Pixel Grotto

Earlier this month I wrapped up a three year Pathfinder campaign for my wife and her best friend + partner. It wasn't the lengthiest tabletop story I've told (that record stlll goes to Abomination Vaults), but it certainly was the game that survived the most life changes.

The game originally started in 2022 online, with two of us based in New York and the other two in the UK. It finished in 2026 in person, with all of us based in London. Over the course of those years, the game went through marriages, multiple moves both international and within the same country, and house purchases. On the scale of life events, those are pretty flippin' huge (I have been a player in campaigns that have fallen apart over much less), and even though we did take a hiatus around the tail end of 2025 that lasted over 6 months, we still managed to finish things.

In terms of the game's structure, it was also an oddball one that combined aspects of two different systems. After wrapping up Ghosts of Saltmarsh for my wife and her best friend in 2021, my initial plan had been to run Candlekeep Mysteries, another D&D 5e book with a similar anthology structure that was relatively new at the time. But I was also getting burnt out on 5e for the usual reasons that most people cite - overexposure, the tendency for it to fall apart at higher levels, Wizards of the Coast's ironclad hold over the industry, etc. So I decided to run things in Pathfinder 2e instead, because even though it's still a d20-based system rooted in D&D tropes, there was enough spice and newness there to entice me.

With the switch in system and stetting came adjustments to the lore of Candlekeep Mysteries. Instead of keeping the anthology's frame story of having each adventure begin in the Candlekeep library of the Forgotten Realms, I adjusted things so that the PCs were based in Absalom and employed by the Pathfinder Society's Dark Archive. Their goal was to catalogue the cursed books of a dangerous, seemingly deceased lich named Matreous Minzer who was once a member of an elite crime group called the Five. (Minzer was my own creation, but I represented him with the art of classic Greyhawk mage Mordenkainen just for fun). And so Dark Archive Mysteries was born.

This reskinning maintained the "each book leads to a mystery that must be solved" structure of Candlekeep, which I liked, but moved things into an overarching story about urban investigation. In reality, though, thanks to decisions made by the players, I ended up using much less of Candlekeep Mysteries than I expected, and much more of the Pathfinder books Dark Archive, Lost Omens: Absalom, and a few extra modules. The final 10 adventures that composed our campaign went like this:

The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces - The PCs were tasked by the Pathfinder Society to investigate Minzer's houseboat, and this took them to his extradimensional getaway home. I played this one pretty close to how it was written in Candlekeep, converting 5e stat blocks to Pathfinder ones on the fly.

Rumoured Cryptids - After the PCs picked suitable Pathfinder Society factions for themselves, they were sent to the outskirts of Absalom to check out a rumoured Cryptid sighting. This was a rendition of the Dark Archive adventure The Beast of Birchfrost, only slightly changed to make the setting more Absalom-focused.

A Fistful of Flowers - It was around here that I started to pull from unexpected sources. My wife was playing a leshy, and due to wife privileges (as well as the fact that I always dictate the flow of a campaign based off of the characters of the PCs), I inserted the Free RPG Day module of this name into the campaign, giving the party the chance to infiltrate a tea party where leshies had been taken hostage.

Studies on Shapeshifters - I completely made this one up because I randomly found art of a werebat and wanted to stick it in the game. So I created the concept of a crime ring run by two former members of the Five who were a werebat and werewolf. These corrupt nobles were engaged in a new crime scheme - selling counterfeit goods that were actually mimics. I still think this is one of the best ideas for an urban adventure I've come up with, and have vague delusions of spinning it off into some kind of fantasy Miami Vice concept one day.

A Deep and Creeping Darkness - The first adventure played in person after my wife and I moved to the UK and we were finally all in the same place. This one was inspired by the adventure of the same name in Candlekeep, but that's basically it. I like hexcrawls, and my players usually like 'em too, but instead of having them explore a decayed village full of Meenlocks, I made them go under Absalom to the Undercity to take care of a Malfesh Monster that had been created by one of the Five, a mutated nature dude that the players ended up referring to as the "plant fucker."

A Few Flowers More - By this time, the second leshy-focused Free RPG Day adventure had come out. It happened to star the same NPCs as the first (including the little leshy named Popcorn that everyone loved) so I had to include it. I used about 50% of the material as-is, changing bits to make it closer to the plans of the mutated plant fucker bad guy.

The Beauteous Unicorn - Another original romp I came up with because my wife's best friend was working in a theater at the time, and I wanted something that took place on stage. It ended up being set in Absalom's fancy arts district, with the PCs observing a play based on an old fairy tale that happened to be found amongst Minzer's collection. The final boss? A cursed unicorn inspired by the Lore of Lurue adventure in Candlekeep, mostly due to the fact that my wife hates horses and will take any opportunity to beat one up.

A Guide to Criminal Secret Enterprises - The Lost Omens: Absalom book is erupting with plot hooks (a few too many, honestly) and one of the best ones involves a crime boss named Dr. Benski Skule who's actually a domesticated troll who assumed the name of his owner after the guy died. Love that, so I made him a member of the Five and set the adventure on his casino nightboat. One of the PCs was an undead pirate, and though this campaign was very Absalom-focused, I kept looking for ways to feature some degree of sea shenanigans. So this was a compromise!

Xanthoria - Candlekeep's final adventure involves a lichen lich named Xanthoria, and I was obsessed with the design of this character. The rest of the adventure didn't match the overarching story I'd created, so I made another original tale where Lady Constance Meliosa (one of the antagonists in A Fistful of Flowers who had become an enduring character in our campaign) mutated into a lich, became Minzer's queen, and sicced a Heartrot Tree on Absalom. Cue another citywide hexcrawl as the tree rose above the city and sent deadly spores everywhere! (Anyone here seen the Dragonball Z movie Tree of Might? Yeah, I'm taken with the idea of sentient trees slowly consuming the world; plant-based horror just vibes with me.)

Ultimate Lichdom - The last adventure, and I intended it as an epilogue where the players once again returned to Minzer's extradimensional lair, only to find it outfitted with deathtraps inspired by their previous escapades. (I also wanted to reuse a battlemap, seeing as how my Roll20 subscription had lapsed and I couldn't upload any new pictures.) It all ended with my wife's best friend finally taking Minzer down by hitting him with chip damage from a Potion of Retaliation. To quote 1937 Batman (look it up): "A fitting end for his kind!"

I'd say the final campaign relied on about 70% of my own ideas, with me casting a much wider net than initially anticipated with regards to the modules that I remixed and used for inspiration. This always happens whenever I run lengthy campaigns, and it's forever surprising and amusing to witness.

It's also interesting to see how my approach has shifted, with this being the third urban-based campaign that I've run (following The Almost Assassination and Waterdeep: Dragon Heist). While I still overwhelmingly love setting things up with little stories linked together via an overarching framework, this one focused on villains more, as I've long thought that I have difficulties developing compelling bad guys, which are hard to pull off in D20 games that ultimately treat enemies as fodder for PCs to punch.

I also ended up leaning more into social commentary with the Five, messing around with themes of social class, rich people controlling everything in Absalom, gentrification...you know, all of those things that inevitably come up when you're running a game for folks who previously called New York home and now all live in London. There were more than a few references to the Epstein Files tossed in there near the end, because why not make the bourgeois villains even more distasteful than they already were?

As for where we'll go with Dark Archive Mysteries now wrapped up, it remains to be seen. I want to put this crew through a few sessions of Mappa Mundi, seeing as how it's a TTRPG I actually helped build, and it's also dictated how my gaming tastes have evolved over the last few years, moving away from D20-based combat crawls to more storytelling-driven affairs. But the wife's best friend's partner also wants to play through Kingmaker at some point, which remains a white whale for me along with everyone else, so we shall see. If this game took three years and saw oceans rise and fall, that one could concievably take us a decade along with another 20+ life changes!

I got to play Resident Evil Requiem for work over the last two and a half weeks. I didn't write the review, but I 100% agree with its assessment that this is a highly competent game, but also one that stumbles about in its second half, fascinatingly reminiscent of a zombie in its death throes.

(The rest of this post will get real itchy and tasty with spoilers, so if you haven't played Requiem yet, beware.) I am going to attempt to summarize Requiem's poorly-explained story here, mostly for my own benefit, because the game expects you to read a 60-page document called "Grace's Report" upon completing it that still doesn't detail things well. Anyhow, the newbie lead is Grace Ashcroft, an FBI analyst who gets sent into the field by her boss to investigate the hotel where her adoptive mother was murdered. (Holy shit, take that up with HR immediately.)

Grace is secretly a child created by Umbrella Corp founder Oswell Spencer, who had an epiphany in his final years and realized that zombie-fueled genocide is actually kinda bad. And so he raised a regular baby before passing her on to Alyssa Ashcroft, one of the survivors of the oft-overlooked PS2 spinoff Resident Evil Outbreak, which is the first sign of Requiem dipping deep into the fan service test tube.

Unbeknownst to Grace, Spencer also gave her subconscious knowledge of a password that can activate a serum called Elpis, which counters all viral strands that Umbrella and its competitors had a role in making. In other words, Elpis is a trump card that Spencer created in his final days to screw over all of the other eugenics nutjobs in the RE universe, in a real "it is not enough that I succeed; others should fail" fashion. Two of these nutjobs include the baddies of Requiem - a creepy doctor named Victor Gideon and a jobber clone of Albert Wesker named Zeno, who is never actually identified as a clone throughout the narrative, but is 100% a clone. I mean, just look at the screenshot below.

Both Victor and Zeno don't know that Elpis is an antiviral. They think Spencer's last will and testament is a bigger and badder bioweapon, and they want Grace to open it up for them. After being kidnapped by Victor, Grace escapes into Rhodes Hill, a health facility/bioweapon testing center, where she gets chased by dozens of zombies and this game's stalker enemy, a big mutated girlie simply dubbed The Girl. Along the way, she makes friends with a little test subject named Emily, and also gets saved by Leon Kennedy, who's investigating the case and gives her a sexy revolver dubbed "Requiem" to survive. Hey, they did that thing where they put the name of the game into the game.

All of the stuff in the Rhodes Hill section of Requiem is ace. Playing as Grace is classic survival horror goodness, and the layout of the hospital features all of the puzzles, backtracking, and inventory management that made me fall in love with this franchise when I did my massive Resident Evil series playthrough almost a decade ago. There are some new wrinkles to the formula as well, coming in the form of zombies that retain pieces of their old intelligence and act in varied ways. Enter a chef zombie, who Grace must avoid as he marches back and forth in the kitchen with a giant cleaver. Then there are two singer zombies who the game describes as possessing "main character energy," and they'll unleash banshee-style screams if you get too close. These little personalities make what would pass for typical cannon fodder all the more endearing, and it's a wonder that Resident Evil didn't think of this sort of thing earlier.

Grace's Rhodes Hill nightmare is made more breathless by the inclusion of a few tidbits as Leon, who has so obviously had enough of this shit that he immediately starts kicking the undead left and right, whacking them to bits with his hatchet and chainsawing them as if he still hasn't learned how to use garden tools properly since his RE4 service in Spain. These are the action-orientated gulps of air that punctuate Grace's extremely tense survival horror moments, and they are very fun, especially when ya boy just darts through sections of the facility that Grace struggled with, blasting undead heads to pulp because you know he's seen far too much of this nonsense since the '90s. There's one killer sequence where Leon has to defend Grace from a rooftop with a sniper rifle that had me yelling out "LET'S GOOO" at very high intervals.

Unfortunately, the Rhodes Hill stuff ends about halfway through the game, and Grace gets squirreled away by Zeno and Victor. Leon takes center stage to follow them to the nuked-out remains of Raccoon City, which marks one of the first times that this series has ventured into the post-apocalyptic setting that nearly all of its lackluster live-action interpretations have insisted upon.

And it's here where Requiem stumbles. Instead of navigating tightly-designed corridors filled with personality-laden enemies, Leon's Raccoon City slog is dominated by a beige environment, typical zombie chuds, and a fetch quest to collect parts of a detonator. I've always believed that Resident Evil should never veer too hard into the dystopia inhabited by The Last of Us and The Walking Dead, where mutations have inherited the Earth and you play as a survivor trying to eke out an existence amongst them. It's just not as interesting as the series' forte, which is all about living in the existing capitalist hellscape that is the modern era, except one where corporations have learned to make and use the undead for profit. Leon's section navigating the ruins of Raccoon City proves me right.

The search for detonator pieces does eventually end, replaced with a foray into Raccoon City Police Department. And it's here that the game tries to emphasize the fact that Leon is coming home, grappling with the PTSD of 26 years ago while slowly dealing with the reality that he too has been infected by the T-Virus, a convenient twist that Requiem handwaves by saying it's due to prolonged contact with zombies over the years. You'll then walk through the hallowed halls that Leon navigated as a rookie in RE2, and the game clearly wants you to feel the passionate pull of nostalgia. It hopes to tug at the heartstrings of longtime fans, eliciting a tear from their eyes as they peer upon scenes they haven't seen in an eternity - even though all of the assets on display aren't really that old, as the entire police station map is just a dirtied-up version of what was made in 2019 for the Resident Evil 2 remake.

