Hollow Victories

I really like how the Elden Ring DLC ends, and I want to try and explain why. Or at least I want to write this down so that I can stop thinking about it for a while.

In the main game the overall attitude towards the ending (s, plural) were pretty negative on release.

Understandable - while I personally would be excited to sit in a big chair underneath a big tree, it didn’t make for the most thrilling of conclusions for (what could be) an 120+ hour experience full of trials, triumphs, and tears. If you look at responses from the time there’s a lot of “oh - first time doing a souls game?” shit - typical pithy videogame fandom stuff; patently untrue for a series that tends to leave you full of bittersweet emotions and no end of questions at the close*. Elden Ring’s endings stand out in the series for unsatisfying they are - the various threads of the game grabbed and woven back into the cyclical narrative without too much ceremony and a mostly identical voiceover. I was cool with it though, I was like, “ok look that’s fine - I’ll get further clarity and closure later when the DLC comes out”. 

This is truly where spoilers lie ahead, but I did not get clarity or closure in the DLC - but I did get a little depressed.

*I’m not going to link these because there are so many - but “uh first time much” is such an insane attitude to have when people have literally built youtube careers doing souls ending: explained videos.

The extra shades are for sharing

My favourite aspect of soulsborne DLC is how they tend to act as extensions of an argument within the main game that forces you to reinterpret the events and re-evaluate your relationship with the setting. At its simplest (and most explicitly ambitious) you have Dark Souls’s’s Artorias of the Abyss DLC, where you are thrown through time to actually do the shit people think Artorias did. This concludes in an epic, setting-defining fight against Manus but, significantly more importantly, it irrevocably changes your relationship to Sif (who even gains a new cutscene post-DLC) and to the dwindling age of fire and its habitual mythologising of (and deliberately lying about) history.

In Bloodborne’s The Old Hunters you are exposed to an escalating, uncomfortable truth: this shit sucks, everything you have been doing sucks, everyone you have ever known sucks, and that the web of seemingly conflicting interests that texture the main game are all united in a singular, defining, desperately hidden sin that super sucks. Wonderfully bleak, it makes explicit connections between the factions and forces you to look at the setting as a series of tragedies that were allowed to happen by the complicity and callousness of the powerful - as well as highlighting the audacity of Yahrnam society’s mythologising of (and deliberately lying about) horrific events and dangerously flawed people.

I won’t go through the rest, but I want to emphasise how thoughtful the additional content is, how clearly they are seeking to add interpretation rather than just “more stuff” to the main game. If you find yourself in a Fromsoft DLC you are doing yourself a disservice if you do not look at how it impacts your relationship with the core text - they are honest-to-god re-litigations of your actions and your relationships, and they often take really odd, interesting angles on the conflicts within the main game that tend to make the world you were in just a little darker and a little worse.

All of them do this, but this one broke the rules a little and has been on my mind a lot. Apologies if we get a bit ramble-y.

I have never been more embarrassed in my life than I was when I was making this image

In the Shadow of the Erdtree when we finally defeat Miquella we are left with a gate made of corpses and a single memory from what was once the kindly demigod. Nothing else. 

Our companions throughout this journey are now dead or missing, their lives burnt out as kindling for Miquella’s ascension, and the story has abruptly stopped; the last possible thing left for you to do is to collect a flower at the corpse of St Trina and return without ceremony to the Lands Between to go and finish what you need to finish - rise, Tarnished, and become the Elden Lord etc. etc. etc. 

I was pretty unsubtle in choosing to say ‘Miquella’ is the end fight, but he isn’t. We never fight Miquella, the closest we come to contacting Miquella at all is when he deigns to embrace us briefly and steals our heart, but I think a great question posed is: why would we even bother fighting Miquella? Miquella (at this point) is a completely empty existence, having carved away every bit of body and spirit to prepare himself for, what he believes to be, a truly selfless godhood. His existence is a parallel to Marika’s, and a prelude to the same great and catastrophic failure to shape the world to a singular will. 

