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gaast · 5 months

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Since October 2022, I've been playing only one game at a time. That might not sound like much but for something that struggles to keep its number of concurrent games even at two, it's a pretty big deal. I did it because I wanted to commit to games, and to commit to finishing them. And for the most part, I've been successful.

As part of this, I've been tracking the games I've played and want to play, and I've been marking down the days I started something (usually) and the days I've finished them.

Now that this much time has passed, I've got a year's worth of games down, and I wanna do little write-ups for everything I played in 2023.

That means that anything I played in late 2022 (Silent Hill 2, Xenosaga Episode 1, Observation, and Red Dead Redemption, among others) can only get mentioned honorably here. But I'm gonna go through everything I started in 2023, beginning with:

Outer Wilds, January 1-January 7

What a way to start the year. Outer Wilds is unique and charming. It's really fun to fly through space in the awfulest space ship ever with the worst autopilot (have fun in the sun!) and check destroyed, abandoned planets, read ancient peoples' logs of their attempts to save the universe, and to be there at the end of everything.

Unfortunately: the fucking angler fish. I hate those fucks so bad that I actually didn't finish the game. I never brought X to Y (no spoilers) because I hate dealing with those guys. So I can't class this a perfect game. Those dudes need some changes.

Still, highly recommended.

The Sims 4, January 6-the ride never ends

I'm not gonna lie. This is just a sex thing for me.

Even still, I don't quite get why people hate it so much. I played the third game, too. This one's fine. This franchise isn't amazing. It's weird and held together by Scotch tape. I like that about it.

What a weird world.

Anyway, this must be around the time my ISP sent me emails telling me to stop pirating shit or they'd kick me off their plan, which would be bad because that ISP is the only one we can get in our building! Imagine being unable to work because you wanted TS4 DLC.

Bioshock, January 14-January 28, canceled

I couldn't do it.

This was my second attempt at getting through this game and I had to just admit that it's not for me. I didn't enjoy it. It was a chore. I decided to just set it aside.

Wish I hadn't paid for a PS4 copy when I already had a Steam copy. Ah well.

The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince, January 31-February 2

A very aesthetically-pleasing puzzleish platformer with a cute story and good music. I enjoyed my time with this simple little game.

Half-Life, February 3-February 5

You starting to see a pattern where I only manage to finish games, like, late at night, so I can't start a new one until later? Anyway.

This was my second attempt to get through this game. I did it this time, and I regret it. I didn't have fun.

I don't really know why I didn't have fun, I just didn't. Maybe the combat was too tedious. Maybe the jumping was too iffy. Maybe it just went on for too long. Maybe it's a case of "Seinfeld Is Unfunny." I don't know. I just know I don't like Half-Life.

So maybe I don't like the game, but I love the Headcrab Fucker 9000.

Poison Control, February 8-February 11

Sometimes you just wanna play a mid game.

Look, I like poison. I love pink. I love androgynous characters in suits. I like NIS. This game had it all. And it was perfectly. It made me want to stop playing a little while before it was over. It had a really good OST. I got the platinum trophy and I didn't feel satisfied.

I liked it. And sometimes that's enough.

This is the first on a small series of mid NIS-related games. I'll have more to say when I hit the other.

Grasping, February 15

Obviously I couldn't play this as intended, but it's not hard to imagine having shoved your hand into an awful box.

Anyway, this was good, I think. I don't really remember it.

The House in the Woods, February 15

Another horror game I absolutely do not recall playing.

Apocryphauna, February 15

I remember this one! It's good! I liked it! I wish there were more to it--like, a lot more. A lot lot more.

Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, February 25-March 21

I held off on playing this for a long time because I had always heard it was "made by the B team" and "not as good as the other games." But I decided to play it. It was the gaping hole in my From résumé.

