Picture this, okay.  It’s 1999, and you are 5 years old.  It’s summer vacation.  And for whatever reason, your mom has a lot of appointments and so, you being five, end up being babysat, woo hoo for you!  Luckily your mom has a cousin who is so gracious as to watch you during all these meetings and, even better, said cousin has kids your age!  And, they have your favorite/only console, the N64!  You spend at least two days a month over there, playing board games and Pokemon and having a great time until, one day, you notice your cousins’ small stable of games and your mind is blown!  There are at least four, no, FIVE, games you’ve never seen before (granted, the only games you’ve seen before are Pokemon Stadium and Hey You Pikachu, but still).  And, on a whim, you ask your cousins to pick their favorite and we’ll play that.  They pull a game off the shelf, pop it into their console and you spend the rest of the time until your mom picks you up playing this game.  

Granted, you’re not very good, you never even get out of the opening area, but you’re having a blast, this is a new experience and you’re very excited over it.  You go home, excited, ready to ask your parents for the game and… you don’t remember the title.  You never got it, it never came up in conversation, it was just, you know, gone.  And it’s the beginning of the schoolyear now.  That was the last time those cousins would watch you and, in fact, would be the last time you saw them for over a decade.  Only one thing sticks with you though.  You vaguely remember that character in the game… was a bear.

Now picture this.  It’s 2008, now you’re 15.  Due to several moves in a short period of time and your own autism-related issues in a classroom setting, you are now homeschooled.  You are mostly left to your own devices, your parents both work and trust you to do the work, which you do, and your school day usually lasts about 2 hours, leaving an obscene amount of free time.  And as you are home, alone, with a computer in the other room, you basically have unfettered access to the internet.  And what’s the first thing you do?  …Okay, what’s the second thing you do as a little gamer boy?  Look up stuff about video games, of course.  Quickly you’re directed to the early gaming scene on YouTube, back when Let’s Play meant a different thing, the AVGN was not uploading on YouTube and was still releasing nonstop bangers, and there was widespread, what we would eventually call “discourse” but back then we called “flame wars”, on what were the “greatest games of all time”.  

All the bangers like Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy VII, Sonic Adventure 2, and more games I will probably get to if I continue this series I’m thinking of doing.  And I was all in on all of them.  I was prime for this kind of discussion, an interest in video games as a concept, no real access to play these games, no real thoughts and opinions of my own that random people could mold into just parroting their own opinions as if they were mine.  I was super prepped for the retro gaming space in 2008 (and the alt right pipeline but I thankfully dodged that one).  And in many of these discussions, one name also came up: Banjo-Kazooie.

You are, of course, floored.  You have, somehow, through the power of the internet, been reunited with this game from your childhood, this vague memory you’d never thought you would see again in your life.  And, as you would, you are scrambling to find ways to play it.  Unfortunately, finding N64 games was really hard in 2008, not that you had money to buy them anyways.  However, a friend decides to let you in on a little trade secret: if you type in “Banjo-Kazooie ROM” on your web browser (shoutouts to Internet Explorer), you can access not just this game, but the entire history of N64 games, on your PC!  And it’s all totally legal!  The new opportunities you have at your disposal excite you… until you try actually playing these games.  

You are not a PC gamer, never have been, probably never truly will be.  Keyboard controls feel funky to you, wrong.  And what’s more, you don’t have a controller you could hook up to your PC to rectify this issue, not that you’d have known how to operate the process of making it work on your PC in general.  And, in truth, even if you did, your parents Windows XP computer, obtained several years back at this point, has a lot of trouble running the N64 games you’re excited to play anyways (not that it was entirely its fault, lord knows N64 emulation is a nightmare).  You have, once again, been defeated, Banjo destined to become yet another distant memory to you.  But you hold out hope, one day, hopefully soon, you will find a way to play Banjo-Kazooie.

Picture this.  It’s 2023, you are now 29 years old.  At the start of the pandemic, you were laid off from your job of around ten years and due to the failing health of your parents, you continued to stay out of the job market for an extended length to take care of them as they recovered from various medical emergencies and surgeries.  Without an income to speak of, you have turned to your backlog, which is sizable, slowly chipping away at it to fulfill your limited free time.  And, to add just a little bit of spice to your backlogging experience, you use tools to randomize the games you play.  This practice has been very fruitful, summoning forth incredibly obscure but fascinating games, old classics you’ve just never finished, big indie titles that do something interesting with the medium, it’s been a blast.  You’ve found new favorites, finished loose ends, it’s greatly improved your gaming experience.  And one day, one fateful day, the randomization tools you use land you on one game: Banjo-Kazooie.

This is it, at long last there is time, there is initiative and, most importantly, thanks to Microsoft’s, at the time, buddy buddy nature with Nintendo, there is availability.  And… you’re not really all that excited.  Despite this game being one of THE major loose threads throughout your life, this opportunity to put it to be it is faced not with excitement but with this kind of mix of cautious optimism and indifference.  This is people’s favorite game of all time, arguably one of the greatest platformers ever made, and yet you, a person who in our last little vignette was so into this era of gaming that it was basically your entire personality, is just like “guess that’s cool”.

See, you’ve changed.  You’ve changed a lot, actually.  The once retro game obsessed child, someone who believed that older games were better as a rule than modern games, has given way instead to an adult with far more complicated opinions on the past.  Your philosophy in what video games should be is no longer a repetition of the old talking point of “if it’s not fun, then what’s the point”, rather, you crave weirder, more interesting, more unique games.  

You’ve fallen out of love with a lot of games, a lot of genres, that were once life-defining.  JRPGs, once your favorite genre, are now nothing short of intimidating for you and, frankly, you find yourself potentially too cynical to enjoy their storytelling anymore.  Games that you used to adore, your Mario Galaxies, your Twilight Princesses, your Sonics, just in general, your love for them proves a distant memory.  They are not what you want, what you crave from gaming, they feel incorrect to you.  And, indeed, the mascot platformer has fallen out of favor for you.  You still get down with Mario, don’t get me wrong, Mario Odyssey has been one of your favorite games of the entire generation and compelled you to even learn a speedrun because of how fun it is.  But by and large, you don’t look at the genre with the same excitement.  You see a mascot platformer and face it with vague indifference.

Not only that, but this is not exactly a road untraveled for you.  As you have been facing this war on your backlog, you have played many beloved games, games people would call their favorites, call the greatest games of all time.  And… well… you haven’t been seeing it.  Maybe it is overhype, maybe you just aren’t in the right place or the right time, but you have tackled games like Sonic Adventure 2, Super Paper Mario, to a lesser extent Yoshi’s Island, and it’s not that you think these games are bad, you actually did rather like Yoshi’s Island, it made your top 30 that year, you also haven’t seen masterpieces.  You’ve honestly started to feel something is broken in you, you are facing the most beloved games of all time and can mostly only manifest a vague shrug for any of them.  You even jokingly post about it on social media, how you played “Ecco the Dolphin”, a game pretty universally considered at best mediocre and at worst awful, and fell in love with it immediately, in juxtaposition of all of the games other people would call the greatest of all time.

But, even in the midst of all these reservations you have regarding Banjo, there is still a part of you who is excited to finally face the bear and bird.  After all, this is possibly the biggest loose end of your life, a game that has been following you, just out of grasp, since you were a small child.  And who knows, maybe it’ll actually click for you, maybe this game will defy the pattern.  After all, on paper this game has a lot to offer you specifically.  You like more unique, interesting games, and Banjo is known for its specific sense of humor and its incredibly unique level design, worlds brimming with character and personality.  And while the gameplay isn’t some really fast paced platformer with a lot of interesting movement tech like its big brother, Mario 64, there’s still a lot of cool stuff to learn with in Banjo.  So, with many reservations, but also many hopes, you take the plunge, you finally play Banjo-Kazooie.  And…

...i don’t like Banjo-Kazooie.

The Humour

Banjo-Kazooie's sense of humor is arguably its most famous trait.  The iconic sense of humor is either the first or one of the first things that you're likely to hear about Banjo-Kazooie.  Its audience loves this cast of characters and their uniquely Rare dialog, emphasizing a variety of gags and jokes.  I imagine this must've been pretty groundbreaking at the time, honestly, at least for the console-specific audience.  There had been "funny" games before this on console but most games trying to be explicitly comedic at this time would've done so through slapstick or pop culture references.  Or, if they were more deliberately written to be comedic, they were likely niche PC adventure games.  Banjo-Kazooie would've been one of the first mainstream video games where the comedy was written, genuine jokes, gags, puns.  They abound in this game.  It's also the part I want to tackle first because I think me not liking the humor in this game is the easiest pill to swallow.

Now, bear in mind that when I approached Banjo-Kazooie, I was already an adult with a fully crafted sense of humor all my own.  Banjo-Kazooie is a game for children, I know people are going to be mad at me saying that but it's a game with a colorful bear and bird where they fight a witch while encountering a lot of toilet jokes.  It's a game for children.  And I think that reflects very strongly in how most of the people who laud this game's humor first got initiated into it.  They too were children, they were able to have their sense of humor shaped by Banjo-Kazooie rather than coming into it like I did, sense of humor already formed.  You can tell when someone's sense of humor was heavily influenced by the N64 Rare platformers, trust me.  So I am not going to sit here and tell you that, because I don't find the jokes funny, that's a problem I actually have with the game.  That's me coming into this and not being the target demo or the target sense of humor.

My problem is instead with how repetitive the humor in Banjo-Kazooie tends to be.  It feels as though the same jokes are being told over and over again.  The same exact setups and punchlines for grossout humor, puns, gags, what have you.  A toilet joke always feel like the same toilet joke, a slapstick gag always feels like the same slapstick gag, it feels like Rare's writing staff thought of a few things that kids would find funny and just kept repeating them.  Brentilda in particular wore me down, as she is an NPC you will keep encountering across your journey and her only role is to tell the same joke about Gruntilda over and over again.  She'll start by mentioning a fact about Gruntilda and then the punchline is always either "Gruntilda is gross", "Gruntilda is fat" or "Gruntilda is ugly".  None of these are jokes I find particularly funny, and having to hear them over and over made me very annoyed.  It was like being trapped in an elevator with a second grader who just found out what farts were.  The worst part about it though is that Brentilda, who is representative of this huge problem I have with the game, is not only not optional, paying close attention to her jokes is necessary for the final level.

Grunty's Furnace Fun

I have more generalized thoughts about the levels that I want to get into later on in the review, but I just want to say that this level might be one of my least favorite levels in gaming history.  Can I just vent for a second?  It's my blog, whatever, this level was miserable for me.  So, I want to be clear, by this point I had already more or less figured out I really didn't like Banjo-Kazooie.  I had fun for the first few levels, up until Freezeazy Peak I was kind of into this game actually.  After that point, the good will started draining rapidly, culminating in Rusty Bucket Bay and Click Clock Woods, two irresponsibly large and complicated levels that each took me hours to complete WITH using Save States.  I was so ready to be done with this game by this point, if I hadn't committed so hard to finishing it, I probably would've DNF'ed it.

So, I want you to imagine that you have gotten to the end of this game you didn't like, you even went the extra mile and 100%-ed it, got every Jiggy and every note, and you get to the final door, ready to face the final boss.  And what you are greeted by is a long, boring quiz about the game you just played all the way through and, moreover, did not like.  You are asked questions about locations you hardly remember because you've already pushed them out of your brain and characters whose names you never cared to learn and every single Brentilda line.  If I had not already effectively 100%-ed the game, I would've stopped.  I would've rejected this.  I don't know if I can find it but I distinctly remember texting some friends of mine and going "the sheer arrogance of this game".  Like "you probably loved our game so much that we're going to give you a quiz just to remember how much you loved it".  I genuinely tried to learn the speedrunning trick where you do a frame perfect transition into a move as Grunty "kills" you so you can just walk across because I wasn't about to walk all the way back through Grunty's Lair to find all the Brentilda quotes and write them all down.  And guides don't super help on this quiz because the Brentilda quotes are semi-randomized.  

But even if I had been more amiable to the game, the thing that awaited on the other side would've still soured me on it.  See, I was 100%-ing the game, despite my own reservations about 100%-ing video games and also my lack of love for Banjo because I felt like that was correct.  To really understand the Rare style of platformer, you have to 100% the game.  This is both a positive and a negative depending on who you ask, fans of Rare love how much there is to find in these games while critics tend to bemoan how much it seems like they were just unnecessarily bloating the game.  So to get a full perspective I felt like I needed to do a 100% run.  Good thing I did, because as it turns out, in order to beat Banjo-Kazooie regularly, you basically have to 100% the game already.

Collectathon

I'm going to do something that I don't really like doing in these blog posts.  I hesitate to compare a game to another game, not that I won't do it, a key feature of my Earthbound posts are me just comparing the other games in the trilogy to Earthbound.  But I tend to think that one of the key issues in the modern media landscape is that too many people are only judging things through the lens of the things they remind one of.  People calling Astro Bot "essentially Mario Galaxy 3" or attributing Clair Obscur to Japan even though it's such a distinctly French piece of art just because it reminds them of Persona, that sort of thing.  I want to view things as their own works of art and so I tend to hesitate to compare them to other works unless it is relevant to their history.  But to really explain why I take issue with Banjo's approach to the collectathon I do have to compare it to another game.

So, in 1996, Super Mario 64 hit the market.  Quite possibly the most influential video game of all time, Super Mario 64 was the first game really properly establish a language for 3D movement in games.  There were other 3D games before this but they didn't have the same full range of 3D movement and the same understanding of what level design could be.  This is not to say they never could, but Mario 64 really accelerated the medium years past where it was.  But more relevant is that Mario 64 more or less established the language of the collectathon platformer.  The lack of space present on the N64 cartridge caused Nintendo to have to innovate, instead of their initial plan of having more traditional Mario levels but in 3D, they opted instead for larger environments with loads of objectives in it.  It is not only one of the franchise's first, but it remains one of its best, an infinitely replayable, completely accessible platformer that feels fresh each time you play it.

But an underrated game design ideal that I think Mario 64 really nails is how it handles the amount of objectives needed to be cleared to get to the end vs. the total number of objectives present in the game.  Mario 64 requires the player to obtain 70 out of the possible 120 stars in order to face the final boss, with other walls being placed at 8, 30, and 40 stars.  Only around 60% of the game's total.  What's more is that there is only 1 actually required star in the game, with another world requiring you to get at least one star in order to progress.  I think that this is genius, I think that this is the perfect way to do it.  You're not forcing your player to do any individual objective really, they have full freedom of where they want to go and what they want to collect, but they still have to engage with the game properly.  It is enough content to where the player can get a full sense of the game's scope, but their progress is also not stalled by being forced to complete an objective they can't or truly do not want to do multiple times.  The Bowser's sub mission is a low point and I can understand people balking off that one, but on the whole the player is free to engage with the game on their own pace.  Obviously this metric is fluid, Mario Odyssey would be a nightmare if you had to collect 60% of the moons in that game to beat it, but for collectathons of this style, 60% is a fantastic amount.

