\\ Oh, The Places You'll Go: Hohokum Review //

This article contains spoilers of certain locations in the game "Hohokum" by Honeyslug and Sony Santa Monica, published by Sony Computer Entertainment. Played on PlayStation 4.

Hohokum is a game about exploration, not only of physical worlds, but of raw feelings, broad emotional states of being, and mental machinations. It’s a beautiful game which eschews conventional wisdom and embraces the pushback. It’s of little surprise that I find Hohokum to be one of the best games of 2014.

\\ A Turn for the Worst: Japanese RPG's //

Japanese Role-Playing Games (JRPG’s) have long been a point of much frustration, anxiety, and sadness for me, a genre which I felt unable to meaningfully parse. In my younger days as a child, I found them simply boring, yet was never able to understand why; I always felt that there was some key ingredient I was missing, as my monthly Nintendo Power subscription often reassured me that games like Chrono Trigger, Secrets of Mana, Final Fantasy, and Skies of Arcadia were “true” classics. I read in GamePro and on IGN of the “greatest games of all time” like Final Fantasy VII, Xenogears, Suikoden, Earthbound. I gathered tales of hours lost, classes skipped, life opportunities missed, all in drawn-out anticipation of meeting Sephiroth in battle, of saving the world from Gyorg, of travelling through time with Crono and crew. Sure, I loved Pokémon as much as the next elementary school student, battling and trading our beloved creatures together on the playground and in cramped bedrooms after school, but that was purely tradition of bygone years.

Yet as my love of games proved to persevere, so too did my disdain for JRPG’s. In 2006, with the release of Kingdom Hearts II, I had finally found a JRPG that sucked me in when I bought it on a whim. What perplexed me was that, finally, there came along a JRPG that instantly fired all synapses for me. I cared not that I hadn’t played the original; in fact, that actually contributed to my taking a liking to Kingdom Hearts II. From the moment you begin the game, and the animation set to Hikaru Utada singing her song, “Sanctuary” plays, my young mind is filled with intrigue. When the introductory cutscenes featuring mysterious robed figures finishes, and the controls are handed to I, the player, I’m instantly confused by the protagonist I’m at the reigns of, that of Roxas.

While Kingdom Hearts II has a bit of a slow start, it does a good job of quickly introducing the player to its mechanics, by way of having the player attempt to keep a beach ball in the air with a stick, instead of with a Keyblade to the Heartless. It’s an attempt at world-building, and a cute one that I appreciate to this day, at that. But more importantly, what the game is doing is communicating to the player the general flow and style of the gameplay. It is saying that this Final Fantasy and Disney aesthetic fusion hosts an action game, not the turn-based systems dictating much of Square-Enix’s past efforts.

\\ A Creature Fear: Alien: Isolation Review //

This article contains spoilers of plot points and gameplay scenarios from the game, “Alien: Isolation” by The Creative Assembly, published by Sega Corporation. Played on PlayStation 4.

The first Alien movie was the best one. It established an aesthetic, a tone. It was well-acted, well-directed. H.R. Giger’s creature designs were (are) impeccably effective. Its sequel, Aliens, is perhaps still-unmatched in terms of boldness and quality by any other film sequel since, with its heightened sense of tension followed by explosive release. Yet, Alien 3 was a complete crapshoot; it was director David Fincher’s first film, and also marred by chronicled production troubles which lead to a film that’s neither too frightening nor too exciting, simply not enough anything. At least Alien: Resurrection managed to salvage a few good laughs out of me with its complete disregard for any sort of tension and embracement of camp. Prometheus didn’t really happen, right?

\\ Plucked From Our Hearts: Pikmin //

This article contains spoilers of plot points and gameplay scenarios in Pikmin for the Nintendo Gamecube.

More and more recently, I’ve noticed many of my favorite games tend to communicate something important about human existence to me, whether it be through mechanics, storytelling, visuals, or music (likely a combination of these elements). We often worry about whether or not a game is “fun”, but fun isn’t the only emotion one feels during play; we undergo sadness, pain, frustration, excitement, agitation, anxiety. It’s the entirety of the development team’s job to understand clearly what is to be communicated through play and aesthetics. Indeed, we often postulate of games as art, but really, I think the more worthwhile discussion is games as communication, games as political statements, games as transcendence, games as personality.