Some of the Easter Eggs here are good, like the inclusion of Tofu in RPD if you visit S.T.A.R.S. office and examine Jill Valentine's old beret. But much of it feels misplaced. For instance, the S.T.A.R.S. sequence would be more meaningful if it were Chris Redfield or even Jill herself doing the examining, since those two were, after all, the actual S.T.A.R.S. members of the franchise, while Leon was just a regular cop. (Once again, I long for Capcom to bring Jill Valentine out of forced retirement.)

Other bits feel way too convenient. Zeno just happens to have a Tyrant in his back pocket who looks like Mr. X, and so Leon gets to duel his old foe, which is neat at first but also feels like a very "let's hit you over the head with how rad Leon became over the last two decades" sequence. This feeling is compounded in the final area of the game, the ARK secret facility lurking beneath Raccoon City, where longtime secret character HUNK appears to challenge Leon to a duel. The game calls him the "Commander," just as it refuses to identify Zeno as a Wesker clone, but make no mistake, this is HUNK. If you parry correctly you can kill him without much trouble, and the entire fight is the equivalent of Boba Fett coming back for two minutes in a Star Wars movie only to be unceremoniously impaled by a CGI-deaged Luke Skywalker. (Has this happened yet? I stopped caring about Star Wars years ago.)

This is not meaningful fan service. Rather, it feels designed to elicit a quick and dirty "holy shit" reaction from streamers, and it succeeds at doing so, if the Leon vs. HUNK reaction round-up on YouTube is any indication. But HUNK's cameo doesn't advance the plot in any major fashion, and one could say this about most of the relevations in Requiem's last moments. Lickers appear, largely to hit home more RE2 vibes. Zeno dies without anyone blinking an eye. Victor mutates into a Nemesis (but not the actual Nemesis that everyone knows and remembers from RE3). Grace heals Leon with Elpis, allowing him to presumably continue kicking ass for another 10 Resident Evils. Emily somehow survives despite mutating into a monster, so that Capcom can have a happy ending for Grace.

I had a rollicking time playing through this stuff when it was on screen, but thinking about it after the fact makes me feel cynical. After its initial setup, Requiem quickly becomes a game that seems desperate for players to adore it, throwing brushstrokes of the past at them like a painter dying to recreate their old style. But Grace's story of learning her past connections with Spencer and Leon's tale of dealing with trauma never align as well as they could have, resulting in a game that feels hammered together from two disparate halves, with Capcom hoping that nobody noticed along the way.

The entire premise of Requiem is somewhat flawed from the getgo, because we're expected to believe that Oswald Spencer - made out to be an utterly reprehensible individual in every other Resident Evil game - somehow became a better person in his final days. But if one were to accept this as a retcon, then there are ways in which Requiem could've been cohesively rearranged. The entire game could have been set in and around Rhodes Hill, for one, focusing more on Grace's story with Leon serving as backup, the role he excels at during the first half. Without the distractions of Raccoon City, Mr. X round 2, and HUNK, we could've had a scaled-down, focused plot about Grace's origins that perhaps provided a little more detail about Spencer's change of heart.

Alternately, if Requiem truly desired to bring players back to RE2's heyday, it should've axed Grace Ashcroft entirely. She's an endearing protagonist, and I do like how Requiem serves as a complete story for her, but this game could've easily starred Sherry Birkin, who appears behind the scenes as Leon's radio helper. She too is suffering from the T-Virus, and her inclusion is once again mostly confined to fluffy fan service rather than anything meaningful. But she could've certainly been recast as the lead role, perhaps with her going off to investigate Raccoon City after hearing rumours of the ARK facility beneath it. This would give Leon more than enough reason to star as the game's deuteragonist, considering their shared history, and it would've made all of the throwbacks to RE2 more pointed. Hell, if Capcom really wanted to elicit hardcore emotions, why not bring Claire Redfield back as well?

Alas, this does not seem to be Capcom's strategy with Resident Evil. Seemingly logical decisions, like making a game starring Sherry - once a little girl in RE2 who is now a grown woman committed to fighting bioterrorism on her own terms - are cast away, probably replaced with the argument of "oh, Sherry has no connection to Elpis, and she's too well-trained for the beginning of the game to be scary if you're playing as her." To this, I shake my head. If Requiem wants to convince us that Spencer regretted his life's work right before he died, surely a retcon of Sherry's origins that link her with Elpis is possible. Sherry could also have simply acted as a desk agent ever since the conclusion of RE6, justifying the limited inventory and more frightening gameplay that she'd be saddled with in comparison to Leon.

I am reminded, for a moment, that missed opportunities are par the course for Capcom. I am a Mega Man fan, after all, as well as a Breath of Fire fan, and I have seen how this company has bungled decisions multiple times with both series. So this is nothing new, and I suspect that Resident Evil's recent aggressive release cycle has also forced Capcom to prioritize pumping these games out quickly rather than carefully, ensuring that they're composed of bits that can be tweaked for future usage. You see evidence of this all throughout Requiem. Aside from the recyled second half, there are models just waiting to be reskinned for the inevitable Code Veronica, RE0, and RE5 remakes. (The Titan Spinner spider boss, Spencer's inclusion, and not Wesker Zeno, right down to his Matrix-esque powers.)

I felt this way when I played Village a few years back, which seemed like its setting was an excuse to make assets for the RE4 remake. And even though I ultimately like Requiem more than the second part of Ethan Winters' story, I cannot help but feel like this game exudes fumbled potential. What was supposed to be a requiem for the franchise as a whole, hence the name, comes across more as an example of how Capcom will continue to make Resident Evils as fast as they can, creating repurposable elements each year while never really letting old characters like Leon rest, and never really elevating what should be obvious choices at successors - like Sherry - to the driver's seat.

Requiem sold something like 5 million copies in a few days, so obviously, there are plenty of players who care little about these things and will eat all of it up. I probably will too, honestly. But I recall that Resident Evil's finest chapters were ones that did something new - RE2, RE4, RE7. Requiem dabbles with this, dangling its personality-filled zombies in your face. But ultimately, it is no RE2. It is the latest product from an annual release machine, too intent on forcefully trying to make us embrace the past and admire its cleverness. As a result, it pushes its finest parts to the rear while elevating the wrong parts to the forefront.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the bonkers Final Puzzle, an ARG-style challenge that had players from across the world coming together to crack a code that involved flushing toilets 8 times in a row and figuring out the distance from the Earth to the moon. And after all of that effort, what did the community get? An achievement and some measly currency points in the in-game shop. Blah. Requiem is fine, but Resident Evil as a whole can be much, much better.

It was truly unusual that in 2025 we were blessed with two 2D revivals of old ninja video game franchises, but the stars aligned and brought us Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound and Shinobi: Art of Vengeance within a two month span. That's right, two games deliberately designed to evoke the older entries in their respective franchises rather than the newer ones, probably a direct appeal to folks in their 30's and 40's who experienced them growing up.

That's me, by the way. I have a deep appreciation for the NES Ninja Gaidens, thanks to the Nintendo Power Ninja Gaiden II strategy guide capturing my eyes in the early '90s. I have less childhood love for Shinobi, aside from some hours with the Palm Pilot port (of all platforms, wow) of the Game Gear Shinobi (of all entries, double wow). But I really love Yuzo Koshiro's musical compositions, and his Super Shinobi soundtrack was a precious discovery in my search for good OSTs when I grew a little older, and it still lives in constant rotation on my YouTube music list.

I therefore relished in the chance to play these twins back to back, and it's hard to not compare them against each other. They're both revivals created by European teams who studied the classics, they both emphasize fast combat and platforming, they both feature fan service galore if you're familiar with the old games. The prologue of Ragebound actually plays from the perspective of Ryu Hayabusa's father, Jo Hayabusa, showing his journey through the forest on the way to the fatal duel that opens Ninja Gaiden 1, be still my nostalgic heart. Meanwhile, Art of Vengeance features action-packed chase levels, including one where Musashi is riding on the back of the dog from Shadow Dancer. Great stuff.

That said, I like Ragebound a little more. It's mostly because this Ninja Gaiden revival really succeeds at channeling the no-nonsense spirit of the OG games - which carried the original Japanese title of Ninja Ryukenden, supposedly changed for the convenience of English speakers who would go on to mispronounce "Gaiden" all the time anyway.

Those games did two things well - they told a good story through the use of cinematic cutscenes, which were a novelty on the NES, and they emphasized blazing-fast action and careful mastery of a moveset. It took real skill to navigate Ryu Hayabusa as he flipped through an oncoming parade of opponents, raging from pumpkin-headed demons to birds that swooped down to screw up your wall jump at the last minute. But the tools to win were within your grasp, especially if you expertly utilized one of those power-ups that created a mirror image of you to extend your range (I believe these debuted in Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos). Eventually, you'd suceed despite the bastard-level difficulty of all three games in the trilogy, and then you'd remember your victory as the next chapter of Ryu's saga unfolded in a superbly-drawn cutscene right out of a manga that never existed.

Ragebound devs The Game Kitchen studied this format and took it one step further by basing the game around duo characters - Kenji, a not-Ryu who's still pretty cool (mostly because he looks just like Ryu if you squint) and Kumori, a tsundere waifu from a rival ninja clan whose soul gets bonded to Kenji's body. Both of 'em bicker like an old couple in the cutscenes, which aren't as special as they were back in the NES days, but are still memorable enough.

The gameplay between the pair is what shines, though. Most of the time, you'll end up controlling Kenji, who specializes in melee stuff and bouncing off of enemies via sword flips. But for range, you've got to switch to Kumori, and you'll also control her during hard-as-nails platforming sections that enter the demon realm, a place only she can access.

There's a dastardly but wonderful rhythm that develops as you slaughter a million foes with both ninjas. Certain enemies are surrounded by blue energy (which means Kenji has to kill them) while others are pink (which indicates that Kumori's up to bat). Defeat the right enemy with the right character, and the next armored foe you have to tackle can be insta-killed with one quick slice. These armored foes are carefully placed throughout the level along with all other enemies to facilitate a very deliberate and delicate dance between both characters, and the game feels built for satisfying speedruns, as long as you perfect the moves at your disposal. Just like the NES games.

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, in contrast, does everything right to a point, but slips in the depths of its execution. The good stuff first - it looks gorgeous, and even though I'm in love with pixel art to the point where I've named myself Pixel Grotto on the internet, I'll go so far as to say that Art of Vengeance is more visually spectacular than Ragebound. This is mostly because pixel retro chic is common these days, but the handdrawn perfection of Art of Vengeance is really rare to see in electronic entertainment, probably because it takes so damn long to do. It certainly helps that the art style of Ben Fiquet, the CEO of Lizardcube and the artist behind this game, is something that I love. Joe Musashi simply looks fantastic, and every fiber of Art of Vengeance is more than reminscent of a manga-inspired cutscene. It's a manga brought to life, breathing and moving as you press the inputs on your gamepad.

So Art of Vengeance clearly kicks ass in the looks department. But alas, it doesn't 100% nail the feel of Joe Musashi's old adventures in the same fashion as Ragebound, nor is it as impeccable as Lizardcube's previous effort, Streets of Rage 4. The fault comes in muddying its own waters. Instead of featuring straightforward levels, Art of Vengeance takes a quasi-Metroidvania approach, which is fine, except the levels are too big for their own good. Most take an hour to run through, and they aren't well-designed enough to justify this length.

Typically, Art of Vengeance's levels alternate between tossing you in rooms packed with enemies, making you do tricky platforming, and resorting to the most block pushing puzzles that I've seen since the PS1 era. And aside from the beat 'em up brawls (clearly Lizardcube's area of comfort), the game struggles with balancing its linear platformer mechanics and its puzzles with satisfying exploration. Also, I shouldn't have to question in a Metroidvania whether it's safe for me to drop from a ledge or if my fall will lead to insta-death. This happened way too many times, largely thanks to the Art of Vengeance's Metroidvania map being unclear, despite an effort to color code certain areas as red for insta-death and purple for requiring an item that you need to advance. (The game never really explains this color coding as far as I know, by the way.)

When discussing Art of Vengeance's slip-ups, I would be remiss to not link Kimimi's excellent review, which digs deeper into all of these faults. Kimimi has one of the best gaming blogs on the internet, and while their overall opinion of Joe Musashi's latest is harsher than mine, they do rightfully point out that the game's portrayal of its female characters isn't great. This is another area where Ragebound is stronger. While no one in their right minds would ever label the Ninja Gaiden series an emblem of feminism - especially its more recent entries, which feature Ryu Hayabusa interacting with a host of gargantuan-chested women in varying states of undress - Ragebound's Kumori is a decent deuteragonist. She's not controllable to the extent that Kenji is, sure, but the story does take pains to center her just as much as the guy, and she's arguably more interesting.