Banjo-Kazooie requires the player to collect 94 of the game's 100 Jiggies to finish the game.  I understand that one of the things people like about Banjo is that it has this sense of adventure, the player is incentivized to delve in deep and explore the various levels in it.  And I'm also well aware that the kind of player who really adores Banjo-Kazooie is also the kind of player who is likely to 100% a video game, even if the process of doing so can and often does ruin their enjoyment of said game.  But I feel like we can all agree that this expectation on the player is ludicrous, right?  Forcing the player to collect 94 of the games' Jiggies means that, should they get to this final roadblock, they will very likely have to go back through and get a lot of things they probably thought they were okay to miss.  They now have to do a bunch of minigames they didn't want to do, or the more annoying/frustrating objectives that they passed on.  They probably have to now go through Rusty Bucket Bay and Click Clock Woods, two incredibly tedious and irresponsibly large levels that often have incredibly complicated orders of operation to accomplish a single objective.  Again, I knew this going into it and I was still appalled at how much the game asked of me to simply beat it, I cannot imagine what it would be like if I had played it blind.

This is not even mentioning the notes, the other collectible this game is built around.  The notes are one of the most controversial aspects to this game even to people who love it.  It's such a problem that it's one of the very few fixes that they made to this game when it was originally rereleased on Xbox 360.  A way to think about the notes in Banjo-Kazooie is that they are the equivalent to the coins in other platformers.  There are 100 of them scattered in each area and you use them as a currency, buying your way past obstacles at various points in the game.  It's very similar to the way Spyro the Dragon handles its gems, as both currency and collectible.  However, Banjo makes the interesting decision to make it so that these notes are not permanently collected.  The game keeps track of your score, when you go into a level you will leave with however many notes you collected or, if you are going through it a second time for cleanup, you will leave with any additional notes you've collected.  However, unless you have already collected every note in the level in question, each time you return to the level you will reset from 0 and have to start collecting everything all over again.  Meaning that, should you die in the level, you will have to restart from 0 and work your way back up as well.

This becomes an increasingly laborious task as the game goes on.  Banjo-Kazooie levels only progress in complexity and so do their ability to hide things.  Many levels in the late game have upwards of a dozen sub areas where collectibles are hidden.  Even if I felt the sense of adventure that so many people feel when playing Banjo-Kazooie, this idea that these worlds are tiny little windows into their own stories that Banjo is just entering, it would've worn me down by the end of it.  Having to collect things in levels stops feeling like an adventure and starts feeling like a chore, as you comb every possible inch of a level and interact with literally everything trying to find every note so you don't have to come back later to do note cleanup and do it anyways.  In levels as simple and accessible as Mumbo's Mountain or Treasure Trove Cove, or even mid game levels like Freezeazy Peak and Gobi Desert, this isn't that big a deal even if I don't particularly enjoy playing the latter two levels.  But in a level like Click Clock Woods, a massive, hard to navigate forest setting you have to not only scour every inch of but scour every inch of four times over?  It's miserable.

It's also completely and totally unavoidable.  You have to collect 810 notes in order to beat the game, there are 900 total in the game.  Just like with the Jiggies, you are expected to collect an absurd amount of them, even before the final doors to the final battle, you need 765 to get into Furnace Fun in the first place.  But unlike the Jiggies, you cannot just operate how the game clearly wants you to operate with the notes.  With the Jiggies, it's clear the game wants you to grab a few, explore some more of Grunty's lair, fill in some more areas, hit a wall, return to previous areas and find any remaining Jiggies and Notes.  The final Jiggy door is meant to be a moment where you go "okay, need to do some cleanup in the rest of the game" and trek back through, re-experiencing this game as you get the remainder of the Jiggies.  But the notes discourage this gameplay ideal because it incentivizes you to get everything in one go.  You are actively punished for playing the game like Rare seems to think you should and actively rewarded for turning the game into a chore.  In my opinion, Banjo-Kazooie feels like it's at war with itself, a game with two core philosophies fighting each other for control.  It wants the player to be constantly going back and forth across Grunty's Lair, completing objectives at their own pace; while simultaneously being a game that encourages the player to obsessively check off every objective before they can move on because, in the end, you need to do all this work anyways.

The Heart of Banjo-Kazooie

Ultimately, though, the main reason I dislike Banjo is because of me.  Banjo-Kazooie's core design ideal is something of a lost art in game design today, mostly because we've kind of evolved past it.  I've called Banjo-Kazooie "a game for children" throughout this post and to a lot of people that likely seems like a derogatory term.  People get irrationally upset when you state that something that is unambiguously for children is, in fact, for children because they think that reduces it to some sort of level where it doesn't have to be taken seriously.  But to me, understanding Banjo-Kazooie as a game intended for children is crucial to understanding it's design and why it didn't resonate with me, a not-child.

See, back in the day, games were different.  Nowadays the majority of games are made with the idea that, first of all, the people buying them are probably the people with direct disposable income and not the people who need to rely on those who do have disposable income.  As such, there has kind of been a shift in game design, an idea that even games that are otherwise meant for children, like Mario, are experiences people are intended to have for a little while and then put down.  These are meant to be finite experiences, pieces that the player engages with for a while and then likely puts down for the next big game because that's just where we are in gaming.  Too many games, not enough time.  There's too much competition to realistically expect a player to even beat a game anymore, if you look at achievements on basically every game, you'll see massive dropoffs only a few hours in as players shift to something else or simply bounce off the game.

This wasn't true back before the turn of the millennium.  The understanding then was that, even as the industry tailored to mature gamers more and more, that the vast majority of their audience would be children.  Children do not have disposable income and their parents are less likely to regularly be buying games for them, especially as they were more likely to see them as toys than a true entertainment medium.  Kids weren't buying a new game every couple weeks, their parents were buying them a few times a year, they were birthday presents, Christmas gifts, rewards for good report cards.  Games mattered more to their audience, it wasn't just a piece of art you were experiencing, it was potentially your only new game for the next several months, if not the entire year.  I know that, for me, games didn't start becoming commonplace until I was in high school and my mom would let me pick out a game at least once a month.  I had like three total games on my N64 growing up, and that was my only console until I was 10!

Banjo-Kazooie is, seemingly, designed with the idea that the people who are playing it would always be playing it.  That its large, sprawling levels with loads of secrets to find and characters to meet would not feel tedious to the target audience because they wouldn't be sitting down to play it with the idea that this was a game to be beaten.  It was just, you know, a game.  And I can't replicate that feeling.  I can't go back to when I was a child and experience games the way I would back then.  Nor do I particularly want to.  Games are such an interesting medium of art with so many works to experience.  The year I played Banjo-Kazooie was the year I played Gris, a beautiful, heart-wrenching, tragic game about learning to overcome the feeling of loss that threatens to consume you after you lose someone important to you.  The year I played Doki Doki Literature Club, a masterful piece of horror that pushes the boundaries of the relationship between player and game.  Ecco the Dolphin, a bizarre, surreal prog rock masterpiece that leaves the player in a unique atmosphere and doesn't let up.  And numerous others, games I adore.  Games I wouldn't get to play if I played everything like I did when I was a kid.  I not only do not like Banjo-Kazooie, I couldn't like Banjo-Kazooie.  Because no matter what I did, it was asking me to develop a relationship with it that I was unwilling to form.

There's kind of a tragedy to that, though, isn't there?  Like, it can't help but be a little heartbreaking, realizing that the way you consumed media as a child is dead.  It's a place you can no longer reach, an old friend you cannot see again.  There are moments throughout life that are like this, moments where you realize that your connection to your childhood is slipping.  It's a difficult thing to confront for everyone, the realization that so many things are falling through your fingers, as if grains of sand.  It's tempting to cling onto it, to try and let that magic continue.  To never let go of your childhood, to instead embrace it indefinitely.  And for many years, that's what I did.

I used to be someone who buried himself in nostalgia, who cared about the things that he grew up with more than anything, who cherished these works that brought me so much joy.  I was a Harry Potter kid and regularly bought Ravenclaw merch before Joanne went mask off, I was the kid who never stopped playing Pokemon even when others abandoned it, while all my friends were moving to Call of Duty and Halo, I was the sole friend who held tight to Mario.  I lived through my own nostalgia and the nostalgia of other people for so much of my life.  As friends were grinding out CoD lobbies, I was memorizing Mega Man robot master orders even though I had only played one Mega Man game.  Losing the part of me that felt this magical, deeper connection to video games was not a small feat by any means.

But at the same time, losing these parts of myself, it's kind of freeing.  I was letting my nostalgia and the nostalgia of others consume me.  I hadn't given myself the space to develop my own taste really, to find the games I love as opposed to the games I have loved and other people have loved.  My relationship with art was just unhealthy, I was clinging to games I either had not thought too terribly deep about or hadn't played at all.  My world was influenced by a handful of content creators and an inability to move past the games I had already played and so it was difficult for me to truly engage with art in any meaningful way.  As these parts of me drifted away, as my addiction to the past subsided I really found my love for games, discovered what my connection to them actually means in the grand scheme of things.

Games mean more to me than just what I got out of them as a kid, maybe not always on an emotional level, but on an intellectual one.  I'm more engaged by the material in question.  It's not always an easy or pleasant road, I've had to go through a lot of growing up to get here, to develop a healthy relationship with the art I consume.  I've had to reject so many ideas I used to hold dear, grow past entire genres I once cherished.  And, in the midst of it all, it's made me feel distant from people I once called friends, and/or content creators I used to watch.  I used to really enjoy watching reactions to showcases with people because it felt like an earnest sense of community; and the reason why I stopped, other than a general frustration with the digital showcase era, is that it's become clear how many people I used to like watching along with and/or would like to hear their opinions about gaming news have gotten more and more insular.  They only crave the things they already know and will not give new games the time of day.

I don't want to be like that.  I don't want to spend my entire life trying to get the same thing out of games I did as a child, I don't want to have my tastes defined by who I was when I was little.  There are so many games out there, so many new ideas to explore, and it feels limiting to only look to the things I already know.  I don't only want to become the kind of person who ignores the entire medium outside of one or two games that come out every year in niches I already occupy and then complains that either video games are going downhill or that the medium isn't representing the wants of "true gamers".  And I want this for others too, to expand their horizons and not just tap into the same well.

I don't like Banjo-Kazooie.  And you know what, that's good.  I've grown as a person, the part of me that would've loved this game is firmly where he belongs, in the past.  He would've loved Banjo if he had gotten it working on the old Windows XP computer and that would've been good too.  I don't mean to make it sound like enjoying Banjo-Kazooie is inherently a sign of having a poor relationship with art, because of course it isn't.  Loads of people love Banjo and have great relationships with art and loads of people dislike it and have horrible relationships with art.  While it is very common for people who like Banjo-Kazooie to be pretty caught up in their own nostalgia, that's true of most video games from the past, especially on a Nintendo console.  It's just, to me at this specific timeline and juncture in my life, not liking Banjo is representative of something important, something meaningful.  That I am not the same person I used to be.  That I am someone who is, undeniably and unequivocally, me.

Games I Cleared in February - 2026 Edition

 Check out the first entry in this series for additional context on what these are and what the nuances of my Game Clearing is~

Game 1: Risk of Rain - Beat

I think this is the first roguelike I've done for game clearing since I started this blog.  Which is crazy to me, actually.  I really like roguelikes, Crypt of the Necrodancer has been my "play at bedtime" game for years now and the first Hades is literally my second favorite game of all time.  Haven't played the second one yet.  And yet, since starting this blog and, moreover, starting my game clearing in general, only a handful of roguelikes have made their way onto my game clearing list.  Of those, Dead Cells and Hyperspace Dogfights were the only truly notable ones too.  2025 didn't have ANY roguelikes in it period, in fact.  So Risk of Rain is the first one in over a year.  Crazy.

Risk of Rain is a roguelike sidescrolling shooter, a "run and gun" as it were.  In it, you play as one of 12 classes of space traveler, which you pick from a character select screen at the start of a run.  Only one is unlocked from the start and as you make progress in the game, you will unlock the others.  Your traveler was driving a freighter through space when it crash-landed on a mysterious, everchanging alien planet, with the traveler being cast deep into the planet as a result of the crash.  They must now fight through hordes of hostile alien creatures to find their way through the planet and back to their ship.

Risk of Rain is unique for its difficulty system; the longer you spend in a run, the more difficult it will get.  Every roughly 5 minutes, the game will adjust its difficulty to be on another caliber, while hordes will get naturally more powerful as you kill more and more of them.  This puts a question to the player: how much are they willing to commit to scouring an area finding helpful upgrades knowing that the more they do, the harder the run will be.  Is it better to just try and speedrun to the end of the area and not really explore, knowing you'll get to the endgame with lower difficulty but with a less equipped build. 

Adding to this is your limited range of options, every class has four actions that have various different cooldown rates, usually some manner of weak rapid fire attack, stronger attack with cooldown, an attack that has additional traits to it like stun, or a dodge/block.  Some pickups also give you items like turrets or traps, but largely you have to work within the confines of your weaponry and their limitations, taking that into account as you decide whether or not to rip the teleporter to the next level as soon as you find it, or go exploring for more possible buffs.  It's a very challenging but reward roguelike.

That being said, after I beat it, I kind of lost the drive to continue playing it.  I think it is very good, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it more than I believed I would.  I'm not a huge fan of "run-and-guns", if you read my best list last year I put multiple Mega Man games on it, but I enjoyed Risk of Rain's chill alien atmosphere and wave based gameplay.  But its not a roguelike I want to play forever, I don't want to do a couple runs before bed with this game like I did with Necrodancer or Hades.  I like a lot about it and I'm very excited to play Risk of Rain 2 eventually, which is arguably the game I should've played in the first place because that's the one people really got into, it just didn't grab me long term. 8/10

Game 2: Oxenfree - Beat

This is what I consider to be the first truly great game I've played all year.  My scale is very different for other people where I have very wide parameters for "good" "fine" "mediocre" and "awful", mostly due to having to abide by a very unnuanced star system that Backloggery uses for my data tracking.  But anything that I would say is a 9/10 or above to me is a "great" game.  Originally when I was tracking I considering everything 9 or above to be a 5 star game, I've since narrowed that window to be only 9.6 or above because it turned out that 9 or above encapsulated way more games than I wanted it to.  I digress, point is Oxenfree is the first game to crack that threshold this year.  I kind of became obsessed with it, it's one of my fastest turn arounds for an essay period, this game rules.  I need to play the sequel.

