Happy new year everyone!!!!!!!

Well, I intended to make 2025 a year where I'd be able to spread my wings and fly around the current state of games media, but between an awful incident in my personal life, complete creative lock-ups aside from the Shenmue piece, a contact for a job that went nowhere and a general sense of my life going wrong on all possible angles, I couldn't really muster the will nor want to write longform critique again. To be honest, I don't really think I still can right now.

But I also don't want to stand around and do nothing of myself. One year was enough, and while it allowed me to pierce through 53 full fuckin' games off of my backlog (!!!) it also felt really empty to not have a way to express these feelings outside of disparate discord servers and DMs. So as a way to kick off the new year and make a use of this new and nifty blog I built (shoutouts to Strawberry Starter, this whole place is soooo much easier to work on now) I wanna go back and talk about some of my favorite things from 2025. I don't want this to be like the other round-ups where I got ahead of myself and wrote too much for 'em (also cuz I wrote those while in the middle of work tehe) so I'll try to keep these short and sweet.

Games

Honkai: Star Rail (up to midway through 3.0)

I don't like this game at all. I find its story really boring, the characters incomprehensible, the flowery language unbearable and the general user experience as a live service game to be annoying to play through. I like some of the designs and found parts of Penacony to be soooorta interesting, but Amphoreus, even the fuckin start of it, was so mindnumbing that I couldn't get back into it. I logged back in to get my wife Saber and that free Archer and haven't booted it up since. Not a fan.

Castlevania - Symphony of the Night

Igarashi nailed the formula on the first try and but no modern Metroidvania wants to admit that half the fun of the namesake genre is in the RPG lying underneath the exploration. It's a really fun ARPG with great music and a fantastic sense of progression and discovery. The only issue is, as many have said already, that the inverted castle really kills the pace as you're forced to explore the exact level you've been in but upside down. A bit of annoying but nothing like, super bad. Good stuff.

Ninja Gaiden (1 Sigma and 2 Black)

RIP Itagaki. He made (or well I guess he didn't make these two) a really fun, unique way of approaching action games by basing it off entirely on positioning ala old beat 'em ups. NG1S has fantastic level design and really fun set pieces even if the bosses are horrendous. 2 Black is really pretty, but lacks a lot of the fun of the interconnected level design of 1 and feels more like a chore to go through. Worth playing though.

South Park - The Stick of Truth

Delightful JRPG. It has really witty humor and is very fun to play through. I'll never forget the broken bottle strategy I beat the game with. Highly recommend.

Tony Hawk's Underground

Yadda yadda Eric Sparrow rules. The levels are great, the progression is super tight. It's probably Tony Hawk's at its best. The final challenge was really good.

Death Stranding

There really is just no experience like reconstructing infrastructure by hauling materials from warehouse to warehouse, hauling ass because of bad weather, sneaking around ghosts and spending a dozen hours just making it more convenient to drive around. For what purpose? I don't really know. But it's really fun to just do and I think that's DS's greatest strength. You can call it a loop if you wanna, but I think the core mechanical throughline is to make you play-pretend logistics and no other game really does this, not even Euro Truck Simulator 2 since that focuses more on just getting from point A to B within a "realistic" framework (real roads, real traffic laws, real radio if you feel like it). DS likes to play it more abstractly and it works for the better. I will defo play DS2 later on (maybe this year).

Shinobi III (on 3ds)

Guys this game fuckin rocks. Fuck that new Shinobi game, play this instead.

Dragon Quest II (SNES)

Playing Dragon Quest I is like witnessing history before your eyes. Playing Dragon Quest II is like seeing the foundation of the future be set in stone. Jackson Tyler has already written a great article on the experience of playing DQ2 as it compares to its predecessor but I think Dragon Quest II has a lot of elements that feel a lot more resonant than I as they expand on how I worked. There's this concept in Japanese called 謎解き (Nazo Toki/riddle solving) where the basis of a puzzle will be structured so that the player has to figure out the clues by talking to NPCs and discovering the world to solve it, and this game plays into that very hard for good and for ill. I respect the search for the medallions, but it's also very bullshit to have two of them just, on the floor, without any indication (afaik anyway). I still really enjoyed the game though, in spite of its awful difficulty spike at the very last area of the game. Maybe play the new remake if you wanna see it modernized, but I also recommend the SNES or GBC versions.

Ace Combat 04

I really just don't have the words to describe how good Ace Combat 04 is. AC5 has better setpieces, AC2 basically perfected the formula on PS1, but there's something about AC04 to me that speaks to me. Maybe it's the really cool plot presentation with the dual POVs between Mobius 1 and the kid in the city, or the amount of bangers in its OST, or the simple fun of "hearing FOX 2 FOX 2" on the radio while dodging missiles left and right. I ended up replaying it on Hard the moment I beat it, which I couldn't do for 5 or 2 (haven't beaten 0 yet though). Either way, it rules.

F-Zero GX

They will never make another one like this and that's the biggest crime of all. One of the greatest ever.

R4 Ridge Racer Type-4

I almost wrote an essay on the appeal of kinesthetics as it related back to this one. The beautiful graphic design that permeates not just the experience of selecting things off of a menu, but the races themselves. The sense of melancholy as every story grapples with what the new millennium will bring to them, as the start of something new. The greatest OST ever composed by a human being. It doesn't just feel like a game, but an aesthetic statement. A hope for a future based on the promise of technology, something that we really want to reappropriate nowadays with LLMs but cannot. It really is a beautiful work of art.

Blue Prince

I'm actually not really a hater of most things. If I write something it's usually because I liked it to one degree or another. Either I found something interesting in its play or themes, or I just wanna gush about how it made me feel. Blue Prince is one of the only games I rolled credits on (the first credits) and felt nothing but sheer annoyance at its existence. I hate the way it mixes deckbuilding and puzzle-solving. I hate the way it wastes my time due to RNG, even when I understand or want to try out a solution for a puzzle. I hate how SLOW it is to play on a movement level. I hate it.

