Nioh 3: Bouncing Off It, Crazy Style

 

 

Should’ve called it ‘san-oh’, hell yeah brother. 

I’ve not been in the right headspace to properly arrange my thoughts and feelings into a cohesive single essay or review, but Nioh 3’s biggest ‘problem’ is that this game fundamentally is not for me. This presents a bit of a difficulty in expressing myself about it, because I am cogent that the vast majority of things that I found wrong with the game were just… things I didn’t like. 

Wrong? Didn’t like? Aren’t these meaningless distinctions in the world of criticism? Yeah, sure, whatever nerd, but I think video games (games more generally, honestly) provide a unique (and highly emotionally charged!) vector of interaction compared to other media. I can’t think of a film that I’ve watched for 20+ hours and then decided it just wasn’t my jam, or a book that I re-read on a higher difficulty to see if it would make me feel anything: my analytical framework for non-interactive media tends to develop alongside my experiences with the text rather than within them. Generally our experiences with media we vibe with or don’t vibe with are also a lot less time-consuming. 

Yes, you can tune in every Tuesday night to watch House and Boston Legal back-to-back, but that multi-hour repeated television experience only compares on a surface level to, say, pumping a thousand hours into fucking Overwatch because it’s the only game your friends are playing.

 

GUESS THE GAME - it is not Overwatch, but truly this is one of the greatest places to be if you wanna acquire massive amounts of psychic damage and multi-lingual insults.

When you play a videogame (or a game) you, like it or not, are actively learning a series of complex skills attached to a series of complex contexts. You might not think of smoke lineups in Counter Strike, or deploying stratagems in 40k, or knowing about parry windows and i-frames as ‘complex’, but rewind 3.5k hours and/or a couple of decades of accumulated community knowledge and see if that still holds true. 

Once you learn those skills (both single- and multi-player) you gain this amazing ability to perceive and assess what is going on so that you can solve more and more difficult puzzles and challenges, but you also gain an increased awareness of what the game is, and the tools with which to reflect about how you feel about the experience. This can lead to a bit of a problematic relationship between the player and the game, especially if after 60 hours you find out that the game wasn’t really for you after all, and that there’s nothing you can really do to make it be for you, and that maybe the only thing you got out of this experience was that you played a game that rejected you while also not evoking anything particularly potent, meaningful, or actionable.

 

Instead of understanding that you only really gained the ability to judge whether or not the game was good after 60 hours, I think a natural response is to instead lash out about the time spent - a sort of "fuck you for wasting my time" response. 

 

I think even the strongest mind (and my mind is not of the strongest, it is very much of the weakest) is vulnerable to the idea that sinking time into something is in itself some kind of qualitative statement, and somehow requires an extreme, intended-experience-warping reaction that justifies why the square peg didn’t fit - if only they made movement more like this other game, if only they’d delete Mercy entirely, if only the WEAPONS didn’t DEGRADE ugh what a FLAW.

 

Actual Nioh 3 things: I gave my character a Scampuss tattoo on her arm knowing that I would literally only maybe, possibly see it in-game at the hot springs. I will kill and die for Scampuss.

 

I ran into this a lot with Nioh 3 to the point where I realised that I wasn’t so much "criticising" the game as much I was "uselessly editorialising". My experience with the game was fine, but I was fundamentally disconnected from it and struggling to come up with anything that accurately reflected that. All I was doing was fantasising about ‘what if Nioh 3 was a game that I liked or hated’ and not tackling with the reality that Nioh 3 was a game that exists and, even though I completed it, still didn’t reward me with that magical ‘a-ha’ moment of emotional connection or the sublime feeling of mechanical mastery. It just ended up being a game that I gave too many chances to win me over, and I probably should’ve figured out that it wasn’t for me before the credits rolled and before the Mtn Dew Code Red clouded my eyes and let it have ten more hours to rot away any actual insights I had.  

 

I am fine with being the wrong kind of player for the game, but I do genuinely respect that Nioh 3 is… Nioh. It isn’t just Japan Souls, or the spiritual successor to Onimusha, it feels like it is firmly in its own lane, and I wish we lived in a world where more game series were allowed to develop their identity and succeed at the cost of occasionally alienating me.

