla, Ben Hur, Clash of the Titans, Total Recall, and Robocop all came and went with hardly a note. In fact, the aborted "Dark Universe" was supposed to be a cinematic contender of the classic Universal monster movies against Marvel's undisputed creations, but fell apart at inception because of many reasons that aren't really relevant here. The point is, with just over a century of film history, we've repeated film ideas constantly. It isn't like film invented this phenomenon, though. Lost to us now, there is a version of Hamlet from the late 1580s (maybe early 1590s?) that we only know about because people wrote about how bad it was. Maybe it was an early draft of the play that Shakespeare himself wrote (which is what Harold Bloom argues), or maybe it was just a trashy version of a familiar story. What Shakespeare went on to write--the Hamlet that has changed the world--is, on a story level, a reboot of the Ur-Hamlet. (And, yes, I would love to read that play.) But even Ur-Hamlet is based upon a Danish story about a prince named Amleth (whose name cracks me up…just relocating the last letter to the front and boom! new name). In fact, almost every story that Shakespeare told was actually a retelling--and he did it better than anyone else. Drama, being the forebearer to film, that makes sense. But even in poetry--arguably our oldest form of permanent communication--we see retellings and reimaginings. While The Aeneid is more of a spin-off from The Iliad, we see Homeric and Virgilian echoes throughout almost all of history. New forms take the epics and uses their tropes to experience the stories again (think, for example, of the experimental novel Ulysses). Even the Bible isn't free from retellings, as the sublime and unsurpassable Paradise Lost shows. What's the reason for this? Being a would-be writer, I understand this impulse. Some stories--and, in many ways, the way the stories are told--have an unexpected influence on a person. A creative person often will take that influential energy and redirect it through their own lens and talents in a hope to glean a piece of the original's power and put it into their own work. I despair of my own writings when I read Steinbeck or It, because I can't reach the level that I see. I want to try my hand at those influential stories--it's the reason I retold Hamlet for my NaNoWriMo 2019--and see if I can "do what they did". But as a consumer, it's a desire to reclaim the awe the original inspired. I envy anyone who gets to come to Paradise Lost for the first time, or experience It without expectations or prior knowledge. There's something inside of these stories that can't be caught anywhere else--but that doesn't mean we don't want to try. Within the Digital I understand why people want to retell and rework and reimagine and remake their stories. What's so fascinating to me about this phenomenon in video games, though, is why they want to try again: The technology has improved. Assuming Bloom is right and Shakespeare decided to try the story of Hamlet again, it wasn't because there was a new innovation in the medium of his story. It wasn't like they discovered they could have stereoscopic sound in the Globe Theatre. There wasn't a technological advancement in printing that made Milton think that the story of Genesis could now be told in epic poetry. (In fact, his choice of epic poetry was a commercial risk, as nobody read or wrote in that format anymore; he was using an antiquated format for his Bible fanfic.) Final Fantasy VII was originally released on the PlayStation because that console had the greatest amount of power available to the developers at the time. They crammed as much content as they could into three CD-ROMs, using every shortcut* they could to be able to tell the story as possible. The limitations of their technology prevented them from doing all that they wished to do. With the continual increase of processing power, photo-realistic graphics, and improvements on acting capture (a level beyond motion capture) technology, video games now have the ability to tell their stories more fully, with greater detail and precision than ever before. The medium itself is changed. So the desire to revisit that which was technologically-confined is, I think, understandable. But what surprises me is that these remakes are, from a standpoint unaffected by nostalgia, superior to the originals that inspired them. And that is a controversial statement. The Power of Nostalgia There's another form of iteration at play here: As rising generations--in this case, the much-maligned Millennials of which I am one--begin to create, they often recreate. It's a call-back to a "simpler" time (simple only because the creator was a child during that time, and most kids have the innocence of childhood to paste over the hard parts of history). I think the best example would have to be Back to the Future, where the modern (1985) clashes with the idyllic (1955). The majority of that film takes place in the fifties, with only the framing concept being in the eighties. The stuff that was modern to Marty Macfly is nostalgic to me now. Stranger Things takes this feeling as the primary part of its appeal (even though it's technically historical urban science fiction--not a particularly large genre, to be honest). It's common for this to happen: Soon enough, early 2000 pop-culture will be used in our stories as creators who have fond memories of a pre-9/11 world will take creative control over our television, movies, novels, and video games and use that nostalgia as fuel for interest in their creations. That is the nature of how we tell stories, I think. Originality is simply a combination of two previously uncombined elements, but those elements still exist. We can find fingerprints of others throughout any story, if we really try. What's happening now in the video game world, though, is that the power of nostalgia is being coupled with outstanding quality. Resident Evil 2 will always be one of my favorite video games. I played it countless times and could probably knock it out in a single afternoon with minimal saves if I really wanted. My long-standing fascination with zombies comes from that video game. (In fact, I tried writing a zombie story in middle school that involved an evil corporation that accidentally turned people into zombies and had to be stopped by the main character, a gun-toting, ponytailed girl who wasn't afraid of the monsters.) I have a huge amount of nostalgic appreciation for that game…but I don't recommend it. Not because of its violence or gore (which is so much worse in the remake), but because it's a product of the times and the technology. The voice acting is bad, the animations