faea gaming: September '25
Hello, again. September's been a pretty slow month, because... I've spent most of it ill :( So I haven't been up to much, but I did play some video games, and now you get to read about them.
Games I Finished
POKéMON Blue Version
Yeah, the woman with the lifelong Pokemon special interest is playing the Pokemon game again, my bad. I booted it up as a pick-me-up on a bad day and immediately got hooked, what can I say. We all know this is one of my favourites already, but I think I like it more and more each time. What I’ve been picking up on this playthrough specifically is how RGBY Kanto expresses its Pokemon in a way that the later series just doesn’t. Like, so many more Pokemon are out in the world that you can talk to, which makes a lot of sense in the first games – it’s an indicator that so many of them have evolutions, or even just exist in the first place. And there’s loads of variety in early trainers, including a *lot* of Pokemon you won’t be able to get for a long time – battling something like Ponyta and thinking it’s awesome, only to look its area up in the dex and see it’s only available on an island in the middle of nowhere, must have been equal parts incredibly exciting and crushing for a lot of people back then.
I’m also a big fan of how archetypal all the types are trying to be: even if it winds up with situations like Fighting being The Bad One, it’s interesting to see a lot of types designed with specifically their defensive profile in mind: Rock, Ghost and Dragon immediately come to mind. But the most interesting to me is Grass: the type with really horrible offensive moves, but focused around utility rather than defensiveness. It’s fascinated me since I was a kid, but I never really understood it… until bringing Weepinbell with Wrap and Poisonpowder, and having a moveset that felt more expressive of that specific Pokemon than, like, anything? (It’s also just really fun!) And most of the other Grass types get *something* like that: Tangela gets the same, Venusaur gets Leech Seed + Toxic, and the others just have decent offensive potential (Exeggutor’s Psychic typing, Vileplume’s Petal Dance, and Parasect’s… well, it can use Spore to set up Swords Dance, if you want to commit that to it, lol. And then fail to crit Slash, because it’s blessed with 30 base speed). It’s really cool! Especially when, since Gen 4, pretty much all Pokemon get access to fairly good standard offensive tools that pushes them towards homogeneity, and their response to that as of late has been giving them signature moves and abilities that feel… largely uninteresting outside of competitive. We’re obviously far past this point now, but I’d be really interested to see the alternate universe Gen 2 that doubled down on those ideas, rather than starting to course-correct them. Outside of doubles and competitive, Pokemon’s always an incredibly simple game mechanically, so leaning harder into more basic, restrained methods of differentiation and their natural consequences interests me far more than starting to give new Pokemon a Unique And Bespoke Method of one-shotting the opponent in the exact same way as everything else.
I also think the region is really cool!! Incredibly standard opinion, I know, but this time I was picking up on how Kanto feels like one small place in a much larger, unknowable world, whereas all future games (as far as I remember) exclusively reference only their own worlds, or other regions established in previous games. Like, yeah we all know Guyana and Russia and the USA are canonised in these games, but right now I’m more drawn to other details: certain Pokemon being exclusive to either the Safari Zone or in-game trades, and the Snorlax returning to “the mountains” after being defeated, implies that a decent chunk of available Pokemon in these games just aren’t native to the region – the only playable region at that point. They’re from a place that, at this point, cannot – and may not ever – be known.
Kirby's Dream Land
Extra Game was, like, necessary for this, I think; turning a pretty alright 20-30 minute romp into a genuinely cool tough little platformer. While it’s hard to riff off expectations set by a game that ends that quickly, I think being technically a Hard Mode attached to a much easier game makes the immediately high difficulty a lot more palatable, and its tendency for playfully trollish enemy placements feel much less meanspirited than they might have done otherwise. I don’t have too much else to say about the game – it’s cute, uses the small screen size really well, pushes Kirby’s moveset around sort of interestingly by the end, and has a lot of cute little individual moments. I beat it over the course of two sessions (very generous with checkpoints/infinite continues, and is just *that* short), and even with that little playtime, it felt really nice storming through most of the game far quicker the second time. Even you, Wispy Woods! Get fucked, you stupid tree!!! Now I could kill you in my sleep.