I won't be retreading ground with Oxenfree because I did already write about it, I feel like that's redundant.  If you're reading this and haven't read that, by the way, and you like Oxenfree, please do.  It's one of my favorite things I've written and it kind of flopped, I don't like to talk about my performance on this blog because it's always so low and I do this for me mostly but like.  That one did REAL poorly and I think it's really good.  At the time of writing this, I still haven't gone back to do other routes and try and find the "true ending", but it's definitely on my list to do that.  I really want to explore this game further and create better outcomes.  And it only being 4 hours long is definitely appealing to me.  I wish that games that were going to have multiple routes were always this short.  I liked Fire Emblem Three Houses a whole lot, for a while it was probably my favorite Fire Emblem game, the prospect of going back and doing what I was going to do in it is so exhausting.

Game 3: Runbow - Beat

Runbow technically wasn't a game clearing project.  I didn't set out to beat Runbow.  I just kind of got addicted to it earlier this year for a couple weeks and binged it while I was working on finishing "We need to talk about Bayonetta 3".  You can tell I didn't intend on beating it as a game clearing project because I didn't start from the beginning.  Usually I try to start every game I do for game clearing at the beginning point of the game if for no other reason than cleaner data tracking.  I like having those dates on my spreadsheet.  Runbow I just kind of did until it was done and then went "you know what, throw on the spreadsheet, why not".

Runbow is a party platformer where you play as a variety of colorful characters in a Mexican-inspired world of ever shifting color.  The default is a male and female character model, each being in 8 colors as the game is built for up to 8 players, but you can unlock a lot of costumes, alternate characters and indie guest stars by playing through the game.  In the main mode, the Adventure mode, you must race to the end of each level trying to unlock a path on the grid based map to the boss of each world, Satura.  Satura is a monochromatic femme fatale who has caused the colors of the world to go wonky through her meddling.  The standard way this impacts the game is through the ever changing color background and how it impacts elements on the plane you are platforming through, i.e. if the background is blue, any blue platforms will disappear.  This can be done solo, of course, but the real charm of the game comes from you having a party to play it with.

See Runbow's levels are bite sized affairs, the longest levels are still under a minute long and it's exceedingly common to have levels takes less than thirty seconds.  This is really effective for its intended audience: small groups who want fast paced, ridiculous platforming gameplay.  While I played it solo and thus didn't get the full effect, Runbow is built for a group of friends to try and race each other to the end of these bite-sized levels, trying to get an edge by either speedy and effective play or by sabotaging each other through fighting.  It is, in a way, "what if you could bring the friend-ending gameplay of Mario Party to the mainline Mario series".

With that in mind, I will say that I didn't get the full effect of Runbow because I didn't have anyone to play it with.  While I did like it quite a bit, I found it to be kind of basic overall.  There are certainly some clever and fun levels but on the whole, a lot of the game seemed to be a simple affair.  I find this to be the case with a lot of platformers that are focused on multiplayer aspects, like the New Super Mario Bros games for instance, the level design tends to be more simplistic because the fun will be produced by playing the game(s) multiplayer.  I know people who had groups to play Runbow with who loved it a lot.  I thought it was just good but not great, if I was in a small group of friends I might pull it out and see what ridiculous antics we get up to, but it's just a decent platformer otherwise.  7.1/10

Game 4: Warden: Melody of the Undergrowth - Beat

In 2020 I purchased the "Racial Justice and Equality Bundle" from the game selling platform itch.io.  It was a great deal for a good cause and I was more than happy to throw a little money to charity and get an absurd amount of games in return.  However, for many years it just sat doing nothing.  I didn't game on PC and, outside of an intensive session of updating my backloggery to include every single video game on the bundle, I didn't really pay it any mind.  That is until I started my 2023/24 era of game clearing where I would just roll a random game in my collection and play through it.  Unsurprisingly the itch games that made up 1/3 of my collection were commonplace.

But in late 2024 and, more importantly, 2025 I changed how game clearing worked.  I wanted to focus in on games I was actually interested in playing and less so on any game that was in my collection.  This was great for my overall game clearing, I was clearing games I was actually enjoying and wanting to play and not "random itch shovelware that was made for a game jam 6 years ago".  I don't think this blog would've sustained in the old way of game clearing because I just wouldn't be playing interesting enough games to talk about on average.  But it left my considerable itch library in the aether, as there were very few itch games I really actually knew ahead of time and wanted to play.  It was like Night in the Woods, A Short Hike, Pyre, and Hidden Folks.  So, I started another project: I would randomly roll itch games from my library, go to the page, see what they were, and if I was interested in them?  I'd add them to the list.  Finally the fruits of that labor are making their way into rotation, and Warden is the first of them.

Warden: Melody of the Undergrowth is an action-adventure 3D platformer inspired heavily by the Nintendo 64 era of both of those genres.  Kind of a blend of Ocarina of Time and Banjo-Kazooie.  In it, you play as a young knight who was out on a hunt with his father, the emperor of a dominant empire, when they were beset by monsters and separated.  Awakening in a mysterious glen, the young knight finds his way to a hearth and finds himself in a dreamy dimension, facing an ancient god.  This ancient god tells him that the world is now in flux and that he has been called upon to assume the role of a "Warden", a chosen warrior who arises once in a lifetime to restore the natural order to the world.  This ancient god then tasks him with a specific goal: find the other Wardens, delve into the temples across the land, and destroy the crystals that his own ancestor, the original emperor, put upon her.

The land of Warden: Melody of the Undergrowth can be approached in essentially any order the player wishes.  Like the Rareware style of Collectathon platformers, there are currency based roadblocks that the player must overcome, the world is, however, nonlinear.  There are three major areas and they can be tackled in any order the player wishes, with each area having specific secrets and sidequests that can only be reached by returning with other upgrades.  Along the way the young Warden will meet his two companions, the other Wardens who had passed a long time ago and who now share his body.  The player can switch between the three of them at any time, with one Warden being able to fire through slingshots to activate switches, one warden being able to grow plants into platforms, and the final warden being able to launch themselves out of cauldrons to temporarily fly.

I really enjoyed a lot of the worldbuilding and atmosphere of Warden.  I felt like it does a good job of creating a world the player wants to explore and a history they want to be involved in.  It's like the skeleton of a really good fantasy work.  Unfortunately the actual gameplay lets it down.  Our Wardens don't feel like they have any real weight to them, platforming feels very arbitrary and unsatisfying and even moving about the world feels weird as the Wardens feel a little slippery.  Combat is potentially interesting, taking the core Ocarina of Time ideology of "playing defensively until you see an opening" and putting it in a more fast paced setting.  However I feel like the more free form combat system they go for, where you're allowed to move about fully in space even when you're locked on, you're not locked to your opponent in any way, contradicts what they are going for.  And while I like the worldbuilding, the main character is kind of insufferably dumb, being told basic concepts like "your father is responsible for a system that greedily takes from the Earth endlessly and doesn't care about giving back" only for him to essentially go "nuh uh" everytime.  There's something here, this game could be great.  For now it's just exceptionally mediocre.  5.5/10

Game 5: Reel Fishing: Road Trip Adventure - Complete

This has been one of my favorite game clears since I've started doing this.  Reel Fishing: Road Trip Adventure does not rank among my favorite games of all time, but it is insanely important to me.  Much of my modern friend group was built on the back of this weird fishing RPG and getting to experience it for myself was delightful.  So many memories in this stupid fishing game, Sean, Alice, and Neil may all be disasters but they're my disasters.  Someday I'll play the sequel for this blog but I promise you it will not be nearly as interesting.  Like the gameplay of this game doesn't even matter really.  It's not a good fishing game even remotely, I rated it a 9/10 and the experience is definitely a 9/10, but if it wasn't as dramatic as it was, this would be bottom of the list.  For real though, if you haven't, which you probably have if you're reading this blog, check out the RTA post, it's an experience.  Just a truly bonkers game from start to finish, love it.

Game 6: The Land of Glass - DNF

The second game in my quest to delve into the itchio bundle I bought and pull out whatever I find interesting, Land of Glass is immediately eyecatching.  Like if you look at the Steam or itch pages to see what this game is, it's not hard to see why I immediately latched onto it.  The entire dreamy stained glass aesthetic is very difficult not to become enamored with.  Its very clever use of simple voxels to make the entire world have that kind of stained glass art quality is difficult not to love, it manages to do a whole lot with very little.  And also if you look at the Steam page you will see that reviews are super mixed.  We'll get to that shortly.

The Land of Glass is a deckbuilding RPG featuring unique real time grid based combat.  The goal of this combat is to play cards as rapid fire as you can, trying to break through your opponent's defenses while repairing yours in real time.  The end goal of this is to, after bursting through your opponent's defenses and creating a weak point.  After which you push on that weak point until you knock your opponent(s) off the battlefield, gaining a reward of either new equipment or new cards each time.  You do this across four stories, each with a lot of lore to learn and a lot of unique character relationships with which to explore.

Indeed the narrative(s) in Land of Glass are the game's main focus.  I only did one of the narratives, I got about 75% through the frog wizard story before I stopped, but the storytelling was indeed interesting.  It's a story about a young frog who wants his people to no longer be looked down upon by the other races in the land.  The often reclusive frogs are typically seen as lower class by the other residents of the realm, in no small part due to their lack of magic and, more importantly, their outright refusal of it.  This young frog wizard has been studying tomes he has found, trying to prove that frogs can use magic and be on the same level as the other races in the land.  But he quickly gets in over his head and unleashes a plague of corruption upon the realm on accident.  The story is about the frog, and his warrior friend who tags along, trying to right the wrongs he has done while also trying to accept that, while this is his fault, he isn't to blame in full.  That a system that tried to push down his intelligence and creativity because "we don't do things that way" failed him.  As his friend says "there are old monsters and new monsters.  The new monsters may be corrupted, but the old monsters have always been here."  While it is presented through pretty small dialog sequences, it's clear the artists had a lot they wanted to say in the Land of Glass.

Unfortunately, I feel like the gameplay lets it down.  I admire the creators for trying something new, trying this idea of a real time strategy CCG.  I don't think it works.  The often frantic gameplay makes it difficult to justify a lot of the cards, in my opinion, at least for very casual play.  A friend of mine likes to say this about Chain of Memories/Re: Chain of Memories, the card based Kingdom Hearts game, that when you dig in deep into the systems it becomes very fun.  I would argue that the incentive to do that is low, and that an average player is going to rightfully surmise that trying to get fancy with their deckbuilding is pointless because you can very easily lose ground in a battle if you are working with a strategy you haven't really learned; and that the average player is more likely to panic doing fancy strategies than get them off.  Games should not be judged based on what they are like when you master them.

Anyways, this is a very similar problem to what The Land of Glass has.  There are loads of interesting things you could be doing with your deckbuilding, unfortunately a lot of them cause you to lose ground very quickly as the game increases in difficulty and scope.  You have to have a constant stream of attack and defense cards always coming in to both break your opponents' grid and restore yours, if a weak point is every carved out in your own defenses, it's a pretty immediate round loss.  So it very quickly becomes clear that the strategy to win most efficiently is "load your deck with attack and defense cards, ignore all spells besides magic cards, and try to brute force combat".  It's an unfortunate outcome for a game that has such an interesting combat system, and I'm sure if you really delve in deep you can find a lot of fun strategies but for a very casual playthrough the gameplay just doesn't really come together, in my opinion.  I tried for like 6 hours and I just had to tap out.  3.9/10

Games I Cleared in January - 2026 Edition

 I meant to start doing this last month but I just kept forgetting.  So last year after I decided halfway through October to do a Spooky games marathon, I did a post recapping all the games I played under that umbrella.  You know just a bit of fun, I played all these games under a specific idea so it was nice collecting them in one post.  But then it turned out, I just liked that format.  It let me talk about games that I otherwise wouldn't have gotten around to, games that either were too short for a gaming diary or I didn't have enough to say on them to commit a full essay.  Games that I beat and I have thoughts on but not enough to commit their own specific post too.  And so, near the end of January, I wanted to start doing that for my other game clearing months.  Unfortunately I procrastinated so now this is being written in early March.  Oops.  At least I'll be able to crank out a couple of these back to back and get caught up.

Something I want to note before I begin: I will be noting if I beat the game, completed the game, or did not finish (DNF) the game.  I keep track of my DNFs as game clears, which I'm sure is controversial to most.  And I get it, the spirit of game clearing is to beat games and to track your DNFs as game clears does kind of feel iffy, I understand.  My logic in it is that a game is finished when you are finished with it.  A DNF and a beat ultimately accomplish the same goal: removing a game from your backlog.  As long as you made an honest attempt at the game and played it for a considerable part of the runtime, and aren't just like "I played it for two seconds and didn't like how the jump felt and so I abandoned it", that counts as a game clear to me.

Game 1: Parappa the Rapper - DNF

This one snuck in there at the very beginning of the year.  The first game I was doing for game clearing this year was Hollow Knight, a game I started playing late last year and took me until early January to beat.  I, however did not own Hollow Knight, I played Hollow Knight via a streaming service as, at the time, I had Amazon Prime and so had a selection of Luna games for free with my subscription.  The consequence of playing Hollow Knight like that is that, being a cloud gaming service, it requires a constant internet connection to be played.  So when my internet cut out for a couple days at the start of the year, well, I had to look elsewhere for games to play.  Elsewhere ended up being the games already downloaded on my PS4 and since I didn't want to commit to anything as, once the internet was fixed, I was going to go back to Hollow Knight anyways?  Parappa, a one hour game ended up being the candidate.

Parappa the Rapper is an early entry in the rhythm game genre.  I don't know if it's the first, I'm sure it isn't, but it's usually the oldest one you hear about.  In it, you play as Parappa, an anthropomorphic dog that lives in a world populated by other anthropomorphic animals and/or plants.  Parappa is an awkward young man who has a crush on his best friend, Sunny, an anthropomorphic sunflower who is always in the sights of Parappa's rival, the masculine and handsome Joe Chin.  Parappa must then undergo a sort of training arc, in an attempt to become more of an adult and attract the attention of his beloved Sunny.  Through the usage of hip hop, he will take up karate, learn how to drive, receive gainful employment, and learn to cook.  The odds are stacked against the poor dog-boy, due to his size and his general awkward demeanor, but as he repeats throughout his journey, he just has to believe.

