The World According to Mamthew

It’s mostly a very good game. I don’t like it as much as Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla for reasons I will get into in too much depth, but it’s probably the most mechanically sound and mechanically “an Assassin’s Creed game” we’ve gotten in over a decade. Combat is fast-paced but strategic, and stealth and climbing are thoughtful and rewarding. But the story leaves something to be desired, which is a shame because Naoe and Yasuke are some of the most interesting and likeable protagonists we’ve gotten in the series, and I wish they’d had more substantial things to do.

The game has two protagonists. Naoe is a young shinobi woman who lost her home to Nobunaga’s unification campaign and lost her father to a mysterious organization that seems to have ties to Nobunaga, in a story that purposely hews pretty closely to Ezio’s story in Assassin’s Creed II. Yasuke is a formerly enslaved African samurai loosely based on the real-life historical figure of the same name who was a close advisor and probably warrior to Nobunaga. Maybe the most interesting thing the game’s story does is delay the introduction of playable Yasuke for a surprisingly long time; he has a few snippets of gameplay near the beginning, but it’s really Naoe’s show for the first fifteen hours or so.

This delay of Yasuke’s addition makes a lot of sense from a gameplay perspective. Unlike the dual protagonists of Syndicate, Naoe and Yasuke actually play very differently from each other. Naoe has stealth and climbing and can really only reliably focus on one enemy or very small groups in combat, while Yasuke is a powerhouse who can take down entire forts of enemies single-handedly but can barely climb and is very poor at stealth. As I’ll get into more later, despite Yasuke’s ridiculous strength, Naoe still feels more fun and free to play as much of the time, but the game first has to make that case. If we had access to both characters from the start, players less comfortable with the stealth and parkour that make up the backbone of the Assassin’s Creed experience might forgo learning that style of gameplay for the more broadly familiar hack-and-slash approach. This way, playing as Yasuke often feels like ceding power, rather than embodying it.

As a shinobi who wants revenge on Nobunaga and a samurai who owes his freedom to Nobunaga, Naoe and Yasuke start the game at odds with each other and take a few game hours to reach a level of trust, which is solid and rewarding storytelling. Unfortunately, as a result of the game design, once they do trust each other, nothing can happen that challenges or disrupts their easy rapport. Since the player can choose to use either of them at any time, both characters are present for nearly every story cutscene, cracking jokes and building each other’s confidence. And while that’s always very fun in the moment, long-term it makes the story pretty conflict-free. The characters find a shared goal and work to complete that goal together without at any point doubting that goal or their partner’s commitment to it, and it barely comes up that, like, it’s not great that Yasuke slaughtered half of Naoe’s town twenty gameplay hours ago.

This lack of conflict is exacerbated by the game’s maddening non-linearity and choice systems. I’ve complained at length about the choice system when discussing previous Assassin’s Creed games, but it’s bad here, too, and the addition of a “canon mode” where the choices are made for you, while nice in theory, doesn’t address the central storytelling issues that arise from choice systems. Because the player can make any choice at any time, the characters have to maintain a baseline personality and moral system through the entire game, with dialogue that makes sense for those characters justifying either choice, which means that the choices have to contrast but not in a way where a considerably different character might have made them. The least frustrating choices are those where the player can choose whether Yasuke or Naoe is the one to respond to a question or act in a moment, because they’re different enough as people that the decision can actually feel like a decision. But even then, the choice doesn’t impact the development of those characters at all, and their relationship can’t be affected by, for example, Naoe killing a target that Yasuke would have spared, so that isn’t impacted either.

Shadows actually has a less impactful choice system than either Odyssey or Valhalla because it’s so very nonlinear. Once both characters have been unlocked, the player can for the most part tackle the main story missions in any order. They won’t actually tackle those missions in just any order, since the posted difficulty levels and geographical locations of those missions funnel them through a broad prescribed order, but because the option exists, the writing can’t allow for characters who behave much differently between a level 13 mission and a level 45 mission. I’d already taken issue with the nonlinearity in Valhalla, which presented story missions in groups of 3-5 and only allowed Eivor’s character to develop after each group of missions was complete. In Shadows, however, it’s one big group of missions, so Naoe and Yasuke must maintain static characterizations throughout. Add that the majority of quests must be written in a way where the player can use either Naoe or Yasuke and even swap between them for any given objective, and we get a story where neither protagonist can change and most major and minor beats can’t matter. Hell, even the Creed has been shifted from “nothing is true, everything is permitted” to “we work in the shadows to serve the light,” so that neither character has to interrogate their own societal assumptions, which is usually the central point of any Assassin’s Creed game, but I guess would work against the story structure imposed by the game design.

The design of the world subtly works against the game’s nonlinearity, too. Most locations that aren’t forts are designed to be approached from a specific angle. This makes sense with the Japanese setting both geographically and thematically, as the mountainous terrain means that most locations are up a steep mountain path and surrounded by forest, and the careful curation of the approach to a location reflects the design philosophies of Japanese gardens, in which every element is placed deliberately to be most beautiful when seen from the set garden paths. But finding the start of a pathway to a marked location can be difficult. In most open-world games, I tend to take an “as the crow flies” navigational approach, where I figure out a heading and move in that direction until I reach my goal, but Shadows disincentivizes that approach to an extent where I often find myself sliding down too-steep slopes through blurs of foliage for minutes at a time until I managed to find enough of a foothold to reach a meditation point at a weird angle, entirely missing the environmental storytelling along the path leading up to it until I see it in reverse on the way down. It’s an open world full of linear pathways with a beautifully presented story that’s really just a collection of dots to finish in any order with no ultimate philosophy or message, and it’s hard to hail Shadows as phenomenal or fantastic or a 9.5/10 when such a deep contradiction lies at its heart.

Despite just having spent the last few paragraphs tearing into it, though, Shadows is actually a very good game. It’s probably the most polished an Assassin’s Creed game has felt on release in well over a decade, with an absolutely gorgeous world and gameplay that’s fun, balanced, and easy to sink into. Although I am frustrated with how static Naoe and Yasuke are for the back 50 hours of the game, both characters are still very likeable and have some great moments and stellar performances. I’m often impressed by little things like the game’s facial animations, changing of the seasons, and intentional use of light and shadow to enhance stealth. This is probably the first game where I’ve consistently stopped to help civilians being threatened by guards because the world feels so alive that I’m more inclined to want to help, and combat feels so fun that killing a few more dudes is never a burden.

While the story doesn’t do a great job of convincing me that the assassin’s creed is meaningful, the storytelling conveyed through gameplay does. As a shinobi and ultimately assassin, Naoe has a traditionally Assassin’s Creed toolkit. She has eagle vision which lets her see enemy positions through walls; can parkour effortlessly and even use a grapple hook to quickly reach rooftops; she has considerable stealth options and can perform assassinations, double assassinations, air assassinations, ledge assassinations and even assassinate from a distance; she has throwing knives, smoke bombs, and distraction items; she can do a leap of faith into a haystack and then kill people from it. Yasuke, however, isn’t an assassin, and all the normal rules of the series don’t apply to him. He can’t stay hidden very well; he’s slow at climbing with a shorter jump, and climbing aids like tightropes and fences will just break under his weight; his only stealth kill option is the single, ground, brutal assassination, which is so loud that it draws the attention of anyone nearby; his ranged weapon options are equippable only at the cost of one of his two weapon slots; his leap of faith is loud and ungraceful, and the haystack doesn’t cushion his fall; and he doesn’t even have eagle vision, so it’s much more difficult to plan moves based on enemy patterns and locations; hell, he’s even a real historical figure, which means that he was so bad at stealth that he ended up remembered for centuries after his death.

Yasuke is powerful. It’s not difficult to tear through an entire castle with him, as his health is high and he heals from each kill he gets. But Naoe’s stealth, climbing, spatial awareness, and tools allow her to bypass all the enemies and move straight to the parts of the castle with the quest objectives, without the added tedium of fighting twenty, thirty, forty guards. Yasuke is a powerhouse but still feels disempowering to play as because he can’t access so many of the tools and actions I’ve come to associate with power in Assassin’s Creed, while Naoe is much less combat-oriented but delivers much more of a power fantasy kind of experience. Because I can switch between characters at any time, actively choosing to use an assassin’s approach feels like an acknowledgement that the approach - and by extension the associated ideological goals of rooting for the little guy and fighting against oppression - is worth it.

As to be expected from a game about a shinobi and a samurai, one of the major themes of Shadows is the way that the rules of engagement societally considered “honorable” limit who has access to legitimate power. The strength of shinobi, just as in the American Revolution, is that they used guerilla tactics against soldiers that were highly trained in warfare only against combatants that were trained the same way that they were. Samurai didn’t sneak around; they charged forward and relied on the strength of their weapons, armor, and training, which is an approach only accessible to those who can afford weapons, armor, and training. To fight back like a peasant was to fight back using tactics that Japanese society considered illegitimate, because they were tactics that didn’t rely on personal wealth or support from benefactors.