It's not as good. It has a ton of bosses and none of them are memorable except for a select few DLC bosses (Fume Knight, Sir Alonne, Sinh). It makes a lot of weird gameplay choices. It takes way too long for Estus sippies to heal you--like, in terms of the health bar going up. The Iron Keep is infuriating. So many of the runups are abominable. It runs with the clunkiness of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls despite having the svelte ambitions of Bloodborne and Dark Souls III. It has way too many sections where it just says, "okay, deal with a ton of enemies now."

And I loved it.

Honestly, this is probably my favorite of the three Dark Souls games. I think it is by far the most aesthetically complete game of the trilogy. It fulfills its own promise, you know? And I disagree with the people who call it bleak. I think it's the only game of the trilogy that actually offers hope. A real hope, too. One that says that, just because our struggle may not take us anywhere, at least our struggle itself is beautiful.

In a strange way, I think that Dark Souls II is the only Souls game that actually understands the Souls series.

"A lie will remain a lie."

Pokémon Violet, March 21-March 25

I didn't want to play this game. I didn't want to like it. I just wanted to play it. I love Pokémon. Sure, this wasn't a Pokémon game (according to me), but I wanted to play it anyway. The morning I finally decided to go for it, I had read that the professors were antagonists all along. How stupid!

And the reaction. Oh boy. All the glitches. All the performance issues. All the memes. What trash, right? Right?

I fell in love. I didn't think anything could unseat Gen 7 in terms of my love for a Pokémon generation, but honestly, this game might do it.

Did it need more time to cook? Absolutely. I'm not gonna sit here and say it should have been released as it was. No; it is in many ways a disaster, and it is certainly unacceptable.

But every inch of it oozes with love.

This game wasn't just shit out to make a buck. It feels that way at first, but no, everyone who had a hand in making the Gen 9 games absolutely loved what they were doing. You can feel it--from the sound design to the music to the character design to, fuck, everything. They did the best they could with what they had and they made one of the most charming, wonderful games I've had the pleasure of playing in far too long.

There is so much heart here. It convinced me that the future of Pokémon is still bright. Very much so.

Just... let's take a couple extra years to make the next one, all right?

Heroine Conquest, sometime in April

Look. It's actually pretty good.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, March 31-April 18

I'll get this out of the way: I didn't really have fun.

The game has aged surprisingly well. Or Skyrim is just a truly unmotivated sequel. Either way, it holds up.

The problem is that I just don't think that TES games are for me. They're just so fucking boring. And I never end up liking literally any character in them.

I have fun actually playing for a while, but the general guideline with Oblivion is "don't level up." Fun! Either way, it's just rote after a while. Nothing really feels satisfying, and you're always worried something is going to break.

Frankly, the main story quest isn't compelling, either. With hindsight, knowing it'll lead to the rise of the Dominion again, it's like, well, shit.

Anyway, I played it. And it's certainly a game that you can play. If you wanna.

FEWAR-DVD, April 23

I called it "an arcade game" in my notes and that's basically what it is. Doesn't mean it isn't fun.

(Have you noticed I'm not reviewing games yet? It's write-ups; I'm giving my thoughts and impressions. Also, it's been a while, so I don't super remember a bunch of these. Oh well!)

Bleak Sword DX (Demo), April 23

I think I liked this? Apparently it's out. I should review it and see if I wanna get it at some point.

It looks pretty cool.

The Signal State (Demo), April 23

I liked this a lot because it's so unique and it taps into a specific type of autistic urge for me but god is its price tag just too high for what I suspect that it is.

Deltarune (Chapters 1 and 2), April 22-April 23

This was a replay of Chapter 1 and a first play of Chapter 2.

I think when I first played Chapter 1 I felt... you know, I didn't want Undertale, or a sequel to Undertale, but a secret third thing. And when I first played it in... late 2019? It wasn't whatever that secret third thing was. I liked it, don't get me wrong. But I think I didn't... get it?

Not to say I wasn't excited for me. It just took me a while to convince myself to finally get to Chapter 2 and to meet the funny spambot man.

Anyway, I won't bother spending too much time on Deltarune. I'll just say that in this play, I realized that Deltarune is that secret third thing, and that I think it's better than Undertale.

I'm scared.

