Transistor Helped Fill The Cyberpunk Void In My Life

I’m a huge fan of the cyberpunk genre. I’ve read Neuromancer, I’m in love with Blade Runner (the director’s cut specifically) and its sequel 2049, and I’ve been enraptured by Akira and Ghost in the Shell. The combination of noir, cerebral narratives about existentialism and body modification, and colossal futurist architecture is truly captivating and is what makes it such a distinct genre. So as you could probably guess, I was over the moon when I saw the world premiere trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 at E3 2018. After a couple of years of hype and multiple delays that seemed never-ending, it finally released on December 10, 2020, to worldwide disappointment. The game was infested with bugs, the console versions were nigh unplayable, the story was fine albeit unremarkable, and to top it all off – it was revealed that CDProjekt Red employees were crunching.

Admittedly, Cyberpunk 2077‘s huge marketing campaign caught me in its wake. I was blown away by the game’s commitment to allowing the player to immerse themselves in a cyberpunk world filled with amazing characters to meet, missions to experience, and lore to dig into. Instead, Transistor, a game from nearly six years ago, gave me the experience I was looking for.

(Spoilers ahead for basically the entire plot of Transistor)

I know it’s hard to compare the two games. Cyberpunk 2077 is a game made with a large budget and an ambitious scope. Transistor on the other hand is an indie game made by a team of fewer than twenty people. One commonality between the two is that they both borrow from the cyberpunk genre for inspiration, but Transistor pays respect to the genre’s deepest questions about transhumanism and technology.

Supergiant Games

If you don’t know, Transistor is a game about an advanced piece of technology that can absorb the consciousness of the dead which takes the form of a great sword. The dead then reside in a place called The Country which could be thought of as an afterlife. The main character Red is a singer in Cloudbank, the game’s setting. Her voice is had been trapped inside the transistor at the same time it had stabbed and killed a man. This man’s consciousness is absorbed into the transistor and becomes a companion to Red on her journey where she fights to stop a legion of sentient robots known as The Process that consume (or process) the city.

What I enjoy about this plot is that it focuses on the hardships of two characters on their journey as they realize the wrongdoings of a powerful elite with unrestrained ideas that have severe consequences on ordinary people. The Camerata, who developed the transistor, use it to control the city at their whim. The kill figures they don’t like and shape the image of the city to their desires. Once the credits roll you feel the pressures wash away when Red and the unknown man in the transistor finally meet in The Country. Red and the unknown man earn their place in the afterlife after having suffered from the trauma of a reality created by The Camerata, yet are able to enjoy it undisturbed. They are allowed to enjoy the fruit of the dark labor of The Camerata untouched by their desires. For such a small game, the world of Transistor and its story feels so fleshed out and rich. It goes beyond its action-strategy gameplay loop to make its characters feel three-dimensional

Supergiant Games

Although I’ve praised the story, it doesn’t do all of the heavy lifting. The dire and apocalyptic tone is fleshed out through reverberating and somber electric guitar riffs and the thick bass synths that have become a stylistic staple in Darren Korb’s work in other Supergiant games. The soundtrack sounds affected and distorted by electronic instrumentation but still integrates the sound of acoustic instruments throughout and it feels fitting for a game that considers the themes of transhumanism and technology. The somber tone set by the music and story is balanced by the beautiful visual style of Jen Zee. The buildings and streets of Cloudbank pop with color and feels like a cross between Art Nouveau (especially the character designs) and a cyberpunk neon metropolis.

Supergiant Games

If you’re looking for something tinged with cyberpunk swagger to satiate your appetite for cyberpunk, then I absolutely recommend playing Transistor. I’m pleased to have finally given it a try, even though I was six years too late.

This is only the beginning of posts featuring me gushing about games from Supergiant Games. There’s definitely more to come.

The Artwork in the Dishonored Series is Something Special

I’ve recently been obsessed with the Dishonored series. Sneaking around and pacifying (or assassinating) targets with a plethora of tools and powers has never felt so fun. The ability to run and gun through the game or get through it undetected is a testament to how deeply layered this series is.

Although the mechanics of the game are stellar. The most awe-inspiring part of the game for me has to be the atmosphere and world-building. Local brand logos and advertisements are plentiful when skulking down the dark streets of Dunwall or the sunny rooftops of Karnaca. They flesh out a world that feels like its living and breathing.

Of course, this is nothing new. The Bioshock series is well known for having a thick atmosphere and complex narratives that make the mind run rampant. The game also used collectible audio recordings and environmental storytelling to ground the players in its world. Disembodied voices guide the player to key scenes and locations strew about the underwater city of Rapture and the sky-high city of Columbia.

While these items did provide the player with some interesting lore about characters and its world, they’re simply not as engaging in retrospect. Dishonored’s collectible paintings on the other hand feel so much more profound in their world-building ability because they highlight the experiences of scientist Anton Sokolov, pharmacist Eleuterio Cienfuegos, and Delilah Copperspoon.

“The Outsider in Conditional Dreams” – Cedric Peyravernay

Each painting in Dishonored 1 and 2 is a portrait of key assassination targets and main characters. Anton Sokolov’s art style, (or Cedric Peyravernay, Sergey Kolesov, and Piotr Jablonski), the wonderfully talented man responsible for creating the pieces is so stoic, bleak, and detailed. Aside from their beauty, they made my mind run rampant. How did Anton Sokolov get the chance to paint the subjects of his paintings? Why would they meet? What ties does he have to these people? What happened in this world before the player even stepped foot inside? It truly lets the player try to fill in the blanks.

Anton Sokolov’s paintings feel like they have the touch of a grizzled and wise old man who’s witnessed the worst of the people around him. The subjects of the paintings are morose and sullen only offering blank expressions and slight smirks almost as if they entranced in thought. Perhaps Sokolov’s paintings explain his ties to the politics and aristocracies of Dunwall and Karnaca.

Delilah Copperspoon’s art style also alludes to her perspective on the people in her company and her desires to become empress of Dunwall. Delilah’s art is colorful and dreamy. Her subjects wrapped in ripples and wisps of color. In a way this makes sense. Her relationship with the Void, may have warped her reality – people becoming blurs within the height of her chaos.