I suppose all of this sounds like I vastly prefer Ragebound to Art of Vengeance. At the end of the day, though, that's not the case. Both were two of the best platformers I've played in ages, and I'm mostly just happy to see classic ninja games dominate a portion of 2025. It was certainly a delight to see them acknowledge each other's similarities in a well-timed package sale that also featured cool art of Kenji and Joe Musashi side-by-side, and I'd love to see The Game Kitchen either make Ragebound 2 or remake the original NES Ninja Gaiden trilogy on their own terms. Lizardcube, as well, could probably perfect their Shinobi format with a sequel that sands down the rough edges of this first try. Or Sega could give them the Golden Axe franchise to revitalize next; that works too.

There are several games I've written about here over the years that I enjoyed, yet were recipients of a mixed-to-negative mainstream reaction. See Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 and DmC: Devil May Cry. Now, you can add Gotham Knights to the list, which I started playing for breaks after work two months ago and found myself liking immensely.

Gotham Knights came out in 2022, and was released at about the same time that I proposed to my wife and we planned to move from the US to the UK. And so life got in the way, and I didn't get around to playing it until now. Public perception told me that the game was "mid," that it failed to live up to the Batman: Arkham series, etc. I must take the contrarian POV here, because after finishing Gotham Knights I actually enjoyed several aspects of it more than Arkham Knight, also known as the game that tries to keep the identity of its titular antagonist a secret, despite practically everyone who's read more than five Batman comics figuring out that it was Jason Todd within the first few hours.

Here's my take as someone who used to run a Batman fan account on Instagram (for more than six years with 30k+ followers, if I do say so myself) - the Arkham titles are superb from a gameplay perspective (well, maybe not the Batmobile fights in Arkham Knight) but they are not sacrosanct. With the exception of Arkham Origins (which was incidentally made by WB Montréal, the company behind Gotham Knights), I've never especially vibed with their storylines, which veer on the side of Joker overexposure and a specific interpretation of Batman seemingly inspired by how the character was consistently portrayed in the late '90s and 2000s - as an utter asshole always at war with his companions, shutting Robin, Batgirl, Nightwing and the others off at every conceivable opportunity.

The ideal Batman game that exists in my brain has always been one that would embrace the concept of the Bat Family, simply because my preferred version of Bruce Wayne is a man who was robbed of his family as a child, but rebuilds it in his own way as an adult via superheroic allies. Sadly, the Arkham series barely acknowledged Batman's connections with his wards, aside from brief DLC and a few tag-team missions in Arkham Knight, which were among the best parts of that game.

Gotham Knights is therefore pure fanservice for my perhaps biased tastes. Not only do we have Dick Grayson, Barbara Gordon, Tim Drake, and Jason Todd (who is finally presented well here, a rarity for the poor second Robin in any piece of media - including comics themselves), but we also get a tale where Batman is dead, killed in action by Ra's al Ghul. The various Bat kids, robbed of their mentor, must find their own path in Gotham and deal with obstacles like Harley Quinn, Mr. Freeze, Clayface, the League of Shadows, and the Court of Owls - probably the most interesting new threat in Batman comics to have emerged in the last two decades, even if their best story is still the one that introduced them.

The game isn't 100% perfect in its characterization of any of the aforementioned characters, with Harley, Freeze, and Clayface coming off as carictures designed primarily for co-op boss battles. Nevertheless, the Bat Family shines. Nightwing is the pack leader struggling with walking in the shadow of the man who raised him, Batgirl is the sole team member who's lost not one, but two father figures in rapid succession (Jim Gordon's dead in this universe), Red Hood is grappling with post-Lazarus Pit anger as he always is (but this time he's actually in therapy, which the game portrays well), and Tim Drake is the impressionable youngster dealing with self-doubt. They all feature unique playstyles that match their personalities, and while WB Montréal took a few noticeable liberties for the sake of varied gameplay (hello, Red Hood who is infused with Lazarus energy that makes him double jump), their respective abilities and stories were, once again, major fanservice for me.

Atop all of this is the spectre of Batman himself, who might die impressively in the intro but lingers on thanks to audio logs left behind for his kids, training mission openings, and a few twists and turns near the end. This is a Batman who is probably still a hardass in certain regards, just like his Arkham self, but also exemplifies the characterization that I prefer - that of a man who's assembled a found family and is proud of them. When so many pieces of non-comic Batman media completely ignore this aspect of the character, focusing on easier-to-convey interpretations like the noir-infused loner or the cold manipulator, it's refreshing to see a product embrace the human side of Bruce Wayne. I think in the world of video games, only the Telltale series (also severely underrated) displayed an equal appreciation for the man behind the cowl.

Good level design in a Soulslike is vital, and can serve as a nice justification of all of the backtracking you need to do after you die. The ideal is to make you feel satisfied that you've learned the ins and outs and shortcuts of an area, kind of like how you might feel satisfied learning the nuances of a new neighborhood in real life. A solid Soulslike level should scratch an "a-ha!" itch deep in the brain and feature branching paths that intersect at some point, bringing players back to their origins via a route they never imagined possible.

After putting 90 hours into Wuchang: Fallen Feathers for work, I'm convinced that it contains the best level design I've seen in a Soulslike in recent memory. This is a wonderful thing. But it's somewhat tempered by the fact that the game also contains some of the worst habits of a Soulslike (and modern gaming in general) that I've come across.

The intricate level design becomes apparent in the first major area, the village of Worship's Rise. There are so many pathways in and out of the village's corridors. Doors that lead to courtyards that lead to backrooms where you can nab an item, sneak up behind a heavy enemy for a backstab, or find a ladder that leads to a rooftop. Said rooftops are filled with more enemies who were previously inaccessible, and if you happen to cross enough rooftops, you'll find a staircase that leads to a hidden boss, a tree that you can kick down to take you back to the safe hub point, and a pathway that circuitously leads to the side door at the start of the region that was previously inaccessible.

It's all such a delicious example of Matryoshka doll design, if you will - routes hidden within other routes, all of which meld together to create a place that feels not just like an area in a video game, but a living community with all of the messy, roundabout vagaries that result from humans living in close proximity with other humans. It's these levels that I appreciate the most in Soulslikes, and they're part of the reason why I don't like Elden Ring as much as many other people - because when you take one of the hallmarks of this genre, which is tight area memorization, and then make it open world, the framework gets both watered down and overwhelming as a result.

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers certainly doesn't feature watered down levels for most of its playtime. The final area is the exception - it's far too "video gamey" in that you've got to pull levers to operate lifts and collect McGuffins to manifest platforms across wide-open spaces. That said, it's about as meh as the last, literally unfinished stretch of Black Myth: Wukong - the game that this will get endlessly compared to, seeing as they're both made-in-China Soulslikes.

What Wuchang does do is get carried away with "gotcha" moments, pasting them atop the aforementioned wonderfully designed levels to induce a sour taste in your mouth. An enemy jumping out from the shadows to gank you from behind, rubble that falls from above to wreck you unexpectedly, a sudden bridge collapse when you're desperately just trying to make it to the next save point. And then you get to the save shrines themselves, some of which are actual MIMICS that will kill you after you've just endured a boss! A certain amount of this stuff is par the course for the genre. But Wuchang gets perverse with it, exhibiting what someone on the game's Reddit accurately described as "too much malice."

Case in point - halfway through the game, you're dealing with a snow level. Hidden in the snow are landmines that will decimate your health if you step on them. But if you stand in the snow for too long, you'll also get the Frostbite status effect, which will wreck your Stamina. Meanwhile, enemies lurk throughout the landscape, including beefy rebel warlords who will carve you in half with their blades. On top of that, you'll occasionally run into smaller mooks piloting cannons from afar, who will fire at you when you least expect it. Oh, and then there are also snipers lurking on towers far above you, and these wankers will shoot exploding fire arrows at you, often around the same time as the cannons. Like, does this game actually need all of this nonsense happening at once? Could you at least remove one of those obstacles?

This "malice" extends to other aspects of Wuchang. The two most troublesome guides I had to pen for work were on all 24 bosses and all 4 endings. It's an ongoing problem in this genre that the playbase has gotten substantially good, and so devs resort to the same tricks they used back in the NES era to extend a game's lifespan. Make everything a pain in the ass, especially the bosses, and Wuchang takes that to heart. Some of these attackers have such nonstop hitstrings that you'll need to resort to cheese tactics to surmount them, and while the game's generous free respec system lets you switch up weapons at any time to develop a suitable build, I do feel like there are some battles that are just intended to unfairly wreck you.

NPC quests act similarly. The good ending is entirely dependent on fulfilling three questlines, none of which are signposted well, and there's a point of no return where you can accidentally lock yourself into the bad ending if you agree to help another NPC. He does indicate that assisting him will change the world irrevocably, but my main issue is that he stands at a very odd point in the level - on a road next to a save shrine, in front of a cave that you technically need to explore in order to encounter key story revelations. Why not put him on the other side of the cave instead? I can only assume that the devs were kind of hoping that some players would lock themselves into an unideal scenario, and once again, that's "malice" for you.

I point out all of these things only because Wuchang is probably one of my top games of 2025, simply on the strength of the overall level design alone. But when they got that aspect down so well, I can't help but wish they'd sidestepped the assholery prevalent in other parts of the game. These levels are already superb - you don't need to inject them with a thousand and one moments that only exist to upend the player and toss them about like a ragdoll. The same goes for the bosses and NPCs - all of the technically good elements are there, but there have been intentional wrenches tossed into the cogworks that cause aggravation and bafflement.

The titular protagonist Wuchang herself is emblematic of these foibles. She's very much a "this is what Mainland China audiences find attractive" heroine, and boasts skimpy outfits that were supposedly added to Wuchang: Fallen Feathers after its initial 2021 reveal was criticized and Stellar Blade picked up subsequent acclaim for featuring a nearly naked protagonist. Some of the sexy clothes make sense, since Wuchang's supposed to be a former pirate, but the ones that resemble nothing but underwear are goofy detractions from the overall vibe of the game, which is a serious tale about Wuchang trying to resurrect her dead sister. Considering the large amount of normal armor options that cover Wuchang up entirely, one has to wonder if the game's sex appeal was dialed up in the eleventh hour - and once again, the devs didn't have to do this. Their product, and the protagonist headlining said product, were both good enough.

After eight months of reading Berserk, I finally finished all 380 chapters that have currently been published. I probably could have come to the end sooner, but if I'm going to be very honest, I usually only read manga when I'm on the toilet. So that's why it took so long.

It was certainly something to have Guts as my companion during 32 weeks, a digit that is close to the number of years that Berserk has been publishing. The series originally started around 1988, with a prototype story that set the stage for what would later become the self-proclaimed "strongest fantasy comic." I was born that year, so this manga is as old as I am, and it's hard to find a similar dark fantasy comic that started back then and is still unfinished. I suppose Bastard!! is a close relative, but Bastard!! doesn't ever seem to be coming back from hiatus.

On the subject of hiatuses, I feel lucky that I binged Berserk all at once, because if I had taken to it in the late '90s or 2000s - when most English-reading fans probably dove in, thanks to the 1997 anime adaptation - the slog might've been too much for me. (How many years did Guts and friends spend on that damn boat? Eight? In retrospect, it's funny. If I had been dealing with it at the time, I might've lost my mind.) And then there's the fact that Berserk has outlived its creator, Kentaro Miura, who passed away in 2021 at the all-too-young age of 54 - a testament to how unhealthy the life of an eternally overworked mangaka is.

Berserk is a rare beast, a longrunning work that outlived its creator and is now being finished by people close to him. It's also a work that has evolved over time, and returning to those early chapters after having consumed the whole thing is tough. There's so much mistreatment of women, such gritty '80s violence, so many instances of a young Miura including something brash that probably seemed cool to a guy in his 20s. I wrote about Goblin Slayer some time ago, and how that franchise received criticism for its shock value reliance on sexual assault. Berserk is guilty of the same faults, and takes them to deeper levels. After all, this is a series that has its opening panels begin with the protagonist in mid-thrust, copulating with a woman who transforms into a demon. Then she's called a "bitch" and has her head blasted off via Guts' prosthetic arm cannon.

If I'd read Berserk in my hornier and angrier years, I probably would've been fascinated by this stuff. As an adult, though, I look at these scenes and realize that they probably set the stage for many of the bad habits that have emerged in seinen manga. Even though Miura's supposedly said he regrets the opening sex scene, there's still the fact that the edginess continues through the Golden Age Arc, the series' fan-favorite saga that tells Guts' origin. Guts himself is molested by an older member of his mercenary party as a child, and in a depressing combination of problematic stereotypes, the guy happens to be one of the few Black characters in the entire manga. Meanwhile, there are countless scenes of Casca, the franchise's female lead, getting violated and shoved around by a wide variety of saliva-dripping monsters.