Pizza Tower, April 14-April 23

I think I'm guilty of wanting this game to be something it isn't.

I wanted WarioLand, and it's like that, but it isn't precisely that. It isn't trying to be precisely that. It's trying to be Pizza Tower.

I like the game, but not as much as I thought I would. Not as much as I think I should.

I'll probably reply this game in a year or two and it'll click and I'll love it the way I was always meant to love it. But for now, I'll just let the "Tombstone Arizona" guitar impregnate me.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, April 19-May 27

...It took me that long? Really? Huh.

Anyway, I love this game. I love love love it. I love the characters and the art style and the way they tell the story and the story itself and the gameplay (holy shit the gameplay!) and just. Man. I wish more games were just like this. Weird, experimental, talky, confident, cool, and unique.

This is the type of game that inspires you to write your own sci-fi. Or to write about its world. To think and to imagine.

And that's the best type of game.

Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, May 28-June 6

Come to think of it, how can a sky be unknown. There's just the one.

As mentioned above, I played this after Ace Combat 2. With both of those under my belt, I now know: the way I want to play these games is not the way I'm supposed to play these games.

And that's fine. I feel like "gamers" nowadays are so fixated on the idea that games should let you play them however you wanna play them, and that if they can't accommodate that then they're somehow inherently flawed. It's like everything needs the mutability of Minecraft, the problem-solving freedom of Scribblenauts, and the role-playing depth of Dungeons & Dragons. If it doesn't score highly on all those axes, it's got problems.

Obviously, I disagree. Games can and should have "supposed tos." You should be expected to play a specific diegetic role. You should be limited (and by the way, you're always limited, so don't act like you aren't).

If I ever play another Ace Combat game (and I wanna play Electrosphere), I might do it on easy. I like these games but man do I not know how they want me to engage with them.

no-one has to die, June 4

I had to replay this Flash game that I had originally played once when I was probably 14.

I'm glad I did.

Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, sometime in 2022-sometime in mid-2023

The strange thing about the Danganronpa games is that they're actually really good.

They shouldn't be. They shouldn't work. But they do.

This was kind of a replay. I had read most of the original orenronen LP back in... 2012, 2013? I only now have actually played it. And it's good. It's really good. I'm glad I went through it, and I'm glad I went through it with my fiancé, and I'm glad he knew nothing of any of the twists, and I'm glad I got to experience someone experiencing those twists for the first time.

SCARLET NEXUS, June 4-June 6, canceled

This was a second attempt after a first attempt in 2022 got deep into Yuito's story before I aborted it.

It's not for me. Not to say I don't like it--I do. A lot. I wish I could play this game. But I demand such fucking perfection from myself when playing it that I get too caught up by how poorly I'm playing to enjoy myself and actually let myself proceed.

I had to stop because I just wasn't having fun. I'm sad about it.

Risky Sanctuary, June 10

This is one of those games that I hope the developer comes back to, not to spruce up but to make anew. Because it's a really fun concept that basically got held back by being made in a month for a jam.

It really shouldn't take that long to clean come off of a wall.

HYPNOSCREEN, June 10

I keep forgetting I gotta play this more.

Parasite Eve, June 9-June 15

I'm still not super sure how I feel about this one.

The plot is fun but it never becomes compelling. There's an obviously evil scientist and he does obviously evil things. Never a good sign.

The gameplay is fun but it never hits nearly the level of intricacy and care that a close relative, Vagrant Story, does.

The dungeons are well-designed, though, and even if the setting is New York, it feels... fresh? It feels like NYC is always a backdrop in games and its specifics aren't important to it (see: Prototype). Parasite Eve actually cares that it's in NYC and it goes to locations there. The game feels like the developers enjoyed making it.

Also the OST is awesome. And Daniel fucking jumping out of the helicopter, getting lit on fire, throwing the bullets to Aya, landing in the water, and surviving is by far the coolest shit I've ever seen in anything ever.

This feels like a game you have to play at least once. I don't know why it feels that way; it just does.