“Her Heart, I Bathed in Poison” – Sergey Kolesov

Eleuterio Cienfuegos’s paintings don’t depict any particular human subject. Instead, he focused on the Void – a mystical place between life and death. His fascination with The Void leads him to paint its landscapes, jagged edges, black curves and all. His paintings are only impressions yet their grim colors and details make them seem like hazy memories of places in the Void he only wishes to have experienced.

“Impression of the Void n˚4” – Piotr Jablonski

I’m not looking for concrete answers to the meaning behind these paintings. Instead, I applaud the artists and their ability to encourage the player to delve deeper into the rich world of Dishonored. Time and time again games have run of the mill collectibles that only serve as extra content for the player. The Dishonored series instead takes a beautiful step forward.

The End Has No End: Why Players Need Closure

For the last ten years or so, I can’t help but feel like the game industry is fighting to make a game that will take over our lives. With the massive success of online-multiplayer games as a service platform, mostly popularized with World of Warcraft, open-world games like the latest Grand Theft Auto Online update ,or mobile spin-off of your favorite series (I’m looking at you Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp). These games feel designed to appear as dense as possible, with content that will last you hours and hours to complete – perhaps never.

Particularly, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with online-multiplayer games like Overwatch and Destiny 2 lately. Overwatch’s vibrant cast of characters always keep me coming back. They all feel unique to play, and the barks and chatter between characters personify them as genuine and believable, but I can’t help but feel like it is always competing for my attention. New characters and maps are released occasionally throughout the year to try and redirect the attention of players that have lost interest in the game and seasonal events introduce new cosmetic items to try and get you to spend money on lootboxes.

Destiny 2 has fun gameplay. The weapons and abilities make my character look and feel powerful, which is the experience I’d expect from an MMORPG-style game. Its online multiplayer modes aren’t to shabby, but in the end it feels like an expensive Skinner-Box. Grind missions, get loot, repeat. Not only expensive in the sense of currency, but expensive in the sense of time, as it expects you to commit yourself to it. Oddly enough there can be something relaxing about this gameplay loop, but it begins to feel repetitive – like the game is trying to prove to me that I’m experiencing new content but is actually just throwing reskinned loot into my lap and expecting me to receive it with fanfare.

Another good example of this is found in many blockbuster AAA titles in recent years. They announce a single player game along with a slew of future content passes to keep you occupied with the same game experience for years to come. For Honor and Street Fighter want you to buy more characters and stages to keep up with the changing meta, Destiny 2 wants you to log in every week to claim currency and other digital goodies that could theoretically make your character more powerful or look more stylish, and Overwatch wants you to splurge on lootboxes during the latest seasonal event to get that exclusive skin or emote.

Behind the seemongly fun distraction of a game are gameplay and economy systems that are competing for our constant attention like an angsty teenager grasping for money and attention from its guardians. They compete for our attention by using systems that are engineered to make us feel satisfied for engaging with them. Not only this, but they are competing to make it a little too easy to spend money.

These are trends in the videogame industry that I and plenty of other folks take issue with. But aside from the financial burden these games may present, they are largely trying to keep you focused on them. They want you to stay within their worlds to consume every last drop of content, preventing you from moving on from their games to another experience.

Overwatch‘s latest event.

Since games are trying their best to appear content rich through collectible items, easter eggs, DLC, cosmetics, and side quests, they demand your attention and prevent you from completing the game in a reasonable amount of time.

This is either good or bad depending on how you look at it. It is arguably a good thing in that a game you purchase may give you an experience that is offering enough content to justify your purchase, and perhaps that content is dense and takes a long time to complete. On the other hand, it is a negative thing because it can obscure a clear end to the game’s content, and a game with no end can be difficult to move on from.

Big-budget games need to become a bit more transient. They need to respect the lives and free-time of their players and they need to have a clearly indicated beginning and end because players need the option to feel closure in the games they play. Other media such as film, music, and books clearly begin and end. A movie ends when the credits roll or the post-credits scene cuts, albums begin with their first musical note and end with their last, and novels begin with a title page and end with punctuation. Video games feel like the only commerically popular medium to constantly feel the need to prolong its endings. Understandably, online-multiplayer games don’t generally begin and end like conventional narratives do, but the constant addition of content feels like its bloating the game. If a game doesn’t adopt the standard single-player format and wants to keep introducing content to its players then it needs avoid manipulative systems to offer that content.

A good example of this is Street Fighter‘s Fight Money economy. Players can theoretically buy every character and most stages with fight money, the in-game currency, for free. Fight Money can only be earned by leveling-up characters, playing through different single player modes, and finishing weekly missions. The catch is that each character costs roughly 100,000 Fight Money and stages cost 70,000 Fight Money. Weekly missions only net you around 3,000-5,000 Fight Money, while the single player story mode grants you a one time payout of 30,000 Fight Money. If the player were to save the Fight Money from weekly missions it would take them about a year to save only about half of the total cost of a new dlc character. To combat the Fight Money malaise is another newer mode that can net you some extra Fight Money called Extra Battle Mode that allows the player to try and defeat an overpowered version of a character. This is a fun idea, but the opposing characters are too overpowered – making it a ridiculous challenge for casual players to even get the measly sum of fight money offered. Players familiar with the mechanics may have an easier time than others, but it is not the answer the awful economy that players were hoping for.

 

Buying new stages with Fight Money

Season 3 DLC character season pass

The root problem with Street Fighter‘s economy is that it is engineered to trick the player into giving up on ever earning enough Fight Money to purchase characters for free, thus encouraging the player to spend their money on the DLC to get some fight money by completing that character’s challenges and story mode – a faint suggestion that you can earn characters for free. It is certainly doable, but it would take a tremendous amount of time to earn all of the DLC characters, maps, and costumes. In a way this feels anti-consumer in nature because it wants the player to either cough up the cash or waste away their time grinding away in-game.

Single-player open-world games on the other hand have had increasingly obscured endings with the addition of post-game content. Don’t get me wrong, I love exploring vast open-worlds as much as anyone else, but I want them to end. I want to move on from that experience.

With regard to open-world games, there are a handful out there that handle these conventions well. The Witcher 3‘s add-on narratives Heart of Stone and Blood and Wine are handled so that you can complete them anytime before or after the main narrative’s conclusion, and not to mention are of remarkably high quality for add-on content. They don’t feel like cash-ins or a cop-out and they want to expand on the lore and richness of the already dense characters and story in the game. On the other hand, Breath of the Wild handles this in a cheeky manner by satirizing the chore of collectible items in open-world games with Korok seeds. After collecting all 900 seeds, the game essentially mocks you with what is a giant golden Korok poop. I really appreciate that Nintendo is trying to tease the player for all the hours spent on collectible items.