Shenmue

Read my article about it lol it's right there. One of the greatest games ever made.

Deltarune Ch 1 through Ch 4

It's hard to talk about Deltarune because, like most serialized fiction, a lot of the interpretation and experience of play comes from how you think it'll continue. I have my thoughts on that too, but playing gacha games for long enough has taught me that it's better to wait until it's all done to give full thoughts on a project like it. As for the individual chapters, I'll break my rule and give a 1-line review:

Ch 1: Still funny. Third best OST.

Ch 2: The funniest one. Best OST.

Ch 3: Inventive structure, fun villain, incredible secret boss. Weakest OST.

Ch 4: Cool aesthetics, made me cry during the secret boss, when I realized the point of the heart and its meta layer I clapped hard. Second best OST if only for the sanctuary themes.

Cairn (demo)

This is probably gonna be my GOTY for 2026.

Exapunks

I'm tsundere for this game. I love it and then I hate it and then I love it again. Someday I'll beat it.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

Mid but I think the sequel is gonna fix all my gameplay issues so whatever. If you don't like the Agua song or the OST in general you have objectively awful taste.

Lost Judgement

It's good but I hate the conspiracy angle; it would have been better with the main antagonist alone. Still worth playing but not as good as the first one.

Umamusume: Pretty Derby

I love it. I love the gameplay, I love the characters, I love the idol concerts, I love the historical philosophy it has. I love it all. I am an idolbuta without any shame. I've been an Uma fan since 2021 but it feels SO good to see it blow up and see people fall in love with it as their idol franchise of choice. I believe we all love idols, we just have to find the groups or franchises that speak to our hearts.

Mahou Tsukai no Yoru (Witch on the Holy Night)

I really don't think I can fully encapsulate how much I love Mahoyo in a round-up like this. Frankly I don't think I could do it justice as a full blog post. It's a very difficult game to put into words, as you can focus on a myriad of things about it, from its character work to presentation and how it operates around Nasu's general oeuvre of work. I love it though, and if you ever wanna talk about it with me please DM me on Bsky.

Pikmin

CHILDHOOD AVENGED. I was so scared of this game as a kid and beating it felt so good. It's a lovely experiment with good music and strategy layers, though I think it only really comes into its own with 2 characters like in its sequel.

Mother

Anyone who says this is skippable over Earthbound is a liar and has no sense of taste of charm or how to have FUN with old games. It's silly, super charming and goes by faster than you'd think, even without the EXP boosting items from the English patch release. Worth every single second.

House of Necrosis

This game made me understand the core fun of mystery dungeon games and for that I think it deserves all the praise it can get. Please play it.

Cyberpunk 2077 (and Phantom Liberty)

Vanilla is like, a really really good exploration of the types of freedoms we lose and gain within a rotten society and economy. It's great, it's defo worth playing by itself.

Phantom Liberty is a feat of narrative design. Every sidequest, conversation, dialog choice and event reinforces the theme of "true" agency in narrative. It's one of the most impressive things I've played in years. The way the four endings play out is a prime example on how choices in games should feel to the player; shitty, awful, and full of regret, but worth sticking through for what you believe will get you at the very end. I love it.

Final Fantasy XIII

Yo all the haters are fucking liars bro this is the best combat system Square has ever put together. The story is really disparate but its saved by the incredible (JAPANESE) script. Maybe I'll write about it.

Gnosia

Really cool premise and I respect how its systems interact with one another to try and make Mafia work single player but it's awful how it degenerates into flag hunting by the midgame. Probably watch the (currently airing) anime if you want a better experience of the plot.

Ninja Gaiden 3 Razor's Edge

dogshit

Final Fantasy XVI

Boring and annoying.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Better and worse than most people give it credit for. It works well when it does but the act 2 twist, while cool and "works" for what the game tries to say, ruins a good part of the story in such a way where it's basically indefensible to choose the M-ending. Maybe that's the mark of a good narrative though, the fact it can inspire discussion like this. Gameplay's good too until it also degenerates into nuking enemies because you don't want to engage with the parrying anymore. Still fun though!

Fate/Grand Order - Cosmos in the Lostbelt

God, the fact I can just say "FGO is over" feels bizarre to say. Obviously the gacha game FGO is still alive, and it'll probably continue on for a couple more years with no issue, but FGO as the narrative game I've been playing since 2017 being "over" and done fills me with...a weird feeling. It's good and it's bad. I wish the final chapter did stuff differently with regards to its real main heroine, but I respect Nasu's commitment to do that ending and leave it to players to try and sort how they feel about it. It's ballsy, at the very least. I do wanna write something about it though, maybe at the end of the month once I can sort my feelings out. Either way, it's been a ride. Thanks for the memories.

My god that actually was way longer than I thought it was gonna be. I might post a different one about the movies, books and anime I watched as well later on. Honestly I think my intent for this is to try and make a monthly round-up of the things I finished in any given month to get stuff out, but I'll figure out if I wanna keep it in this subfeed or put it in the main one later.

Either way, if you're reading this, thanks for checking me out. I don't really write for clicks or fame, but if you wanna talk to me and check my thoughts on things as I finish them, you can check my Bluesky, and my Backloggd here as well.

Have a wonderful 2026, and I hope we see each other soon!.

Shenmue might be the most impossible-to-talk-about game ever made. Despite the legacy it has left in the wake of it and its sequel’s releases, Shenmue is a game whose magnitude in scope and ambition defies whatever written histories may try to qualify as important. In some ways, we still live under the shadow of it, unable to live in a world where its promise is fulfilled with increasingly evolving technology over the years; Yu Suzuki’s tale of revenge and realism unfinished as the world adopts simplified, streamlined and, in some ways, cheaper ways of achieving what Shenmue wanted to do.