Who we actually fight at the end is Radhan, the legendary general we fought in Caelid, but returned to his younger form to take the place of Miquella’s consort. But are we? This Radhan is a homunculus, the tired spirit of a deeply loved brother stuffed inside a fleshy prison of another, less cared-for demigod. Radhan was chosen for his “strength and kindness”, but here he is lifeless and devoid of personality, a tool of pure violence piloted by a now uncaring Miquella. 

But was Mohg, the vessel of Radhan, not also beloved? The most genial and wise character we encounter is an old vassal of Mohg, Annsbach - if we can’t bring ourselves to care for the Mohg dynasty or Mohg himself, then is this man’s love not enough for us to see value in the person Miquella used and desecrated? If the world Miquella wishes to create is one of compassion then why are the harms caused to these characters - and others - necessary, and the justification for causing those harms beyond any kind of reproach and isolated from any kind of question of reparative or restorative justice? 

The Miquella that we encounter doesn’t embody kindness or love or compassion, but detachment. The mortal struggles that happen on his doorstep and the corpses that pile up around him mean nothing, and in his abandonment of everything remotely human his ascension renders him as distant and inhospitable as the stars. We cannot ever really fight Miquella or get an ending from Miquella because he’s already long gone, and our journey up to this point has been one of grieving what he once was and what others thought he could have been*. 

So where does that leave us, the victor?

 

Miquella reframes and mirrors the player experience so that the desire of the character and the desire of the person playing are the same: what we do, how we feel, how we connect, and how we value and interpret the world is as important here as it is in real life. We cannot reduce our journey to ‘combat’ to ‘hitting things until they die’ to ‘Cool Boss Guide 27: Guaranteed Easiest Way To Beat’. Miquella did this - he’s a Power Gamer. He’s solved the lore. He’s a huge fan, piloting the sickest warrior to win. 

You are playing against a character who is just as cynical a reflection of the player as Slave Knight Gael was in Dark Souls 3’s Ringed City. We, the players, are under the microscope here in a way that we never were in the main game. It’s uncomfortable, and deeply lacking in catharsis because we can't really "win" - even if the game let us fight Miquella for real. 

*Poor Moore, man. That guy really deserved a fucking break.

 I love these stupid guys, fan since DAY 1 RIDE OR DIE FOR THE CURSE FROGS

Our power, our premium-brand player-controlled agency is clear in the fight against Leda: according to this world we are strong and we can affect it in ways the other characters we talk to and journey with can only dream about. We can dream in ways these characters cannot even comprehend, our ambitions greater than the gods themselves. Miquella shows us what the player-focused idea of power and agency looks like reified - the embodiment of the player who solved the game and all the elements in it, the player who put themselves above the scenery and the mechanics and the stories to become a god. So what we get from this ending is a pretty simple, personal message: enjoy the journey, you’ll have more fun if you do. 

We can see this theme played out by characters all throughout the DLC: Messmer is stuck prosecuting a genocide that will never end, Midra is stuck waiting for an ending he failed to bring around and no longer wants to strive for, Thiollier exists to die, his only drive a suicidal one that may bring him closer to St Trina (it is a weirdly beautiful touch that in Thiollier’s quest we're even able to die better than the characters around us), Igon’s entire world consisting of an impossible, doomed, obsessive hunt. 

We, the players, the people actually interacting with the game, need to be better than our endings and our eternal gods, we need to be able to enjoy our brief journeys through the Lands Between or Yharnam or our actual real lives - we need to embrace contexts, histories, people, what they care about, and how we can care for them. We need to learn the lessons shown and not get caught spending our whole lives chasing something that will always be out of reach. The souls games have always been hopeful, they've always been about a positive, affirming personal journey for the player even in an increasingly lost and terrible world, but in Shadow of the Erdtree we're left with a stunning snap back into our reality that threw me for a bit of a loop and forced me to confront a bunch of thoughts and feelings. It's weird, and well crafted, and it made me feel strangely empty.