As much as I love games that are rich with content, they must allow me to move on from them. I need time to process my experience with them and I need closure to the narrative threads that I followed for a dozen hours or so. Overwatch and Destiny 2 don’t want you to walk away from them. They always want you to stick around to see what is in store and they don’t want to end anytime soon. It is okay to love a game so much that you want to commit all of your free time to it, but this becomes a larger problem when a developer expects you to exchange time and money for game content that should already be available to you.

I love games, but I want them to respect the lives of their players. I’m hopeful that last year’s lootbox controversy was enough of a kick in the pants to prompt change for the video game industry. Perhaps we’ll have to wait and see.

Super Smash Bros. as a Nintendo Time Capsule

Two weeks ago hordes of video game enthusiasts, press members, and industry executives flocked to the Los Angeles Convention Center to take part in the largest video game exposition in the world. Big name publishers and tinier indie studios all showed off their current and upcoming projects to the world.

Of the dozens of games, I was most excited for Super Smash Bros. Switch, now titled Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Casual fans and competitive aficionados of the Fighting Game Community reacted in complete disbelief – Nintendo was throwing together a Smash game for the ages. All characters are returning to the new game along with a select couple of new faces familiar to Nintendo fans. Older stages from Smash games of yore are returning, in addition to new stages based on Splatoon and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Stages can be fought on the battlefield or final destination variants for every single stage included in the game. The game engine is speedier and features a new shield parry, a more accessible short-hop, and air dodges to satiate the more competitive fans. Characters are polished and touched up with new quality of life features as well. Nintendo heard the cries of its fans and trying to prove it with this one.

Although all of the new polishes to the series are certainly welcome, I hope that Nintendo’s depiction of their legacy is still in tact. As a largely casual player of the Smash series, I most enjoyed Smash Bros. as a celebration of Nintendo’s history. The original Super Smash Bros. on Nintendo 64 was relatively bare bones in this regard. Nintendo was still relatively young in 1999, and had a number of respected franchises but perhaps wasn’t ready to ground itself as a company worthy of representing its entire legacy within a game. Then the second iteration on the GameCube, Super Smash Bros. Melee, released and featured a slew of new modes like target practice and adventure mode to celebrate its history. The game also introduced a trophy mode to the game. The player could collect trophies of various Nintendo characters, items, and environments. Super Smash Bros. Brawl on the Nintendo Wii and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U continued this trend and featured additional methods of adding new trophies to the player’s collection. Since Nintendo positioned the Smash Series as a commemorative Nintendo crossover, revisiting these games in 2018 feels like opening a time-capsule.

Booting up Super Smash Bros. on Nintendo 64 from 1999 reminds me of the series stark polygonal beginnings. The game only featured a handful of modes such as Training Mode, Break the Targets, and Versus Mode. Other than twelve characters from Nintendo franchises and a select handful of modes, there isn’t much else. The game is even limited mechanically, with the lack of a side-B special move later introduced in Super Smash Bros. Melee.

Super Smash Bros. Melee, released in 2001, features a trophy mode that allows the player to view trophies collected by playing any of the other modes like Classic Mode, Race to the Finish, Adventure Mode, and All-Star Mode. A trophy lottery mechanic that simulates a Japanese gachapon toy machine allows the player to spend coins earned in other modes on a random trophy to complete their collection of up to 293 unique trophies. These trophies are models of various characters and stages from Nintendo’s history as of 2001. Some highlights include the Excitebike motorcyclist and Love Giant from Doshin the Giant, and Chozo Statue from the Metroid series to the deeper cuts of Nintendo history like Ayumi Tachibana from Famicom Detective Club Part II only released in Japan. Although this isn’t a thorough coverage of Nintendo’s history, the trophy mode still represents some of Nintendo’s earlier successes in the video game industry and its first foray into full-fledged 3D game design – moving all the way from 2D sprites of the NES era to full 3D models with the GameCube.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl increased its trophy count to 544 and greatly expanded on the trophy mode. Challenge mode had the player unlock trophies by completing challenges through gameplay and the Coin Launcher mode allowed the player to shoot coins at trophies to unlock them. While Melee may have introduced western players to smaller franchises unique to Japan and Nintendo’s beloved series from NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, and Game Boy, Brawl recognized third-party franchises that were affiliated with Nintendo like Metal Gear Solid, Sonic the Hedgehog, Advance Wars, Golden Sun, and Hotel Dusk: Room 215. Aside from a larger inclusion of third-party franchises, Nintendo was able to recognize franchises and games from later in the GameCube’s life-cycle and the freshly popular Nintendo DS system. Overall Brawl’s trophy mode indulged in Nintendo’s fifth generation hardware successes. There’s a trophy of the Elite Beat Agents, Chibi-Robo, the Custom Robo robot, a Nintendog, Kat and Ana from WarioWare: Smooth Moves, the Pokémon: Diamond and Pearl legendary Pokémon characters, and even Toon Link from The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker has a trophy and is a playable character – Nintendo made an effort to illustrate the progress of its first and second-party series like The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario, Metroid, and Pokemon up until 2008. Additionally, Brawl featured the neat Masterpieces mode where players could unlock timed trials of Virtual Console ports of classic Nintendo games. Although these demos are limited, I personally love that this additional mode shows Nintendo directly pointing to some of their early successes in the video game industry.

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS, released in 2014, did something largely similar to Brawl by expanding upon the trophy mode introduced in Melee with additional trophies raising the total count to 707 unique trophies in the 3DS iteration and 743 in the Wii U iteration. This game also added new modes to earn trophies in the Trophy Rush, StreetSmash, and Trophy Box modes. Characters from both first-party and third-party series were featured. Characters from Xenoblade, Bayonetta, Street Fighter, Final Fantasy, and Mega Man were all accepted into the fray along with trophies from their respective franchises. With previous smash games recognizing Nintendo’s first and second-party histories, this game specifically focused on Nintendo’s attempt to welcome the presence of third-party franchises. It is also an archive of successful modern Nintendo franchises and third-party video game series from the last six years but also looks toward the future with the addition of Bayonetta, Cloud, and Ryu. Nintendo certainly isn’t forgetting its past here, as there are a multitude of trophies from Nintendo’s past, but Smash 4 decidedly marks a progressive transition for Nintendo’s business politics – they are open to the ideas of other creators. The stark insularity marked by strict quality control from the 1980’s to the early 2000’s is a shown as a thing of the past. Sega, Capcom, and Square Enix are all represented here alongside Nintendo. Smash 4 is an artifact that looks toward the future with a smile on its face, reveling in the merriment of its acquaintances and welcomes new faces with open arms.