Yet despite that, Shenmue still lives on. The fact it is still talked about and revered in the corners of the internet stands true to how important Shenmue still is, not just as a historical piece —a game whose structure invariably influenced the current landscape of AAA games— but as an expression of what games can be when taken to the logical extreme of a philosophy, an ideological perspective on the nature of games as reflections of reality.

It’s impossible to talk about Shenmue because Shenmue is everything. It is a revenge narrative as told through the framework of an arcade designer; it is an expression of realism in space taken to the absolute extreme; it is 15 different NAOMI/Model 3 arcade games where each one is a bespoke interaction with the world. Shenmue is a game about reality, and most of all, how games are expressions of that same reality we live in.

To talk about Shenmue is to talk about all these things. It’s impossible to segregate all these elements into their cleanly-labeled categories because they all coalesce into the whole of the experience in such a way that not mentioning them would create a gap in the critique of the work itself; a gap as big as the thing that is being discussed. Because of that, I don’t think I can adequately cover Shemmue as a whole in this post. However, I want to discuss one element that takes elements from every single part of the game and creates a picture of the intent and what it left me as a player. Because most of all, Shenmue is an arcade game about reality.

A primer on Yu Suzuki and Taikan game philosophy

This isn’t a historical blog, so I’m not gonna dabble on specific sources on how director Yu Suzuki began his career at SEGA and how Shenmue came to be, since I want to keep most of this post’s content about the core idea of Shenmue’s ascendants as elements of its legacy. So to keep it short: Yu Suzuki began working at SEGA in the 80’s and headed its AM2 division for most of his stay there. His most popular games are arguably the holy trio of Taikan arcade games Space Harrier, Outrun, and After Burner (If you’ve played any SEGA classics collection or Yakuza games you’ve at least played the first two). I make note of mentioning the Taikan part of these games (体感ゲーム or “Bodily Experience Game”) because it’s an important part of the historical experience of SEGA’s development from the 80s towards the future. Taikan games were not only just arcade games, but full-body experiences where you’d sit in a recreation of a cockpit, motorcycle, airplane, etc, and the arcade machine would move around as you moved the controller, creating an immersive, almost realistic experience.

The development of Taikan games continued throughout the 80s in various forms, but eventually, Suzuki directed a certain game called Virtua Racing. Unlike other games that used 2D sprite artwork and various techniques to emulate the feel of 3D space, Virtua Racing was a fully polygonal 3D racing game about F1 cars, and it was also one of, if not the first, 3D game of its kind. Coupled with one of the deluxe models having its back modeled after the cockpit of one of the cars, the intended experience is simple to ascertain: to create a feeling of realism and immersion, as close as possible, to the real thing, within the structure of an arcade machine. The next game of the Virtua Series, Virtua Fighter, tried approaching this idea differently.

Virtua Fighter utilizes a classic arcade setup: one stick and three buttons. These buttons were for punching, kicking, and blocking, and utilizing them in conjunction with the stick in different forms, be it holding the stick in a certain direction, moving the stick in a certain motion or even just leaving it in a neutral position, and doing all that with any possible combination of those three buttons, the player could input an incredible variety of moves for each of the playable characters. In addition to this, unlike its contemporaries like Street Fighter and Fatal Fury, Virtua Fighter has little to no fantastical or mystical elements in its mechanics. There are no quarter-circle Hadoukens or Power Waves; if you want to hit your opponent you have to learn the spacing and characteristics of your character’s attacks and learn to execute them while you hold an advantage over the other player. Coupled with the revolutionary 3D character models, all fully animated with no 2D tricks to fool you into thinking it's not real 3D, it created another immersive, realistic, experience that you couldn’t get anywhere else. It was a specially made game for specially made hardware, exclusive to the domain of the arcade machine.

There were a couple of other games in the Virtua series that followed this philosophy. Virtua Cop utilized light-gun technology and 3D graphics to immerse the player in its shooter gameplay. Virtua Striker and other Virtua sports games followed the same ideas by letting the player partake in fully 3D recreations of sports like soccer, and later on basketball and track and field.

All of this is to say that the core philosophy behind Yu Suzuki’s games during the Virtua era is as such: to utilize the freeform nature of the arcade machine and its lack of standardized input methods to create games that utilized those bespoke controllers to create experiences that were both irreplicable on home consoles at the time, and also let the player be immersed in cutting-edge graphics that showed the next step in gaming: fully realized worlds utilizing 3D graphical technologies. Every subsequent game in the Virtua series expanded on these ideas by improving the graphics, refining the gameplay, and adding more and more complexities to its mechanics, like Virtua Fighter adding more bespoke mechanics to each of its playable characters and creating individual playstyles for each of them that required mastery to play them well, and Virtua Cop 2 adding extra realistic levels for the players to shoot their way through.

However, throughout the 90s Suzuki was developing a secret project for the Sega Saturn: a full Virtua Fighter RPG starring its main character Akira Yuki, as he incurred a journey of revenge against the man who killed his fighter, eventually becoming the character we know him to be in Virtua Fighter proper. It was quite an ambitious undertaking, especially for the time and for the targeted hardware. Eventually, this project would change from its origins as a Virtua Fighter RPG and into another game entirely: Shenmue. A game that would take every single concept from Yu Suzuki’s career and adapt it all into a project with one goal: to create the most realistic game possible.

An expression in arcade realism

One of the most striking things about Shenmue is how it starts. The moment the player presses the new game icon, a cutscene begins. Our protagonist, Ryo Hazuki, enters his house in horror as he slowly approaches his father’s dojo. There he finds him fighting another man, Lan Di, asking for some object he calls the “Dragon Mirror,” which he gives him right before he kills him in front of Ryo. Four days later, on December 3rd, 1986, Ryo wakes up from injuries from the beating he took and he resolves himself to find Lan Di and kill him to avenge his father.

The game opens up the notebook function, it shows you the first two pages with a little bit of background info and one instruction: Find Lan Di. You’re not told where to go but you know what you have to do. The game has begun.