Parappa is most noteworthy for its distinctive visual style and soundtrack.  It's a very interesting looking game, using 2D sprites in 3D environments that make the whole thing look a bit like a diorama.  The characters themselves are flat and 2D, like paper dolls, and the rough PS1 voxels make everything look like cardboard, selling the aesthetic even more.  The soundtrack is also iconic, even if it is rather short all told.  Containing only six songs is unideal, especially if you're approaching it from a modern lens, but each song is instantly catchy and really fun to listen to.  Chop Chop Master Onion is probably one of the most iconic songs in gaming history, so much so that entire competitions have been held just off who can perform that song the best.  And every song has an entirely different subgenre of hip hop in it, the driving song has a very old school throwback vibe to represent the serious driving instructor, the flea market song has a nice reggae vibe to it, etc.  It's a cool soundtrack.

I hate this game.  I'm sure you were thinking of that when you saw I DNFed a one hour game, but like.  I truly despise Parappa the Rapper.  It all comes down to how its gameplay works.  Admittedly, I am coming at this from the perspective of having decades of rhythm games that have come after Parappa.  But it honestly feels like Parappa just doesn't function?  There's not like feedback for what you're doing, if you hit the button on time or don't, the game's not going to tell you.  The one single indicator on-screen that can inform you of what happened seems to go up or down randomly.  I swear I can do things perfectly and it says I'm closer to failure or I can really screw up and it'll go "yeah that was good" and I don't really understand why or how I'm supposed to understand why.  Parappa is, unambiguously, one of the most important rhythm games of all time, but it kind of feels like the biggest impact that Parappa has left is the knowledge that no game should ever be like this ever again.  2.3/10

Game 2: Hollow Knight - Beat (One Ending)

Admittedly most of Hollow Knight was in last December but I beat it this January so.  Shrugs.  There are many holes in my gaming history, games I absolutely needed to get to and just.  Haven't.  But Hollow Knight was a massive one.  I am a huge fan of Metroidvanias and Hollow Knight is famously one of the best.  Unfortunately I just never got around to it because I was kind of getting into game collecting and was immediately brainwashed by game collectors into thinking owning physical was a moral issue due to how many delistings were happening and so I never wanted to take advantage of the numerous digital sales.  And then Covid struck and I stopped having income anyways.  So Hollow Knight was pushed off until I found out I could stream it.

I won't go too much into what Hollow Knight is and my experiences playing it, whether I liked it or not, because I've already done that.  Hollow Knight was my first gaming diary of the year.   The TL;DR is that I didn't love it like a lot of people did, and in the early game I wasn't very fond of it, but about 7 hours it clicked for me and I really liked it.  I will say, in the couple months since I've beaten Hollow Knight, I've grown to really appreciate it more.  I've been seeing a lot of lore videos explaining it and been listening to the music and regretting I don't actually own it to try and get a better ending.  I don't know if I'll go back to play Hollow Knight ever to accomplish that ending, having to start from 0 is a pretty big nonstarter for me with how many other games I want to play.  But I do actually kind of really want to play Silksong and don't be surprised if it really clicks for me there and I become a Silksong fanboy.

Game 3: The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap DNF (Softlocked at the Final Boss)

Doing Zelda games is always very touch and go for me.  I don't care about my opinion being different from other people, but I don't like to sit here and be like "the things people like about Zelda I think are bad" and just not having any middle ground really to have conversation.  I don't like dungeons and Zelda fans don't like overworld exploration, Zelda fans and I are too different now.  So starting a Zelda game on this blog is always going to be interesting, especially one that is as beloved as Minish Cap and is as antithetical to what I get out of Zelda.  It's literally the smallest Zelda game.  So I went into this expecting to hate it and I actually liked quite a bit.  It's a good one.

Again, Minish Cap is a game I did a Gaming Diary for so it'd be redundant for me to talk about it.  I do want to say I haven't gone back to actually finish Minish Cap.  Like, what happened is that I died at the same time as the cutscene telling you that you failed to save Zelda was starting and, as such, the game just stopped.  One of these days I should go back and actually finish it, I'm admittedly still pretty salty about it softlocking on me.  Having to redo a final dungeon as someone who doesn't like dungeons is a hard no from me, dawg.  Someday, though, I promise I'll actually finish Minish Cap.

Game 4: SteamWorld Dig - Beat

It's very rare that I encounter a game that I can beat in one day.  Typically a lot of the games that I play are games that take multiple play sessions over the course of multiple days to beat, and that may be even longer if I'm doing a gaming diary alongside it.  Some days I need to just write, you know?  SteamWorld Dig, though, was a game I effectively beat in one sitting.  I had actually started to play this game many years ago, I got it via Humble Bundle I think, and what had happened is that I had begun to dig down and then quickly realized that I did not have a way back up.  This was before I had played, like, Minecraft, so I didn't exactly know the rules of digging games, that you're meant to build your own way out.  So progress stalled pretty quickly.

SteamWorld Dig is a bite sized indie Metroidvania that exists within the greater "SteamWorld" universe, a series of games that all take place within the same shared post-apocalyptic Steampunk Western setting.  In it, you play as Rusty, a young miner robot who travels to the dying mining town of Tumbleton after inheriting the local mine from his recently departed uncle Joe.  After meeting the locals and building up a rapport with them, he starts his digging down into the mine to find his fortune, occasionally returning to the surface to upgrade his tools to more effectively mine.  But soon into his digging, he finds a mysterious cave, and within it is a message left behind by Uncle Joe.  Rusty was not simply brought here to find riches, he's here for a purpose: Uncle Joe disappeared before he could uncover all the secrets within this mine, and he now wishes Rusty to dig down, find all the caves, solve their puzzles, and learn the forgotten history of SteamWorld.  Along the way, Rusty will bring life back to Tumbleton, as more merchants and establishments find their way into the dying town due to his bringing wealth back into it.

SteamWorld Dig was not the first entry in the SteamWorld series, but it is perhaps its most famous and the one that has left the biggest impact.  It is one of the first titles to blend the beloved genre of Metroidvanias with the genre of sandbox games like Minecraft.  SteamWorld Dig has specific objectives that you are trying to accomplish, as you dig down you will be alerted to caves that contain upgrades for Rusty and more clues to the mysterious nature of this mine.  But, on the whole, the map is your creation.  You have to choose how you want to approach digging tunnels, the most effective way there is to get to your destination while also leaving a path out when you need it.  This can be actually rather tricky to do so if your brain isn't attuned to this style of game, it's very easy to misjudge how high Rusty can jump and end up stuck in a pit where the only way out is to die, respawning at the top and losing half your money in the process.  This fairly unique blend of genres has led SteamWorld Dig and, moreover, Rusty to become something of an indie darling.  In fact, Rusty was a common face in indie crossover games for a bit.

All that being said, I just kind of feel like SteamWorld Dig is fine.  I think it's kind of fascinating how small scale it is and how common it was for indie games to be this small scale at the time this released.  There's like a four year difference between SteamWorld Dig and Hollow Knight and it's crazy to me how quickly the indie game standard evolved from "smaller games that you can beat in a single session" to "games that are as big, if not bigger, as the titles that inspired them, and often with far more meaning than them".  I do actually enjoy the brevity, for what its worth, it's nice sometimes to be able to just sit down and beat a game in one sitting.  But it's very basic and very repetitive, the loop of going down, digging for a while, returning to the surface to sell your riches and upgrade your equipment, then going back down is just not particularly noteworthy.  It's a very average game, fun for a little while but it won't exactly leave a long term impression other than its interesting setting.  I'm interested to play the sequel though!!!  I really do like the SteamWorld aesthetic and the characters were fun.  7/10

Game 5: Secret of Mana - DNF

This one is so sad to me.  Secret of Mana is one of the Super Nintendo games I was most excited about playing for so long.  I actually own a physical cartridge for it, I have a Super Nintendo a cousin gave me and I own three games for it: Mario World, obviously, Mortal Kombat 3, and Secret of Mana.  I need to get more Super Nintendo games but also like, it's whatever.  I was an RPG fan for much of my life and the SNES era of RPGs in particular had and still has my heart, even if I don't always love the games themselves there is just something truly magical about this era of RPGs.  So finally getting to play Secret of Mana as part of this year's game clearing was an exciting prospect.  And I didn't finish it because I didn't like it.

This is yet another game I'll avoid talking about at length because I have otherwise talked about it at length before on this blog.  But I do just want to say that, in hindsight, I should've just bunkered down and finished Secret of Mana.  Like I wasn't having a good time, I think that this game is really poorly designed and just didn't grab me at all with its plot or writing to want to continue past the point I left off.  But like, I do regret not finishing it, not just because I don't like having so many DNFs on my list, but because I've committed to finishing way worse games since.  Like, at the time of writing this, I am at the end game of Revelations: Persona, the first entry in the Persona series.  It's so much worse than Secret of Mana, Revelations: Persona is ranking really low (high?) on the worst list this year.  But I chose to beat it for some reason and not Secret of Mana and that's like a disrespect to Secret of Mana, in my opinion.  So if there's a Secret of Mana Gaming Diary Part 2 (there won't be), you know why.

Game 6: Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero - Beat

This one is technically a replay, I played the first Quest for Glory many years ago as part of an old game clearing project. However, I felt it poignant to replay it as a new game clear for two reasons.  One: Quest for Glory is a series built around the idea of the five games in it being a singular series of quests.  You can play them individually, but the way they were intended to be played is that you start in the first game with your own created character and then load that character, with all your equipment, spells, or items into each subsequent Quest for Glory game.  While I finished the first one, oh, 8 years ago, I thought it would be best to start over if I'm intending on playing the rest of them, which I am.  Second of all, I lost my save anyways.  Quest for Glory is not compatible with Steam cloud saves.  So like, while I still could just start with the second game since I already played the first one, I felt it was in the spirit of the Quest for Glory saga to see it through from beginning.

Quest for Glory: So You Want to be a Hero is a classic PC adventure/RPG made by the legendary Sierra On-Line.  In it, you play as a young adventurer who has just arrived in the town of Speilberg, a small town in a mountainous region of the world heavily implied to be somewhere in Eastern Europe.  Speilberg has been, over the course of the past decade, been stricken with a string of bad luck: their princess was kidnapped, their prince disappeared in an attempt to rescue her, an intelligent group of bandits has made their home in the area, the forests have become overrun by monsters and the local Lord has become depressed and reclusive as a result.  This all occurred after the Lord ran afoul of the ogre-witch Baba Yaga, who lives to the north of the small kingdom and who the Lord has previously tried to dispose of by sending armies to take her down, only for them all to be struck down easily.  Lacking any free hands with which to solve these issues, it becomes the duty of our plucky young adventurer to tackle the problems one by one, saving Spielberg from the curse.

Quest for Glory is unique in that it combines the classic Sierra style of point and click adventure games with its inventory system and focus on puzzle solving with genuine TTRPG mechanics.  The way you interact with the world is not that different from the King's Quest series of video games, a very similar series of traditional point and clicks that Sierra also made, with you collecting inventory items to then use at specific points in the game to solve puzzles or overcome obstacles.  But with this comes a stat system, spell learning, equipment purchasing, and an in-depth combat system that functions very differently depending on your class.  I chose the mage, because of course I did, so a lot of my combat is built around infusing my weapon with magic for massive critical damage, and casting spells to push through combat.  But the thief's combat maybe more focused on dodging and looking for opportunities to attack, while the warriors will be more focused on brute forcing it.  Similarly, the quest is entirely different depending on which class you choose, with various NPCs holding more or less weight depending on what path you take and some characters and locations being entirely useless depending on your class.

Quest for Glory is not like an especially great RPG or a great adventure game.  While I admire its blend of the genres and find it compelling, I would be lying to you if I didn't think it was worse than the sum of its parts.  Due to being a Sierra Adventure game, death can sometimes put you back years if you aren't an obsessive saver.  In most Sierra Adventure games this isn't too bad because you can often speedrun your way back to where you need to be as you've already solved those puzzles but Quest for Glory, being an RPG, means that you lose levels and lose stats and have to work your way back up to where you were.  It ends up slowing down progress a lot and leads to a game that is far harsher than its Sierra brethren.  That being said, I think it's really fun.  The humor is great in it, the clever way it uses RPG mechanics to solve puzzles, the way it effectively captures the sense of adventure of going on this fairytale quest.  It's not great, but I like playing it and I look forward to rolling the other games in this series.  6.8/10

Game 7: Earthbound Beginnings - Complete

Remember when I mentioned finishing games that were worse than Secret of Mana?  I love Earthbound Beginnings, mind you.  While the gameplay is definitely underbaked, everything about it is so distinctly and unapologetically Earthbound that, as a long time fan of the series, I can't help but love it.  I'm doing the thing I often criticize others for; going "yeah, it doesn't really matter how many problems the game has because it makes me FEEL something".  But I will be the first to tell you that unless you're so Earthbound pilled that hearing Pollyanna makes you get emotional, this ain't for you.  This game is objectively terrible, despite my own feelings on the work.  I might've done Secret of Mana dirty, y'all.

This is again a game I'm not going to talk about too much here, as I not only have talked about it at length before on this blog, but I also will continue to talk about it.  My gaming diary will not be the last time I talk about Earthbound Beginnings here.  I know at this point the recaps feel like just self-promo, but like, I think it would be pretty redundant to talk about something I have already talked about for pages and pages.  I will say though that I do regret playing it on WiiU.  I don't have an active NSO subscription at the moment so I couldn't exactly play it on Switch but the rewind would've been so helpful.  And also like, if I had played it through other means I could've taken advantage of the community's work at making Beginnings a better experience.  Instead I just did the whole thing raw, lol.

Game 8: Hypnospace Outlaw - Beat

Hypnospace Outlaw is one of the best games I have ever played.  Now to be clear, it's not a game that I rank among my favorites.  While I do really like Hypnospace Outlaw, I didn't get as much out of it as I probably could've.  I've described this as "one of the best games I don't have time for", Hypnospace Outlaw really benefits from the kind of person who has the time and drive to really explore it and learn its numerous websites by heart.  I am not that person, I like to beat games, I like to live in their worlds temporarily and then move on.  So at some level Hypnospace Outlaw just isn't for me.  But I immediately recognize that this is one of the best games I've ever played.

Hypnospace Outlaw is less a game than it is a simulator for a pre-y2k OS that never happened.  In it, you play as a recently appointed moderator for the obscure operating system HypnOS, a technological advanced operating system that you hook up to your head while you sleep and then navigate in your dreams.  HypnOS has a small but dedicated community of users, so tight-knit that they often know each other in real life.  We enter it in 1999, shortly before the new millennium, and we enter it in a tumultuous time for the operating system,  As it becomes more popular and more "legitimate", HypnOS has hired more moderators to crack down on copyright infringement, malware, illegal or unsavory sales, harassment, that sort of thing.  As you progress, you start pulling back the curtain on HypnOS' practices, how a major restructuring funneled a bunch of different people running nerdy pages into the same ecosystem, forcing them to develop a deep web in the OS, how the hacker that keeps infecting the OS with malware is connected to other users, what the founder of HypnOS is truly up to.

