#part of me does think nintendo has some favouritism towards him because he's the most unique and developed of the champions

[timegears-moved]

okay revali brainrot incoming: rewatching the botw trailers and i find it interesting that revali was not only the first champion shown but he was also the only one to appear before the e3 2017 trailer dropped like half a year later and showed daruk and mipha

#bwark #part of me does think nintendo has some favouritism towards him because he's the most unique and developed of the champions #but that also might just be wishful thinking on my part #totk certainly hasn't helped #anyway i know it's been 6 years but can i still gush about how amazing the e3 2017 trailer was #like actual chills

[theangrypokemaniac]

@nyarthsis

If Team Rocket 'always had a heart for unpopular Pokémon', that's an admission their Alola catches aren't particular loveable creatures, so I'm not thinking anything too controversial.

You're saying they take pity on the animals no one wants, as in it's normal for me not to find them adorable.

Some Pokémon, such as Lucario, become fan favourites without the advertisement of a regular role the anime. With Wobbuffet, Bewear, Stufful, Mareanie and Mimikyu, do people like them for themselves, or because of their association with Team Rocket?

I think its the latter. I can't imagine there would be such interest in them were they to be owned by a Twerp or appear as a one-off. Really then, it's not what or who they are, it's to whom they belong that matters.

Alola has really devalued catching. Rather than be true to the source material, so battering a Pokémon into submission, as Ash did with Bulbasaur, Primeape, Muk, and many others, now you have to ask their permission!

Bewear didn't even get that. She hung around for no reason, and her 'friend' Stufful was belatedly tacked on. I see why those two were left behind, as Team Rocket had no right to take them elsewhere.

In terms of welfare, Mimikyu and Mareanie are better off staying with them, free and safe, rather than locked in the insalubrious depths of H.Q., but then it never bothered the writers sending previous Pokémon into an uncertain future, so what difference does it make now?

It can only be that, like their predecessors, there is no intention to ever bring them back, but unlike the rest, the fans can't even be allowed the vain hope of a return, not with this rather awkward disposal.

It's feasible that Jessie and James could call their base and request old monsters to join them, but it's difficult to imagine they'd fly across the world to Alola, wander through the woods, pick 'em up and go all the way back again. Why make parting so final and irreversible?

It does imply that Game Freak don't like them, so why should I?

I keep noticing this fickle attitude. A new era starts, we're expected to fall instantaneously in love with every element, beg for more and yet more. Then, once the next region arrives, this adoration asked of us is meant to evaporate and immediately transfer to the next batch.

Well why start to like them, if eventually the makers don't care, to the extent you wouldn't even know previous Pokémon had ever been alive?

Have you heard one mention of Seviper, Yanmega, Dustox, Cacnea, Carnivine, and Mime Junior since they left?

Why were they happy to chuck Wobbuffet after Sinnoh, yet fetched for Kalos?

How could Team Rocket live without it for an entire generation but suddenly it's indispensable again? What do you imagine the rest of their Pokémon felt about that?

Have Jessie and James wondered allowed how Arbok, Weezing, Lickitung and Victreebel are doing?

What of the last two generations?

What is this nonsense where every character is so detached from the past?

Supposing I was to force myself to appreciate them: since they've gone, never to return, I'd be dissatisfied with the show, thus no better off than I am now.

My feelings don't run on a switch. I can't find myself besotted one minute then dump the object of affection without a second thought, just because Nintendo want it from me.

Even if I had a more positive opinion of the current interpretation, there's no benefit to becoming involved when it's all so fleeting.

Mareanie is ugly, with three teeth. I think he's a sea anenome, so ought to be more attractive, but it's covered in nipples instead!

It looks like a bonsai tree growing breasts, reminiscent of the hideous content lurking within an Hieronymous Bosch painting.

The idea that all Mimikyu copy Pikachu, the most famous Pokémon, when in their world it's nothing special, is too stupid for me to accept. How could that be coincidence?

It's referencing reality, acknowledging the real world's view of Pikachu as the star, so if it's breaking the fourth wall, it invites disbelief.

Wobbuffet does sod all. It's a complete dead weight and has no attacks. Yet it's the one to survive generation after generation. Where's the logic in that?

I suspect his popularity rests on being there so long he's considered part of the furniture, the sole catch in which you can invest an emotional connection whilst fairly certain he'll remain around.

By now it ought to have developed some semblance of a personality, but it's as faceless as ever. Other Pokémon that have been and gone had a bit more about them, but Wobba's so bland no one can summon the energy to write him out.

