Honesty hour — I have an extremely turbulent relationship with competing.

You see, I was unfortunate enough to inherit my father’s ego (yeah, it’s genetic, I swear). Its presence has beleaguered me on the field of play throughout my life, be it in sport or in gaming.

Winning has never felt that good — instead, customary. Like something I deserve. Losing, on the other hand, rings with the insecurity-driven reverberations of indignance and inadequacy. And I lose a lot.

As I age, I’ve started to become more distinctly cognizant of my reactions to competitive loss. I’ve begun to question them more frequently and analyze them more lucidly. What I’m finding is that my perfect foil is…

Miyamoto Musashi.

Y’know, from Onimusha: Way of the Sword?

In all my athletic and competitive endeavors, I want to get better, I want to improve. I’m seeking more “power” and “strength,” as Musashi would say.

And like Musashi, when I don’t get that sweet taste of victory, I lose my way and retreat into myself, petulantly stewing over my bruised ego. Of the many things I’m still yet to learn about victory and defeat, I was given a small preview of their morals while helping Musashi cut his way through hell’s greatest hits of demon hordes. I’m finding this journey I’m on will be more grueling than I could’ve imagined.

But that’s life, right? You’ve got to learn to love the challenge. I wonder what this intrepid swordsman can teach me.

Miyamoto Musashi opens Onimusha’s campaign looking to be the best samurai swordsman there ever was. In his endeavors, he tracks down famous and renowned veterans of the craft to challenge, test himself against, and overcome. When each is defeated and only he remains, Musashi surmises, he’ll be the strongest swordsman alive.

Central to Musashi’s desire in Onimusha is his quest for power, for strength. They feel like the two most common words to leave his lips in the story’s early stages, when the young duelist is searching for a way to rid himself of his Oni gauntlet. The device, Musashi argues, is cheating. For, though it gives him strength and power in spades, it does so cheaply — the gauntlet’s might is unearned; given, not developed.

Already, Musashi is probing at the heart of something deep within my being.

As an Only Child™, I come as a packaged deal with a certain kind of presumption and entitlement. Imagining myself in Musashi’s sandals, I wonder if I would conversely delight in the gauntlet’s pro-bono handout, riding its wave of charity all the way to its reductio ad absurdum and reveling in my stolen valor all the while. The thought of victory and greatness, of plaudits and recognition might be too strong for me to resist not taking a shortcut or two.

Not only was I born and raised an Only Child™, but I also hold the distinct honor of being the single most decorated member of the Participation Trophy Generation™. In my childhood, I was showered with trophies that I didn’t win — soccer, basketball, baseball awards littered my shelves. Even my advanced math class had a gold-stamped certificate you got just for showing up enough times. Struggle and challenge are the very thing Miyamoto Musashi desires, yet they aren’t concepts I’m well-accustomed to, in truth.

Now, as a veritable grown up, It’s beginning to come into view how deeply these things are ingrained in the way I see myself and the world around me. I seem to believe that I deserve to win by virtue of just my presence. That knowledge of a game equates to mastery of it. That a few good but fleeting moments in the midst of a match should accumulate to ultimate victory.

None of these things are true, and both myself and Musashi know it.

Comparing my self-righteousness to Musashi’s far more humble and honorable response to the gauntlet’s gifts paints a picture that I, quite frankly, needed to see. In this way, we’re starkly different. But the ways in which we are the same struck me even deeper than our contrasts.

Musashi and I are both on a quest for self-betterment. This desire to improve has been innate for as long as I can remember — it is as baked into me as my aforementioned entitlement, as my ego. In everything I do, I strive to do it well, to maintain a high level, to get better. And so I return to competition again and again, to do just that.

Furthermore, when I lose — when reality clashes with my internal expectations about myself and the world around me — my mental rowboat starts to capsize in a similar way to Musashi’s.

Along his journey towards greatness, Musashi skirmishes frequently with his self-appointed rival, Sasaki Ganryu. As one of the game’s insipient boss encounters, Musashi makes quick work of him. The two’s dialogue both before and after the battle implies that, to Musashi, the victory is nothing more than a supplementary feather in his cap. To him, his encounters with Ganryu are predetermined, trite, a waste of time.

That makes it sting all the more when he falls to Ganryu’s blade later on in the tale. Musashi, in his handsome heroics and admirable gauntlet admonition, has his singular great weakness revealed when he finds himself on the losing end of a no-holds-barred duel with Ganryu;

He’s a pouty little baby.

Ganryu spares Musashi’s life at the confrontation’s conclusion, and our protagonist is forced to retreat to his homebase to lick his wounds in front of what is more-or-less Onimusha’s entire cast — a cast that depended on him for the safety and cleansing of their world.

But it’s not their expectations that plunge Musashi into a sulking fit of bitterness — it’s his own. Shocked, shamed and in shambles, Musashi slumps over in isolation when back to the safety of his comrade’s abode. For a few moments, he considers taking the gauntlet’s fraudulence to a new height, crossing the moral event horizon and absorbing not just Genma souls into the armpiece for strength, but human souls as well. Compromise and ethical bargaining cloud his thoughts almost as much as his underlying, substantive pain point; his own weakness.

Video game characters — at least those of the variety that I frequently take control of — are often a few barriers away from true relatability. They’re all destined, special, chosen. They all wield power, they’re all experts or masters at what they do. They all overcome any obstacle in front of them, ceaseless forces of good, steamrolling through broken worlds to provide resolution and closure and peace.

Me? I’m just an average dude. Nothing special to see here.

But to watch Musashi wallow in his own sadness over a simple loss — that, for me, was something special to see. All barriers to resonance between us came down in those scenes. Scarcely has a scene made me feel so seen.

This reaction to failure — and yes, I do see the silliness in all of this — is deeply personal to me. It’s something I’ve grappled with significantly in my late twenties and now early thirties; this attitude of mine, these behavioral traits that are more childlike than adult. I still play sports, I still jump into the queue, I still compete. And I still lose. A lot.

My adult mind is aware of how unbecoming this behavior can be, and so I stifle it in public. I hold it in, bury it, hide my honest, knee-jerk reactions. No one wants to see that, no one likes that guy, no one wants to be friends with a cry-baby. On the surface, I do everything in my power to lose gracefully, only to collapse in self-loathing behind closed doors later on.

He had the upper hand of righteousness on me in the first half, but after tasting the agony of defeat, Musashi and I are back on even footing. How do the two of us respond, then?

Well, Musashi’s growth and progression as a character in Onimusha are defined largely by a moment a few chapters after his loss to Ganryu. Rather than cut corners by consuming human souls in reaction to his debility, our self-interested swordsman eventually acknowledges his own imperfection.

The game frames this admission of weakness as virtue — the spiritual Oni warriors of centuries past immediately further lend Musashi their power upon his revelation, our protagonist’s self-acceptance having earned their respect. These Oni ancestors provide Musashi with the god-like power-up that he needs to defeat a particularly challenging opponent. Newly enwreathed in their blessed and badass armor, Musashi recieves the game’s ultimate ability — the Oni Awakening Form. The transformation allows for boosted attacks, flashy speed and easier Issen Attack timing. Mechanically, it’s an ult, a limit break, a win button. Metaphorically, it’s a motif for Musashi’s ascendance beyond himself.

The message at this stage of Onimusha is clear: coming to terms with one’s own limitations is an integral part of what makes one truly strong.

While I’m still a work in progress, one solution I’ve discovered as of late is to simply acknowledge my truth. I’ve written it out in this very essay (or is it a journal entry?) already, in fact; I’m just a regular person. I’m not a hero, I’m not a born winner, I’m not a natural competitor. I don’t have that dog in me, I don’t have the capacity to, Michael-Jordan-style, “take that personally.” I’m just average. This, as I see it, is the next logical step in becoming ok with my own shortcomings. I think Miyamoto Musashi would agree.

It took loss, it took self-reflection, it took introspection and it took seemingly endless friction, but Musashi and I have found the key — acceptance. Not everyone can be Lebron James or Tiger Woods or Tom Brady. Perfection isn’t necessary. Knowing yourself is enough.

The road there is rocky, but the destination is peaceful. And hey, that’s life — you’ve got to learn to love the challenge.

And you might think that’s the end of Musashi and I’s tale. Problem solved, self-love achieved. Surely.

But then something peculiar takes place.

Following Musashi’s life lesson, Onimusha’s difficulty significantly ramps up. What plays out is almost the opposite of what you’d expect — with his power boost and skill unlocks, shouldn’t things get easier for our now-virtuous samurai?

No, instead they get harder. You’ve got to learn to love the challenge, after all.

Up to the point of Musashi’s realization, Onimusha was dishing out wave after wave of new enemies and unique boss encounters. There were one or two repeat opponents off the beaten path, but those were the exception rather than the rule. Curiously, that colloquialism is reversed after Musashi’s admission of weakness — repeat boss encounters become the rule rather than the exception and are rehashed ad nauseam, some in side quests, many in the main campaign. What used to be a big-bad is now a standard elite mob. What was once waiting for you at the end of a long, arduous, hand-crafted level is now fodder waiting for you at the end of a rift closing sequence.

The only difference is that these reused assets are now more aggressive. And deal far more damage. Up to this point, Musashi has claimed victory over every single one (and over himself!), yet they persist. Harder, better, faster, stronger than before, Musashi doesn’t just have to fight his enemies a second, third and fourth time, their new supped-up nature means that he has to lose to them a second, third and fourth time. The lesson was administered, the growth was achieved and yet, still, Musashi must have it drilled into him ad infinitum.

You cannot flip a switch and become strong, they say. You are weak. Don’t forget it.

It’s a mechanical representation of what I’ve found during and after my own acceptance in real life, too.

Grasping my limits and tempering my expectations of myself didn’t automatically make me a winner in my rec sports, in my gaming… in anything. I still lose. A lot. I’m still an average joe, I’m still just some guy. I have grown on the inside, I have shifted my perspective, but that alone does not equate to victory over competition. That must be earned time and time and time and time and time again. And a lot of times, like it does in Onimusha, both the opponents and the lesson get more challenging as they drag on.

My parallels with Musashi crystalized in the story’s rising action, as the hero of Kyoto climbed Yoshitsune’s impossibly tall tower of malice to usurp him from his god-adjacent throne. Between elevators whose length would make a Souls developer blush, Musashi is assailed by each of the game’s story bosses, one per floor, in the identical order in which he encountered them earlier in the campaign.

From a design perspective, I thought it was a shocking decision. Especially in a game that already includes a boss replay feature — one that’s available at the conclusion of the first chapter. I felt that these rematches — with more aggressive attack patterns and more inflated health bars — were nothing more than limpid padding, an asinine obstruction that teetered somewhere on the line between senseless and monotonous. The inclusion and recapitulation of Onimusha’s boss battles was so egregious that I figured it had to have a deeper meaning. The setup was so painfully literal that my brain demanded I interpret it as symbolic in order to make any sense of it at all.

As Genma after Genma fell at the external end of Musashi’s blade, so too did I imagine the slaying of his internal demons — self-obsessed with his own inadequacy and deficiency — alongside them. Again and again, our hero is forced to cut down his darkness despite having already surmounted it earlier in the story.

It feels ludicrously unfair and insurmountably pointless to face more powerful realizations of lessons already mastered — to be faced with one’s finite ability with ceaseless repetition, having your internal progress indifferently shrugged off as externally you face your own brutal execution. I didn’t want to fight these enemies a s̶e̶c̶o̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶r̶d̶ ̶f̶o̶u̶r̶t̶h̶ nth time. And I don’t want to struggle continuously and lose eternally in real-life competition, either. I find it unjust to have to re-learn a lesson that’s already been taught.

But that’s what I have to do. That’s what Onimusha forces Musashi to do, at least. I guess that’s life. Learn to love the challenge and all that.

And so, I considered each of these boss challenges my teacher. A tutor sent to reiterate my curriculum in self-image, in arrogance, in hard work. What was most strange in this perspective switch was my reaction to it all. These bosses were the same as the last time we fought, only faster and stronger. Onimusha’s gameplay and combat were also unchanged, only, when they come together with such speed and intensity, they elevate to a new level of finesse and satisfaction. Parrying blows and sweeping aside swipes became — despite the fact that I’ve seen this all, frame-for-frame, a million times— dare I say… fun? I may have been irritated that the challenge existed, but was I, possibly, enjoying the challenge?

It’s how I’ve started viewing my opponents outside of the game, too; as opportunities to improve, to execute my practice, yes, but also as instructors whose lectures I’ve heard before but that I nonetheless must listen to again. I will lose more during my career as a competitor. And I will be reminded of my own weakness. Is it possible to love that process, rather than abhor it?

Nowadays, I look upon the freely given medals and awards from my youth and deny them the same way Musashi rejects the power of his gauntlet. They no longer carry the value they once did. I didn’t earn them. There was no friction there, no effort, no growth.

It’s a good start.

Although Musashi eventually reaches the pinnacle of his climb, I often wonder if I ever will. If there’s enough brain-rewiring capability in all the world to undo the ego-tangled web that is my subconscious, to call me surprised would be an understatement. What I’ve seen through Musashi is that this exercise in obstacle, setback, acceptance and repetition is a lesson I’ll have to drill again and again until time immemorial; a boss I’ll have to defeat even long after I’ve committed its attack patterns to muscle memory. And when I do achieve a hitless run, someone will inevitably crank up its difficulty again anyway.

Hard work, thoughtful execution, dedicated repetition; there are things that competing asks of a person that I’ve never had to give before. Watching Musashi reenact the metaphor of my life with the perfect foil — the gauntlet, of course — has helped me recontextualize all that came before and all that still lies in front. Thanks to him, I’m starting to see the merit in the challenge, in the grind — in the actual act of the earning. I’m also beginning to wake up to the reality that it never gets easier and, in fact, only gets harder instead. And while that sounds like a brutal revelation, Musashi’s journey could yet have another answer for me; it might be possible to take pleasure in it all.

And that’s life, right? You’ve got to learn to love the challenge, after all.

As Onimusha’s story moves along through its final chapters, Musashi appears to forget his primordial quest to become the world’s best swordsman. Though he gets his “revenge” on Ganryu for his earlier defeat, he doesn’t frame that victory as redemptive in the slightest.

His mind has shifted to more meritorious concerns — his comrades, his righteousness, his own worth. Musashi has slain (his inner) demons so many times that his fear of their standing as motif for his possible or eventual failure has faded away into white noise, scoring instead the head-banging melody of his propensity for personal development.

I’ve taken some of the same “classes” that Musashi has. Passed a few of them, even. But I’ve yet to graduate. There are many more floors of my personal tower of malice left to summit. In the meantime, I’m attempting to find the utility in the grind of it all — the endless waves of opponents and bosses, of wins and losses. Somewhere amongst the struggle, there’s value, there’s growth, there’s deliverance from the ego-driven turmoil that so plagues me.

Onimusha is a game that held up a mirror and told me I’d be staring at it for the rest of my life. Better comes to grips with what I see. Better find a way to love it.