Full disclosure, I almost wrote an essay about Hypnospace Outlaw.  This game leaves an impact on you.  What is has to say on the commodification and centralization of the internet, the death of microspaces, the destruction of child-friendly content because it's not profitable, etc. is poignant and depressing.  It's not only a celebration of the pre-y2k internet, a celebration of charming blog pages and weird obscure services, but a mourning of it.  It's beautiful, frankly.  Unfortunately, I felt out of my element and the work never materialized.  I get what this game is saying and I find it super interesting, but in the process of writing it, I realized how out of my depth I was to talk about this.  I often say I've been on the internet too long, and that's true, I've been regularly on the internet since at least 2005, but I wasn't around for the true y2k era of the internet being this magical, free place.  The internet I have always known has been one that was beginning to centralize.

I really wish that I had the time/the headspace for Hypnospace Outlaw.  While the story of Hypnospace Outlaw is definitely important and incredibly intriguing, especially in the back half of the game, the person who is going to get the most out of Hypnospace Outlaw is the person who can devote the time and has the want to just live in its world.  There are numerous pages on HypnOS that, in a standard playthrough, you are never going to see if you don't seek them out because they don't do anything.  But they're still these beautiful works of art that a person who has more drive to just live in this space will get a lot out of.  It's kind of tragic, really, I like Hypnospace Outlaw a great deal but also have to acknowledge, at the end of the day, it's not for me.  I like something with more of a structured progression and Hypnospace Outlaw is a game that wants you to just vibe in its world.  Still a masterpiece, still one of the best games I've ever played, just not for me as sad as that is. 8.7/10

Revelations: Persona - A Gaming Diary

Review:

The very first entry in the Persona series is something of an anomaly nowadays.  It's something of a stopgap game in terms of style and tone, it features a modern day high school setting and has more of the philosophical leaning that one would associate with future Persona games, but it is still distinctly SMT.  This unique blending of styles and tones creates something of a rather interesting and compelling horror RPG, with a really interesting mystery at its center that hooks the player in.  Unfortunately, a very clearly poor translation, unlikable characters as a result of said translation, and some of the most confusing and poorly designed gameplay I think I've ever experienced quickly squander what promise the game might've had and beating it becomes more and more of a chore.  Its systems are so confusing and poorly explained that it makes you feel bad about winning because you likely have done nothing to earn it, just randomly rolled a win button.  And it also feels padded more and more as it goes along, with dungeons often lasting upwards of two hours.  No exaggeration, Revelations: Persona is unfortunately one of the worst RPGs I've ever played in my life and I regret ever committing to a full playthrough.  I was more than happy to get a bad ending if it made me stop sooner.  3.5/10

Diary:

2/20/26

First Persona game, let's go!  Also, like, THE first Persona game, which I realize to a lot of people is probably insane.  Like even the most diehard of Persona fans don't play 1, I literally saw a content creator I watch go through every Persona game EXCEPT for 1 because her audience told her to just read the manga.  I'm not doing something similar, for the record, I'm not playing every Persona game in order, I only own this, because of the PS Classic, and 5.  It's entirely up to luck that I pulled Persona 1 before playing P5.  I know the argument could be made I could've skipped this one and just played P5 but I was curious about P1.  I basically never hear anyone talk about Persona 1 or 2, the majority of Persona discussion I hear is about 3 onwards, so I've always been like "but why".  I can kind of already tell but why.

Let's get some positives out of the way: while it can be a little obtuse and not explain itself very well, I do enjoy the battle system in this game.  Positional battle systems own, what can I say.  If there is something you can learn about me from this blog, it's that I love turn-based RPGs that have a more strategic element to them.  In general I love turn-based RPGs because I love setting up a strategy and watching it play out.  It's why I'm less than enthralled with RPGs that introduce interactable elements to turn based combat, I just want to menu and then be able to answer a text message midturn.  I digress.  I think the positional combat system in this game adds a lot to it.  I like that the weapons have certain reaches and, as such, you have to always be aware of where your characters are positioned in order to maximize your in-battle efficiency.  I'm sure I'm going to get annoyed late game by enemy team compositions and how I have to keep rearranging my party mid battle to adjust for them but right now, it's a fun combat system, idk.

I also like the sense of intrigue, mystery and also like the vague horror elements in this game.  I don't know what I was expecting going into it, I guess I assumed that Persona was a series where characters existed in the real world but were aware of and connected to the supernatural one.  And I know Persona 1 is not like the other Persona games, being way more of an SMT game but with a traditional party setup instead of being strictly a Monster Tamer.  But I like that this game is just like "well, you messed around with the supernatural and now you're trapped in the demon realm, sucks to suck".  There's also a lot of intrigue around the character who, in the translation I'm playing, is named Mary.  Mary fell deathly ill at some point before the game began and has been stuck in the hospital for several months, with our cast having visited her just before the inciting incident.  But, after the demon realm takes over, Mary reappears at the school up and moving as if nothing had happened.  But, strangely, her memory of both the past several months and of general knowledge she should know is missing, like who the police are.

The soundtrack is also killer.  The unfortunate thing about playing the original release is that it makes it kind of difficult to figure out what the characters' individual themes are when searching up the OST on YouTube.  Most Persona fans just use the more "correct" Japanese names and, like, some of them are obvious, Elly is Ellen for instance, but like.  Some of the other themes aren't so obvious.  But the soundtrack is good, the soundtrack is probably the high point of this game so far.  It's nice finally hearing the Velvet Room in its original context, I had always heard the fight remix in Smash previously so hearing it as it was "meant to be heard" is a really cool experience.  The police dungeon theme is such a banger, I was really taken in by it.  And the Frog Pharmacy theme is just so silly, I love it.  Also yeah, there's a frog pharmacy!!!  Love a frog pharmacy.  I think this is probably a recurring thing in SMT because when I showed people, the first thing they said was "which MegaTen game is this" but it's new to me!

Now for the bad: this game sucks.  Like it's real bad y'all.  I like things about it, don't get me wrong, but like, hoo boy.  So the first thing is that it's really slow.  Persona 1 genuinely moves at a snail's pace, especially in dungeons.  In the overworld and in "field" scenes, you have the ability to speed up your movement, which doesn't do a whole lot but it does help a tiny bit.  In dungeons you are just moving as slow as humanly possible.  You're also weirdly slippery?  Like I overshoot what I am trying to get to constantly because the character still moves after I let go.  It feels like it's on a grid and so it has to complete a full movement before it'll stop but it's also in 3D and doesn't have an actual grid laid out so it's difficult to parse where that grid is.  Mind you, that might be a emulation issue as well, I am playing on the PS Classic and this microconsole infamously has emulation issues.  When I played Wild ARMS last year, I had a swath of audio glitches that were definitely emulation based.  I was too harsh on Wild ARMS, I like that game more the more I think about it.  Regardless of whether or not it is an emulation issue, it's still very annoying to navigate the world.

The game is also very obtuse, like.  I know modern games get a lot of criticism for overtutorializing, that just like the first five hours of a game, or more if it's a longer game like a JRPG, are just all tutorials.  But there's a good reason for it, and games like Revelations: Persona are why.  I don't need a game to hold my hand, but I would like a game to, for instance, tell me that I have a map on L2 so I'm not just guessing my best when navigating the overworld.  Or for the game to give a rundown of what your in-battle actions actually accomplish as they do not explain, for instance, the entire demon conversation mechanic unless you happen to stumble upon the Velvet Room early enough, which doesn't even open until like 3 hours into the game anyways.  Which is a wild thing to not explain because it's key to the game's core mechanic.  Like, Persona 1 feels like it's made with either the understanding that you have already played a lot of SMT and so know what to expect, or that this isn't your first playthrough.  When I do, inevitably, play P5 and complain about tutorializing, remind me of this because like, I don't enjoy how much modern games hold your hand at the beginning but man is it better than this.

Also I can just tell that this translation is going to be a problem.  I'm usually not overly critical of the 90s style of JRPG translations that much, it can be frustrating, mind, to have them be a bit too jokey and referential.  It seems like Japanese game companies were concerned that Americans wouldn't handle a game with a lot of quiet, serious moments.  To be fair, a lot of Americans still can't handle media that's more introspective but that's moreso due to the death of media literacy than it is a cultural thing.  And like, it can get annoying sometimes, I've criticized it in the past, but also a lot of JRPGs are very light affairs.  A bunch of heroes taking on a super villain to save the world, it's usually classic fairytale/fantasy stuff.  Persona is not that.  Persona is a more introspective piece, that is what the Personas are understood as in the context of this game.  They are reflections of the inner self, the other side of the person who summons them.  

There's a very interesting bit in the opening where someone, presumably the protagonist, talks about a dream they had where they are a butterfly.  And how when the dream ends, they awaken and still don't know what's real.  The butterfly dream felt so real, so true.  Are they the butterfly, are they the person, which is the true them?  Both?  Neither?  It's an interesting concept that perfectly encapsulates the relationship Personas have to their users.  However, given what I've seen, I worry about how this translation is going to handle concepts as introspective as this.  Characters tend to have very surface level and extreme takes on things, a rivalry isn't just a complex relationship between two people, it's simplified to unabashed hatred.  There are several times where the character I know as Nate tells the character Mark that he is going to leave him to die if he isn't useful to him.  Which as an aside, is an unhinged thing to include in this version of these characters when Nate is a rich kid and Mark is black.  What were they cooking?  Anyways, I'm concerned that the way this game communicates its ideas to the American audience is going to water them down.

As well, the way the contextualize Personas in this translation is very basic.  Like, Personas are many things, a reflection of the inner selves, manifestations of gods and monsters from across literature and folklore, a representation of the major arcana in tarot.  Persona 1's original English translation though opts for a very basic angel vs. demon dichotomy, referring to them as "inner angels and demons" several times.  This is an issue I have with a lot of Western translations of Eastern media and/or how the audience of that media engages with it.  Like, it reminds me of how Western audiences only contextualize the Sinnoh creation story in Pokemon Diamond and Pearl through the lens of Western Christianity, depicting Arceus as the equivalent of the Abrahamic god when he's more akin to the creatio god in Shintoism.  I digress.  The point is that there is this genuine worry I have that the translation might not be able to properly handle its own themes that it's already attempting to setup due to its attempts to make it relatable for an American audience it doesn't fully trust.  I hate criticizing localizations, by the way.  Just despise it.  Like that's such a topic that has been co-opted by right wing grifters that don't even really want to engage with the ideas present in these games, they just want to complain about how the games are "censored" because they take out the parts where you can date underaged characters.

Speaking of, I feel like I should already keep a counter of how many characters in this game have inappropriate thoughts or relationships with minors.  Because so far it's 2.  It's 2.  Why is it 2.  I've barely even started the game.  But it's 2.  The less problematic one is the owner of the General store and one of the named character's fathers.  He has a bizarre fixation on his son's fencing rival, a beautiful young girl who recently transferred to this school and has dethroned his son as the fencing champion.  When the demons ascend and the city changes, he's quick to ask how she is doing, saying "I don't care about my son, so long as she's alright".  This is clearly meant to be a guy we are supposed to find creepy and hate, so like, it's not necessarily "problematic".  But it's still a thing that happens and it makes me uncomfortable!  The weirder one though is that the main character's teacher has a bizarre fixation on him.  Like the teacher is almost always talking about being concerned about him specifically, ensuring that he's alright, worrying about how he's faring.  It's to a point where you feel like it's more than just being concerned about a favorite student.  And, unlike the former case, this one isn't seen as abnormal.  Like a woman having a problematic fascination with an underage boy is somehow "better" than a man having a problematic fascination with an underage girl.  From what I understand, this is a trend in the Persona series too, so not looking forward to that!

Also, just real quick, I have been made aware about the whole Snow Queen thing.  That because I am playing the original PS1 localization, an entire main quest line has been removed from the game.  It's disappointing, not only because, from what I understand, an entire character from the start of the game just disappears if you don't have access to this storyline, as well as numerous plot threads being introduced but never followed up on, like the school disappearing entirely after you leave for the police station.  I can't pretend this isn't disappointing, like.  I make no promises I'm even going to finish Persona 1, I am more than comfortable with DNFing a game if I'm not feeling it, ESPECIALLY if that game is going to be long.  If I'm not into it by hour 15 I'm not going to be into it by hour 40, y'know?  So not being able to do a questline in a game I'm not super sure I'm going to finish is not the biggest deal in the world.  It just sucks because like, something I love about RPGs is the idea that your choices matter, that you can shape the narrative.  Play a role.  It's something the genre, especially those coming out of Japan, has kind of lost in my opinion.  So having a choice so monumental that it entirely changes what the story of the game even is?  I can't help but feel like that's a tragic loss.  Oh well, we push on.

2/21/26

Y'all, I don't think Revelations: Persona is long for this world.  Like this game is so bad in so many ways that, despite me finding the core story intriguing, I'm already finding it difficult about 7 hours in to justify continuing to play this.  Which would suck, I hate that already for the second time this year (technically third), I've had a Gaming Diary end in a DNF.  But like, the more I get into this game, the more the things I even kind of liked about it at the start seem to sour.  Meanwhile, all the things I disliked about this game at the start just seem to be getting worse.  I can totally see why this game has the reputation it does, it's very frustrating to get through.

So, in the interest of not just ranting this whole time, I do want to highlight how fascinating I find the plot.  Even if the version I'm playing is kind of obnoxious about overexplaining things, as if the players would immediately abandon you if you left any ambiguity in the game.  When I finally got to the end of the dungeon I spent most of this play session inside of, our attempts to stop the CEO whose experimentations appear to have brought forth the demon realm are foiled by an incredibly powerful little girl simply named "the Girl in Black".  After she stops us from killing her "daddy", we awaken back in the high school, but everything is weird and different.  Things are as if time froze six months ago, before Mary went into the hospital.  The actual days have passed, our cast confirms that touchstones from their own time period like an upcoming track meet are still happening, but it's as if nothing else has progressed in six months.  They awaken in their old gymnasium, from before the remodel, and are told about students who had disappeared in the past six months as if they never left.  It doesn't take long for the cast to stumble into the truth: this isn't their world.

The world they've been transported into is an alternate universe, one where Mary never got sick.  This is why we have this mysterious other Mary that appeared out of nowhere and who doesn't seem to have basic memories.  This Mary doesn't know what the police are because, in her world, the police don't exist.  Where their station would be in the protagonist's world is now just forest.  In this timeline, Mary's mother is a distant, work obsessed narcissist whom Mary has cut herself off from due to being unable to handle how toxic she is.  Stuff like that.  This alternate Mary quickly apologizes for keeping this secret, believing that it was unnecessary to inform the party as all they had to do, hypothetically, was kill the evil CEO and then their worlds would be set right.