Yasuke has the training and had a benefactor, so he’s clumsy when trying to fight like a peasant, even now that he fights on their behalf. Naoe has only ever been a peasant in a shinobi village, which ironically gives her the upper hand as long as she doesn’t put any stock in the cultural notions around what counts as honorable. While no one in the game states the phrase after which the franchise is named - “nothing is true, everything is permitted” - every gameplay loop is balanced around that central premise anyway, which is very cool. Even if it would have been cooler if they’d said the thing.

I’ve barely touched on the culture war shit surrounding the game, and I don’t really want to, but I do want to say that I think the developers had expected the backlash to go the opposite way. The Assassin’s Creed devs have had a hell of a time trying to get a female protagonist in their games, and Ubisoft has consistently made them provide a male option. Here’s the most recent iteration of that: Naoe is the protagonist of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. She’s essentially the only playable character for the first fifteen or so hours, and the story is hers more than it is Yasuke’s. Yasuke is fun and has his own great moments throughout, but he really is a major side character rather than the protagonist. I could easily see an iteration of this story where Yasuke was like Aya in Origins: a supporting character the story switched to for a number key moments. But Ubisoft requires that their games have male protagonists because their CEO said that men only want to see stories about big strong masculine men, so Yasuke got top billing in Naoe’s story. And as a result, we all got to learn that the loudest gamers are somehow more racist than they are sexist. yaay.

It’s maybe impossible to overstate how much I love Persona 5. It’s my favorite game of all time, and directly started me down the path to being a radical. It’s got some flaws – many of which were fixed in its rerelease, Persona 5: Royal – but it’s such a fantastic package in terms of story, gameplay, art design, music, and thematic resonance that it’s hard to fault it for them. I’ve played and enjoyed subsequent P5 material, but none of them are nearly as devoted to a political message as the original, meaning that even though they’re all good, they ultimately fall short of what I love about the initial game.

Metaphor: ReFantazio is a 2024 RPG by a good number of the folks who made Persona 5, and you can immediately tell. It has a very similar art style, uses many of the same sound effects, has a similar battle system, and is built around the calendar/social links/social stats system that the Persona series is known for. It is essentially a Persona game, but set in a fantasy world rather than contemporary Japan, and without Persona’s emphasis on Jungian psychology and the tarot. It’s also thoughtfully political, but in a way that’s maybe less engrossing and blisteringly relevant than Persona 5. That said, what it does have to say is worth engaging with, as it uses its more traditional fantasy setting to comment on the ideological underpinnings of RPGs as a genre and games more broadly, as both an artistic medium and an industry.

In many ways, Metaphor is “Persona does Final Fantasy.” It’s clearly an homage to Final Fantasy at its core. It may have Persona 5’s battle system, but it’s got FFV’s job system, and it’s reworked the “one more” mechanic to feel more like the Brave/Default system from Bravely Default, or the Conditional Turn-Based system from Final Fantasy X. The job system is especially interesting. There are 14 basic jobs, with each job having 1-3 class change upgrades that unlock at specific Social Link levels with the job’s corresponding character. Every party member can use any job, but have very individualized stat spreads that make certain jobs more viable than others. For example, Strohl starts with the Warrior job, which hits hard and doesn’t do much else. He could use the Mage job, but his physical attack is like double his magic attack, so that would probably be a waste of his massive attack stat. That said, some players might opt to train him through Mage anyway, because at level 20, Mage gets a skill that increases MP by 15%, which they could equip to Warrior so he can use more of his big hits that spend MP. I, on the other hand, trained him in Pugilist, which has powerful physical moves that spend HP instead of MP. It’s a bit more risk/reward, but Strohl has considerably more HP to spend. And that’s one of the seven party members, each of which has their own unique stat spread.

That customizability is fun and rewarding, but limited by the use of a Persona calendar system. I’m less inclined to experiment and try training characters in weird directions when I only have ten in-game days to reach the end of the current dungeon and only have about an in-game year to reach the end of the game. Due to the FOMO brought on by the time constraints, I spent about eight hours just mindlessly bashing enemies in old dungeons in order to unlock all the jobs, which was pretty decidedly unfun, and I ultimately only got to play around with maybe half the fully upgraded jobs in the end. Persona’s time-management (which often translates to some occasionally brutal resource management in dungeons) has always ratcheted up the games’ tension and forced a level of deliberateness in decision-making. That works fine in Persona, but dampens the freedom of choice I associate with job systems. The calendar generally feels like a weird thing to keep. On one hand, the narrative and mechanics have been built around it, but on the other, part of what I enjoy about the calendar in Persona is the mundanity of it. The changing of the seasons, interspersed with real-world holidays, as experienced by a protagonist who is attending high school and therefore at the mercy of the calendar, all help to complement the familiar contemporary setting of a Persona game. In Metaphor, there are no seasons or holidays, the weeks have five days instead of seven, and the one-year cutoff for the action is arbitrarily enforced by a spell rather than by familiar societal norms, so the days tend to blend together. This calendar has all of the anxiety of Persona’s system with none of the novelty, and that’s not a great place to be in.

That said, what Metaphor loses in variety from the calendar it gains from its much larger world and its travel mechanics. Each chapter of Metaphor is set in a different city, and the characters must travel to each city using their gauntlet-runner, a land-based version of the classic Final Fantasy airship complete with a pilot who’s clearly Atlus’s take on a Cid. Each city has several dungeons, landmarks, and surrounding towns that the party can travel to and explore as side-jaunts to juggle as options within the time-management system. Some of these can take several in-game days to reach, but traveling has its own activities that raise social stats, craft items, or even develop social links with party members. In Persona 5, many of the side activities had their own unique content but wasted precious days to do, and travel-time feels like a way to alleviate some of that sense of waste, by limiting you to just “bedroom activities” like reading books, cooking, tending to plants, doing laundry, cleaning the floor, bathing, or inviting party members to hang out. You have to go to the extra dungeon either way, so you’re stuck on the gauntlet-runner either way, so you might as well raid the pantry, use the shower for a small Exp bonus, cook some fermented meat with Hulkenberg, do some laundry with Heismay, and then read a fantasy novel while you’re there. Much of the traveling system feels like an iteration on the central premise of Persona 5: Strikers, allowing the characters to go on a road trip and see a bunch of cities but without the dearth of things to do outside of dungeons from which Strikers suffered.

Metaphor is in most ways an improvement on Persona 5. It’s a much bigger game, with a more strategic battle system and prettier visuals. That said, its dungeons are generally a bit less interesting. They’re more straightforward, without the verticality that made especially Persona 5: Royal’s dungeons shine. They’re also less colorful, less surreal and – I guess a bit ironically – less metaphorical. That makes sense, since all the dungeons are actual locations within the game’s world and must therefore follow the world’s logic, but it’s weird infiltrating a giant fantasy airship and being struck by how much duller it is than Persona 5’s Diet building – a real-world place known for being boring. The music, too, is less interesting than Persona 5’s. It’s still technically solid, and there are certainly some bangers, but because the soundtrack is aping Final Fantasy in genre and instrument choices, it’s much less engaging than the acid-jazz of Persona 5. Metaphor also has less to do than Persona 5 or especially Royal. The game doesn't require that you grind up relationship points with social links, which cuts out a lot of the frustration of the social link system, but also means that there's no reason to take characters on dates or to the movies or to play darts. The world feels less varied because the activities are much more clearly laid out by which social stat they increase.

Both this game and P5 are punching way higher than their weight class in terms of budget and team size. They’re both essentially AA games that have been catapulted into the AAA space, and both are a generation or more behind in terms of actual graphical power. Both games made up for that discrepancy with stylish artistic flair, and while that papering over succeeds in both games, the stylizing of Metaphor feels less relevant to the game than with Persona 5. Persona 5’s intentional use of color and effects make it feel both pulpy and like agitprop material, which are two of its major artistic influences. Metaphor’s stylings, however, mostly make it feel like Persona 5, which clashes a bit with its more classical fantasy setting. I’ve seen a number of people complain about the game’s graphics being outdated, and I think the fact that it retreads so much stylistic ground is why the unimpressive graphics are more noticeable this time around, even though it’s much better graphically than any previous Atlus entry. The game’s reuse of many Persona sound effects aggravate this issue. Those sound effects feel punchy and contemporary, and work great in the context for which they were created: a game that turns rpg genre conventions on their heads by using a contemporary setting. Here, in a game that’s purposely leaning into more classic genre conventions, they instead feel lazy and out of place. The game clearly had great sound designers; there are plenty of new sound effects as well as the old. I wish they’d had those sound designers replace the reused sound effects as well. The game's localization, however, does set it apart from Persona 5. Metaphor is another JRPG to outsource its localization and English voice work to the UK, rather than the states. Most of the characters are voiced by UK voice actors, and they all do an outstanding job. Honestly, the weakest link voice-wise is the protagonist's voice, which was clearly directed to try to be fairly flat and unaffected. Still, I'm just so happy to have a voiced protagonist that I didn't mind all that much.