WASTE EATER, June 17

It asks for like 20 minutes of your time and makes you cry. It's awesome.

EXPERIMENT: GROCERIES, June 17

I was more bored than spooked. It was a good try and maybe someone else will find it more fun than I did.

I'm sure if I replayed it and turned a critical eye to it I could talk at length about it. But I just don't want to.

I feel like if you're going to make uncanny the grocery store, there's other ways to do it.

Final Fantasy X: HD, sometime in 2023-sometime in 2023

We're about to see schedule issues. You'll find out why later.

This was, obviously, a replay.

I swear, this game gets better every single time I play it. I don't know what it is. It's such a smart, insightful game, with lovingly crafted characters. I love the inexorable northward journey, the feeling like you're constantly outrunning something even if you know you're running straight into the very thing you're outrunning.

Maybe it's because once you're aware of the spiral, its pull becomes that much stronger. I swear, I cry more with each playthrough, maybe because it just becomes all the more apparent how hopeless the journey is, and how much strength it takes to hope regardless. Yuna and Tidus are fantastic.

The gameplay ages like a fine wine, too. I know, it's turn-based, so it's hard to get clunky, but the game knows how it's being lenient to you and it knows just how to turn it against you. It's a system you can get better at. It's a game that rewards you in proportion to the time you're willing to put into it.

I don't need to tell you that FFX is a masterpiece, I hope. But it's worth reminding ourselves that it is. Because I think it's willing to be vulnerable in a way that most games just aren't anymore. I think the only Final Fantasy game that I've played that is more vulnerable than X is XIII. I respect the hell out of that.

(Speaking of, another honorable mention from the end of 2022 is my replay of the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy--and frankly, my love and appreciation for those games grew only deeper. They rule!)

You can talk about X forever. You can live in its world. It's fantastic, and it's always worth returning to.

Even if you have to make Yuna dance again, at least you know there'll be a time when she won't have to anymore.

Succubus Academia, September?-September 16

I tend to stay away from RPG Maker games, not for any valid reason but because creators, especially of eroge, tend not to really edit much. They end up looking fairly samey, with similar gameplay. Menus don't get edited, music is pretty bland, it's a fantasy setting... Exceptions exist, like Miwashiba's games ("that's a different engine!" yeah well they're still well-crafted despite being Made Like That) and, apparently Succubus Academia.

I won't tell you what tag I searched to find it on DLSite but anyway, I found it, I got it, I played it, and I loved it.

The map graphics are standard RPG Maker fare, sure, but the battles are totally custom and they're actually really fun. The music, though, the music fucking rules. I was there to bust a move, not bust a nut, I swear.

The concept is really fun too. "The only way to proceed is to literally get killed the right way. Sorry! But hey, at least you'll save the world. Snrk." Coupled with a battle system that actually has a really fun push-pull kind of resource management/health system, it just works. It helps that the battles all have Live 2D animation work going on, too.

Give this one a shot (no pun intended) if you like eroge. Seriously.

Dohna Dohna, sometime in September?-sometime in October

All right, look. It's not the best at anything. But it's pretty good at everything.

The character designs rule. The color palettes are awesome. The gameplay is fun. The OST is actually pretty outstanding. The combat is really fun. The mechanics are interesting. The writing has a lot of care put into it.

Alicesoft wanted to celebrate its anniversary and they were welcome to do it. I enjoyed celebrating with them.

Kirakira best girl. Even if Joker is truly best girl.

Baldur's Gate 3, sometime in October-November 14

One of the first sounds you hear in this game is a Wilhelm scream. This is a subtly masterful introduction to the game, as it signals to attentive players a lot about the artistic experience they're about to embark on: It will be more or less the same as everything else they've ever experienced, just remixed so it will hopefully be less noticeable.

And that's the thing. We've seen everything that BG3 does before, over and over, and we're so used to seeing all of these signs and tropes that it's actually become difficult to tell when they're being used poorly. BG3 throws so much of the same old shit at the wall and it can only stick because the shit that's there from last time still hasn't dried.

