In 1983, the video game industry crashed.  While almost certainly the impact of the now famous video game crash of 1983 has been overstated in the halls of gaming history, it is still a monumental occasion.  One of the largest markets in the world and, at the time, the center of the fledging video game industry effectively vanished over night.  Video games in the US went from a lucrative industry to a dead fad over the course of a couple of prominent game releases, only returning due to clever marketing by Japanese game company Nintendo essentially Trojan Horseing US retailers.  The Crash of 1983 is such a pivotal moment that it's not hard to wonder what would've happened if it didn't.  If maybe there was a higher standard of quality that made it so the industry could sustain itself, a way to combat the oversaturation of gaming and the dip in quality that followed.  What would that world look like?

Arcade Spirits - Dating in an Alternate History

What is Arcade Spirits?

Arcade Spirits is a 2019 dating sim that takes place in an alternate 21st Century wherein the video game crash of 1983 never occurred.  This game posits the consequences of this change resulted in two major cultural shifts: the first is that the 1980s culture continued indefinitely.  In the way Fallout kind of posits a world where the shift to nuclear power and the continued focus on vaccum tube technology instead of chips would cause culture to indefinitely stall in the 1950s; Arcade Spirits kind of implies that as a result of video games not crashing the world kind of stays in the 1980s.  The second consequence of this change is that arcades, hence the title, never go out of fashion.  They continue to exist as a viable business strategy into the 21st century, and they run the gambit from massive entertainment corporations to small mom and pop shops.

In Arcade Spirits you play as unemployed young adult that you can fill in with your own name and identity, though by default they are named Ari Cader.  Ari has recently been laid off from a job they really liked and has now been staying at home depressed, concerning their roommate and best friend Juniper greatly.  Juniper, as a result, decides to turn Ari onto a phone app she uses: Iris.  Iris is an AI personal assistant that can do a multitude of things for the user, keep track of their calendar, make notes, read e-mails, etc.  But its most relevant function is that the user can answer questions Iris has and with that information, as well as the data on their phone, Iris can find the user a career path that will make them happy.  Ari very quickly clocks that Iris is more than just an AI assistant, as the app seems genuinely concerned with helping Ari in life in a way that Juniper's Iris never seems to.

The virtual assistant sets Ari up with an interview at a local mom and pop arcade called "the Funplex".  The Funplex is run by a lovely old woman named Fran, who had been running it with her husband for many years before he passed away.  Fran is a bit of an idealist, something that her employees quickly inform Ari of and communicate their thoughts on.  Fran believes the arcade isn't just simply a business, but rather a place for people to find themselves.  She has fought hard to keep the arcade open despite steep competition and an inability to purchase new games, often having to resort to interesting garage sale and auction finds from decades ago, to keep this ideal alive.  She wants this to truly be more than just a cute little retro arcade, but a place for people to come together and grow.  She asks Ari if they are willing to be part of that dream, and after confirming, sets them to work manning the prize counter.

Romance On The Arcade Floor

With that, Ari is turned loose onto the arcade and begins to meet our collection of eligible dating options.  Arcade Spirits is heavily inspired by 80s workplace sitcoms, things like Cheers or Night Court.  The game heavily focuses around a core cast of characters made up of both the other employees of the arcade and the arcade's handful of regulars; a small but closeknit group of gamers who enjoy the simple, intimate atmosphere at the Funplex.  These characters also make up our pool of eligible dating options.  They are the following:

• Gavin - Gavin is the first character you're going to meet in Arcade Spirits, the no-nonsense manager at the Funplex.  He's precise and focused, his priority is on the business side of the Arcade, on trying to dig this place out of the hole.  Everything Fran isn't, Gavin is.  That's not to say, of course, that Gavin doesn't believe in Fran's ideals.  Even if he doesn't fully understand her all the time, Gavin does truly believe in the arcade and its sense of community.  He is just, you know.  A realist.  He sees the numbers and he sees they're not exactly good, especially since they are working with so many older arcade games that require frequent repairs and there is an ever dwindling cache of parts to repair them with.  This, along with his controlling personality and his frequency of getting lost in the numbers often puts him in conflict with the other members of the Funplex staff.  But, despite being such a stick-in-the-mud who doesn't seem to understand the magic of arcade games, Gavin does have his own secret gaming love: he's a pinball wizard.
• Naomi - Naomi is, quite literally, the character that the game was built around.  When they were planning out routes for this game, Naomi's came first and came fastest.  Naomi is the mechanic of the Funplex staff, she works on all the arcade machines in her "garage" in the back of the arcade.  Naomi has a hyperfixation on arcade restoration, something that often puts her at odds with Gavin.  Naomi sees the beauty in these machines, the sheer unadulterated magic they bring.  These machines are important to her, and her inability to throw anything out, while sometimes helpful as she frequently needs to repurpose parts for other machines, is clearly a symptom of her obsession.  She is also, as you would imagine, rather shy and awkward, keeping in the back for most of the day not just do to her "projects" but due to her lack of social skills.  Still, she's kind, affable, and once you get her talking about her favorite thing, it's impossible not to get pulled in by her exuberant energy.  In other words, she's on the spectrum!
• Ashley - Ashley is the last employee of the Funplex and the other person who works the floor.  Part customer service representative and part mascot, Ashley is the resident costume designer and cosplayer.  Comparatively to Gavin and Naomi, Ashely is a relatively well-adjusted young woman, being more friendly and outgoing and often being caught up in the center of the two's arguments as a result.  That is not to say, however, that Ashley isn't her own brand of quirky.  Ashley loves cosplay and definitely feels more comfortable in costume than out.  She also has a bad habit of getting TOO into character, especially at large events.  There's a convention scene in the game where Ashley is in cosplay the entire time and only drops character when she's in very small groups of her friends.  Her obsession with cosplay is just more than a special interest though.  Ashley is experimenting with her own gender identity.  She's recently gotten very into crossplay, she does a lot of cosplay of male characters and finds the feeling she gets dressing in traditionally masculine garb rather compelling.  She's also kind of a gremlin, she is shockingly THE member of the cast who is quick to go "what if we did something illegal".
• Percy - Percy is the first of the three romance options that isn't part of the staff of the Funplex.  Percy is a regular at the establishment who is particularly obsessed with the game "Mr. Moopy's Magic Maze", a parody of both Mappy (one of my favorite arcade games) and Pac-Man.  Percy is rich, smarmy and aloof, he's a British immigrant that moved into the area for his job in stock trading and due to both his effectiveness at said job and its pretty lax nature, he finds himself with loads of free time.  He devotes basically all his free time to the Funplex, trying to achieve a world record run in Mr. Moopy, his apparent life's goal.  Your first interaction with Percy speaks volumes, he's in hot water for hogging the machine and not letting people play, so he offers to buy the machine and let the arcade keep it for him so he has free reign to use it whenever he's here.  Percy can come across as kind of a jerk at first, but quickly you find out why he's like this.  Percy has a serious, incurable heart condition that has put a time limit on how long he has to live.  Combined with his lack of care for himself, much to his friends' chagrin, Percy is clearly obsessive over Moopy because he knows he has an expiration date and wants to leave his legacy on his favorite game.
• QueenBee - QueenBee is my wife.  QueenBee is a professional gamer, a notable figure in the Esports scene for the in-universe MOBA/Fighting game hybrid Fist of Discomfort.  She is not only a regular at the arcade, she is THE regular at the arcade, a prominent gamer and streamer who, thanks to some clever work by Naomi, is able to stream directly from the arcade, using their FoD machine.  In a way, this is a plus, the arcade gets a steady stream of revenue from the Queen as she spends her streaming sessions grinding FoD and battling people who stumble into the arcade wanting to test their best against a prominent figure.  However, QueenBee is not always attuned to the vibe.  She's arrogant, foul mouthed, has kind of a temper, and often ends up butting heads with other patrons, namely parents of small children, at the arcade due to these things.  That being said, she's also sassy and funny and gets along with the staff and most of the adult patrons fairly well, though obviously the group needs to tell her to chill out.  This arrogant personality is, however, a mask.  The Queen is hyper aware of her place as a woman in gaming, and especially a woman in professional gaming.  Bee is part of a prominent ESports team, and she knows that she is on there as a token woman.  There have been plenty before her and will be plenty after her, she knows exactly what her worth is to them.  A pretty face they can parade around as a mascot for a while until she gets "too old" (meaning like 26) and then the first loss they have, they get dropped for another.  QueenBee doesn't just want to be the best, she NEEDS to be the best, or else her career is over.
• Teo - The final of the romanceable options (at least in a normal playthrough), Teo, at first, seems like he's being propped up to be the token "bad boy".  He rolls up with his crew to the arcade and starts making kind of a ruckus, as his group dominates the dancing game machines.  He's sexy and flirtatious, the kind of guy who seems like he'd be bad news in these types of games.  Teo is the nicest guy in the cast.  Outside of his flirtatious personality, which is a thing he cannot stop no matter how hard he tries, Teo is incredibly selfless and puts the needs of others before his own almost 100% of the time.  He's the kind of guy who would check in on his friends at a party to make sure they were getting hydrated, just a total Golden Retriever.  Absolute himbo energy.  He also is very passionate about his craft, he's not only good at dancing video games, he is an excellent dancer.  His crew uses the dancing games at the Funplex as a means to sort of gameify their practice, they do like actual pro dancing at various events and organize flash mobs with other crews on occasion.  He also wants to better himself to a fanatical degree.  This is, however, his biggest weakness: Teo throws himself into projects very quickly and bounces around from place to place, project to project constantly.  He is quick to give up on dreams to embrace new ones, leading to him being kind of wishy-washy about important stuff.