The Super Smash Bros. series intrigues me not only as a crossover fighting game, but as a handful of digital archives that have recorded the successes and peculiarities of Nintendo’s history within the last thirty years – no wonder Masahiro Sakurai gets so exhausted from directing these games, he’s essentially tasked with crafting a playable exhibition of recent Nintendo history. I can’t wait to dig into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s trophy mode this December and see what Nintendo goodies are waiting to be remembered.

Concept Toys: Interactive Art, Games, and their Intersection

In central Tokyo lies a towering commercial complex known as Roppongi Hills that houses the beautiful Mori Art Museum. The Mori exhibits modern art and themed collections that cycle through the year. This year I had the chance to check out the respected Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich at the Mori Art Museum, known for his piece “The Swimming Pool” that places the viewer within the illusion of being underneath a pool.

The exhibition titled Leandro Erlich: Seeing is Believing featured various optical illusions based upon realistic phenomenons and scenarios. “Port of Reflections” simulated a natural phenomenon with boats suspended in air by cables that are programmed to bob up and down like the natural movement of water. “The Classroom” has viewers sit on black felted boxes in front of a glass screen. Behind the glass screen lies a model of a destroyed classroom. The viewer’s image is then projected into the classroom like a faint ghost of the past, sitting within the classroom like elementary school students. “Neighbors” appears as a set of blinds covering a window. Upon opening the blinds, the viewer can peer into the windows of neighboring folks and peep at the private things they are up to. “Building” has the viewer lie on the face of a model building. Their image is then reflected to appear as if they are falling from the building. Among these four pieces is an interesting trend: the viewer must interact with these pieces to give them meaning, substance, and to understand how they function. As long as the viewer makes the decision to interact or pose with the piece, it changes its meaning for the artist and the viewer. It is no longer a stationary piece of metal, cloth, or plastic, but a method to make meaning.

The still life of “Port of Reflections”

Viewing our ghostly-selves in “The Classroom”

These pieces intrigued me so much because they require the viewer to make meaning of them. Without the viewer, there is no experience to gain from it. This isn’t to say that Erlich’s art is not three-dimensional, but it holds a strong similarity to the state of play found in video games. Viewers must walk through the exhibition and physically interact with these pieces to understand their purpose.

Peeping into the lives of our “Neighbors”

Like Leandro Erlich’s art, video games are experienced through a physical interaction and a submission to the rules made by the developer. Buttons must be pressed and joy-sticks must be moved to engage with the medium, and a person needs to dedicate their time and attention toward playing them. After the player commits to play, they can then experience what the developer wants them to.

Posing with the crowds for “Building”

Specifically, games like Katamari Damacy, Vignettes, and Everything remind me of this phenomenon in video game design. These games perform like toy-boxes that must be opened and tinkered with to be understood.

Playful Games

Katamari Damacy’s eponymous mechanic, the katamari, must be rolled around an environment to collect items and grow in size to collect even larger items. This works by growing from being able to collect thumbtacks and mahjong pieces to rolling into and collecting people, houses, animals and eventually continents and entire planets. The game has an incredibly innocuous presentation, almost child-like in its portrayal of experiencing the world around you. Any objects that come into contact with the Prince’s katamari is recorded in a database – almost feeling like a child discovering the world around him or her for the first time. Everything is significant because it is new, so, attempting to roll the katamari onto objects can reward the player with discovery of special items and growing the katamari larger and larger in size to explore new areas.

Vignettes feels closest to this toy-box style because the player must physically tap and spin objects around to discover extra clues and secrets hiding withing the game. A matryoshka doll can be spun upside down to then morph into a lamp, and then a light bulb and so on. Colors and music also change to prompt the discovery of new items and reward the player for their curiosity.

After spinning the matryoshka doll…

…it transformed into a light bulb.

Everything, from David O’Reilly, is similar to Katamari Damacy in that it has a sand-box feel. Possessing an animal or a rock and meeting with other animals or rocks produces a certain interaction or animation. Moving from the life-size beings to the microscopic or cosmic scale rewards the player with quotes and lectures about existentialism, spirituality, and morality from philosopher Alan Watts.

These kind of games are a reminder that video games are a creative experience of play. The creators of these experiences such as Keita Takahashi, Skeleton Business, and David O’Reilly design the rules of play. They dictate how far and deep our exploration can go within their games, but it is up to us as the players to peek around every corner and make our own discoveries. The designers create, but we give those creations life – a collaborative medium.

Interactive Art and Games and the Future of Play

With playful games being artistic, this shows just a single facet of what video games as a medium can do. Video games are after all a three-dimensional medium. They inspire an array of feelings and types of experiences that can wildly differ from player to player.

The connection between video games and interactive visual art shows that there may need to be a reevaluation of what play actually means. Interactive art and video games are blending both traditional styles of child-like play found on the playground and the modern digital mediums that have been thriving for the past forty-something years. Play and art mingle across many mediums. They move from the playground, to your smartphone, the television in your home, and into the exhibition halls of your nearest museum. This gives me hope for a future where video games can be accepted by wider audiences as both a medium of play and medium with a message. Hopefully we’re not too far off from that future.

Thanks for reading.