I might not be finished with what I have to learn, but I did finish Onimusha: Way of the Sword. And do you know what happens at the very end of the credits?

Musashi and Okuni playfully waltz forth towards a crowd of oncoming Genma, swords in hand, ready to continue their endless task. The screen cuts black.

“Never a moment’s peace, huh,” Okuni asks.

To which Musashi replies:

“That’s life. You’ve got to learn to love the challenge.”

Wolverine has everything a modern game should have, but critics found it empty. Worldless shows what was missing.

If you consume enough video game reviews, you start to notice something buried below the surface.

A bread crumb trail of hints, suggestions and petitions; vague meanderings about something idealistic in scope. Modern game reviewers almost always communicate this thing, but they’ll never define it for you outright, they’ll never carve out the space to open their review with a thesis statement expounding it or post a manifesto detailing the intricacies of their meaning.

But if you pay attention, you’ll be able to piece it together yourself. You’ll discover it implicitly in the way they criticize mechanics, you’ll decipher it by reading between the lines of the narrative shortcomings they choose to spotlight (or choose not to spotlight), and you’ll unravel its meaning when you’ve heard them speak enough about the design choices that irk them or the gameplay that they admonish as trite, superficial or facile.

For me, this ambiguous reviewer-speak finally came to the fore while watching Skill Up’s recent review of Wolverine.

As my favorite games reviewer assailed the title in his delicious Australian accent for failing to respect his intelligence, neglecting to create combat and traversal mechanics that are bespoke to Wolverine’s person, and just being an all-around formulaic, uninteresting pile of mid, I couldn’t help but compare it to the critical reception of the recent Control: Resonant, or comparatively older titles of the same vein (you’ll see what I mean in a moment) like Elden Ring or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

All these games look pretty, operate well, tell a story and have functional gameplay. But one of them clearly is not like the others.

So what sets them apart?

I’d like to purport that the defining factor eliminating Wolverine from this list of greats — and the thing reviewers are silently crying out for — is authorship.

Contemporary games reviewers seem to agree (indirectly) that a game can have excellent combat, satisfying progression, plenty of content, polished presentation, competent storytelling… and still feel empty despite all of that robust execution.

The ideal game, implicit in much modern critique, is not necessarily the game that does everything perfectly or streamlines every moment of its experience down to a repeatable, manufactured science. It is the game that has a point of view — a work that feels as though its creators had something they wanted to express and were given enough freedom to express it in every aspect of the experience.

Game reviewers want something with that intangible oomf. They want games to be art.

And that’s what Worldless is.

After that 400-word opener in which I buried, delayed, and then buried again the lede while name-dropping elite, creative masterclasses from FromSoft and Remedy, you probably weren’t expecting me to execute a whiplash-inducing pivot to an obscure indie title whose playable characters are jumbled collections of geometric shapes and saturated primary colors.

But now I have your attention, so you might as well see this through.

Worldless, the 2D platformer developed by Noname Sutdios and published by Coatsink in 2023, is so great. And while it’s certainly not on the same level of Elden Ring or E33, it is a prime example of the things critics say (…or don’t say) they want, and an even better example of a video game with identity, soul and authorship.

Art Design & Visual Aesthetics

You can probably get a hint of that identity, soul and authorship just by looking at the screenshots I’ve selected for use in this article. Even if you’ve not played the game, it’s clear that the world of Worldless (if it even has a world, I suppose) is a triumph in art direction.

Its scenes glitter with an intergalactic shine, somehow managing to capture both the emptiness of the vast, unknowable expanse that is the cosmos and the clutter of enigmatic space-stuff that consumes its stars and galaxies.

Worldless is esoteric when its map and its hub world loop back around on each other, suggesting something cyclical about the nature of existence. It is surreal when the rain falls upwards onto overturned lampshades as if they were inverted umbrellas, their lightbulbs’ switches flipping to the on position only when they feel the weight of your feet. The game is abstract when the player-character’s body is composed of three dots, a string and two tapered limbs, yet nonetheless manages to formulate into a silhouette capable of conveying meaning in its many poses and positions. Worldless is, if nothing else, simply interesting.

While its environments sometimes feel weird in a heavy-handed way (see the aforementioned lampshade region), each of them serves the game’s thick ambiance of mystery and unfathomable infinity. They play a role, too — there’s a suggestion in Worldless’ narrative that the story’s iteration of the universe is incomplete, lacking in proper complexity. That nebulousness is mirrored in the game’s locales, each of which belies arcane secrets in their minimalist intricacy. Their ontologically ambiguous structures, pillars and shapes are familiar, yet other; friend, yet foreign.

Meanwhile, our heroes strike sharp, dramatic poses in satisfying angular and geometric fashion while the screen shakes and the controller vibrates; molecules and particles and stardust collide in bombast. Customary concepts like symmetry, style and beauty are all at play while we watch these hypothetical, amorphous entities of unknown composition act out the earliest scenes of eternity, devoid of concrete visual information yet nonetheless reaching expressive supernova.

The ethereal word-vomit of a hobbyist games blogger can’t capture what Worldless is or what it looks like — its essence is constructed from the intangible, from the formless infinity that we call the universe. How many other games can you name that dance gracefully along the line of Kandinskian abstraction and Dalian surrealism? How many are bold enough to attempt to depict reality through deconstructed distortion? And how many are confident enough to never explain a single aspect of any of this to you?

Only the ones that display pure, unfiltered authorship in spades.

Gameplay & Mechanics

In admonishing games that feel manufactured as if from a manual, reviewers are thankfully careful. They rarely tear down a work for recycling formats, mechanics and proven mechanisms of gameplay. No reviewer is asking every new game to reinvent the wheel or finally dethrone sliced bread. Instead, they ask these games to execute these traditional gaming features well, in a way that’s all their own.

And that’s what Worldless does.

The game’s combat and exploration don’t necessarily bring anything new to the table, but they work, they feel good and they are — again — interesting.

The game is a 2D, metroidvania sidescroller superpositioning as a turn-based puzzle combat adventure game in a star-system of genres that feels fresh despite nothing truly new existing there.

Combat and traversal are flashy, snappy, tactile, stylistic and satisfying. They come together in a way that makes your character’s movement through this impossible world somehow graceful and purpose-driven, both fashionable and utilitarian.

Worldless’ combat in particular stands out in this way, managing to merge its aesthetics into a puzzle-based system that requires failure.

That failure is a key point here — in contrast to Wolverine and so many other guilty games before it, Worldless is a game happy to let you fail, and even more content to sit back in silence while you flounder for an answer somewhere close to correct.

Worldless will never tell you exactly why you failed a combat encounter and had your character abruptly sent flying back through the air and onto the ground. It will not hold your hand with ambient dialogue explaining the solution, nor will a tutorial appear on screen after a few failed attempts. Players of Worldless must simply ascertain why their combat encounters are ending seemingly for no reason.

It’s up to you to discover that you must parry 9 consecutive blows against this particular enemy or they will just reset, it’s up to you to struggle and experiment until you unravel that breaking a different enemy’s elemental block within a temporal window allows the combat to continue as normal. The list goes on and on, but I must hold my breath — even that was a little too spoilery for my liking.

Traversal adopts a similar indifference to the player — while there is overall guidance on your map about where to go next, there is absolutely no help in the actual getting there. The map doesn’t convey the shape, size or exit and entry points of a given room — that’s for you figure out through trial and error. No overworld puzzles have any clues or cues about how to solve them. Players can simply miss the game’s monoliths and the lore dumps they provide. Players can also simply walk past some combat encounters, missing the skill point they provide. There are even some pseudo-cutscenes that take place in the background of most areas that can be entirely ignored.

What this amounts to isn’t a game with nothing to offer to the player, but instead a game with everything to offer to the player — provided they come and take it. Worldless isn’t a game that’s been watered down to its most comprehensible parts in an effort to be more accessible to a consumer market. Instead, it’s an experience that expects you to pay attention, be mature and truly engage with it. It doesn’t care if you do or don’t.

Worldless knows this respect for the player by way of mild friction within its systems is an integral part of interfacing with art. It knows there’s beauty to be found in the struggle, that gaming’s best moments come in independent discovery. It knows that if it shepherded you along its golden path with a scent trail, it would be stripping you of your agency and robbing you of a valuable aspect of its experience.

Narrative & Diegetic Design

Another thing that makes Worldless feel so utterly and distinctly authored is its one-of-a-kind subject matter. And its thick subtext.

Frankly put, Worldless has something to say about its themes circumnavigating godhood, creation, duality, opposites, transcendence and perfection.

Put not so frankly, it’s even more admirable how the game succeeds in saying so much while saying nothing at all.

Worldless contains almost no text whatsoever, no dialogue and no cutscenes. Everything is shown to the player, not told. Recall the scripted scenarios that I mentioned play out in the background and understand that understanding of those scenes is entirely down to the player and their willingness to watch, to ponder and to personify.

Players that bother to engage in this way are also privy to other revelations — like the supremely immersive diegetic UX design that manages to communicate and confuse in lockstep. Tapping the map button doesn’t open up a menu, it instead pulls the camera literally inside the cosmic orb of the player-character’s head. Said-map, though displayed in a two-dimensional plane, is spherical rather than flat — exiting out its left corridor simply turns you up on its rightmost edges, circling infinity but never capturing it. Thoughtful players are left to wonder about the galactic entity they control and the worlds that may or may not exist inside their ethereal heads.

Better still is the skill tree, which is no tree but instead body. Again, the pause button resists becoming a window interface and instead zooms close to our player-character as they rise, twirl and extend their limbs — revealing a set of nodes that the stardust of any conquered alien entity can be placed within. Players of Worldless don’t spend points on a skill tree, they place the remains of their enemies within their body’s framework and use them as a boon.

Even better still is noticing that the nodes on your character’s left arm — their shield-carrying arm — are all skills that enhance their defensive capabilities like blocks and parries, while skills on their sword-wielding arm interact with their offensive techniques like charged sword swipes or contextual combo extensions.

Thoughtful, communicative design doesn’t stop with pause interfaces but continues as players control their characters and enact even the game’s simplest actions. Successfully surmounting the terrain of Worldless’ abstract ether demands constant swapping between the two playable cast members. Edda needs Aven’s double jump to reach new vertical heights, while Aven needs Edda’s dash to cross horizontally atop water. And that’s just one example. Combat follows suit, requiring tandem displays of both dexterity from Aven and fortitude from Edda.

Everything about the two is polarizing, contrasting — purely and firmly opposite. And yet, Edda and Aven must become Yin and Yang to prevail. You cannot complete the game without the individual skills that each brings to the table. You need both. Controlling these dual sides of the same coin and mastering them towards a common end reflects (without spoiling too deeply here) what’s occurring in Worldless’ story while also reinforcing one of its central themes.

In Worldless, gameplay and narrative are not segmented or compartmentalized. When players play the game, they are also playing the story, enacting its message, and performing its conclusions.

Worldless in an Empty World

All the above and more coalesce to form the cohesive package that is Worldless, a package that’s unique, interesting and creative from start to finish. That’s why it’s the game you and so many others in the space are looking for.

Modern game critics — and more and more often, I’m noticing, players — are demanding (if not overtly, at least with their own criticism’s subtext) for the games they play to feel like a holistic, artistic creation. Gamers are starting to develop vocabulary that allows them to better describe how vehemently they crave nuance, how they’re searching for a game with meaning, with a stance, with an identity.

With authorship.

As we play more and more games and as the world surfaces more and more slop for our mindless consumption, there remains a crowd of gamers who yearn for a piece of media innate with the sense that there is authentic creative intelligence behind it — a group that wishes for a game where it’s abundantly clear that its designers made deliberate, distinctive choices rather than pulled from an industrial process checklist to produce a competent instance of a conventional, mass-produced consumer product.

No matter how games journalism- or corporate-pilled you think a reviewer might be, these are often individuals who respect the medium. They know what video games are capable of and they want nothing more than for the genre to fully realize itself.

And it does, far more often than many of us are aware.

If you’re one of those that’s unaware… you should play Worldless.

Worldless is the Thing that Game Critics Say They Want was originally published in Analog Stick on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thanks to my enduring infatuation with the Soulslike genre, I have walked through the valley of the shadow of death innumerable times.

What’s that mean?

Well, Soulslikes are dark. And they take place in locales that are often without illumination. I have craned my neck, raised my screen’s brightness and equipped my lantern more times than any gamer should, and then some.

I have climbed to the pinnacle of soulslike expertise and strategic buildcraft management, but all this ascension took place in the descents of some stinking pit or was mastered while diving a black-as-pitch tomb, chasm or jail cell.

I did not merely adopt the dark, my gaming career was born in it, molded by it.

But that doesn’t mean I enjoyed all those dimly lit aesthetics I was traversing. In fact, I could hardly manage my second playthrough of Bloodborne due to the deeply uneasy feeling the game’s atmosphere elicited.

On the contrary, I’m someone who’s equally enamored with soulslikes as I am with vibrant colors and gorgeous vistas that games like Neva or Ghost of Tsushima provide.

Imagine my excitement then, when the idea of a soulslike in the sunshine was presented to me.

Enotria: The Last Song (which I’ll refer to from here on out as just Enotria) ticked so many boxes. Its inversion of the typically blackened and bleak souls experience made it a must-play for me, regardless of how it reviewed. Finally, I could have my delicious soulslike combat drenched in sweet, satisfying, drool-inducing saturation.

On top my general happiness in regard to getting-to-see-pretty-colors, I was stupendously intrigued to find out what a soulslike could be when the saturation sliders are cranked up.

Enotria asks the question; what would a soulslike be if it was bright and beautiful?

And in response, I venture to ask the question; to what effect does this brightness and beauty serve?

Does a soulslike in the sunshine mean something fundamental about the experience is different, or is this really just Dark Souls with the lights on?

So, I took my seat and watched the play unfold.

What I experienced turned out to be as souls-y of a soulslike as one could get. As Enotria presented tired soulslike trope after tired soulslike trope, I began to ask myself just how impactful these colors, contrasts and visuals really were.

When Enotria’s final act concluded and the curtains closed, however, I found that, despite the game’s hackneyed gameplay and thematic underpinning, its visual aesthetics did serve to make a meaningful difference in the experience.

Enotria’s bombastic hues, skylines and decorum served as a faithful reflection of the richness of its lore, narrative and world design, creating a soulslike that transcends its milquetoast mechanics and tropes in a way that won’t necessarily endear it to gameplay-focused gamers, but will instead endear it to appreciators of the arts.

And that’s me. So let’s break it down.

JUST ANOTHER SOULSLIKE

Gameplay

Enotria presents itself as a fresh iteration on the typical combat flow of the modern soulslike.

Rather than shoehorn players into one build that focuses on one aspect of a diverse combat system, Enotria allows players to wield a myriad of different roles, builds and character set ups — and shift between them seamlessly.

Players can equip Masks to activate powerful buffs when certain combat criteria are met, they can equip Aspects to tweak their stats and hit weapon-wield thresholds easier, and they can slot in up to six different passives in addition to the standard weapon and spell selection we see in many modern RPGs.