strange, the controls a mess…everything that we now use to judge a game's quality** renders Resident Evil 2 as a definite pass. Yes, it's influential and continued the survivor horror genre in video games. It's an important game. But it's no longer a "good" game…at least, not without context. Resident Evil 2 Remake, however, is excellent on almost every front. Again, without the nostalgia-glasses, it deserves the acclaim it's received and could be considered a better game than its original. If you add back in the nostalgia, its power is diminished a bit (since it can't ever be experienced in the same milieu of life in which I experienced the original), but only a bit. Where it fades (the twists and turns of the story aren't a surprise, for example), the nostalgia of being in the Racoon Police Department, hunting for the Diamond Key more than makes up for it. Final Remake Much of what I said about Resident Evil 2--and, by extension, Resident Evil 3--doesn't apply as much to FFVII. That game is still wonderful, and even has a retro vibe*** to it now. In fact, I insisted that my son play FFVII on his iPad before he played the remake on the PlayStation 4, as I didn't want him to create nostalgic memories of something that I didn't have. I wanted, in this particular case, his experience with Cloud to be dictated by the original PlayStation version. And I think I made the right choice (though my other boys won't have that experience, since they've watched me play FFVII Remake and have now started formulating their own childhood memories that will one day bloom into nostalgia). My oldest is at the perfect age to allow these types of memories to shape him and go with him. And while I think FFVII Remake is a remarkable game, the power of the connection between the original and me can't really be undone. I'll never be able to feel about Remake as I did about the nineties' version, because I'm not that person any more. I'm not in middle school in an America that had been at war since before I was born. I'm no longer living in a world with corded telephones and no home internet. What I made out of that game is contingent on when I encountered that game. So of course the remake can't really generate the same sort of feelings. Instead, whenever I play FFVII Remake in the future, it will remind me of this time, of the chaos and strangeness of living in quasi-quarantine as a virus ravages the world. The context of now will continue to affect how I feel about that game, just as the context of then affects me now. Still, it is remarkable to me that the video game industry is able to be iterative in its reiterations. I think there's more to this than happenstance, too, but I won't know for certain until we get remakes of things like Overwatch or Fortnite…and maybe we won't. Perhaps our technology has reached a place that current ideas can be realized fully on the first try (albeit with a patch or two), preventing the necessity of remaking anything. I guess we'll have to wait and see. --- * FFVII had "solved" the problem of not enough processing power by having all of the character models be simple geometric shapes, imbued with a subtlety of movement within their animations to convey their feelings. The other members of Cloud's party would disappear, walking into his body so that the game didn't have to render three characters at once. When they went on to develop Final Fantasy VIII, the developers at Squaresoft wanted to keep the models of the characters the same in the battle sequences as in the world--no more of that blocky, severely deformed character model idea. That desire nearly prevented the game from being completed, as it was one of the most difficult programming feats the developers had to do. ** Not the story, though…I've never seen the caliber of story as one of the graded components of a video game review *** If you were curious, I don't much care for retro aesthetic. I didn't like pixelated video games when that was all I could get. I disliked seeing cover art that looked so dissimilar from the product. Retro gaming doesn't appeal to me because it creates a false impression of nostalgia--it looks like my gaming past, but it's a brand new game that I didn't actually play. Without nostalgia to smooth over the rough (pixelated) edges, I don't get a lot from the game. This is not a review of the book, Brave New World. As I may be teaching that next school year, I'll save that effort for another day.
No, instead I'm talking about a new world that I've been working on. Since my birthday, I've been stewing on what I love about both Innistrad in the Magic: The Gathering world and Overwatch. A Venn diagram of the two doesn't have a lot of overlap: one is a dark, grim, vicious world filled with vampires, demons, devils, zombies, ghouls, werewolves, angels, and much more. The other is a video game with vibrant, bright, charismatic characters set in a near-future world and tells a story through subtle, in-world nods and extra-medial storytelling (comics and web-videos, for the most part). Tonally, they're hardly anything alike. And, with that in mind, why would I be so interested in such disparate things? As far as the tone is concerned, I think it's a matter of variety. I am an open anglophile and much of Europe continues to fascinate me. As far back as I can see, my family's roots are European (nearly 50% English, too), which connects me to the past in a personal way. Additionally, I've always been a werewolf fan to a certain extent--ever since I saw Michael Jackson's Thriller music video (and was convinced that dragging the garbage can out to the curb at night was how I would die, because the Michael Jackson werewolf was awaiting me in the darkness between my childhood home and the white picket fence). Zombies have been my bae since Resident Evil 2, and though vampires are kinda meh to me, the paradigm of angels versus demons, while maybe overdone in pop culture (according to agents' wish lists I've seen), are descendants to Paradise Lost. Toss in Innistrad's distinctive look of soaring cathedrals and Tudor-style houses and you've a perfect mix for my interests. Overwatch, on the other hand, is polar opposite: Bright and energetic, with an optimism that permeates the diverse crew, Overwatch is an addictive experience. The sets are reminiscent of Disneyland, and the carefully constructed yet thoughtful presentation makes the game immensely enjoying. Not only that, but the variety of the characters lends itself to continual exploration (even if I do main Ashe and Hanzo), and the diversity of races, languages, orientations, genders, and play styles are all exceptional. I've gushed about Overwatch before, so I'll let you follow the link