If he went, what would you miss? Breaking out of his ball and hissing 'WAAAAAHBUHFEH'? Is that so integral?

I have several objections:

What is it meant to be?

Why does its tail have eyes?

Why is that never mentioned?

Is it a sort of quadruped, or has it only one foot with four toes, arranged like the bottom of a medical walking stick?

A lot of my reactions to Pokémon are influenced by encountering them in the games. With Wobbuffet, I remember first coming across it in the cave near Blackthorn City, and just as you're winning the fight, it pulls out Destiny Bond and suddenly you're both down.

When you finally get one, it's tricky to train. You have no choice but to guess whether the opposition will launch a physical or special move, and mostly you get it wrong. He never learns anything else and doesn't evolve, so it's that forever.

Persevering with Magikarp is worthwhile, but what's to be gained from taking any time out to fight with Wobbuffet?

The anime eliminates this problem. You're aware of the nature of the approaching onslaught because you can see it coming, and the opponent said it aloud.

In this context Wobbuffet should be the most powerful Pokémon in the universe. Come on, it can deflect every attack!

Is it? No. It has a successful defence about once a generation, and still loses the battle. I can't say if it's worse to be utterly pointless, or to not fulfil one's potential.

I resent it muscling in on the motto, as if it's considers itself of equal rank to Meowth. No it's not!

When I was young, there was a tendency for magazines to refer to Team Rocket as a duo. Meowth was judged to be in the same position as Pikachu: a main character yes, and valuable enough to be accorded the privilege of liberty, but still very much owned by people.

You would see references to Jessie and James as his Trainers, though how they assumed this worked went unexplained. Even if shared, one had to have to caught him, thus be his proper owner.

Later on this developed into them being three equal members, and the term 'TRio' emerged, but now, although perhaps not officially recognised, there's an attitude of treating them as a quartet.

It's just wrong! Wobbuffet's not been around since day one. He didn't join Team Rocket voluntarily because he had nowhere else to go. It was a choice made for him by his original Trainer, so out of his hands, or rather his flippers.

If he was an independent Pokémon who just tagged along one day, that would be different, but it belongs to Jessie. Promoting one of hers means James is lesser, and no longer equal.

In each generation Team Rocket catch at least one local Pokémon, but as Wobbuffet's there, it ends up with Jessie having more on her side than James, and I dislike the imbalance. Plus the one he does get is violent.

It can't be solved by giving him another new one, as then he's captured two in the region, and she has only one, so again it's skewed.

Whilst Wobbuffet does count in numbers, he's not on the level of the rest, who fight regularly. He's both there and not simultaneously.

I'm still irked the way Lickitung was ejected to make room.

It was the best Pokémon they ever had! It took out Pikachu, Vulpix and Bulbasaur with one move! It would've won those Princess Dolls for Jessie if the writers hadn't changed the rules so that Lick only affects those of sound mind!

It was as if they realised their mistake too late, and so Lickitung was featured less and less to avoid it dominating a fight, then hurriedly traded away for something reliably feeble.

The following analogy you may not understand, but I think it fits rather aptly:

There's a game called Final Fantasy VIII. One of the side quests involves you racing through a castle under a time limit. If successful, you are rewarded with Odin as a Guardian Force, which is a deity that will provide a defence.

Unlike others, he is out of your control, but every so often, as you enter battle, he turns up and annihilates your opponents. It's very welcome.

Unfortunately this game was programmed by bunyips, who clearly didn't want the last section of the game to be accidently easier for you. Oh no. If you're progressing, it ain't gonna be through luck, or turning the console on and off until he arises.

Therefore, towards the close, you come up against ex-friend Seifer. Odin is fixed to rush to your aid, but when he does, bloody Seifer slices him in half, horse and all!

He killed Odin, the ancient King of the North! The Lord of Valhallah! The Father of the Vikings!

It's not normal fighting death, it's irreversible. He's gone for good.

After this Gilgamesh introduces himself as a replacement. He too will randomly appear and set about the enemy.

The problem is that whilst Odin destroyed monsters unfailingly, with Gilgamesh it's a rarity.

He uses four swords, and which you get is also a lottery.

One is the same as Odin's, two deal average damage, but not death, and the worst one depletes 1 HP, so it might as well not have bothered.

Not only does it arrive but a fraction of the time, but it's in a fraction of those times that it's of any assistance, which is something of a comedown.

Lickitung is Odin: didn't see it often, but it tore the place apart!