Endings happen all the time in ways we can’t even comprehend until it happens to us. Miquella's last words are "I'll make the world a gentler place". I don't know if I can do that, but I know that I can pay attention to others, to be present for them, to care for them and to hope that the way I travelled through the world helped more than if I did or didn't reach my goal.

Maarten's Stairs

Ok, so a level designer who goes by Maarten Frooninckx posted an incredibly interesting conundrum on twitter about what to do with this particular set of stairs that he didn’t want the player to go up in a Counter Strike 2 map.

He got a lot of suggestions - I’ll try and illustrate them as we go - but some people had the same thought that I had for a Counter Strike-appropriate barrier: a child gate.

This picture is from an Amazon listing and it's completely insane I'm so sorry

Some had assisted living devices.

My personal favourite had a real-world example of an open-staircase saferoom, which I think was incredibly creative and grounded in the setting that he had established (a Spanish colonial mansion in the jungle).

But Maarten also got some interesting pushback from a game dev who goes by SarahJS, which led to this exchange:

I think this is incredibly fascinating regardless of what side of the discussion you fall on. For the record, I agree with Sarah one hundred percent, and I think Maarten’s response is incredibly telling about the attitude that is often brought to level design. 

For others this is a house with stairs that need to be blocked. For me, this is a situation where the reality of the asset - a multi-story house - sublimates the reality of the environment - that of a game. 

Here, as a functional part of a gameplay environment, the stairs and the second floor need to go. Like lmao look if I’m playing CS2 and I see stairs and a second floor, I’m looking up, because the existence of vertical space is a massive threat indicator in this kind of game. If we use the creative medium of Bright Red Circles, I can demonstrate where you are probably looking when you are interacting with this game as a combat environment.

I'm also not very good at FPS games but CORNERS and HIGH GROUND man come on

You can use as many lighting tricks as you want to drag my eyes away from here - unless you completely block my awareness of a potentially accessible high ground or remove it entirely I’m still going to look up at the flashing danger sign that says “look up”, and I don’t think this is a particularly controversial take.

But ok - Maarten might be using the CS2 engine to design a level rather than design levels specifically for CS2, that’s all good. So then we have stairs without purpose and a second floor without purpose; to me this means we still have a failure to imagine something that could exist beyond the multi-story house. Someone in this process has failed to acknowledge the creative corner that exists when you accept the reality of ‘a house’. You control the house: this house is exactly as real as a fucking Goomba, there is no inherent reason that this house couldn’t have a sunroof here instead of stairs, or be a one-story mansion that sprawls over hundreds of kilometers, or be tied to giant, stair-negating turbines that keep it suspended hundreds of meters in the air (the safest possible place for a Spanish colonial mansion to be).

In fact, if we are going to get a little freaky, there is no inherent reason to this house.

Battler, when I talk in RED it means the house is expanding 

I love this kind of stuff because I’ve dabbled in (UNDERPAID, NDA, I'M NOT MAD ACTUALLY DON'T PUT IN THE PAPER THAT I'M MAD) narrative design in video- and board-games and have encountered clashes in philosophy before: sometimes it benefits everyone for a writer to come up with a creative solution within the assets; sometimes it benefits the writer that the assets have been designed and fully exist to benefit the player experience; sometimes it benefits the level designer for the story to be fully fleshed out by the writer beforehand; sometimes it benefits the level designer that the assets make the level, where the story is clearly and plainly written for them by the self-evident existence of A Thing.

There are SO many answers to the question of 'why should this be here?' that come up constantly and in ever-changing circumstances during any kind of development - which makes Maarten’s reaction incredibly uncharitable by calling Sarah’s response nihilistic and boring! They’re right! The house is meaningless until you give it meaning! - but it is the kind of thing that asks a lot from the observer: where do your priorities lie? Do you want to benefit the player experience? Does it fit the narrative? Can it fit the narrative? Does the narrative fit what we have? Can I bend the player experience to fit what we have?