But here's the thing: I don't even know if any of its shit sticks. It's all so bad.

For instance, the party. Each individual party member is a collection of about 3 traits, plus their own unique brand of "horny for you." They're about as complex as late-stage Tales characters, but they have way less charm because they don't have anything like skits to round them out. In fact, because there's no guarantee that you'll have X or Y party member, or that they'll be present for conversation A, your party doesn't really have conversations together so much as they just talk through you like you're a telephone. You don't really have a party. You are a guy who has friends.

So you drag along this uninteresting, blandly-designed crew of the same fucking shit you've seen a billion times (literally one dude's whole thing is "I'm a vampire and I have vampire problems") who never really engage with each other (they'll maybe trade quips here and there, and they've got some dialogue they'll run through ambiently when specific ones are in the party together, but it's clear that This Does Not Matter) through a pretty standard fantasy world that by its own popularity offers little novelty. As you do so you meet asshole upon asshole who has a quick trait or two and says things in a European accent and maybe you'll get the scummiest Narrator I've ever heard say something smarmy based on a passive roll you'll probably fail mid-conversation. Go kill some shit and come back and maybe I'll try to help you not die. Idiot.

But you can't not die. You need to keep dying, and people need to keep failing to help you not die, or people need to keep trying to kill you because you're dying the wrong way for them, or else there'd be no reason to have the game. Honestly, if you lost the tadpoles before you killed the final boss, like, two party members would probably just outright try to kill each other, and everyone else would fuck off back to their shitty little lives, except for the ones who managed to escape their shitty little lives, in which case I guess the adventure continues! I don't feel like any of these people, with maybe three exceptions, would actually keep litigating the campaign if their lives weren't on the line.

But hey, even if almost every time someone speaks it's just to either whine about how hard they have it or to criticize you for a choice you made or to give you a quest because everything in Faerûn is your fucking problem, at least you get to have the gameplay! At least you get to slog through some of the most bullshit combat encounters they can throw at you with their barely-working mess of a battle system! With the most boring bosses imaginable save one! (Why is Gortash the only fun boss? Why does he get to have those explosives systems that aren't anywhere else?)

But oh, you get to make so many choices! You can be whoever you want, so long as they're someone who'll make any of these specific choices. Fuck off.

Meanwhile the music makes you want to fucking tear your hair out because I swear to god every single track uses the exact same leitmotif and it is so boring. Oh my god this game takes absolutely no fucking risks with anything. There's no fucking reason to play this thing. It's miserable. It's miserable, it'll make you save scum, its loading times (to load saves; loading areas is quick as can be!) are atrocious, and every time you have an option to pick something cool, you get fucking despised for it. You can become a fucking mind flayer and the game makes sure to tell you you're a complete fucking scumbag for doing it.

I hate this game. I hate it so fucking much. It is so bad and it has nothing redeemable in it and it has nothing noteworthy in it and worst of all it is just not at all fun. It's awful.

Game of the Year. Play it.

Monark, November 25-December 3

Time to fulfill the promise I made back with Poison Control.

This game is good. It's not great. Maybe it's pretty good. I liked it a lot. I enjoyed playing it.

Does it have problems? Sure. Could they be easily corrected? Yep. Does that hamper my perception of it? Of course.

As I said, sometimes you just wanna play a mid game.

After I finished Monark, I checked out its TV Tropes page, and I of course linked to "So Okay, It's Average." The Quotes page on that trope all seem to imply that just being all right is somehow worse than being bad.

I can't agree with that.

First of all, I think the binary of "good" and "bad" art is a false one. There's value in literally all art. There's something to mine, to find, to take home, to use, to learn--to whatever--in everything. Meaning and worth aren't exclusive to the good.

Maybe something isn't as good as it could be, but it's certainly what it is, and nothing else is as good at being it. Monark maybe isn't a great game but it's awesome at being Monark. I doubt any other game could compare.