Further, players can construct multiple loadouts by mixing and matching all the above and then switch between each loadout in the midst of combat with the press of a single button.

This “summer soulslike,” as the game dubbed itself, and its many multi-toned splashes of sunlight promised players a bright and invigorating experience where they could begin playing with the pieces of a near-endgame build almost immediately.

And while that’s exactly how things play out in the game’s menus, it’s not how they play out in the actual action.

Enotria is a parry-focused soulslike, and it simply cannot escape itself, no matter how many varied builds it offers and how early it offers them.

Enemies are aggressive, their attacks are carefully timed and delayed to catch players who “panic roll,” and for those who do choose to dodge, iframes are few. Spellcasting isn’t a valid playstyle either, as the “mana” necessary to cast from long range only charges when you deal damage to an enemy. If you want to cast, you have to enter the fray and swing your weapon first.

While Enotria does offer diverse options to build out a character who’s focused on dodging or spell casting, players will find that those playstyles are hardly viable (unless you want to die a lot). Enotria boasts of offering players many bespoke ways to play, but truthfully, there is only one.

Everything about the game’s combat design forces its players to get up-close and personal with their foes and parry their incoming attacks. It’s so hard to be successful doing anything else, that parrying becomes a playstyle nearly all Enotria players will have to adopt.

The color-splashed identity that Enotria brought to the table was supposed to be a suggestion that this game offered something new, but instead it leaned heavily into a tried-and-true soulslike mechanic. That’s not a bad thing, but it doesn’t make Enotria’s “summer soulslike” promise equate to anything more than a standard soulslike where the developers have said “we turned the lights on for you this time.”

Themes

Gameplay isn’t the only segment of the Enotria experience where the game fails to segment itself into something new.

Enotria’s themes and endings are lifted straight from the pantheon of soulslike greats who came before it. Among the predecessors that the game borrows from are Dark Souls, Hollow Knight, Bloodborne, Lies of P, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers and more.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list. Generalized spoilers follow.

• The game takes place in a stagnant world, with the nameless player-character — The Maskless One — fighting to free it from its stagnation. (Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring)
• Enotria’s villains purposefully caused the world’s stagnation for self-serving reasons, be it either vanity or hubris (Dark Souls, Lies of P, Wuchang, The Surge, Bloodborne)
• Enotria’s villains were, at least in part, concerned with cosmological enlightenment and ascension, desiring to transform their mortal, human selves into something akin to godhood. Their endeavors cost human souls as funds and fuel, and in their human sacrifice they brought their own civilization to ruin. (Lies of P, Wuchang, Bloodborne)
• As revealed at the game’s conclusion, the player-character is a walking husk designed to embody and enact the will of another more powerful, governing being. (Hollow Knight, Elden Ring)
• The game includes three endings — a good, bad and true ending. (Lies of P, Wuchang)
• In those endings, the player has the choice to either side with or against their creator. (Lies of P).
• In one of those endings, you can ascend to the next phase of humanity’s existence and evolution. (Lies of P, Bloodborne)
• It is entirely possible to complete all tasks required for the true ending and then muck it up at the 11th hour because the game does a poor job of communicating to you what’s required to attain the ending (can you tell I’m mad?). (Lies of P, Wuchang)

Hubris, vanity, stagnation, bleakness, hopelessness, rot, decay, ascension, greed, struggle. The only other trite souls theme that Enotria doesn’t contain is cyclicity. Even then, one could argue that Enotria’s selection of themes simply perpetuates the cycle of soulslikes to recycle repetitive tropes over and over.

Again, we see that, when it comes to the game’s thematic undertones, Enotria’s sunshine played a role in changing its visuals, but not much else.

A SOULSLIKE IN THE SUNSHINE

Despite how abhorrently similar Enotria is to so many others in its own genre, it is still able to transcend its milquetoast entry into the soulslike ensemble.

Those jaw-dropping visuals did change something. Enotria’s aesthetics manage to serve a meaningful purpose that gives this soulslike a reason to exist above ground — they reflect the vibrancy and vivacity of what really gives this game life.

The game’s lore, worldbuilding and narrative are thoroughly rich, presenting a taste of mythos that’s severely underrepresented in gaming and representing it in a way that’s bursting with vivacity, life and inspired design choices — mirroring the saturated tones of Enotria’s vistas.

Like how Tales of Kenzera: Zau rose above its nature as a run-of-the-mill metroidvania with its diverse and colorful cultural inspirations, so too does Enotria elevate beyond itself thanks to its inclusion of Italian folklore heritage.

Enotria draws heavily from a mix of Italian cultural history, theatrical tradition and classical literary influence, and nearly every small piece of the game is brought to life by the real-world foundations these inspirations provide.

Italian Cultural History

Enotria’s blending of Italian legend with Mediterranean ambiance sidesteps the typical medieval European backdrop we often see soulslikes inhabit.

The game’s emphasis on bright coastal landscapes and Mediterranean architecture are more than just pretty, but communicate a more laidback atmosphere — something akin to soulslike on vacation. Meanwhile, the city of Quinta embodies the festival atmosphere found in medieval carnivals and celebrations, while Falesia Magna, replete with a coliseum, is a potential reference to a fallen Roman or Greek empire.

Items and mechanics in the game work in a similar vein, as the “Columbina’s Pizza” tool cures status ailments and fully restores health, while the Vis status effect is meant to replicate the experience of being wine drunk, clumsily increasing your character’s damage dealt but also increasing the damage they receive.

The cast follow suit, with Enotria’s lineup of gods and goddesses drawing from Etruscan and Italian mythology.

• Maja (known as Maia in the Etruscan pantheon) was a goddess whose domain was unclear, but may have been associated with some kind of growth. In game, we see her strong association with plant life as she reigns over life and death.
• Veltha serves a similar purpose in the game that she did in real life, where she was associated with war, land and vegetation. Her sex in ancient Italy was just as uncertain as we see it in Enotria, where he’s referenced with mixed pronouns throughout.
• Mecenate, while not a character from Mediterranean myth, was a real-life historical figure. A wealthy patron of the arts, he funded playwrights and poets in the reign of Augustus, similar to how he manages the shop in the theater as The Maskless One conducts their artwork.

Even the lowly gardener enemy from the game’s opening level hearkens towards Italian agrarian ritual effigies that were burned or paraded at seasonal festivals. And all of this is supported by an authentic soundtrack composed and produced by Italian musicians wielding bespoke instruments from the Mediterranean region.

Theatrical Tradition

But much of the Italian folklore is sprinkled on top of the game’s driving narrative influence — the Commedia dell’arte.

The Commedia dell’arte was a professional improvisational theater performance that originated in Italy in the 16th century, and Enotria is all the better for selecting this cultural phenomenon as its backbone.

Without bloating my wordcount by diving too deep into the play’s origins, cultural impact and manifestations, Enotria represents a wonderful realization of a monumentally important piece of playwright history and tradition.

Thanks to the influence of the Commedia dell’arte, players of Enotria experience a cleverly theatrical-inspired world in which a divine script narrates the actions of every soul, effectively turning the world into one giant stage. Masks provide mechanical build strategy, yes, but also serve as thematic props that emphasize the game’s theater motif, turning every character into an actor that’s playing a role. I daresay one won’t find richer storytelling in a Shakesperean work.

Everywhere one looks, Enotria is bursting at the seams with lush, robust references to vibrant historical and cultural heritage.

…and take a look at my word choice there; lush, vibrant.

Those are words you’d use to describe Enotria’s colors, aren’t they?

And now you see the crux of my argument; that Enotria’s visual beauty serves the primary function of being a reflection of something deeper.

Enotria, is rich, vivid, luminous and distinctly alive with energy because it offers robust, culturally and historically informed worldbuilding that brightens its experience at every turn. Its staggering use of color doesn’t make the game any richer, but it does aptly reflect the fullness and liveliness of its building blocks in a way that matches its artistic inspiration, narrative design, and diegetic mechanics.

Enotria: The Last Song might not do much of anything with its gameplay systems, buildcraft or overarching narrative themes, but it does prove you can copy/paste large swathes of the souls genre and still make something deeply interesting and tremendously meaningful if you give it the right color palette, costume and mask.

Ultimately, the game is an intensely spirited, flourishing and radiant work of art, not in the sense that it’s a pretty painting, but that it’s a complete package brimming with inspired design, lovingly crafted worlds and meaningful morals.

If this is what a souls game in the sunshine is like, it’d be my pleasure to bask here forever.

In the quiet, still darkness of an empty grotto, I awake.

The hollowed chasm I find myself within echoes and creaks and drips. Overhead rests an ancient, crumbling monument of some sort. It looms, threatening to fall at any moment.

Below, I notice I’m covered in dirt and dust. My clothes, tattered. A dilapidated weapon lays at my feet. Almost instinctively, I pick it up and return it to the sheath that was already hanging from my hip.

Rising from the fetal position I awoke in, I next assess my surroundings. I find I’m in a pool of water up to my ankles.

Oh, yeah. There’s always water up to my ankles for this part.

A blank slate being born anew, I emerge from the unlit womb onto a cliffside with a sweeping vista. My eyes don’t blink at the returning sunlight.

The surrounding village and its suburbs are a mire of collapsed buildings, crisped cinders, improvised barricades and rotted staircases. The scent of singed flesh lingers. Clutter and rubble litter the pathways, lined by broken weapons stabbed upright into the ground, masquerading as faux tombstones.

Something happened here. It was hostile and brutal.

I don’t spare it a thought.

Further in, fearful citizens cower inside their homes, talking to me through their locked doors but refusing to ever open them. They speak in tongues of pleas, admonitions and mistrust. They speak of warlords, of stagnation, of monsters. They speak of the menacing unknown, of life, death, and hope. Or the lack thereof.

I wonder, would that I could see through the gaps between the wooden panels of their doorways, if I might make out the script it feels as if they’re reading from.

Regardless, their warnings have long lost all meaning to me. I have work to do.

My experience is my shepherd. I shall not want.
It leads me through ravaged pastures, it guides me beside hostile waters.
It restores my dark soul and leads me on the path towards righteousness.
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil.

Many hours later, I wander amongst the vacant innards of a dynastic temple. Massive chunks of concrete are missing from the exterior, scattered as boulders, rocks and pebbles on the ground before me. This place has long gone to waste.

I navigate atop the heaps of forlorn stone to find my way inside.

Used weaponry and rusted armor crowd the lifeless marbled walkways of the stronghold. Symmetrical masonry has given way under the weight of centuries, use and the elements. Weeds creep between the structure’s building blocks as if they were the appendages and fingertips of Father Time reaching out to grasp all within. Vines hang from the rooftops holding displaced shingles like grapes while long-rotted human skeletons lay in all manner across the manor. This is a dead, vacant, desolate place.

Out from around the corner jumps an iron-clad knight who thrusts a spear at my face.

Without a blink, a wince, a moment’s hesitation I deflect the blow, laying bare this enemy’s plated torso and leaving him defenseless and exposed to a repost. In and out my weapon goes, the proceeding wail of agony and elongated bloodstain going unnoticed as I trudge further into the ruins.

I head towards the throne room. In the distance, I see an archer resting high above on a rooftop, vigilantly safeguarding the entrance to the throne which I seek. A golden treasure chest rests at his side.

Navigating the nearby buildings up staircase after staircase and making careful work not to trigger the traps within, I climb my way to his perch to catch him unawares. As I emerge via a ladder from the building’s top floor, I stop before approaching and punishing the marksman from behind. That would be too easy.

Instead, I turn a 180 and again, I parry an unsuspecting blow. This time a massive greatsword deflects, then readies itself for another swing. The clang has alerted the archer, and apparently his comrades, too. As I prepare my next move, masked assassins vault over each of the rooftop’s corners. I’m surrounded.

Of course I am. The archer was always a decoy.

I jump back down the ladder’s chute, knowing the crowd will follow. As each stumbles down the opening, I step on and off the pressure plate that lay before it. Steel-tipped arrows launch from hidden holes in the wall and plunder the bodies of my aggressors before they can reach the bottom rung. Before long, there is a pile of corpses at the ladder’s base.

With the archer gone, I move to reap my rewards.

Obviously, however, there’s one more thing to do. Before I open the chest he was guarding, I stab it with my spear. A health bar appears above the box, and as the splinters fly, its gauge plumets from full to empty.

I scoff. Not another one.

As always, the world is my aggressor, but this is the only reaction I can muster to give it anymore.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil.
My veteranhood is with me.
My sword and my staff, they comfort me.
Combat is as carefree as dining in the presence of mine enemies.
Though they attempt to anoint my head with oil, instead my cup overflows.

Hours upon hours later, still, I find myself exploring the region’s underground. I’ve ventured so deep into the recesses of dust, mud and soil that the idea of sunlight illuminating my surroundings is a laughable one. Instead, the locale is brightened by glowing alien fauna, ribbed, capillaried and pulsating almost as if it carried sentience.

Here, everything is either a withered semblance of gray or a blood-soaked shade of red. Structures, like an elevator I make use of, are constructed with the bones and skeletal configurations of some long dead race. So are the pillars to my side. As is the bridge to my left.

The bridge, of course, is meant to allow for the transport of locals over the bubbling pool of blood and quagmire beneath.

I don’t even bother using it. I walk right through the crimson river. I’m used to having water up to my ankles, after all.

The pillars I mentioned earlier, as they always are, are holding up a fleshy mass, one bulging with humanoid faces and the disjointed limbs of man. The flesh burns and writhes in an unwelcoming cacophony. Some of them come alive and lurch at me, chasing retribution for whatever horrific rituals left them this way. They leave pools of poison in their wake, whose mists waft a cursed scent through the air.

My nose doesn’t nary a twitch.

Deeper within the confines of this befallen civilization, I breeze through its ancient libraries, turning a deaf ear to the ramblings of its apostles, its priests and its clergymen. Of ascendence they speak, their words laced with vanity and hubris as their voices tremble in euphoric awe of the unfathomable powers of the universe.

And yet I keep moving; through the winding hallways of a masquerading medical facility, of a deplorable internment camp, of a dark and miserable prison. Beyond each of the endless doorways I pass are the remains of the inhumane science experiments performed upon the living — the very same experiments that created the coagulations of corpses I turned my nose up at just minutes ago.

I don’t need to lay bare the scripts of each facility’s scrolls, the texts of their tablets or the meanderings from their denizen’s zombified mouths. I don’t need to expunge their secrets and pour over their item descriptions.

I know what they’ll say: An entire civilization was but a small price to pay for the results of these experiments. Some unknown authority’s attempt at ascension was ostensibly well-worth the countless lives that were genocided away in the name of progress for the few.

My mind doesn’t spare a single empathetic — or even judgemental — thought.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil.
Surely the soulslike will follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in stagnant post-apocalyptic hellscapes forever.

It’s hard to spare those thoughts, to feel much of anything for these stories anymore. I’ve been here so many times before.