What’s important to point out here as well is that this situation isn’t just similar to being handed a piece of a level and being asked to narratively justify it - it’s… exactly that. This is crowdsourcing narrative - not level design - for a level that is in-development, using the responses as a way to fill in the gaps that the designer couldn’t (or didn’t want to) change. For the participating audience there is no difference between this house having stairs you can’t walk up or a big window you can’t smash or any immutable asset that is inconveniently getting in the way of playing the game. 

I would encourage you to look at your games as if every single piece of the environment was as up-for-debate as Maarten’s stairs. It’s so much more satisfying to look at how the technical and non-technical why’s of game- and level- design intersect than to just let yourself get bombarded with endless ‘correct’ decisions re; player guidance, map clarity, objective clarity, what houses are, what direction you run in a platformer etc. You are in an explicitly constructed environment!

Please, if nothing else, please question the nature of the construct!

Nothing exactly groundbreaking here from me honestly, I just thought it was interesting to think about lmao.

Repetition Part 1: One More Time

There’s a concept that I’ve been playing around with for a while called the ‘Forever Game’. Not the greatest name*, but the broad idea is that a Forever Game is something that takes up part of your time regularly for the foreseeable future. I think everyone at one point has had at least one ‘Forever Game’ or something equivalent depending on their stage in life, passions, or genre preferences - a game that they know they can and will keep on going back to whenever they feel like playing a game.

What a Forever Game is, especially, is yours. If you are of a certain age you will have extended deliberately limited experiences and transformed them with your friends, maybe if you had a couple of hours you’d boot up Starfox 64 again to play through the fastest route, or you’d give yourself a challenge to play a single type team in Gold and Silver and excitedly tell people on the playground about your progress. You curated these Forever Games for yourself and you willingly and joyfully let them take a near-permanent space in your life.

Games are these fascinating things because there really is no fixed ‘end’ for them. You interact with them in a way that is more dynamic than, say, with a book. I never like acknowledging that the player has any power (that’s what games are for!) but there really is no greater exertion of agency than making the choice to repeat a process in a slightly different way. There’s nothing the game can do but be forced to accommodate you for as long as you wish, even if you are forty hours deep into an eight hour game. That’s what I mean by no fixed end - there’s no way for a game to stop you, say, repeating the same level or the same jump or the same action until you are personally satisfied with it. To do that with listening to a bar of a song or reading a chapter of a book is to fight the medium and the intent behind it, to limit your experience as an audience by overstepping; to do that with a game is to explore the limits of the deliberately constructed interactive boundary.

You can, if you choose, take this to extremes that warp and distort the intended experience completely. In Pokemon the popular challenge run is the Nuzlocke, Resident Evil has trophies now for various player-driven challenges such as “x number of steps”, “No saves”, “Never acknowledge the merchant’s existence”, all of these are wonderful little self-contained ecosystems of player expression and community love so strong it fundamentally changes the way that millions interact with the game. I think this is kinda beautiful - the ability for the player to choose to play the game in a way that fundamentally shifts what the game is. Speedruns are a great example of this artistic transformation on a large scale; if you’ve been paying attention to games (and charity) for the last decade plus you will have witnessed Mario 64 change from a leisurely platformer to a high performance sport where the weight of twenty five years of repetition has created a version of the game that is expected to be finished in under ten minutes. Then finished again. And again.

The sharing of enthusiasm and love for a thing and the desire to continue to play it transforms your experience of it and can transform the experience for others; it doesn’t require a hypothetical suitable game but instead the endless poking, prodding, treasure hunting, and strategising of imaginative play - something that I should point out is significantly easier to do while being part of a community.