When you leave your house an event plays out with one of the children around the neighborhood. One of them, Megumi, found a lost kitty whose mother got run over by a black vehicle in the middle of the night a couple of days earlier and she’s been caring for her since then. A pretty sad story all things considered. Megumi mentions that she hasn’t had anything to eat today, so Ryo mentions that the shrine nearby has some dried fish and tofu. You pick between one or the other by holding the left trigger and focusing the first-person camera on the shrine offering table and go back to the kitty, now mildly happier than she was a little while ago.

But that black vehicle she mentioned before was sort of suspicious, especially considering it left in the middle of the night, at the same time Ryo’s father was killed by Lan Di. So you go around the neighborhood and ask the lively bunch of housewives if they’ve seen any vehicles around recently. None of them seem to remember, but one of them says that the old man Yamagishi was splashed by something that could have been what you’re looking for, and she mentions he’s at the park nearby. So you go to the park and ask him if he’s seen a black car recently. He says that he saw that black car speed by towards the shopping district of Dobuita, but doesn’t know much besides that. Now you have a new lead, somewhere around Dobuita, someone must have seen that black car go through.

As you enter the stupidly detailed map that is Dobuita you start to ask all the shopkeepers and pedestrians walking about if they’d seen that black car around. One of them, Ryo’s friend Nozomi, asks if he’s been ok ever since his father died, to which he responds a dismissive “Yeah” before asking her about the black car. She mentions that, while she didn’t see who was in the car, there was a rumor going around that the American hotdog vendor Tom had an argument with them for trashing his stall in the middle of the night. Ryo then goes around town, eventually finding Tom, who says that the men in the black car looked suspiciously Chinese, and urges Ryo to go ask the Chinese people in Dobuita about it instead since he thinks they might know more than him.

However, Dobuita is quite the large map, and every single NPC strewn about has its schedule to abide by from 8:30 AM to 11:00 PM, the amount of time a day in Shenmue takes. Realistically speaking, you will not find more information by blindly asking every person if they’re Chinese or not. However, if you took the time to find one of the maps scattered through Dobuita, you would notice that there’s a Chinese restaurant on one of the side streets right around where you came from. So you mark that spot in your mental map and go find it by remembering the general layout of the district and the things around it, like how there’s a vegetable shop near the Chinese restaurant, so by finding the shop and going east through the street, you’ll be able to find the spot you’re looking for: Ajiichi Chinese Restaurant.

Inside, the chef Tao Duo Ji, and his wife Tao Lin Xia, are working, same as usual. Ryo asks him if he knows of any other Chinese people around who could help him locate Lan Di. Duo Ji says that he doesn’t really know of any, but that maybe the “Three Blades” could help him. The three blades are three people around Dobuita specializing in different trades: a barber, a cook, and a tailor, all of which use bladed tools. Lin Xia then mentions three names: Maeda, Itoi, and the chef at Manpukuken Ramen, as they might have information that could help Ryo find what he’s looking for.

So you now have your next objective: go find the three blades of Dobuita, since one of them might have a clue as to where Lan Di might be. Itoi and the cook don’t know anything about Lan Di, and Maeda only mentions that Liu of Liu Barber and Hair Salon might know more than him, as he’s only a second-generation immigrant while Liu is a first-generation immigrant. After asking around town for Liu’s whereabouts, Ryo finds him in a park near the arcade. After being asked about Lan Di, Liu mentions that, by the sounds of it, Lan Di might be a member of some Chinese black market gang, or perhaps even the leader of the Chinese mafia itself; and also mentions that the Chinese mafia has been making the port nearby their home base, so it might be prudent to go find some sailors nearby and ask them if they know anything about Lan Di, since they’re more likely to have interacted with the mafia in the past. Now with this new lead, Ryo, the player, needs to go find somewhere where sailors might be during the day or night. You have to ask around, deduce, and find your next lead to get to Lan Di.

I don’t like recapping video games much, but I feel it’s important to tell you, the reader, what Shenmue is doing here. From the moment you’re given control of Ryo, you’re only given one instruction: Find Lan Di. You have three maps to explore and talk to people in to find information about Lan Di, and as you do, you slowly start uncovering who Lan Di might be, what he’s doing here, and how to slowly, bit by bit, get closer to him.

You’re playing a detective story, lead by lead, beat by beat, conversation by conversation. Nothing you do in Shenmue comes from actions outside of your purview. You have to find Lan Di on your own, with the information you gather, and slowly deduce how to get to him as you’re given more and more leads throughout the game.

This type of gameplay was not new in 1999. Adventure games like The Portopia Serial Murder Case and Famicom Detective Club had already gamified the process of deducing and playing through a mystery lead-by-lead utilizing text prompts and commands. What Shenmue is doing here is not necessarily new. However, the degree and the scope in which Shenmue is doing it is. You, the player, are not just investigating this by telling the computer to go east, or by pressing the “talk to X” prompt, but you’re actively controlling a real character, a character with a motivation, who is controlled with a third person point of view and can interact with the entire world on a per-drawer basis. If you go around Ryo’s house at the beginning of the game, you can find a multitude of unique, bespoke items that only exist in this one house, and you can only find them by holding the left trigger, focusing in on the drawers, cabinets, and closets, and finding them, piece by piece, cabinet by cabinet.

This level of bespoke interaction with the mechanics of the game is present throughout. When you get into the scripted scuffles around town, you fight utilizing a modified version of the Virtua Fighter combat system to do it. When you’re chasing someone, you’re in the middle of a cutscene with button presses that you have to time correctly, or else you fail and have to start over (nowadays this is the much-derided Quick Time Event, something Shenmue invented). During disk 3 you must play through 20 real-life minutes of forklifting crates between two warehouses until you find the next lead. If you need to pass the time because you have an appointment at 3 PM and you go to Dobuita at 9 AM, you can go wait at the arcade and play some Space Harrier or Hang-On, though you better check the clock because if you’re late you’ll have to go try again the next day. When you go into a convenience store you have to focus on the specific item you want, select it, and then a cutscene plays where Ryo buys that individual item and then plays a raffle minigame that could net you a unique Super Sonic minifigure, or a home console port of Space Harrier (which you can also play in your house with an anachronistic Sega Saturn that’s just sitting under the TV) You interact with the world of Shenmue as you would a normal person. Bereft of the abstraction that exists in other games, it forces you to approach it like you would real life, creating a connection between you and the game that makes you approach it on its terms, the terms of real life and not the ones of a videogame. Shenmue is, at its core, a Virtua World.