Metaphor opens by posing a question to the player: does a story have the power to change the world? I figured when I started the game that this question was referring to Persona 5, and the difficulties of creating a story with a specific, clear political message and having to deal with its audience agreeing with the message and longing for that change but not working to bring it about – or even worse, a chunk of its audience refusing to acknowledge it as political at all. While Metaphor was clearly inspired by that initial tension, it addresses a much broader question than that: why do video games – works in a medium that tends toward fairly radical political theming – seem to attract audiences that refuse to engage with their theming? Much of the game’s use of Final Fantasy elements is in service to this question, since Final Fantasy is sorta the seminal RPG. The game’s antagonist, whose name is frustratingly spelled Louis and pronounced Luis, represents in some ways the ideological underpinnings of Final Fantasy and is even designed to look like the FF1 Warrior of light, with long flowing white hair and curved horns. The main plot of the game involves a powerful spell that forces the kingdom to hold a democratic election. When the king is assassinated, his voice thunders down from the sky that the crown will go to whomever the most citizens believe in their hearts should be the next king in about a year’s time. The protagonist enters the race because he opposes the two frontrunners – Louis and the head of the very racist Sanctist church.

The protagonist often reads from a utopian novel and communes with the novel’s imprisoned author, a man named More, probably because he represents the demand that society improve and offer us more. The novel discusses the workings of an idealized version of our contemporary liberal democratic system, and all the party members fight in some way to try to realize that system. The novel itself was banned and all its copies burned, while More was arrested and sentenced to exile for writing it. While both the protagonist and Louis love the book, they had vastly different takeaways from it. The protagonist and his party see the book as calling for a society built around caring for its citizens, protecting and providing for those without the means to protect or provide for themselves. Louis, on the other hand, sees the book as calling for a society built on “true equality,” where all are forced to fend for themselves and only the strong survive. In both cases, the circumstances of one’s birth theoretically don’t matter, and leadership isn’t decided by a bloodline, which makes both visions look preferable to the world of the game: a heavily racially stratified monarchic theocracy. With the crown up for grabs, both characters have the opportunity to try to realize their visions of this utopian system, if they can convince the populace to back them.

This conflict is, deliberately, the conflict at the center of liberal democracy: is our system meant to be more individualistic or more collectivistic? Does the “liberal” mean that individuals must fend for themselves without a societal support structure? Does the “democracy” mean that the strongest must sacrifice the fruits of their advantages to provide for those without the same advantages? That the game takes the side of the whole over the part is unsurprising, given that it was made by the folks who made Persona 5. And hey, that’s the side I agree with more, so no skin off my back. But, using liberal democracy as the basis for its core theming makes Metaphor feel considerably less radical than Persona 5 did. Most of the oppressor/oppressed relationships in Metaphor are ones for which we have answers, which stands in stark contrast to the real-world-inspired conflicts in Persona 5, and when the characters look to the utopia of the novel for a solution, they’re looking to the answers we already have. And as Persona 5 already told us, those answers are insufficient.

That said, what feels backwards about the game’s theming becomes more interesting when we consider it instead as a metacommentary on the politics of RPGs. Louis, the villain who looks like the Ur-FF Protagonist, is an individualist to the extreme. His vision for a perfect world is one where all compete to live and only the strongest survive. That’s barbaric to most folks whose brains haven’t been poisoned by weird sectarian internet communities, but it’s also pretty much how RPGs operate: you keep fighting guys who are weaker than you to make yourself stronger until you’re the strongest, and then your character uses that strength to change the world the way they want. This is – crucially – also how this RPG operates. The protagonist might oppose Louis’s vision, but he still has to do so on Louis’s terms. It turns out that the conflict at the heart of liberal democracy is also the conflict at the heart of many power fantasies: we imagine ourselves being strong enough to make the world fairer, but in doing so, we engage with an individualistic framing. When looking at the metaphor of Metaphor, we can think of the protagonist as the story of a game and Louis as the narrative told through its mechanics; ultimately, what a story says is still constrained by what the game does. So the question of whether a story has the power to change the world is complicated by the introduction of the constraints placed upon a story by its medium. Why didn’t Persona 5 change the world? Metaphor implies it’s because its audience is primed to see its brand of power fantasy as apolitical – not even about the world to begin with.

I think increasingly often about a time I got into an argument with the admin of a Persona 5 Facebook meme page. He’d posted a meme complaining about people’s need to inject politics into Persona 5, an otherwise apolitical game. I found this absurd. The game in which you infiltrate the Japanese Diet building to stop a fascist from stealing an election is apolitical? The game where the personification of humanity’s tendency toward rebellion leads the party into battle to destroy the god of wealth at the center of a panopticon? It was beyond comprehension. But an art form that constrains most of its narratives to center around accruing power through conflict in order to elevate oneself as an individual has maybe inevitably attracted an audience that’s allergic to the idea that fiction can and usually does say something about the real world. And when I say “allergic,” I don’t simply mean “unwilling.” We’ve crossed into a political moment where the arbitrarily-defined level of “woke” in a piece of media determines whether a chunk of people will deign to engage with it at all, but based on my googling, Persona 5 is hilariously considered “not woke” (though Royal is simultaneously both “woke” and “anti-woke,” the remake of Persona 3 is too “woke” to bear, and Metaphor ReFantazio is under scrutiny but they seem to be leaning toward “not woke”). So the line in the sand is whether or not a game comments on the real world, but that line is drawn by people with shockingly low media literacy.

One element of the story that confused me clicked into place once I considered this angle. The game’s world is plagued by huge and brutal monsters called “humans.” In the game's world, the word “human” refers only to these monsters, while the sentient denizens of the game’s world call themselves “people,” or refer to themselves by their fantasy races. It’s bizarre to hear characters talk about “humans” and mean big weird giants that massacre towns and aren’t recognizably human at all. But when we consider this through the lens of a metacommentary on games, this choice comes to make sense. In an RPG, the player is a human roaming through a world of non-humans. They’re infinitely stronger than everyone around them, and in the end, only the human’s decisions matter. Everything exists to placate the human, and if the human refuses to engage with a story on its terms, then that pretty much destroys everything the story is trying to do. Those characters who exist solely to make the human feel something become fodder, to be ground up and discarded by the human. If we look at the relationship between art and audience from the perspective of the art, the audience becomes something like a kaiju, applying its own warped reading to the text, forcing it to submit to that reading. A story only gets to change the world if it first wins that battle with the human, and humans are getting increasingly combative. Obviously, there’s story reasons for the word choice that I won’t spoil here, but they align pretty nicely with my reading.

Final Fantasy XV is a kind of fascinating game. It's a mainline Final Fantasy game that's been in a weird state of incompletion literally throughout its entire lifetime. It was announced in 2006 as Final Fantasy Vs. XIII, then was in development hell for literally a decade after its announcement, when it finally released as Final Fantasy XV in 2016, alongside a movie that filled in a pretty big chunk of its lore, an animated OVA that filled out some of the characters' backstories, and several crappy side-games. It released alongside a season pass that promised three single-player campaigns and one multiplayer campaign that all filled in missing pieces of the story that otherwise felt excised from the game's story as it was at launch.

In FFXV, Gladio leaves the party for a time and returns with a facial scar, refusing to tell the group why. Ignis is separated from the party during a battle and in the aftermath is revealed to have been blinded in the altercation, with no explanation as to how. Prompto is kidnapped and when the group rescues him, he mentions offhand some pretty mind-boggling backstory he has discovered, with no time to explain what that even means. Near the end of the game, there's a ten-year time skip, the interim of which is barely explored. Each of these missing pieces was slowly filled in over the course of 2017, and only for those who had the money to shell out for the extra content and the time to play the kind of tediously long Comrades DLC.

But even after these holes were filled in, many fans were unhappy with the final game. FFXV's entire back half feels incomplete, like it was rushed despite its at least ten-year development cycle. Its final dungeon is pretty short, and its ending is…divisive…which is a nice way to say that it's a downer and most gamers especially circa 2016 couldn't handle a game having a downer of an ending. Throughout 2017 and 2018, the developers kept patching in more story beats, more quality-of-life tweaks, and more side content, in an effort to both make the game feel more complete and cater to fans upset about the less-than-rosy story elements.

This culminated in the release of FFXV: Royal Edition in March of 2018, which packaged in all the previous patches and DLCs and completely reworked the final dungeon to be much larger, more detailed, and to present closure on several plot threads originally left ambiguous. Royal also promised the release of four more story DLCs, based on the results of a fan survey, which would combine to give the game an entire alternate happy ending. But in October of 2018, three of the four DLCs were canceled and director Hajime Tabata left the company. The first of these DLCs, Episode Ardyn, released in March of 2019, a full year after Royal Edition's release. The Episode Ardyn DLC honestly kind of makes the original ending (as in, the only ending we'd gotten) worse by making the villain, Ardyn, aware from the beginning exactly how the game's story would play out and ascribing the entire thing to a fate that no one escapes. It even presents a newer, bigger villain who never gets his comeuppance.