I think that’s really the key to why I find the Forever Game so appealing -  they show we naturally and individually create imaginative play spaces within play spaces.

Not the reason I started writing this, but I found my old copy of Pokemon Gold lmao. Shroomish is here to deter the weird used game market, don't worry about him. 

There’s no real way to manipulate a static experience, only re-interpret it. As an interactive experience, a video game has just enough room for you to do both, and I think our deeply personal libraries of Forever Games shows how incredible and unique that interaction can be. 

If you are into fighting games you will find people with whole libraries of Forever Games, stretching out into the increasingly obscure distance until you start to wonder if they ever play anything else at all. Speedrunning communities are filled with people who would have initially found the hobby by simply playing their Forever Games to the point of boredom or (depending on the medium) to actual physical destruction, introduced to like-minded people who love to just play these specific games in increasingly specific ways.

You only have a certain amount of Forever Games in your life, and as you gain more responsibilities that number will naturally reduce. I used to play through the old Dawn of War: Dark Crusade campaigns on multiple difficulties with multiple factions, I don’t anymore because I am older and have to “work” and “feed myself”; my capacity for sinking time into a mostly unchanging experience has been diminished, as has my capacity to change that experience. As I age the joy in re-exploring and putting time, energy, and effort into imaginative play inside these spaces has lessened, and I think the beauty of the ‘game’ and the promise of endless entertainment has significantly lost its luster now that I’m a bitter older weirdo.

But even then I’ve found an exception - fighting games! Fighting games are an incredibly diverse genre but the foundations are always the same: mind games, character placement, spacing, knowledge, timing etc. etc. etc. and each individual game will have its own tribe of sickos desperate to convert you to Sailor Moon S or Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game and it rules. To me fighting games represent the purest form of imaginative play - upon entering the game to compete against another person you are forced straight into that headspace play as you respond and adapt to what is directly in front of you using both fundamental genre ideas and hyper-game-specific arcane bullshit.

I'm dead serious: check out this fucking game it rocks so hard. If you see the term 'kusoge' used while researching this, remember: kusoge is the Japanese word for a 'wicked dope mondo cool videogame'. 

There really is (FORESHADOWING) no good way to replicate this feeling and no good parallel anywhere else in the wide world of media. For me to have found a genre that generates that meditative, engaged feeling that used to come from hours of repeating the same story or the same grind feels like a magic trick - like I’ve found the cheat code to enjoying what I play while still improving core aspects of comprehension and physical skill.

This cannot apply to everyone, of course. Fighting games are hell to some people, games where a loss state is an actual loss can cause people stress that locks them out of imaginative play and makes them miserable. The same repetition that brings me happiness cannot be so simply parlayed to the experience of someone else; similarly I cannot engage in the joy of a yearly playthrough of FFX - that isn’t fun to me, I can’t see where that would activate or stimulate the parts of my brain that buzz when I’m Fully Gaming, and I don’t understand how it works. What I can do is wave at them cheerfully from my repetitive fighting game archipelago and permit myself a tiny sense of awe at how varied and incomprehensibly layered our interactions with these funny little pieces of entertainment media are, and how incredible it is that we can stretch out our simple, repetitive actions inside simple, repetitive structures to such an overwhelmingly creative extent.

No matter our age we take our silly toys with us as long as we can until they stop bringing us joy, and the act of pushing that enjoyment, that refusal to put one toy down permanently because we know we can come back and find a sense of home inside of it, is, to me, a beautiful tribute to the games we have played and will play. It’s a comfort to me to look at Dark Crusade, knowing that I will never feel the same feelings or enjoyment that I had for it when it was my Forever Game, because it reminds of the capacity that I have to immerse myself in a world and transform it via play into one filled with my own little stories and my own little hopes.

What a pure and lovely note to end on, I’m so glad this blog won’t have a second part! (FORESHADOWING)

* The caveat is that the name Forever Game is like... not totally accurate on it's face. If I come up with a better name I'll go back and edit it in and pretend that I was using it this whole time.