Dark Entries and Morbid Curiosities: Similarities Between the Castlevania Series and Bloodborne

Gothic horror games are a true gem of the video game genre. Perusing the shelves of video games in various shops in Tokyo, classic gothic games like Castlevania, Devil May Cry, and Resident Evil caught my eye and reminded me of the rich influence of European gothic styles on modern Japanese video games. Castlevania, (known as Akumajou Dracula in Japan) helped establish the metroidvania genre of explorative side scrolling action RPGs and made them a known style within the gaming sphere. I call the Castlevania series a gem because I feel that at some point their presence in the public and critical eye dramatically decreased. This is partially the fault of Konami slowing their involvement in the video game market, perhaps noted through them losing one of their beloved creators Koji Igarashi, a key figure in the development and production of several classic Castlevania games such as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and the Nintendo DS titles such as Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin and Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. Not only was the aesthetic of the games foreboding and horrific but they were also challenging for the player. Players were tasked with leveling their characters and mastering the snappy kinetic combat to overcome difficult bosses and enemies lurking throughout the narrow castle passages. Exploration through haunted castles while encountering werewolf and zombie-like creatures nailed a specific feel that other action games rarely explored – themes of the dark and morbid creatures like vampires, werewolves, and zombies as real obstacles to the player. I’m not saying that games have never handled gothic monsters as sinister threats that dictate the player’s exploration and progress, since the Resident Evil series, the Devil May Cry series, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine could be argued as games that feature modern homages to the classic gothic monsters and victorian themes of the 19th century. As much as I respect these games, Castlevania attempts to elicit fear through a different means: using its labyrinthine setting to challenge the player to explore new areas while risking the danger of encountering enemies and bosses that could be far too difficult for the player’s ability. Although the castle can be threateningly twisted and large, the games usually give the player an idea of their progress with a map that details the areas they have recently explored. This gives the player a feeling that they are overcoming challenging obstacles and understanding the structure of the castle itself. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night pulls off a clever trick halfway through the game where the castle has been mirrored to challenge the player’s memory of its layout.

With this legacy in mind, a recent darling of the action RPG genre has taken the world by storm: Dark Souls and Bloodborne. These games have already been praised a countless number of times for years, but Dark Souls and Bloodborne have established themselves as the go-to challenging gothic horror fantasy video games of the modern era. Dark Souls features behemoth-like monsters and demons behind every corner waiting to test your ability to react and defend yourself. Bloodborne is, on the other hand, a unique to the Souls series in that it so closely emulates the style of Koji Igarashi Castlevania games. It features fast-paced combat, haunting lore, and simple action RPG systems. Thematically, there are werewolves and vampires, victorian garb, Lovecraftian and Edgar Allen Poe inspired creatures and lore. Bloodborne mixes these elements in a manner that is atmospherically unique. The game’s environment is foreboding, yet invites speculation and exploration through its item descriptions, quiet narrative cutscenes, mysterious NPCs, and notes found throughout the world. It takes effort to add up all of its extraneous lore beats, just as the characters in its universe were trying their best to wrestle with the idea that their world was slowly becoming a victim to blood-borne tragedy by resorting to violent methods of slowing the infection that is transforming citizens into beasts – establishing leagues of hunters to dispatch them.

Bloodborne feels like a true 3D successor for the Castlevania series. It offers slick and challenging action RPG combat that rewards aggression. Additionally and most importantly, Bloodborne shares the same ability to capture dark and grisly atmosphere like Castlevania. The visual and level design of Bloodborne’s locales feels similar to Castlevania. It rewards the player for exploring a dangerous setting and for overcoming difficult enemies. Backtracking through or inspecting discrete parts of the environment is rewarded with shortcuts that make adventuring more efficient and loot to make the player character stronger and more adaptable against future threats. Visually speaking, Bloodborne is both haunting and gorgeous. Early environments feature gothic architecture and disheveled denizens of Yarhnam, churches and chapels that ring ominous bells in the distance of the Grand Cathedral, forests infested with monsters in the Forbidden Forest, and the haunted Cainhurst Castle long ruled by vampire royalty. The latter half of the game delves into the cerebral with the explorable Nightmare of Mensis and the cemetery of the Hunter’s Dream. These environments are made especially engaging through ambient sounds and music that give life to the eerie locales. Of all of these locations, Cainhurst Castle feels most strikingly like a Castlevania homage. This castle is haunted by phantoms in rooms adorned with paintings of the vampire clan that once dwelled there. Snow-covered statues are scattered about the exterior of the castle and gargoyles protect the upper ramparts of the castle. To further prove this aesthetic similarity, the player character arrives at Cainhurst Castle by a carriage drawn by undead horses – this is just about as goth as Edgar Allen Poe, Frankenstein, Bauhaus and Joy Division.

Comparatively speaking, Castlevania’s true transition from 2D to 3D wasn’t as graceful as it could have been. Castlevania: Lord of Shadows felt closer to mimicking the God of War series than it did with staying true to the classic style of Castlevania exploration and role-playing mechanics. Castlevania was an engaging series because of the combination of action and gothic style within an oppressive setting. I don’t mean to disrespect the God of War-style of hack-and-slash action games, but Castlevania is about traversing through a rich gothic environment and not executing outlandish damage on mobs of enemies. As fun as this could be, it seems that Castlevania: Lord of Shadows was more interested in matching the trendy style of quick-time events and action gameplay that was popular around 2010.

With this knowledge of Castelvania: Lord of Shadows’ haphazard attempt to bring the series to 3D, Bloodborne feels like the true successor for the Castlevania series because it so closely understands the importance of capturing gothic horror through a combination of its environmental design and lore. Bloodborne knows atmosphere best.

Koji Igarashi and his team are hard at work readying a spiritual successor to Symphony of the Night titled Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. This could hopefully scratch my gothic horror itch. Additionally, now that the Dark Souls series is basically finished, I’d love to see what FromSoftware does next. A trailer from the Game Awards in Los Angeles last December hints that they are working on something mysterious. There’s also rumor that FromSoftware’s next project will be shown off at E3 this June. A legion of fans and I are hoping that its Bloodborne 2.

Thanks for reading.

Celeste: Getting Back Up Again and Again

Introduction
I’ve spent about a month playing and fawning over Celeste, the latest release from Matt Makes Games. It’s been a grueling, yet beautiful trip climbing up Mt. Celeste with Madeline and Theo.
Playing this game felt like an emotional journey for me as much as it was for its protagonist Madeline. To offer some important context for before jumping into the bulk of my thoughts on this game: I’ve spent the last year or so realizing that I may be afflicted with some kind of anxiety and depression disorder. I also just moved to Tokyo from Los Angeles a couple of months ago, on my own, working in a completely new environment. It felt right to pick up Celeste not only as a distraction from my newfound stresses but also as a means of coping with my aforementioned affinity to needlessly worry about everything. Celeste felt like a story that I could relate to on an emotional and mental level, like a haven where my concerns and worries could dissipate. Together, Celeste and I could struggle and triumph together.

(Spoilers Ahead!)