But also you get the sense that, while this is A conclusion that explains what is going on, it's not totally accurate.  The way the students talk in this other world is (allegedly) very different from how they talk in the main world, seeming more one note.  Less like people and more like movie characters.  Our party highlights how shallow and superficial they all seem, how "fake" this world is.  It's almost as if it's a world that was created by someone with intense power but poor understanding on how to use it.  The kicker is when they meet "Bruce", a former jock at the school who mysteriously eloped with another student a couple months prior in the main timeline and who disappeared shortly after.  Bruce is trapped in this alternate universe and the student he allegedly eloped with was taken by the demons.  The strange thing is that six months prior, where this school is supposedly trapped in time, Bruce was dating not this other student, but Mary.  Bruce was dating Mary before she fell ill, and is now stuck in this world with this alternate Mary who never got sick.  Interesting that.

So the sense of intrigue is there, I like this plot.  I want to see it keep going.  The problem is that everything else about this game is super frustrating!  Like, for as much as I'm interested in the plot, I don't enjoy these characters?  We are now 7 hours in and have had ample time to talk to them so I feel kind of confident in saying this, and this might be a localization issue this localization is so bad anyways, but like.  Any time I try to talk to these people and get more of a sense of the depths and nuances of their characters, it goes one of two ways.  Either they reiterate points they've already established, like Nate and Mark hating each other or Alana, my fifth party member, being kind of an airhead.  Or they just repeat some manner of "stop wasting time, we have things to do".  I get that a character arc is something that develops over time and, as the game progresses, I am more likely to get the depth I'm hoping for, but at the same time it feels like I'm actively discouraged from talking to them, as every time I do they tell me to stop talking to them.  It's like the game doesn't want me to engage with it.

And again, like, it feels like there are so many mechanics in this game that feel like I should already know how they work but the game just didn't tell me how they work.  Like, I'm starting to wrap my head around crafting Personas, using a guide to help me so I don't spend way too much time trying to trial and error getting cards.  First off, maybe it's just because I wasn't in the mood to play last night, that might be a thing, this part of the game is really unfun?  Like you just say nonsense statements until you find the one that makes the enemy's interest start going up and then you just repeat that one singular option until they go "okay, what do you want".  Nothing feels organic about this system, I'm not intuitively trying to figure out what to say based on demon personalities because I still don't know what personality traits like "Surly" have to do with wanting to hear Mary spout conspiracy theories.  It feels as though my experience playing Persona is just worse because I made the mistake of having not played it before my first playthrough.  Like people often wonder why Final Fantasy was able to gain a foothold when almost every other JRPG is obscure and niche and it's literally just that Final Fantasy is accessible.  It has very intuitive mechanics and/or explains its unintuitive ones properly so that players don't feel put out by them.

Speaking of unintuitive mechanics, I have now successfully created additional Personas.  Shame I can't equip any of them.  Like I don't even know what I'm doing wrong here, I guess the Arcana matters?  Because each Persona has an Arcana in front of its name?  But unless I missed something major in the menus which I've been spending most of the game in, I haven't seen anywhere where the game highlights "Arcana compatibility".  So either I'm just unobservant, which could very well be true, or this is yet another point of the game expecting me to have a Masters degree in how to play the game before I even start playing the game.  It's just... this game's overwhelming.  It's complicated but it doesn't onboard enough to where you want to learn the systems, it just throws you in deep and goes "welp, figure it out.  Or not, I don't care."  It's honestly making me a bit hesitant to play other Persona games.  Like 5 has been on my shelf for years, I bought it after hearing my best friend talk about how good it is (only to then be told I wouldn't like Persona really, I guess that prophecy is coming through in real time).  But seeing that these mechanics that I'm very intimidated by and honestly don't find overly fun are also in that game is making me go "maybe I sell this, actually.  Maybe I take P5 off my list and sell it."

Also I just kind of dislike how, this early into the game, I'm already at a point where I'm encountering insta-death moves.  It's not just a single enemy type either, several enemies will either just have one powerful move that drains all your HP or a combo move that just decimates it.  It makes combat really unfun, I never know when I enter a battle if it's going to be an actual rewarding fight or if I'm just going to get bodied by an enemy who just has the win button.  It's like genuinely this game does not want you to like it, that's how it feels.  The very few parts about the game I was actually pretty positive on just keep getting worse.  Also, I haven't been given an actual opportunity to upgrade my equipment in the 7 hours I've played this so far?  I've only been able to go to the store once and all the equipment they had was just the stuff I'm currently wielding anyways. So it's like, combat is becoming just unfun but I don't have the means to make it more manageable.  I can see why Persona fans ask you not to play this game, it's kind of miserable.

I'm sorry y'all.  Like I know DNFs aren't fun, I know posts where I'm super negative aren't fun.  I try not to just criticize a game nonstop because like, I love video games.  I adore video games, I want this place to have nuanced opinions, I'm certainly not going to not criticize a game, but I want these blogs to be about the joy of playing a game.  But man, Persona is just beating me down.  Like, it's so sad because I want to see where this story goes, I'm very intrigued by it.  But I just don't want to force myself to finish something I'm not enjoying, especially not something where I know that like I have potentially 30-40 hours left of it.  It wouldn't make me happy.  I'll commit to another play session, I like to at least give every game I play 3 play sessions before I bounce, but like.  I DNF'd Secret of Mana earlier this year already and I was having way more fun with that game.  I guess in a way DNF-ing is an honest experience, which is the point of the gaming diaries.  See you on the other side.

2/23/26

Well then.  This was an interesting play session.  And by that I mean I managed to get a Persona that is a win button on accident.  I stumbled into a Persona that has the spell "Nuke", for 8 MP I can basically insta-kill almost any party of enemies.  This is already an insane power level but something I haven't really mentioned is that your MP in this game naturally restores.  I don't know if this is a side effect of a Persona I have equipped or just how the game is, but every couple steps you take restores 1 MP.  So by the time I'm usually in another encounter, Mary, who I have the Persona on, is ready to just Nuke the field again.  On the one hand, I'm glad, because now the game is much more manageable.  At this juncture I feel like I could beat the game.  On the other hand like, having a win button is nice, but I also don't feel like game balance should, you know, let me do this?

This has also created a snowball effect where Mary is now getting more and more overpowered because of this Persona.  The way EXP works is that every participant in battle gets a baseline EXP value.  So as long as your party just exists, they're getting EXP.  But then that EXP has increased based on how the party member performs in battle and how effectively they use their Persona.  So if Nate buffs the entire party, that's a big buff to his EXP.  Mary, who is now regularly dealing 300-700 to entire parties of enemies is now getting thousands of EXP per battle.  It's crazy, I realize, but I have no incentive not to do this.  The game doesn't seem to particularly care about party balance, it seems like if you make a Persona that just wins the game early on, good job, the odds were in your favor.

I know it seems like I'm complaining, and I kind of am.  Like bad game balance is bad game balance even if it swings in my favor.  But I am also happy.  Having a path forward means I get to find out where this plot is going, which is something I do actually want to know.  Like, despite everything else that's happening in this game that I'm not super fond of, I find the story very intriguing.  There's been this theme developing, now that we're in this "other world" of the idealism of this alternate reality.  Characters constantly mentioning how all they want to do is be happy, and how this world is intended to accomplish that goal.  That before the demons started showing up, before the main antagonist began enacting his plan, corrupting this ideal world, it was kind of paradise.  But, there's something insidious about this place as well, like this happiness is not natural, it's artificial.  I feel like there's a dystopia like this but I can't place which one off the top of my head, where everyone is "happy", but they're happy on the grounds that if they aren't, they'll be punished.

Contrast this with the other half of the alternate town.  The alternate town has a barrier that runs north to south directly through the middle of town.  You can only access the other side through the Subway tunnels underneath the town, which are currently infested by demons to prevent anyone from going to the other side.  After a long dungeon, you come out on the other side and quickly go to the first landmark, the Mall on this side of town.  In the protagonist's world, this is a mall like any other, it's called Joy Street, but in this alternate world it's the "Black Market".  The Black Market is run by a mysterious woman known as the Harem Queen, a woman who works for the Girl in Black.  The Harem Queen imprisons people inside the Black Market, once you enter, you're unable to leave.  You are her prisoner, and her slave, and she begins to strip away the parts of you she covets.  Alana is quick to pick up on this as she feels her beauty being drained the longer she spends inside the Black Market, and indeed the Harem Queen covets beauty most of all, wishing to be the most beautiful.

The Harem Queen, as well as her boss The Girl in Black, are unambiguously the villains of this section, they are keeping people prisoner and kidnapping them to suit their own machinations.  They are a corrupting influence on this idealized world, a world that knows so little strife that the police don't exist in it.  But, at the end of the day, the idealized world is also a prison.  A place where everyone involved is trying to escape the harsh realities of life, where the key driving force is to "just be happy".  It's a toxic positivity, one that forces you to never address the problems in your life.  And it's one that our party has a lot of thoughts on, for the first time these characters have thoughts on the world around them.  Not Mark though, Mark kinda just reacts to everything like "what is going on".  He's very dumb.  But in particular, Nate and Alana argue constantly about this idealism, Alana agreeing with it, saying life is just happier when you bear no mind of the past or the future.  But Nate, who for once isn't trying to complain about Mark existing, presents the idea that this is just a fantasy, that the past and the future will happen and that by hiding out in a present where nothing bad has or will happen, you are just fooling yourself.  It's not a lot, mind, and I'm assuming this is the localization removing more nuance again because that's the common thread, but it's the first time in this game so far where it seems like Persona is what I've been told it is, you know?  An introspective game series.

As such I want to propose a theory, one that I feel like I have hinted at numerous times but haven't stated in full I think.  And to be clear, the game is not subtle about this theory I'm proposing, I think it's meant to be a big reveal but they're laying it on pretty thick.  I think this alternate universe is not actually an alternate universe.  I think that this is a world created by Mary.  That Mary, who has been in the hospital for the past 6 months and who herself has the ability to tap into Personas, created a world to retreat into where she never got sick.  Initially just an idealized fantasy, it become more and more real until it started actually existing and bridges started forming between the two.  It's a world so without conflict that the police don't exist, a world where time has progressed but the world is frozen six months into the past.  Things that Mary could not possibly know about are unchanged for her.  People that only recently showed up into her life months before exist as question marks, the fencing rivals who in the main universe are these two interesting NPCs who always fight are hardly even rivals because, when Mary fell ill, one of them had only recently moved into town.  This world is a place for Mary to retreat into when he sad life being chronically ill gets to her, but now it has been made real.

It makes me wonder, then, what the purpose of the twin girls who seem to rule this land are.  I've previously mentioned the "Girl in Black", who we now know is named Maggie.  There is, also, a Girl in White who we haven't seen yet, who is apparently named Mae.  Maggie is something of a jailor in this realm, she exists to imprison people here and destroy the idyllic nature of it.  She is stated to be the main antagonist's daughter, but I'm not so sure.  I think that she is some aspect of Mary, maybe her own self-loathing who exists to destroy her happiness.  Or the crushing weight of her reality, the inescapable truth that she is bed ridden and ill and may never get better.  Mae is less seen, but if I had to guess, she is attempting to protect Mary's world from crumbling.  The part of her that exists to preserve this idealism.  Which would be very interesting, we are told that Maggie is the villain of this tale but, should this theory be correct and I think it is, Maggie may be the one that's ultimately in the right.  If Mary is creating this idyllic world to not face her reality, then it is her who is the one trying to break this chain.  Interesting.

Anyways, remember my counter?  The one counting adults with unhealthy fascinations with minors?  It goes like WAY up now.  So as previously mentioned, to get the means to craft new Personas, you must bargain with enemies.  Each party member has a methodology through which they can bargain, usually having four.  A lot of these options, and I mean A LOT, are just bizarrely horny.  Mark frequently needs to dance for demons and the game specifically highlights that he's doing so "seductively".  Nate will neg demons.  Mary tends to make herself look small and shy and scared so the big strong demons will want to protect her.  And Alana does just proposition them, like, that's just a thing she does.  This is already bad, but it's worse when all the demons are depicted as adult men and women?  Like outside of the directly monstrous ones and the sort of Earthbound-esque weird enemies like a sentient basketball or a toilet (I know the toilet is a yokai), they're usually depicted as humanoid and decidedly adult.  So essentially can no longer keep track because the answer has went from "a specific number of NPCs" to "yes".  People willingly choose to play Atlus games, that's the crazy thing.

As well, I'm uncomfortable about the Black Market storyline.  So, the basic storyline is simple, there's a Queen that rules over the Black Market, once you're inside you're not allowed to leave and she slowly steals your life force until you are weak enough to where she enslaves you.  Classic scary story stuff.  But the majority of the people in the Black Market are either in drag or implied to be trans.  And more specifically, these are not decisions they have made, they are decisions that the Queen has put onto them.  It's implied, at least in the localization, that these men have been here so long and have had their most important pieces stripped from them that they are becoming increasingly feminine, and those that have been fully transformed state that it's only a matter of time before the same happens to those who are still only wearing wigs.  It's literally the conservative myth of "trans people and drag queens will indoctrinate you and make you like them".

It's not an unexpected thing to come up, Atlus' treatment of LGBTQ+ persons to this day is awful.  I often cite Catherine, a game criticized for being transphobic by having a storyline where a member of the core group of guys falls for the waitress at the bar they go to only to discover later that she's a trans woman and be disgusted by this fact.  Only for Atlus to go on the rerelease "we hear you, we see you, we're going to make the game more sympathetic" and leave the storyline not only unchanged but also alter that characters' story so that, in one of the "good endings" of the game, to have that character never have transitioned.  Atlus is a company that fixes transphobia by making things more transphobic.  And these are modern games, so a game in 1996?  Forget about it.  Still, it's really uncomfortable to get through and I can't wait until I'm done with this part of the game.

I don't like Revelations: Persona.  I want to make that clear.  Am I having a better time with it?  Absolutely.  Will I likely finish it?  Most likely.  But this game has aged pretty poorly, and arguably wasn't that great to begin with.  The design decisions and obtuse nature of it are just not good for an RPG with these many unintuitive mechanics.  I think it needs a modern remake, though I worry that Persona 1's unique flair would get lost with one.  Atlus would try to rework it as a Persona game more and kind of lose some of the interesting atmosphere and more dark tone.  I mean they already kinda did try this with the PSP remake of Persona 1 which didn't change too much about the gameplay but did radically change the soundtrack to match more of the modern Persona stuff and I've seen a lot of people say the newer soundtrack doesn't match.  Speaking of which, the soundtrack has still been killer, I've just been failing to take as close of note of tracks while I'm playing.  Here are a few of the neat tracks I've found in this part of the game.  But yeah like, me no longer not wanting to DNF the game, at least at this stage, doesn't mean I'm liking it suddenly.  Even if I find the themes and story interesting, everything else really is just poorly done.  We'll see how this develops.