In July of 2020, we got this book, Final Fantasy XV: The Dawn of the Future, a novelization of the story the canceled DLCs would have told, had Tabata been allowed to cook. A friend gifted the book to me the month of its release, and I immediately started graduate school and had too much work to get to it. Four years later, I dug through all my still-packed boxes of books to find it and finally get some closure on the game that dominated three years of my life so long ago.

Dawn of the Future isn't great as a book. It's written well enough, but the pacing of a video game story is pretty different from the pacing of a novel, since so much of the pacing and so many story beats are presented through the language of combat, the primary means of interacting with a video game world. Plus, as an alternate ending to a preexisting story that exists across a game, a demo, a movie, two OVAs, four DLCs, two years of updates, and several weird side projects, the novel assumes the reader is familiar with its world and characters. I was, so it worked for me, but I can't imagine how confusing it would be to try to read this book as someone who had never played FFXV before, or even as someone who had played FFXV but hadn't seen Kingsglaive or maybe hadn't played the Royal Edition of the game. FFXV exists across too many parts for any one story to stand alone, and that's especially glaringly obvious when I'm reading a novel - a medium I usually engage with as self-contained.

Dawn of the Future is interesting, though, as an attempt at recreating a clear plan that was shut down early. It seems to take very few creative liberties with the events as they would have unfolded in the DLCs. Part of why the pacing is so weird is that it details every boss fight and tries to make each of those fights take up as much space as the fight would have taken time in the DLC itself. It takes time to describe what clearly would have been the gameplay loop of each DLC. It's trying to convey to the reader what the playing of this story would have felt like. For that reason, this attempt to bring closure to fans is also, at least for me, a reopening of the wound it's trying to heal. I would have loved to drive a motorcycle across the wastes of the Gralean Empire as Luna and Sol, setting up campsites along the darkened road. Aranea's sci-fi dragoon combat style sounds fun as hell, and chasing Diamond Weapon across the burning city of Gralea would have been up there with the fall of Altissia for spectacle. I'd love to play a boss fight against Bahamut using two different characters in two separate planes of existence - that sounds rad. I'm reading a game I don't get to play, and games generally are more satisfying to play than to read.

I'm also of two minds on the story from the perspective of a fan. Much of what it adds are either things the original game definitely needed more of or fun riffs on previously established gameplay loops. Aranea, Sol, and Luna all being important playable characters would have helped to fix the lack of female characters in the original game, for instance. That's sorely needed. Going on a Mad Max-style motorcycle ride through the post-apocalypse was an inspired twist on the low-stakes road trip that made up the first half of the main game. That's creative and much appreciated. But the ending itself is, in my opinion, weaker than the ending we got. It's a much more traditionally Final Fantasy ending, in that the characters all survive and defeat a cosmic enemy that would otherwise destroy the world, so I'm sure there are fans who see it as a much-needed alternate ending, or even maybe "the ending we should have had if the devs had made the game right the first time." But it loses so much of the ambiguity and ambivalence that the original ending holds.

Noct and his friends dying to wipe out the royal family and cleanse the world because the notion of royalty was a trap that existed only to set right a great evil his ancestors perpetrated was darkly ironic. Instead, Noct and his friends and his fiance all survive while the ancestor apologizes to those he hurt, resulting in the continuation of the royal family. That's thematically inconsistent from what the game tried to do up to that point and is also…just…limp. But I say that knowing full well that if this ending had released with the original game, I'd have no issue with it. I wouldn't have finished the game and said "well, it was all ruined at the end when all the characters didn't die." It's through the act of papering over what was messy and thematically interesting about the original that the inadequacies of this ending are made apparent.

This is a strange book that left me feeling two ways about the game it's based on; FFXV is both lesser and greater for the loss of these DLCs. But that's always been true ever since the game's initial release. FFXV has always been in a state of flux, reliant on tie-in media and promised future updates to bring it to the state where it will be what was promised. Now, with those promises broken and its director pushed out, it's a game that's been refinished just about every month for three years and will forever be unfinished despite it all. The Dawn of the Future is a reminder of a future that never will be, a testament to the ugliness of AAA game development, and a fascinating look at the refinements and setbacks that would have come from chasing fan expectations.

I had no idea what to expect from Final Fantasy XIV's new Dawntrail expansion. 2021's Endwalker ended up being probably the most resonant piece of art I have experienced in my life, but I had no illusions that they'd manage to do something like that a second time, nor did I need them to. Endwalker was the ending of a story arc that covered the initial story and three expansions, that then released during a global pandemic, a year after the death of my father. There was a lot of confluence there that would be impossible to recreate.

Dawntrail, on the other hand, promised to be the beginning of a new story - a jumping-on point that would still incorporate previously introduced characters, but in a way that would be more newbie-friendly. I don't have much regard for people who story-skip, but I did at least appreciate the logic of a new story for our old characters now that they've saved the universe from despair and mostly done away with the villainous hangers-on from the old Eden from which the world of Etheirys and its thirteen alternate forms were born. There's still a ton of lore potential to the universe of ffxiv that's fairly removed from the old conflicts, so it was exciting to think that they'd be mining some of that.

Each of the expansions for XIV has been loosely based on each of the old Final Fantasies, in order. Heavensward reuses elements of FFI, Stormblood FFII, Shadowbringers FFIII, and Endwalker FFIV, so I naturally assumed that Dawntrail would lean into FFV elements. I was surprised, then, when they instead said it would be based on FFIX - my favorite in the series besides XIV. That said, it would also be set in the "new world" - a pair of continents across the ocean to the west of the protagonist's home countries, roughly analogous in location and culture to the pre-colonial Americas. As FFIX is based on western Europe, to the point that members of the development staff traveled to Europe to research design aspects of the game, it seemed an odd fit. Still, I wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth, and I happily shelled out for my Zidane and Garnet minions.

The first two-thirds or so of the game do not in any way resemble IX. They're probably closest to XV. Wuk Lamat, adopted daughter of the leader of Tural, has to compete against three other possible successors to determine who's most fit to ascend his throne. She has hired the strongest warrior in the lands outside of Tural to help her compete, and that warrior is you. Thus, like XV, the opening chunk of the game follows a royal and her retinue touring major settlements throughout her nation in preparation for her ascension to the throne. Like XV, Dawntrail does often feel like a road trip. The rest of Wuk Lamat's retinue is made up of several of the protagonist's friends from throughout the previous expansions; the stakes are shockingly low by our crew's standards (the number of world leaders the Warrior of Light has installed has got to rival the CIA by this point, so one more isn't especially noteworthy); and the locations are beautiful, filled with friendly people from diverse and interesting cultures. This expansion released with a pretty sizeable graphics upgrade, too, which further enhances the feeling of taking in the beautiful sights in a foreign country.

Wuk Lamat is essentially the protagonist of Dawntrail, a la Lyse in Stormblood. It's a good call, since the Warrior of Light is too strong and experienced to leave much uncertainty as to whether she can defeat any given opponent or resolve any given conflict. Wuk Lamat, on the other hand, is young and kinda an unknown quantity. Whether she'd even be the right call for the throne is up in the air at the beginning of the story, so through challenging the trials in the competition to lead the country, she's proving herself to the player as well as to the country. Several major established friends of the Warrior of Light actually back one of Wuk Lamat's rivals as well, for more considered reasons than the protagonist's own retinue has, which contributes to a sense of uncertainty as to whether she will - or even should - take the throne. I really enjoyed having the Warrior of Light take this mentor role for a good chunk of the expansion; providing support and guidance to someone who will need to learn quickly if she's going to lead a whole nation.

Wuk Lamat carries this sizeable story importance well, too; she's impulsive and compassionate, ready to fight to help people without necessarily weighing the consequences of her actions. She believes herself to be very knowledgeable about the many cultures and peoples living in Tural, but soon realizes she has much to learn. Quickly, her willingness to learn - to ask questions and chase what she doesn't know so she can better understand the people around her - develops into her biggest strength. She is, definitionally, radical, in that she digs down to the historical or material roots of a conflict or atrocity to determine what needs to be changed to rectify the issue, which is nice to see in a story, even if it's handled clumsily at times. She's dynamic and likeable, strong but flawed. If Dawntrail was a mainline title and not an expansion, she'd easily be near the top of my list of best FF protagonists. As it is, she's absolutely a worthy addition to the huge roster of great characters in ffxiv.