So many articles from game writers and journalists lament the concept that "there's so many great games out there that it's just impossible to want to make time for anything that isn't great." That's... such a sad state, to me. Imagine playing a game only because it is considered "great." Imagine needing everything you play to have an award or a green Metacritic score just so you'll make time for it.

I don't think these writers mean to do this when they say it, but they're really benefiting a capitalist mindset. Companies have to do everything they can to get your attention. They have to make "great" games, or you won't play them. They need hype machines. They need stellar reviews. They need people talking. They need public reception to manufacture their game's own greatness, so that it will be great and then be played and then make money. If the incentive to get good reviews is to make money then the game is just a product and it wasn't made to be art.

I don't think people purposely set out to make shitty games or average games. I just think they set out to make the game they make, and the question is how well they achieve that goal. And that's entirely personal. It's something that only the creators can decide.

But in the end, some of the creators are producers and directors and executives at publishing companies who look at games in terms overhead, costs, projected income, earnings statements, financial reports.

But these are the people who make great games. Because they have to money to spend to make them great, the clout they need to keep exploiting their specific workers, and the agents necessary to make sure that reviewing publications will be predisposed to helping make their game great (you know, like what Nintendo relies on pretty much exclusively). The game doesn't have to be good. People just have to be told that it is, and then when enough people believe, they'll police the narrative so much that others will be scared to voice their opinion without getting a ton of clown emojis in their inboxes.

I'm not saying that's every "great" game. I'm willing to argue it's probably most Games of the Year as determined by Big Industry Figure Geoff Keighley, though (borne out for sure with 2022's winner; Elden Ring is so mediocre, dude).

Anyway, there's no need to play all the "great" games that are out. You know what you can play instead? The games you want to play.

You don't have to agree with me that sometimes you just wanna play a mid game. But you'll probably agree that sometimes you just wanna play a specific game. Good, bad, or mid, it's what you want to play because it, in some way, speaks to you.

That's all you need.

Mediterranea Inferno, December 4-December 6

Until now, I was cautious about pandemic stories.

The problem has always been that, sure, the lockdown happened for a year (in the US, at least), but it was only a year. It was major, to be sure, and I'm not downplaying that, but in the grand scheme of human history, it was a year. There's no guarantee (or even, necessarily, reason to believe) anything like it will happen again for a long time. So, I thought, how applicable could stories that come from it be to the future?

Don't get me wrong, I always recognized that in the lockdown was stories about isolation, grief, illness, fear, loss. But those are all distinctly human things we've been writing about since we could write. They weren't unique to the pandemic. Why use the very specific imagery of the lockdown to tell a story about those things when there's definitely more universal things to use?

I'm, as always, an idiot.

Beyond just the fact that it was an event and we'll never stop needing to take stock of it, to examine it, to see who we were and became through it, the pandemic was a world-ending phenomenon, a sea change, a new way of understanding ourselves, or misunderstanding ourselves, or misunderstanding others.

Mediterranea Inferno is about having lost yourself. The lockdowns made three young Italian men lose themselves, and when they came back together in 2022 they found that they had lost each other, too. It presents continuity with their histories: their self-destruction wasn't inevitable, but the pandemic forcing them to grapple with their places in life created living nightmares of isolation, grief, powerlessness, loss of identity, and loneliness.

When you start a new game, a card informs you that the creator made it "about his generation." He seems to think that we're lost, not in the way that the Lost Generation was, but in a different way. Whereas in the 1920s we lost faith in symbols, institutions, and humanity, in the 2020s we lost faith in ourselves and each other.

It's terrifying to admit that we can't do this alone, and that the crutches we always used to get through each day were other people. Claudio relied on his family name; it lost all meaning when his father blew his inherited fortune, revealing that there isn't necessarily a continuity between past success (Nino) and the present. Mida relied on the ways he could keep people at arm's length and when he couldn't get closer to the only person he wanted to grow closer to, he decided that others were there for him to take. And Andrea was never able to identify precisely what he needed from other people to keep him going, mistaking sex and skin-deep pleasure for the validation he so desperately craved.