Yet it isn’t without the touches of what came before it. I want to circle back to how I started this section, with the game starting the moment you’re given control of Ryo. The game would start as you take control of the protagonist, that much is obvious. However, think about it in the same context as you would something like Outrun or Space Harrier. When you press play in those games, you start playing. The objective of the game, its main verb, and its progression are all apparent and clear-cut once you start playing. The game says “drive” and you will drive until the end.

Shenmue is the same. Its mechanical objective, contextualized through narrative, is to find Lan Di. Just like the dude from Outrun can do nothing but drive until he reaches the end, Ryo must investigate, deduce, talk, fight, labor, and open, and close the myriad of interactable elements in the world to get to his end goal. Its arcade simplicity in design is clear; the only thing Shenmue is adding to it is narrative contextualization and the scope to make its story feel as enormous as the martial arts revenge movies it's taking inspiration from.

Playing this game for the first time in 2025 felt like I was experiencing a world that should have been but couldn’t be. Shenmue is a pure expression of mechanics and history condensed into a single vision. Taking the last 10 years of SEGA’s arcade history and turning it all into a bespoke experience where each element of the idea of an interactive martial arts movie was accounted for. You explore a world so detailed you can see everyone’s cabinets. You play through the story with minimal to no shortcuts, where you finish the day off by walking home and sleeping in your bed, only to wake up in your house and go back to town to continue to investigate, the only thing missing being a food and water survival meter to make the experience even more akin to real life. Shenmue is more so than a game, it’s the maximum expression of what a game can be, and bearing witness to the level of ambition on display here was awe-inspiring. Shenmue is the concept of video games taken in as a whole, more so than anything else in the world.

What's the purpose of the spaces we go through in games?

The rundown

The Trails series has a very strong initial pitch: an RPG series in a single continent where you explore all the different countries set in it as different characters, with the hook being that every character from every game is still alive and doing something before or after the player sees it.

Each sub-series of games then is set in a unique environment from the other. The player gets to experience the whole continent of Zemuria through the eyes of different people who've lived different lives and they slowly unravel the story behind the world through different perspectives.

Trails from Zero is the fourth game in this series, starting a new subseries after its trilogy predecessor: Trails in the Sky. It's a game about the struggle for national identity, the inherent contradiction in the police system, the strength of found familial bonds and how systemic powers get utilized for the benefit of the elites.

It's also a game about how the places we live in inform us, what we want to protect and what we value in our lives.

Let's talk about it a bit.

The city, a person

Rather than the game spanning across a gigantic kingdom with multiple cities and towns like its predecessor, Trails from Zero is set in Crossbell, a single big city with a handful of areas surrounding it. In the story, Crossbell is framed as a buffer state between the two superpowers of the continent: the Empire and the Republic. As a result, Crossbell grew in size and became a hub for all the latest technologies and engineering projects. You, as the player, control a newly established police squad whose purpose is to attend to civilian needs and requests, familiarizing yourself with the city, its people and its history.

Crossbell itself is large, with distinct districts and unique environments throughout. You get to learn the lay of the land by accepting citizen and governmental requests, from finding lost items, investigating crime reports to monster extermination requests. As you complete these quests, you learn of Crossbell's history, its people and its geography. The once big and imposing city slowly opens its heart to the player, and the player gets to interact with Crossbell as more than a city, but as its own character.

The process of learning how Crossbell's small, unique idiosyncrasies make its character whole was what made me fall in love with it. Learning how each section interacts with the other, how to get from one place to the next, how to access its different shops and roads and how the different forms of diegetic fast travel interact with one another made it feel grounded and special. Through the course of the 45-ish hours it took me to beat it, the city embedded itself in my heart. Its realness made it memorable to me, it made me want to be in it.

The space, a moment

I have a hard time really picturing spaces in games as "real." It's really easy to generalize the abstraction of "space" in your head as a quirk of the game and never really feel it out as something familiar or real.

RPGs in particular have this funny relationship with space. Because the games are designed to be these large-spanning adventures through multiple environments, where you run through fields and mountains and cities and towns, learning about the world and its characters and the things that surround them, you grow extremely intimate with the elements that constitute a certain "realness" of space in your mind.

I grew attached to these places as time passed.

In talking about Trails from Zero with friends and while writing this very post, my mind wandered about all the other RPGs I'd played before where I felt that element come to life. This relationship with space we share as we play is something that sounds easy to replicate but requires a grounded sense of culture and history that's larger than the player can ever experience.

I think what makes a lot of these games work is that closeness to the worlds they create. If you're able to think about a city as a city, with all its intricacies and annoying elements intact, that space is cemented in your head as elemental to you in the act of play itself. It never leaves you because it becomes a part of your play.

Games that manage to capture this are fundamental to me in the RPG space. Creating this sense of realness, of "space" as a tactile element to the setting enhances the experience more. You learn to love it, you learn to get annoyed by it, but by the end of the game, it lingers. You become a part of the city, and the city becomes a part of you.

I think about mid games a lot.

“Mid” is a term thrown around a lot recently. If you’re in any online space that has any kind of zoomer-ish element or personality you’re bound to see words like that being screamed at other people for days on end. There’s a kind of bizarre antipathy towards any kind of “mid” media nowadays, games or movies or books that don’t quite leave you an empty husk in a boring way, but aren’t really impactful enough to leave you thinking like those holy grails we all seek in our quests. I guess if I were to describe them in those terms, I’d say that mid is the little bumps in our proverbial road, the things that keep us wanting because they lack this or that, but aren’t especially meaningful in their own right. You see it, play it, and throw it away.