2/25/26

I spent like half of this play session lost in a dungeon.  The Karma Hotel, which is only like the third or fourth dungeon in this game, being 10 floors without an easy way to get up or down is quite a choice.  Actually, something I've noticed about this game is that they really like this design element of "multi-floor dungeons where you have to go all the way down to the bottom before working your way back up".  Which I get as a thematic choice, Persona dungeons are meant to be labyrinthian structures built into normal buildings we'd see in real life.  And that comes with the need to create a logic for how the dungeon design adopts and adapts realistic proportions for multi-storied buildings.  It is just kind of crazy that their solution for how to change a 5-10 story building into a dungeon is "you go all the way up or down, then work your way through in the other direction".  But complaining that Persona 1 doesn't have the most compelling gameplay is old hat by this point.

That being said I'm going to do it more.  Look, I know PlayStation games, especially ones with complex 3D environments which Persona is kind of, couldn't be huge.  They were limited by what they could actually put on the disc and so a lot of games had to use tricks to make themselves seem so much larger in scope than they actually were, to get more out of the players' time.  Persona's way of handling this, however, is just tedious.  In the section of the game I did this time, I spent an hour and a half navigating a dungeon, only to get to the end and get teleported out.  I then had to make my way back down through the dungeon to fight the boss.  After I beat the boss, I had to manually exit out of the dungeon, then walk all the way back to a different dungeon I had already been through, the Subway Tunnels, navigate that dungeon again, then walk towards the next dungeon.  And when I pick the game up again tonight, I will almost certainly have to navigate the dungeons I've already visited to progress.  It feels like padding.  That being said, like, I don't like this game really so maybe it feels padded to me because of that?

So, the Harem Queen.  As we get further in the dungeon, we find rooms of conventionally attractive men whose entire existence is to worship the paintings the Harem Queen makes, she's obsessed with her art being seen as the best.  The party quickly clocks two things: a, that the paintings are technically very competent but lack any sort of artistry behind them, and 2, that they are all reminiscent of the style of their missing friend Selina.  Selina was the student the party believed had eloped with Bruce several months ago.  She was transported to this world at the same time Bruce was, and was very quickly abducted by Maggie and brought beyond the Wall.  As you may expect, the party's missing friend is, in fact, the Harem Queen, which means that this is a teenage girl who is enslaving adult men, keeping the sexy ones for herself and turning the "less desirable" ones into women.  I hate everything about the Harem Queen plot if you couldn't tell.

When we reach the bottom of the dungeon, we meet Selina in her private chambers.  The group immediately clocks how much she's changed, Selina, a girl who always took pride in her perfect appearance, now has a face covered in large black moles, with more growing by the minute.  She explains that Maggie, after kidnapping her, granted her a magic mirror that will grant her every wish.  However, each time she uses it, another mole appears on her face.  It's the classic story of your inner wickedness manifesting outside of yourself until it ruins your outer beauty.  Selina cares very little about how her appearance has shifted because her newfound power allows her to finally be what she has always wanted to be: adored like Mary is adored.  Selina, as it turns out, has always been rather jealous of Mary.  How effortlessly Mary was loved by everyone and how good she seemed to be at everything.  Selina's obsession with her art being seen as the best spawns from the fact that she always believed she was in Mary's shadow, that despite Selina's art technically being better, Mary's art was more beloved.  Selina even states that her dating Bruce was a means with which to get back at Mary, that her jealousy and hatred for the girl made her steal her boyfriend.  On orders from Maggie, Selina uses the mirror one final time to turn herself into a demon and kill the party, being promised that Maggie will return her beauty to her if she does so.

After defeating Selina, something snaps in her.  She tries to hold onto the persona of the Harem Queen but it is slowly fading, the weight of what she has done settling on her shoulders.  She alternates between continuing to lash out at Mary in jealousy and beg them to leave her to her misery.  That what she has done is unforgivable, even despite being told by the party that they forgive her, that she's a victim of an evil person manipulating her for their own gain.  As we get through to her, Bruce suddenly appears in this room, overjoyed to have finally found Selina.  Selina, being deeply insecure, is quick to tell Bruce to go away, to be with Mary, the woman Selina believes he actually loves, and leave her.  Bruce, humorously, responds "Selina, I dated Mary six months ago, that's been over and done with".  Honestly, I wish I was taking notes on this because the entire conversation between Selina and Bruce is very funny.  I'm pretty sure he at one point says "yeah, sure your face is covered in all these ugly moles, but you know what, I don't really care".  I've been very critical of the tone this localization has taken, especially how many deeper psychological concepts the material wants to address, but this time it works, this conversation is very sweet but also very funny.

Selina tells the gang that Maggie's hideout is in a castle on this side of town, and luckily the castle is on the map.  Interestingly, it's where the hospital is in the real world.  I would like to draw attention back to my previously stated theory that this world is a creation by Mary.  I think it's very interesting that this world has half of the town, the half where the hospital is, as this dark, shadowy place, with the hospital being a literal bad guy fortress, while the side of town where the school and thus her friends are is a bright, idyllic place where strife is so unknown that they don't even have cops.  We are 100% inside Mary's head right now.  Anyways, Maggie appears at the castle and states that the gang can never enter, because the only other person with a key, her "sister" Mae, not only lives on the other side of town but is also too much of a coward to ever help them.  She locks the door behind her and the group has no choice but to seek out this cowardly young girl and convince her to help us.

Mae lives in a fairytale forest that arose in this alternate world in the past month.  In the real world, this is where the police station is and, in Mary's alternate world, this was a flower garden.  Both have mysterious disappeared to instead be replaced by this beautiful forest of gorgeous pink trees that the party states they haven't seen in a long time.  I don't think that's accurate, these trees are all over the place, they are the save room, but you know.  Ludonarrative dissonance.  The things that happen in the gameplay are not always indicative of the text.  Anyways, she literally lives in a gingerbread house in the center of this forest, which going off the theory that Mae and Maggie represent parts of Mary's internal psyche, I find interesting.  Like Maggie, this evil side of Mary, lives in the place Mary hates the most; her hospital.  The thing that has robbed her of life for the past six months.  But Mae, who is presumably the "good" side of that coin, lives in a fantastical fairytale setting where nothing can harm her.

When we meet Mae, she tells us what we probably have already pieced together: that her and Maggie are not truly two separate beings.  Mae is the creator of Mary's world, a deity that used her distinctive crescent moon compact to creator an idyllic world with no violence, illness, or corruption.  Everything was safe and happy, until the main antagonist of the game found this world.  He sought to possess its power and called forth to the darkness inside Mae, which stepped outside of her, creating Maggie.  The girls' compact fractured in two, and now they exist as separate entities, one of whom uses their powers to imprison and manipulate the people of Mae's ideal world, and the other who hides from her darkness.  Mary is quick to note two things about Mae: she resembles Mary from when Mary was a child, and also that the compact the two girls are fighting over resembles one she used to have, one that had been lost to her before the other version of her, the "real" version of her from the protags' world, went to the hospital.  She bizarrely takes the idea that she is a creation of a little girl surprisingly well, but I guess it's not uncommon in fiction for figments to accept they are figments once that reality is put upon them.

The party asks Mae for help to defeat Maggie, but she is unmoving.  She is scared not only of the other girl, but also of what might happen if the party accomplishes their goals, because I think it's pretty clear here that Mae is a representative of our Mary and if this world reaches its conclusion, Mary's will to live is likely to give out.  I think that's a pretty safe bet as to what's going on given the clues as presented.  Which is ironic because the cast is begging Mae to help them so they can get back to their world to find and help their Mary.  Mae just asks them questions about what use fighting is, why they even bother.  After answering her, she refuses to give the compact over, instead sending her teddy bear, which grows into a monstrous creature, to stop the gang.  She disappears after you beat it, dropping her compact resignedly.  But the party feels uneasy about this.  They feel as though something has gone wrong.  I too feel as though something has gone wrong, I know this game has a bad ending and I feel like I just locked it in.  Oops.  If that's true, I'm just gonna be upfront, I will be swallowing that choice and I will not be replaying the game to get the good ending.  The choice is 13 hours in and might be longer on a second playthrough depending on how quickly I can remember how to access Nuke, it's just not worth it to me.  I like this game's story but I don't like the rest of game enough to care about reaching its "proper" conclusion.

2/27/26

I'm not going to front with you, I barely remember what happened in this section.  I was kind of juggling playing Persona while being invested in conversation with a buddy of mine.  And I'm often juggling conversations with Persona, mind, that's just what I do when I game.  I'll throw on a stream and kind of chat sparsely in it, answer questions if a friend needs help and I know what to do.  But I was like super invested in this tonight so I kind of just went on autopilot for Persona.  This led to me, a, not accomplishing much of anything, I got through like one dungeon.  But 2, I don't exactly remember everything that happened in this section of the game.  So forgive me if I don't have any interesting analysis on the plot I did encounter.  Alright, so, this section of Persona.

I almost lost to a boss fight in this section.  This is not an uncommon thing for this style of JRPG, while I haven't played a Persona before I have played the very similar Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth games.  And you quickly learn that no matter how overpowered you seem during normal gameplay, it all gets thrown out the window the moment you hit a boss.  It did not help that, a, the boss did just have an attack which consistently one shot my main damage dealer, but also my play was just horrid in this section.  I was not making the most optimal of plays because I got into this headspace of "well a longer fight gives me more opportunity to work on my Persona leveling".  When really I should've just been doing the best things I had access to.  It took me several turns to switch in my buffing Persona and start spamming Magic Up so NukeMore, the upgraded Nuke spell, would deal more damage than just like.  130 per turn.  I've been open about how bad I am at most, if not all games, but this is probably one of my worst performances in recent memory.  I almost wiped to this boss like 8 straight turns in a row and if I had, I probably would've stopped playing because I hadn't saved in several hours.  Though I guess if I really wanted to, I could've gone back and fixed the decisions that possibly locked me into the bad ending.

There was kind of a clever subversion of the "villain telling their enemies their plans" trope in this section.  So, this has been one of the most made fun of tropes in storytelling history, the villain explaining their plan and how exactly to defeat them.  Now I think it is kind of obvious why this trope exists, especially in a video game, you need to communicate to the audience key information that you might not otherwise have the opportunity to.  This is especially needed in video games, where you have to lead the player to their next objective, and a convenient way to do that is by having the villain explain what they would need to do to defeat them.  So, Maggie, for instance, is the one that told us we need to find Mae in order to move forward.  Having found Mae and receiving her compact, we return to the Castle where Maggie lives and insert it into the lock, only for the whole thing to immediately disappear.  The main antagonist has played us for fools, he needed to get the compact to further his plans but he seemingly can't leave this side of town and Maggie, who can, cannot touch Mae.  So by leading the party to Mae via explaining his plans, he let them do his work for him.

And Nate had figured out that's what is happening but didn't tell anyone because, idk, he just didn't feel like it?  He explains that it was a moot point anyways, as they needed to get to the main antagonist and Maggie so they were kind of in a no-win situation, but like.  Come on dude, you could've communicated with the others.  I don't think I've made it the most clear, but I really dislike these children.  Maybe it's because of the localization decisions or maybe it's because my patience for teenaged characters has gone down considerably over the years, especially in like anime/manga/JRPGs, but these kids are so one note.  Their conversations are redundant, they don't feel like three dimensional characters, they are always fighting with each other.  They're insufferable.

But Nate?  I hate Nate the most.  He's the most frustrating party member in the game, he's a spoiled rich kid who looks down on all the other party members and despite being the "know-it-all" smart kid, he is categorically unhelpful, figuring things out on his own only to then hide it from the other party members until it's convenient to drop on them to make them look dumb.  It's crazy too because like, he's one of the only party members that has had a humanizing moment, his butler/surrogate father died at the start of the game and it left him shellshocked for the first dungeon.  And yet despite this very recent tragic death, he behaves like it didn't happen.

I actually just want to stop and talk about the localization, if I may.  So, I've been giving the game the benefit of the doubt so far that its script is largely bad because of a poor localization.  Some things are clearly not that way, the most problematic plot points have to come from the source, but I've been quick to blame most problems on the localization.  But like... that can't all be true, right?  Like, I'm sure the thing they're saying are drastically different but there's no way they changed the text boxes to be shorter.  There's not exactly a lot of room for nuanced character development or actually meaningful psychological insight.  And I know this is the first Persona game so they probably haven't really decided to go all in on that aspect.  But I guess I'm starting to wonder: is Persona actually what I've been told it is.

I've always been given the impression that Persona is a JRPG with a brain, that it has actually things to say in a genre dominated by stories with less complexity and nuance to them.  JRPG fans are going to get really mad at me for saying that but I don't care.  I've played a ton of them and I've loved a ton of them, they ain't exactly Victor Hugo my guys.  But now I'm just wondering like, is Persona smart, or were you just 15.  Everyone I know who really loves Persona for its themes either got it into when they were a teenager or if they were older, they were used to not playing games that presented a viewpoint.  And I just have to wonder, is this franchise smart or did it seem smart to you because you got into it at a point in your life where you weren't used to media that tried to say something?  Anyways, I'm very seriously considering removing Persona 5 from my to-play list after this, don't hate me for it if I do.

So we get to the end of the Castle and we meet the antagonist yet again.  His name's Guido, by the way, I haven't said his name because I felt like it wasn't going to be important, and it's arguably still not.  Like I'm pretty confident that, if I were playing this game to the good ending, Guido would be taken out at the point where the plot diverges and then we'd be spending another like 10 hours with a new villain.  Anyways, Guido reveals his true master plan: that by obtaining both compacts from both girls, he now has unfathomably power.  He can destroy and create as he sees fit, effectively becoming a god.  With this power, he retreats to the protagonist's original world, having turned the factory he used to work at into a massive palace.  He declares himself a god and then moves into his palace, challenging the protagonists to find a way to defeat him.  Yes, as is tradition with JRPGs, we need to find a way to kill god.  In a rare humanizing moment, our fifth party member, Alana, does break down.  Consumed by the hopelessness, for the first time something getting to the usually upbeat girl.  Unfortunately it's not really explored because the team tells her to cheer up and she does.