Gameifying The Dating Experience

Now that we've met our core six, let's talk about the dating experience.  Ari is a bit of an awkward and reserved sort by nature, a realistic way of doing the classic gaming trope of a blank slate protagonist.  Ari is not super used to complex social situations and, moreover, people being attracted to them.  They've spent much of their life believing that they are cursed and have kind of opted to keep other people out of that curse.  Luckily for them, they have Iris!

This is one of my favorite things about Arcade Spirits, the gamefication of the dating experience.  Our wonderful virtual assistant, in an attempt to aid Ari in their romantic pursuits, has decided to put the process of romantic pursuits in terms that Ari will understand.  She cooks up an RPG stat screen for them, wherein she will keep track of the responses they give when talking to their potential romantic partners and raise their stats in kind.  As well, she will keep track of their affection with any specific potential partner as the game progresses, letting you know how far along you are with any specific route.  This not only serves as a fun and effective way to spice up the dating sim gameplay, it's also a very effective tool for getting new players into a dating sim.  It gives them a really clear and obvious system from which they can latch onto to ease them into it.

These minor RPG elements are not just for flavor, however.  The outcome of choosing to raise certain stat allows you to influence Ari's personality and how they interact with their friends and/or potential love interests.  The potential love interests all respond better to different responses, QueenBee will like it when you're sassier, Gavin will like it when you're direct, Naomi will like it when you're more kind, stuff like that.  And as you engage with these responses, you'll raise your stats in these areas, allowing you to be able to successfully perform various checks throughout the game that you need your stats at a certain level for.  Just in general, you won't be able to date a character unless your stats in areas they like are high, but these stats especially become useful in the endgame, as the final confrontation(s) are heavily influenced by your stats.

As well, much like an RPG, you are given direct consequences for the responses you choose.  This is not a game where you can maintain good relationships with everyone, while they all will always remain your friends, to get up there with one person does come at the cost of another.  Not only do they favor different stats but, after the first day, you are often choosing to hang out with one person at the cost of hanging out with another.  Certain members of the friend group will, by necessity, fade into the background as you pursue others and these consequences do have a major impact on the game.  More directly though, there are several points where you are thrust into a conversation between two of the friends and forced to choose between them.  As an example, Gavin and Naomi, due to their working relationship and entirely opposite personalities, are frequently caught in arguments.  Naomi's idealism vs. Gavin's realism.  In these scenarios you end up being the mediator often unless you just try and avoid both of them.  To agree with Naomi is to lower your affection with Gavin and vice-versa.  This might be a turn-off for some dating sim enjoyers, I know in dating sims like this people like to keep up good relationships with the entire cast.  But I really like it, I really like that there are consequences to your actions.

A Short, Spoiler-Free Review

Before we get into the actual plot and themes of the game, I want to give a quick spoiler-free review for those who might want to play it themselves and are bothered by games getting spoiled.  I really like Arcade Spirits.  I enjoy its cast of characters, the sort of workplace sitcom setting its going for, many of the individual storylines, and the fun and creative use of arcades and arcade games.  I also love how it utilizes this RPG stat system to great effect, I think that this is a good entry level dating sim because of it.  As someone new to dating sims, the only one I've really played outside of this is Huniepop which is really bad as a dating sim, having this familiar, more game-y aspect to it really eased me in.  I especially love what its main character arc is, I think this game has a lot to say about video game history, 80s nostalgia, and finding yourself in early adulthood.