Wobbuffet is Gilgamesh: once in a blue moon it provides rescue, but it's on a lot lower percentage than it's predecessor.

It's difficult not to be disappointed.

#team rocket #wobbuffet #mareanie #mimikyu #bewear #stufful

[nanigma]

Leon Fanbook Translation: Questionnaire Results

Link to the Takumi Fanbook

Introduction

Profile

Famous Lines

Relationships

Leon&Kamui + Words of Love

Daily Routine + Cooking Showdown

Fashion Check

Dream Change

Interview

Sorry for the wait, but there was just so MUCH text involved in this update. I think I spent about 10 hours total translating this over the past weeks. It had even more text than the Takumi version, since they added some additional comments and reader answers. Just one more update to go after this one and I’ll have finished it. Gonna take a break from translating for a while after I get back to the promised translations I couldn’t do in the meantime.

Part time job is still going and paying decently well. Still, more always helps, so if you’d like to support my work, consider buying me ko-fi or two.  

- All the photos on this post were taken by the lovely @zaziki7

My comments in italics

Questionaire Results

Pages 40-41

Page 40

The part were you and me talk about Prince Leon!

When we commemorated the release of our Prince Leon magazine, we also send out a questionare through the official Nintendo Dream twitter account. For 10 days, from July 13th 2018 to the 23rd, we accepted 560* filled out questionnaires and will now publish the results. We will convey the intense and simply overwhelming love that Leon's fans have for him, their explanations for it, and the heartfelt well-wishes towards him.

*Interesting to note that Takumi had 627 questionnaries filled out.

Questionary Demographic

Gender = Backed overwhelmingly by women!

Graph

Women: 89,5%

Men: 7.3%

Unspecified: 3.2%

Age = Over 80% in their teens and twenties!

Graph:

Twenties: 50.4%

Teens: 28%

Thirties: 16.5%

Unspecified: 2.8

Fourties and older: 2.1%

These are the results. The percentage of Leon's female fans almost reaching 90% is a deviation that surpasses all imagination. Surely the percentage of women is as high as it is, because we were asking for a magazine. Conversely, isn't it sort of unfair that male fans of „Fire Emblem“ do not have a character fanbook appealing to them? At least that's what we think... Gentlemen among fans, raise your voice!

They already get 90% of the figurines. I think they are more than compensated.

Q1. (Of course Leon's most attractive feature is that pretty face of his!)

“What about Leon do you like? Please choose three options.“  

Graph (no actual numbers given, so I'll just approximate)

His face: ~325

His voice: ~200

His heart: ~225

His outfit: ~75

His behaviour: >75

His strength: ~125

His retainers: ~25

Everything: ~250

Q1. Picking out the other answers:

“The way he uses magic!!“

Zola: “I-is this my cue?“

Odin: “Not you. Sit down.“

Other answers: How he feels inferior to his older brothers. It's quite human./ His slight clumsiness/ When he acts like an older brother/ How he is sweet to his brother or sister, even when facing them as enemies/ How he is kind to both his family and subordinates/ His lower eyelashes/ (English comment passing through) Smart, condescending, well written character, and a great unit to boot. His design with the black and purple designs reflect light beautifully/ How he always does his best to use his wits to approach others with nonchalant friendliness and to dodge the scrutiny of his opponents./How he is the kind of man, who, while not always used to flirting and occasionally showing surprise, will take the lead when it comes down to it and spoil his partner./ First answer repeats here for some reason/ How his character, face, magic and entire existence make him the very image of a stud. But I also like his less icy character traits a lot.

Q1. Picking out the other answers:

“His lower eyelashes!!”

Aqua: “Yes... Leon's eyes are quite sharp.”

Zero: ”That’s not what you should be paying attention to...”

Page 41

Q2. (Cute? Cool? In either case, he makes you want to protect him!)

“How would you describe your feelings for Leon? Please choose 3 options.“

Graph

Cool: <400

Cute: <450

Strong: >150

Healing: ~250

Want to snuggle up to him: <150

Hope to interact with him: >50

Beautiful (and other answers): <5

Other answers: Even though he is an excellent take on the old-school, collected hot guy, I always love it when his collar is inside out./ I want to spoil him/ I want to worship him/ I want to pat his head/ I want to support his feelings for Camilla/ I want to see his sleeping face/ I want to watch him from afar/ I think it's very human how he appears to be able to do anything, yet there are many things he cannot do/ etc.

Leon ol’ pal, there is actual support for your darkest secret out there...