I struggle with Casca, who represents several of the flaws that exist in Berserk. She starts with potential, but is also the typical strong-willed female character that many male authors resort to because it's easier to write such a trope rather than create someone realistic. She later becomes traumatized after she is raped by the demonic reincarnation of Griffith, Guts' androgynous rival who is a compelling villain, but also remains somewhat underdeveloped to this day. This scene is rendered with Casca in titilating poses all the while and is pretty disgusting. Following this incident, Casca becomes nonverbal for much of the manga - and while there are moments of brilliance that come in the later chapters, such as when Schierke and Farnese navigate her dreams and put fragments of her shattered soul back into place, she's almost always in some kind of distress, a plot device for Guts and Griffith to conveniently go to war over. Don't get me started on how she's also apparently the mother of the Moonlight Boy, the unborn child of Guts and Casca who for some reason has taken control of the body that Griffith incarnated in.

There's a lot of stuff in Berserk like the Moonlight Boy that isn't explained very well. While many devoted fans make it their life's work to break down Miura's plotting with university-style essays, the sheer truth is that he was working on this comic for 30+ years, and making it up as he went along. Berserk's strength, then, is not so much the plot, which spends a lot of time meandering around after the Golden Age Arc is complete. Nor is it the characters - though aside from my issues with Casca and Griffith, I do really like Guts, Schierke, and the others. (Even Chestnut Puck - I love me some Chestnut Puck.) No, where Berserk excels is offering a feeling of growth when you look at its beginning versus its current state. This growth happens gradually, though it becomes especially noticable in the Millennium Falcon Arc (chapter 170 or so), which is less edgy than everything that came before. As Guts becomes more than a tortured warrior obsessed with ripping and tearing, the vibes of Miura's work begin to mellow with him.

This is not a bad thing. You can't always wallow in darkness without any semblance of light, and a mangaka cannot work on the same story for decades without maturing as a human being. Berserk showcases what I assume was the maturation of its creator with Guts slowly gathering a party of like-minded damaged souls - or rather, a nakama, to use a Japanese word referring to a group with familial bonds. The story also brings in more fairy tale elements to balance the dark fantasy, and even though we never really find out what the Hellraiser-inspired God Hand are all about, we do get scenes showing Guts learning to trust again, especially as he controls the insiduous Berserker armor with the aid of Schrieke's magic. What was once an angry young protagonist developed by a young author becomes someone deeper, and the world around him grows as well.

That said, Miura is no longer with us, and Berserk's recent chapters have once again seen Guts falling into the depths of despair. But the growth that the manga accumulated over time is still there, carried on by the Studio Gaga artists continuing Miura's legacy. Gore, violence, and the occasional naked woman continue to dot the comic, but everything feels somewhat more controlled and uderstated rather than explotative. Berserk's recent artwork, as of Chapter 380, is even more rooted in shoujo traditions than ever before. This was always the case for Griffith, but the manga has more of an expressive, almost watercolory feel these days that is such a far cry from the hard and harsh seinen roots that it was so entrenched in from the start.

Hand-in-hand with Berserk's evolution is the foundational legacy it inspired, and I would be remiss to not highlight the subsequent works which bathed in Miura's vision. Final Fantasy VII's Cloud, with his monumental Buster Sword, is Guts in a thinner, blonder frame. Elden Ring's Blaidd resembles the Berserker armor, and there's even a giant golden tree in the background of the entire game, which is literally something that Griffith raised in the manga. Finally, the aforementioned Goblin Slayer, while taking most of its influences from D&D, Sword World, and other TTRPGs, does indeed feature another not-Guts fighter with a big sword, and it probably wouldn't exist in quite the same way were it not for Miura's manga.

At the end of the day, I'm probably less enamored of Berserk than many others. It has tremendous faults, ranging from its treatment of women to a plethora of plot elements that never really go anywhere. But it remains a seminal project almost the same age as I am, with influences that have permeated the fabric of many of the media experiences that I enjoy. I am glad that I spent these last eight months reading it, and part of me is sad that my toilet time is now free of the severe angst - and eventual acceptance - that Guts provided. I hope that his story may be finished sometime in the far-flung future, and I wish that one day he'll find some semblance of peace...like "buried memories from the days of an early spring."

Not too long ago, I married Maru, the nerdy Stardew Valley girl who makes robots. I then proceeded to get her final 14 heart relationship event, after which I lost interest in Stardew Valley.

This has happened to me before. 20 years ago, when I was into Harvest Moon 64, I chased Karen incessantly, giving her all the random gifts that I could forage in the forests and spending my evening hours in the bar with her at the expense of my farm. Upon winning her heart, I stopped playing the game.

Back then, I liked to joke that this represented some sort of cad-like behavior in myself - that the chase was all that mattered to me. But as an actual married fella these days, I know this isn't the case. Rather, I've realized that I enjoy Stardew Valley (and by extension the Harvest Moon games that inspired it) not so much as the cute farming game it mostly is, but as a relationship game. And when I say relationships, I don't just mean the ones that occur with Maru and the other dating options. I mean the whole idea of moving into a small country town, making friends with the villagers, and becoming a fixture of the community. All of that stuff vibes with me way more than the act of growing turnips, milking cows, or building silos so I can grow turnips more efficiently and milk even more cows.

To explain this in more detail, many serious Stardew players post pictures on Reddit showing their pimped-out farms that are entirely automated with turnips that grow themselves. My farm, in contrast, is a bit of a mess - it's semi-automated, but I've got trees planted far too close together, my crop arrangements aren't aligned, and the western sector of my farm continues to remain a shitshow because I just can't be arsed to clear away those rocks and stray weeds. All this aside, my farm is good enough, and I don't feel like continously improving it because it's not the meat of the game to me.

The meat, rather, is those aforementioned connections made with villagers, all of whom are kind enough to show me their current affection level with a handy little colored dot representing a heart in the righthand corner of their text boxes. Over the process of wooing Maru, I managed to max out the hearts of her parents, her brother Sebastian, all of the villagers who live in proximity of her family's mountain home (hello Linus, you swell hobo), and almost all of the other bachelors and bachelorettes, who proceeded to hit on me shamelessly after Maru and I went steady, because that's just how this game works. (Everyone lusts for the farmer.)

And so, with most of the townsfolk that I cared about either in love with me or enamored with me as a close friend, my interest in the game dwindled. Oh, there's still stuff to do in Stardew Valley, like finishing the community center or getting a 100% score, and for a while I considered both of those challenges. But the community center is infamous for the busywork required to complete it, and it forces me to pay attention to my seasonal crop output, fishing catches, and recipes in a way that requires min/maxing or guide-consulting, which is something I feel reluctant to engage with in a game about retiring from the stress and monotony of city life for the simplicity of the countryside. Once the center is complete, as well, nobody in town actually uses it, which is perhaps the most lamented fact on the Stardew Reddit. And as for the 100% score, I'm just not built to achievement-hunt and do every little thing for the allure of getting the 'perfect' game these days.

Stardew Valley also carries over an unfortunate habit from most of the Harvest Moons. Once you marry someone, their personality slowly diminishes as their story reaches a conclusion. This is fairly typical for video games, which have never managed to represent marriage as something that's a beginning rather than an end. Yes, you can have kids with your spouse, but those kids only grow to toddler age and end up waddling around your farmhouse for all eternity, only slightly more interesting than furniture. And I don't really want to have kids with Maru anyway - I just want to manifest the outcome of her 14 heart event, which was a cute astronomy date where we reminisced about her robot MARILDA, who gained sentience and decided to fly through the cosmos. At the end of it, we watched a falling star, and I told her I'd made a wish to grow old with her, and she said she had the same wish. But this wish shall never play out.

I say all of this with some facetiousness. Obviously, Stardew Valley is a very good project made by one very hardworking guy, ConcernedApe, who put years of his heart and soul into it. Marriage was just one piece of the puzzle for him to implement into a game that needed to juggle enough elements to appeal to fans of Harvest Moon, Rune Factory, and heck, even Legend of the River King. But as someone who loves the relationship side of these life sims more than anything else, I simply daydream of more. I chose Maru because she's the closest Stardew character who resembles my real-life biracial wife, and as one of only two POC characters in the game, I demand to know more about her existence as a half-Black resident of a mostly white town. On that note, what are her thoughts on being neurodivergent and having astronomy and robots as her special interests? (Yes, her dad Demetrius is most certainly on the spectrum, and Maru probably is too.) What about her relationship with her half-brother Sebastian, who resents her as the child who receives more fatherly affection?

All of these character traits gleamed at me as I got to know Maru, and alas, they remain mere gleams that are not further developed. Once again, I suppose it's a bit much to ask for Stardew Valley to delve into topics like race relations, since this is after all a very white game due to what I assume are the life experiences of ConcernedApe. (Maru herself is a 'Black girls do STEM' sterotype, admittedly.) But the fact that Stardew even bothers to bring up these topics at all makes me see the lovely potential that exists beyond the stars, and I wish that potential could be cultivated.

If I were to turn all of these hopes into reality, I suppose my ideal Stardew Valley would be one that still looks the same, but doesn't place end goals on farm success. (Indeed, I think you could replace farming with a wide number of professions - I'd personally love to play as a bookstore owner or libarian in a small town.) Rather, the finale would depend on raising those little heart levels in everyone's text boxes, creating community to the fullest, finding friendships that don't always exist in real life, and loving someone with all of their warts and drama - through spats with their family, realizations of their deeper self, and wishes that may never fully develop. Until we finally grow old and die together. The closest Harvest Moon ever got to managing this was with A Wonderful Life, but to quote an old meme, I think we can go deeper.

So that, in a nutshell, is why I married Maru and stopped playing Stardew Valley. To me, my game more or less reached its natural finale when the two of us smooched under the stars and thought about a future where we grew old and crusty together. That's the future that I long for with my real-life waifu...and I guess I kinda want it with my in-game waifu as well.

I just finished Vagrant Story, a game that came out in the heyday of Squaresoft in 2000. I never played it 25 years ago, though I was aware of how Famitsu had given it a perfect score. I was also aware of its excellent translation and Metal Gear Solid-turnt-medieval cutscenes. But the game itself escaped my reach, which is perhaps fortunate as I doubt I would've been able to complete or appreciate it as a kid.

As an adult in his late 30s, I find Vagrant Story utterly compelling, perhaps because it is different from much of Square's output. Project head Yasumi Matsuno mentioned several times in interviews that it wasn't meant for everyone, and it certainly subverts the streamlining that defined the Final Fantasy games around the same era. Instead, the influences present are older and feel more primal. If I were to trace Vagrant Story's lineage, I'd point to early Japanese PC titles like Dragon Slayer, any number of Sokoban games, and Wizardry.

Above all else, nowhere in Vagrant Story is the JRPG party of teens and young adults full of pluck. Instead, you are a one man army named Ashley Riot who declares "I am the reinforcements" while wearing assless chaps designed by illustrator Akihiko Yoshida (probably better known for his Nier art nowadays; oh wow, here's a post I wrote on his work ages ago when this blog was but a baby). Ashley has little in the way of pluck - his is a grim mission into the cursed city of Lea Monde to rescue a duke's son and stop a cult, and though there are enough twists and turns along the way to boggle one's brain, Vagrant Story remains a dungeon crawler through and through. Expect to vanquish dozens of foes and suffer the occasional block pushing puzzle as you traverse rooms with gothic names like "Repent, O ye Sinners."

The fact that each room is meticulously named serves as a nice representation of the detail under Vagrant Story's hood. I often had trouble understanding complex systems in games as a kid - chalk this up to my childhood diet of point and click adventures, where story was king - and while I wouldn't say I'm necessarily a fan of them in this day and age, I can at least appreciate dense mechanics after having worked on so many analog equivalents in my career as a tabletop RPG designer.

Vagrant Story's systems bang and clang with a fury, reminding me of a Palladium TTRPG from the '80s with a gargantuan chart of weapon combinations that you need to look up in order to figure out how to optimize your damage. Hot damn, this game happens to have just that. Weapons are, in fact, the bread and butter of Ashley's existence, for Agent Riot does not level up himself. Rather, his weapons level up depending on what enemies they slice and dice, and all weapons are divided into a series of types (blunt, edged, piercing), specialize in harming a different class of enemy (beast, dragon, evil, human, phantom, undead), and possess an affinity (physical, air, fire, earth, water, light, dark) that's absolutely the stat you want to maximize.

You'll run into countless workshops throughout Vagrant Story that kind of function like the save rooms in Resident Evil, playing relaxing music and letting Ashley take a brief breather. But instead of merely capturing your progress, these workshops let you forge and combine new weapons, mashing up the classes and affinities of your killing tools to create new combinations that are sometimes awesome. The game uses a complex formula for combining weapons that requires much trial and error, or at least consulting that chart I mentioned, but it pays off in the end when you do manage to construct a masterpiece. Upon commandeering your customized weapons into battle, the fact that you put blood, sweat, and tears into them fosters a unique attachment that goes beyond any random pickup you could find in a chest.