Part of me feels like I should just stop.  Like, I feel like I'm close to, at the very least, the ending I am going to get.  Maybe one or two more dungeons and I'll get there.  But also I'm not having fun anymore.  Arguably I was never having fun, I guess, but in the early game I did find some enjoyment from the combat and I was intrigued by the story.  These things have dissipated.  Every fight has devolved into "hit the win button and if it doesn't work, spam basic attacks".  The characters being as poorly written as they are is actively eating away at what the plot had going for it.  The promise it had has faded.  Part of me wonders if I'm feeling this way because I know I'm probably not getting the "true ending" of the game, but at the same time playing until I get the true ending means another 30 hours of THIS.  I feel bad because I'm choosing to finish this but didn't finish Secret of Mana, which is also a game I did not like at all but it's definitely a better game than this.  But I guess this had a hook that got to me and it was way too late to turn back by the time I was fully over it.  This is one of the worst RPGs I've ever played and I will be happy to never see it again.  Next time, hopefully, that'll be the case.

3/1/26

I didn't beat the game in this section.  I'm close though, like, I HAVE to be close.  I am in the final dungeon, though, or at least what I think is the final dungeon.  This is Guido's palace after all, so I can't imagine I have that much left, or at least not that much left for what ending I'm probably getting.  Like, I'm almost 100% confident that I am receiving the "bad ending" for this game, but I'm not sure if the ending is just "a different cutscene and maybe a "true final boss" thing or if it's like "oh there are 10 hours left".  Probably the latter, actually, as HLTB lists Revelations as being a 30 hour game and I'm entering hour 20 right now.  20 hours of this.  I should've DNF'd it three play sessions ago when I was only at 12, I foolishly thought that I only had a few more hours left and now every dungeon is like an entire play session.  I'm so sick of hearing these children say Persona.

I do want to say, though, that I did really like the Haunted House dungeon.  Dungeons haven't been my favorite part of this game so far, they're normally just overly large and difficult to navigate even with a map.  And often have this same design of "going all the way to the bottom so you can climb all the way up" (Guido's Palace is like this as well, it drives me crazy).  But the Haunted House has such a nice atmosphere to it.  It's probably the most well thought out dungeon in the game so far, making good use of the game's "dark maze" mechanics and its circuitous dungeon design to actually make a place that feels like a twisted, haunted space.  On top of that, the dungeon's soundscape prominently features a crying woman, the woman who is believed to have haunted this house now being made real by the alternate world's rules.  It's very interesting because in the "real world", the Haunted House doesn't exist.  It used to be present when the main cast were kids, but it got torn down by Guido's construction and there's a lot of superstition surrounding it.  That the ghosts were now angry with the town and now haunt outside the boundaries of their former home.  It's nice to finally get to see this place which has such a legend in this game.

The Haunted House also ends with a very unique interaction: the player being allowed to choose to not fight a boss.  It's weird that a game with this entire system built around reasoning with the enemies doesn't have this option normally, come to think of it?  Like you can't do a full pacifist run because there are, a, some enemies that you can't reason with, namely Guido's security team, but also you can't do it because you have to fight the bosses.  Anyways, the boss of the Haunted House is a sexy four armed demon lady who is the cause of all the crying we've heard throughout.  But something strange happens when you get to her.  She starts calling out for Mary, asserting that she is actually Mary's mother and that she has came to look for her.  This parrots an event from the real Mary's own past where she got lost in the Haunted House as a young girl and her mother went in to find her.  The alternate version of Mary, of course, doesn't recognize her as she believes truly she has no mother.  But the remainder of the party is less certain, with some of them believing the demon to be Mary's mother corrupted while others (Nate) believing this to be a trap. But if you choose not to fight the demon, it turns out to actually be Mary's mother.  I guess it's probably still Mary's mother if you choose to fight it, you'll just have killed Mary's mom in that case.

I want to correct something I said before about the alternate Mary's history.  I had parsed that, due to her assertion that she has no mother, what that must've meant is that she cut herself off from a toxic mother.  But literally the alternate Mary does not have a mother.  When she talks to Mary's mother, Nancy, she says as much.  That's why, throughout the journey, Mary gets very defensive over people saying she has a mother, she doesn't even know what a mother is.  I think this is interesting operating under the theory that this world is just a fantasy concocted by the real Mary.  It's Mary who believes that her mom is just obsessed with her work and so doesn't have time for her.  And so this world she created to hide from her troubles in lacks her mother entirely.  And when she appears in it, despite this being a fun childhood memory for Mary, a time when her mother braved a haunted place to save her, the older Mary's complex opinions on her mother cannot reconcile that she's doing so for good.  It literally depicts her as a demon.  But, by choosing not fight her, we allow Mary to have some manner of closure, with the alternate Mary calling Nancy "kind" and "selfless".  It's a good moment.  Good dungeon.  If I liked this game more, this would be a tearjerker.

So, after that, I entered the final dungeon, Guido's Palace.  We're greeted by a minor character from earlier on in the story, a very confusing scientist character who continued to work on Guido's plans despite being entirely opposed to them.  Like maybe Guido was more subtle in the original script and so this made more sense, but here that guy is always talking about how he hates humanity and how he wants to build a world where his nihilism can become law.  Genuinely, no exaggeration, when Pokemon did this plot in Diamond/Pearl/Platinum they managed to give their villain more nuance by at least having the implication that Cyrus still had some humanity in him, as he refused to attack his hometown and the people who raised him.  Absurd.

Anyways, the scientist is now parroting Guido's philosophies and we quickly find out this is what he did with the compacts he's gathered, the power he now wields.  He has changed the world to make everyone think like him, to make everyone believe humanity is a sickness and that their continued existence is meaningless.  Some are managing to resist this mind control, but the longer Guido remains in power, the more humanity falls under his spell, a process we see begin to happen in our own party, as Alana mentions throughout the final dungeon that she is having increasingly intense headaches, a sign that Guido is entering her brain.  Most noteworthy, however, is that Guido calls out Mary specifically.  And not simply as a girl he recognizes, no, he states the two have history.  That Mary is his ally in all of this.  The alternate Mary is confused by what this means, but I think we can pretty easily parse what's going on from all the clues given.  The real Mary, having become isolated and with her hopes for the future dwindling, likely believes all the things Guido believes.  That's why her world started becoming corrupted, that's why Maggie exists at all.  I imagine we're going to get to the center of this and Mary will be powering Guido's whole scheme.

Usually in the penultimate section, which I'm sure that's what this is, I give my thoughts on the project so far before the final wrap-up and review.  But like.  We all know I don't like this game, I genuinely should've abandoned it when I realized that initially.  I think the interesting thing I've found through playing this is I'll recount my experiences to people and how poorly designed this game is, at least in my opinion, and they'll go "oh yeah, Persona is just like that" and like.  Why... do people like this?  This is one of THE RPG series, Persona 5 is one of the rare JRPGs that is an actual commercial success that's not named Final Fantasy, this is a series that people consider a must-play and that more and more people are jumping on board with.  And like, I know they've probably evolved since then, but it feels like none of the problems ever get addressed from what I'm seeing.  Revelations: Persona has not just been a bad experience on its own, its been a bad experience that makes me want to avoid the franchise.  Not just for making the games look bad but because, in my discussion on why this game is bad, I have not been given any confidence that it ever improves with later entries.  And now I'm scared to ever play Persona 5 because that game is way too long and I don't even want to think about committing to it if the clumsy design of this game isn't resolved 20 years on.

3/2/26

I had literally 40 minutes left of the game, I'm so mad, I'm SO MAD that I stopped playing when I did last time.  I have not been sleeping well lately so when I get tired it hits me suddenly, but man, I should've just pushed through.  I knew I was at the end of the dungeon, ahhhh.  It didn't even take me that long to actually fight the final boss.  It took me like five turns for the first phase and three for the second and for how slow Persona 1 can be, especially with how long Persona summoning animations are (because for some reason you have to fully summon your Persona every single turn for every single character despite Personas just being "casting spells), the whole boss fight probably took me like seven minutes.  I could've been done with this and just moved onto Monkey Island 2 and not have this Sword of Damacles hanging over my head.

Okay, so the final dungeon is really boring.  I didn't really talk about it last time but in a game with incredibly bad dungeons, Guido's Palace is the worst, at least in the game so far as I was willing to play it.  It is, like most dungeons, a very tall dungeon with a lot of going up and down floors to progress, specifically climbing all the way up, going back down, and then climbing back up once again.  It's also a massive labyrinth with tons of dead ends that don't go anywhere.  I get this from a dungeon design perspective, this is supposed to be the "final dungeon" so you use a lot of the tricks from previous dungeons.  Classic game design trope.  The dungeons in this game are just generally awful and so all these returning ideas are more annoyance than anything.  But also new to this dungeon is a light puzzle where you have to copy a pattern on the ceiling on the floor, but each time you step on an unlit tile it lights up and vice versa and the actual "solution" is not clever and not fun.  You kinda just have to do this dance of "take two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back".  Maybe it's just because I'm over this thing, but it's not even a little clever.

So, at the end of the dungeon we get to Guido, ready to fight this megalomaniacal monster for the fate of the world. But, when you get to him he's not feeling it.  He sends Maggie away and it seems as though his drive has gone.  He quickly muses about how he accomplished everything.  His life's goal was to build a world that saw his truth, saw how this world was meaningless.  He has nothing to live for now.  He wonders if this is the fate of all gods, to wield absolute power and have said power be made worthless.  He doesn't want to fight anymore, he just wants to understand.  Understand how the party resists him, how they can find the strength to push on.  What they are fighting for.  Mark is quick to say that looking to the future accomplishes nothing, you need to fight for what's now, what we can do to make our lives good in the present.  Alana says something super sexist about how she's fighting so she can find a husband who doesn't even need to be rich.  Why did they make her say that?  The protagonist and Mary say they don't have an answer, but that finding one is reason enough to live.  It seems, almost, like we are going to de-escalate the situation, to fight with words instead of weapons.  To have our ideologies fight and to convince Guido that he's wrong.

And then Nate has to ruin it by piping up and roasting Guido.  I hate Nate so much, y'all.  So much.  He starts talking about how much of a loser Guido is.  How he's done all this and it amounted to nothing.  How Guido is nothing more than a lonely, spoiled brat who hates his own life and so needed to make everyone hate theirs to deal with it.  He just goes off on this guy when the rest of the party has done such a good job de-escalating.  Unsurprisingly, Guido doesn't take this well and once again asserts that he is a god, and that a god should not be burdened by the opinions of mortals.  So we have to fight anyways.  I will say the boss fight does do something pretty interesting.  During the first phase Guido battles with his Persona, using its powerful magics to supplement his range of sword techniques.  However, as the battle progresses, the Persona overtakes him.  His inner self, his desperation and longing for understanding, it becomes his outer self, being warped into a monster that the gang must now kill.  It's a neat way to tell a story with the battle.  Even if the thing is called "Super Guido", hate that.

After the fight, Guido lies dying on the floor and reveals what we've probably gathered by this point, or at least I have: he is not working alone.  Mary, the true Mary, has been his accomplice this entire time.  Her phenomenal psychic powers having been the generator powering his reality warping machine.  The Mary that travels with us is nothing more than a figment of the real Mary's imagination, an idealized version of herself from a Utopia without illness or conflict.  The twin girls, Mae and Maggie, are simply aspects of Mary's personality meant to protect the world she created.  In a way, they themselves are Personas.  This Mary does not take this revelation well, which is crazy because this isn't the first time that she's been told she isn't real, but the party is quick to point out that before, Mary existed within the confines of her own heart.  The world we were in was Mary's, a palace in her mind meant to keep her safe, and so this version of Mary could not know conflict or strife.  Out here, though, the "Ideal" Mary is real, and she panics.  She refuses to accept that she isn't real and runs off, hoping that should she just run away from her problems, they won't be true.

Unfortunately for her, she finds the real Mary.  Mary is comatose and hooked up to a machine, her incredible psychic power empowering Guido's entire palace.  Confronted with the real Mary, the "Ideal" one is forced to accept the truth: she isn't real.  Not only is she not real, she's a copy of the true villain of this story, a depressed, nihilistic young woman who became so jealous of the joy others felt that she created a dream world to hide in and then, when it wasn't enough, turned it into a prison.  All in the name of loneliness.  Mary begins to break down, feeling she does not deserve kindness or forgiveness.  The world has been put through so much suffering, and she is the cause.  It is here that Mae appears once again, now having gained her full power from defeating Guido.  She banishes Maggie, the "evil" part of herself, and once again seeks to imprison the other Mary.  Pulling her back into the world of her creation.  Mary calls out for the protagonist, and Mae, having now fully accepted her role as an aspect of the true Mary, tells her not to worry.  In this new utopia, Mary can have as many of him as she wants.

Thus we get the bad end.  Guido is lauded as the hero who saved the world and the party is forgotten.  Things go back to normal swiftly, but nothing ever changes.  People just keep running from their problems, pretending if they don't acknowledge them, they'll go away.  Mary is implied to have died, a butterfly flying into her now empty hospital room.  And we end off with a simple quote: Cogito, ergo sum.  The way this ended is almost enough to convince me to go back and do the good ending because Mary is the only character I was invested in and I'm sad this is her outcome in the bad ending.

But I won't, because this, no exaggeration, is one of the worst RPGs I've ever played in my life.  I can give it grace as much as I want for the fact that I played an inferior version.  The translation is bad and they cut out half of the game.  And because of these issues, I didn't like the characters and found the story less nuanced than it probably should've been, even if I did like it a lot at times.  But I cannot mourn forever the version of the game I didn't get.  I played the American release of Revelations: Persona for the PS1, and that is what I am equipped to judge.  And this game has awful writing, it has shallow and unlikable characters, it has a lot of problematic moments that don't seem to add much of anything to the story.  It was a mess and, more tragically, it could very easily not be.  The core plot has something to it, I was compelled by it, but everything else works against it.

And this isn't even mentioning the actual gameplay.  Combat is slow moving and wastes your time as you have to watch the same handful of animations sometimes multiple times a battle.  Enemies are often unfun to fight, either being one shot by the good move you have or taking several turns to battle because they're immune to all magic and so you have to slowly whittle them down with melee.  The demon persuasion system is nonsensical, giving you too many options to try on every individual enemy but not even hinting at what works, requiring either a guide or infinite time to trial and error.  And the entire process of Persona fusing and equipping, which is what the game is built around, is poorly explained and feels like you are just pulling on the slot machine until you get something that lets you win.  Persona is a game where I was mad I was winning because I did not win by learning the systems and using what I learned therein to create a powerful Persona.  I rolled a win button on like my fifth try and that carried me through the game.  I don't feel good about that.  The biggest crime, however, is that Revelations: Persona leaves me without a desire to play other Personas.  Persona 5 has been on my shelf for several years and more and more I'm looking at it and going "I should sell this".  3.5/10