Q2. Picking out the other answers:

“I envy your popularity!!“

Marx: “Who? Who could have left this answer....”

Macbeth: “W-Why are you looking at me?”

Q2. Picking out the other answers:

“I want to marry him!“

Elise: “Eh, then I want to marry him too!”

Camilla: “My... stealing isn't nice, alright?”

Am I really supposed to believe Elise is in her teens? Also, what is this family?

Pages 42-43

Page 42

Q3 (Those fleeting moments, where he breaks from his cold-hearted and unfeeling persona show Leon's true self!)

“Tell us which one of Leon's scenes and lines is the best of them all.“

1st Place (at 34.8%): Birthright Chapter 18 – Prince Leon of Nohr: His scene with Kamui after the map is cleared.

“... I lied, sister. I lied about hating you.“

2nd Place (at 20.5%): When doing a critical attack.

“Turn to dust already!“

3rd Place (at 18.2%): Prologue Chapter 1 – Nohrian Brethren: Scene with Kamui

“Eh!? My collar is inside out!? T- Then say so already...“

Other answers: Birthright Chapter 18: “The true blackness will paint over everything... your life, your future, it will all come to nothing...“/ Birthright Chapter 18: “That's quite the thing to say. If you keep looking, it should become obvious soon enough. Come on, I am already... this close after all.“/ A-Support with Odin: “It doesn't matter which world you go to, you'll always continue to be my retainer.“/ A-Support with Elise: “Yeah. Even if we only share half of our blood, even if all we are doing comes to naught.... so long as we accept each other, our bond will not be torn.“

Q4. (With the way it makes his pale skin shine, the Dark Knight outfit is far and away the most popular!)

“Tell us which one of Leon's possible classes (outfits) is your favourite!“

Graph:

Dark Knight: 79.7%

Sorceror: 0.6%

Butler: 0.4%

No percentages from here

Strategist

Dark Flier

Grandmaster

Others

Below graph box

Overwhelming approval for the Dark Knight! Straddling his horse adorned with golden ornaments, the armour carrying the elegance of the night sky, and the garments lightly dancing around his figure proudly represent the official outfit of Prince Leon! It's befitting of a king!

Translating this made me come close to crying from frustration.

Page 43

Q5 (The bond between master and servants are strong! Zero and Odin come at number one and two!)

“Tell us which character is your favourite besides Leon.“

1st Place: Zero (at 111 votes)

2nd Place: Odin (at 61 votes)

3rd Place: Elise (at 57 votes)

4th Place: Marx (at 45 votes)

5th Place: Camilla (at 38 votes)

6th Place: Takumi (at 36 votes)

7th Place: F!Kamui (at 32 votes)

8th Place: M!Kamui (at 30 votes)

9th Place: Foleo (at 21 votes)

While within the story, the bonds between the Nohrian siblings run deep, the popularity of Leon's group in general is superior even to that. But Zero has the most overwhelming support of them all. When adding in his personal history, one can't help but grin at seeing the viscously distant Zero having close banter with Leon. Surprisingly (?) big brother Marx beats out Kamui and gets into 4th place.

Pages 44-45

Page 44

Q6. (Most think he seems the type to join a social sciences type of activity like the student council! On the other hand, many also believe he wouldn't join any club at all.)

“If Leon went to a modern day school, what kind of club do you think he'd join?“

Graph

Student Council: ~70

None: >50

Literature/Literary Club: <45

Chess Club: ~35

Equestrian/Horse-Riding Club: >25

Science Club: >25

Gardening Club: <25

Wind Instrument Club: >20

Book/Reading Club: <20

Astronomy Club: >15

Tennis Club: ~15

Shogi Club: ~15

Chemistry Club: >10

Supernatural/Occult Club: ~10

Fencing Club: ~10

Art Club: 10

Other: History Club/ Basketball Club/ Board Game Club/ Mathematical Research Club/ Soccer Club/ Light Music Club/ Magic Club/ Theater Club/ Debate Club/ Broadcasting Club/ Science&Engineering Club/ Newspaper Club/ System Appliances Club/ Go Club/ Conversational English Club/ Table Tennis Club/ Tomato Appreciation Club/ Handicrafts Club/ Swimming Club/ Biology Club

Most answers we received weren't about any club activities, but the school council!! No matter the circumstances, he still gives off a regal image. On the opposite extreme, many were opting for him to not join a club at all, probably reflecting his attitude of wanting to make his own path without being tied down by other people. The other answers referred to his demonstrated rationality and reasoning with clubs such as the literature and literary clubs, or his desire to raise tomatoes with the gardening club. Within the 'Other' answers, there was certainly a theme centering around the „Debate Club“ (likely because Leon is skilled at fighting with words alone).  