Stop, Drop, And Stagger

 

I don’t generally play RPGs. I don’t have anything against them as a genre, or as a like mechanical exercise - I just disconnect somewhere around the 20 hour mark and wind up never re-connecting without any clear reason. 

This has happened to me enough times that I’ve been through what I have come to call ‘The Critical Cycle’: Stage One; the game is wrong and stupid for forcing me to disconnect from it. Stage Two; the whole genre is wrong at its core, evidenced by my repeated disconnects. Stage Three; actually everyone else who has ever talked about the game is wrong, and my disconnect is proof that I am appreciating it on a uniquely different level. And finally Stage Four; nothing wrong with me - nothing wrong with these games either, everything falls apart and comes together in this vast and fucked up world so we might as well give the things that appeal to us a try, even if they don’t stick. 

There are probably other stages further along that I haven’t reached yet, but right now I find myself completely satisfied with where I am - trying games that I would traditionally bounce off without a shred of expectation, letting myself be beguiled by any and every promise. 

Fuck it, we ball. 

I gave it a shot, I bounced off, I bounced back, I loved it - FFXVI was a great time and a charming, wholesome reminder that striving for a better world is a dream that we need to hold on to, share, and never stop fighting for. The game tricked me into its earnestness, hiding behind a dark fantasy story of revenge, violence, and slavery, only for our protagonist to grow up, learn his lesson, and then spend the next half of the game teaching it to others. I fully bought into it - past the fantasy politics, intrigues, and world-building lay the simple fiery heart of something like Gurren Lagaan or G Gundam. We are encouraged to strip away the adult artifice that builds and twists the world into something unsolvable, and instead choose - actively, aggressively and with great resolve - to believe in ourselves and in the people around us.  

I think they'd be friends

But I don’t want to talk about the game, I want to talk about the combat. I’m sure that for other people FF16’s combat fluidity was an amazing lesson in the broad horizons of the fight, a fun expansion on the real time combat of XV and FF7 Remake Part 1. For me it was a frustrating exercise in seeing something that I immediately loved being ground down into a dull paste by the word ‘Stagger’.  

The Stagger mechanic needs to go away. Please, for the love of god, either use it meaningfully or shelve it. We are in a zone where ‘Stagger’ is a ubiquitous part of JRPG lexicon and it will never leave until we get its stamina bar to a certain threshold so that we can start doing critical damage to it. It has become a rote and boring way to interact with combat, and its existence in this game funnels an expansive field of potential choices into a repetitive grind.

I think that FFXVI has one of the best designed combat engines that I have played with, full stop. It’s astounding - every single skill you learn, every Eikon, pretty much everything (other than the big flashy super moves) changes the combat environment and allows you to control it in a different, more dynamic way. The detail and depth is staggering - you are the master of your environment and the only limit is the knowledge of your skills and the imagination with which to combine them.

If I hadn’t already had the link to DMCV pointed out and advertised to me, I would have seen this as an incredibly worthy and extraordinarily faithful bearer (FFXVI JOKE) of that game’s legacy. It really is that good.

 

The issue isn’t with the combat - it’s the goal. You aren't fighting to have fun, you aren't fighting to get better at the game, you aren't fighting for a reward or rank, you are fighting because the game wants you to take some time before the story moves on. Partway through the last third of the game, after the sky gets a little fucked, I found myself wondering if I would be happier with a more expansive skill tree, with some timing-based sword combos, maybe with a hat that I could equip that spends Gil in combat. Then it hit me - no, you fool, you moron. It isn’t the moves that I am doing; it’s that none of the moves that I do in the game matter. None of them. They’re just fucking buttons. 

Somewhere along the line FFXVI had lost the mandate of heaven (my engagement), and it was because fighting - fighting using one of the best, most in-depth systems I have seen in a game! - had stopped mattering.