For instance, everyone on the internet acknowledges that you need to have at least three weapons of each type to finish Vagrant Story. I personally beat the game with seven. You have the option to name them all, and mine were dubbed Backwoodsman (a heavy axe), Berserk (a greatsword), Exorcist (a heavy mace), Gobsmasher (a mace), Headshot (a crossbow), Sting (a sword), and Windpiercer (a spear). I tried to consolidate them at one point, but I couldn't do it. Vagrant Story's obtuse weapon mechanics had demanded a certain degree of systems mastery from me, and the result was me falling in love with my motley collection of blades (plus one projectile shooter) to the point that they had gained a degree of sentience in my mind.

Beyond blacksmithing, Vagrant Story's combat is also an intriguing beast, featuring a wireframe around Ashley similar to the one that surrounded Aya Brea in Parasite Eve. You can target different body parts of an enemy, and reducing the HP of each part will affect that enemy's stats. Bash the head to bits, for example, and said enemy won't be able to use spells, since their intelligence will be shot. Attack their legs, and their speed will be reduced. Meanwhile, foes can target Ashley's limbs in a similar manner. To inflict the most damage and defend to the utmost, you'll need to master Chain and Defense Abilities, which are assigned to each button and need to be pressed at the exact second an attack hits, a la Paper Mario, but more grimdark. You can technically keep chaining attacks forever, but doing so increases Ashley's Risk meter, which greatens his chances for dealing crits but increases the damage he takes from enemies while decreasing his accuracy. It's all a balancing dance, between Risk and every other system under the hood, and I haven't even talked about Break Arts or Magic here.

Systems, systems, systems. Vagrant Story has a lot of them, to the point where you really should play the game with a guide for maximum enjoyment. I actually went and ordered the excellent Piggyback strategy guide from eBay (expensive but worth it) after deciding that I was going to play this, and I recommend that anyone tackling Vagrant Story today take a similar approach. Because let's be real, at the moment the only accessible way to experience this game is via emulation. (I played it on the Steam Deck, and it works like a dream.)

Even with a guide, though, it's possible to make it to the final boss with an underpowered weapon that only does 5 points of damage. I mention this to stress that there are definite cracks in the veneer of Vagrant Story's plethora of systems. But the game possesses the conviction which made me want to learn these systems, and it was certainly helped in this regard by the story, which was expertly translated by Alexander O. Smith. There's some important background info hidden in the Japan-only Ultimania guide that was never translated into English outside of fansites, and in a truly baffling decision, you'll miss a vital opening movie that clarifies Ashley's mission if you press Start too quickly on the title screen. But by far and large, Ashley's tale is a gripping one that delves into how people curate the memories they choose to believe, and even invent new memories in order to deal with trauma. Anyone who played Final Fantasy Tactics knows that Yasumi Matsuno has always used games to tell thought-provoking stories, and the stuff on display here is so good that if you don't want to play the game, you should at least watch the cutscenes in a compiled two hour format on YouTube.

Vagrant Story has yet to receive a sequel that develops its loose threads, though it feels like some spinoff concepts made their way into Crimson Shroud, Matsuno's 3DS experiment that required you to use a stylus to throw digital dice. Sequel or no, Vagrant Story deserves at least a remaster to streamline its clunkier edges and make it accessible to a modern audience who, like me, would probably appreciate it more than the reception it got in 2000. Mockups of such a remaster regularly appear on the Vagrant Story subreddit, which still fizzles with the fervor that only a cult classic can create. And lengthy analysis is all over YouTube, including an excellent series by Resonant Arc, who break down both the game's mechanics and plot in several must-watch videos that greatly helped my playthrough.

I learned of 'natural fantasy' as a subgenre the other day after seeing the Fabula Ultima Natural Fantasy Atlas, which defines it as any work that features a connection between nature and humanity. Imagine green-infused organic trappings, references to the planet as Gaea, cautionary tales of climate change, lush forest settings, and protagonists who are druids, rangers, friends to animals, etc.

Avowed, an excellent action RPG made by Obsidian Entertainment, is one of the best natural fantasy media pieces I've seen in recent memory. The game seems to have gotten a good reception since its February release, but I'm of the mind that more people should play it. Set in the backdrop of the Pillars of Eternity duology, a world that feels like a Game Master's homebrew setting in the best way possible, Avowed casts the player as an envoy for a far-reaching empire who's supposed to check its colony of the Living Lands. This frontier island is suffering the effects of the Dreamscourge, a virus that both destroys minds and makes multicolored mushrooms pop up on everyone's skin.

Despite the terrible trappings of colonization, I find myself drawn to its real world historical paths and consequences, and the same is true for fictional tales. Avowed lets you subvert the role of the imperial lapdog, and you can be as empathic towards the Living Landers as you want to be, and even openly defy your orders. But beyond that, the game also delves into the idea of the Living Lands as its literal namesake - a breathing entity that's manifested an ecological scourge as a direct result of the colonial efforts of the occupying party.

As someone who's been working on a tabletop game for the last year and a half that deals with themes of ecological change (Mappa Mundi, go check out our recently-funded Kickstarter), I find these concepts extremely compelling. Avowed takes them to interesting places, and by the end of the game, the player's influence stretches beyond that of a mere political tool, becoming either a savior of nature or at the very least an instigator of change in the wilds.

All of this is the epitome of natural fantasy, I think. Avowed is far from the only property to investigate these things - Breath of the Wild showcased a similar flavor in video games, Princess Mononoke and pretty much all of Hayao Miyazaki's work does the same in the realm of anime, and I'll insert another shameless plug here for Mappa Mundi as an up and comer in the tabletop space. But Avowed does so with a wonderfully beautiful sheen - mushrooms really are so prevalant everywhere, those with mycophobia should be aware - and some of the best designs for dryads and other plantlike humanoids that I've seen in recent memory.

I was not aware of the term 'natural fantasy' when I first began working on Mappa Mundi or playing Avowed, and I'm not sure how 'official' this subgenre classification is. But I realize now that I've always been pulled towards these tales. The Mana/Seiken Densetsu franchise remains one of my fondest JRPG series, with an overarching plot that revolves around a world fed by magic from a giant Mana Tree. My first D&D character was a ranger, my first World of Warcraft character was a druid, and I've typically gravitated towards all of the other classes that I mentioned at the start of this post. And when I even think back to how I first fell in love with the fantasy genre in the hands of Tolkien, it was the pastoral existence of hobbits in a make believe version of nature-infused England that got me. (As I get older, I lust for the life of a hobbit more and more, second breakfasts included.)

Musing on this reality makes me chuckle, as I wouldn't consider myself an 'outdoorsy' or 'nature' person in day-to-day life, at least as far as those terms are defined by most people. I don't like going on hikes, and while I've been camping before as a boy scout, I tend to prefer the comfort of my own bed above all else. But perhaps there are more ways than one to feel an appreciation towards the planet we occupy, just as there are oodles upon oodles of fantasy subgenres waiting to be defined by products like Fabula Ultima (which really is a great TTRPG; go play it). In my case, I'm very happy to study my appreciation for natural fantasy through Avowed and similar tales, which in turn make me feel both the pulsations of this living land and the desire to save and serve it, in my own deeply personal way.

The Vampire Survivors DLC Ode to Castlevania ended up as one of my most entertaining gameplay experiences of 2024. This took me by surprise, as I was late to hop on the Vampire Survivors train, and didn't play the game until earlier this year. I'm not sure why I avoided it, considering how much I dig Castlevania (hey, here's a link to an old piece I wrote here about how the series cured my childhood fear of vampires), but it probably has something to do with automatically distrusting anything that gets too popular, and then thinking I am somehow superior for avoiding the mainstream.

That aside, Vampire Survivors is really a great game that's full of Newgrounds-style pluck, and it's precisely the sort of thing that a kid with no money to play real Castlevanias would've devoted their life to back in 2001. I kind of was that kid, considering that I first experienced all of the Castlevania games via emulation, but I digress. The ability to pimp out your character with all manner of add-ons and then stand in the middle of the screen as legions of foes try to get close, only to be bashed backwards by your spinning auras of bullshit, is tremendously entertaining. My fave survivor is Poppea Pecorina, who sings magic energy pillars into existence and apparently has a naughty name in Italian. But nobody in the OG Vampire Survivors roster can compete with the thrill of actually commanding Belmonts and the other associated protagonists of Konami's whip-slinging franchise, and that's what the Ode to Castlevania DLC brings to the fray.

The question of "who's your favorite Castlevania character" is one that renders tribalism equivalent to kids arguing about Batman versus Spider-Man on the playground, or maybe SNES versus Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. But it actually doesn't matter here, because almost all of the Castlevania characters to ever star in a game are on display in this DLC, either from the getgo or as secret unlockables after you "beat" the main map with Richter Belmont. And yes, mainstays like Richter, Trevor, Simon, and Alucard are all present and accounted for, but I'm more intrigued by the lesser-known and underappreciated characters, who have always been my preferred ones. (There I go again, deviating from what's popular.)

For instance, Juste, the Belmont who supposedly starred in the "worst" Game Boy Advance game (eff that noise), is very good, has a rocking remixed theme (all of the remixes here are top notch, to be fair), and boasts a pleasant nod to his role as the premiere Belmont mage thanks to an item called Belnades' Spellbook, which lets him spam magic like a beast. Then there's Sonia, the one female Belmont who starred in a game retconned by Koji Igarashi (also eff that noise), who is finally given the star status that she deserves (as well as a pair of trousers) with an OP skillset that makes her power rise the more meat she consumes. Now that's a Belmont matriarch for you!

However, it is the truly obscure cuts that make me bounce up and down in my seat whenever I'm playing Vampire Survivors: Ode to Castlevania. I'm talking about inclusions like Quincy Morris, who only tangentially holds a connection to 1994's Castlevania: Bloodlines/The New Generation. Bloodlines is a personal favorite of mine as one of the best games on the Genesis, but I also like it as a title that dipped into funky continuity by tying Konami's "Conan versus Dracula" games with Bram Stoker's original Dracula novel. Quincy Morris is supposed to be the same Quincy Morris (spelled Quincey in the book) who showed up in the latter half of Dracula - you know, the part where the novel stops being gothic horror and becomes a rollocking D&D adventure. He's a Texan hanging out in Europe who just happens to have a bigass Bowie knife that he later uses to behead Dracula, and he was only referenced in the instruction manual of Bloodlines/The New Generation. Instead you played as his son John Morris, who would later go on to sire his own offspring named Jonathan Morris in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin.

All of this lore is well and dandy, but Quincy has technically never appeared in an actual Castlevania game, nor has he had a sprite of his own...until now. Vampire Survivors did it, of all games, and now Quincy has been canonised as a dashing Texas bastard with a black hat and a...shuriken as his default weapon. I still think they should've stuck a Bowie knife into the game, but seeing as how there's already a standard knife, I see why they didn't. And hey, if Quincy can pop up in Europe in the original Dracula book just to fight the undead for the heck of it, who's to say that he can't pop up in Castlevania canon with a ninja star as his go-to projectile? The Morris side of the Belmont family line is clearly a weeaboo lineage!

I mention this attention to detail to outline the good work that poncle, the little company that could, has done with Ode to Castlevania. What started as a project that was intentionally derivative has evolved into something not only officially sanctioned by Konami, but a game that’s making its own contributions to Castlevania lore by ensuring that fallen-in-the-cracks characters like Quincy get their moment. This is especially important in the weird era we live in, where Castlevania is a very hot property thanks to the Netflix show but one that hasn't really had a game since Lords of Shadow 2, which was a decade ago and unfortunately poorly received. A few years ago, I would've said that Konami just doesn't care about their IP any more outside of what they can squeeze from pachinko machines, but seeing as how they published a remake of Silent Hill 2 courtesy of Blooper Team earlier this year, who knows. Maybe they're just waiting for the right studio to farm out the next Castlevania revival to.

If poncle ever wants to make a game beyond Vampire Survivors, I'd say that they'd be the group perfect for the job. As it stands, though, Ode to Castlevania probably wins the title of the best Castlevania game of the last ten years, and even if that's a low bar to clear, what we have here is very, very good and the epitome of fan service. I'm glad I stopped avoiding Vampire Survivors and finally dove in, and now I've got an eye towards checking out that Contra DLC from a few years back too...

For the last month and a half my gaming life has revolved around Black Myth: Wukong. I have covered it extensively in my day job, and I urge everyone to check out our exhaustive walkthroughs, which are darn good if I say so myself. Job aside, playing Black Myth has been something of a thought exercise in how I feel about my Chineseness. This is a big, sexy Soulslike and China's first AAA game to win international acclaim, not just from the niche audiences who know what "wuxia" means, but from white people who probably assumed that this was another Japanese game at first. Put another way, mainstream YouTubers are now making lore videos for Black Myth that are explanations of Journey to the West references, and it's wild seeing them talk about Bodhisattva Lingji and why Nezha needs to be in the DLC.

This phenomenon makes me realize that Black Myth: Wukong is one of those rare products that incites pride in my Chinese heritage, despite the fact that in almost all circumstances, I identify as half-Taiwanese instead of Chinese. That's a choice (and a political one), but in spite of these feelings I still wrote a goofy Steam review of this game after my first few hours, exclaiming that it made me "adopt a Beijing accent, speak in 4-character proverbs and sip tea under chrysanthemum trees while composing poetry about the glory of ZHONGGUO."