That being said I do think that some parts of it are less than stellar.  I think its themes can get a bit muddied, especially in the latter half of the game.  The romances can feel a bit tertiary even though the majority of the gameplay is built around dating.  And I take issue with parts of the ending.  It's not by any means a perfect game, but I think it's incredibly strong and I think it's a great way to onboard people onto the genre in question if they maybe don't play dating sims and/or have only played meme dating sims like Hatoful Boyfriend.  8/10

Where Dreams Come True

As Fran establishes when you first meet her, the Funplex is not simply a business.  It's a place to find yourself.  A place where dreams come true.  And that goal of "finding yourself" of "making your dreams come true" is obviously very central to the plot.  As you could probably tell, a lot of the characters descriptions are about them either accomplishing their dreams or self-actualizing in some way.  QueenBee has made it as a professional gamer, but it has caused her a lot of mental and emotional stress.  Ashley is experimenting with her gender identity.  Stuff like that.

But the central arc of the game is Ari self-actualizing themself.  Ari enters into the Funplex as kind of a listless 20-something.  They believe that they are cursed, half-jokingly stating that there is some supernatural force that is at the center of their job and personal woes.  Ari is, as most 20 somethings are, directionless.  Their life had been dictated for so long by hard structures and now they are out on their own and they are drowning because of it.  It's actually a pretty neat touch that Ari has a background as a lifeguard, not just because it preps them for high stress environments like running the arcade floor, but it sets up a very good character trait: Ari is good at saving others even if their life is a mess.  The Funplex, while at first seeming like just a job they're doing, is the environment needed for Ari to self-actualize, to become what they were always meant to be.

Something I enjoy about this is that Ari's self-actualization is actually separate from the romance.  There's nothing wrong, of course, with a romance storyline having "a person self-actualizing because they want to be better for their partner" as an arc.  It's a very classic romance arc, especially in romantic comedies and workplace sitcoms, which Arcade Spirits draws a lot from.  However, I think it is nice that Ari does better because Ari wants to do better, and through that they become more confident and attractive to their potential romantic partners.  Ari finds themselves at the arcade in a very real way, they don't just thrive in the environment, they BECOME the environment.  We see them crave responsibility, asking Fran if they can take on more and more of the arcade's planning, eventually becoming its official events coordinator.  Everyone in the arcade may have a dream to find, but Ari finds their entire life here, and its a storyline I really like.

Polybius

Of course, we can't talk about Ari finding themselves and growing up without talking about the opposite, now, can we.  Enter Polybius.  Polybius is the only arcade machine present in Arcade Spirits that is not a parody of a known arcade machine, this is something that is analogous to a real world thing.  That being said, they definitely used Polybius because it is not real.  Polybius is one of gaming's most infamous urban legends.  The story goes that in the early 1980s, in the city of Portland, Oregon, a mysterious arcade cabinet started popping up in arcades around the city.  It was an abstract shooter similar to a game like Tempest, called "Polybius".  Polybius was, allegedly, an incredibly addictive arcade game that would cause players to play for incredibly long sessions, playing past exhaustion and allegedly causing the death of some players.  The people who played it would report psychoactive symptoms, hallucinations, night terrors, stuff like that, but that they would be drawn to the machine in spite of it.  No one was quite sure who made it or why, but those who remember it remember men in black occasionally descending on arcades to collect from the machine, not necessarily the coins, but data the machine had collected somehow.

Polybius is, almost without doubt, not real.  What likely happened is that a number of different memories had been conflated, creating this legendary game.  There was a lot of uncertainty around video games in the late 70s and early 80s, a lot of unexplained health issues were happening from people playing games but there had yet to be research into the why of it all.  Nowadays, we know that video games can be a trigger for epileptic seizures and other light-sensitive conditions, but back then there was a big question mark and, as such, a big panic around video games and their adverse health effects.  Couple that with parents and other figures paranoia around video game addiction and you have the basis for this hyper addicting, killer arcade machine that haunts us to this day.  And the men in black?  That actually WAS happening.  Arcade owners in Portland were commonly converting their arcade machines into gambling machines back in the day and, as such, there was an FBI crackdown on arcades in Portland.  They weren't collecting data from their secret killer arcade machine, mind you, but there were a number of black-suited men tampering with arcade machines in Portland in the early 80s.

Polybius enters Arcade Spirits in its second chapter, a chapter in which Naomi, Fran, and Gavin recruit Ari to aid them in obtaining new arcade machines for the arcade.  They inform Ari of a mysterious auction being hosted by an eccentric billionaire who saves arcade collections from going to estate sales.  This billionaire believes very strongly in the sanctity of arcades and so he buys entire collections once their owners have become deceased and does private auctions for the local arcades.  He then hosts extravagant parties on his dime for the arcade owners and staff to schmooze.  In this instance, the collection in question belonged to a recently deceased pop star who was pretty big in the 80s but after her success started to waver, she became reclusive and addicted to video games, spending much of her fortune on an arcade collection and spending her time in her personal arcade.

Naomi is sent to investigate the collection, attempting to find either arcade machines they could buy to fill niches in the arcade's classic game selection and/or broken machines that either could be fixed up for cheap or used for parts to repair other old machines.  When she doesn't return and the actual auction nears, Ari is sent to find her in the maze of machines.  That is when they stumble onto Polybius, and it draws them in, compels them with an almost supernatural force.  Polybius seems to sense that Ari is susceptible to its power, that because of their belief in having a cursed working life and having a stagnant social life, they are in a point where it can dig its hooks in and never let go.  It is counter to everything the game is trying to say, it represents the kind of stagnation that many people would find appealing.  A safe, comfortable life that never moves forward.  And it's one that Ari almost finds themselves embracing.  After all, they're happy right.

In the machine, they see a fragment of the popstar that once called this collection hers, sees someone who was content with their life.  But they were never happy.  They abandoned a real life for comfort, abandoned their career for the familiar.  And they beg Ari not to make the same mistakes they did.  To not let Polybius take them too.  And man, it's such a cool use of Polybius.  Arcade Spirits, being a game about arcade games, was always going to have to address the nostalgia of the 1980s in some meaningful way.  It is so easy to get caught up in idealizing the past, taking the best parts of an era and wishing we could live in it forever.  The 1980s especially has been one of the most beloved eras by pop culture, we still are living inside of 1980s nostalgia multiple decades after the 80s nostalgia boom should've ended.  But Arcade Spirits, despite its setting, is not about trying to idealize a time period that doesn't exist anymore.  It's about looking forward, it's about growing as a person and finding yourself.  So using this decades old urban legend, a longtime gaming mystery that people have been enamored with for years, as a representative of the inability to move forward is genius.  And by freeing themself from the pull of Polybius, Ari does begin to truly look forward.

The Actual Romance Part

I want to next talk about the romance because, admittedly, it's something I'm pretty mixed on.  Now, to be clear at the time of writing this, I have done one romance plotline, QueenBee's.  As such, I am not going to criticize the individual romance storylines because I don't have experience with them, nor am I likely too.  I will return to Arcade Spirits eventually but there are some romance storylines I'm just uninterested in pursuing and I don't think that's wrong of me to say.  So anything I say in the following section should be taken with the knowledge that I have only done the Queen's.  I don't expect that to matter but just in case I say something wrong and someone with more knowledge on Arcade Spirits is like "hey, this isn't really true", feel free to correct me!