Q7. (So Leon really is the the indoor type? Books were his key item* all along.)

“You are going on a date with Leon! Where do you think you'll go?“

*dating sim reference

Graph

The library: ~70

An art gallery/museum: <50

Some kind of tomato plantation: ~45

A spot from which to gaze at the night sky: ~35

A high-class restaurant: >30

The cinema: ~30

A stylish café: ~25

An aquarium: <25

A planetarium: >20

A theme park: <20

Some Nohrian place: >15

His place: ~15

Others: ~140

Other answers: Watching a play at the theater/ The park/ The cinema (this was already in the graph?)/ A forest/ His home/ My Room (as in the Fates one)/ A flower field/ An antique shop/ Exploring the castle/ A place from which to watch the night sky filled with stars/ We'd have walks from the Sakurahommachi station in Nagoya, where I would drag Leon, who hates getting his feet wet, to the beach. We'd visit the Landmarktower in Yokohama and see the whole city sprawled out below from the viewing platform. Then finally, while riding a ferry's wheel, I'd want to watch as Leon would blush and become embarassed at failing to work up the courage to congratulate me on my birthday by the time we reached the top./ To an orchestra performance/ A botanical garden/ A horse ride/ A curiosity shop for tomes/ A haunted house

Some have clearly put more thought into this than others...

Leon love for tomatoes is carried by a deep knowledge of them! Speaking of, the library, art galleries and museums, are places that do the most to challenge his intellectual mind. Next is something normal people would never have thought of: A tomato plantation. Probably to go gather tomatoes. Enjoying your favourite person's favourite together must be a very fun activity. It makes us imagine Leon with a carefree smile on his face.

Page 45

Q8. (While his image is all over the place, the common feature happens to be the intellectual elite!?)

“If Leon were to enter the modern workforce, what kind of job do you think he would have?“

Graph

Something IT-related (including management): ~60

Scholar/Researcher: ~30

Lawyer: ~25

Company President/ Member of a Company President's family: <25

Company Employee: >20

On a Tomato Plantation: <20

Secretary: ~15

Teacher: <15

Company Manager: ~10

Marx's Confidant: <10

Government Employee: <10

Company director: <10

Librarian: <10

Doctor: <10

Bureaucrat: >5

Others: ~190

Other answers: Accountant/Whatever it is, he'd be wearing a suit/ Strategist/ Flower Shop Owner/ Human Resources/ System Engineer/ Diplomat/ Public Prosecutor/ Model/ Greengrocer/ Actor/ Employee at a pharmaceutical company/ Policeman/ Administrative Scrivener*/ Day Trader/ Playing in an Orchestra/ Bank Employee/ Designer/ Investor/ Translator/ Real Estate Agent/ Publisher/ Bartender/ He'd come from a good family, graduate from a famous university, find employment at a leading company and be a very promising newcomer there./ Idol/ Astronaut/ Free-lance Designer

*From Wikipedia: Administrative Scrivener(行政書士 Gyōsei shoshi)is a legal profession in Japan which files government licenses and permits, drafts documents, and provides legal advice around such interactions.

What overshadows the minority opinions are results strongly influenced by Leon's reputation as a schemer. He, who even during the plot stuck to his own methods and views, would surely acquire expertize the business world of our time and establish himself with his own abilities in the blink of an eye. Futhermore, most people see Leon at the top of some kind of organization, rather than below someone like Marx, when our previous impressions of him saw him as someone's number 2.

Q9. (The impression of him having a preferance for scientific subjects is strong! It's surprising to see English were it is... we assumed it would be German.)  

So it's semi-officially confirmed that Nohrians are meant to speak German?

“If Leon was a teacher at a school, what kind of subject do you think he'd teach?“

Graph

Math: >100

Natural Sciences: >75

Chemistry: ~55

English: >45

Physics: ~45

Science: >25

Japanese ('Native Language'): ~25

History: <25

Biology: ~20

Social Studies: <20

History/World History: >15

Others: <30

Other answers: Economics/ Ethics/ Philosophy/ Civics/ Music/ Art/ Geography/ Magic

The impression that Leon is the science type was certainly shared by many, so as a result Math and the Sciences all stand at the top. His Strategist class (That is a tactician. Many have pointed out that in our age it would propably translate to being an expert speculator) also left quite the impact on these results. Although it's possible to say his love for books within the story has certainly been noticed, even when considering at answers for subjects like socials sciences, Japanese and English, the overwhelming majority still leans towards scientific subjects. While strict his methods would also be precise, so there can be no doubt he'd make an excellent teacher.