if you want to know more. The point is, there's a lot to recommend Overwatch, not the least of which is the type of subtle storytelling that, I've come to learn, is something that I appreciate. I've found, in looking over my own fiction over the years, that I like to have small things matter in big ways later on. A letter that shows up early on in a novel will have an impact on how the story ends. What seems like a random detail of a pager at a restaurant is actually a deliberate action from one of the bad guys. Both Magic and Overwatch are games that focus on story happening outside of the main purpose of the hobby, giving them rich lore that is often elliptically or obliquely understood. The more that one dives into the extracurricular (as it were) lore, the more rewarding the game becomes. Since I write novels, I don't think I could easily pull off what happens in these games. Brandon Sanderson has his Cosmere and tons of tiny details that loyal fans will be able to see and obsess over, but those are almost all in-text. And, frankly, there's a lot of Sandersonian text to work through. While I like to pretend that I have the creative wherewithal to do something likewise, I probably don't--at least, not when I have a full-time job that taps a lot of my creativity and mental energy. So, I thought it might be interesting to pull some of my favorite things about Overwatch and Magic and turn it into an experiment of storytelling. I'm currently building a new world, one that has the danger and grimness of Innistrad, with the heroic, "gotta save the world" attitude of Overwatch in the hopes of getting to an enjoyable ending. However, to get to that ending (which could be inspired by Endgame, if I'm being honest), I want to get readers attached to characters quickly. So, I'm thinking of having five or six novelettes, which could be read in any order, all building toward a novella at the end that ties the stories all together and gives the big-arc story its conclusion. That way, rather than spending multiple years with a group of characters to build toward an ending, it can be the entire experience in a single volume. There are a lot of potential problems with this, not the least of which is that I'm a verbose writer and I need to establish a world in five different stories without any of them feeling too boring/familiar. (I think back to my Animorphs readings and how I would always skip over the descriptions of transformation, as they were tedious and added nothing to the story; I want to avoid that.) I need to create a new world that is diverse enough and strange enough and yet understandable enough that I can play in that world with ease and enjoyment. I have to fuse the familiar magic tropes with enough newness that it doesn't feel tired, and yet at the same time, I have to take all the shortcuts I can because there's so much ground to cover. I've tried writing differently before. It ended up not really working, with me stopping the story after getting only about one fifth of the way through. So it's likely that this isn't actually something that will work. Add to that the fact that I'm still working through my Shakespeare MacGuffin chase story (though I may be winding down on that) and suddenly I'm rather busy with potential stories. And while I'm excited about that--it's a nice change from the drought I've been driving through lately--it also makes me a bit leery. I'm out of practice and often out of patience. How am I supposed to make this worthwhile? How am I supposed to make this work the right way? I don't know. I'll have to jump in and try in order to find out. Video gamers are a peculiar lot. While I wouldn't say that I'm a "gamer"--it carries with it enough negative connotations that I'm leery to use it--I definitely call myself an aficionado. And I like what I like the way I like it, rather unapologetically. Though my stance is shared by many who play video games, others--purists of one stripe or another--don't see games the same way I do.
For a long while now, there's been arguments about whether or not a video game should have an "easy mode" or some sort of accommodation so that the player can enjoy the game on her own terms. On one hand, the game's conception and conceit is designed around a particular experience--more than many other media, video games' ability to interact with the player (and vice versa) means that the personal connection is, at times, crucial. Though particularly impenetrable cinema or literature (I haven't, for example, been able to finish Alan Moore's Jerusalem yet, despite picking at it for years) can require mental fortitude or an intellectual flexibility to "get" what the filmmaker or writer was trying to say, there isn't a skill set that has to be attained when one picks up the latest John Grisham novel. Almost every video game demands a certain level of skill to enjoy the product. It's part of the nature of the medium. And so the desire of the designer to enjoy their vision is, in a sense, predicated on the assumption that the game will be played a certain way. This means, however, that the ability to enjoy the video game is contingent on something outside of the designer's control. I may get bored of a movie and turn it off, but I've abandoned video games that I liked because I got stuck in one particular part. My skills weren't enough to be able to continue accessing the content that I enjoyed (and paid for). The designer wasn't able to anticipate my skill level, thereby shutting me out of the experience of the game that I wanted to enjoy. And that's where the other hand comes in: I've invested in a product in the hopes of being entertained and--if the video game is good in more than superficial ways--leaving the title behind having had an emotional response to it. Not only do a great many games rely on narratives to pull the disparate parts of the game into a coherent experience, but the catharsis of completion--of hitting an end state--is a crucial component to the point of video games. There's a reason that characters in video games have specific missions, actionable desires…players want to be able to know if they have succeeded. It's a primal thing--some writing advice insists that a character should always be wanting something, even if it's just a glass of water--that helps propel interest in what's on the screen. Completing the objective--regardless of what it is--requires that the game allow a way deeper into its contents. If there's an obstacle between the player and the game, and that obstacle is the game itself, then the game isn't actually doing what it was designed to do: be played. Yet there are some neckbeards out there who are really adamant that a game even having the option (not even that it would force them into using the option, mind you) to play the game on an easy mode is an insult to the designer's vision and ought not to be. The idea that a feature programed and implemented by the designer as somehow being against that designer's vision is…um…stupid. Why sugar coat the absurdity of that argument? If it's in the game, it didn't happen by accident.