So, I've previously mentioned that something I find interesting and a quality I like about this game is that Ari's growth as a character is not just about them wanting to grow up for their potential love interest.  They find their own sense of fulfillment in life and self-actualize as a result of that fact.  But a consequence of that decision is that, frankly, the actual romance can feel like a secondary element to the story.  A vast majority of the gameplay is built around you building relationships with many members of the cast but, ultimately, a lot of this game can function whether you date any of the options or not?  It feels like these characters are almost completely unchanged by their romantic relationships in any meaningful way or, if they are, it's one sided.  Again, I'm basing this off the QueenBee route and the other routes I had to engage with when she was busy, but it feels like Ari gives a lot to these characters in conversation but they don't give a lot to Ari back.

This is made even more clear by the fact that the actual dating sim portion of the game ends just after the halfway point of the game.  Following the structure of the workplace sitcom, the midgame is home to two "event episodes".  We'll be talking about the second one, the Beach episode.  The entire crew (including Juniper!) goes to the beach to celebrate after the previous event episode and has fun throughout the day.  They hit up the candy shop, the boardwalk arcade where Ari spent part of their childhood, play volleyball, all the classics.  This is also the point where your relationship gets locked in.  This game allows you to interact with the cast one final time and then, as you reach the end of the day, you will go on a date with the person you have the most affinity with, which will feature some sort of proclamation and you will go steady with the person at the end of this.  It's a good moment and I find it to be a satisfying conclusion to the actual romantic arc, but it does feel a bit odd that this dating sim's dating portion ends at about the 60% mark and then we go into the final arc with our relationship already having been sorted.

That's not to say the romance is irrelevant in the final part, of course.  Conflict does arise based on your romantic partner and your conflicting ambitions.  And in the game's final confrontation with the main antagonist of its final arc, your romantic partner comes with you and helps dictate the conversation.  But it does tend to feel like, somehow, in this dating sim the romance can become secondary and it's unfortunate.  I don't necessarily want to call it bad, because I understand the vision.  They wanted Arcade Spirits to seem more like a realistic relationship between two young adults, people who have their own lives who enter a mutually beneficial relationship that doesn't necessarily define either of them.  It's not an unwelcome inclusion in the world of romantic comedies, again I do think it's nice that this game treats Ari's self-actualization as something separate from their romance.  But I also can't help but feel weird that the romance in this dating sim feels like just a thing that happens sometimes.

The Commodification of the Arcade

Arcade Spirits does not exist in an idealistic utopia.  While the game does present an alternate universe that could hypothetically be seen as a gamer's paradise, it does not shy away from using this setting to criticize the modern games industry and, in general, the state of arcades nowadays.  The need to maximize profit over providing a solid gaming experience.  I don't know if you've been to an arcade in recent years or seen a video of an arcade, I recommend Brutalmoose's videos on arcades,  While arcades do still exist and do still provide players with arcade gaming experiences both new and old, it is not a secret that they've been overtaken by games designed to get players addicted and sink their money into. This is especially a problem in Japan, it's an old joke by now that Japanese gaming companies have stopped really making games and started making glorified slot machines utilizing their IPs.  There are probably more Castlevania Pachinko machines than there are Castlevania games.

In Arcade Spirits, this criticism takes the form of the game's main antagonist, arcade magnate Deco Nami.  Deco Nami runs a chain of arcades that is dominant in the industry, titled "Deco's Palace".  Deco's Palace is similar to real life restaurant/arcade chains like Chuck E. Cheese, GameWorks, Dave & Busters, and the failed DisneyQuest.  It's a massive entertainment center that combines a restaurant, bar, and arcade, designed almost like a casino in some ways.  It's meant to get people in the door and keep them playing for long periods of time, draining their money slowly but steadily.  Unlike the often chaotic but also tight knit vibe of the Funplex, Deco's Palace is massive, clean, and soulless.  It is just a business, and moreover it's a business designed to push other arcades off the map if they're considered even remotely a threat.  Deco is charming, but he's also very clearly sleazy, a complete and total shark who will eat whatever small fish he can get his mouth on.

Deco enters the story after the events of the Polybius section lead to Ari takeing over as the Funplex's event coordinator.  Ari hosts an event that is so successful that it puts the Funplex on Deco's radar as a potential threat.  Deco had always had an eye on the Funplex but even a heartless businessman has enough respect for one of the OGs like Fran, or at least is aware enough that trying to push her out would be a bad move for his relationships with the industry.  However, with this event doing well, even Deco is willing to make a risky play to snuff out a potential serious competitor.  Fran does not wish to sell, knowing that Deco is likely to turn the arcade into another soulless cash machine, if he does not close the location outright.

This meeting eventually results in Ari going to Deco's Palace for the first time in their life, bringing along one of their friends who is best equipped to talk about the business side of things (I brought Percy).  And getting an inside look at Deco's Palace is harrowing but in a familiar way.  Deco Nami's arcade is full of overpriced, low-quality, reheated food that is oversalted and has very little flavor otherwise.  The employees are not only indifferent to the goings-on in the arcade, but actively trying to detach themselves from the ecosystem, lest they be contracted into being free babysitters by the overwhelming amount of parents attempting to use the arcade as a day care.  The machines on the floor all bear the images of familiar faces, the in-game parallels to arcade legends in the real world, but none of them are even necessarily games.  They're coin pushers and ufo catchers and prize machines.  I'm really glad I brought Percy actually because of his direct connection to Mr. Moopy, and his reaction to seeing the timing based ticket machine that bears his name.

It's not difficult to see what Arcade Spirits is saying here.  Deco serves a dual role, he first represents the hyper consumerism that defines the era Arcade Spirits is riffing on.  If Arcade Spirits is a world where the 1980s kind of just continued, Deco represents the conclusion to that, the greed that defined the era, its most soulless parts.  The reason why most 80s kids have childhoods that are just commercials for choking hazards.  But in the context of the gaming space, Deco represents the modern arcade industry as a whole.  An industry that has given up making proper video games to optimize profit.  The industry that favors simplistic, addicting games designed to have quick failure and reward conditions rather than develop full scale games like the olden days that players will gather around and try to top their local leaderboards.