Depression and Anxiety: The Twin Furies of Celeste
Like many other critics lauding Celeste, it depicts depression and anxiety in a believable manner. This happens primarily through dialogue and visual quirks.

The tone of the dialogue in Celeste deftly maneuvers between worried thoughts and dwindling self-esteem to the paranormal lore surrounding Mt. Celeste. It handles it delicately and gently, but isn’t afraid to depict it with the weight it deserves. “This is it Madeline. Just Breathe. You can do this” acts as a key example of Madeline trying to calm herself before she tackles her climb in the game. Not only does it hint at her disposition of being confident yet nervous, it is basically the theme of the entire game for both the player and Madeline. The game calms the player with this message before it throws platforming challenges that constantly ascend in difficulty into their lap, as if the game knows that its going to take patience and dedication to achieve its challenges. Not too much later in the game, Madeline’s fear multiply and attempt to sap her of her confidence: “I can’t do it.” This dichotomy between self-assurance and dissipating confidence established the emotional tone of Celeste. These moments of fear and low self-esteem are combatted by the smaller successes that prop up Celeste, but at the same time her self-esteem prevents her from recognizing her progress. This is the oscillating struggle for Madeline in Celeste.

On the other hand, the imagery in Celeste assists the narrative in explaining Madeline’s transition from collectedness to complete fear of herself. The imagery uses sharp, grabbing black tentacles to represent the ever-present feeling of any life-situation being on the cusp of falling into disarray. Like it’s gliding toward a path of certain doom, while being completely out of your control. These tentacles jab and writhe toward Madeline throughout segments of the game when she is fighting the evil version of herself, but once she approaches them they snap backward and reveal a path forward. This aspect of Celeste holds much more symbolic importance than is readily apparent. It serves to prove that Madeline is a woman that is capable of overcoming her own problems, and can overcome her inner demons through small gradual steps. Simply moving Madeline toward the tentacles is a tiny triumph. Since depression and anxiety have been things that aren’t always present but rear their ugly heads whenever they see fit, this segment feels real in its portrayal of someone fighting against themselves. The smaller victories in our lives are the ones that carry the most meaning, as they remind us of our ability to gather the will to push forward even when we’re at our worst.

Additionally, the segments with the tentacles or the ones that feature Madeline fighting against the evil version of herself in the mirror level are only fabricated by her, and aren’t apparent to other characters like Theo. They exist solely within Madeline’s mind, which makes it all the more frightening to her. Theo is unaware of the raging war in Madeline’s head until later in the narrative. This dynamic so truthfully portrayed the struggle of knowing that only people with anxiety and depression may wrestle with a voice in their head that is constantly trying to deny them of their worth. Once Madeline has a final battle with the evil version of herself, she becomes even more powerful, with glowing light blue hair flowing behind her and a new ability that allows her to dash twice in the air – symbolizing strength, triumph, and most importantly, unity with herself.

With this newfound power, she must climb from the base of the mountain to the peak after being knocked down in a battle with her evil self. I truthfully love how powerful Madeline is presented at this moment. Cutscenes between each segment of the mountain feature Madeline and evil Madeline cooperating and chatting about how easily they are ascending the mountain together – both versions of Madeline are depicted with renewed motivation.

At this moment later in the game, Madeline strikingly transitions from pulling off small jumps to daringly fast leaps up the mountain. Once she had finally accepted the presence of her depressive self, she could muster enough might to climb the mountain with ease. Though ascending the mountain is obviously depicted as a great accomplishment for Madeline, her new power is the most important achievement as it symbolizes her ability to keep her mental demons at bay. She achieves her goal of ascending the mountain while coming to terms with her depression, panic attacks, and rekindling her dwindling self-esteem. The greatest achievement is within herself.

Running, Dashing, and Leaping for Your Life: Inheriting Gameplay Mechanics from Towerfall: Ascension
The gameplay of Celeste is tight, snappy, and rewarding when understood. It feels like its borrowed straight from Towerfall: Ascension – and that isn’t a bad thing. /Towerfall/’s snappy controls feel right at home in a setting that is dedicated to platforming. Dashes and jumps feel weighty and swift, but they must be executed deliberately to ascend the mountain. This is the kind of platforming that is a test of the player’s finger finesse, with mistakes being their own fault. In combination with some borrowed sound effects from Towerfall, the dashes don’t only look good, but their sound design feels good too. The sound design for dashes is so tightly designed that you could time your dashes and jumps accurately. Speedrunners will absolutely drool over this kind of minutiae.

Sound Design That You Can Feel
Celeste boasts a beautiful soundtrack that accentuates everything from the mysterious tone of the mountain to the fear and panic felt by Madeline. Other than a couple of tracks such as “First Steps”, “Resurrections”, “Checking In”, “In the Mirror” and “Reach for the Summit” really stuck with me as they strongly illustrate the tone of scenes and levels really well, particularly “Checking In” with its eerie yet groovy style. The rest of the soundtrack sounded like standard indie-game style with flourishing synths, thumping drums, and sparkling piano chords. The soundtrack isn’t the highlight of the game for me, but it beautifully accents the themes of the game.

The sound design for character movement and text-scrolling is incredibly tactile and responsive. This is especially one of the highlights of Celeste’s sound design. Jumps feel quick and agile, while the glitchy gibberish sound of character voices during dialogue sequences is surprisingly expressive and charming.

Difficulty and Death as Experience
Celeste is pretty hard and the developers don’t sugarcoat this. They understand that difficulty doesn’t suit all types of players, so they added an assist mode for the game allowing the player to tweak and adjust the physics and movement of the game to better suit their needs when the going gets tough. I appreciate this addition. While it not only allows for greater accessibility, refraining from using the assist mode felt like a sort of meta-achievement for me. There would be countless times where I’d get stuck on a certain level and die over and over again. It was so tempting to return to the main menu and activate assist mode so that I could finally progress through the narrative. It was so satisfying to get to the peak of Mt. Celeste with pure dedication alone. All 1200-something deaths stamped onto my save file felt like a true achievement. At first I didn’t enjoy the recording of my deaths. It felt like I was being reminded of my lack of skill, but at the end of the game it now feels like a symbol of me and Madeline’s trials and tribulations on Mt. Celeste.