* This reminds me of how excited my five year old, Demetrius, has been going through my old catalogue of Spider-Man video games from the original PlayStation era. They both have a "Kid Mode" which allows for the player to swing about more easily, take less damage, and basically have a way through the story and beat the game. Demetrius was ecstatic when he beat the first game (though he did need some help from his more experienced dad, even with the kid mode). Why? Because it's a Spider-Man game and so it was awesome to play as Spider-Man. It's pretty straightforward: He wanted the experience of playing as the wall-crawler and the game allowed him to do that. No vision** was corrupted, no video game gods offended that a player of a different level than an "ideal" player got the opportunity to play through a game. It was nothing but positive. The inspiration for this essay comes from a kerfuffle that I just learned about, explained well here. Since you can click through and read that article, I won't repeat what it's about. Instead, I want to dig into the sanctimony of what Fetusberry (I'll pass over the name without comment) was implying by his tweet. Not only is he completely wrong about the idea of the writer "cheating [him]self", but he's also, apparently, confusing real life benefits with digital ones. There's nothing risked in video games. I quote this bit by McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory all of the time, but it's always important to how I view the medium: "[In games,] violence is at its most extreme--and its most harmless" (23). The reason it can be so extreme while still being harmless isn't just that it's pixels and digital representations--it's because there's nothing risked anyway. The stakes in a narrative aren't a personal stake; they're important for the characters. And though the interaction that a player can give the video game shifts this to a small degree, unless someone is playing video games professionally (like with e-sports), they're not "risking" anything when they plop onto the couch and fire up Bloodborne. What really irks me about Fetusberry (besides his*** asinine name) is that he's probably (and I'm acknowledging that I don't know this person and I'm making a broad generalization and assumption that could be wrong) the type of gamer who 1) doesn't think that violence in video games affects a person, nor should there be controls over who has access to violent content; 2) video games are art, but; 3) it's "just a game" so who cares if someone is offended by problematic content in, say, a Grand Theft Auto game? The reason I assume this is because there seems to be a trend among people of a certain gaming stripe: The more hardcore they are, the more they abide by those three interpretations (though number two is a bit squishy, since the concept of art--what it is, how it works, why it matters--is often lost on them). The thing is, number three can't be a defense if numbers one and two are true. If it's "just a game" then it's not really art--it's a game--and toys that lead to harm and violence can easily be banned. Additionally, if it's "just a game", there's very little to talk about. People don't get hot under the collar over a game of Parcheesi, why should they if someone is playing Sekiro differently than they would? Yet he insists, almost as if Sekiro and its punishing difficulty are part of a divine aspect of spiritual growth, that the author somehow skipped over an Abrahamic test by playing differently. We can't have it be "just a game" and the path to apotheosis--some contradictions can't work, no matter how hard we try to force them together. Now, as I said before, I may be wrong about Fetusberry (*ugh*) specifically, but the mentality is one that I see really frequently. One of the complaints that I see surface is when a video game is called out, criticized and critiqued, and its defenders seem incapable of realizing that criticism of a thing that they like isn't the same as a criticism of them. Just because I think that the treatment of race is immensely problematic in Resident Evil 5 doesn't mean that I can't appreciate and enjoy it. Shakespeare's treatment of women, while progressive for his time, doesn't mean that he's above reproach in our era. He has women behaving in all sorts of damaging and dangerous ways--just look at what Kat puts up with in The Taming of the Shrew--and that needs to be confronted. The same can happen to video games: If they are supposed to be treated seriously enough to inspire people and change who they are and how they see the world, they are serious enough to receive criticism. Perhaps more importantly, if they're going to slap an M for Mature rating on their boxes because they have "mature content" (boobs and blood and bad words), then those who play them they should be "mature" enough to know how to converse about games, to listen to criticism, and to empathize with others' points of view. Accessibility in video games is a hot topic now, in no small part because (no surprise here) disabled people like to play video games. If designers can accommodate that, it's a sign of maturity and respect for their audience to provide them. The greatest thing about video games is the interaction between player and game. Why not rely on that strength to allow it to be flexible, so that players can interact with it as they will? And, for crying out loud, Fetusberry, change your insipid handle. --- * Glitches are a bit of an exception to this rule, but only in the sense that it's impossible to get a perfect product. I've purchased books that had pages printed out of order, or with screwy margins. Flaws abound. An easy mode, however, isn't something that glitches into a game. It's not a bug. ** Vicarious or otherwise. Okay, that's a really deep cut for that joke. Hats off to whoever gets that one. *** Yeah, I don't know the pronouns, but let's be real: The person behind that stupid of a name with that stupid of a comment has gotta be a dude. I beat Final Fantasy VIII for what is, I believe, the third time in my life. The game was released twenty years ago and has been a divisive entry into the franchise's storied history the entire time.