I have some mixed feelings, however, on Tural itself. Tural as a nation, in its current iteration, has only existed for a few decades. Eighty years ago, Dawnservant Gulool Ja Ja - Wuk Lamat's adopted father - traveled throughout both continents with a growing roster of allies and used his peerless strength and wisdom to pretty much solve every major conflict between cultures in the entire land. His city of Tulliyolal, then, is super new and still led by its initial founder. Many of the historic cultural practices the party learns about only date back to when Gulool Ja Ja helped create them. I like this idea, to a point. "Dawnservant," as a title, is clearly meant to be analogous to the Warrior of Light, so Gulool Ja Ja was for his continents what your protagonist was for Eorzea, Ilsabard, Othard, Thavnair, the First and Thirteenth reflections, and Ultima Thule - a Really Really Big Strong Guy who cut through the shit and fixed stuff by being big and strong, collecting a diverse group of loyal friends in the process. That's cool, but it comes at the cost of much of a greater historical context for the nation.

While Tural has some ancient history, the chronal scale of much of it pales in comparison to, say Sharlayan, who left a boat on top of a mountain in Gyr Abania fifteen centuries ago. This is pretty different from the...real-world cultures Tural is based on. While conquistadors may have called Tenochtitlan part of "the New World," that city had been around for around two centuries by the time they got there. I don't love the framing of this country as being literally "new." There's an easy fix to this problem, too: just make it so Gulool Ja Ja did this stuff two hundred years ago instead of eighty. Players aren't going to question whether two-headed mamool-ja, viera, or giants can live that long. If you can say eighty years, then you can say two-hundred, and that gives Tural a little more time to have a history. Tural also has many of the features the United States claims to have, but with no irony or darker side. It's a melting pot, but because all these different people with different cultures and beliefs already lived there and a Big Guy came through eighty years ago and solved their disagreements.

My issues with the setting got even dicier when the characters traveled to the northern continent. Xak Tural is designed after the North American Western frontier, with two wild west-style towns built only in the last twenty years, an older town of pueblo-style houses, and an encampment of tipis. The people and places there all have Native American names, while the people living in the pueblos and tipis are explained away as being "more traditional" and against the oil drilling operation and railroad the new frontier-style towns have brought. At one point, a railroad operator meets with one of these "traditional" leaders, hears he has concerns about the railroad, and says "we'll talk about it," which pretty much ends the conflict. It's an oddly bloodless depiction of the deep divides between old and new in colonial and imperialist North America, especially in a game that's usually pretty good about refusing an easy answer to historical traumas broadly and imperialism and colonialism specifically. The characters in Xak Tural all have USian accents too, in stark contrast to the accents everywhere else in ffxiv, which is an accent I associate with having reached a late stage of imperialism. It's not an accent I consider - at least in the language of fantasy storytelling - to represent indigenous characters living unmolested in their historic homelands.

But this discomfort recontextualizes some of the rest of ffxiv, too. If I don't feel great about the fact that real-life conflicts between colonizers and the colonized that fueled countless real-life genocides are being mined here to give Gulool Ja Ja another notch on his belt, why shouldn't I feel the same way about the Warrior of Light having brought the feuding Dwarf tribes back together? Or ending the conquest of Bozja and Zadnor? Again, the stakes for this story are pretty low because the Warrior of Light has installed so many world leaders already, but that's...kinda messed up, when you think about it. I'd already had some hang-ups about Stormblood - an expansion with a story about getting Mongolian tribes to team up with Korean peasants to form an army to free Japan from the Soviet Union to create a distraction that will ease the pressure on the Mujahideen, to whom you are covertly providing military aid so a Soviet military base won't be able to focus on your own country. But those hang-ups were noticeable because Stormblood is so bad in comparison to all the other expansions. Dawntrail, on the other hand, is good! And still uncomfortable! So there's nowhere else to channel my discomfort.

The back half of the game introduces a twist that's also where most of the FFIX references come in. The fabled "golden city" turns out to be a portal to another reflection (or alternate dimension), which attacks Tulliyolal with a robot army and traps a section of the northern continent under an impenetrable energy dome. When Wuk Lamat and the Warrior of Light's party invade the dome, they find that the land there has fused with a city from this other reflection, like in FFV, and thirty years have passed within the dome. Much of the rest of the game is focused on Wuk Lamat applying the strategies she learned over the course of the Dawnservant competition on this new, strange and hostile kingdom. It's a good idea and in hindsight I really like the story resonance there, especially since her strategies help her make headway but ultimately fall short and don't prevent a conflict between the nations, forcing her to develop some new strategies. But in the moment, it's harder to tell that this is what's happening, and the sharp change from exploring a mostly pre-industrial South and Central America to exploring a sci-fi culture borne out of Western Europe gave me whiplash. I stepped back some and did a few side things at this point, which is pretty odd for me when going through a new story.

This kingdom, Alexandria, was once nearly identical to the kingdom of Alexandria in the original FFIX, gorgeously rendered in FFXIV's new graphics. After a devastating calamity that killed countless citizens, the kingdom put up a protective barrier and over time developed a culture around technology used to avert the trauma of losing so many and the pain of living a difficult life under a deadly eternal lightning storm. Their solutions were to implement storage systems for memories and souls, allowing people to reload their memories on harvested souls when they die of unnatural causes, continuing their lives until they die of old age. When someone dies, all memory of them is deleted from the minds of everyone who ever met them (a FF Type-0 reference), so that no one has to deal with the pain of loss. Then, the memories of the deceased are sent to a highly curated virtual afterlife that runs on the energy of harvested souls, so they can live a blissful existence for the rest of eternity. This is why Alexandria plans to invade Tulliyolal: they're running dangerously low on soul energy, and their whole society breaks down without it, so they plan to violently harvest those souls from other reflections.

This conflict is a pretty short hop away from the central conflict in FFIX, which also involved nations committing genocides to harvest souls for powering an army or resurrecting the long-dead people of another planet. And it uses this conflict to explore some similar themes of the fear of death, the dangers of nostalgia, and the genocidal tendencies of expansionism. That said, it explores those themes in ways that moved me less than FFIX does. I couldn't tell you if that's because Endwalker already set such a high benchmark for feeling emotions about FFXIV, or if FFIX actually is legitimately better at tugging at the heartstrings than Dawntrail is, or some combination of the two. I teared up once or twice, but there was never a scene that impacted me as much as the Black Mage cemetery scene in IX, or the Palaka's Stand scene in Endwalker. It made some solid thematic points, but the complexity of the society that got us there maybe made those points feel a little less applicable to something real.

God, though, as a FFIX fan, I still ate up their absolutely beautiful shots of Alexandria, reorchestrations of music from IX, references to characters and locations from IX, and thematic similarities. Wuk Lamat, as an adopted daughter of a king, and Krile, as an unwitting refugee from a far-off land, both serve as neat parallels to FFIX character Garnet. The final zone is a sort of sci-fi take on Memoria, the final dungeon from FFIX. I'll say, too, that while this section contrasted pretty heavily with what came before it in the expansion, they did still bring it all together pretty well. The second round of the war between the two powers had me literally on my feet cheering, and I appreciated that Wuk Lamat was doing here what she'd done in each previous area before it. The final boss fight, too, was a blast.

There's another neat convergence between this futuristic dystopia and the pre-industrial South American setting of the first half of the game that I wish the writers had made a little more explicit. The "golden city" that turns out to be the portal to Alexandria is an obvious reference to El Dorado, an alleged city of gold that Spanish conquistadors sought in their conquest of the Americas. I think it's kinda neat that here the golden city is instead indigenous folklore about what turns out to be an imperial power, turning that original context on its head. But another legend the conquistadors chased was the "fountain of youth," a spring they believed would grant eternal life to anyone who drank from it. The fountain of youth is never mentioned in Dawntrail, but Alexandria invades Tural because its people's souls serve as a literal fountain of youth for its people. It seems obvious to me that this was an inspiration for much of the plans for Dawntrail, but unless I missed something, it never came up throughout the game. I think a more explicit reference would have been nice, so I could have connected those dots earlier than like...two days after I finished the expansion.

I came into Rebirth a bit skeptical, and had some real friction with the game's opening hours as a result. Remake was a phenomenal game - a gorgeously detailed remake-slash-sequel-slash-metafictional exploration of the difficulties of creating a remake of a game with as much love and baggage as Final Fantasy VII did. I came away from it with the impression that no matter what the other games did, Remake was a masterpiece of a standalone endeavor in its own right, worth playing on its own or as a companion to FFVII; and that that was a good thing, because there was a very good chance the sequels would not live up, and it would forever be best experienced on its own. Crisis Core Reunion - the Crisis Core remake that stole the obvious perfect title from the upcoming third FFVIIR game - further lowered my expectations with its dull voice acting and visuals and weirdly uninspired direct translation of pretty much every aspect of a game that was great back in 2007 but has noticeably aged since.