Of course, if one of them gets accepted to Heaven during the Assumption, one of the others kills their friends and, in one case, accidentally himself. And if none of them make it--or if all of them do--they tell themselves that they're no longer friends. They walk away. They fall to the ground. They feel, sharply, the absence. They try to feel it in the crutches they replaced each other with (the past, the prestige, the plenty). But it isn't there.

Alternatively, if they suffer enough, they can give their spiritual guide through their pain an opportunity as well, and through him learn that they went through all of it to encourage them to revolt against their fathers, against the endless history that suffuses every rock in Italy. Paraphrasing: "There's never been an Italian Revolution. We've always been satisfied with what our fathers gave us, so long as we had permission to kill our brothers." He, like so many, wanted the pandemic to become a watershed moment, one that spurred on change, made the world a better place.

And the Sun Guys reject it. Their revolt is to refuse to be told what to do.

Just give them time to figure out what to do next.

I don't think you can tell this story without the pandemic.

This game is bleak. It's harsh. The style is immaculate. The soundtrack rules. Play it.

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, June 16-ongoing

Here is why the schedule slipped.

I like this game a lot. I burned myself out on it. Over the course of months.

I'm still not done. I'm not letting myself uninstall it until I'm done.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Pokémon Fool's Gold, unknown

The new music was great and the sprites were awesome and I love Eris. But to me this was mostly a fun new way to experience Gen 2. That's not a bad thing, really. Gen 2 isn't great, but there's a lot about it to love.

Pokémon Unbound, unknown

This and the previous entry are the only two Pokémon mods or fangames or whatever that I've ever played. I'm glad I started here!

If you're into playing fangames or whatever you know about this one and you know it rules. I'm not gonna bother praising it directly, though I'll say it earns all the good things said about it.

For me, projects like these really remind me of why we're still drawn to the Pokémon series even when the people in charge of it keep making pretty drastic decisions. I've said for years that the series is for kids and that it's not only fine but right to keep its focus firmly on kids, but Black and White proved that we can actually have our cake and eat it, too. We can have a game for kids that is also just flat-out a good game.

But for some reason, even if I ended up loving Gen 7 more than I did Gen 5, I feel like it's harder to call Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon good games? It's more like I can call them good Pokémon games. But are they good games?

I want them to be.

But what I want Pokémon games to be is totally different from what anyone else wants Pokémon games to be. Fool's Gold and Unbound confirmed that to me. I mean, I always knew it was true, but they confirmed it. What surprised me about them was that they were also good. That even if they weren't my vision, I still enjoyed them as a vision for Pokémon.

But to return to what I said a few paragraphs ago: We're still drawn to Pokémon because in each new entry we find more promises. We find new things to enjoy, to marvel at, to wonder about, to fill in. Every new mainline entry, especially since Black and White, feels like a new reinterpretation of what Pokémon is and can be, and even if we as fans don't always agree, we still have the conversation and we're still often compelled enough by something in the new interpretation that we hang onto it and let it be a part of what Pokémon is to us.

For as much as it stays the same, Pokémon is very much a living franchise, one that changes and, no pun intended, evolves. Maybe it does so in different ways than we might want, but there's nothing stopping us from knowing better. Well, nothing except Nintendo, a company that is more than welcome to fucking die immediately.

Pokémon, both the franchise and its fan works, is constantly grasping toward perfection. But we all know that perfection doesn't exist. We head towards and we know that we'll fail and we also know that even if we were to attain perfection, we'd reject it. Perfection is an illusion, a cruel one; even were it not, it would still be cruel, a poison pill. Real beauty isn't in perfection, it's in striving for it knowing you'll fail. It's about being weak, bad even, useless even, and still being loved. It's about trying, hard, getting nowhere close, and smiling afterward. It's about working together to make something new, something that loves, something that brings us all together to love even harder. It's about the struggle; it's about the effort; it's about the handshake after the battle.

Wherever Pokémon goes, no matter who's propelling it along, it'll be Pokémon. And that's what I want.

#long

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