Pages 46-47

Page 46

Q10. (This is a bit biased, but it's the cool Leon we are talking about, so we want to hear his whispers full of sarcasm.)

“Tell us the one line you would want to hear from Leon.“

1st Place: “You really have the worst luck.“

2nd Place: “Turn to dust already!“

3rd Place: “I love you“*

*It shows both „Aishiteru“ and „Daisuki“ here, both of which are commonly translated as „I love you“. However, Aishiteru is a lot stronger in meaning than Daisuki. You wouldn't say that in everyday life even to your spouse of 10 years. It's inappropriate for all but the most dramatic situations. Like 'someone is dying' dramatic. This has been a language PSA.

Other answers: “How foolish“/ “My collar isn't inside out, right?“/ “My collar is inside out“/ “... Good grief, you really can't be trusted without me around.“/ “Jeez... looks like I have no choice. I'll protect you.“/ !You are pretty lucky.“/ “Eh... Sister you are sca-... Too close! You are too close!“/ “Do you want to eat tomatoes with me? Sister?“/ “I love you“/ “Are you stupid“/ “Despicable fool.“/ “Death shall be your redemption.“/“Look only at me, think only about me.“/ “I love you.“/ “Can I hug you?“/ Upon telling him his collar is inside out: “Ugh, say so earlier!“/ “I'll destroy you with black arts.“/ “Jeez, I'm no match for big brother.“/ “Pull yourself together, sister.“/ “Feel free to become Foleo's wife“/ “It's a lie that I hate you.“/ “That was well done.“/ “Welcome home.“/ “I want to eat your miso soup.“ *chokes*/ “Thank you for cleaning everyday“ (Maid setting)/ “How clumsy.“/ “You are always hard at work. I expect much from your services.“/ “Aren't these clothes inside out? Eh? That's how they are designed? Uhh...“/ “My collar is inside out!? … Tell me that sooner!“/ “Huh...?“/ “Traitors are a disgrace to the Kingdom of Nohr. Death shall be your redemption.“/ (In English) “I love you so much, please love yourself.“/ “You really can't do anything without me.“/ “Do you also want a tomato?“ (as in eating one)/ “Let's eat tomatoes together.“/ “I love it when you turn redder than a tomato.“/ “Don't say I have a woman's face.... I'd rather have you say that I'm cool instead of cute.“/ “Isn't your coat inside out as well? … Hehe, I'm kidding.“

Everyone's love is bursting from these answers. We can fully understand both the group that wants to be disparaged and the group that wants to be treated gently. Seeing just how many fans aren't satisfied with just a tsundere, but desire a cheeky little brother who verbally abuses them, we get the feeling we have found Leon's true appeal.

Kinkshame 100% appropriate.

Page 47

Takumi VS. Leon!!

Just like in this book, we also made a questionary to celebrate the release of the „Prince Takumi of Hoshido“ fanbook. Both of the questionaries included 5 questions pitting Leon and Takumi against each other. Although it appeared mostly like a popularity contest, we also gathered many responses and explanations that were overflowing with love. Although we have obviously published these answers in the Takumi fanbook as well, we will be publishing the comments that came with choosing Leon only in this magazine.

Q11. (Their popularity is almost exactly the same! Those who answered with something else mostly commented about how they „wanted to watch team X from afar.“)

“If you had to choose a side between them, which one would you pick?“

Graph

Leon: 45.1%

Takumi: 43.9%

Others: 11.0%

Q12. (Although they share many of the same habits and outlooks, it seems Takumi came out on top on this one.)

“Who do you think makes for the better father?“

Leon: 48.8%

Takumi: 51.2%

Reasons for choosing Leon: He praises Foleo from the dephts of his heart. He is able to truly accept him./ He hasn't known love from either of his parents, so he seems to put great effort into raising his child/ He seems very good at giving out praise!/ As a strategist he seems like he's be great at planning out child-rearing and lifeplans./ Because he seems to have an understanding of his child as a human being/ After apologizing to his son for rejecting him without even listening to his side, he is able to come to a mutual understanding with him/ Because he seems great at applying the carrot-and-stick method/ Because he is someone who holds his family dear. Together with his child he is able to learn from both success and failure and grow as a person./ Since he knows what he wanted for his own childhood/ He seems great at calming people down/ He seems the type to help his kids with their studies

Q13. (Just like with Question 12, Leon comes up short in the results. Could it be that he is a bit of a complex father figure?)