And it's a criticism that I am mixed on.  On the one hand, this makes perfect sense as the villain to this game.  Arcade Spirits is a game with a lot of reverence for the golden age of arcades and classic arcade machines in general.  This game was conceived of by watching arcade machine restorations and the preservation of traditional arcade cabinet is a massive throughline in the story.  There are many scenes where the characters discuss the work needed to keep these machines running and how, despite this, it's a worthwhile investment just to keep these games playable in any capacity.  To see someone just throw them all away in terms of profit is truly sad, a crime against games, game preservation, and against people who could be robbed of these games they may love.  And moreover to replace them with cheap, soulless cash-ins that wear the corpse of a dead IP is kind of a tragedy.

One the other hand, I feel like this is counteractive to the other themes of the game.  Like, Arcade Spirits does a good job of trying not to be just an "old games good, new games bad" sort of commentary on the games industry.  Despite being so steeped in 80s nostalgia, it also criticizes that nostalgia and those who live in it.  To turn around and then have such a heavy handed condemnation of the modern state of arcades feels about thematically iffy to me.  The truth is that arcades do have to get that bag, and these simplistic, for profit games are actually rather fun.  They are providing the arcade ecosystem games people want to keep playing, games they want to get good at, games they want to compare to their communities.  It feels a bit like Arcade Spirits is trying to have its cake and eat it too, both be about looking toward the future and clinging onto the past.  It's something I'm very mixed on, it feels like the story fails to really commit to anything in the end.

The Ending

Perhaps the most upsetting part about Arcade Spirits, though, is how it actually ends.  Not the actual resolution to the core conflict of the game, I find that part good, but the aftermath of the game's ending.  To those who have played Arcade Spirits, it is the most infamous thing about this game.  I have stated before that Arcade Spirits is going for a workplace sitcom sort of vibe.  This is a closeknit group of employees and regulars akin to a sitcom like Cheers.  But throughout the game they become more than that.  They become a group of actual friends, a group that chooses to hang out with one another outside of their pre-established location and who hold a deep love for each other.  The kind of friend group that actively chooses to stay together, even when the context of their friendship is removed.  Ari is the linchpin, mind, the thing that brought them all together, but they found each other as well.  It's an incredibly nice part of this game, that your core cast seem like they've become friends outside of just all being around this one person.

And then two of them leave.  I mentioned in the section about the stat system that there would be consequences to your choices throughout the game.  That choosing to hang out with people comes at the cost of hanging out with other people and agreeing with one person in conversation will lower your affection with the person they're arguing with.  And that the game is tracking all these decisions throughout the game, building your affection with some characters and reducing it with others.  This is where that matters.  At the end of the game, the two characters you hold the least affection with will leave the friend group.  The game does a "where are they now" reel, going through each characters post-game lives and whichever two you held the lowest with just drift away.  This is frustrating, not because like "if I had known this would happen, I wouldn't have made the decisions I did".  I like that the actions you take in this game have notable consequences.  It's frustrating because the game has established that this group of 8 people has become very close and it repeatedly states that they're going to work together and build each other up.  They put so much work into making them seem like a group so closeknit that they're basically family.  And then two of them leave.  It just does not feel properly in line with what the game is otherwise telling us and it's just a bit of unnecessary, out of nowhere sadness to close the game out.

Final Thoughts

I already established this in my review but despite my numerous criticisms, I do really like Arcade Spirits.  I think when it is good, it's an incredibly fun and compelling story about finding yourself using the medium of gaming and the locale of an arcade to accomplish that goal.  It's a very fun workplace sitcom with a lot of interesting characters that are all endearing in different ways.  And it's clear the people who made it have a lot of love for all facets of gaming culture, representing preservationists, esports players, cosplayers, score chasers, etc.  And especially if you are coming into a dating sim for the first time, this game is an excellent starting point, utilizing familiar language to make the player more comfortable within its world.

But it is imperfect, and the ways it is imperfect are frustrating.  It feels like it's thematically all over the place, contradicting itself in key ways.  The romance feels more mature and like an actual adult romance, but because of that it can feel secondary in the story, sometimes it feels like the third most important thing in the story even.  And, of course, the ending is just frustrating.  Its messy, but it's also good when it gets there.  I look forward to eventually returning to it someday, though I promise I won't write a whole other review when that happens.  It's a solid 8/10, big recommend.

Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling - A Gaming Diary

 

I want to temper expectations before we get into this: I am not a fan of the Paper Mario franchise.  Now, I know that's weird, why do I own Bug Fables if I don't like Paper Mario?  Even worse, why do I own a physical copy of it from Limited Run Games?  So for a long time, I did consider myself a Paper Mario fan.  I've talked before about the circles I used to run in online before and Paper Mario was pretty central to those circles.  I had watched numerous playthroughs of the first and second games, as well as a couple of the third and that compelled me to want to play these games myself.  I even actually preordered Sticker Star because, in the leadup to that game's release, I was that excited about a new Paper Mario game.  I didn't get very far, I think I only actually beat the first Paper Mario though that's in question.  This blog was founded on my Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door playthrough, which caused me to adapt a sort of "gaming diary" format I had been doing on Discord for a while into an actual blogpost.  I digress.

The point is that when I finally got around to playing the second and third installments in this series, I had been over it.  These are RPGs for children, I am not a children, I'm not particularly interested in engaging with media as I did when I was a children, and I don't think it is healthy necessarily to try and enter that mindset every time you play a game.  See "i don't like banjo-kazooie" for more details.  So I played them and I found them to be pretty mediocre.  Super Paper Mario has some interesting narrative ideas but takes too long to get there, has a pretty dull midgame in my opinion, and its attempt to adapt the RPG elements into a more traditional platformer makes it worse than the sum of its parts as its lacking in both the fun snappy platforming of Mario games and the more slow, methodical, puzzle driven platforming that defined the Paper Mario series.  Thousand Year Door, meanwhile, I find just to be repetitive and dull, it has a pretty solid plot for a Mario game but the actual gameplay is so uninteresting at points that I find it hard to really care about the parts of it that are good.  I was kinder to it in my blog post about it than I am in hindsight, if that should tell you how I'm currently feeling about TTYD.

Now , this is not to say I'm going to be negative about Bug Fables.  While its obviously useful to understand where a game's inspiration comes from and judge accordingly, especially if you haven't already bought it, every game is also its own individual work of art.  And a lot of them may surprise you.  I don't really like the N64 era of Rare platformers, but I adore a Hat in Time, a game ostensibly inspired by them.  It's even made my top 50 games.  I don't particular like most Sonic games, and especially find the 2D games more frustrating than rewarding but I love both Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Sonic Mania.  Bug Fables can, and likely will, surprise me.  I'm just saying that if I go into it and I'm kind of grumpy, overly critical, and just in general if I'm quick to go "I made it to the end of the third play session, I'm tapping out", this isn't an actual statement of Bug Fables quality.  That just means I was never going to like Bug Fables in the first place.  So with that out of the way, let's get into it!