I, a fast and furious fan of Final Fantasy VII, insisted that my mom buy me a copy of the game the day it came out whilst I was still at school, so I could start it as soon as I got home. There are vague memories of my mom giving me a hard time about not being able to find it…or the people at Target not knowing something about it? I can't remember that part; I just recall that I spent a lot of time listening to The Aquabats versus the Floating Eye of Death! album and grinding away with Squall and friends. Maybe the nascent at-home Internet connection led me to some walkthroughs or perhaps it was an actual guide (though I doubt it; I have no memories of using a printed guide), but I recall sitting in my brother's bedroom (where the PlayStation was), one toe on the X button so that the characters would automatically attack the bad guys and my hands would be free to work on my pre-calculus homework. I happened upon a strategy of having Irvine injured so badly that he could automatically use his Limit Break, as well as the Initiative ability so that he would start the round first, then blasting away the mini cactuar monsters in order to give my Guardian Forces extra AP as quickly as possible. I remember getting into arguments with kids at school about how the "fantasy" part of Final Fantasy didn't preclude (not that I used that word) it from being an actual fantasy, despite the high-tech world. Debates about who was better, Cloud or Squall (answer: Cloud), probably also came along with my first experience with Final Fantasy VIII. This was in the beginning of the school year--fall of '99--which also coincided with me finding my first (and only) girlfriend. Gayle was interested in "geeky" stuff, too, so I lent her my PlayStation at one point, during which time she played a lot of Final Fantasy VIII as well (going so far as to rename Angelo "Steve" in honor of me). Bonding over a mutual experience like that, I'm sure, helped to cement the relationship that eventually built into our 14-year-long (and counting) marriage. So I have fond memories of Final Fantasy VIII, a game that I would likely have repurchased had Square Enix ever figured out a way to recreate the files and publish it in HD mobile or PS4 versions. As it stands, I still have my original copy, which has stuck around despite multiple moves and large-scale reorientations of my life. For Valentine's Day, Gayle bought me a book dedicated to the game, which pushed me to slide the black-sided disc back in and revisit Balamb Garden, Esthar, and that theme song that so surprised and delighted me when the lovers were first talking in the Ragnarök. The Story One of the things that I've noticed about my enjoyment of these long-form video games is that it's kind of tricky to remain focused and interested in the story long enough to feel as though a cohesive tale has been told. This is something I've been struggling with in the realm of large, meaty books (though it wouldn't surprise me if I set aside this critique this summer and return to Derry, Maine): Sustained attention. My brain is tired; it's hard for me to really focus on a single thing for prolonged amounts of time, at least when it's during the school year and so much of my mental energy is invested in my students. For me to actually finish Final Fantasy VIII, I had to swear off Overwatch (I gave it up for Lent this year) and only focus on this PlayStation title. Each night, I logged a couple of hours, eventually ending the game a touch under 40 hours. By doing this, I managed to get a much stronger focus on what was actually happening in the game. Yes, I took a couple of side quests seriously, but I ignored my completionist impulse for the most part and pushed through the story in a consistent, about-10-hours-per-disc rate. Though there are still some bits that are confusing (I, for example, never connected that Laguna was Squall's dad, despite the fact that they look similar--I needed the book to draw that line for me), and some of the details are a bit extraneous, I feel that the story is pretty solid. Squall's character really changes a lot from the beginning, when he was too cool and isolated as a person to get into anything approaching a relationship. He eventually learns--most prominently during the scene in outer space where he has to throw himself into the void in order to catch Rinoa--that he truly does care about others, about people, and that he is willing to go to the ends of time to help the woman he loves. There are some contrived moments, that's for sure: That none of the characters recognize each other from their time together as friends at the orphanage until about halfway the story is a bit of a cheat, for example. And, since there's always the option for the player to select who is in the party, my specific experience--having Zell, Squall, and Rinoa as my main crew--is shifted from what others may have chosen to do. It's a single love story about some teenagers (another weird decision, in terms of the kinds of responsibilities that are put on the team, most particularly Squall), but it's told with an ensemble cast. The plus side to this is in the video game world: I can pick and choose who I think is actually on the adventure, rather than having the story dictate that (for the most part). The down, though, is that I never felt as connected to Selphie or Irvine, as I never tried to learn more about them. They were periphery to the main story, and their conflicts always felt tangential--as did Quistis' after she was demoted from being a teacher (how did she get so advanced? We're never told)--so much so that it's only now, as I write this, that I realize the game never explained why Irvine froze up. If he was such a great sniper, but always choked, why was he assigned to the team? And, for that matter, what happened to the icicle through Squall's chest? We never get an explanation to his mysterious healing*. These gaps notwithstanding--as well as the sometimes bizarre shifts in tone, such as the weird zombie attack on the train early on, or the bafflingly advanced technology of Esthar (which breaks down when you need it most) in the midst of magical sorceresses who are bent on using their magic to destroy the world--the story as a whole is exciting, varied, and enjoyable. There's a lot of history that's hinted at, and though the feeling of being the only human on the planet is as pervasive here as it is in the other Final Fantasy titles of this time period, the interweaving of the different times--as well as conversations that drop parts of the past into the narrative--manages to make the story feel as though there are still parts about the world left unexplored by the time Ultimecia is destroyed. I do want to point out one of the things that really worked well for me (and this is definitely a personal weakness**): I