June 1st

Welcome back readers.

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This Week in Videogame Blogging is a roundup highlighting the most important critical writing on games from the past seven days.

Role and Move

This week we’re starting with a genre-focused section exploring all things RPG.

• Best of the Rest: Cult Classic and Misshapen RPGs to Learn and Love | Paste
  Dia Lacina lays down the lowdown on 7th Saga and its intriguing, punishing ilk.
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 didn’t invent Final Frenchtasy or the J’RPG: the newly dubbed subgenre has a long and complicated history | PC Gamer
  Francisco Dominguez charts the fragmentary history of access that informs the contemporary French “J’RPG” (Further Reading – Jay Castello talks to Quinn K about localizing French indie RPG Off).
• Black Crypt: Memory, meet reality | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi comes away disappointed by a stifling lack of imagination in Raven’s inaugural Amiga blobber.
• Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord | All Time Bangers
  Jackson Tyler begins at the beginning, with a maze, a town, and a wizard (Further Reading – Art Maybury on Wizardry).

“This is Shin Megami Tensei, this is Dungeon Meshi, this is Earthbound, this is Pokemon and this is Dark Souls. This is Planescape Torment, this is Binding of Isaac and this is Morrowind. This is why people play Dungeons and Dragons in real life, this is the worth of a good Dungeon Master, a moment of pure authorship that takes the experience beyond the mechanical. After this moment, you never know what could be on the next tile, and you’re never sure where the boundaries are.”

Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment

These two pieces unpack the experiential depth of their subject games.

• Collecting Coins In Super Mario 64 | erik blog
  erik goes to the mat for those 100-coin stars.
• Shenmue As Arcade Realism | Eithi Writes
  Eithi brings together the Yu Suzuki oeuvre to express a Virtua theory of game experience (Further Reading – Dia Lacina on Shenmue III).

“You interact with the world of Shenmue as you would a normal person. Bereft of the abstraction that exists in other games, it forces you to approach it like you would real life, creating a connection between you and the game that makes you approach it on its terms, the terms of real life and not the ones of a videogame. Shenmue is, at its core, a Virtua World.“

Summoning Sign

Now we’re looking at games as social experiences, both with close companions and passing acquaintances.

• Elden Ring Nightreign is nothing like Elden Ring and that’s too bad | Polygon
  Maddy Myers argues that Nightreign‘s pressure-cooker thrills come at the cost of some of the feelings of connection and mutual assistance that make From’s more traditional fare shine.
• Is Blue Prince’s success due to ‘social play?’ | Game Developer
  Danielle Riendeau highlights the delights of puzzling, together (Further Reading – Rob on secondhand enjoyment of games like Blue Prince).

“Without giving too much away here, Blue Prince offers many flavors of puzzle and strategy that it naturally lends itself to the escape room logic of “many brains make light work:” just like my partner and I, certain types of players are attracted to (or repelled by) certain kinds of problem solving. It’s wildly satisfying (for us and players like us) to collaborate and play this as a team sport and essentially share in the glory.“

Interviews

Interviews? Interviews.

• What I learned during a marvelous meeting with To a T creator Keita Takahashi | Game Developer
  Chris Kerr conducts an interview that’s Takahashi to a T.
• DESPELOTE Interview: Developers Julián Cordero and Ian Berman on courting chaos to bring Ecuador to life. | Umby Cord
  Austin Lancaster chats with the duo behind Despelote on the improvisation and craft of its dialogue, recording, and performances (Further Reading – Luis Aguasvivas on Despelote‘s affirmation that ball is life).

“Much of the dialogue gains its vitality by being broken out of the enclosed diving bell of the recording booth. The game’s cast—largely made up of Ecuadorian friends and family—were encouraged to improvise and bounce off each other, contributing not just their voices but their own memories and personalities.”

Play it Loud

These next three picks situate their games in the times in which they were made and played, relative to both author and industry.