Once it became clear that Rebirth would be an open-world game, I fully resigned myself to a drop in quality of gameplay, if not story. I enjoy open-world games. I'm a fan of Assassin's Creed, the Arkham Trilogy, Horizon: Forbidden West, and many other open-world games, but the genre itself has become synonymous with a very by-the-numbers approach to game design. Climb the towers, follow the breadcrumbs, rinse and repeat until you're bored or you have a platinum trophy. The genre itself has taken on an almost political connotation, implying a top-down approach to development in which executives demand that the game be what's been printing money for everyone else, and the devs comply because they have no other choice. Rebirth isn't that. I couldn't begin to tell you what approach they used for Rebirth, but whatever they did was almost certainly artist-led, because there is no other explanation for what a batshit game Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth actually is. And I mean that with love.

I'm actually blown away by how much Rebirth is an artistic achievement. It's open-world, but every detail of each biome is so deliberately and lovingly crafted that it feels like a world of difference from the algorithmically generated worlds in most open-world games. And the towns are even more densely detailed, to a point that walking around each town is an almost overstimulating experience. Add to that auditory details, tiny details in animations, word choices for certain lines, the impossibly vast array of musical pieces all working with motifs from the original game. Rebirth is constantly not just referencing details from FF7, but remixing them, subverting them, at times even resisting them - and it conveys the sense that the designers had an absolute blast making it. That's a sense many games with comparable production values are missing, and it makes the playing of Rebirth a kinda eye-opening experience. It could still come out that the developers of this game were forced to withstand all manner of labor abuses, and knowing Square it wouldn't be that far-fetched. But the sense Rebirth conveys is one of a passion project at every single level. I can't imagine the same executives that allowed Chocobo Racing out the door actually greenlighting half the weird side-jaunts in this game. And I can't imagine a game with this much work put into it being profitable enough to justify its existence to those execs. And yet here it is, with a sequel on the way.

Rebirth continues a lot of the elements that shone in Remake. The battle system is mostly the same as the blistering and surprisingly strategic system from Remake, with a few new additions - some of which work and some of which feel tacked on - and with a few new playable characters, all of whom are a blast to use. The preexisting characters' movesets have been reworked a bit; they mostly feel the same, but most of them have a buff to maintain now, and systems in place to encourage usage of the more varied toolset. The changes feel a bit inspired by FFXIV, in a good way. That said, the fact that the AI-controlled characters barely build ATB and don't use any of their unique abilities without the use of a specific materia means that any given party has the player juggling three different characters' maintenance simultaneously, needing to constantly switch between them just to build up the ATB necessary for upkeep. While that's certainly not impossible, I tended to just use one character for most battles just to keep things simple, and my damage output definitely hurt as a result.

The characters, too, are just as well-written in the first game. Now that they've built up a rapport, watching them interact is an absolute treat. The new party members slot in nicely, too. By the end of the game, we have FFVII's full party, though not every party member is playable yet, and it makes for a fun preview of the group dynamics to come.

The two major flaws in the game's writing are not all that bad, but worth mentioning. First is the passion, enthusiasm, and attention to detail has added so much worldbuilding that the new sometimes overshadows what was subtle in the old. I don't think the details about the Republic of Junon and the war between Junon and Shinra does much besides muddy the waters of how much power Shinra even has in the game's world, for example. For another early example, watching the giant serpent Midgardsormr get impaled on a tree is much less impressive than coming upon the serpent already impaled on the tree. Sometimes less is more, which a game as "more"-focused as Rebirth has difficulty understanding. Another flaw is the treatment of the meta-narrative, which is much clumsier and much more central than in Remake. I adored the meta-narrative of Remake, which explored the difficulty of remaking a story as beloved as FFVII's, and the anxieties fueled by decisions about what to change and what to keep. In Rebirth, the meta-narrative gets much bigger - just as with everything else - and as a consequence much messier. I think they already made their intentions about this trilogy clear in the first game, so there was no need for more Whispers, but Rebirth adds several varieties, locked in a massive war for the soul of FFVII. It's too much, and by the end of the game, it's most of what the characters are focused on. Both these flaws derive from a writing philosophy that I respect: that the original game still exists, so if the remake messes up some of what worked about that original, it's not that big a deal. And I agree with that philosophy, but I think parts of the game cheapen things that were impressive about the original in a way that might poison newcomers' opinions of it. Which is a shame, if a minor one.

Tales of Zestiria released at a time when I was big enough into Tales that I pre-ordered Special Editions and asked Gamestop employees if I could keep promotional posters after they were done with them (I still have the posters for Graces and Xillia). This means that Zestiria, as a Tales game on the brand-new PS4 hardware, had me vibrating with excitement and set me back over a hundred dollars. To call the game a disappointment would be underselling it. I skipped meals to afford this game and then couldn't bring myself to bother opening the Blu-ray movie that was packaged in the Special Edition, or to preorder the prequel, Tales of Berseria, two years later. Zestiria was inescapably bad.

Still, I'd expected to come away from this replay a decade later with a new appreciation for the game. I'm better at analyzing art now than I was then, and even bad art can have something interesting to say, even by accident. But the further I dug into this playthrough (which cost me an extra fucking $60, by the way, because my original disc has gone missing and i guess namco cant be bothered to lower their prices on 2015 offerings), the more appalled I was at Zestiria's lack of quality assurance, cut corners, bland story, and infuriating systems. Every Tales game has its fair share of jank. With Zestiria, the publishers clearly assumed this this meant Tales fans' jank threshold is through the sky. And given its 9/10 Steam rating, maybe they guessed correctly.

The best Tales games deconstruct genre tropes by first presenting those tropes at face value, then turning them on their heads halfway in. Symphonia is probably still the clearest example of this, as its Chosen One pilgrimage is revealed to hide something much bigger and more sinister behind it, but most games in the main series do this both with their main story and with one or more party members' individual arcs. The idea behind Zestiria and its prequel Berseria was a novel take on this series staple: have Team Destiny make a game with a doggedly cliche story and have Team Symphonia follow it up with a whole-ass game that turns all those cliches on their heads. I really appreciate this initial idea, and it actually works pretty well, still; Zestiria's story and characters are noticeably more complex and interesting after you've played Berseria and gotten that context.

But. Zestiria is a worse game than Berseria, by far. Once I'd played Berseria, replaying Zestiria to catch the new context was a massive chore, with its frustrating battle system, terrible area design, worse dungeons, and bland characters. It's easy to play Phantasia after its stealth prequel, Symphonia, because Phantasia PSX is fun and polished, and the areas where it is dated don't invite immediate comparison to the same areas in Symphonia. But Zestiria is unfun and unpolished and released only two years before Berseria on the same hardware. Zestiria's status as a sequel is simultaneously the most interesting thing about it and something that makes it even more inexcusable. While I don't know anything about the development of the two games, I can't help but wonder if the existence of Berseria is part of the reason why Zestiria feels so rushed and unfinished. They couldn't release Berseria first without ruining the whole point of the games' connection, for both of them. So if one game was going to have to drop on a strict deadline it would be Zestiria, the more cliche entry that allows for Berseria to function as a deconstruction. Now, though, 6-8 years later, it just means that only one of the two games in this legitimately cool experiment is actually worth a replay.

On its own merits, Zestiria's story is just a cliche. Sorey, our protagonist, is a human raised by Seraphs, elemental spirits invisible to most people. Because Sorey can see Seraphs, he takes on the role of Shepherd, a Chosen One religious figure that historically works with Seraphs to beat back the evil Lord of Calamity every time a new one crops up. He collects a team of Seraphs along with a human whom he gifts with the ability to work with him, and together the crew "purifies" "malevolence" by fighting monsters. At the end, he purifies the Lord of Calamity, sacrificing his friends and/or himself and/or his time (it's unclear, both accidentally and deliberately) to do so, thus saving the world. There's a few more wrinkles than that, but generally it's a fairly simple story. The neatest thing about it, actually, is that Sorey's Seraph friends can turn into weapons for him when they fuse with him, which is a fun reference to Tales of Destiny, a game in which certain characters had magical talking swords that only a select few people could hear.

It gets ideologically...troubled, though, when it comes to the concept of malevolence. In the world of Zestiria, feeling negative emotions can turn living things (and somehow also some inanimate objects) into monsters called hellions that serve the Lord of Calamity, which is essentially the being with the most malevolence in the world. By fighting those monsters Sorey can usually return them to their normal selves, unless they're "too" malevolent or they like their malevolence somehow and refuse to turn back, and he's forced to kill them. Malevolence isn't necessarily generated by doing bad things, it's generated by the negative emotions themselves. Someone doing bad things who think they're doing them for the right reason won't turn. Someone doing good but resentful of the fact that there's a systemic shortcoming requiring that they fill this need will turn. This essentially cordons off a chunk of the range of human emotions as "the bad ones," thus generally denying them to all the characters we're supposed to care about.