Anyway that’s pretty much the end of my actual thoughts, here’s some dumb stuff:

• The time travel story is super silly. All the stars are here, a constellation of Japanese historical favourites arranged in what amounts to fun, wacky fanfiction. Very on-brand for the Nioh series, but I think it got a bit scattered.  

• I do think they genuinely fucked up the boss intros. Half the bosses were just dudes staring at rocks, and the other half were monsters that just sorta appeared somewhat un-dramatically. We’re at peak cultural relevance for Ryomen Sukuna and in Nioh 3 he just kinda stomps forward and glares wordlessly before the fight kicks off lmao. When they nail it they nail it though, I thought Ibaraki-Doji was sick for non-horny reasons, Minamoto-no-Yoritomo was super dramatic to the point where I thought he was going to be the final boss, I also loved the first Hiruko boss, great fuckin intro, and the Kasha (also for non-horny reasons). Top 4 right there, Okita and Takasugi tied for 5th, liked them both but maybe I’m too Gintama-brained. The rest were a bit sauceless. 

• Related but I also think they pulled the trigger on Takeda Shingen a little too early? Out of the villains of the eras not only is he given the fuckin coldest lines to say, but he’s also genuinely interesting as a dude!

• Maximum build take-backsies was a pretty sick choice. Just make as many mistakes in the menus as you want, you can reverse them with a literal button click, don’t sweat your build, it's eminently adjustable. Great stuff, phenomenal overtures towards the number-and-build perverts that will be playing this well into the future, great understanding of audience wants. 

• - Critters. Amazing critters, so good to see so many critters in a game. I love an exceedingly small lil dude, I love being able to turn into a Kodama, I love the Chijiko, I love the Scampuss, I love the critters, great critter game. More of this, please. I am so glad that after the first Nioh they decided to pivot to creatures. 

The critter carnival scene is legitimately amazing, I love them!!!!

 

I wish Giant Scampuss was real and also my friend.

 

Flopaganda: 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

 

I was writing about Stranger Things after I watched the entire series for the first time in the lead-up to the final season (‘s final season, I hate release schedules like this thanks Attack on Titan), but the whole thing stuck in my throat. It was too much of a bummer, it was all too mean, and exploring one problem led to explaining another problem which meant defining a third problem and it just started getting very… Youtuber-esque. Me and the team (me) decided to park that project and instead look at something that has been relentlessly fascinating to me since I was utterly repulsed by Zero Dark Thirty: the weird and wonderful world of post-Iraq-regret US military propaganda. 

This will be a fun little series to ring in 2026 with the halting and phlegmatic start it deserves, trying out a different format and maybe carving out a couple of repeated and focused niches that build into a cohesive body of work and not just “writing about a random piece of media and desperately trying to find a good font for the thumbnail at 3am”.

Pictured: me and my horrid little thoughts deciding not to publish Stranger Things things.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is a deeply strange film. 

Opening with a ghoulish half-documentary/half-dramatic re-enactment of the brutalisation of Muammar Gaddafi’s body, we follow John Krasinski’s journey into a profitably unstable Libya as one of the six special operators who fought in secret to defend American lives in the lead-up to and during the events that would become colloquially known as ‘Benghazi’. Shackled by an incompetent and devious CIA, the eponymous secret soldiers struggle righteously against the events of the true story, narrowly missing out on saving lives before eventually being backed into a corner inside the CIA annex where they fight tooth-and-nail throughout the night without any hope of relief. 

They kill a lot of guys, most of the Americans make it out, they go home, and the film ends. 

First of all, contextually, this film came out in 2016 - which was both ten thousand years ago and also potentially just yesterday. This places it in an odd space because the kind of pro-military/anti-state libertarianism that makes up the bedrock of the film’s clearly stated politics was, at the time, considered a valuable, serious, and respectable stance to have. Anti-state intervention in relation to an ongoing occupation, but pro-state intervention for whatever happened in the immediate past that got us stuck here.