really like the manic pixie dream girl trope. Yeah, I know it has a lot of problems. The issue with it, though, is that there's nothing in the girl's life besides helping the morose guy learn how to loosen up and show emotions. In the case of Final Fantasy VIII, Rinoa does have a purpose--she's a military radical that's trying to overthrow the government. Her goal is attained earlier on in the story, but she herself is an interesting character, complete with her own doubts, desires, and skills. She doesn't feel like a walking trope, designed simply to pull Squall out of his cold shell. Instead, she feels to me like a fully-developed person, with different points of view and significant choices to make. There's a symmetry to the beginning of her relationship with Squall that I really like. In the famous dance scene, Rinoa looks over at Squall and smiles, pointing up at the sky. She's excited about the fireworks and is sharing that with him. At the very end--before the credits roll, when it's still a little ambiguous if Squall survived the cataclysmic final fight--we see her standing on the balcony. We can't see who she's talking to, but she smiles and does that same gesture. It's a subtle, beautiful way for us to know that Squall made it and is there, too.*** Influences I have to admit, though, having recently replayed Final Fantasy VII, the influences of the perennial favorite shine through in FFVIII, sometimes beyond the circumstantial. Amnesia plays a massive part in both games, as does the magic system and how it affects the world (though it's more pointed in VII). Both protagonists end up in outer space; both go to great lengths to rescue the damsel in distress (both of whom are unique women whose magical inheritances make them targets of the oppositional forces to the hero). A graduation into different forms of transportation features heavily in both. The list could go on, though I think the point stands. This is something that Harold Bloom talks about in his book, The Anxiety of Influence, and though I don't know the text well enough to see how it might apply to Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII, it's clear that the successor was trying hard to hew close to what worked for the predecessor. This isn't necessarily a bad thing--VII is a masterpiece, and it's understandable that they wanted to emulate that. But, at the same time, it made the game feel slightly more iterative rather than innovative--except, of course, the dreaded Draw system. Draw System Compared to the materia system from Final Fantasy VII, the Draw/Junctioning system is…less than impressive. The main issue I had as a teenager was that, if I wanted to have an overpowered attack, I had to use the best magic and, after using that magic, I was no longer as physically strong. This criticism still stands, but it's not as much of a deal-breaker as I used to think. Though it is true that the experience of sitting through endless animations of your characters Drawing magic from their enemies isn't the most thrilling of things to do, I found that there were times when I could do as I did when I was younger: Put my toe on the X button and do something else whilst my characters buffed up with additional Drawn magic. I would fold laundry, read a book, or goof off on Twitter for a few minutes--a pleasant enough way to spend the evening--while a powerful enemy, smitten with silence, failed to cast spells on me and allowing me to get my magic reserves swollen. But what makes the system more interesting to me than it was back then was the risk-reward of magic harvesting that I didn't see until this time around. I found that I could focus more on how to get the most amount of magic with the least amount of damage, the system was more interesting and variegated. Boosting the Guardian Forces was still rather dull, but by the time I got Counter attached to a physical-attack heavy Squall, most of the encounters weren't too painful. And I like that. Once I had some of the Guardian Forces' abilities unlocked, generating the kinds of magic I needed wasn't as tedious. Attaching different magic that I'd found onto defense or weapons made the characters more powerful in ways that I didn't anticipate at first--like when I fought a Ruby Dragon and had enough Firaga equipped to my defense that it healed me instead of hurt me every time it attacked. Where it ended up being the most interesting--and, at times, frustrating--was when I was in the final fight of the game. Ultimecia's attacks would kill off the GF I summoned, so I had to rely on other spells. However, she could also nerf my accumulated magic--once, she took out the spells that boosted my HP, dropping me from over 7,000 to about 3,500. This removal of what I was expecting forced me to reconsider how I was fighting, which order to place my attacks, and tweaked the game on me even in the last moments. That kind of depth would have been fun throughout the game, but at least it happened at some point. Final Thoughts Final Fantasy VIII is, in my mind, the most ambitious of the PlayStation era games. VII was risky; IX was safe. VIII was hoping for something different: It feels like the game was trying to get a strong emotional response. Rather than fridging the would-be girlfriend for shock value (as in FFVII), Final Fantasy VIII wanted to create a relationship on the screen that the characters could care more deeply about. The player who first met Aerith in the slums of Midgar may or may not have cared about Cloud's relationship with her (as in my case; I liked Tifa much more). To prevent that same problem, Quistis, the first female Squall meets in the game, doesn't get to have her name changed. The designers didn't want players to name Quistis after a real-life girlfriend, only to have the real relationship form later on in the game. It's this sort of thoughtfulness that makes me believe that the designers were interested in telling a more complicated, a more emotional, a more…well, ambitious game. For the most part, I think it worked. Not a perfect masterpiece, and not nearly as well done (despite my feelings, the Draw system really did work against it, and the age of the protagonists made it feel more like a high school romance than anything that deserved the amount of passion as some of the characters exhibited) as FFVII, but still an excellent addition. If I had to rank the Final Fantasy games that I've played (which isn't all of them), I'd probably put VII in the top slot, and then VIII either as second or third (X is really impressive and does a lot of things right). It's an impressive piece of work and deserves more credit than it gets. --- * This is nothing compared to the clear, obvious death of