Review:

I will simply be honest with you: I do not think I am equipped to talk about Bug Fables.  Not only did I, spoilers, not finish it, but playing it was just not a good time for me.  I tried to give it its fair shake and the conclusion that became apparent is that Bug Fables doesn't seem interested in being its own thing using the structure of Paper Mario as a launching off point to be its own thing, it's primary goal is to be Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door but indie.  Being an honest critic is acknowledging when you are ill-equipped to talk about something and I am so about Bug Fables.  As I said in the preamble, me not liking Bug Fables is not a statement of Bug Fables' quality, which I do think is rather high.  I can see why people who love Paper Mario and would want more games like it hold this in such high regard.  It is simply confirming I was never going to like it in the first place.  If you are at all interested, my score is 6/10.

Diary:

3/19/26

I made it through chapter one and most of chapter two in this play session.  This is probably not going to be a surprise given my preamble for this diary but I'm not having an amazing time.  It's the gameplay, is the thing.  The thing I most dislike about Paper Mario is the action commands.  I don't know why this is the system I take so much ire with, I love turn-based combat, I love real-time combat, I even like ATB combat, which is usually what people who like the other styles of RPG combat take ire with for being the worst of both worlds.  And I even like action commands, I love the Mario & Luigi series a ton and think the combat there is excellent.  For some reason the way Paper Mario handles action commands just turns me off it, and Bug Fables is trying to emulate Paper Mario, so it has a lot of these same issues.

I think maybe it's that the action commands for everything you do are different?  Like, in Mario & Luigi, you are only ever timing your A and B button presses, so everything is very intuitive.  It's a combat system you can get good at very quickly and feel like you can master it to the point of being second nature.  In both Paper Mario and Bug Fables, every action command is an entirely unique input, and as such I feel like no matter how much I progress in the game, I'm still having to watch the action commands because I never really learn them. But this issue is especially exacerbated for me in Bug Fables because of how it chooses to adapt action commands.  Like, there is an entire character whose action commands are all randomized inputs meaning that I never get that satisfying feeling of "I've learned what to do in the combat and so now it's second nature", I am always having to be on with them.  The combat is a worse experience for me than the games that inspired it.

That being said, I think in every other way I'm liking Bug Fables more than the duology it takes the most from.  First of all, I just like that your party is a consistent set of three, meaning you have access to their overworld abilities at all times and don't have to switch in and out.  And choosing to upgrade what the party can do as the journey progresses rather than introducing new party members to fill new niches either in combat or in puzzle solving is nice, it allows you to actually get attached to using them.  I feel like in Paper Mario, party members have a bad habit of being the most important character in the world for exactly the chapter they are introduced in and then only ever showing up to solve a handful of puzzles as the game progresses.  You could replace most of them with items and the game wouldn't be any different.  Especially in TTYD where 90% of the time you're using Vivian in battle because she's just better than everyone else.  But here, these are pretty established party members with legitimate roles.

I also just like this party?  Like, they aren't going to become some of my favorite characters of all time or anything but I do enjoy following this trio.  Kabbu is weirdly the standout for me so far, I really like his seasoned samurai vibes and how he seems to have a story for every occasion.  It plays off Vi pretty well too, this hyper and energetic young explorer who is quick to sass people and is in exploring ostensibly for the rewards.  They're a good duo, and it's nice seeing them become actual friends over the first two chapters.  And then there's Leif, who admittedly I kind of feel like gets let down by the tone of the game.  Leif is kind of this engimatic figure, a moth that went missing decades prior only to re-enter into a changed world.  They speak very bizarrely, referring to themself as "we" and sort of having this "man out of time" quality where the way they speak and act is very old school.  But Bug Fables is also irreverent, it's a very light-hearted adventure, and so Leif has a tendency to tell jokes and riff in a way I feel like doesn't fit their character?  But there's also a lot of intrigue surrounding them that I find compelling.

This world is also just really strong.  I really like games starring bugs and I'm glad that more and more people are getting on board with bug games.  It's just cool what you can do with a world at this small a scale, and I think Bug Fables does a great job of using the familiar to build a small scale world.  Like in the main town you go through, there's a theater there for bugs to put on plays and musicals and stuff.  The entire theater is inside of an organ grinder.  The first dungeon you go to is called Snakemouth and the entrance is literally a fossilized snake skull.  It's just fun to look around in this world, see what little details are in it.  And I think it does a good job of justifying the paper aesthetic because of this.  It's like all the characters being made out of paper in this world comprised of a mix of structures built by the bugs and discarded items from humanity just feels right, y'know?

It also feels like a world with a deep history and mythology, if you want to delve into that.  I hesitate to truly get in deep with it because like, I still don't know if I'm even going to finish it, obviously.  But I have been trying to read the lore as I find it and like.  Leif being kind of this man out of time does mean the history is present regardless.  The juxtaposition between the queen he knew, a kind, humble ant queen who was so loving to her people that she refused to build statues in her honor at their kingdom, instead honoring the ant who stumbled upon this land as a true hero; and her daughter, the current queen, an arrogant, militaristic warrior queen who holds a tighter grip on her people is a recurring conflict in the narrative.  A major sidequest is about finding all the lost books on the world's history scattered about the world.  And reading them, they are interesting, you get a lot of insight into how this world came to be and how people reacted to their own history.  It makes this world feel so much more alive, even if the histories are sometimes just a few sentences long.

Also, a lot of the characters are really fun designwise.  Like I love the designs in this game. There were so many times where I looked at a character and went "oh you're cute" or "oh you're sick".  More the former than the latter admittedly.  The super sad, super anxious musician who got ousted by the theater when a major singer came into town has my heart.  I enjoy in particular how they've adapted the bug traits to communicate things about the characters.  One of the recurring antagonists, a fellow adventurer of not great morality named Zasp, is a paper wasp who always looks sleek and angry, signing to the player that he's dangerous.  But his partner, the diva Mothiva, is instead designed to deceive you into thinking she's chill, with her soft wings and warm appearance, while also highlighting "she thinks she's better than you" by having the wings give the appearance of a fur coat.  Character design is my favorite part of this game easily, they're very good at implying a whole lot with very little.  Which is good because these characters often have a couple lines and then you never have to talk to them again, meaning their character kind of has to be entirely in the design.

Like I said, I'm most of the way through chapter 2 and like.  I'm liking the story, but I'm also worried about it.  I like the setup so far, I like that there's this grand mystery around Leif and why they seemed to have been in stasis for decades.  I like that we're not sure if we can trust the intentions of the kingdom we've sworn our loyalty to.  I like that everyone is racing to find the artifacts our little adventuring trio has been sent to find, implying a bigger conspiracy going on than what we're told.  But I also worry about the episodic nature of the game so far.  I worry that this is going to be like one of those games where the story comes in bits and pieces until suddenly, in the final chapter of the game, it's like "here is the entire plot all at once".  Hopefully the fact that we keep running into other entities who are trying to beat us to the artifacts is indicative of a more present story, but I'm cautious about it right now.