I was probably inspired to write this review thanks to the excellent Chinese dub, which is indeed full of Mainland accents. (The English dub, for what it's worth, is also very good and full of British accents, which I prefer over American ones for something like this.) Honestly, I found myself surprised that I was so enamored, as I haven't fully read Journey to the West. My one attempt to consume the Arthur Waley translation as a kid failed, and when I listened to the Julia Lovell version via audiobook a few months ago, I found it a bit lacking. (Turns out audio isn't the best way to consume a 16th-century collection of Monster of the Week tales where the moral often boils down to "Buddhism is the best!")

I'm not alone in this regard, though, as most Chinese folks - especially those in the diaspora - probably also experienced Journey to the West via alternate media. In my case, Dragonball was the big property that brought Wukong into my consciouness (albeit via his Japanese name of Goku), and I will perish upon the hill that the first arc of Akira Toriyama's manga is actually a solid interpretation of the story. I was also oddly obsessed with the PS1 games Monkey Magic and Saiyuki: Journey West, and at one point, I attempted to make a game in Klik & Play where I edited a sprite from Conquest of the Crystal Palace into wannabe Wukong. I never made more than this sprite and a makeshift title screen, but my heart was certainly into it for that brief period.

Frankly, you don't need to be familiar with Journey to the West to enjoy Black Myth: Wukong, though some knowledge of the subject matter does help to comprehend the game's plot, which is communicated in the usual Soulslike way. By the time of the game's release, more players were probably attuned to Black Myth's controversies instead of its inspiration, to be honest. There were the mysognistic comments the devs had made, the report by IGN translating these remarks, the limitations on streamers, and the culture war that resulted when chuds decided that legitimate criticism of this game was too "woke." Amidst all of this was the fact that as one of the few Chinese games to obtain global appeal, Black Myth: Wukong naturally became a cornerstone of nationalism. "This game is China's pride and joy! It wasn't made for Westerners with DEI requirements! Blah blah!"

The discourse was deeply disheartening. Frankly, it made me not want to like Black Myth: Wukong. I'd rather support something that isn't embroiled in woman-disparaging rhetoric or tankie apologism, and when it comes to made-in-China games, I'm more partial to anything made-in-Taiwan, like Detention or any of the other great projects made by Red Candle Games.

But those games don't have the big budget and glitz of Black Myth: Wukong. They don't have a hidden ending where the Destined One transforms into a gigantic Stone Monkey and punches Erlang Shen in the face. And they don't quite have this phenomenon that's motivated consumers into mentioning Chinese mythology and culture in the same sentences where they're namedropping Elden Ring. That's something special that makes my heart shine, and once again, we return to the fact that I normally identify as half-Taiwanese.

To identify as Taiwanese is to forever be in the shadow of Mainland China, a nation that forces the name "Chinese Taipei" upon an island that it says it will claim by force if necessary. To be Taiwanese American, in my case, is to constantly be assaulted by US media harping on about cross-strait relations, and rolling my eyes at "China Watchers" who play wargames where they move pieces around a board to simulate a hostile takeover of Formosa.

Yet, political pain aside, Taiwan does have a connected lineage with its larger neighbor. And Journey to the West is one of those shared mythologies, with Wukong not only capturing the imaginations of the denizens of China and Greater China, but also the mind of just about everyone in East and Southeast Asia. There's something about a Monkey King springing from a rock that makes people temporarily unite, and I admit that at the end of 105 hours, I am one of those persons.

I had to devote a lot of time to Black Myth: Wukong because of work. But even if I hadn't been paid to play it, I'd still consider it very good. It's embroiled in kaka almost as bitter as the vehemence that spans the Taiwan Strait, but it's a fine game, say what you will about separating art from the artist - or in this case, politics from the monkey and his quest to recover Buddhist scriptures. I hope that the discourse doesn't repeat itself in time for the inevitable sequel, and I hope the devs learn from their errors and stop being shits to women.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is finally out on Steam today, and everyone should play it. I'm really hoping that a large audience can finally appreciate this game for what it's worth, because I feel like it received a double whammy of negativity upon reveal and not-so-high sales upon release.

Part of this unfortunate combo is due to gamers being crappy, while the rest is Ubisoft being Ubisoft. When The Lost Crown's first trailer hit in 2023, it initially seemed like it had replaced the long-dormant, long-awaited, long-troubled remake of the most-loved PoP game, The Sands of Time. That remake has since been rebooted for a release date in 2026, but it didn't stop some from lamenting that Sands of Time 2.0 had been ditched for a sidescroller. "Looks like a mobile game," cried members of the YouTube peanut gallery. Others focused their ire on the main character, who is Black, and the trailer's accompanying music, which was a rap song. I read at least two comments that said "More like Prince of Wakanda," which made me want to slap a bitch through my screen.

But then the game was released, and it got lots of positive press. As someone who'd felt the burning need to defend The Lost Crown from folks making "Prince of Wakanda" comments, I was enthused to see them eat crow. Alas, Ubisoft made the decision to release the PC version of the game not on Steam, but on the meh Epic Games Store and on their Ubisoft Connect launcher, a piece of software that nobody uses because they want to. And so, despite strong reviews, The Lost Crown came out of the gate slightly hampered.

At last this error can be rectified, and hopefully everyone can see that this is the PoP revival we needed. Even though series creator Jordan Mechner wasn't specifically involved in The Lost Crown, this game feel like a natural evolution of the formula he established in 1989 right off of the heels of Karateka. PoP started out as a tough-as-nails platformer with an emphasis on exploration and cinematic scenes - it only makes sense that it should transition into a tough-as-nails Metroidvania with style and storytelling influenced by anime.

Prior to this game's reveal, the PoP franchise had been floundering, trying in vain to recapture the mainstream appeal that it had snagged during the Sands of Time trilogy in the mid-2000s. Proof of the struggles to reimagine the franchise have emerged in since-leaked videos showing reboots that were thrown away by Ubisoft in favor of more Assassin's Creed games. (Hi, I'm one of those folks who remembers that the first Assassins' Creed was supposed to be a PoP spinoff, and resents the fact that the Prince floundered in obscurity for over a decade while AssCreed got over two dozen games.)

But the wait was worth it. Ubisoft Montpellier (the one team at Ubisoft that I like, since they made Rayman and seem to rise up every five years to drop a banger before disappearing back into the mist) reinvented PoP by looking at what AssCreed had become and then veering in an entirely different direction. Instead of an overbudget open world experience littered with microtransactions, we have simply a good ass video game that focuses on the trademarks of the Prince - sweet parkour moves, tricky combat, and time travel shenanigans.

That said, you don't actually play as full-on nobility in The Lost Crown - you play as Sargon, a cocky member of an elite team of bodyguards dubbed the Immortals. These larger-than-life anime figures are tasked to go to Mount Qaf to rescue the Prince, and Sargon's connection to the title "Prince of Persia" is interesting and not the obvious "oh, he's just the Prince in disguise" twist that I expected.

All of this is to say that the plot of The Lost Crown is solid, and there's a certain amount of respect paid to the source material that goes beyond the "vaguely inspired by the Arabian Nights" schtick of every other game in the franchise. As should be the case in 2024 for something with "Persia" in its title, actual people of Middle Eastern descent worked on this, and apparently the Farsi dub is excellent.

As for Sargon, his design does boast the Killmonger dreadlocks that have become a tropey shorthand for "cool Black guy" in media. But aside from this, he's great, and he really grows over the course of the story. Everything about his dual-wielding fighting style to his double jump is excellent, and you'll need to master those moves to make it through The Lost Crown's boss fights, which are intricate, multistaged affairs that toss Sargon in arenas against huge foes who have their names presented in ALL CAPS along with a subtitle - for instance, "JAHANDAR, Guardian of the Citadel."

I'd been cocurrently working through Elden Ring for my fulltime job of writing game guides as I started playing The Lost Crown, and after dying for the eighth time against Jahandar, I realized that this game's emphasis on bosses combined with Sargon's ability to quaff healing potions a limited number of times (and take a limited number of hits) was awfully Soulsy. That said, The Lost Crown isn't a full-on Soulslike, but there's borrowed DNA here. Aside from the bosses and healing, collectible lore items that reveal extended backstory lie in abundance, and Sargon's moveset demands the sort of attention and mastery that Soulslikes promote. There have been some stunning combo videos showcasing everything he can do in combat, and outside of fights, expect to make Sargon navigate through some absurd platforming sections replete with spikes farther than the eye can see.

Honestly, there were a few instances in The Lost Crown that made me curse modern gaming's love affair with Soulslikes and grunt, "WHY DO GAMES THESE DAYS HAVE TO BE SO HARD." Then again, I was playing on Hero difficulty level, which is a step up from Normal and meant to be tough, so I have nobody but myself to blame. And the original PoP was no walk in the park either, even if you can speedrun it in less than a half hour these days if you know what you're doing. Overall, the challenge level in The Lost Crown is fair, especially because the game presents you with a wide array of accessibility options, and you can lower the difficulty at any time.

I think if you've played Hollow Knight, which I've seen The Lost Crown getting compared with a lot, you'll be ready for all of the obstacles that Sargon faces. I haven't, despite obtaining it via one Steam sale or another several years ago, but now I want to. Both games share an absolutely huge map in common, and as someone who enjoys Metroidvanias but is mostly used to the two franchises that gave the genre its title - Castlevania and Metroid - seeing Mount Qaf spread out before me on the map screen in a seemingly endless fashion was way larger than anything I'd previously witnessed. Games today, man. They're not just hard, they're big.

I for one am grateful that PoP is back in action with such a big title, and with the recent release of The Rogue Prince of Persia only a few months after this game, suddenly I am inundated with more Persia content than I've had in years. Maybe Ubisoft's gearing up to milk this franchise AssCreed style, which seems to be a possibility that I'll be forced to call them out on if it ever occurs.

Around the end of last year I made the decision to get into Goblin Slayer, and I've now gone through every chapter of the manga released in English, including all of the spin-offs. I've also skimmed parts of the light novels and anime, and I even did a readthrough of the Goblin Slayer roleplaying game with my buddy Daniel of Asians Represent, mostly to see how well it translated bits and pieces of Sword World, the most popular fantasy TTRPG in Japan.

In short, I know the franchise well by this point, and I like it, which is not what I expected. In fact, I steered clear of Goblin Slayer for years because of its reputation. If you're unaware, when the anime adaptation came out in 2018, it turned heads for depicting sexual violence in the very first episode. Basically, newbie adventurers go down into a dungeon, attempt to fight some goblins, and suffer terrible consequences, with the women of the party facing the sort of fate you might expect. It's a plot point intended to communicate to the viewer how awful goblins are in this world, and it also offers justification for the titular Goblin Slayer to show up on the scene to save the only survivor, Priestess. Goblin Slayer kills all of the goblins responsible for the attack, and he even goes the extra mile to unearth a hiding spot of goblin children. When Priestess shows some reservations at slaughtering kids, Goblin Slayer remarks that there's no such thing as a good goblin before stomping the little ones to bits.

In case you didn't know, Goblin Slayer is based on Kumo Kagyu's Dungeons & Dragons adventures. There's probably some influence sneaking in from Sword World, Tunnels & Trolls, and Wizardry, since those are the often-cited building blocks of Western fantasy tropes in Japan, but D&D is definitely at the forefront of the recipe. And knowing that Goblin Slayer evolved from D&D is what made me want to read it. (Well, that and the main character's armor design - dare I say that GobSlayer possesses one of the simplest yet coolest armors in all of existence.)

However, when I run D&D myself, I always say that all three of the things that this franchise begins with (bioessentialism, sexual violence, and violence against kids) are off-limits. So why does Goblin Slayer get a begrudging pass from me?

It's probably because I see the series as a meta analysis of D&D, right down to the tendency of most Dungeon Masters to get needlessly edgy with their campaign story arcs. Put another way, this is a 3.5e campaign where the star player has min/maxed himself around only one thing: the best possible build required to kill goblins. He's somehow managed to gain 15 levels by doing this, and he comes up with incredible battle strategies that the rest of his party quickly fall in line with. Every time I see GobSlayer pull off some ridiculous tactic to take down a foe, like the time when he links a portal scroll to the bottom of the ocean and proceeds to unleash the raging tides of the sea against an ogre, I can't help but shake my head and mutter to myself, "Damn, that's cool."

Then there's the more obvious fan service. And I don't mean "fan service" in the sense of pantsu shots or big boobed femmes, though Goblin Slayer does have a lot of that. (Hi, Cow Girl, childhood friend of the main character.) No, I'm talking about the fantasy roleplaying fan service. For instance, GobSlayer and his buddies fight creatures out of every edition of the Monster Manual. There are obviously goblins up the wazoo, but you can also expect beholders, drow, liches, oni, and even a mythologically-accurate tarasque, which shows up in Goblin Slayer: Year One.