So often when I escape the “horrors” of real life, I wind up here. Amongst the ash and the rubble. Hollowing, Turning, Feathering, Maddening.

In the 2025 soulslike, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, there’s a narrative moment where the player can instruct the titular player-character, Wuchang, to perform a unique emote that helps progress towards the game’s good endings. In this emote, Wuchang spins a pinwheel in her hand — a nostalgic symbol from her childhood that offers recollections of simpler times.

The emote animation carries on almost… too long. There’s an additional few moments on the tail end where Wuchang stares into the rotating origami in a way that one might describe as zoning out.

As the pinwheel spins, the scene reads as if Wuchang is hypnotized, entranced, even. Not for some lore reason connected to her past, but simply because the pinwheel’s rotation was too satisfying to look away.

I love soulslikes. They’re important to me. They harbor good memories and fond experiences. But even though Fallen Feathers had all the makings of a great one, I slept-walked through it like a Red-Mercury-revived zombie. I stared at my television screen like Wuchang and her pinwheel, and I went through the motions in a spaced-out state until the credits rolled.

Have I, after all these years, finally gone hollow?

‘Wuchang’ and the Numbness of the Soulslike Veteran was originally published in The Ugly Monster on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Life isn’t always fair.

Sometimes you do all the work and your boss gets all the credit. Sometimes you let a car in front of you in the drive-through line only for them to order the last McFlurry before the ice cream machine breaks.

Other times, you don’t grow up on Journey to the West and thus miss out on the most robust and complete experience possible in Black Myth: Wukong.

I fall into the last category (I would never let you in front of me in the McDonald’s drive-through).

Black Myth: Wukong — which I’ll from here-on-out refer to as just Black Myth — is, in my mind, without-a-doubt one of the most exceptional video games of the last few years. The only criticism I care to wave at it is that a full understanding of all the incredible things it does requires players to have read 2,000 pages containing 500,000 words of a 400-year-old (at least!) manuscript.

Truly, appreciating Black Myth and capturing all its nuance requires a serious familiarity with its source material — the ancient Chinese literary classic by the name of Journey to the West. And that book is damn long.

“Real Life™” unfortunately didn’t permit me to sit down with it in preparation to play Black Myth as I would’ve liked to. Instead, I was relegated to YouTube summaries and recaps. I’m glad I took the time to engage with the novel in some way however, otherwise I’d surely have been lost amongst Black Myth’s egg-rocks, cicada transformations, and feuding spider sisters.

Ultimately, I left the game with a sense of sadness (and seething jealousy of Journey to the West fans) that I didn’t have complete, complex knowledge of the monkey king’s westward pilgrimage. Surely I missed out on something by not knowing everything.

Playing Black Myth as someone who hasn’t read Journey to the West is like visiting Harry Potter World as someone who never got into Harry Potter. Yeah, this is cool, but imagine how much cooler it would be if I knew what the hell was going on.

It’s sad then, what players might miss without the context that the book provides. Black Myth manages to offer ingenious inversions, expansions and critiques of Journey to the West simultaneously. The game flips Sun Wukong into a silent protagonist, enabling it to expand Journey to the West’s side characters and locations into an aftermath narrative that casts a shadow over the monkey king’s eventual glorified resurrection.

It sure would be a shame if someone dropped 60 hours into this masterpiece only to have all that go sailing over their head. I sure would be jealous of anyone that caught it the first time.

INVERSION

One thing that must stand out in Black Myth to fans of Journey to the West (from now on, just Journey) is just how weird it is to see Sun Wukong… shut the hell up for a second.

Journey’s Wukong is an impulsive and untamed ticking timebomb of initiative, proactivity, and beating things over the head with a stick. Black Myth’s Destined One, by contrast, is a blankly stoic tabula rasa, requiring developers to script immersion-shattering lines of dialogue like “you don’t talk much, do you” into the most tense of confrontations.

It turns out to be a good thing, however. Wukong’s voice — as evidenced by the prologue — is far too high-pitched to deal with for 60+ hours anyway.

Besides saving players from ear-grating chimp-speak, Link-ifying Sun Wukong into the silent Destined One does allow for some meaningful game design. Without the vivacious and rambunctious Wukong dominating narrative space as he did in the novel, Black Myth fills the void by enlivening its peripheral cast and locales.

Previously auxiliary demons, spirits, deities, monks, villages and mountainsides are given the bulk of the spotlight in Black Myth, allowing developers Game Science to reimagine the world of butter that Sun Wukong’s hot k̶n̶i̶f̶e̶ staff churned through in Journey and give agency to characters who originally only existed as minor roadblocks to be tossed aside.

EXPANSION

That reimagining materializes in plenty of cleverly inventive ways.

Rather than focus on the hero’s journey of the monkey king, Game Science instead chose to look at his journey from Journey as its own living entity.

In the ancient Chinese text, Wukong’s pilgrimage took place episodically, each chapter featuring a new flavor of villain-of-the-week. Wukong and his compatriots would blitz through mountain and valley, casting aside said-villains as they went. Black Myth slows down that frenetic pace, opting to wonder what those villains were like before Wukong arrived and — crucially — how they developed (or deteriorated…) after he left.

Each chapter of Black Myth is lifted directly from chapter(s) of Journey, except set many tens of years in the future from the happenings in the novel. Sitting further down the timeline than the original text, the game allows us to witness the fate of Journey’s Black Bear Demon as he continues his lust for both material possessions and piousness; it asks players to recontextualize the morality of the book’s Yellow Wind Sage; and it even develops a previously unexplored Charlotte’s Webian love story between spider and pig.

What’s noteworthy is that none of these expanded stories are disconnected from the source material. The effects of Journey’s pilgrimage linger in each chapter of Black Myth, informing, enlightening and haunting its every narrative turn.

The entire Wolf Demon Clan in Chapter 1 resents The Destined One for his demolition of their leader as Wukong; the Scorpionlord found in Chapter 4’s secret area drowns his grief over the death of his late wife (killed indirectly by Wukong) in alcohol; and Chapter 5’s Princess Iron Fan places the blame for her entire household’s tragedy squarely on the head of the monkey king for his actions in the novel. The stories Game Science choose to tell in each of the game’s chapters coalesce to turn Black Myth into an aftermath narrative that explores the residual effects of Wukong’s holy pilgrimage.

Marginal and secondary characters or locations aren’t treated as tangential in Black Myth. With Wukong sidelined, they’re the game’s primary focus.

Almost.

CRITIQUE

The main narrative is actually very concerned with Wukong, but its nature means it often takes a back seat to the immediate surroundings of any given chapter.

The Destined One is on a quest to recover the six relics that Sun Wukong split himself into at the conclusion of the game’s prologue. Reuniting all six will ostensibly bring Wukong back from the dead.

There’s very little discussion or interaction regarding these relics throughout the campaign. As we’ve discussed, this successfully gives the narrative room to explore other topics, but when it does stop to turn its attention towards Wukong’s remains, Black Myth leans in hard.

The game undeniably venerates the monkey king, representing him as a powerful, unstoppable and morally just force. Zhu Bajie marvels and muses over his former greatness with frequency, boss encounters tremble at the familiar sight of a staff-wielding monkey, and chapter epilogue painting examinations feature a narrator who’s all too quick to paint Wukong in glorious heroics.

Further sanctifying the nimbus-rider is the game’s final approach cutscene, which shamelessly indulges itself in a sun-soaked, Sun Wukong-centric crescendo replete with glimpses of iconic moments from Journey in a sort of rowboat cruise down the monkey king’s memory lane. The ambiguous heavenly guide that ushers Zhu Bajie and The Destined One through these waters is enamored with these recollections as he prepares The Destined One to finally reanimate Sun Wukong.

The scene, however (and any exaltation of Wukong that came before it), stands out against a bleak backdrop of woe and remorse. In pursuit of reigniting the monkey king’s greatness, The Destined One traverses all manner of mountain and village, finding what Wukong left behind so many years ago. What becomes apparent as players make their way through Black Myth is all the ways in which Wukong’s flight west left passerbys with baggage.

Aside from the aforementioned Wolf Demon Clan and the drunken Scorpionlord, Chapter 5 may be the most prominent example of this.

The Destined One returns to the fiery mountain domain of the Bull King to retrieve a relic of Wukong and finds that the scars of monkey and pilgrimage have left nothing unscathed. The brutally charred-to-cinders mountainside offers a look into the consequences of Wukong’s rebellion against heaven in Journey (he’s the one who knocked the burning furnace down onto the mountain in the first place), the fate of the furnace boy is revealed to be mired in misery and limerence, and the Bull King’s shattered family reckons with their heavenly demotion and subjugation via crippling depression and resentment (in the case of the Bull King) and hubristic plots of revenge (in the case of Red Boy).

“Are you cursed, monkey? Wherever you go, you leave behind broken families.” — Bull King

We can likewise find more of the suffering that snowballed from Journey’s holy pilgrimage in chapters 1 and 2, where Wukong’s fiery demolition of the Guanyin Monastery in the book paved the way for the Black Bear Demon’s attempts at anachronistic preservation in the game, or how our protagonist’s conflict with the Yellow Wind Sage during Journey led to the decapitation of Bodhisattva Lingji and the deterioration of the once-heroic Sage in Black Myth.

While Wukong himself isn’t always directly incriminated as the villain in any of the expansion stories we see in Black Myth, the afterglow of his westward expedition takes on a new, dimmer hue. Black Myth glorifies Wukong and his pilgrimage while simultaneously showing us its dark underbelly, thus challenging both readers’ and players’ established perceptions of the heavenly-ordained adventure and asking them to ponder the sanctity of Sun Wukong’s original voyage.

By giving narrative agency to characters whom the novel only previously treated as flash-in-the-pan, Black Myth uses the aftermath of Journey to reconsider the original pilgrimage from a moral perspective while asking its players to question if Wukong’s Buddhahood came at a price — and if it was a price that was worth the outcome.

What’s elegant is the ways in which Black Myth achieves this — not with statements or exposition, but by weaving its romanticization of the monkey king amongst the ashes of his actions. Players are never forced to focus on one or the other, they are simply presented with these themes and granted the opportunity to watch them brush up against one another.

It all comes together to turn Black Myth into a staggering piece of genuine artwork — one that I’m sincerely jealous of players who had the pleasure of fully grasping on a single run.

To see a timeless, beloved tale handled with such deftness and respect is inspiring. To be able to experience the extension of a story that’s stood the test of the ages and pull a similar amount of value and meaning from it as its source material is quite simply a triumph of storytelling and artistic invention.

I might be burning with the jealous Flames of Samadhi now, but when the dust settles, I’ll be grateful Black Myth was a story I got to engage with at all.

I’ve never done something so fast in my life.

Alarm bells have never triggered louder in my head, my reflexes have never been stimulated to such a degree.

Not even the monstrosities of Elden Ring have ever forced my fingers to lurch for button presses as quickly as they did in this one singular moment during the opening 10 minutes of gameplay of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (from here on out, SM2).

Every single one of you knows that I’m talking about here. I promise you do.

We all can understand. We can all relate.

My digits moved with punishing pace through SM2’s menus to turn off the god-forsaken ambient podcast episodes as soon as humanly possible.

Rarely has audio been so annoying, so frequent, so tiresome and so unwelcome as the 80+ ambient radio segments of the original game. The instant — the literal nanosecond — that they reared their ugly head once again in SM2, this time featuring some high-pitched nobody side character whose opinion I didn’t ask for, I sprung open the pause menu and searched like my life depended on it to find the off toggle.

Mercifully, there it was.

Pause -> Settings -> Audio -> Podcasts -> Off

I breathed a deep sigh and my shoulders relaxed. Ah. Sweet silence.

I was free! I had turned off the game’s very first podcast episode while it was only a mere sentence into its introduction. I was free before I was even held captive. I was liberated before I could suffer at the hands of my oppressors. Now, I could zip across New York at high speeds, unimpeded by anything unwanted. I was empowered before unlocking a single power up.

I felt like I had just silenced god himself. Like I’d muted a holy cacophony just as their rapturous voices reached crescendo, attempting but failing to spell my eternal damnation in sanctimonious harmony.

In my head, in that instant, I hadn’t just muted god, I had muted The Man. CEOs, corporations, big business, Big Video Game™.

Surely countless producers, writers, voice actors and audio engineers had toiled tirelessly for hours upon hours, days upon days to draft, review, approve, manage, record, troubleshoot, quality control and finalize these countless voice lines that I sent to the seventh depth of hell within 10 minutes of booting up the game.

Truly, how much work went into SM2’s podcast feature, only for me to throw it in the bin after it managed to get across roughly five words? How much work did I mitigate, whose efforts did I shun, how much money went to nothing?

Color me curious.

There are 33 total podcast segments in SM2.

It feels like a mercy.

There were over 80 in the original title.

No wonder I wrote so dramatically in my intro above. I came into SM2 scarred. I apologize for my dramatization of the description — clearly my PTSD was kicking in.

But I can’t blame myself. The radio and podcast segments dragged and dragged, made all the worse by J. Jonah Jameson’s incessant yelling.

Was he funny sometimes?

Yes.

Was he obnoxious all the time?

Also yes.

Now back to the topic at hand. There are 33 total podcast segments in SM2. They serve as narrative and world-building mechanics designed to simulate podcast- and radio-style commentary on current events happening in New York as you traverse the city in red and blue tights.

These audio clips play automatically in the background — ambiently — as the player travels and explores the open world. It’s narrative exposition without cutscenes.

The two podcasts in question are “Just the Facts, with J. Jonah Jameson,” which portrays Spider-Man and his actions around New York as reckless and detrimental to the city, and “The Danikast” hosted by a side character named Danika Hart, who ultimately casts Spidey as beneficial to the city. As if us players are so dumb, we need our cutscenes explained back to us from both a positive and negative point of view.

Ahem. Sorry, that was out of line. Back on topic.

Jameson is voiced by Darin DePaul, who also appeared in Doom, Doom Eternal, Final Fantasy XV, Overwatch and Overwatch 2, to name a few. Meanwhile, Hart is voiced by Ashly Burch, who you may know as Aloy from the Horizon series, Chloe Price from Life is Strange or Tiny Tina from Borderlands.

Between the two, there are, to my great surprise, only 40 minutes of podcast dialogue in the game.

But what does that translate to, in terms of actual work done by humans?

Well, using what I can find as averages for a person’s spoken words-per-minute — especially for a professional voice actor — let’s assume a spoken wordcount of 150 wpm (words per minute).

40 min x 150 wpm = ~6,000 words of podcast dialogue

If we assume a line of dialogue is about 10 words, on average, then –

6,000 words / 10 words per line = 600 lines of podcast dialogue

If we want to convert these numbers to pages of script, we can use an average words-per-page count from a few different screenwriting, play, and writing resources online. That number is harder to pin down, but to aim for the middle and keep it simple here, we’ll use 200. With that info –

6,000 words / 200 words per page = 30 script pages of podcast dialogue

When you flip through the menu and disable Jameson and Hart, as I did, you’re blocking a small, but meaningful chunk of the game and its words.