Ryu Hyabusa in the first Ninja Gaiden for the X-Box. He's killed--spine severed and gore gushing from the wound--in the prologue of the game. But then, after a tidy cinematic, he's back in fine form and wearing his sexy leather getup. What's up with that? It still bugs me, even after all these years. ** Why is it personal? Well…I kind of married a manic pixie dream girl. Gayle and I were at some con or another and we went to a panel specifically about that and other problematic tropes. She asked what "manic pixie dream girl" means. I explained that it's the optimistic, happy girl whose sole purpose in the story is to make the dour, morose main character see that there's a lot of great stuff in the world and he shouldn't be so gloomy all of the time. "Oh," she said. "So, me, basically." The big difference between the trope and my wife (and, as mentioned above, Rinoa), is that there's nothing wrong with having an optimistic, outgoing person paired up with a reserved, introverted type. That's good storytelling, inasmuch as there's contrast and difference of opinions that lead to conflict (though not antagonism). The problem with the trope is when that's the entire character. If all Rinoa was good for was to get Squall to be happy, then there's a problem. As I argued above, that's not what I see from the game. That being said, Rinoa is put in the damsel in distress position far too often. Despite that, she is capable of a great deal, which I like. But…yeah, she's helpless too much in the story. So that sucks. *** The after-credits final shot, where it has Squall and Rinoa clearly together and smiling and happy, is--to my mind--unnecessary. Perhaps it's because of pushback from the vague, unsatisfying ending to Final Fantasy VII, but it seems like the designers put that in to make sure that no one was misunderstanding what was going on here: The hero of the game and her knight both made it through the ordeal and are happily together. It's a happy ending--not a strong suit of the PlayStation era Final Fantasies, I would argue--and a good one. But it doubts the ability of the player to recognize that action, to see what that smile means. It doesn't trust us to understand the subtle ending already beautifully provided, and that's too bad. Tiny missteps like this one (and the tropes I mentioned above) are what mar the story. Not irredeemably, of course. The game is still brilliant. When I was a teenager, my first exposure to zombie fiction was in the form of Resident Evil 2 for the original PlayStation. My friend Mark and I would play through the game frequently until it got to the point that I could run through the first half of the game without much difficulty. (Due to the nature of the old PlayStation, my memory card had a tendency of getting erased, so I ended up playing the beginning of the story more times than finishing it.) It started a seed of zombie appreciation that continues--albeit abated--to this day.
Capcom recently released a full-fledged remake of Resident Evil 2 for the PlayStation 4. I don't know what the thought process was, though I hope that Square Enix is taking notes about how to update without rebooting, to pay homage to the past without slavishly abiding by it, because Capcom has really created something worthwhile here. A handful of caveats: 1) I didn't finish the game; I didn't finish one campaign. I imagine I was within striking distance of finishing Claire's story, and I have the entirety of Leon's to play, but my Redbox rental came due and I didn't want to spend any more money on a game I'm likely to buy sometime in the not-too-distant future. 2) I'm not really going to divulge a bunch of plot twists or spoilers per se, but I also amn't going to hold back on points I think are worth noting--consider this the spoiler warning. 3) This game is extremely graphic and it has quite a bit of foul language. So, if you're thinking of trying out the game but those things bother you, then you may want to reconsider. Onward… The great challenge (or, more precisely, one of the great challenges that isn't related to how the community of developers and fans treats minorities and women) of video gaming is the closeness of incipience and perpetual iteration. Video games are living memory-new, having been born at about the same time as a great many aficionados were. Video games, therefore, have a quality to them that is inherently nostalgic. Its roots are ludic (it's in the name, right? Video games) and there's a sense of possession that this particular medium has which extends far beyond the type of possessiveness that other burgeoning media might have had. Comic books were printed on pulp because they weren't considered valuable enough to preserve. Early film--heck, no film--was available for home-use consumption, so film couldn't be seen on-demand up until the '80s--right around the same time that video games began to make themselves known. What I mean by this is that I believe there's an unprecedented connection between the product of the medium and the consumers of it. Video games are inherently interactive, and the fanbase that has grown up with video games takes that sense of interactivity to (all too often, sadly) claim it gives them possessive rights to the games. They're the DNA of our childhoods, as it were, and mutating that DNA is risky business. Gamers are strange beings in that they claim to crave originality but truly they only want more of the same. (Evidence: Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Assassin's Creed games are indistinguishable from previous editions to all but the most dedicated fans. And for all its glory and beauty, games like Flower or Journey are footnotes on the indie-game scene.) So when it comes to wanting a remake of something, video game developers are in a bit of a bind: If they hew too closely to the first, it isn't "original" and is considered a waste of money. If it's too different, then it's clear that the developers have lost touch and they're just trying to exploit the fan base. This is, I'd wager, one of the biggest hangups that Square Enix has on remaking Final Fantasy VII: There's a lot of stuff in the original game that doesn't transfer well to the 2020s, so what should be changed? What kept? And how does a company take what made the original so beloved and update it to modern* sensibilities? Capcom's biggest hurdle was finding a way to invoke the distinct flavors of Resident Evil 2 from 1998 in a way that, just over twenty years later, can utilize new methods of gaming. That is, a beat-for-beat remake would be dull--an HD Remastering, not an actual remake--and something that took the series into brave (and controversial) territory, as they had with