We all seek special things in our lives. We all want to experience the high of a really well-told story or a really impressive-looking play or movie. Part of the human journey through art is that specific search for that sublime, works that resonate with us but aren’t sublime in the same sense as art scholars would use it.

Art is a strange thing, all things considered. In our human search for beauty we’re bound to step into realms that question ourselves and how we relate to the world at large. The culmination of these experiences building the bedrock in which our tastes are developed over time. We consume and experience and watch and learn and all these things come together to create a mess of paints and textures and that is our human lives. We find meaning in the meaningless. We are bound together by this search for greatness that connects us, relates us to one another and builds something better.

And there’s a kind of beauty I appreciate in that.

We wish to look upon the looking glass and replicate that same awe and wonder we sense through our connection with art. We want that high, we want to grasp it again and again and find its never-exhausting shine bright within us as it leaves and we search for it again, and it’s within that search that we find the pebbles on the road to guide us. These little things that contain moments of the sublime, or glimmers of its light within them but don’t quite grasp it fully. Those pebbles are what form the larger foundation of our own journeys through the world. It enriches our selves. It makes us us.

The internet, I feel, enhances this. We’re able to relate to one another through the spaces we inhabit and the tastes we share. We create social spaces that fundamentally create our personalities and change the way we experience the world, more so than with spaces in real life. Through interfacing we connect with people, creating relationships that extend through space and makes us feel more human than in reality. Our lives are altered by our interactions, and the things we wish to see change as we talk to one another. Even if you meet someone for a moment, be it a Youtube comment or a single reply on Twitter or a grand, inspiring essay on someone’s personal website, we create these bonds with other people that makes us more than ourselves.

This post is about The Caligula Effect: Overdose.

The Caligula Effect is a game that sucks ass to play.

It’s a game that made me understand myself a little more.

It’s a game that connected me with my friends more.

I think it’s a bit special.

You can say a lot about Caligula 1’s influences and general game-y things. It’s quite obviously riffing off of Persona’s influence, to the point that its scenario writer is one Satomi Tadashi, main writer of Persona 1 and the 2 duology. You can see it in its non-calendarized Social Link system and how it expands on nu-Persona’s idea of connection with its 100 or something social links with every single student that attends the school in Mobius. You can say that Caligula is “Persona but jank” or whatever else you want, but you’d be wrong.

I think that more than anything, it’s a game about how the internet helps us.

One of the main parts of the setting in Caligula 1 is that Mobius, the virtual world that serves as the setting for the story, is a world created to disrupt its people. Not out of any malice or whatever from the part of its overseer, Mu, but out of a desire to create better spaces for everyone in it. Nobody in Mobius is their real self; they’re all the idealized version of the desires of the person in it. This ranges from the obvious, like an 8th grader who looks like he’s 18 and buff or a trans woman who can live out her idealized body, to the mundane, like people who want to return to their high school days to run away from their current problems.

There’s a real sense of…relatability, I guess, at seeing how these characters create versions of themselves to fit the social climate they’re stuck in. Despite the protagonist faction being people who realized they live in a Matrix and want to get out of it, they never once break off from what their ideal selves visually, and it’s only through conversation and progressing their own character stories that the player gets to learn who they are as people, what drove them to land in Mobius, and by the end, what they want to do when they’re free from this.

It’s very easy to see the analog to profile pictures and discord bios. We make up these online versions of ourselves, project them onto the spaces we wish to show them and form a connection based on both the reality of ourselves being that projection and the projection being that: a projection. Not necessarily something fake, but something that we create.

When I make my Cohost self, I project the ideas that I want other people to know about me within the space. I want to look smart, I want to feel insightful, I want to be the person who writes about games he likes and have a platform in which I can reap a social reward out of it. That’s the persona I want people to see within the social space I occupy.

But it’s different everywhere. My self on discord is different from here, and from Twitter, and in real life and in school and at work and everywhere. We swap out these versions of ourselves depending on the social context, and the instantaneousness of the internet makes these selves a lot quicker to create and a lot easier to fuse into themselves. We all eventually return to nothing, a version of ourselves we want people to see, even if it’s not real.

The Caligula Effect’s best aspect is how it approaches this infiniteness of the self. We see it through the eyes of the protagonist, someone who lives out this dual-life between their Mobius persona, their Lucid persona and the Player persona, as someone who’s commanded to respond through dialog options. This trinity is what makes the character episodes work as well as they do, because the player is primed to see the world through the lens of the world responding through what the party members want out of their lives. There’s a kindness in the episodes that feels human, realer than real. An understanding of the dynamics of people within spaces like the internet that I think is really effective.

I played through the entire game on stream through Discord, mainly to two people who wanted me to play it and a bunch of other people who joined in from time to time. Playing a game that emphasizes this connection to others through an unreal space made me appreciate the people I talk to online more, to put it bluntly. I think there’s a real beauty to that connection, it’s something that I appreciate a lot the more I think about it.

We find ourselves seeking holy grails, but I think the connections we gain with other people who also stumble through the same pebbles is valuable too. It’s that light we find within others that makes our lives better. The warmth that comes from it is something that I want to cherish more in my life. I think that connection is the real sublime in life.

Kingdom hearts is a series known for two things: Mickey Mouse doing anime shit and its brutal boss fights in its hardest difficulties. KH2's longstanding reputation comes primarily through how its 14 secret bosses challenge the player in different ways, playing around with various systems that colease into a game that demands high execution from its players. It's never impossible, but learning how to work through their mechanics and besting them by appreciating and understanding the combat engine is one of the most satisfying things in any game and makes it stand on top as an incredible action game.