But how big of a chunk? Let’s use some other famous games as a benchmark.

According to the Gamicus Codex, Final Fantasy X featured 120,000 words of dialogue, while Dishonored used 130,000. GTAIV is also estimated to have 130,000 words along with Dark Souls and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Some of these games are, of course, larger in scale due to their branching quests and multiple endings, but they are also games from quite a few years ago. Additionally, Dark Souls famously doesn’t include much dialogue. I’m equally as bewildered as you that’s in on the same level as GTAIV. Regardless, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to put SM2 right in their ballpark (or even higher), but let’s keep being conservative.

If SM2 features, say 100,000 words in its script, then –

6,000 words from the podcasts / 100,000 words in the script *100 = 6% of the game’s dialogue

So, when you, like me, power your way through the game’s menus to tell Jameson and Hart to shut the hell up, with one press of a button, you completely eliminate the following:

• 40 minutes of dialogue
• 6,000 words
• 600 lines
• 30 script pages
• 6% of the game’s spoken audio

And these don’t manifest ex nihilo. Tons of people have to work to create them.

And someone’s gotta pay all those people.

When you mute the myriad of words in SM2, how much money are you muting?

This is the part of the article where I introduce a new concept to you. It’s called hack-math.

Not math that’s so clever it feels like hacking, and not math that’s so easy it feels like a hack.

It’s math that’s completely untrustworthy because it comes from a hack. Me.

Hack-math
Noun
/ hæk mæθ /
(formal: mathematically challenged)

The study of numbers, shapes, and space using reason and usually a special system of symbols and rules for organizing them. Conducted by a dumbass.

But, to keep our hack-math within the bounds of reasonably publishing on the internet, let’s at least make sure our sources are trustworthy.

To that end, I’ll be citing my data from SAG-AFTRA.

Who’s that? Why, it’s the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

It’s a labor union for, among other things, voice talents.

Adding legitimacy to my cause, we know at the very least that Burch is a member. We can’t confirm that DePaul is, but we are going to operate on the assumption that he is, to keep our numbers concise.

Now, according to SAG-AFTRA’s Interactive Media Agreement, a AAA interactive media session would cost developers around $1,100. There’s also an additional 17% built into SAG-AFTRA contracts for pension & health care contributions.

…and there’s also the matter that DePaul and Burch are premium talent. Their resumes, as far as video game voice acting goes, are elite. They’d easily be able to negotiate much higher-paying contracts — in fact, they likely had to do no negotiating. It’s more likely that Insomniac approached them with scaled offers already.

What exactly those scaled offers were, we may never know, but that’s ok.

We can do hack-math.

For our hack-math, we’ll quintuple the minimum SAG-AFTRA rate owing to SM2’s budget and our actors’ expertise. Multiplying the labor union’s base rate by five is meant to acknowledge DePaul and Burch’s vast experience while also keeping in mind that these two aren’t speaking in main roles in SM2, but roles of side characters.

As a result, we’ll say both DePaul and Burch were paid at a rate of $5,500 per recording session, of which, based on the amount of dialogue, there was likely just one. And don’t forget the pension and health bonuses at 17%.

17% of 5,500 is 935, so –

5,500 session fee + 935 health/pension = $6,435 per session

* 2 sessions (DePaul’s and Burch’s) = $12,870 for both primary voice talent sessions

But we’re not done. SAG-AFTRA members very often have agents. And those agents are strictly limited to a 10% commission on union-covered work.

Again, DePaul and Burch are huge talents. I’m going to assume they have agents.

10% of 6,435 is ~643.

So really, our hack-math might look like –

$643 in agent fees * 2 for DePaul & Burch’s contracts = $1,286

12,870 + 1,286 = $14,156 for both primary voice talent sessions

And you may note — I used the word primary there. What I haven’t yet mentioned is that the Danikast features interviews with the citizens of New York and other special guests. There’s a ton of other talent that participated in the creation of the Daikast. Too much to track, really.

We’re deep enough in the reeds of our hack-math at this point, there’s no need to dig up what these other Danikast guests’ dialogue might’ve costed. They were likely recorded by the groups used to record New York’s other ambient audio anyway, with contracts that might’ve addressed a group rather than individuals… it would be impossible.

We’re going to keep this simple and add an additional 1K to represent these people — likely undershooting.

~14,156 for both recording sessions + 1,000 of hack-math = 15,000 for all podcast recordings, rounded down for a clean number

That number still might not be as high as you expected it to be (it certainly undershoots my expectations when I began drafting this article), but here’s a few reminders.

• We estimated DePaul’s and Burch’s rates. Remember, this is a $300 million AAA game. Maybe they went more than quintuple the SAG-AFTRA rate? Ten times? Who’s to say?
• This estimate forgoes the contracts and pay of script writers
• This estimate forgoes the contracts and pay of audio engineers
• This estimate forgoes the contracts and pay of programmers & other technical developers

There are a slew of people who touch SM2’s podcasts both before and after DePaul and Burch work their magic.

Writers draft a script. They edit their work. It’s likely reviewed and approved by management. Producers and talent acquisition conduct recording sessions. Audio engineers master the sound. Programmers and developers, the names of whose roles I’m not familiar with, take the audio files and place them within the game, setting up all manner of flags and triggers so that they play only when they are supposed to.

We can’t keep estimating the expense of SM2’s podcasts at this point. Many of these developers, unlike DePaul and Burch, are likely full-time, salaried individuals. Looking up median salaries online is never accurate, and trying to do so while also accounting for each role’s time on the project would only be possible for an omniscient being. Or the Insomniac HR team.

And that’s not me.

Remember, I’m a hack.

What we can take away from all this is that the actual cost of producing these audio clips is very likely far greater, summarily, than our $15,000 estimate. And that, for my purposes, feels good.

Because…

It’s stunning to me that there’s an off switch for this stuff built into the game’s menu at all. Not buried, not hidden layers deep, it’s just… there.

All this effort by passionate, hardworking individuals — and all this money — was poured into SM2’s unique podcast design, only for someone on the development team to turn and say “let’s give people an option to completely turn this off and never engage with it.”

Please, don’t misunderstand me. I’m eternally grateful for said option. I may have never completed the game if I had to listen to Jameson shout for minutes on end after every quest completion.

But, it still shocks me.

Including an off switch for the podcast system reads to me like an omission of guilt by Insomniac — they know this shit is annoying.

They’re so aware, they built a failsafe into their game to save themselves from review-bombing and gamer-sass. They added an off switch. It’s a public declaration of shame. An intrinsic apology to their audience.

Hey, we put something bad and terrible into our game — BUT! — we gave you the option to turn it off. Please don’t say bad things about us on the internet.

If you have to gave it a kill switch, why even build it out in the first place?

Again, I’m not mad about this. I’m overjoyed — elated, even.

But I just cannot for the life of me get over that Insomniac knows they made obnoxious bull crap and might feel embarrassed about it.

I have to stop.

I’ve droned on for so long that I sound like Jameson himself at this point. Hopefully, you get it, and you’re as bewildered as I am.

The nature of having an off-toggle for $15,000+ dollars of human effort and creativity is whack.

I love it, it’s beautiful and useful and saved SM2 for me, but it’s still eternally strange.

I mean, for crying-out-loud, my whole point is that — *record scratch*

*pauses article*

Pause Menu -> Settings -> Medium Writers -> Eric B. ->

On | [Off]

Ah. Sweet silence.

‘Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown’ Fooled Me Twice. Shame on Me.

Lost Crown feigns depth and complexity in favor of something built for 14-year-olds

Something I didn’t expect when playing through Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was the player character casting a Kamehameha wave.

Nor did I expect my protagonist and his foes to dart around combat arenas faster than the speed of light, striking dramatic poses while silhouetted by kinetic action lines.

Not that it wasn’t badass, mind you, it’s just that nothing in the game’s marketing alerted me to the fact that I was playing Shonen Anime: The Video Game in a Prince of Persia, Metroidvania skin.

It felt like a tonal clash on occasion, but it was one that I was down with. Over the course of a 20-hour playthrough, sometimes atmospheric idiosyncrasies like this can serve the larger aesthetic of a piece of media. Blending two conventionally contrasting styles can often create something new, beautiful, and valuable.

I only wish Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (from now on just Lost Crown) had gone and created something new, beautiful, and valuable.

Instead, the game stays true to the moral underpinnings of its primary artstyle inspirations — shonen and seinen media — to a fault, forgoing any opportunity to sidestep expectations and instead leaning into its manga- and anime-inspired roots.

There was a time in my life I would’ve been fine with this, but I’m in my thirties now and I can’t help but feel a little bit disappointed that Lost Crown deceived me into thinking it was something that it wasn’t.

In Lost Crown, the player takes control of Sargon, a member of an elite combat unit known as the Immortals. This Avengers-style team of fighters is tasked with defending Persia from any and all foes.

In the game’s early stages, the group is caught unawares, and the prince of Persia is kidnapped. Tailing the mysterious thief leads the Immortals to Mount Qaf, an enigmatic region where the supposed god of time — an entity known as the Simurgh — once dwelt.

The group soon becomes trapped on the mount, stuck traversing the forests, depths and ancient civilizations that rest there until they can find their prince and work out a manner through which to escape. All the above is made all the more difficult due to the mountain’s curse — Mount Qaf is trapped in an endless time anomaly, causing the temporal flow of the region to shift erratically.

It’s through these time anomalies that Lost Crown offers its first suggestion that it might have a powerful message to communicate to its players.

Throughout his journey across the lands of Mount Qaf, Sargon encounters both past and future versions of himself, all trapped within Qaf’s confines and all desperately searching for a way to save their prince. Sometimes these doppelgangers know more than Sargon about the locale’s mysteries, being from the “future” and having inhabited the lands for longer. Other times they are further “behind” and reflect a previous Sargon’s emotional state. Either way, they all want one thing — Sargon’s power.

As Sargon has been traveling Mount Qaf, he’s been acquiring upgrades and abilities in true Metroidvania fashion. It’s suggested that collecting enough of these will allow Sargon to defeat the prince’s kidnapper and save Persia’s heir.

Rather than try and cooperate with his past and future selves, almost all versions of Sargon opt to attempt to slay him and usurp his power instead. Thus, Lost Crown sets up numerous nuanced “Me vs Me” scenarios in which Sargon must reckon, plead and battle with himself. Each Sargon makes a compelling argument as to why they must duel to the death and each meets their demise at the end of the player-character’s blade.

As the player’s Sargon journeys through Mount Qaf and metaphorically battles with his internal anxieties, doubt, and frustrations due to the prince’s kidnapping, so too does he do literal battle with himself all over the mountain.

…At least, that’s what you would hope.

The narrative setup and opportunity for character development in all of these timey-wimey shenanigans is rife. And yet… the player’s Sargon engages in combat with his alternate selves, defeats them, and then says nary a word.

While Sargon often muses to himself aloud throughout his journey, he’s distinctly silent after his interpersonal duels, and it’s an extreme let down. Granted, these encounters are meant to have late-game payoff. Let’s explore that before becoming overly critical.

Nearing the climax of his journey, Sargon comes face to face with the god of time, the Simurgh. Here is their exchange.

Sargon: Why did you choose me, rather than [my alternate selves]?

Simurgh: Which others? They exist only in your eyes. I only see one man before me. They are your doubts. That one, your anger.

Sargon: They are always with me, I can’t defeat them.

Simurgh: Why defeat them? This one is your strength, another your wisdom. All are your allies. All are fragments of a future sun. He who accepts the universe, becomes the universe. Be the universe.

This all sounds deeply profound, yes, but don’t be fooled. This dialogue is nothing but revisionism of the previous 20 hours of gameplay.

At no point does Sargon come into knowing contact with his doubts, anxieties or anger. At no point must he struggle against them, learning, growing, and developing along the way. Sargon never battles a manifestation of his anxiety only to find out it was actually masquerading as his wisdom all along, and that it protected him from some kind of certain doom. Instead, our hero simply fights alternate versions of himself and walks through the door to the next room. One endgame cutscene can’t undo what hours of gameplay had already established.

Watching Sargon grapple with literally killing a past or future version of himself and the implications of those actions would’ve been a meaty narrative addition that could’ve carried Lost Crown to new heights. Instead, interactions with alternate Sargons are just mini-boss encounters and little more, despite what the Simurgh will try to tell you at Lost Crown’s conclusion.

Fooled me once.

At least those mini-boss encounters look cool though, right?

Sargon-on-Sargon action carries with it some of the most stylistic sequences in the entire experience that is Lost Crown.

Each alternate Sargon makes use of one of the game’s Athra Abilities — just think of these as unique attacks that deal lots of damage. Each of them is quite flashy, to say the least.

The game also reaches anime levels of combat action in some of its few cutscenes, with the game’s antagonist, Vahram, in particular boasting tons of manga-inspired moves and poses.

As described in the intro, these scenes come replete with teleporting, grunting and punches that send grown men flying into walls some 50-odd yards away. It’s all a bit exaggerated for the game’s overall tone, but again, that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing.

Where the “bad thing” comes into play is what all this battle anime- and battle manga-style combat subtly implies.

Sargon is at-odds with the majority of characters in Lost Crown. He pursues the antagonist, Vahram, he fights temporal versions of himself, and finally, he must cross blades with various members of the Immortals who believe him to be a traitor.

To his credit, in most cases, Sargon does attempt to reason with his aggressors and talk his way out of armed conflict. However, in all cases, armed conflict is exactly what ensues. When you drape these constant confrontations in an anime-skin, you inevitably begin to bring forth the genre’s dark side.

Anime and manga protagonists — specifically of the shonen or seinen variety — often amass power and strength in their adventures with the express purpose of using that power to beat up an evil doer and thus halt his nefarious plans.

Often times, these protagonists — like Sargon — strive for a greater good in the world. But their intentions don’t always justify their methods. Shonen protagonists tend to solve the problems of broken societies and unjust dictators through physical dominance. In shonen and seinen media, it is through strength, power, conflict, battle and victory that virtuous outcomes are achieved. These stories often passively communicate to readers that social recognition, ideal expression and desirable outcomes can be imposed with one’s fists.

It’s a topic even plenty of academics have tackled. In their 2025 paper, Lonely Champions in Japanese Panels: Deconstruction of Violent Success in Male Representations on seinen Manga, authors Alcaide, Carvalho, and García argue that in shonen and seinen manga, there is an “…issue with the relationship established between power, superiority, and satisfaction. Given the typical resolution of [shonen and seinen] plots, the three are often interpreted as synonymous, as the attainment of one implies possession of the others.” Ultimately, the trio of authors surmise that “violence becomes the sole means available to catalyze change in the world.”

The more Lost Crown leaned into this trope, the more it lost me.

I’ve seen Goku and Naruto and Luffy do this a million times. And yes, it was gratifying back then. But I was also a 17-year-old back then.