There’s also a dungeon crawling aspect as GobSlayer and his party systematically plan out their roles and tactics everytime they delve into a hole in the ground. There's constant talk of who needs to be in the "frontline" and "backline," which are terms right out of Sword World, and Dwarf Shaman and Priestess are often chatting about how they can only use their spells a select number of times a day, which is that Vancian magic we all know and love/hate. Dai Katana, a franchise prequel that tells the story of a samurai and his comrades, outright feels like Etrian Odyssey in how it systemically shows the party tackling a megadungeon level by level, mapping as they go. (This does get repetitive over time, and I liked Dai Katana the least out of all the Goblin Slayer spinoffs. The characters have cool designs though, especially the mantis-like myrmidon dude.)

Finally, there's the idea that GobSlayer's realm, the Four-Cornered World, is a literal four-cornered game board lorded over by "gods" who are just enjoying a cosmic tabletop campaign. The more you read, the more this becomes clear. Everyone's referred to by their class or job titles rather than their names, after all, and a major arc in Year One involves GobSlayer assisting a mage who wants to enter the realm of the gods and "travel beyond the game board." After the pair ascend to the top of a seemingly endless tower (I do dig a reverse dungeon crawl that goes skyward rather than downwards), the mage disappears as her role in the campaign narrative that the "gods" have developed presumably ends. And last but not least, GobSlayer himself is constantly referred to as an average miniature on the battle map who somehow took on a life of his own by surviving whatever threats the cosmic GMs tossed at him. "He does not let anyone roll the dice," the tagline for the franchise goes.

I love all of this stuff. Maybe I'm giving Goblin Slayer too much credit, but I see this series as a deconstruction of what it means to sit at a table and imagine lives and stories for a diverse cast of characters, riffing off of fantasy concepts first assembled by Gary Gygax and his contemporaries back in the 70s. I can't be that off-base with this assumption, seeing as how characters in Goblin Slayer regularly "curse Gygax" when stuff goes wrong.

But just as Gary Gygax had questionable views when it came to a wide variety of things (like women, for instance), Goblin Slayer's got icky bits that can't be swept under the rug. This is a franchise that depicts female victims in titillating poses when they’re being abused. Goblin Slayer isn't alone in this regard - plenty of other seinen manga exhibit this nasty habit, including fan-favorites like Berserk - but it feels all the more annoying here because Goblin Slayer presents its assault scenes mostly at the very beginning for the sheer sake of shock value. As the series goes on, sexual violence disappears from the narrative almost entirely, as if Kumo Kagyu and his collaborators realized that it shouldn't have been emphasized in the first place. Instead, we're left with an interesting tale about GobSlayer moving through trauma (his family was killed by goblins when he was a kid, you see) and slowly learning how to feel again as he surrounds himself with the found family that is an RPG party. That's a good story, and a heartwarming one. Unfortunately, it's buried under a veneer that will likely turn many away.

I can't blame anyone for noping out of Goblin Slayer due to the sexual violence. I also can't blame anyone who doesn't play TTRPGs for not fully understanding the appeal of witnessing GobSlayer and his buddies strategize about the best way to defeat hobgoblins. But personally speaking, Goblin Slayer hit me in some good places, warts and all. I was fully prepared to write the franchise off as grimdark schlock, but it surprised me - and after reading up on some of its contemporaries, like Redo of Healer (which really is schlock) I'm further convinced that the series is smarter than it appears. It's just a shame that the smart bits are held back by the same problematic tropes that often cause D&D itself to falter. (Remember that whole orc discourse from 2020?)

For better or for worse, Goblin Slayer is representative of all sides of traditional tabletop roleplaying: the critical successes that celebrate imagination and comraderie, the critical failures that dehumanize women and veer too far into edgelord territory, and everything in between. The franchise has its problems, for sure, but there are moments when it shines - just like the glint of a well-painted miniature resting on the edge of a four-cornered game board.

Last week I finished running a three year Pathfinder 2e game, which is the longest continuous tabletop campaign I've GMed thus far. We started in June 2021 with Menace Under Otari, the short quest included in the PF 2e Beginner's Box. Then we continued onto the adventure anthology Troubles in Otari, which lasted us about six months, and finally hopped into the three-part Adventure Path Abomination Vaults, which commenced in January 2022. Now here we are in June 2024, done and dusted!

Running this game was the very definition of a learning experience. When we began, it was my first time dealing with the PF 2e ruleset, which was pretty new at the time. (Technically, I started this campaign before my March of the Dead games that I wrote about last year, though those wrapped up first.) Only one other person in my group had played 2e, so everyone was learning. Paizo tends to make solid quickstart boxes, but I really do need to give them a handclap for designing a decent beginner's experience that helped teach mechanics bit-by-bit in an easy-to-follow dungeon crawl. I'd say that Menace Under Otari contains precisely zero surprises - it's almost the same thing as the PF 1e box, except instead of bashing goblins you fight giant rats in a cellar, then kobolds, then a dragon - but it teaches mechanics nicely without overwhelming a GM or players. Aside from the Fabula Ultima Press Start (I started playing Fabula recently and am obsessed with it), it might be one of the best Beginner's Boxes I've run.

Once Menace Under Otari was done, we moved onto Troubles in Otari, which is a hodgepodge of missions designed to help anyone who'd run through the Beginner's Box level up. They're a decent selection of tidbits that flesh out the town of Otari, turning it into something like the equivalent of Sandpoint from PF 1e, which radiated that special feel of "howdy, this is the homebase for you, newbie adventurer." Troubles in Otari was where my players' characters really started to come into their own. I tasked them with converting a fishery that they'd cleared of monsters into a Pathfinder Society outpost, they beat a bunch of dwarf doofuses called the Leadbuster Lads (who really should serve as the endbosses of the anthology), and the Fighter accidentally wooed a female troll and ogre, setting him down the path of acquiring a monster girl harem, which quickly became a running joke.

Then it was time for Abomination Vaults, which has won recognition for being a high-quality dungeon crawl module, and one of the few straight up megadungeons that Paizo has put out. It's been so popular that it's gotten a 5e conversion and will soon be the subject of a video game, and yeah, I can confirm that it's pretty good. Certainly better than the last dungeon crawl-esque adventure I found myself partaking in, 5e's Out of the Abyss, which struck me as slog city.

I will say, however, that despite its strengths, Abomination Vaults still felt reaaallly long to me, even though as a three-volume Adventure Path, it's shorter than most others in Pathfinder's catalogue. I imagine if you're running weekly sessions instead of biweekly ones you can speed through it faster than I did, but even then, you've still got ten levels of dungeon to conquer. I also probably made things more complicated by letting all of my players roll new characters at the start of Abomination Vaults, since it starts at level 1 instead of picking up at level 5, where Troubles in Otari ends. The whole reason behind this was that my players' old characters would be trapped somewhere in the titular Abomination Vaults, tortured at the hands of the undead witch Belcorra Haruvex, and their new heroes would have to rescue the OGs. I love stuff like this (basically, reasons to make my life as a GM more complicated), and it meant that my players were each able to choose between two sets of characters throughout the end of the campaign.

Aside from this flair to enable more player choice, I did try to stick close to the books, at least at first. This is tough for me, as my natural tendency while running campaigns is to homebrew twists and turns up the wazoo, but since I was still learning the intricacies of PF 2e's rules, I wanted to walk before I ran. Partially because of this conservative ethos, it took a looong time to get through everything - Volume 1 of Abomination Vaults took us about 10 months to finish; Volume 2 took 7 months (but only because my group stopped exploring every nook and cranny of the dungeon and "sequence broke" a few bits); and Volume 3 lasted about a year.

Volume 3 also coincided with some dramatic life events. Only a few months after I started running this stretch of the campaign, my wife and I decided to move from the US to the UK. This was the right decision for us, but not exactly the right decision for the game. I was now five hours ahead of my players, who are all New York City guys. Five hours is a weird time difference to surmount when it comes to running tabletop RPGs, because it basically means that weekends are the only sensible time that'll work for everyone. Alas, the fellas in my group couldn't make weekends consistently work.

Thus, I undertook the somewhat mad decision to continue running the game while living in the UK...on NYC hours. This meant that every other Tuesday I needed to run a game that started at 11:30 PM and went until 2:30 AM. If that sounds like torture, realize that sometimes the game stretched a bit late, until 3 or so. Things became even more complicated when I returned to fulltime work and needed to clock in at 9 AM on the following morning (not in an office, thankfully). Needless to say, I don't recommend that any GM out there does this - 11:30 at night is simply a terrible time to do anything as socially and mentally taxing as running a roleplaying game, and I only managed to survive about ten months of doing this by gritting my teeth and brute forcing it. Was it worth it? Well, I'm always sad when longterm campaigns peter out into nothingness, and I made it a point to say that I wasn't going to do that. Call it my own weird GM sense of responsibility, or simply me trying to prove to myself that yes, I could run an entire Adventure Path without fumbling the finale, but it was worth it in my eyes.

At the end of it all, I cut some stuff in Volume 3 to ensure that I could finish running Abomination Vaults without my mind falling apart from lack of sleep. But I also stopped sticking too close to the book in general, mostly because by this time, I was extraordinarly familiar with PF 2e's ruleset. Hence the introduction of my standard twists and turns. For instance, I fully fleshed out the nebulous fate of an important NPC whose soul gets sold to a devil over the course of the game, and my players somehow managed to take an impromptu trip to the Dreamlands to battle denizens of Leng and capture a starspawn of Cthulhu in a jar, which they then used in our very last session to trick said devil into returning that NPC's soul. Oh yeah, and the monster girl harem expanded to truly incredible size, and one of my players somehow managed to relate his character's final fate to Starfinder, thousands of years in the far-flung future.

The last four weeks of my gaming time were consumed by Dragon's Dogma 2, an extravagana that's something like experiencing a wild D&D campaign that keeps going off the rails over and over again. (I'm pretty sure Capcom would be pleased with this comparison, seeing that they released promo art heavily based on AD&D's classic Red Box.)

DD2 has been a delight to devote 100+ hours to, and I find myself wishing I'd bought its predecessor ages ago, especially during those Steam sales where it sold for ridiculous prices like three or four dollars. I never did because I thought it looked sort of generic. Joke's on me! To be fair, this second one could also be described as looking generic upon first glance (though Capcom's RE Engine is certainly proving that it's got legs since Resident Evil 7), but I feel like that was an intentional decision. The goal here was clearly to create something with the trappings of the iconic Western fantasy setting (plus the inclusion of cat people, AKA Beastren) to draw players in and get 'em comfortable before presenting them with one of the most wacky open worlds in recent memory.

How's it wacky? Well, DD2 has a billion different systems under the hood, all colliding with each other. There are the systems that dictate the schedules of NPCs, who you can find wandering roads and getting into fights with enemies. Said enemies have their own systems, and on more than one occasion when I was fighting one of the game's huge bosses (drakes, golems, minotaurs, ogres and the like), that fight spilled over into the territory of another boss, who proceeded to attack both me and the first boss. A kaiju rumble ensued as the systems of both bosses collided with each other, and sometimes this rumble veered too close to the borders of a settlement, attracting the attention of pawns, which are basically the sidekicks assisting the game's main character, the Arisen.

If you're playing online, pawns created by other players can randomly appear in your game, and there were many special moments when I ran into a bizarrely off-proportion thief with the incredible name "Frog Nasty" and a half-naked mage dubbed "Lucy Liu." On one such occasion, Frog and Lucy joined my ever-evolving kaiju battle, and the incredible chaos continued until a griffin just happened to swoop down from the sky to snatch me up in its arms. As I went in the sky, I proceeded to climb atop that griffin’s head and smacked it silly with my mace until it dropped me into the ocean where I was devoured by Brine, AKA DD2’s in-world explanation for why you can’t just swim everywhere.

My description of this incident is no exaggeration. Unscripted mischief of this ilk happens every five minutes in this game, and it's the result of all those systems smashing into each other with delicious gusto. That said, not all of the systems work as well as they should, and some are half-baked. For instance, there's a romance/affinity system that's a carryover from the first Dragon's Dogma. The affinity levels of characters are never truly explained, and you can unexpectedly cause random people to fall in love with you by giving them the right gifts again and again, or completing their sidequests at the expense of others. This means that the Vernworth tavern keeper, who plays no important role at all, can suddenly show up in the final cutscene as your true heart's desire, in the clutches of your mortal enemy. I guess even when DD2's systems are half-baked, they still yield entertaining results.

As someone who runs a lot of tabletop RPGs (but often doesn't get the chance to act as a player), Dragon's Dogma 2 truly reminds me of a dedicated Game Master who doesn't mind when players test limits. This is a GM who clearly loves madcap battles full of unexpected twists that can take up an entire gaming session, as well as expansive side quests with more flavor than anything else in the campaign. The main story is not said Game Master's preference, which serves as a handy explanation on why you can find many Reddit threads decrying DD2's plot as kinda blah.