Could it??

“Whose son/daughter would you want to be?“

*I orginally translated this question wrong in the Takumi fanbook. The additional ansers here gave it context. I’ll correct it there as soon as I get around to it.

Leon: 43.6%

Takumi: 56.4%

Reasons for choosing Leon: While he is strict, he seems like he'd take care when teaching magic arts./ Although I also want to be Foleo's sibling, mostly I just want to be praised by Leon./ If I conveyed my love for him all sweet, I am sure he'd be grateful./ I'd have a beautiful daddy/ Because I could support Foleo no matter what his dreams were/ He seems very cold, but I think his love runs deep/ Because he seems the type to passionately devote himself to helping me study/ Human nature/ I want him to praise me by saying „That's my child!“/ He seems like he'd be a good hugger when he is in the mood to spoil/ He'd probably be a doting father/ Although he seems like he'd be a very careful father, I want to be there to see him be careless at times/ I want to see how his usually calm presentation as a father gets disrupted by his subordinates/ Because Team Leon has Zero in it/ Although he'd deny it at first, someday he'd become a father who understands his love for his child./ Because I want to have a knowledgable father/ Although cruel, he is nice to his friends and family/ It'd be fun being around Zero and Odin from a young age.

Q.14 (Their popularity is the same here, leading them to share perfectly identical results! There were several heated comments explaning the decision!

“If you could have one of them as your own child, which one would you choose?”

Graph:

Leon: 50%

Takumi: 50%

Reasons for choosing Leon: Although he'd be a bit careless, I can see him becoming a son worth boasting about./ I want to coddle him/ He'd be an obedient child growing up. Also, since he's grow up to be very beautiful I would want to dress him up a lot./ He would probably need to be helped out a lot, which is just too cute!/ Because I want to spoil Leon!!/ Because I want a well-mannered child/ I want to watch over him with a smile whenever he is clumsily rushing through life/ Because being both smart and friendly is very cute!/ Because I want to defeat Leon's unbelievable loneliness with praise!/ I want Leon to have more confidence in himself/ Until I die, I want to continue seeing Leon as an irreplacable presence in my life, more valuable than anyone else./ I hope to decrease Leon's inferiority-complex even a little/ Since he is starved for motherly-love, I want to be the one to show it to him/ Because I want to feed him lots of delicious tomato dishes/ So we can read lots of books together/ He seems to be the obedient, quiet type/ Since Leon's relationship with his mother can't be called good, I want to raise him lovingly this time around./ He|d be a smart, hard-working son to boast about/ Because I want to have him enter a boy's choir group/ He is just so cute!

Anyone else get the feeling some of these people would be better served with a doll than a child?

Q.15 (An indoor type like Leon can't hope to compete in this with an outdoor type like Takumi...)

“If you were stranded together on a deserted island, who do you think you could rely on most?“

Graph

Leon: 39.1%

Takumi: 60.9%

Reasons for choosing Leon: I bet he could do something with Brunhilde (such as harvesting fruit)/ I think Leon would be better at staying calm and make the right decisions during such circumstances.  Then he'd use magic to light a fire, dig a waterway, cut down trees and gather materials to then use them to build a house/ I think he'd be able to stay calm about it/ Utilizing his vast knowledge, he'd likely be able to provide safe water and food./ Because he can grow apples/ Either of his retainers would give it their all/ Unlikely to panic, he'd be a calm guide/ He can make fire with magic/ As he is called 'Gravitymaster', he can manipulate the earth as much as he likes and provide a lifestyle that way./ Having magic that can manipulate gravity seems useful/ No matter what happens, I am sure he'd be able to use his knowledge to get by somehow. Plus, I am sure big siblings Camilla and Marx would rush in to the rescue.

So what do you think of the results of these 15 questions? We truly thank everyone who gave their answers within such a limited time. Although we think that there were a lot of unexpected questions relating to our modern way of life, but do you not agree that in this way we were able to more clearly solidify our image of Leon? If all of you continue supporting and showing your love for Leon... we can only call that the correct result.

-------------

Next update will finally be the last. It may take a bit to get out, but it should happens faster than this. I just realized I’ve spent over half a year on this project...I want to sleep 100 years..  