Resident Evil 4, 5, 6, and 7 would fail to feel like they were being genuine or connected to the past. What they discovered, however, was that it's not so hard to invoke nostalgia that can actually enhance expectation and subvert it at the same time. The Raccoon City Police Department's layout is almost the same, particularly with the massive hall in the center and the two separate wings. There are some new things that I wasn't expecting--emergency shutters and Mr. X stomping his way through the building--but familiar pieces made the transition, too (the licker jumping through the one-way mirror in the interrogation room, for example). The result was a familiar story--Claire Redfield looking for her brother amidst the hellscape of Raccoon City during the G-Virus outbreak--with enough twists to make it feel fresh. Chief Irons has a larger story, and there's an extended amount of area to explore, including an orphanage where Sherry Berkin is kept prisoner for a short segment of the game. The updating of gaming mechanics--being able to move and aim and shoot instead of the tank-controls of previous iterations--was a good move, in part because there were enough wrinkles** to make it so that, enhanced aiming notwithstanding, the zombies put up a good fight. Allowing the camera to be moved around instead of fixed-camera angles was necessary--it's how we're used to controlling characters nowadays--but there are enough zombies-in-the-dark-or-sneaking-up-behind-you moments that the jump scares still happen. In fact, as I was playing through a section in the sewer, my wife sat down to watch some of it. A zombie that we both saw slump off a banister was waiting when we came down and immediately jumped on my character's back. My wife, concurrently, jumped and screamed, declaring how much she hates games like this. All of the additions feel perfectly at home in the Resident Evil world--with a gripe about language. I know, I know; I'm aware of the hypocrisy in being fine with graphic violence but not swearing. But there's hardly any in the original, and Claire cusses the entire time she's taking a bead on a zombie. It's…distracting. Chief Irons is the biggest perpetrator--and since he's supposed to be scum, one might almost expect f-bombs from him. But Claire's profanity felt gratuitous and somewhat out of character. Speaking of graphic violence, though, there's a large difference between the pixelated flowers blooming from a zombie's face in 1998 and the glistening viscera the REngine can create. While the details of the world--and the insides of many of the victims of the game's violence--are incredible, the 2019 version did something that the '98 version never really managed: A genuine sense of revulsion and recognition of just how bad a zombie apocalypse might be. While there might be spots with static blood or a corpse on the ground in the 1998 version, there is no sanitation of a loading screen--back in '98, any time I wanted to see if a zombie really was dead, I need only wait for the bloodstain to grow beneath its stomach. Then, when I came back into the room, the corpse would be gone--spirited away by the limitations of the gaming system. Not only that, but there aren't any loading screens now…it threw me off for a bit, seeing Claire shove her way through double-hinged door after double-hinged door (not complaining, by the way, just noticing the difference). I didn't realize how the screen loading affected how I responded to the world until I started realizing that the tension I felt in the hallways never abated. In the past, I was accustomed to having a few seconds to catch my breath before the next screen opened up. No such luck in the 2019 version: Everything blends perfectly together, and the chances for a break are few and far between. Unlike Final Fantasy VII, which has countless memorable tunes, Resident Evil 2 (1998) only had a couple of songs that really stood out to me: The RCPD main hall theme and the eerie-yet-soothing theme of the "save (safe) rooms", a place where you could be certain a zombie wouldn't attack. Those auditory clues aren't in the 2019 version--though I think you can buy a more expensive version of the game that will come with the original soundtrack (which bothers me, but I won't get into that right now)--and I miss them. Still, on the whole, the game is an excellent game, a wonderful balance of nostalgia and freshness, and entirely worth your time--provided you like that sort of thing. To old fans of Resident Evil 2, I think you should give it a go. To those hoping to get into the series, this is a good way to see what Resident Evil 2 did to us twenty years ago, back when we were kids. --- * Another interesting bit: The progress of "modern" gaming. The iterations of gaming systems--with talk of a PlayStation 5 already looming, as well as other offerings from Microsoft, Nintendo, and (perhaps) even Ocular Rift--is fast enough that they can fit inside of presidential terms. What makes a game modern will quickly become antiquated--I remember buying Metal Gear Solid 4 in a deluxe edition because I assumed I'd never be able to buy another MGS game. Unlike the classics of literature, which has a real past, "classic" video games are really just the oldest--regardless of their value. I actually find it really interesting to see the ways that gaming culture tries to mimic canon when there isn't an Iliad or Odyssey to use as a measurement. How long before this medium has something that is the quintessence of the form? I don't know; hasty awards, while noteworthy, fundamentally fail what the medium is capable of. It'll be interesting to see what kind of consensus is required in determining what is the best representation of video games. ** In the sewer portion of the game, I got poisoned because a big monster vomited goo all over my face. Claire limped around for a good twenty-five minutes as I searched (mostly in vain) for relief from the poison. Whilst infected this way, Claire would frequently fall into coughing fits, which meant she couldn't run as fast and, if aiming, couldn't pull the trigger. These moments were particularly tense, as I often found myself going up against overwhelming odds and--unexpectedly--unable to fight back. The way they increased the horror differed, but the effect was the same: It made it more intense, more terrifying. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the name of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! |
AuthorWould you like to support my writings? Feel free to buy me a coffee (which I don't drink, but I do drink hot chocolate) at my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! Archives
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