Every time Sorey gets frustrated by an injustice or his inability to help someone as much as he'd like, he's cautioned to stop feeling that way, or he might turn and in so doing, force all of his friends to turn too. And while plenty of good people turn, they can't be reasoned with until they've been purified, and their emotions reset. They do a few interesting things with this, like when Sorey must maintain a sort of radical empathy toward the man who tortured and killed his grandfather in cold blood, while the man taunts him about having done it. But for the most part, it means that Sorey's character does not really develop throughout the game. He must stay friendly and approachable but stoic and incorruptible because the story's stakes if he falls are so high that the writers can't let that happen. The intent here is to frame hellions as one thing so that when Berseria features a protagonist who is becoming a hellion, the player's conception of the world is challenged and broadened. A more interesting story would be one in which Sorey does become a hellion and has to figure out a way to stop his friends from changing too, but that would lean too much into what Tales of Berseria does, so Sorey must stay a bastion of positive emotions for the sake of the twist, which only happened two actual real-world human years later, and not to these characters.

I think Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker is a useful comparison, here. In that game, feeling despair about the impending end of the world turns people into monsters, killing them instantly. It's a metaphor for the way inaction from the feeling of helplessness at the mind-boggling scale of the problem of global climate change keeps us from trying to do anything to fix the problem; the problem of "don't despair at the end of all things or you'll end sooner" is, purposely, a paradox because our current call to action is also a paradox. The problem's too big for any one of us but we can't let ourselves think that way or it'll only get worse. But the negative emotions in Zestiria aren't also unconstructive emotions. The central theme of Berseria is that angry people get shit done, which is demonstrably true in our world too! So it feels insincere when Zestiria frames anger as a problem that must be solved before any larger problems can be handled. Especially when one character, Rose, is an assassin whose mission is to kill people who use their power to ruin the world. She doesn't become a hellion because she doesn't kill out of anger, but the question then hangs over the entire game: why does that matter? If the evil Cardinal Forton was stabbed by someone who was mad at her, she wouldn't be any less stabbed. You can easily find lots of old forum posts from back when the game released of people trying to piece together why character A was a hellion but character B never changed, and in the end, the answer is it's arbitrary. The writers decided A was too angry or sad or something and that B hadn't reached that level.

It doesn't help that the translation is pretty shoddy in places. This was an issue with localizations of Japanese games at the time. I remember the discourse around the localization of Persona 5, a good game I like a lot with powerful themes and messages about real-world issues. The localization didn't really give its characters distinctive voices and had many sentences that were nonsensical or poorly structured, to the point that the localization of Persona 5 Royal had to go through with a scapel and rewrite a number of lines for clarity and voice. Zestiria has this problem but much worse. At the end of Persona 5, I knew what the characters were fighting against and why. The cutscene before the final boss of Tales of Zestiria is so hard to parse that I found myself questioning things I'd thought I knew about the basic parameters of the story and characters. This really does a disservice to the voice actors, who work valiantly to make their characters sound distinctive and individualized through a sludge of boring words. It's especially frustrating because for the first (and I believe only) time, they got some voice actors known for their internet presence for the game, and those guys had to work twice as hard to make their roles in a seminal JRPG series memorable.

I've written this much and barely touched on the gameplay yet. One of the most frustrating things about Tales of Zestiria is that its battle system is designed after the one in Tales of Graces, the game with my favorite battle system in the series, but it's tweaked in ways that make it borderline unplayable. In Graces, regular attacks that used the attack stat were called "A Artes" while special attacks that used the magic attack stat were called "B Artes." This game keeps that differentiation, calling them instead "martial artes" and "arcane artes" and adds a third category for spells, or "seraphic artes". The game attempts a rock-paper-scissors style tier system in which martial beats seraphic, seraphic beats arcane, and arcane beats martial. In practice, this means that each type of attack can't interrupt the attack type it's weak to. And then, instead of hitting them out of casting, arcane artes speed up the cast bar of any spell users they hit. This makes arcane artes (i.e., the cool moves you use in every Tales game because they're cool) a dangerous proposition because at any time their target might start casting and get off a powerful spell instantly as a result. It also makes the bad AI of CPU characters way more dangerous, as even if you know how to stop an enemy from casting, often your partner will run over to another and help it cast faster instead.

Also, no character type has access to all three types of artes. Humans can use martial and arcane, Seraphs can use martial and seraphic, and the powerful human-seraph fused forms can use arcane and seraphic. The fusing system means that there can only be as many Seraph characters on the field as Human, so a battle party is either two characters (Sorey and one Seraph) or four (Sorey, a partner, and two Seraphs). In the many parts of the story where Sorey is traveling only with his four Seraph friends, you're stuck with a battle party of two. If a Seraph dies in battle, they can be switched out on the fly and recover over about a minute while benched. If a human dies, they can revive by fusing with their partner Seraph. Fusing is the only way to revive human characters without items, and the only way human characters can get access to healing spells, which are used by spending gauge that's built up by comboing.

This means that players are disincentivized from playing as Seraphs, as if the Seraph dies, they'll have to switch to another character they're less familiar with until their character has been benched long enough to return. It also means that human characters at their weakest right after getting revived are in a dangerous position, as fused characters can only use arcane artes, which can make enemy spells cast faster, but they have to build gauge by hitting enemies in order to get enough to spend on a heal. The system is both overly complicated and makes it difficult to claw back out if things go south. It's the result of a lot of pretty good ideas stacked together until they're getting in each others' ways.

Another collection of pretty good ideas that get in each others' ways that is then stacked on top of all the rest is the equipment and skills system. Sort of like in Tales of Vesperia, equipment can have skills attached to them. Unlike in Vesperia, however, there's no way to permanently learn the skills attached to your equipment. Once you switch to a stronger weapon or armor piece, your character loses the skills attached to their previous gear. On top of this, each skill is placed on a 5x13 (I don't remember the exact proportions) tic-tac-toe style board. If you manage to place columns, rows, or stacks of skills on this board, you get better skills. But, again, those are wiped away if you replace your gear. If you find a sword with 60 more attack but it breaks the column that raises all your stats by 20, then all your other stats suffer if you equip it. If that same sword breaks the row that improves the character's attack growth rate for level-ups, then in twenty levels your character might have worse base attack than they would have if you'd kept the crappy sword that let you hold onto that growth rate. But then, on top of that, all characters' growth rates are decided by the stats of the equipment they're wearing when they leveled up. So maybe it's a better option to just wear the strongest gear and let that improve your growth rates that way? There's no way of knowing which one helps you more. And in the short-term, you're going to have a difficult time in battle if you're using weak equipment, even if it lights up your tic-tac-toe board like a christmas tree. Then, there's also an item fusing system where you can chunk items of the same type together to combine their equipped skills. But every time you fuse two of the same item with different skills in the same slot, the resulting skill is unavailable until you fight with that item equipped for a certain number of battles. If you fuse a piece of gear with a locked skill slot, that slot disappears, making the resulting piece of gear worse, rather than better. So to actually get good enough gear options, you have to fight wearing items you fused regardless of their stats or how they fit on your tic-tac-toe board (you can't even see where a locked skill will go on the board until you've unlocked it).

So you have to wear bad gear sometimes and some of that bad gear is going to affect your stat growths during levels, and suddenly this is three different decent ideas combined into a terrible chimera of a gear system. This makes equipment management for the six (sometimes seven) party members an agonizing process that often easily takes twenty minutes to slog through every time you get a new piece of equipment or visit a shop. There's even more complexity to this gear system than I've brought up here, but I'm exhausted just talking about it, so let's move on.

So we've got an equipment system that's overly complex and often contradictory in its modes of engagement, grafted onto a battle system that's engaging and occasionally interesting but unintentionally punishing and limiting. And all this is presented through the jankiest engine and worst art direction in the series. Zestiria is graphically ugly and runs like a nightmare, with a stuttering frame rate, a tiny draw distance, and bland, same-y environments. The developers had the idea of having battles take place on the main map, rather than placing them in separate flat arenas like in other Tales games, and while this makes sense in theory, in practice it means that the camera is actually hellish, often getting stuck on setpieces or other characters, or just...the idea of a slope. Dungeons are designed with this in mind, as nearly all of them are made up of thin corridors between large rooms where the enemies are placed, but enemies will follow the player character without ever giving up or tiring, often at a slightly faster pace than the player character. Enemies grouped together result in longer and more difficult encounters, where more enemies keep entering to replace the ones you dispatch.

If, for example, you're 50 hours into a game and trying to get to the next room of a dungeon without a fight, but all three enemies in a room catch up to you in a narrow hallway, then you're stuck fighting twenty enemies in groups of five at a time while the camera resolutely stares directly at the wall behind your character and at any time one or five of them might start casting a spell, which the partner character might speed up with an arcane art, and then the party's dead and you lost all the gameplay that got you to that point. While this is a worst case scenario that only happened to me a handful of times this playthrough, any combination of these issues plague nearly every enemy encounter in the game.