The End
I really loved my time with Celeste. It was a bumpy ride, but it was always a good challenge. A couple of months later, I’ve mostly settled into Tokyo. Many anxieties and fears have dissipated, but I’m still left with depressive thoughts and anxiousness. Like Madeline, I must take my smaller victories and hold them dearly to remind myself of my worth. I recommend Celeste to anyone with these problems. Although it is difficult, it feels worth the time and dedication to relate to its respectfully told story of the darker and lighter sides of depression and anxiety. Celeste is one of the most emotionally genuine games I’ve played in a long time, and it truly deserves all of the praise it has received.

Thanks for reading.

Injustice 2 Raises The Bar For Modern Fighting Games

It is late August and I’ve arrived a couple months late to the Injustice 2 appreciation party, but it’s better late than never!

If you’re unfamiliar with it, Injustice 2 is the latest fighting game from NetherRealm Studios, the folks behind the Mortal Kombat series and the previous entry, Injustice: Gods Among Us. Injustice 2 features DC Universe heroes and villains duking it out in a scenario where Batman and Superman have taken opposing stances on crime fighting after disbanding the Justice League. Batman wants to continue penalizing criminals for their activity, but Superman wants to kill them to prevent any future crimes from being committed. This scenario plays out in a gorgeous, cut-scene laden story mode where the player assumes the shifting role of heroes and villains fighting for their respective causes and against Brainiac, an alien who is bent on learning about worlds by hoarding them in his ship.

This story mode is nothing to write home (or online) about. The narrative features your standard superhero fare of conflict. Batman wants justice, but is ultimately impeded by Superman’s cut-throat endeavors – characters fighting for what they they are passionate about. This same premise is found throughout numerous other superhero narratives. Take the X-men as an example. Mutant heroes seek to fit in as normal humans but are oppressed by society because of their differences. The X-men fight for inclusion.

Now let me tell you why the Injustice 2 narrative is a surprising treat – it gives its fighting characters a purpose within its ludic structure. Street Fighter V, releasing to endless criticism for being a lazy cash-in by Capcom, eventually received a story mode in the form of dlc. It was half-baked, and it failed to inject any true personality into its cast of characters. Yes, I know that Ryu is a virtuous and altruistic fighter that seeks to take down Shadaloo, but why? Do our heroes challenge Shadaloo simply for the sake of justice or because of intrinsic personal values? The game needs to tell me why I should care about these characters, though it is first and foremost a fighting game. It is about mastery, competition, and adversity. Any semblance of story for these characters feels tacked onto the base fighting-game package. Injustice 2 integrates it. It fills in the cracks of the game’s lore and references with context behind the stages and characters. After completing the story mode, I finally understand why Superman was trapped inside a glowing red cage on the Red Sun Prison stage. I can finally sympathize with Batman’s deep-seeded disappointment with Superman’s decision to kill rather than penalize.

Injustice 2 surprised me because it does what Street Fighter V only dreams of doing. It presents a story mode that introduces the conflicts and values of its individual characters (albeit a little hastily) through fully polished cut-scenes and smooth fighting game mechanics explained in detailed tutorials. The scenes transition smoothly from Batman yelling at his son Robin for killing Arkham Asylum prisoner Victor Zsazs to an all-out fight between the two. This flow between cinematic storytelling and gameplay works well for the game. It is a tried and true formula in video games to utilize video to preface gameplay, and it looks beautiful doing it too.

Aside from the narrative tying the Injustice 2 experience together, the character models are polished and look amazing on screen. Street Fighter V is over a year old now and still has clipping character models and goofy character animations.

Birdie would have a tough time fighting with his chain and necklace fused like that… [Credit: Capcom]

On top of the narrative polish, the game has tons of quality-of-life improvements that make Street Fighter V look strict and stubborn in comparison. Injustice 2 features a character’s special moves on the pause screen and allows you to favorite combos and moves to easily access them later in training mode. Street Fighter V hides them within its pause menu, and are only accessible by pausing the game and breaking the flow of the fight.

No capes clipping here! [Credit: Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment/NetherRealms Studios]

I keep comparing Injustice 2 with Street Fighter V because I have become disappointed with fighting games in our current generation of video games. The Street Fighter series used to be the go-to franchise for tense competitive fighting and casual play alike. Now, it resembles a meek shell of what a high-budget fighting game should look like.

I’d truly like to see Injustice 2 become an influential piece for future fighting game developers. The polish, quality of life improvements, and fleshed out narrative and extra modes makes Injustice 2 feel like a completely curated package – and these push me and players unfamiliar to fighting games to keep coming back for more of the experience.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is Beautiful and Lonely – Early Impressions

It is August and I’m about five months late to the BotW appreciation party. After finally nabbing a Nintendo Switch in early July, I’ve had the chance to experience what the system has to offer beginning with Mario Kart 8, ARMS, and the juggernaut launch title -The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

What I like most about Zelda games is how quiet they are. They always begin with a lone amnesic learning about their purpose within a new world, being the perfect proxy for the player who is also fresh to the game’s world. The games largely make their narrative conflict present through text and image-based explanations of their lore. There are very few moments of dialogue between other NPCs, and when the player does speak with NPCs they usually reveal hints toward the main quest or filler dialogue. Aside from narrative, the game introduces its primary mechanics (swinging your sword, blocking with a shield, rolling) relatively early in the player’s quest, with more complicated mechanics in the form of dungeon items introduced later in the game. After Zelda games get the important stuff out of the way, their world is open to be explored at your own pace. Of course this varies from game to game, depending on the chattiness of your sidekick (see Navi, Tatl, King of Red Lions, Midna, Fi).

At the very beginning of my playthrough, I’m enjoying Breath of the Wild for this same reason. Breath of the Wild introduces Link, once again an amnesic, to a small portion of the world map and tasks the player with locating a handful of key game items for the Sheikah slate (a tablet that grants Link abilities like bombs, magnetism, item stasis, and freezing). The player is only directed by points on a map, and the game largely leaves the progress of the game’s main quest line to the curiosity of the player.

Once the initial area is finished, the player is taught of the game’s central conflict with Calamity Ganon and the rest of the map is open to the player’s exploration by accessing several towers found through the map. As I was working my way through the initial area, I couldn’t help but feel how un-Zelda the game was. The game wasn’t holding my hand barking at me to continue its quest and I honestly felt a little lost because of this. After playing Zelda as a linear franchise for years, I had a hard time feeling encouraged to explore. Although the beginning area is quite grand I didn’t feel as if I had a purpose within its apocalyptic world – and that is what felt so engrossing about the game. The game made me feel lonely even at its starting point. Link wakes up within a world that is alien because of its bleak obscurity.