I have also never beaten one of them. (EDIT: as of the repurposing of this post on December 26th 2025 I beat 12/14 of the Kingdom Hearts 3 superbosses on critical mode. I'm just that fuckin' cool)

So playing through KH 0.2 as a warm up to my KH3 playthrough was very interesting because this is the most Kingdom Hearts has ever approached being an action game. There's no customization, no decisions, no gained abilities outside the first area. It's just you, the enemies, and the designer trying to see how it all ticks together. While most of the game is a generally easy slide that prepares you for KH3 by showing you what the team can do now that they're on a playstation 4, its secret boss gauntlet was genuienely one of the hardest things ive ever played in an action game, and it all comes down to its final boss.

Zodiac Phantom Aqua is, from my understanding, kinda meligned by the general KH community. Her attacks are very reactive and you can't get away by spamming magic or grand magic or whatever it is you want to beat her. You need to learn the timings, the animations, the general flow of the battle and experiment to find those windows for yourself. Some of them are dumb, like the slow walk, others are pretty ingenious, like learning you can jump out of a block to do two full combos. Learning these patterns throughout my 4 hours grinding her was really, really fun and it made me understand what truly makes a Kingdom Hearts boss special. That ebb and flow of the systems mixing together and learning to fight a boss on its own terms, besting it in what it itself is good at, is a feeling like no other. I can't wait to get my ass handed to me by the data fights in 3.

Fate/Samurai Remnant is a game that I didn’t really have any expectations for, or any hopes of being good, but ended up blowing me away with its immense attention to detail on history, themes and what makes Type-Moon stories work.

It’s a game that tries to blend a lot of things: Musou combat, themes about violence and selfishness, interesting reflections on history, a virtual tour of XVIIth century Edo, and make a cohesive experience out of it all. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t really work, but it ends up feeling like a full package with something to actually say with its own words, even if what it’s saying isn’t inventive or new, it feels more resonant because it expresses it through itself.

But first, some context:

Fate/Samurai Remnant is an Action RPG made by Omega Force and published by Koei Tecmo. It’s based on the longrunning Fate franchise, made by writer Kinoko Nasu and it’s set in XVIIth century Edo during the early-ish days of the Tokugawa shogunate. While the game is set in the Fate universe, it’s not connected to anything other than the main elements of the setting.

When it was announced during the Fate/Grand Order new years livestream during December 2022 I was very…skeptical. I’ve long been tired of Type-Moon’s endless wheel-spinning with FGO in particular, and the state of the company thanks to it and Fate’s broadening and expanding popularity made me think that this game was just going to be another generic Fate™ branded game with nothing new to add either thematically or in concept. It didn’t help that it took around 5 months for us to see the first trailer with gameplay, which made me a bit concerned that, since the game was being developed by Omega Force, was going to be a normal musou in the vein of the studio’s other spin-off games, and while I enjoy my fair share of musou games, there wasn’t really anything for me to be excited about aside from seeing a “new” Fate game.

That was until I played the game at Anime Expo, and suddenly it started clicking for me. Bit by bit the gameplay seemed way more interesting than what I was expecting, since it didn’t end up playing like a musou game. As more and more information started to come out, I got increasingly more interested in what the game had to offer. All the interviews made it seem like the staff was extremely passionate of what they were making, and all the staff comments and live shows had this vibe of sheer hype from everyone, which kinda ended up making me excited about it.

Buuuut what about the game itself? Well like I said before I think the game is very good, but it does falter in some aspects. A lot of it really works, and two weeks after beating it I feel like I can say for sure that it’s one of my favorite works within the Fate canon for a lot of aspects, mainly the story and themes. So as my first review on this blog, and my first longform piece of writing I’ve done in a while, I want to try to examine what makes the game tick for me, both in gameplay and story, and how it all coalesces into a game that really gets what makes Type-Moon stories work.

Needless to say, there’s gonna be full spoilers in this after the read more part, so if you wanna see what the game does by yourself I recommend you play it for yourself; maybe after a sale or something.

Samurai Remnant’s combat has some interesting mechanics and plays with some ludonarrative aspects well, but does feel janky in ways that are inherent to the systems it’s inheriting from other Omega Force games. Some bosses shine, especially the servant fights that don’t involve Archers, but for most of the game you’re stuck spamming the same special skills and healing your way through fights while poorly telegraphed attacks and unclear riposte timings murk you immediately. The stance system is very fun and I think that Iori’s playstyle as someone who plays more like an ARPG character compared to the Musou-playing servants is really cool, but there’s bits of brilliance in the system that I don’t think were particularly suited for the system the game is using.

For starters, the game is really bad at being a pure action game. While it feels great on a holistic front, take one of the mechanics away and it suddenly gets a lot more boring very quickly. Whenever you have to fight a boss as a guest servant or without Saber or a Rogue Servant party member, the game devolves into tedious button mashing and waiting for windows of vulnerability, making you rely on the unclear riposte system to deal good damage against the enemy’s shield gauge so you can start dealing real damage to their health bar. I think there’s an interesting system in place here, but the issues make it very hard to determine what makes it fun and what doesn’t really work.

This doesn’t entirely mean that the game is tedious button mashing. Like I said, taking the combat holistically, it feels really nice to engage with the RPG elements. Buffing yourself, using healing items, using magic, choosing your extra party member, it all feels great to engage with even on the highest difficulty.

There’s pockets in the game where taking away mechanics does shine though. The fights with Saber, the duel with Musashi in chapter 5, the Rogue Berserker fights, the couple fights against Rogue Saber; these were all very fun fights because, to me, they feel designed around being fought first and being playable second. One of the main issues the musou framework has over the combat design is that every Servant boss (with a couple exceptions) has to use the same moveset and animations of their playable counterpart. This creates a problem with certain fights where attacks go by super fast and are impossible to react to, which leads to you getting hit hard and needing to spam healing items. Coupled with the unclear and unreliable riposte system, this makes for generally frustrating fights that felt like a slog to go through.