The six-hour DLC, which is really just a single 11-floor dungeon with fusing (and therefore player one's healing and reviving capabilities) removed, which provides no new story information, makes these issues even more apparent, and frustrating. A pathway up to the eighth floor is locked behind a hidden door on a wall on the sixth floor with three purple dots on it. The whole dungeon is tinged with a purple haze, so these dots are hard to make out, and it's made harder by the constant stream of enemies chasing you through the dungeon without stopping. In most of the game, if you fight an enemy, then all nearby enemies disappear when you finish the fight. In the DLC, though, they show right back up while you're recovering and keep chasing you, meaning you can get five to six encounters in a row with no chance to get your bearings, all while hunting for three small purple dots on a wall somewhere in a purple dungeon. It was clearly purposely designed this way to try to wring more time out of a miniscule DLC, and it worked, as I spent at least two of my six hours with that DLC just scouring the same three floors for that hidden door. That DLC was on release - and still is - ten whole dollars.

It's impossible not to have to grapple with the realization that Bandai-Namco forced this game to be bad. The game needed more development time that it did not get. The game needed more QA testing or, more likely, to actually respond to feedback received from testers. The game needed better localizers or, more likely, localizers with enough time to put the script through a few drafts before finalizing it. The game didn't need DLC, the DLC it got didn't need to be six hours long, and it definitely should never have been $10. The game itself should not be $60 now in the year of our lord 2023. And none of this is because Team Destiny said "let's make the game bad and expensive and frustrating." It's because someone higher up in the decision-making process said "I don't give a shit if the game is bad and expensive and frustrating." Tales of Xillia feels like it was made to be a benchmark of quality for the series. Tales of Zestiria proves that the developers were not being given the time or resources necessary to meet that benchmark. We'll see if we get another utter failure like Zestiria after Arise, or if they manage to maintain the new benchmark Arise has set. But knowing Bandai, I'm nervous about which way that's likely to fall.

Graces is a weird beast. It first released on the wii in 2009, but we didn't get it stateside until Graces F, the PS3 remaster with a bonus post-game story, 3 years later in 2012. There's broadly two main Tales dev teams with fairly different styles and design philosophies, Team Symphonia and Team Destiny, and this was the first of Team Destiny's games to actually make it stateside since their first game, Tales of Destiny, in 1997. This means that when I first played this game, I was pretty taken aback both by how much better the combat flowed and how much worse the story and characters were than in other Tales games I'd played. Though it took a while for me to realize that the combat flowed better, as the game starts with a 5-hour intro section where the combat is stripped down to almost nothing as an excuse for a tutorial.

The game's story is somehow both meandering and too-focused. When protagonist Asbel was ten, he met two children who changed his life. One was Sophie, a mysterious girl with amnesia and magic powers, and the other was Richard, the prince of the neighboring kingdom. During this meeting, Sophie died horribly, Asbel's brother Hubert was sold to the lord of a faraway nation, and Asbel ultimately ran away to join the knights. Seven years later, Sophie mysteriously returns from the dead, Hubert comes home and exiles Asbel from their hometown, and Asbel aligns himself with Prince Richard, who quickly turns out to be evil. As Asbel, Sophie, and other party members wander from country to country, they keep seeing more proof that Richard is not only evil but will soon destroy the planet if left unchecked, but Asbel is so convinced that their brief friendship from when they were both children was so real that he can't bring himself to oppose him. Rinse and repeat for hours of Asbel and Sophie lamenting "but Richard's our friend!" while Richard demolishes countries and finally tries to drain the planet itself of all life.

It's pretty bad, and made worse by how one-note the characters are and, most frustratingly, the fact that Asbel is proven right in the end. The game isn't well-written generally. It has a bad habit of giving characters thought bubbles with internal dialogue that make already telegraphed emotions way too plain, as though the writers didn't trust the audience to understand that a character bowing his head with tears in his eyes is probably sad. Despite all that, though, the skits are still mostly fun. The characters may all be pretty flat, but they bounce well off each other, and their performances are mostly good, sometimes great. Jamison Price as Malik, Cassandra Lee Morris as Sophie, and Laura Bailey as Cheria are clearly the best, though everyone besides Asbel and Richard do well, and for those two I think it has a lot more to do with voice direction than the actors themselves.

Ideologically, Graces is kind of a mess. All the politics of the game are really just different venues for Asbel to be sad about Richard in, rather than actual political systems, but it's still distressing that Richard is objectively the right choice to be king of his country, even after he tried to destroy all life on earth. The game also goes to great lengths to convince us that Asbel and Hubert's physically abusive father who sold one of his sons to an emotionally abusive father on the other side of the world was a paragon of virtue, trying to do the right thing by children who simply weren't mature enough to understand, yet. Malik's story is that of an exiled revolutionary returning to his homeland still ruled by a fascist dictator and realizing he should have stayed and become a reformist in the fascist government, then doing just that, working with the dictator to bring central heating to the impoverished masses and at one point sentencing another revolutionary to exile for refusing to work within the system. It's generally all pretty yikes, but feels mostly incidental, less like the writers are actually saying anything about their worldview and more like they were scrambling to find ways to add flavor to their story about some kids who really don't want to fight their shitty friend.

Despite all the agonizing over not getting a Tales release at the time, I'm glad we got Graces F and not the original wii release. While it looks kinda rough for a PS3 game, the HD does help the visuals a lot. Also, the Lineages and Legacies story does a lot to make the characters more likable and interesting than in the main game. It feels like the writers were excited to do things with the characters again, and made them all more fun and playful while also giving them added depth. Asbel makes his only interesting decision of the main story about five minutes before the end of the game, so it's genuinely engaging to see him and his friends grappling with the fallout from that decision. It makes all of them much more rounded than they ever were in the main story and I'm kinda sad that it's only about 15% of the experience.

Where Graces shines, though, is its combat. It is still, over a decade later, the best combat system in the entire series, fast-paced and rewarding split-second decision-making while always making the player feel strong with flashy standard moves and rapid-fire super moves. I used Hubert when I played the game twice back in 2012, and every time I picked him up this playthrough, it was like I hadn't skipped a beat. I immediately remembered his full moveset and what to use in what situations, is how much the combat sets into your bones. This time, I used Asbel, and while I think Hubert is more fun, Asbel's more balanced style was definitely useful in a lot more situations.

Tempest is a 2005 japan-only release for the DS developed by Dimps, the freelancers behind most handheld Sonic games and a good chunk of handheld licensed games, especially for DBZ and Digimon. When it dropped, it received so much hate from fans that Namco pretty quickly pulled it from the list of mainline Tales games, though they've recently quietly added it back to the list. They developed two more DS Tales games afterwards, in-house, and to fan approval, which makes Tempest even more interesting to me, as a first, failed attempt at a handheld Tales game.

It's definitely a bad game. Everything that involves a menu takes about three more button presses than necessary, the world takes a long time to travel for no good reason, the models are low poly and the textures are worse. The battle system is so unnecessarily limited that it's honestly barely worth engaging with. You only get four arte slots, and the protagonist's main gimmick is that he can turn into a werewolf when under half health, but transformation takes up an arte slot, so he functionally only has three. CPU-controlled characters also will only use moves assigned to their four arte slots. And there's no access to the artes menu in battle. Two of the five characters are werewolves, so only have three slots. Two more are mage/healer combos, so you have to divide their four slots between both offensive and healing spells. They balance this by making healing items unbelievably cheap and easy to obtain. Lemon and Pineapple Gels are 90 gald each. Miracle Gels are available in all stores for about 200 gald each. I ended the game with 80k gald.

The game has five party members, but only the protagonist, Caius, gets enough focus and story relevance that I'd consider him a character. Of the four main villains, two end up being his father and his brother. Another villain wears a mask and has the same hair color as the female lead, so I figured they'd be related in some way, but no, the female lead is so coincidental to the story that despite being on the box, she's the only character whose name I don't remember. Two of the party members, Tilkis and Forest, are the prince of a country you never see and his bodyguard. The last party member, Arria, is a priestess with the evil church who's sent to spy on the party, immediately gains their trust with no effort, and then immediately turns coat on the church when pushed. There's not much there.

That said, the lore has weirdly a lot of potential. About a century ago, humans committed genocides against the werewolf and ogre races, which carved out space for the human country to take over as the main superpower on the continent. Now, the human church is carrying out an inquisition against werewolves once again for unknown reasons, stoking fear against werewolves among the populace by spreading false rumors and executing any werewolves delivered to them without trial. This is pretty standard rpg stuff, but it's made interesting about halfway in, when it's revealed that the church is capturing werewolves to try to learn about a magic spell the werewolf country once had that was able to resurrect the dead. The goal of the inquisition is to gain and use this spell to resurrect all the victims of that genocide, thus making humans no longer culpable for the sins of their ancestors.

It's a fucking good hook, honestly. It reminds me of current debates around history education and white guilt. The church figures they can commit any violence they want in the present, as once they get that spell, the dead will come back anyway, so they won't have done anything wrong. The best parts of the game are when Caius tries to make his adversaries understand that making the dead no longer dead doesn't fix torture or generations of oppression. It doesn't rebuild the ruined werewolf city, return their lost poetry, or make their two countries relative equals on the global stage once more.