In many ways this film isn’t just a eulogy for Benghazi, but a eulogy for a specific type of "serious" right-wing thought and for a specific type of American Dude, ostensibly armed and ready to water the tree of liberty, but utterly steamrolled by the new, aggressive weirdness of the American Right. Would the person who idolises the quiet, family-focused operators of 13 Hours get frothing mad over the Cracker Barrel logo? Would they jump from fad diet to fad diet, backed up by a weighty medicine cabinet of nootropics and weight-loss pills? Would they whole-heartedly support a government that is explicitly run by and for pedophiles? The type of American conservative this film was made for is gone, his self-image shattered into a million pieces, his essence scattered to the winds, and his absence keenly felt when examining a film so clearly tailor-made for him.  

Even the subject - Benghazi! - feels like a relic from an ancient time. Once the poster child for how the Obama admin and Hillary Clinton let down The Troops, turned into a guttering candle of an issue kept barely alive by the already-dead.

Rugged men doing rugged things, ruggedly.

13 Hours is an attempt to deliberately and nakedly mythologise Benghazi, crafting an extremely simple and straightforward version of events that confidently and effectively builds broad, unequivocally heroic characters for us to edify. 

From literally brandishing Joseph Campbell to literally telling the audience that this is The Alamo, there is an awfully cynical self-awareness to this story of the six operators and the thirteen hours they spent in the middle of the Benghazi debacle. We are watching heroes, the film repeatedly tells us, all-American heroes who didn’t want to be here (but they are getting paid), who were willing to give their lives to defend what was right, and who in no circumstances would ever - ever - kill civilians.

This last point they repeat a couple of times in sort of a “my t-shirt that says ‘I would never be involved in the killing of civilians’ is raising a lot of questions already answered by the shirt” kind of way. 

Why they repeatedly insist on this point, I truly do not know. 

The Libyans are presented as an amorphous, entirely unknowable, inhuman, (and therefore easily justified) fleshy targets to shoot with a series of fun weapons. There’s a videogamey unreality to 13 Hours, first person perspective shots and all, a jingoistic themepark version of a war film where the bad guys shoot American flags for fun and attack in scripted waves. This is your film industry on Call of Duty (a series which does indeed make a brief cameo here): rubbish propaganda raised on a diet of rubbish propaganda. In this world they might as well be killing civilians with abandon as well, there is no practical difference because the massively xenophobic brush it uses to paint with does not allow for the audience to see any civility or possibility of understanding.

As with its approach to interventionism, it loves the idea of violence, but hates the idea that there could be any adverse results from that violence. A thousand bad guys down is fun, they explode into cool bits on camera, our weapons are bigger and now they know not to fuck with America; one American gets scratched and it’s serious. He had a family, guys. He was a real person. He would have never killed any civilian, please stop asking what our definition of 'civilian' is.

The intelligence guys, the film repeatedly suggests, did not do their job properly. It goes further, insinuating they were fundamentally incapable of doing their job properly, separated as they are both physically and philosophically from the warrior wisdom of the titular secret soldiers who are nearly always correct, but rarely listened to. Visually this is presented in an incredible way: the int guys are out of shape, or if they’re in-shape then they are too suspiciously well-groomed, too immediately and identifiably effete to be one of the tough rugged operators. Our guys work out, they stay sharp, they’ve got like a hundred kids for some reason, they’ve got beards. In one scene, the CIA station chief shouts at one of them to stop working out (shirtless, obviously) because he’s annoyed by it! Every event in the film is broken down via this internal US conflict, the escalating series of disasters only halted or triaged when the warrior men are grudgingly given control by the flabby and unprepared CIA.

Buff Office Jim will return in..... that one fucking stupid CIA show he did

The climax of the film inside the CIA annex is presented as a heroic last stand against the mindless savage hordes, but it even sort of fails the heroic last stand test by neither being particularly heroic, nor a last stand? 