As an adult, punching one’s way to resolution isn’t the satisfying conclusion that it used to be. I crave more depth, I crave authenticity, I crave nuance. Most of the way through Lost Crown, it didn’t feel like the game was interested in delivering any that.

However… sporadically, as I navigated deeper into the underbelly of Mount Qaf, I’d find traces. Breadcrumbs and clues that Lost Crown might be… going somewhere with all of this.

The final 30-or-so minutes of playtime while navigating towards Lost Crown’s ultimate encounter include some incredibly misleading dialogue.

All throughout Sargon’s exploration of Mount Qaf, he encounters a temporal shade of a child. This child phases in and out of time uncontrollably in the game’s early stages, attempting but struggling to communicate with Sargon. When the two are finally able to hold an uninterrupted conversation, it’s revealed this time-traveling youth is an adolescent Vahram (the game’s primary villain). The two connect over the course of each rendezvous, with Sargon taking on the role of mentor as their relationship develops.

This all leads up to two final conversations on the way to Lost Crown’s completion. What’s important to note about them is that they come at a point where the narrative is spiraling towards an inevitable violent confrontation between Sargon and Adult Vahram.

Young Vahram explains to Sargon, “I know of the other me. Sargon, you taught me to control my power, and I did. But the other me, he didn’t learn. He lost himself. Sargon, I have no path. I leap across time and yet I’m still a boy. I’m a traveler who can leap and yet I’m still stuck in the same place.”

To which Sargon replies, “Maybe not, Vahram. Maybe there’s a path you can’t see yet. A better one.”

Here, both characters imply there’s more to their journey than meets the eye.

Later on, the two come together one last time.

“I [know Vahram is in] there. I don’t want to be like him. Sargon, you’re still my friend, aren’t you? There has to be a way to save him,” Young Vahram says.

To which Sargon replies that he’ll “find a way. I didn’t give up on you, and I won’t give up on him.”

Again, it’s suggested here that there’s an alternative to violence. Adult Vahram isn’t so lost that he must die. He can be convinced to put down his weapons.

Beyond just Young Vahram, the prince of Persia and the remaining friendly Immortals remind Sargon outside Adult Vahram’s gates that “bloodlines are not everything. It’s your actions that matter… You must defeat him, Sargon.”

To which Sargon is blunt; “I’ll try to save him first.”

Lost Crown continues to offer another option besides violence. But it doesn’t stop with that comment — even the god of time carries the belief that Sargon has options.

In the aforementioned coming together between Sargon and the Simurgh, the time deity reveals visions to Sargon. It challenges our protagonist; “the wise man does not need an enemy to prove his strength.”

With that affirmation, Sargon secures his plan. “Vahram is not my enemy. I can still save him,” he says.

Let’s recap that, briefly. Young Vahram, the Immortals, and the Simurgh. And even Sargon himself. They believe physical conflict with Vahram is avoidable. They believe our antagonist can be saved, and they’ve said as much — out loud — three times.

1. Young Vahram implies there’s an opportunity to learn.
2. The prince and the immortals imply fate does not have control — that Sargon’s actions can make a difference.
3. The god of time suggests that true strength does not come from battle.

All three think Adult Vahram can be saved.

So, why then do these conversations lead directly into a 3-phase boss battle in which Sargon gains super-anime powers and darts all over the battlefield shooting sword-laser beams at Vahram for the next thirty minutes of gameplay??

All this build up. All this feigned introspection. Only for us to be forced to whack Vahram over the head repeatedly until he submits.

And hilariously, he does.

The very first thing out of Vahram’s mouth after Sargon bests him is “You were right, Sargon.”

We, the player, literally — and I can’t stress this enough, literally — kick Vahram’s ass until he agrees with us.

Just like Goku and Ichigo and Naruto and Luffy and Asta and Deku and so many, many more, players of Lost Crown enforce their will upon their opposition by way of fighting. Somehow, beating Vahram to a pulp has prompted him to genuinely change his mind on a matter he devoted his entire livelihood to.

Lost Crown’s message is clear; might is right. Outcomes are decided by the powerful.

Fooled me twice.

In hindsight, maybe I should’ve never been fooled in the first place.

Lost Crown wears its inspirations on its sleeve. I suppose I assumed they were only aesthetic — I never expected them to trickle down into the narrative, as well.

While shonen and seinen manga or anime have great lessons to teach about perseverance and camaraderie, a byproduct of those positives and the ways in which they are often achieved is another lesson; disagreements can be solved violently.

It truly appeared as if Lost Crown had a narrative that was heading into unexpected territory — the game insisted on suggesting that something other than beating the ever-loving-crap out of the bad guy was its ultimate outcome.

But it wasn’t.

Flanked by heavily inked speed lines and freeze-framed with energy beams flowing from fingertips, players are required to beat the ever-loving-crap out of the bad guy.

My reaction to all of this is what caught me the most off guard — as a teenager or a twenty-something, I would’ve been relieved to not be denied a climactic, action-packed final duel with my primary nemesis.

As a thirty-something adult, I reluctantly went through the motions of the game’s final boss encounter, disappointed that Lost Crown was incapable of taking a more grown-up approach to solving its own problems.

Maybe what I was most disappointed in was that Lost Crown deceived me into thinking it was something that it wasn’t.

I may never understand why the game masqueraded as a deep and profound experience, only to flip the script and lean into its shallow, problematic worldview.

Ultimately, Lost Crown hides an anime moral underneath an anime skin. I can fault it for that now, as an adult, but at least the game isn’t afraid to be itself. Even if that self is a little ugly.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Fooled Me Twice. Shame on Me. was originally published in The Ugly Monster on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s a character in FFVII: Rebirth that is just as important and gets just as much spotlight as both Cloud Strife and Aerith Gainsborough.

In fact, probably more than both combined.

They’re present in every story arc and almost every single arc is, in fact, about them without ever actually making them the center of attention.

All of the party’s efforts, all your button presses and all the hours-upon-hours you’ve spent playing the game have been in service of this character.

You might be a long-time Final Fantasy fan and not even know their name.

I’m talking about Gaia, The Planet in the FFVII universe.

Many have criticized FFVII: Rebirth (from now on, just Rebirth) for its bloated world and its padded environments, but I’d argue that those accusations miss the point.

In fact, the hours you spend traversing The Planet’s landscapes and engaging with her denizens are entirely the point. The Re-series would be far less effective without the connection between player and Planet that Rebirth creates, and you can count on all that “wasted time” spent competing in mini games or navigating open world spaces paying off heavily in 2027 when Revelation launches.

Yes, I’m putting forth the assertion that the most important, most prioritized, most valuable character in Rebirth is not a human, but The Planet itself.

And while sidestepping your carbon-based cast for a more earthen focal point might seem counterintuitive, Square Enix’s writers and developers can afford to do this because they spent the first 40 hours of the Re-series establishing their other main characters — the party.

Remake is full to the absolute brim with slow, drawn out, indulgent interpersonal moments between members of its cast. For example, Cloud, Tifa and Aerith go on a long-winded ghost hunt as a symbolic reckoning with Aerith’s past, one of Don Corneo’s cronies gets a whole backstory about how the Don kidnapped his lover, and several members of AVALANCHE stop by Jesse’s mom’s house for a slice of pizza.

This emphasis on character interaction did serve as another valid criticism from some — that the game was too padded as a result — but for many players, these moments characterized and brought life to fictional beings in a way that provided tremendous emotional value.

All the anime-esque grunts, sighs, uhs and giggles — complete with long, hesitant pauses in-between — served to make the game longer, yes, but also to allow players and characters to exist in personal, emotional moments for more substantial amounts of time and really feel the effects of them. These segments tangibly developed stronger bonds between characters while simultaneously enhancing the emotional connection that the player felt towards them as well.

That all changed in the series’ second installment, and the bonfire scene in Cosmo Canyon serves as the perfect segue to understand the differences in character emphasis between Remake and Rebirth.

In the initial Final Fantasy VII, the party, having only really been together for 5–10 hours of play time, were mere acquaintances upon reaching Cosmo Canyon. They weren’t the party as Rebirth players know them; they were instead more like circumstantial coworkers only united by way of their common goal.

In the original game from 1997, the quiet, reflective environment of Cosmo Canyon’s bonfire served as the group’s first chance to slow down and be vulnerable. In this scene, the group individually and collectively reflects on their fears, regrets, goals and purpose. The calmness of the evening’s twilight coupled with the somber atmosphere of the bonfire provided a space where the cast could unwind and decompress. Many players cite it as the first time in the original game that the team truly started to feel like a family.

The same scene in Rebirth goes a little differently.

After the 40-hour deep dive into Cloud, Tifa, Aerith and Barrett that was Remake, Rebirth doesn’t have to establish a camaraderie between the game’s playable characters. What it has to do is build up to its grand finale and make you care about its most important remaining character — Gaia.

As such, the entire scene is revamped, serving more to spotlight a Gaian community’s hope, the spirituality of the universe and the interconnectedness of The Planet with its inhabitants.

Instead of a quiet moment between the crew, Rebirth’s bonfire scene is a crowded and lively event including lecture, discussion, ceremony and sendoff. Aerith and the people of Cosmo Canyon explore the interrelatedness of The Planet, humanity and the dead. The scene is capped off with a lantern release that serves as part memorial and part commune with lost loved ones, believed to still be present in spirit thanks to The Planet and the Lifestream.

The focus here isn’t on the small interpersonal desires or relationships of individuals as it was in Remake, but on something much, much grander. Something astrological in size. The focus is on The Planet, along with all that she provides and allows for her residents.

The differences between the original Final Fantasy’s and Rebirth’s bonfire scenes are stark. And they weren’t well-received by everyone. But they did serve as a microcosm of Rebirth’s paramount purpose.

Rebirth is many, many things, owed to just how large and genre-spanning of a game that it is.

But one way I like to consider it is as a world tour.

The game is vast, sprawling, and full of side content. It allows players to visit and fully explore (depending on how you slice them up) roughly 10 major settlements, 15 different biomes, two separate continents and one giant ocean.

Players can ride Chocobos, drive boats, explore mines, gather trinkets, navigate deserts, partake in combat challenges and even collect and duel in a fully-fledged card game. All of that and I haven’t mentioned any of Rebirth’s staggering amount of mini games.

Optional side content like mini games is yet another thing Rebirth has fallen victim to criticism for, because who needs to spend their time whacking bipedal cactuses or nose-punching beach balls while racing on the back of a dolphin? Who wants to press X to make a frog play Fall Guys? Who wants play Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots with Sephiroth 10,000 times in a row before they memorize the parry timing? The list slogs on and on and on.

And while I agree with players’ collective mini game exasperation to an extent, I also assert that it’s the whole point of Rebirth.

When you traverse across vast distances in the game’s segmented open world maps, when you explore an entire desert (and an ocean!) that’s mostly empty, when you puzzle your way through the forests of Gongaga, or climb the mountain at Nibelheim for the third time, you’re doing something really important to Rebirth’s — and the entire Re-series’ — goal.

When you chase soccer balls in Costa del Sol, play the local board game around Fort Condor, or waste the night away on the racing sim in the Golden Saucer, you’re intimately experiencing Gaia and all that she has to offer.

You’re interacting with her people, living within her cultures, walking her landscapes and breathing in her vistas. You’re experiencing firsthand the heritage, the personality, the quirks, the vivacity of The Planet. You’re getting closely acquainted with the very thing you’re going to spend the entirety of Revelation trying to save.

When I think about this, I think about the brief flight segments above Cosmo Canyon and Nibelheim. The player is allowed to “control” Cid’s aircraft as he shuttles the party from one location to another.

In reality, there are strict limitations to how much the player can actually move the plane while in flight. Truthfully, the entire minutes-long sequence is completely on-rails and players are limited to only being able tilt the plane in various directions without having any actual say in its trajectory.

It felt… pointless, or even self-indulgent to an extent. If the player has no agency here, then why give them any control at all? This could’ve been a cutscene but it wasn’t. Why?

Because you need to see Gaia’s beauty firsthand. You need to experience her rocky seascapes from above, just as you’ve already experienced her various beauties from ground level in previous chapters. The player needs this time to sink into The Planet’s atmosphere while in the driver’s seat of a new vehicle, even if the full range of Gaia’s skies aren’t open to them yet. Having the player “play” this section rather than put the controller down for a cinematic creates a space where you can truly engage with Gaia’s aeronautical vistas.

And Rebirth is overflowing with overindulgent moments like this that place the emphasis on the societies, terrain and venues of The Planet.

Take the Queen’s Blood tournament on the Shinra-8 cruise ship as another example. Fun as it may be, it’s nothing more than a filler arc. It serves little-to-no narrative purpose besides worldbuilding and flavor.

But what it does do is give players a chance to directly engage in a favorite pastime of the people of Gaia at a large scale. This game, Queen’s Blood, is an aspect of The Planet’s culture. This is how people spend their downtime, how they compete, how they collect. Thanks to this card battling tournament arc, one can imagine a whole subsect of Gaians with binders full of Queen’s Blood cards hosting trade shows or game nights at their local card shop.

The long gameplay arcs, gluttonous cutscenes and interactive traversal we’ve just explored are a chance to let players experience the vibrant environments, moments and events that The Planet and its people create.

These scenes and locales, bloated as they might be, establish Gaia as a real, alive and lived-in place. This planet might, in actuality, be a collection of pixels and zeroes and ones, but after Rebirth, you’re meant to interpret it as so, so much more.

After Rebirth, I’d argue that players are supposed to feel — even if a little subconsciously — a real connection to The Planet. And it’s the exorbitant amounts of time and activities we spend with her, the deep-dives into all the diverse and colorful aspects of her being, that create that connection.

In Remake, you spent 40-some odd hours getting to know the people with which you’d spend the next 100.

In Rebirth, you spent 100-some odd hours getting to know The Planet that grants those people life and keeps them all connected.

Having played both games, you care about everyone and everything. The cast is worth saving. The Planet is, too.

And now — since you know just how valuable all of it is — you’re going to be tremendously motivated to save it in Revelation.

The Main Character of FFVII: Rebirth Isn’t Cloud. Or Aerith. was originally published in Analog Stick on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I feel like I’ve just done something incredible.

Like I’ve surmounted an impossible challenge, overcome overwhelming odds, and leveled up to a new, complete form.

I am not who I used to be before, I am not the gamer that I was before.

No, I am a better one — I have experienced mastery.

I feel as if I’ve tamed a beast. Or — maybe better said — hunted a monster.

Previously, I’ve played both Monster Hunter: World and Monster Hunter: Rise to High Rank completion. After that, I dabbled with some extra hunts and crafting, but I largely left the games behind. There were too many other things on my backlog to complete, too little time and way too much grind to get me to stick around.

But now, I’ve gone and done it. Whereas I only tasted hints of it before, saw glimpses of the possibilities, felt mere echoes of a true hunter’s spirit, now, I have accomplished. I have evolved.

I have participated in the endgame of Monster Hunter: Wilds.

I have mastered a Monster Hunter title. And I believe this is the singular most difficult thing you can do in gaming.