When I wrote about Majora’s Mask, I spoke in great detail of a game which had changed in significance for me over a timespan of several years, and discussed the ways in which the game in general was a failure for me as an appropriate means of communicating to the player the things Aonuma and his team were interested in. I lambasted the game, and looked at it from many different angles, as I thought it was a very interesting game, even despite being a failure. Failures tend to be the most interesting prospects for deep criticism, criticism which doesn’t choose to merely wade in the shallow pool but dives in the deep end, wading through the breadth of experience in pursuit of fuller and more profound truths in the world.

The truth of the matter is that it’s simply easier to acquire the necessary level of interest to embark on these adventures when a work seems daring, stepping away from the norm and wandering in the pool of unexplored territory. It becomes easier and more rewarding still when the works holds some significance to you and your past.

\\ Dark, Yet Clear As Day: Dark Souls II //

This article contains spoilers of plot points and gameplay scenarios in Dark Souls II for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

After much deliberation, I think it’s safe to say that the original Dark Souls is my favorite game of all time. It’s just such a wonderful thing that I can barely contain my composure when talking about its vast, sprawling worlds, filled with things to do, secrets to uncover, and mysteries never to be solved. Huge, imposing creatures found in the most dank, depressing corners of Lordran. Tough, imposing, uncompromising, yet doable boss encounters which tested your limits, pushing you further and further into the brink of uncertainty, kicking you out from the game for days, weeks, possibly months. But when you returned, fresh and revitalized, you’d find yourself empowered, a changed person, and would find the strength and the courage to plow through until the next surprising twist, the vicious circle beginning anew.

Dark Souls took me two years to complete; a long time indeed for a game that’s not really that long in the grand scheme of things, yet the experience of playing it is long. It felt like finishing a year at school; one takes the time to sit down and look back at the things that have changed in their life, the friendships mended and broken, changes in our bodies, maybe finding ourselves in a new place to call home. Finishing Dark Souls felt like how I would imagine breaking up with a long-time spouse could feel; it was good that I had closed the book on it, but I yearned for more. But of course, too much of a good thing is never a good thing.

\\ Half Moon - Majora's Mask Review //

This article contains spoilers of gameplay scenarios and plot points in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask for the Nintendo 64.

Travel back in time with me to the mid 1990’s.

I was preciously young, and not too aware of a life beyond the confines of my room, but I surely knew video games. I was introduced to the original PlayStation around that time by my mother’s now ex-boyfriend, and became enamored by the foreign yet somehow familiar worlds of Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and Croc. I’d heard rumblings of a fabled maker of magic from across the pond. People my age knew them by many different names, but you might recall the name Nintendo. As a youngling, I always saw the house that Miyamoto built as an enemy of the state, a force which was to be ignored so as to preserve my rather insular notions of what a video game was and could be (one shouldn’t be surprised to hear that I was also extremely shy and socially awkward, literally afraid of social contact with anybody beyond the scope of my immediate group of friends, even at that sacred age where nothing you say is of any consequence).

But by 1998, it became impossible not to pay attention to these tremors emanating from the fields of Hyrule. Nintendo had just released The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on their struggling Nintendo 64 console to massive amounts of critical acclaim from video game publications everywhere. Former senior editor of Gamespot and current editor-in-chief of Giant Bomb Jeff Gerstmann at the time wrote of the game as being, "a game that can't be called anything other than flawless.“ IGN writer Peer Schneider echoed this sentiment, declaring, "The new benchmark for interactive entertainment has arrived." (Indeed, I ripped these quotes from Wikipedia.)

Though I wasn’t cognizant of Ocarina of Time’s release at the time, nor did I know much about the Zelda franchise in general, it was hard not to feel the aftershocks of its arrival. You saw it in stores, in magazines, on TV; you heard about it at your pre-kindergarten daycare, you heard about it, bored at the DMV, pouring over whatever reading material was available on the shelf. You wondered what the big deal was; how could a game that had just come out already have declared itself a legend?