They leave with two or three on-camera American deaths, they blow apart hundreds of Libyans, our heroes mostly get to go back to their families in peace and our anonymised atomised assailants are dead for absolutely zero reason. We see shots of grieving, veiled women who go to the bodies of their families and friends in the daylight, but again I have to wonder why. What is the point in providing this tiny glimpse of humanity when the rest of the runtime has been spent blowing them up? Libya doesn't matter, the Libyans don't matter, what they were fighting for doesn’t matter - they were props to knock over or bugs to squash, and we get to the end of the film without it ever having the teeth or the guts to really talk about the events as anything more than a series of things-that-happened. We are divorced from any kind of empathy for the non-Americans in the film (and indeed we are so divorced from Libya as a setting that it might as well take place in space), yet in-between sick 360 frag montages we get some self reflection that war has a cost for both sides?

It is the core issue of 13 Hours: this is a film that has a hard commitment to half-assing it. It doesn’t ever seem to want to say anything without doubling back and making sure we understand that the opposite could be true or that there could be shades of grey here or we might possibly be wrong who knows. CIA bad but CIA maybe also good; war bad but war also kinda cool. The film is blind, and is casting around wildly for someone to blame and its greatest failure as a mythmaking tool is failing to find that special someone. It can never land the plane because it never commits to a good old fashioned pillory, so it just stumbles around second-guessing itself as the idea of Benghazi bounces around its incoherent political sphere making it angrier and angrier. Angry at what? A general... broad meaningless sense that an injustice has been done somewhere to Americans that hasn't been sufficiently restituted, in the opinion of the filmmaker?  

Instead of finding a point it ends up just shrugging its shoulders and says, a direct quote, “Your country has got to figure this shit out Ahmal.” Fuck off! Why are the secret soldiers IN THE COUNTRY what are you guys DOING HERE did the state dept. have ANYTHING to do with the CURRENT UNREST!

None of the events here were good, the film says, but to condemn any of them would require wrestling with what happened in Libya and why it happened - which this film cannot do because, again, it fundamentally agrees with the violence enacted by the US govt up to the exact point where an American is harmed in response. It is close to a perfect post-Iraq-regret slice of US propaganda - a loud, confident mess that doesn’t have the bravery to point at any issues directly or take any responsibility for the grotesque state of the world it depicts.

We love and support our troops, but we’re really not sure what they’re doing, or why, or even where. 

Also the secret soldiers of Benghazi - CIA contractors!! Isn’t that insane? “Oh they were probably marines or something” nope! They were ex-military guys doing contracting work!!

2025 Game Awards [REAL DOT MP3 DOT EXE]

Wow, gang, this is some real confidential stuff! Would you believe it, but I managed to get my hands on a Top Secret Document that contains the script for The Game Awards 2025. Let’s dive in together, and see what Big Gaming has been gatekeeping from us for the sake of flashy trailers and corporate sponsors and uh… games… released this year. 

Look, I had a bit for this where I was going to pretend to leak the awards early but I forgot which day the awards were happening, so here’s how the 2025 Game Awards should’ve gone.    

Should've been called the Guillaume Awards based on how many nominations E33 got, am I right folks?

Best Narrative

In a year full of games with words and stories, one game stood out for having maybe the best words and stories and that game was Silent Hill f. I wrote about Silent Hill f previously, but I really dug it - I think it provided a simple, compelling narrative full of genuinely ugly characters and a depressing cultural context. Now that we’re here and not in a spoiler-free environment or whatever I wanna give massive, undulating props to the Fox's Wedding ending, one of the alternate endings you can get if you refuse to take the red capsules. 

Fox's Wedding is one of the most disgustingly cynical endings I have ever seen in a game lmao. It is horrific, an utter betrayal of your journey so far as Hinako is subsumed entirely into a narrative about how the two boys in your life maybe can get along after all.

It is so good.

The little fist pump Fox Mask/Kotoyuki and Shu have made me throw up a little in my mouth! SHf definitely has some issues with regards to how you get to some of these endings (I think it doesn’t quite respect your time on subsequent playthroughs, particularly as you limp through endless combat towards the end!), but the rewards are just so good and often deeply uncomfortable. 