I get these complaints. The game's main missions are not terribly long - 40 or so hours, probably - and the clear meat of DD2 is in the exploration and combat. This isn't to say that the story's total rubbish, as it does have poignant moments in its cyclical, meta take on an Arisen who rises up every couple of years to complete a destiny of fighting the titular dragon. There's a secret endgame that also delves even farther into the tabletop RPG comparisons, giving you the chance to "defy the Dungeon Master," if you will, sending the campaign even further off the rails as you potentially see what happens when the GM just has no shits left to give and decides to turn the world into an apocalypse.

All of this makes DD2 probably one of my favorite open world games. I've been thinking a lot about what sort of open worlds attract me, since I'm a firm believer that more often than not, video games don't need to go all massive. (Give me a small-scale, well-developed area over a massive map filled with junky quest markers.) That said, I've noticed that I like open worlds that buck the Ubisoft-style trend of having busywork for really good writing (The Witcher 3 comes to mind) or simply invest in their mechanics to the point that everything fills up like a wonderful sandbox, with lots of bits and bobs to play with (that would be The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild).

Dragon's Dogma 2 is definitely more on the kooky sandbox side of things, with its oversized monsters at every turn and wonderous pawn shenanigans. The true appeal of this game, however, lies in the little stories that you create with your main pawn and other pawns along the trail. There's something special in the relationship you forge with these AI allies, who aren't real in the slightest, but bring forth that feeling of being a Game Master yourself as you corral them into taking down a drake. I was downright emotional when I said farewell to my main pawn at the end of the game (okay, the fact that I designed her to look like my wife probably helped, but still).

So here's to Dragon's Dogma 2, a wild piece of entertainment commandeered by a Game Master who clearly loves the journey more than the destination. Here's to those moments when you and your loyal pawns are facing down an ogre in its lair, or just barely survive a golem's laser beam after a series of hobgoblins stunlocked you into low health over and over again. Here's to sitting by a campfire, enjoying an unpredictable open world, and realizing the grand truth that comes with all tabletop RPGs - that the unscripted moments truly are the best part of the adventure.

One of the neat side effects about my job writing guides for Rock Paper Shotgun is getting exposed to stuff that I don't typically touch. For example, the survival/crafting genre, which blew up in the 2010s when I was living in Asia and too busy trying to survive in real life. I was aware of games like The Long Dark, of course, and I thought Valheim looked okay when it came out. But as someone who's never been thrilled with the idea of chopping down digital trees for wood (except for maintaining my farm in Harvest Moon 64), survival games have mostly fallen off my radar.

Obviously, that's no longer the case thanks to work. Survival games are perhaps one of the few video game genres out there that remain opaque as hell, therefore making them perfect fodder for guide writing. And this year has already seen several big survival games released, with Palworld taking up far more of my mental space than I ever would've imagined for much of January and February. (My lukewarm take is that Palworld is okay. Not really my thing, but I get why people like it as both a meme game and a "I can't believe Nintendo isn't suing, because that Electrabuzz ripoff is equipped with a GUN, somebody stop him!")

But this post is not about Palworld. It is, rather, about Nightingale, an enchanting survival title made by Inflexion Games that unfortunately launched into Early Access only a few weeks after Palworld probably stole some of its potential player base. I had the chance to consume a fair bit of Nightingale prior to its release, and I also wrote a few guides on it for work. I'm not sure if it's actually going to take off - its current player numbers aren't as high as expected, and the game bristles with a special degree of enrapturing jank that's definitely not going to appeal to everyone. Case in point: half of my colleagues hated the pre-Early Access UI, which made several unusual decisions, including flipping the usual hotbar configuration present in these sorts of games. This has since been rectified, and now the UI is more streamlined and accessible, though also a bit more boring, in my eyes.

I think Nightingale sticks with me precisely because it boasts an aesthetic and setting that are very much not boring. We're talking about a gaslight fantasy atmosphere that feels a tad Neil Gaiman, if he were channeling the same stuff that inspired Alan Moore to write The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Apparently, Nightingale's concept was based on the novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I have not read but now want to, and the game starts by placing you as an inhabitant of a late 1800s reality inextricably linked with Fae beings. A big calamity happens, and folks exploring the Faewilds are tossed into disparate realms and separated from their magical hub city, dubbed Nightingale. You have to help your character survive in these bizarre biomes, which are filled with Wonderland-style beasts and floating sculptures in the sky. Hopefully by constructing your own estate in these magical outposts and allying with other Realmswalkers, all of you will one day reach the city of Nightingale once more.

I am an absolute pervert for this sort of alternate history Victorian stuff, and if I'm going to be very frank, my initial reaction when playing Nightingale was wondering if its enchanting setting was "wasted" on a survival/crafting game. It's the sort of thing I'd expect to see in a tabletop RPG (which I would gladly play), not a game where you need to construct a sewing table and then kill 5 hippos so you can skin their hides and put those hides on the aforementioned sewing table and wait a minute so you can craft a little cape for yourself.

I'm not the only one to have this thought, and there's a whole calvacade of commentators who posted similar things on every Rock Paper Shotgun article devoted to the game. In a nutshell, it seems to come down to the fact that many outspoken individuals don't like the survival gameplay loop of running around chopping down trees so you can craft a better axe to chop down more trees, but thus far they've safely been able to ignore most crafting games because they typically take place in forests or post-apocalyptic environments that are usually pretty samey. Nightingale is not samey, which makes people want to play it and then lament that it's not in their ideal genre of choice.

Once again, I really need to expoud upon how much charm this game has. Your guide through the tutorial is a smooth talking fey with a poncy vocabulary named Puck. Umbrellas serve as in-game gliders to make you descend from great heights like Mary Poppins. And even though the basic survival loop is there - yes, you've still got to farm those damn hippos - there is a nifty tarot card system in place that procedurally generates the worlds your intrepid Realmswalker is forced to confront. It's a mishmash of ideas that really feels like it's ripped from the pages of some Game Master's steampunk world (there I go again, going off on how much I'd like to play a Nightingale TTRPG), and even though it's largely busywork, eventually you can get a rifle that shoots ice ammo and a legendary set of "armor" that's really just a Victorian tweed suit. By damnation, it's appealing.

It's this sense of originality that makes me want to play Nightingale more, and injects within me the strength to overlook the jankiness in the combat and UI that make me ocasionally feel like I'm playing a game from the late 2000s. (The first Witcher, are ya there? I'm reminded of you.) And I daresay it's unfair to say that Nightingale's eclectic setting is "wasted" on a survival/crafting experience, which is a harsh statement that probably does a disservice to both Inflexion Games and to the entire genre. While these sorts of games might not be my automatic cuppa, Nightingale actually makes me want to play more of them, and I plan on purchasing V Rising next month, which I missed out on back when it came out.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that there's power in a good setting and a striking coat of paint. Sometimes that's all we need to overlook gameplay loops that do not initially appeal to us, and I'm sure there's a whole audience out there that cared little for crafting in the wilderness but loved monster collecting. Palworld was the honeypot that probably encouraged them to look deeper into what survival games had to offer. For me, Nightingale performs a similar function.

Over the last few years, thanks to my wife's English side of the family, I've visited a fair share of interesting British museums. One of these is the Shuttleworth Collection, a neat place that features an array of planes from the early half of the 20th century. If you're ever in Bedfordshire and have a hankering to see biplanes from the 1920s, I really can't recommend a visit enough. I wouldn't call myself an aviation geek, but there's something about seeing a World War II aircraft in person that stirred my imagination, and one of the souvenirs I bought from my visit was a cool pair of socks that had pixelated biplanes on them.

I specifically bought the socks because they reminded me of Capcom's 1942, the first entry in the 19XX series of shoot 'em ups, AKA shmups. Honestly, I hadn't played much of 1942 at the time, but I've always known enough about shmups to think of the game when I see pixelated biplanes. It probably stands out in my head as an interesting example of a Japanese company making a product where the whole goal is to blow up the Japanese. Yep, 1942 puts the player in the role of a Lockheed P-38 Lightning pilot maneuvering his aircraft through the skies of the Pacific Theater, on a mission to reach Tokyo and blast the heck out of everything. Apparently the game was made with Western audiences in mind, so I suppose we have capitalism to thank for a game that is both historically accurate and not historically accurate at all. (Yes, Japan lost the war, but I don't think any of the Lockheeds in the Battle of Midway had spray guns capable of shooting a billion bullets at once.)

I recently dove into 1942 and almost all of the other games in the 19XX series, mostly because I was inspired by my British nephew, who's recently been going on about planes for hours on end. You can play almost all of them via the Capcom Arcade Stadium compilations on Steam, which repackage classic arcade games and make them easily playable without the hassle of needing to fiddle with MAME emulation. (The decision to make each game DLC that you have to buy is probably questionable, but putting that aside, these packages are pretty okay.)

Anyway, I soon discovered that the original 1942 is the epitome of a 1980s arcade quarter gobbler, with a staggering 32 levels of monotony and some of the most annoyingly tinny background music known to man. It's fun to do loops around Japanese bombers for the first ten minutes, and I've always loved the power-up that gives you two flanking planes that help soak up extra damage, which would go on to be a series staple. Beyond that, 1942 grates at the soul and has not aged well.

1943: The Battle of Midway, and its slightly remixed semi-sequel 1943 Kai, are much better. Here, we bear witness to screen-filling tsunami attacks that can instantly wreck all enemies, a more forgiving difficulty level, and varied stages that don't consist of simply flying over the ocean and rice paddies. Everything's faster and a good deal more fun, and instead of solely taking down planes, now you've got boss battles against Imperial Japanese naval fleets, ending in a fight against the battleship Yamato. And thankfully, the tinny music is gone and replaced by battle-ready tracks that are nicely catchy.

This formula is refined even further in the later games, all of which loosen up on the feeling of "one American plane versus Japan" for a progressively zanier feel. 1941: Counter Attack ditches the Pacific Theater for firefights over European skies, and despite taking place in the earlier years of WWII, your pilot goes up against enemy crafts that are so extreme in size and flavor that they border on science fiction. You'll fire away at German rockets that look like they're designed to fly to the moon and tanks that take up a quarter of the screen. The end boss is a Horten Ho 229, the German prototype bomber that never went into mass production, yet is a formidable foe in this game that is sleek and almost alien-like in its movements.

19XX: The War Against Destiny takes that science fiction appeal to the maximum and says, "To hell with a historical shmup, let's go to the future with two X's, baby!" In an amusing move that would later be replicated by the Call of Duty series two decades later (when they jumped from WWII to the arena of Modern Warfare - and later Advanced Warfare), 19XX sees you taking on the Outer Limits, a terrorist organization that somehow has a futuristic army with hundreds of expendable fighter pilots. For the first time, you can choose between three different planes: the old school Lockheed P-38 Lightning (the well-balanced one), the de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito (the heavy firepower one), and the Kyushu J7W Shinden (the speedy one). All of these planes are worthy options against enemies that scale in a ludicrous fashion, and one of the bosses in the later levels is basically a mech. It's great. And because the game runs on Capcom's CPS-2 arcade board, which also powered the Street Fighter Alpha/Zero series, the action is fast and clean to a degree that's very reminiscent of the company's fighting game output.

1944: The Loop Master is the last 19XX game I played, because it's the last one available in the Capcom Arcade Stadium. It takes the action back to WWII, but the gusto and fury of all the futuristic stuff exhibited in 19XX: The War Against Destiny is present and accounted for. Hello, my biplane can shoot lasers? Sure, why not! Technically, this one was developed by Eighting and not by Capcom, and all I know about Eighting is that they made the Bloody Roar games and Battle Garegga, another shmup with a cool soundtrack that samples the techno track "Jupiter Jazz," by Underground Resistance. They did a good job, and while 1943 and 19XX: The War Against Destiny stick out in my memory more than The Loop Master, I can safely say that this one features a little dude who parachutes out of your plane when you die. About time I finally saw my pilot!

Honestly, I'm not a great shmup player. I played all of these casually on my Steam Deck, and I never would've made a dent in them in the arcades. But there's something about the 19XX series that's appealing to me, at the very least on an aesthetic level. It's probably the highly detailed 2D pixelated artistry that goes into the top-down depiction of these warplanes, which are given the same slavish fanboyism that you see in Japanese mecha franchises. I think back to the several times I've visited Japan and been to antiwar exhibits like the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. Minus a few groups of nationalist nutjobs, Japan's by far and large a deeply antiwar country - but there do exist otaku who nerd out over WWII-era tech, usually not in a "the Imperial Japanese Army was right" sort of way, but in a way that basically says, "the Yamato was one of the biggest battleships ever constructed at 70,000+ tons, I shall now proceed to write an essay about why that was cool." And you know, I can appreciate that attention to technical detail, just like how I can respect the planes on exhibit in the Shuttleworth Collection. So give the 19XX games a whirl if you like planes or simply dig fine artistry - and go visit the Shuttleworth and buy those socks while you're at it.