faea gaming: July '25
Hi! It’s been a rough month on my end, to be honest, but finding some games that I could fully fixate on through the weeks has been a very pleasant reprieve. More notably, though, I’ve started experimenting with publishing my pieces on other sites – namely Substack, so far. (Even though there’s only one piece there at the moment…) If it feels right, I could see myself posting everything I do here over there as well, though I’ll always keep this place up to date. It’s good to have a slice of the internet that I can actually claim as my own, at least to some degree. Anyway, let’s talk about video games.
Games I Finished
FINAL FANTASY II (NES)
I wrote a deeper and more exploratory piece on this game (and the weird reception surrounding it) that you can read here, so the TL;DR… it’s good!!!!! If I wanted to sound annoying and contrarian, I’d call it my favourite Final Fantasy… and it is, and I do!!! It’s a little weak in like, boring ways (balance being a little wonky through some sections just being weirdly easy, gil barely being a factor for most of the game, certain status spam being kind of uncounterable without a lot of foresight and pre-preparation, etc.), but the leveling system is just so fun! I went in with a cursory knowledge of how bits of it works through internet osmosis, and it gave me a deepened appreciation for the sorts of decision-making it causes: for instance, intentionally not healing through hits to encourage HP growth, but wanting to put out heals in-battle to get spell and magic-stat growths; there’s tons of little interactions like this that make every encounter feel like a micro-optimisation game that’s always rubbing against itself in really interesting ways. The fact that the game feels at its most interesting with a little bit of knowledge really makes me wonder what the JP manual is like – does it suggest any of this? Does it flatly lie to you? Is it helpful, or not? How much more scrutable would the average Japanese player experience be compared to the English-speaker with no supplemental mechanics guides?
Pokemon Moon
Pokemon’s never been able to let go of the past, has it? That feels at its most pronounced narratively during gens 4 and 5 – respectively a game that’s, in my eyes, about fearing and antagonising the inevitable march of progress, and a game that wears the facade of progress to tell a story about how freaking awesome the status quo is. So it’s unsurprising, if still disappointing, to see the now-trending past worship seep into by far my favourite Modern Pokemon through awkward-feeling returning “do you remember this guy from two games ago??” cameos and all the new regional forms being of Kanto Pokemon. It’s hardly my biggest problem with the game, but as someone who’s well gotten used to all the design and mechanical gripes I have with the later games, this stuff is what grates against me the most.
And it is a shame when those bits do pop up, because when armed with full confidence and individuality this game is really good! It’s incredibly charming through and through. Really big fan of the writing in this one: the moment-to-moment dialogue is generally a lot of fun, the characters are really charming, and Lillie’s story is really sweet, as much as I’d have liked it to have a bolder ending. And for all my problems with modern games’ mechanics and design… filling a team of one of the coolest new dexes in the modern games and slotting them into their own defined-but-kinda-weird little niches is a lot of fun. I played without EXP Share and with no items in battle and had to do a lot of puzzle-solving to beat the champion: shoutouts to Millie the Raticate for landing a +4 Z-Move OHKO on the final Snorlax, after I forgot to teach the Pokemon I passed four Calm Mind boosts to any special moves!! That’s what these games are about!!
Zelle
It’s the fuckimg undertale of religious trauma!!!!!!!!!!!
Utterly amazed how such a clearly self-serious game leans so hard into being blatantly and intentionally comedic and completely nails both. There’s enough to dig into on the story side about the morality of religious afterlifes and moral codes, but the game makes no attempts to hide the inherent humour of its scenarios or combat system, and outright leans into it in incredibly entertaining ways. There's tons of parallels to Undertale’s story moments and aesthetic flair that sort of feels like they ripped them out and covered them in paint, but I don't really care when something blatantly riffs off something else out of admiration, as long as it's still confident in itself – and honestly, the more direct parallels kinda just made the funny bits even funnier. You can tell pretty much immediately whether you'll like this thing or not based on the fact that it sometimes look like this:
Citizen Sleeper
Gamifies its disability allegory in a way that feels like a quaint and easy little problem-solving task for the majority of the game: there’s usually a comfortable application for low-roll action dice that progresses storylines just as well as high rolls do, and the time-limits the game impose feel much more like a suggestion than a threat. Additionally, the game’s politics are overt in a way where it’s easy to feel like you know a character’s whole personality, background and position just from their introductory dialogue – but I found it hard to not feel charmed by them anyway. While it might have missed the physical experience of disability, it did communicate the feeling of the communal aspect of marginalisation, with each little storyline drawing to its conclusion compounding the feeling that I’d fallen into a mutually-supportive group of equally-struggling outliers, washing away a bit of the indifference the mechanical side had given me. And the particular way the endings are handled only solidifies that for me.
Prose might be a bit too wordy for me, though. I don’t think I actually took in like 80% of the words oops
Games I Haven't Finished
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
Really liking the combat mechanics and RPG-ish flourishes to give what’d probably otherwise be a pretty unremarkable simple action platformer an awful lot of texture. High/low blocking is neat for decision-making in bullet-dodging gauntlets, but having an extra non-centralising defensive action gives individual enemy design room for extra depth. My personal favourites here are the Ironknuckles – juggling the position of both their shields and their swings, along with the momentum needed to close the distance and land a hit, is incredibly tense and satisfying, and lands the feeling of a duel better than any game I’ve ever played?
This one’s another entry in the NES Games I Didn’t Finish But Quite Liked Anyway collection (it’s really hard!), and while I think it has part of the Experimental NES Game In Popular Long-Running Series problem where it’s a difficult action-platformer whose main playerbase is gonna be, like, ALTTP fans, I also wonder if part of the poor reception to games like this is also a feeling of entitlement to being able to complete a game? Like, I can guarantee a lot of people would not have beaten this back in the 80s – as with probably a lot of games? – and yet people still ended up being drawn to it regardless. Hell, I loved a lot of games when I was younger that I couldn’t beat! Beating them wasn’t even at the front of my mind, really. So it’s hard for me to mind if I don’t, or can’t, beat a game, especially if it’s one as interesting as this.
Shin Megami Tensei
What’s up with Hama having, like, regular accuracy???
Feels uncomfortably familiar for someone who’s spent almost a decade trudging through this series that I really don’t like as much as that’d imply; I think that’s more of a condemnation of the series’ future refusal to let go of both concept and execution (seriously, the demon fusion feels almost identical to the next 25 years of SMT down to its finer details) than SMT1 itself, since much of it feels more fitting here than anything the series would warp itself into in future. For instance, demon negotiation is as fun and annoying as always, but negotiating for resources (specifically magnetite) feels like much more of a genuine decision. Negotiating to avoid encounters also feels important, as some encounters will risk exploding half your party – but then it starts to brush against EXP gain in a way that makes you second-guess whether you should be doing it or not. (In general, the amount this game encourages smartly *avoiding* encounters is really cool!) And since demons don’t level, fusion feels even more at the forefront of decision-making: at this point they’re literally tools, “minions” as the game loves to put it, so why not chuck them away as soon as they start to be an inconvenience? The story premise is interesting so far, too, but I'm a little guarded considering that’s how I felt about Strange Journey’s story at the start… so maybe part of my motivation to finish this thing should be to see if Atlus has ever been capable of not writing a bad story?
My other main gripe is just that I don’t like the high-density, DQ-group blobber combat, sorry!! It just hasn’t been very interesting so far!
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Thanks for reading as always :) Don’t forget to take a look at my Substack as well – subscribe if an email newsletter is a little more convenient than chasing up my posts or using the RSS feed that I don’t know if actually works, or just give me some sweet, sweet engagement. See you next month!