3/20/26

I didn't really get a lot done in this play session.  I ended up doing a bunch of sidequests after fighting the boss because I genuinely can't resist a sidequest list.  It's a serious problem, if/when I do the Fallout games for this blog (Fallout 4 and New Vegas are on my list), you will find out how much I can't resist a sidequest.  I will go for so long without ever advancing the plot in those games because I'm like "I should clear out my sidequest list first".  But then, as soon as I'm told "hey, you can fight the final boss now", I'm just like "sidequests?  What sidequests?  I never agreed to do any sidequests!"  This literally happened when I played TTYD a year and a half ago, I did like every sidequest except for the ones that only opened up between chapters 7 and 8.  If I choose to finish Bug Fables, which is a pretty big if at this point, you will see me just suddenly and decisively leave all my sidequests unfinished right before the ending.

So, we met the goddess Venus on our quest to find the artifacts.  Venus is a giant, sapient flower whose roots spread across the world and who is always watching for interesting people because she's bored and lonely.  Upon beating her construct to prove ourselves, she hands over the artifact and agrees to answer Leif's questions to the best of her ability.  While she doesn't really know how or why Leif managed to survive for so long in the spider's web we found him in, she can confirm to Leif that his former partners made it out of Snakemouth safe and sound.  She also drops an incredibly interesting tidbit about Leif: her roots detect the people of Bugaria by some sort of sixth sense, as they have no eyes of their own.  This entire time, Venus could not sense Leif being here and only knows he is present when he speaks.  Even as she looks upon his face, Venus still has difficulty believing he is truly there, as she cannot sense him.

After returning to town, we meet up with the other adventurers of the guild and get informed by the Queen that our next mission is already set.  Unsurprisingly, these artifacts are all designed to work in tandem with each other.  The artifact we received in the first chapter, a mask, is actually something of a cypher that when used translates the gibberish on ancient tablets left behind by the roach sages into roach script.  No one alive knows how to read roach script, but its progress.  When the roach script is translated, it will reveal the location of the Ant Queen's true goal: the Everlasting Sapling, an ancient tree that is said to grant those who eat from it immortality.  It was her mother's goal to find it initially for the good of her people, but given the colder nature of Elizant II, her intentions are probably not so noble.  This brings us to our next mission: to head to the home of the Ant Kingdom's ally, the Bees, and trade for their artifact.  But first, we have an opportunity to sidequest.

There's only like one sidequest I really want to highlight.  Most of them are fine, mind, but again, this is kind of a simplistic style of RPG and so the sidequests tend to just be "go to a place, talk to an NPC, find their lost item, return it to them", y'know.  It's the same way that its inspiration handles sidequests and its fine for what it is, you know.  Gets the job done, especially given the intended audience for those games is young enough to where this would probably be their first experience with sidequests.  But the Monsieur Scarlet sidequest is actually one I want to touch on.

A request appears on the Quest board from fellow adventurers Levi and Celia, a pair of adventurers that our party is on good terms with and who helped us out in the last mission.  When we ask them what is needed, they reveal that they have tracked down a mysterious criminal named Monsieur Scarlet, an eccentric serial killer who posts requests on the board pretending to be a helpless man named Rogu who lures people into his lair only to them drain them of their life force.  Upon defeating Scarlet and running him out of Bugaria, Levi and Celia grant the crew access to an underground tavern, the single place in all of the Ant Kingdom that isn't under Elizant II's eye.  This tavern's patronage is made up of, primarily, criminals, but it's also a place where those distrustful of Elizant II (read: anyone with a brain), can find comfort knowing that for a little while, they aren't having to speak about their dissatisfaction in hushed whispers.  It's also a place to finally trade in your collectibles for prizes!  And there's a card game!  Hey, indie game devs, listen.  I know we all love Triple Triad.  I know we all love Gwent.  Please stop putting card games into your games, actually.  Not every game needs an in-depth CCG side mode.  I'm doing King of Cards soon, can you tell?

After this, we head out to the desert that expands from the Northeast of the Ant Kingdom, connecting it to its neighbors in the Bee and Wasp Kingdoms.  Two things.  First of all, this is where we unlock the ability to go fast, as Kabbu suddenly remembers he can dash.  I really wish they had given this to us sooner, because even though this game tends to be pretty small, moving around the world tends to be very slow and that becomes obvious as you backtrack.  You don't have to necessarily backtrack, mind, if you are just trying to make it through the story you can just fast travel back to the Ant Kingdom.  But if you are sidequesting, you're probably backtracking through areas, and the part moves really slowly.  I would've really appreciated having the dash prior to this for those instances.  But this also totally makes sense why they would give it to you now, the desert has a lot of very big, open screens to dash across and it really sells the increase in scope compared to the previous areas.

The second thing is that entering a giant desert area with a kind of confusing layout just really made me realize how little fun I was having with this game.  Like, this area is so reminiscent of the desert area from the original Paper Mario that I kind of had a Ratatouille moment but not in a good way.  Like if the critic tasted the ratatouille and it reminded him that his mother couldn't cook.  Going through this area confirmed my worries about Bug Fables; that this game isn't going to be a Shovel Knight or a Hat in Time.  That it's truly not a game taking inspiration from games the developers love to create its own fully unique thing.  Bug Fables feels like what it appears to be on the tin, at least to me, a derivative work of Paper Mario in the most uninteresting way possible.  I feel bad because like, I'm just so over this game after 7 or 8 hours in when I've finished much worse games than this which are just as long, if not longer than a full Bug Fables playthrough would be.  See, Revelations: Persona.  But Bug Fables just isn't doing anything for me.  I like a lot about it but I also can't get over the parts of it that I find detrimental.  It's been a boring mediocrity instead of an interesting bad for me and so I'm kinda over it already.  Sorry y'all, I gave it a shot but my total indifference for Paper Mario is winning out.

That is not to say that I'm uninvested in what's happening though.  While the gameplay and general structure are definitely turning me off of it. I do still like these characters and there are some plot/character developments that I enjoy  For instance, in this section I made it to the Bee Kingdom, the Hive, which has kind of been this sort of shadow over the journey thus far.  Vi has yet to really talk about her past, just that she ran away from home because she wanted to become an explorer and the hive treated her poorly for this ambition.  But as we enter the hive, Vi admits that they didn't really do anything to her.  She's been trying to avoid coming home because she was a brat, that she took some teasing about her ambition, blew it way out of proportion, yelled at both the Honey Factory's Overseer and the Queen herself, and stormed off.  She's been avoiding coming home because she knows she's in the wrong but her pride won't let her be the first to apologize.