You see, conquering a Monster Hunter title is more than just defeating a boss rush, whacking big beasts over the head with a large sword as you go. If you’ve never done it before, I can promise you that it is so, so, so, so, so much more than that.

Conquering a Monster Hunter title takes more brain power than any puzzle game. It requires more dexterity than any MOBA. It asks more of you than any From Software boss. It demands your complete devotion.

It demands mastery.

Nowadays, with various quality of life improvements streamlining the Monster Hunter experience, developers have souped-up their monster rosters in order to continue to apply the level of challenge the series is known for.

For better or for worse, the game is dastardly hard now.

Late-game monsters are incredibly aggro with very little downtime between attack sequences and myriads of moves that can one-shot you through defensive buffs and armor.

There are times it feels impossible. There are times it feels unfair (fuck Seregios, all my homies hate Seregios).

But then there comes a moment. You defeat one of these impossibly powerful forces of nature and it was…

Easy, sort of?

How? It was only an hour or so ago that you threw your controller into the wall in frustration. How can you suddenly pivot like that and call it easy?

This is what it feels like to turn the corner. To reach the crest of the Monster Hunter mountain. To inch towards mastery.

But this isn’t just “gitting gud,” like you might expect.

This is a culmination of hours upon hours of learning, preparation, attention to detail, and practice.

It’s mastery.

The reason I lean so hard into that word — mastery — is because this isn’t just swinging your sword at the right time. You can’t beat the behemoths in Monster Hunter like that.

Instead, you must wield in addition to your weapon an endless array of systems and mechanics, drilling everything from combat mechanics to resource management into your head at a 3- 4- or 501 level.

To truly master Monster Hunter, you must master:

• Your weapon
• Your equipment (items, mantles, traps)
• Your build (armor, slots, perks)
• Your loadouts
• The menus
• The crafting tree
• The environment
• The monster

Let me walk you through what that means, exactly.

YOUR WEAPON

If you’ve never played a Monster Hunter (from now on, “MH”) game, their combat is truly, sincerely something worth experiencing — even if you never intend to grind the title’s endgame.

Weapons in MH are different beasts than that of most third-person action/adventure RPGs. They are almost characters in and of themselves.

Each has a unique moveset with specific combo strings and ultimate attacks that feature a major payoff (and a massive dopamine hit).

In addition to your standard swings, your weapon comes equipped with aerial attacks, sliding attacks, back and sidestep attacks and forward momentum attacks. Typically, these can all chain into various combos.

In addition still, most every combo string in the game branches. At any given moment, you can nope out of bad situations by choosing the shorter combo branch, or lean into a moment of opportunity by choosing the longer, more powerful one.

This makes MH combos and movesets infinitely adaptable, able to fluidly change on the fly to match the situation at hand while also making them long, complex lines of button inputs and animation commitments to memorize and account for at any given moment of gameplay.

Not all moves within a weapon’s moveset are immediately accessible to you upon the press of a button. Some of the best moves, in fact, are buried within the moveset, meaning you must complete an attack animation — sometimes 2–3 attack animations — in a specific order before your button input will trigger that specific move you’re looking for.

Let’s try and make this make sense.

Some attacks are accessible at different points of different combo strings. A strong overhead slash, for example, might be available 4–5 attacks deep as a finisher for your standard, bread-and-butter combo, while also being accessible quicker, as the 2nd attack in your forward momentum combo. But the move is never available to you from an idle position.

Therefore, if you’re trying to land a heavy, powerful overhead slash, you need to think –

• How much time do you have to execute a combo before the monster hits you
• Choose (in your head) which combo is better suited for the moment to get you to your overhead slash at the appropriate time
• If you’re already in a combo, you need to remember at what point the combo branches and which branch to take to arrive at your desired attack
• Remember the combo string inputs to get there
• Execute the combo inputs in the proper order

And dude, it’s not just the combo strings.

Some weapons power themselves up over time. Others require you to complete certain combat actions to move a meter or fill up a gauge. Some feature two modes — like switching from an axe to a sword on the fly. Others, still, feature a myriad of mechanics connected to their shield. Or maybe you’re wielding a weapon that allows you to seamlessly vault up in the air, or a weapon that features an option to apply stun damage to a monster’s head. Or maybe you’re buffing your allies with items or songs.

My descriptions here don’t even scratch the surface of these things’ complexities, and remember — there’s 14 of them.

We’d be here all day if I tried to ramble on about all the ways these weapons are living, sentient pieces of steel and monster bone. So let’s keep moving.

YOUR EQUIPMENT

You’ll need a handle on your equipment if you’re going to be successful on your hunts.

When I say equipment, I mean items.

There’s a lot of them in MH.

Status Items

First, you’ll want to be aware of the items that remedy MH’s status effects. Status effects of which… there are a lot.

• Burn
• Poison
• Toxic
• Paralysis
• Sleep
• Binding
• Stench
• Bleed
• Blast
• Stun
• Defense Down
• Fireblight
• Waterblight
• Thunderblight
• Iceblight
• Dragonblight
• Bubbleblight

Thankfully, a simple Nulberry will cure about half of those, but still. You’ve got some work to do memorizing.

Monsters can usually only inflict 1–2 status effects on the player, so you’ll only need to bring the status remedies that coincide with the monster… but we’ll save that for the Loadouts section of this essay.

Traps

In addition to status effect items, another piece of equipment of paramount importance on your hunts is your trapping gear. There are Shock Traps and Pitfall Traps, but there is some nuance and situational uses between them.

Both traps will stall the monster’s movement for a short time allowing you to wail on them for free damage, or capture them, ending the hunt then-and-there (monsters are only capturable when under something like 15% of their total health).

Some monsters — especially those with the Thunder element — are immune to Shock Traps. Other monsters — like ones that fly in the air — are immune to Pitfall Traps unless they land directly on top of them. Shock Traps are faster to place down but have a smaller area of effect.

Most of the time, you’ll be laying down traps to capture a monster, so following up your trap with Tranquilizers will be paramount. In order to capture a monster, it must be both in a trap and asleep simultaneously, after all.

It requires two Tranq Bombs to send a monster to sleep. Or you could use Tranq Ammo or Tranq Knives for a long range approach. Either way, you need to carefully time your Tranq deployment to make sure your bombs or ammunition connect. Waste too much time, or miss entirely, and the monster will escape your trap.

Use too many traps, and the monster will build up immunity to them — that, or you’ll run out of gear to re-craft them with.

But we’ll save that for the Crafting Tree section.

Mantles

Along with all the above (and more that I won’t even have time for), you’ll need to grab the right mantle for the occasion.

Mantles are shawls or overcoats that offer unique effects.

1. The Evasion Mantle adds iframes to your dodge and gives an offensive boost when executing an iframe dodge — it’s perfect for agile weapons like the Bow or Dual Blades.
2. The Rocksteady Mantle allows your hunter to poise through most monster attacks without stumbling or being knocked back — perfect for weapons with long charge times or high-committal combos, like the Hammer or Gunlance.
3. The Corrupted Mantle applies a negative status effect on your character but can be mitigated or even enhanced by cleverly pairing it with certain weapons and passives.
4. The Mending Mantle slowly restores your HP, pairing ideally with bulky, tanky builds.

There’s a lot of things to consider when selecting your items, your equipment. So to make this sound daunting and impressive, we should probably talk about Loadouts next.

LOADOUTS

There are so damn many items and options and actions in MH games, and the monsters and challenges within are so hard, that you’ll often find yourself switching around your gear for each specific monster in the game.

This would get massively tedious after a while, if it wasn’t for Loadouts.

Loadouts allow you to fill your bag with items, equip your armor and weapon of choice and then save all those selections as a set. Whenever you want that exact set of equipment again, you can just choose that Loadout and it will auto-equip every item, armor and weapon you had saved. This keeps you from having to navigate every single menu to equip and re-equip everything for each hunt. It’s a quality-of-life mechanic.

But you can’t save a loadout until you build one first.

Which means for the game’s more challenging monsters, you’ll need to think carefully about what items counter them, what armors protect you from them, and what weapons deal the best damage to them. Then, equip all of it (carefully considering your build as you go — we’ll get to that in a moment) and save it as a loadout. There’s so much nuance and so many options for builds in MH, that the developers give players — by default — 140 loadout slots. And people really do be using them all.

That’s fine. Impressive, but not that revolutionary. Plenty of games have done it before.

Where MH is just plain “built different” is that you can save HUD and UI elements as Loadouts.

MH allows you to set items of your choice to a quick-access “Radial Menu” which can be pulled up and navigated with ease in the middle of combat, saving you from having to sort through menus and navigate your bag looking for items while a monster is hacking at you.

These Radial Menus are fully customizable not just with items, but with mantles, traps, emotes, actions (like calling your mount, initiating multiplayer, or setting up the grill to make food), and even crafting.

Yes, you can set up a crafting shortcut on your Radial Menu to quickly craft more, say, healing potions in the heat of the moment, should you run out. This means you can think ahead — stock your bag full of the max amount of healing potions and then, knowing you’ll run out mid-battle, also stock your bag full of the items that craft together to make more healing potions so you can escape the bag’s potion limit. Then save both the healing potion and the auto-craft-healing-potion to your Radial Menu. Then save all of it as a loadout.

Next time you go to your item storage to stock up, simply choose this loadout and your bag will automatically refill with the healing potion items, and your radial menu will update with the shortcuts. Convenient.

You can set and access up to eight (8!!) Radial Menus in MH: Wilds.

And here’s where it all comes together — you can save any amalgamation of Radial Menus as a loadout.

Read that sentence back again and dwell on it a moment.

As if eight Radial Menus wasn’t enough, you can save a nigh-infinite amount of specific, optimized combinations of eight Radial Menus, organized in any fashion, for any occasion.

Loadouts in MH aren’t just as simple as “bring some burn heal items for the monster that breathes fire.”

They’re complex enough to ask you to consider “out of pretty much every possible action I can take in this game, which ones do I want easy access to against this specific monster?” And then “where on the radial menu do I have space, and where on the menu do I need to place my equipment so that I can access it with muscle memory in the heat of combat?” And also, “should I organize my radial menus by their purpose, like one for traps, one for heals, etc?”

It’s insane.

THE MENUS

If you want to build an efficient Loadout, however, you’re first going to need to navigate the menus.

This is not my favorite part of MH. Like every other thing in the game — as I’m sure you’ve gathered so far — there are a lot of options here. It’s just that having a lot of options for countering a monster or filling your item inventory is fun. For Navigating menus, it’s not.

There are seven pages of menus when pressing that Start button in MH: Wilds.

The reason that I’m including these in an essay about mastery is that they are fully customizable. You can rearrange something as mundane as the menu itself in any order you want.

In fact, you can go further than that.

You can manually add a new page to the menu — one that’s purely a blank slate. This is the Favorites tab, which you can then fill with shortcuts to all the other frequently used menus you navigate.

Even writing this down I’m chuckling and shaking my head. This is the only game I’ve ever played that gives the player full power and customization options over the menus.

It’s hilarious to me at this point. But it’s also incredibly useful and you won’t catch me hating on it.

YOUR BUILD

Builds in MH come from passive skills that are found on weapons, armor and decorations.

Decorations (think of them as runes or gems from other games in this style) slot into weapons and armor — assuming the armor has enough slots and the right sized slots for said decorations to fit.

If you want access to a skill like Weakness Exploit during combat, for example, you’ll need to equip a piece of armor with that skill on it or equip the Weakness Exploit decoration into a piece of your armor with a big enough slot.

What makes buildcrafting a task that requires such mastery is that each skill in the game comes in levels. Some cap out at level three, others at five.

At level one, Weakness Exploit is fine, but not particularly worth it. You really want an extremely valuable skill like this at level five, so you’ll need to wear more armor pieces or slot in more decorations with the Weakness Exploit skill.

Wearing a helmet with one level of Weakness Exploit? Slap on a pair of greaves with it too, and you’ll have two levels of Weakness Exploit on your build.

Cool, now get that up to five.

Straightforward enough. If Weakness Exploit was the only skill you wanted on your character.

But it’s not.

There’s easily 5–10 other juicy, alluring, beneficial and desirable skills to add to your build at any given time — from offensive to defensive to situational to everything in between.

And sometimes, skills are so hyper-situational that you only want them when you are hunting one or two specific monsters or using a specific weapon. For example –

• The Fire Resistance skill would be useful against fire breathing monsters, but a wasted slot against ice-element monsters.
• Maximum Might is a skill that increases your crit rate when your stamina is full, so it would only be useful when you’re wielding a weapon that doesn’t consume stamina.

Did I mention that each piece of body armor in MH (of which there are five — head, chest, arms, belt, legs) is capable of innately having multiple levels of two to three different skills?

Buildcrafting in MH is an insane juggle between –

• Selecting armor with at least a couple of base levels of various skills that you want
• Making sure your armor has enough slots (and you have enough decorations) to fill to get to level three or level five of each skill you want to cap out
• Doing all the above without sacrificing your raw defense stat
• Doing all the above without sacrificing your elemental resistances

There are multiple online buildcraft simulators to help players with this endeavor. Take a look. There’s just so many options. The mixing and matching is practically endless.

The in-game menus themselves even have multiple sorting tools and mechanisms to help players find the armor, skills and decorations they want because scrolling through them all on your own is such a chore.

It’s a lot to manage, but seeing that completed build with tons of maxed out stats balanced between offensive boosts and defensive protection is oh so, so, so satisfying.

But you’ve got to work for it. You’ve got to learn for it.

THE CRAFTING TREE

But this… this shit right here??

This is when MH started to freak me the hell out.

After getting my feet wet with the loadouts, the menus, the radial dials, and all the other levels of the game’s complexities, I was dumbfounded when I opened up the crafting menu for the first time and truly comprehended what I was looking at.

It’s not as simple as just Herb + Honey = Potion.

No, this is MH.

It. Must. Go. Deeper.

The crafting menu isn’t a list, it’s a tree. A hierarchy of base materials that combine to form, let’s call them “level 1 materials,” which then combine with another level 1 material to form a level 2 material.

Some level 2 materials combine with other materials to create level 3 materials, but in order to get to level 3, you have to start at the base material and craft all the way back up each branch of the tree.

So, following the example above, if you want tons of Mega Demondrugs, you must start off by acquiring a large amount of

1. Bitterbug Broth
2. Honey
3. Adamant Seeds
4. Nourishing Extract

Then craft your way up the tree. And remember, you’ll need to use the Bitterug and the Honey to create Catalysts, so you’ll need double the amount of Bitterbug and Honey to get the amount of Mega Demondrugs you need.

Demondrug is just one example. There are plenty of other miniature crafting trees that produce varyingly valuable items in MH.

To account for this, you need a steady stream of base materials (like Bitterbugs and Honey) flowing into your inventory, since they’re constantly being thrown in the mixer to produce higher-tier items.

And the game has a system for this, too!