If anything, I feel like people are slightly underrating SHf’s storytelling because of how gnarly some of the narrative and character questions and implications are. Not here though, here we rate it correctly - well done for winning the Best Narrative award at the real actual game awards. 

Winner: Silent Hill f

Runner Up: Silent Hill 4: The Room available now on GoG with a bunch of improvements. 

Best RPG

What a nice little cat. I hope nothing bad happens!

Welcome to the best RPG award, presented this year by aaaaa star of some kind! Holt McCallany maybe! 

Wow, what an absolutely stacked year for RPGs, JRPGs, CRPGs, and SRPGs (FF tactics does and always will go super hard). With all these wonderful adventures available to us, it’s a wonder we have time to play any of them at all, which is why this prestigious award goes to one that I actually got around to playing near the start of the year: 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim. 

It is silly how good 13 Sentinels is, and I am so disappointed in myself that it took me until big ol 2025 to play through it. A genuinely jaw-dropping experience available on a bunch of platforms, it’s worth giving it a go even if the elements that make up the game (anime, mechs, cats, yakisoba pan) aren’t really your thing. The game is supremely difficult to talk about in detail; the way 13 Sentinels treats twists, turns, and spoilers is utterly bonkers, and every story beat and development is part of an incredible ride that will stick with me for years. 

Also the mech-based pseudo-real-time strategy sections are real fun - a lot of DNA from this game and the battles in this game clearly made it over to Unicorn Overlord. 

Winner: 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim

Runner-Up: The new physical edition of Blood Bowl that I’ve been really enjoying, or E33

Best Blorbo 

I love them......

Between the little patchwork creatures and Esquie and the silly rock creature, E33 deservedly and decisively won the best blorbo award for its breadth, depth, height, and heft of the blorbos on offer. If E33 was a Nintendo product we'd be able to look forwards to merchandise of these creatures and critters for years to come, but alas I fear they might go the way of Emile from Nier and only show up occasionally. Bask in their glory while you can, I can only hope this marks the beginning of a true blorbo renaissance in western game dev the likes of which hasn't been seen since that one kangaroo mascot platformer. 

Winner: Expedition 33

Runner-Up: Digimon Story: Time Stranger

Best Shape

The tone of this list is jokey, but this is a 100% real recommend. Please try it!!!

Games aren’t just squares and blocks anymore - we’ve got all sorts of triangles, polygons, shapes I haven’t even heard of yet, all packed together into wonderful combinations that both delight and intrigue. 

Many games this year used shapes and honoured the legacy of shapes, but very few games took the time to really be about shapes, which is why the illustrious Best Shape award goes to To a T.

To a T was a real delightful time, one of those weird games that sits alongside Tearaway where you feel deeply and fundamentally uplifted and full of the energy needed to go change the world or create something or eat a nice pastry outside. 

It is a quintessential ‘touch grass’ game: respectful of your time, encourages you to take brakes, and full of an infectious joie de vivre that should really be like… prized more in our gaming experiences, maybe even prized slightly above things like addictive gameplay loops or battlepass rewards. Not just joy - and not to sound like I’m talking up the game too much - but To a T has a fundamental respect for life and for the dignity of life, which is a deeply odd and affirming thing to encounter in a video game about shapes and aliens. 

The songs are real gnarly earworms as well - check em out

Winner: To a T

Runner-Up: Triangle Strategy 

GOTY

That's right the French RPG made it again what a grand day - wait hold on folks I'm getting a live update from the venue, something completely unexpected has happened. 

By gawd - a surprise contender has come to claim the belt at the last possible second, knocking out all the competitors with its affordability, accessibility, depth, rollback netcode and patented organic farm-grown grain-fed fun! That's right, the winner this year was Guilty Gear XX AC+R with a shocking come-from-behind victory!

Fighting games have always been slow to build momentum, but to win GOTY 2025 at the Sportsbet dot com presents the Coinbase Mr Beast Game Awards fifteen years after release is a massive achievement. An inspiring tale of never giving up despite age, relevance, or eligibility, well done to Guilty Gear XX AC + R.

Winner: Guilty Gear XX AC + R

Runner-Up: Guilty Gear XX AC + R