But when she arrives at the Hive, no one hates her.  Well, that's not true, because Mothiva is there, but no one from her home hates her.  It's not like a warm welcome, tension is still present after what Vi did, especially after shouting at the Queen.  The queen herself greets her with kindness, not saying she forgives Vi but saying that she's proud of her.  That the stories of the spitfire explorer bee who has done what most other explorers couldn't are a point of pride for the hive now.  It's not the welcome she was expecting but immediately she's in higher spirits, agreeing with her friends that the best thing to do would be to apologize to her family and community after their mission is done.  It's a nice little arc and I'm glad I stuck with the game long enough to experience it.  Though I'm still not done with Chapter 3 so for all I know this is about to go horribly wrong.

I'm not going to sugar coat: I am unlikely to continue Bug Fables longterm.  I'll see how I'm feeling after one more play session, I like to at least give most longer games 10-12 hours to win me over.  If I had left out of Hollow Knight in the first couple play sessions I would've never gotten to City of Tears and grown to really like the game.  I want to make this clear, I do not think this game is bad.  If you like Paper Mario, this is a must-play, I could easily see this game being among your favorites.  It's just so not for me.  It wears its inspiration on its sleeve to a degree that I find both uninteresting and off-putting.  Even if I liked Paper Mario to some significant degree, I would be unlikely to like this, is the thing, this isn't just "oh you didn't like Paper Mario so of course you didn't like this".  It hasn't helped but like. I don't really want to just play games that fill in a niche I feel I'm missing and don't really do anything else.  I would just simply be thinking this game is a 7 rather than a 6 and be more likely to finish it.

3/22/26

I have made the decision after finishing Chapter 3 to put this one on ice.  This is not a surprise, I imagine, I have made it no secret that I don't enjoy the actual game part of this game.  I do have to say, though, this is always an outcome I hate.  DNFs aren't something I shy away from doing, I feel very strongly about the idea that a game is done when you are done with it.  But at the same time I'm always sad when a project goes this way.  Especially one as renowned as Bug Fables is, I know it probably doesn't seem like it based on how immediately I was like "I don't like playing this" and how critical I've been of the game since, but I did and still do want to like this game.  I enjoy the story and the characters especially, a part of me wants to see the mystery of Leif unfold.  Not finishing this isn't an easy decision.  But it's the right one.  I got through Chapter 3, did a couple sidequests, and was not having a good time through any of it.  This game really did capture Paper Mario, and it is no more apparent than in its worse moments.

Real quick though, I do want to highlight the soundtrack.  I haven't done it so far and I always want to do it at least once for any game I play.  Bug Fables sounds like Paper Mario, which is also not my favorite thing, I'm not super fond of the Paper Mario soundtracks.  But I would be lying if there weren't some incredible tracks in this game.  I'm a big fan of Snakemouth Den, it's an excellent dungeon track that sells the tense atmosphere without losing the lighthearted nature of this game.  The One Left Behind is a great character theme, it encapsulates Leif so well.  In the Court of the Ant Queen is an excellent castle theme, being very regal and kind of church-like while also being just a bit sinister, implying Elizant II might not be all she says she is.  Golden Lands is a great flower field theme, Harvest Festival is an excellent festival theme, Defiant Root is an amazing desert town theme, High Above, Bee Kingdom is a fantastic theme.  I especially love that last one, it's like very regal and classical but it keeps having notes of electronica in it, communicating the Bee Kingdom's technological superiority.  There are a lot of very good songs in Bug Fables, it may not be a soundtrack I think is always amazing but I like a number of the tracks I've heard.  And there's a cute little anxious butterfly with an ocarina in game you can hear the music from!  I love her so much.

Whoever made the boss of Chapter 3 need Vi to hit it twice for the other party members to do anything when characters only get 1 move per turn, have to give up their move for Vi to move a second time, AND have it so that enemies get up from being knocked down at the end of the turn they are knocked down; I want you to know you are why I'm not finishing your game.  What were you doing.  The boss of Chapter 3 is so unnecessarily tedious.  It's a boss fight that is bound to outresource you not because you lack resources but because your actual damage output is so slow that the boss is bound to just war of attrition your party down.  It's such an annoying boss fight given how limited your options are, made even moreso by the fact that it gets a massive power boost about halfway through the fight.  And the fact that, because Vi is the only real damage dealer in your party, she's going to be doing the most in the fight, keeping her alive is paramount, which is difficult because she has low HP.  There were multiple times in the fight where I got into a situation where it looked like I was going to just lose because the boss had killed Vi and Leif and Kabbu was just sitting there, doing nothing.  I understand that Bug Fables is designed to be a little harder than the game that inspired it, since it's for adults, but I don't think that this boss was hard so much as it was tedious.

There was one final thing I wanted to do before I stopped playing the game.  Vi's drama with the Hive was one of the things I was invested enough in to highlight in the previous section and, since I was able to, I wanted to see a resolution to that story.  So before I ended off, I decided to reconnect Vi with her sister, Jaune, and have the two of them make up.  The nature of the sidequest ended up being frustrating, unfortunately, it's your classic trading quest where you have to go all over the world talking to random NPCs to find the next item to trade for until you eventually find the end point of the quest and work your way backwards.  But it was very sweet and I'm glad I saw it.  Despite the fact that I'm pretty sure what Vi did to her sister was the equivalent of calling her a slur given how Kabbu reacted to it, and also how upset she is that her sister, in trying to protect Vi from the dangerous life of an explorer, tried to stamp her dreams down, the two sisters make up and forgive each other.  Jaune, the Hive's best artist, even makes a painting in honor of the moment, a painting so good that she says even the portraits she has made for the Queen pale in comparison.

I shouldn't have played Bug Fables.  You know, I did the thing I tend to criticize others for, picking up a game you know you're probably not going to like, playing it because you "want to give the game a fair shot", and then being like "wow, I didn't like this".  I'm sorry, y'all.  DNFs aren't fun, me not gelling with a game is not fun.  I want to be clear, I don't think Bug Fables is a bad game at all.  While I don't think I would ever love it the way others do based on my own opinions on this stuff, it's obviously a very good game if you're into this style of RPG.  It's not for me, and I probably could've and should've recognized that fact before I even tried it.  It is pretty embarrassing that this game, which I do acknowledge is a good game, is going on the DNF list but Revelations: Persona, one of the worst RPGs I've ever played, was finished, I'm very sorry about that.  6/10, though I wouldn't be surprised if it makes the worst list this year after I've sat on it for 9 months either, I tend to rate things higher when I play them and am thinking about more "objective criticism" and then my subjectivity overtakes in the subsequent weeks or months.

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.