Besides what you can scrounge up yourself in the field (players will certainly have to do their own scrounging from time to time — and hey, you can add foraging skills to your loadout to make this more efficient! Guess you need to create a bespoke gather loadout now too, huh?), you can also assign friendly NPCs to do some item gathering for you, adding hefty chunks of key items to your inventory idly.

Can you believe how in-depth this is?

THE ENVIRONMENT

Once you’ve mastered all of the above, if there’s still room left in your little peanut brain, you also need to mind the gap.

Ahem. Be aware of your surroundings.

Environments in MH aren’t quite the living, breathing beings that weapons are, but they have some liveliness to them. There’s tons of ways to interact with them.

Traps

Remember the Pitfall traps we talked about earlier? Some maps in MH are rife with trees, vines and branches galore. You can usually find at least one section of vines that are cut-able mid-combat, allowing you to drape a monster in a temporary trap to wail on them for free damage.

Obligatory desert levels often include ways to trigger quicksand and, again, wail on your prey for free for a brief period of time.

During the Sandtide — MH Wilds’ sandstorm-meets-thunderstorm weather event — ferocious cracks of lightning can befall either the player or the monster at random.

In addition to all of these, eagle-eyed players (or anyone willing to tilt their camera up) are likely to find loose pillars and dangling rock structures. These can be dislodged to topple on top of unsuspecting monsters for massive damage.

A particular loose piece of hanging rubble in the forest map of MH Wilds lands in a pool of shallow water — causing a small tidal wave that topples monsters over, once again, allowing for a free damage window.

You’ll need to make note of these as you traverse MH’s environments, so you can use them to your advantage to score massive chunks of free damage when dueling with a monster.

Endemic Life

This essay is getting out of hand (that’s the point), so let’s be brief here.

• Flash bugs can blind a monster temporarily
• Angered bees can sting and apply poison to monsters who disrupt their nest (or who are near it when you disrupt it yourself)
• All manner of elemental frogs can do things like paralyze or put to sleep your foes
• Vigorwasps provide a mist that can heal you in the heat of battle and their cousins offer a status cleansing mist as well
• Tether-like bugs in the air can serve as grapple points allowing you to quickly escape, or jump over oncoming, ground-based attacks

Mind the Gap

But not every piece of the environment is helpful to the player.

The Iceshard Cliffs and the Oilwell Basin feature weather effects that freeze or overheat the player-character, respectively. The player will need to come prepared (usually with a specific item loadout) with the right inventory item to combat their effects.

The Scarlet Forest’s rivers fluctuate in depth depending on your location. The Oilwell Basin features pools of oil and mire a hunter must trudge through. In the deeper areas of each, your character moves slower (unless you slot in for the Aqua/Oilsilt Mobility perk in your build!), making you easier prey for large monsters.

The same quicksand that can trap a monster can punish a hunter, as well. Meanwhile, molten rock is damaging for any hunter to walk on, chipping away at their health as they fight for their life versus larger-than-life prey.

Put it all Together

Is this list long? Is this essay exasperating? Good. Now you’re getting the picture.

You see, the environment isn’t that hard to get a grip on in MH, what makes it something you need to master is the culmination of each facet combined, as well as their unique quirks.

Toppling loose pillars and rubble on a monster takes precision — the environmental traps fall in the same direction every time, so you need to line the monster up mid-combat (literally while it’s trying to kill you) if you hope to hit it.

The rubble (and other environment traps) often take a second to spring, which means if you’re too slow or you’ve positioned poorly, the monster will move away from the crash-zone before the trap has landed its mark.

All that effort to line up your shot… and you could still miss. Better master it so you don’t miss out on thousands of hit points worth of damage.

And remember, be careful! If the monster backs you into an oil mire, you’ll move slower and attacks you’d normally dodge with ease might just clip you. That could mean the end of your hunt.

Oh and remember those flashbugs we mentioned? They can blind you too, so don’t trigger them by accident, or your own daze will cause you to miss out on the free damage window that the bugs should’ve provided.

It’s… a lot. And you’ve got to cram it all into your head on top of all the other things we’ve discussed so far, and then access it in the heat of the hunt. While you’re trying to dodge onslaughts and preform niche weapon combos.

And then execute it with precision to reap the reward.

Thousands of hit points worth of free damage doesn’t come easily. It comes to those with mastery.

THE MONSTER

All that, and we haven’t even discussed the whole point — the beast we are trying to slay.

We haven’t even discussed the attack patterns, the locations and nests they like to frequent, or the quirks and personalities that each one possesses.

We didn’t mention how the Rathian will swarm you if you touch its eggs, how the Chatacabra will get itself stuck inside rock walls, how Nu Undra can slither through cracks and crevices to prematurely escape, how Gravios’s hardened shell will bounce your attacks until you soften it, or how Uth Duna’s motions will kick up waves that knock you off balance where you stand.

We neglected to get into detail about how each monster has a roar — a roar that can be i-framed for a small damage window — but the timing of their shrieks differs by species.

We also forgot to elaborate on the differences in hostility between each monster’s normal and aggressive state, and all the new moves they make use of when they are truly riled up.

We’ve yet to talk about how the added wrinkle to understanding your weapon’s moveset is that you must also understand the monster’s moveset. We didn’t mention how when these two things are mastered in tandem, you can weave combos in wrong directions on purpose, because you know the monster’s current attack pattern will take it to your endpoint right when you whip out the most damaging move in the string.

There’s so much more to discuss.

But alas, we’ve already been here too long.

THE BEAST, TAMED

Whew. I’m exhausted just reading all of that back.

Putting pen to paper on all the ways that one must master a Monster Hunter title was almost as laborious an effort as actually mastering a Monster Hunter title.

I’m sure the same could be said about having had to have read the last 4,500+ words.

And therein is the point — mastering Monster Hunter is the hardest thing in gaming because of the sheer amount of things you have to master and the various ways of thinking, planning and dexterity you must engage in to reach that mastery.

And remember, while the above list is exhausting, it isn’t quite exhaustive. There’s more to these games than I’ve not had word count to write (or you’d have patience to read).

But if you’re tired at this point, you understand how a Monster Hunter player’s brain and fingers feel at the end of a play session.

That must be the price of mastery.

What if I told you that when you overcome mountainous challenges in difficult games like Dark Souls, you aren’t really, truly getting good?

I would be an obnoxious, holier-than-thou reddit user, that’s what I’d be.

So let’s not do that.

Let’s focus instead on a new type of gitting gud that an indie 2D action game introduced to me recently (or rather, re-introduced to me), one that made me rethink what it means to git gud and reminded me of bygone days no-scoping noobs in Call of Duty or winning 1v1s in Super Smash Bros. as a teenager.

Moonscars, developed by Ukrainian-Moldovan studio Black Mermaid and published by Humble Games, is the game in question.

To understand how it gave me a genuine “got gud” feeling that transcended that of the Souls series, you’ll have to understand a few of its systems first.

My mentioning of Dark Souls like three times already does two things;

1. Exposes me as a hopeless fanboy
2. Works in this case because Moonscars is heavily, stupendously Souls-inspired.

The bleak atmosphere, the layered worldbuilding, the esoteric lore dissemination — it’s all there. And so is the structural stuff, too.

As you take control of Grey Irma on a quest to understand the state of her world and her place in it, you’ll move in familiar fashion from “bonfire” to “bonfire,” or checkpoint to checkpoint.

Resting at one will respawn all enemies in an area, as you’d expect from this type of game. Falling victim to these enemies at any time will respawn you at the last bonfire you rested at and rob you of your currency, which you’ll then have to go pick up from the location at which you died.

And there’s even a hub world where you can trade items for lore drops, buy and sell gear, or build out your character.

It’s standard fair for a Soulslike, but there’s a catch that throws a wrench into everything you’re familiar with — Moonscars isn’t an RPG, it’s actually a roguelite in disguise.

Notice how, when listing the activities you can partake in at the hub world, I did not say you could level up. I did not say you could acquire permanent attributes or spend skill points.

That’s because you can’t.

Moonscars repackages these systems in a way that’s pretty fresh. You see, you do level up in Moonscars, but you do it on the fly and your levels can (and will) be undone.

Remember, Moonscars is a roguelite.

In Moonscars your “runs” don’t reset you to the beginning of the game though, they reset you to the latest “bonfire” you rested at.

So Moonscars is a roguelite that takes place in between DarkSoulsian checkpoints.

Each “run,” you’ll gain experience points and acquire levels, which will not give you skill points or attribute points, but instead give you a choice between three perks.

These perks are randomly selected from a pool of about 5–6 total, so there’s variance in which three you get to choose from each time you level up. You can level up five times per run, so you can attain five total perks — things like increased crit rate, increased heal percentage, chance to refund spell cost, etc. If you die, you lose these levels and the perks that came with them, starting from scratch again.

Like most roguelites, there is currency that carries over between deaths in Moonscars.

But this is where two things happen;

1. Moonscars encounters its first problem
2. Moonscars sets itself up to force you to git gud

Let’s start with the problem.

Moonscars’ biggest issue is that hardly any of its carry-over currency is worth spending. You can spend them on two things (sweet, more numbered lists with two things in them) –

1. Gemstones which give unique passives (think of runes or charms or the like). You only have two gemstone slots.
2. Combat Abilities on your skill tree.

That seems fine and dandy, but it doesn’t play out that way.

Moonscars is a game with roughly a 10-hour runtime, so there’s not really time to buildcraft with gemstone passives in a meaningful way. And with only two gemstone slots, there’s not really space to buildcraft with passives in a meaningful way, either.

There are very few gemstones in the game and very few of those select few are actually worth playing…

… Now replace “gemstones” with “combat abilities.”

Here, I’ll do it for you –

There are very few combat abilities in the game and very few of those select few are actually worth playing.

So, the issue becomes this: currency that carries over from death to death becomes purposeless, as there’s just about nowhere worthwhile to spend it. That means that the only thing you keep upon death is useless.

Thus, I’d argue that players feel little-to-no sense of progression while playing Moonscars. And that’s something that’s typically pretty pivotal for a roguelite.

I switched my build one single time in my 10 hours with Moonscars.

The gemstones I equipped in the first hour were the ones I finished the game with. The Grey Irma I started the game with was the Grey Irma I finished the game with.

When this all came together for me during play, it almost made me drop the game. I felt like I was going nowhere, pushing buttons for nothing.

But… believe it or not, I’m not here to criticize Moonscars.

You’ve already read it — I spent 10 hours with it. I finished the game. So, what was it that made me come back?

I put Moonscars down one day expecting to never pick it back up again. But then a thought crept into my mind — how the running and jumping, dodging and maneuvering, slicing and dicing felt so good.

I picked it back up to see if I could get over the hump and I did — I ended up finishing the game the next day.

Combat in Moonscars is tight and satisfying, but there’s more of a point I’d like to make here than just “gameplay is fun.”

What I noticed as I continued playing, continued winning, continued dying and continued moving through the story and world of Moonscars is that there actually was a sense of progression. It was just happening outside of the Steamdeck I was playing the game on.

The thing that carried over from run to run, from death to death, was my dexterity.

In most Soulslikes, you can git gud and defeat a difficult boss with your dexterity alone, sure, or you can go a more common, less frictional route.

Route 1: Level Up

As RPGs, most Soulslikes let you spend your level-up points on attributes that give you more health, allow you to deal more damage or dodge more often. Importantly, these stay with you even after death.

So, if a boss is giving you trouble, you can go somewhere else to grind up a few levels to survive more of its hits and deal more damage.

Route 2: Get New Equipment

In addition to leveling up, you can also return to previously unexplored areas and search for new equipment — like buffs, charms, runes, shields etc. — to make your character more specifically-tuned to overcoming the roadblock you’ve encountered.

Route 3: Exploit a Weakness

Soulslikes often also include an elemental or status system, allowing players to equip spells or weapons or items that deal fire, lightning, poison, or ice damage, to name a few.

Key enemies often have at least one elemental weakness, meaning if a boss is giving you trouble, you can up your damage output against it by arming yourself with the proper element.

Route 4: Abuse Your Mechanical Arm

Other Souls or Soulslikes give you a whole-ass mechanical arm — Sekiro, Lies of P — that often includes abilities which straight-trivialize some encounters if you know how to use them.

Other games, like Elden Ring or Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, might not have mechanical arms, but they do have the Weapon Art and Discipline systems, respectively, which also add similar (often busted) skills to your character's combat abilities.

Levels gained, skill points spent, weaknesses exploited, buffs and equipment abused — these things stay with your character after each failure. Who needs more skill when you can arm yourself with more tools?

In Moonscars, you can’t get away with that because, as we’ve discussed, nothing meaningful carries over with your character after deaths.

One misstep and you’re back to level 0 with nothing to show for it and nothing to build upon and no tool to lean upon in your next run. And enemies don’t have elemental weaknesses since the game doesn’t have an elemental or status-infliction combat system.

Instead, the game is fast paced. Enemies are basically full aggro all the time. They have long combos that reach long distances, they heal and dodge and block, and in true DarkSoulsian fashion, developer Black Mermaid intentionally puts you in unfair situations so enemies can team up on you.

It’s not that the game is particularly challenging, it’s that the game requires a certain type of play from you — something no perk or passive bonus can help you achieve.

To succeed in Moonscars, you must be locked in, laser-focused on your enemy, your positioning and your attacks.

And above all, you have to be quick.

Zing-zapping around the battlefield finding space to heal, moments to parry and managing mages vs paladins vs speedy foes is a skill you must develop, hone and then master throughout playing this game.

The cherry on top of all of this is that the game’s roguelite nature really helps in this regard; the better you get at managing the game’s intense combat, the more you’re rewarded.

You’ll survive longer in each run, meaning you’ll level up more and more. With that, you can stack a few levels’ worth of crit rate and heal percentage perks and basically reach god-like status — if you possess the dexterity to survive long enough to reach level five, that is.

Where Moonscars really started to work was when, even after dying and resetting to the nearest checkpoint and losing all my perks, my IRL finger dexterity stayed with me. After enough repetition, I could beat the same enemies at level one instead of level five.

Hit this point, and you’ll slice through the game like a hot knife through butter.

But only if you meet it where it’s at and accept that the person gitting gud isn’t Grey Irma with some overpowered abilities and broken passives — it’s you and the speed with which you can read the needs of battle and move your fingertips accordingly.

This was the distinction that I made when I successfully got gud at Moonscars.

This is what made me rethink gitting gud, what reminded me of days of gaming that I rarely partake in anymore — afternoons at my friends’ house during my childhood in which we’d test our reaction speed in Call of Duty lobbies, or afternoons at the YMCA, using my quick fingers to give a beatdown to strangers at Super Smash Bros. in the kid’s room while my mom was at spin class.

It’s not a gitting gud like in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, where you can math your opponent to death. And it’s not a gitting gud like in Dark Souls, where you can RPG your opponent to death.

Moonscars forces you to git gud in real life, independent of itself.

It does this by creating a space where it encourages you to disregard its systems, its currencies and its skill tree and focus on the thing you can control — your own fingers and your own reaction speed.

And I loved that about it.