As I completed the first area, obtained my Sheikah items, and continued on my journey to Kakariko Village, this loneliness made meeting NPCs feel like an event. It felt as if these NPCs were sharing my loneliness in this world, and interacting with them to learn about their opinion on Calamity Ganon or the state of the world after the war one-hundred years ago feels like a cherishable interaction. Discovering quirky environmental puzzles a-la the Koroks made testing the boundaries of the world all the more engaging and planning my attack on a sleeping Moblin camp felt as if it rewarded and satiated my curiosity at the same time.

To accentuate this, the music moves dynamically from subtle electronic chirps and riffs to full instrumentation during the heightened tension of battles during my adventure, but usually left me pretty sleepy when I was running aimlessly among the hills of Hyrule.

Aside from design, the narrative is scarce at 7 hours into my playthrough. The game doesn’t explain its lore very often and only describes it through short bursts of narrated cutscenes. This adds to the obscurity of the beautifully barren landscape, but hasn’t given me a reason to care about defeating Calamity Ganon just yet. I’ve only met a couple of major characters such as Impa the wise elder of Kakariko Village and her charming sister Purah in Hateno Village. The two are wildly different in personality, but equally intriguing in their importance to the narrative.

Gameplay has been entertaining because of the focus on survival. I enjoy the need to find and manage food, weapons, clothing, armor, and money. This survival focus feeds into a major gameplay loop with the player surviving to find powerful loot that will eventually lead them to even greater loot. It feels rewarding, but this is limited by early weapons that break after a mere four or five swings. Weapons feel so brittle that I constantly need to search for new weapons to prepare for their inevitable disappearance. I wish there was a weapon upgrade system to counteract this issue, such as finding different items in the wild to upgrade your current weapon’s durability, damage, or abilities (such as fire, ice, or electric augmentation) so you can hold onto that special weapon for just a little longer!

At the moment, I’m largely enjoying Breath of the Wild aside from a few light hiccups. It feels large and begging to be explored, with an interesting cast of characters and secrets to uncover.

The Witcher 3 Wants You to Care

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for one of several Witcher 3 endings

In a sense, video games train players to follow a set path of tasks and choices. On completion of these tasks, another becomes available for the player to complete – an interactive checklist. It renders the game-playing as an objective-based activity, and the choices made throughout the course of a game are designed to enhance the player’s interactive role in the politics, narrative, and conversations within virtual worlds. This is a quality found in open-world games that provide seemingly world-sized consequences for your actions. Fallout 4 urges the player to side with a particular faction through dialogue choices, but doesn’t actually give the player a reason to care about their decisions as factions are positioned as a kind of set track for a particular ending. This is really an emulation of agency rather than a recognition of the player’s investment. These choices are focused on a simulated world impact instead of an impact on the narrative paths of characters that inhabit it.

The Witcher 3, on the other hand, does not mess around with its choices. During the final two-thirds of the game, the main character Geralt is tasked with assisting different characters in exchange for their help in a future battle. Although the game dresses this as simple quests to complete in preparation for a huge battle, these quests also set the political world in stone. Assisting Sigi Reuven and Vernon Roche in overthrowing King Radovid prevents the continent from becoming an ethnocentric and racist political behemoth at the game’s conclusion.

More prominent than the political waves that can be shaped by the player, The Witcher 3 has choices that urge the player to focus on the roles of characters within the narrative. The last 3-4 hours of the game is packed to the brim with decisions that allow Geralt to imbue his adopted daughter with courage and self-determination or he can play the more attentive and coddling father that pushes her to question her abilities at the end of the game – resulting in one of three possible story endings.

My first ending was the worst ending you can possibly get. I spent those 3-4 hours treating Ciri as if she was a sacred artifact that must be protected at all costs, resulting in an ending where Ciri loses hope to defeat the omnipresent White Frost. Geralt (and the player) is only left with his memories of Ciri, and must live with the consequences of his decisions. The fate of Geralt is uncertain, as he is left in his lonesome in a cabin surrounded by monsters while clutching Ciri’s lost Witcher pendant – his only lasting memory of his lost daughter and his lost mentor Vesimir.

This scene is contrasted by the quest leading to it. Geralt finds and kills a group of peasants who’ve trapped a wolf. Geralt is eventually confronted by the Crone that had stolen Ciri’s pendant. In this fight, the Crone forces Geralt to confront his purpose as a Witcher, a slayer of monsters. There was almost a vaguely symbolic quality to this final quest because Geralt is forced to recognize the brutal objectiveness of the Witcher’s Path (slaying monsters for money). Oppositely, Geralt defending the trapped wolf is an act done out of guilt for the monsters  that he has slayed on his path.

This ending was horribly bleak. It made me feel as if I was robbed of the impact I had on the lives of different characters because there was absolutely no closure for any character in the game. You don’t get an ending with one of two lovers Triss and  Yennefer, you don’t truly know what Ciri’s fate is, and you never know if Geralt dies after that final scene.

Regarding the player’s role, this horrible ending felt like a punishment for perceiving Ciri as an object rather than a character with agency in the narrative. Ciri even mentions this issue to Geralt in the final scene: “This is my story not yours. You must let me finish telling it.”

Although I shuddered at the thought of everyone’s fate, this ending was completely just for my decisions. Geralt didn’t deserve a happy ending because he didn’t allow Ciri to craft her’s. Its a punishment for the player not recognizing Ciri as a character with her own motives and interests. Understandably, the game’s main quest in the first chapter is focused entirely on finding Ciri, so its arguable that the game renders Ciri as an objective. But it was my fault for not recognizing that Ciri is a grown adult that can take care of herself – she isn’t a woman that must be saved because she was repeatedly saving herself from the dangers of the Wild Hunt.

This ending was so cruel, but it was truly a punishment for my inability to recognize Ciri’s importance to the narrative. The handling of player choices and consequences is the most important quality of the Witcher 3. The player must recognize the impact of their choices, not only on the world and politics, but also the fate of characters.

Through the convenience of autosave files, I reloaded a recent save and earned the Witcher’s Path ending for Ciri. An ending befitted for my big-hearted Geralt and his friends.