• Parents and the Past in Pokémon Emerald | Gamers with Glasses
  Samantha Trzinski contemplates growing up with separated parents in Hoenn and beyond (Further Reading – Flora Merigold on being a girl in Pokémon Crystal).
• It’s been 32 years since The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening launched, but the Switch remake makes it feel like yesterday | GamesRadar
  Aidan Moher reminisces about the uncanny charm of Link’s Awakening past and present.
• Splatoon Proves That The Best Ideas Come From Outside Video Games | GameSpot
  Grace Benfell examines the style, culture, attitude, and finitude of Splatoon (Further Reading – Lex Luddy on feeling fit and fresh in Splatoon 3).

“Splatoon’s aesthetics are not vacuous imitations, but grounded homages. Its social media and events give the feeling of a world beyond the borders of the game. Splatoon feels like a real place, albeit one that you can only ever visit.”

Consolation

Keeping the temporal theme going, let’s look at stories of the industry’s past and future.

• No, the Saturn Didn’t Fail Because Sega Didn’t Anticipate the Rise of 3D Videogames | Paste
  Marc Normandin sets the record straight on Sega’s magnificent, mismanaged machine (Further Reading – Kimimi on Layer Section II).
• Video Game Consoles Are Dead | Aftermath
  Carli Velocci portends that the future console landscape will be Switch-and-who (Further Reading – John Thyer on the lousy current state of the console landscape).

“The video game industry has long been defined by machines. There have been console wars, infighting, countless articles on whether you should buy an Xbox or a PlayStation. Companies have risen and fallen on whether they can compete with the Big Three or if they chose one console over another for a game launch. There are people who have, for better or worse, based parts of their personalities on which company they like best. Many of us have to budget every few years to get a new machine to play new games. This is how it’s been for decades, but that status quo is about to change.”

Relational World

The organization gets a little loose towards the tail-end of the roundup, as can happen when I’m finishing it off in the wee hours of the morning, but the articles are no less potent. The guiding theme here is that games exist reciprocally within the world, revealing, interrogating, and informing its processes, values, and movements.

• “What if Napoleon had won?” | Designing Alternative History in a Victoria 3 Mod
  Luo Chenchen designs and argues for an alt-history scenario of French Imperial governance (Further Reading – Bret Devereaux on Europa Universalis IV‘s state-centred approach to history).
• Fear of Failure in Many Nights a Whisper | Unwinnable
  Emily Price debriefs on missing the shot (Further Reading – Robin Bea on the same game).
• Feeding the Cartoon Gators: Cult of the Lamb and Moral Disengagement | Unwinnable
  Emma Kostopolus wonders if doing crimes in Cult of the Lamb placates our subconscious sewer gators or simply lets ’em out.
• The Quest To Revive A Summer Festival Is Off To A Strong Start In Danchi Days | Inverse
  Robin Bea checks out new work from Analgesic that bucks some cozy tropes.
• Final Fantasy VII Confronts Capitalism: Tifa Lockhart vs. Medical Debt | Sidequest
  Kathryn Hemmann delves into a Kazushige Nojima novel set in the FF7 Remake chronology to excavate a portrait of inevitable radicalization (Further Reading – Ian Walker links Clair Obscur‘s gommage to the US healthcare system).

“Tifa can never rest, but Traces of Two Pasts doesn’t argue that work itself is bad or unnecessary. Rather, Nojima’s story makes it all too clear how even someone like Tifa would feel compelled to take action against the direct cause of the suffering in her community, the capitalistic exploitation that keeps people in debt and thus forces them to devote their entire lives to work.”

Critical Chaser

Dumpy Kong is here.

• I want to eat Donkey Kong’s Whole Ass | Ferg’s Frickhouse
  Ferg wants to eat Donkey Kong’s Whole Ass.

“Donkey Kong’s claymation-lookin’ booty spinning every time you jump! That beautiful buttocks can land on me ANY DAY.”