I love Nektar so much - Not really related to combat but he's so good man look at him

There is an uncomfortable tension in the game between ‘raising stats to make the numbers go higher’ and ‘balling out of control, super stylish style’. The story goal is the same as in DMCV: get strong enough to kill a god, but in FFXVI we are consistently held to an absurd numeric value that starts to build an ocean between the mechanical depth and what we’re using that depth for. Our strength in this game reaches a personal skill ceiling quickly, and then we're held back from exploring further as numbers just go up gradually with levels and shinier swords - our ability to be strong is constantly shackled by a game that has run out of patience with us fucking around. Juggles mean nothing because you can only do them on small mobs, small mobs mean nothing because they never pose a threat, there are a million ways to move and to reposition others in a violent dance of elegant combat and it just doesn’t do anything.

The enemies are not smart or varied enough to force us to use our tools, so the payoff for learning and stringing together moves, keeping track of cooldowns, switching Eikons etc. is that you reach the exact same level of effectiveness as mashing randomly. This is bad! It's annoying, and so 'Stagger' becomes less of a core problem as a concept and more the number one symptom and herald of the problem; this big yellow bar that appears in the most bombastic moments of the game to remind you that you are here to press buttons, not to use skills. We stagger the big enemies not because 'Stagger' is inherently bad, but because FFXVI cannot figure out any other way to represent these larger, more threatening enemies.

After a while it certainly starts to feel like the game thinks I cannot be trusted with remembering, optimising, thinking - every "-ing" that requires the player to be engaged while playing, really. I trick myself into being switched on and active then I slip a little, my brain turns off, and I mash my way through a fight. The game doesn't seem to notice the difference. 

For combat-focussed character action games - of which FFXVI could have easily stood amongst the best - the trick to a dangerous enemy, or a uniquely dangerous group of enemies, is usually found within your core toolset - stunning, juggling, repositioning, and parrying until you are elegantly and effortlessly pirouetting on a knife-edge, where a single mistake can mean death or, worse, a D-Rank. Here the knife-edge is neither sharp nor thin, replacing ‘danger’ with ‘stagger’ so that your dazzling moves are reduced to actions for actions’ sake. When there is no risk, there is no tension or reason to explore the game mechanically - even at the very end it feels like the game is just deathly afraid of punishing you for not paying attention or not using your skills correctly, refusing to acknowledge the player's ability to learn and refusing to present us with any kind of friction that might make our fights a struggle worth overcoming.

:)

Ok, so perhaps the game just gave me too much time overall to spend with these tools to the point of exhaustion. In smaller, tighter games like DMCV and Bayonetta this is an impossibility, but hey maybe great combat gets tiring and loses meaning through Gamer Ennui. The encounters don’t stop, and after a point it’s fair to say I no longer sought them out to indulge in the gifts and mechanics I had been so generously given. Possible, for sure, but then - during a later story mission - I found myself using Shiva’s ice dodge to freeze an enemy in place and reposition before spending the level 3 Zantetsuken to combo from a move I have never seen Torgal do before. My third eye is opened, the game is a broad horizon with unlimited opportunities, fuck me, this is fun as hell. 

Then I encounter the boss in that area, a late-game challenge with a cutscene heralding the arrival of a huge lumbering destructive force with a terrible attitude. The yellow bar appears at the top of the screen, stretching out into eternity, and I am reminded that my brief joy in expressing myself through combat is about to be reduced, again, to throwing numbers at a bigger number until it's over and I can get back to believing in the burning fist of my heart or whatever.

FFXVI doesn't really want me to fight - it fucked up by letting me fight so well and so creatively with so few guardrails. FFXVI wants me to win, and it wants me to win in a certain way, having levelled up a certain amount, and taken a certain amount of time - and in doing so takes what should be the most fun and engaging moments in the game and frustratingly boils them down to waiting, waiting, waiting for a stupid yellow bar to deplete.

Kweh!