What makes this more frustrating is that, like I said before, sometimes the system works incredibly well. The Musashi duel I mentioned earlier is my favorite boss in the game because all her attacks are clearly readable (they literally shine with different colors) and you’re always able to play strategically against her windows where she’s vulnerable.

I think Samurai Remnant’s combat shows the cracks within Omega Force’s style of gameplay when used in a non musou context. In those games you have to plan around the macro of the level; the difficulty stems from having to do objectives and traveling the level rather than the micro of dodging attacks and doing combos. Since this game doesn’t do that, you get combat that feels “fun” to engage with but leaves a lot to be desired when engaging with the vast majority of enemies. There’s some mechanics here that try to adapt the formula into this smaller scale, like the earth parry and riposte, but because attacks in the musou framework have to large and full of VFX the screen gets hard to read very quickly, and it doesn’t help that the riposte requires some strict timing that’s not made clear with the fights involving monsters and human enemies when not controlling Saber or whatever servant you have to control in the moment.

It does work with some bosses though, like the Musashi duel and the Saber boss in chapter 3, but these fights are few and far between, which makes it extra frustrating because you can see a version of the game where learning all those timings would be really rewarding and fun but most fights feel unreadable and unreactable, and I ended up spamming affinity skills and healing items to get through them.

But honestly? the gameplay is really nothing to waste my breath over (even though I did write like 750 words on it lol). The main meat of the game is the story, the characters, the themes and what the game itself represents in the broader context of Fate and Fate’s relationship to history as historical fiction.

At its core, Samurai Remnant is a story that’s interested in the contrast of violence between post-Sengoku Japan and the “peaceful” Tokugawa shogunate. The game makes clear time and time again that Edo, compared to the Sengoku era, is a better place to live since war isn’t as prevalent or common, it’s a new era for everyone since they can live peacefully and without worries; “There’s no need to pick up the sword anymore” says Miyamoto Musashi in one of the animated cutscenes.

Iori, in turn, is a character who realized his lot in life relatively early. He understands that his path is one of violence and and dead bodies, one that he’s forced to walk down for the sake of his dream. For Iori, attaining enlightenment through the sword is what he’s meant to do, and he lives his life for the sake of it. This contrasts with Saber’s motivation and backstory. They were someone whose life was also defined by their bloodshed and murder. The legendary hero of Yamato, the one who killed the Takeru brothers, who killed their own father and brother, a person molded by violence from their fictional start.

Both of these characters live in accordance to the blood they shed, but Saber has the benefit of being able to see their life through different eyes. They start the game with a chest filled with pride and superiority, a servant like no other, one who wields the legendary Amenomurakumo-no-tsurugi. As their relationship with Iori’s facade develops, they begin to understand both the world around them and what Iori truly believes in, and little by little they start seeing the beauty in the peace of Edo.

But who does this violence serve? Samurai Remnant tries to take this premise and runs through it with every character. The wishes of the participants of the Ritual all beg to release themselves from the world they live in and from what the future holds for them. Shousetsu is destined to fail and die, her historical counterpart’s coup resulting in little more than a footnote in Tokugawa’s history. Zheng Chenggong’s rebellion against the Qing will end with his demise as the Ming dynasty ends in ruin. These wishes, the wishes of the people who yearn to be free from the fate of the world are taken and thrown away, discarded into the everlasting brightness of the full moon.

“You truly are beautiful---How wonderful would it be if I could realize your wish?”

To Iori, reaching enlightenment through the sword is the path he’s cursed to walk on. Just like how the Root curses all mages into a life bereft of happiness, the sword does the same to anyone who wishes to strive higher and higher. His trauma over the bandit incident during his childhood and the passing of Musashi---the passing of his gateway to enlightenment---leads him to try to quench his thirst for blood by seeking a fight with someone who’s as skilled with a blade, as fast and as beautiful as his former master.

I think there’s something beautiful in the way the final scene between him and female Musashi is framed, as the night sky is painted with the stillness of the full moon, instead of the sharpness of the crescent moon that he saw on that day. The unquenchable thirst that drives Iori leads him to his highest high: being defeated by the hands of the strongest opponent he knows, and being killed by Saber is the thing that leads him to reach enlightenment.

This wish, this idea of the fullness that swordsmanship can bring to you, is core to not just the base ideas presented in the thematic bible of Nasu’s work, but also in the way the Waxing Moon itself functions as an object of enlightenment. A failure of a device that exemplifies the unhappy lives that the people who swear by its processes are forced to live through.

But while wishes are discarded, the people are not. There’s no need for a magical device when you can try to bring your dreams to reality yourself. If violence is your destiny, then cut away and grasp it with your hands. Every character ends up attaining their wish in some manner by the end of the game. Iori himself wished for an upheaval, a world of endless violence where he’s able to attain his own enlightenment through his own means, but even though he’s cut down by Saber, he’s not unhappy with his fate. It’s this contrast that makes the game one of the most interesting works in the Fate canon of works to me.

But as I played and screamed in joy at the very end of the game, I was reminded of another game that tackled the same ideas more than 10 years ago: Nitroplus’s masterpiece Full Metal Daemon Muramasa. It’s honestly kinda funny how Samurai Remnant’s ending C and the ending of The Hero in Muramasa are basically the same beats note for note, but while Muramasa is focused more on the personal ethics and philosophy involved with the path of violence with regards to justice, Samurai Remnant is more interested in the selfishness of each participant’s wish and the ramifications of the wish itself. I think this is what makes it more interesting than any other non Nasu Fate spinoffs, because it approaches the premise of the Holy Grail War from the perspective of someone who is already willing to engage in it for the sake of itself and for the violence it presents.

What are wishes for? What is violence for? Samurai Remnant is a game that, while a bit clunkily, manages to make this question feel central to all the interactions you have with the ludic element of the game. From the gameplay to the story, I think Samurai Remnant is a game that will really spark something in the people who are interested in the history of the setting and the history of Fate as a series about history.