Hollow Knight: Silksong
Feeling upsettingly neutral on a game with highs as high as this has. There’s some really fun world design early on – Act 1 being my favourite part, with how well it can be picked apart with a little bit of effort – and the combat fundamentals, as well as a lot of the encounters, are just Good. Playing Act 1 effectively backwards, and then finding the backdoor into the Citadel, was basically my highlight of the entire experience, and the game’s insistence on spacing and positioning combined with some of the more dynamic bosses and enemy gauntlets felt so good to pick apart that they got me heavily interested in playing more platformers. Me! The woman with a horribly strained relationship with the genre. If that’s not impressive, I don’t think anything is. The game’s also got a fantastic, often meanspirited sense of humour which I’m a massive fan of. Lots of individual moments stick out to me, but my favourite is that That One Zone Everyone Hates was mean enough to actually make me feel like the butt of the joke, and I really loved it for that! Even if it wasn’t so fun in the moment.
But I’d say all of that – the Silksong’s Greatest Hits – made up about 5-10 hours of my playtime, and the rest tended to feel a little bland? MMO 12 Bear Asses sidequests aside, I felt like both bosses and per-area combat/traversal tended to feel a bit too similar for a game of such an extreme scale. I feel most other games in the genre that I’ve played also don’t have wonderfully engaging moment-to-moment combat, but they’re either being used very clearly as longer-term numerical attrition, or the game is so short and momentum-driven that the rate at which you get new tools outweighs how simple moment-to-moment combat often feels. Meanwhile, Silksong’s combat kills you quickly if played wrong with how high enemy damage often is, but your access to healing – your only real recovery mechanic – being a direct reward for playing well to begin with means that if you are playing well enough, you build excess healing so plentifully that it almost makes individual encounters nonthreatening, and if you aren’t, you're gonna be fighting for your life. I do really enjoy how dangerous it can cause certain encounters to feel, but generally the result is combat needing an awful lot of concentration despite it often just being solved by either pogoing or hitting and then dashing away, regardless of the situation the game’s putting you in – [[and those same simple responses work throughout the whole runtime of the game!]] I think that’s probably a better way to lament my boredom with the levels than complaining that it doesn’t have intensely-gripping levels all the time – I don’t think many of its peers do either, and aside from the absolute logistical nightmare of doing so, I think the combat pushing back on you even harder would risk making the act of exploration feel like a complete nightmare.
And my problem with the majority of the boss roster is similar to my issue with the filler combat: most bosses are very static – the boss readies one attack, uses it, and then waits a second before doing the next one; you learn the correct response to each attack, maybe optimising them a bit to get some extra hits in, and perform them over and over until you win. These fights can get really difficult and intense despite the theoretical simplicity of learning the correct Responses to the enemies’ Calls, but that makes them harder to stomach for me; once again, I’m having to spend intense focus on something I don’t think is actually very interesting. Rarely are the fights built around introducing extra variables and unknowns; rarely do you need to use the game’s incredibly fluid, responsive movement to improvise out of the way of a situation you aren’t able to simply memorise. As well as just not being a design space that I enjoy – I’ve been calling them “dark souls bosses” as a pejorative – it makes a lot of them feel the same: poke the boss, dash away on a wind-up, and keep running, maybe jump or even pogo in response, run back in, rinse and repeat. The parts of the game that do subvert this are absolutely wonderful, though, and a couple of the endgame bosses that still do sorta feel static were tight enough and had interesting enough positioning and dodging to be really satisfying regardless.
To be honest, even almost a month after the game’s launch this all still feels sorta like spitballing! I don’t really know how to wrangle my aching thoughts with a game of this immense scale and ambition into something concrete, let alone anything that feels remotely actionable. Anyway I’ve been playing Super Mario Bros for the NES it’s pretty good
Games I Didn't Finish
POKéMON Stadium
It’s cute! But my team from Blue just isn’t well-rounded or, well, good enough to get through some of the battles reliably. With how slow the battles are and how few options my team realistically has against teams that are, like, actually well-statted, I lost my momentum pretty much as soon as I ran into a difficult fight :( The alt-colour Pokemon are really cute, though.
~*ʚїɞ*~
Thank you for reading, as always. I've got a couple of pieces in the pipeline (I am working on them, I promise!!), so please support me on my Substack if you like what I do! It’s free and always will be, and seeing tangible support for my writing helps to keep me motivated. Here's hoping for a more comfortable October... see you next month ~♡