#nanigma translates #fire emblem fates #fe14 #leon #fanbook #fire emblem leon

[awfulcomingdown]

Live From Wherever: It’s the awfulcomingdown Top 10 Games of 2020

An Introduction

I graduated from university in May of 2020. In the 7 months since, I haven’t done much. I’ve spent a lot of time in empty homes, trying to get up.

What I have done, though, in this time, is play a lot of video games. There’s been very little else to do. I played classic indie games I’d never touched. I played dozens-of-hours-long-JRPGs I never thought I’d finish. I’ve gotten a lot better at just hanging out with video games.

So at the end of this year I’ve written what might be the only thing I could really write about 2020: a list of my favourite games of the year.

And so I now present:

Live From Wherever: It’s the awfulcomingdown Top 10 Games of 2020

10: The Stanley Parable

The most important thing that happens in The Stanley Parable comes in the first five minutes of the game. You watch the introductory cutscene, leave Stanley’s work station, walk through the deserted office, and come to a set of doors. The Narrator says “When Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he entered the door on his left.” But you haven’t. You haven’t done that. He doesn’t say that you should or that you would, he says that you already have. But you’re still standing there. You haven’t done anything.

And so the rest of the game unfolds from the brilliance of this opening statement. The Narrator says what you’ve done, and then you either do or do not do it. There are some good jokes in there, too.

But so the point is that the rest of the game, all the possible endings/jokes/things to see, are just a fun sort of way to spend some time, none of them being the actual important part of the game, because the important parts already happened.

Okay but so there are some endings that feel like they’re worth writing about. This one’s called the Dream Ending, unofficially or maybe officially. It goes like this:

When you get to a stairwell, and the Narrator says that you went upstairs to see your boss, you go down the stairs, and when you do that, the Narrator begins talking about how you just couldn’t face your boss. It was too scary. He’d think you’re crazy.

The Narrator then says that Stanley begins to think that maybe he is crazy. He says that Stanley begins to wonder why doors always shut behind him, why he can’t see his feet or body, why the basement hallways and rooms he’s been walking through have clearly been repeating themselves, over and over, the entire time he’s been walking down there.

The Narrator says that Stanley comes to the conclusion that he’s dreaming. He (Stanley) begins to make himself float, and makes the space around him turn to stars. The Narrator says he begins to wonder how he’s got so much control over his dream. And then, the Narrator says, Stanley begins to wonder why there’s a voice in his head, describing all of his thoughts and actions. He begins to wonder why the voice is describing him wondering about the voice. He wonders if this voice speaks to all people in their dreams.

The Narrator says that, of course, this is not a dream. Stanley decides to prove that it is.

He closes his eyes (the screen goes black), and the Narrator describes him feeling the sensation of lying in his bed in his apartment. When Stanley’s eyes open, we see the same repeating basement we were in before. The Narrator says:

“Stanley began screaming.”

Eventually, the screen goes black, and the Narrator begins talking about Mariella. He says that one day while she was walking to work she came across a dead man lying on the sidewalk. He says that the woman knows that the man was crazy, and she becomes thankful that she is not crazy, and that she has her life together, and she generally looks down on this crazy man. Then she turns from the body and resumes her walk to work. Then it ends.

This game has a lot of things to say about a lot of things. They might all be brilliant. Stanley spends his days sitting in front of a screen waiting to be told what buttons to press and how long to press them for. The Narrator says that to most people this would be torturously boring, but Stanley feels like he was made to do it. He’s happy. He enjoys being told what to do and then doing it and then receiving the desired positive result. This is maybe too obvious a metaphor for me to explain here without feeling ridiculous.

So but anyway, The Stanley Parable is most interesting to me as a game that’s taunting video games and sometimes maybe narratives and reality as a whole, or that’s presenting you with the exciting nightmare feeling of reality breaking down around you.

I guess let’s maybe talk about the scene that takes place right before the credits roll.

I don’t remember how you get there, what path you take. All that I remember and all that matters is that you find yourself removed from Stanley’s body, looking down from atop the room where Stanley is first presented with a choice. The Narrator says “When Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he entered the door on his left,” and nothing happens, because we’re not there to control Stanley. We’re just watching. Stanley stays motionless as the Narrator again asks for him to please make a choice. The asking turns to pleading. The Narrator’s voice cracks as he begs Stanley to please just make a choice. He says it doesn’t even matter which he makes, the Narrator promises that Stanley will win and everything will be great either way so just Please make a choice. It gets desperate and surreal and you’re standing there above it all as the names of the people who made the game begin to scroll past your eyes.

Yes, this game is great.

9: Paratopic

Paratopic is a game made of only the things that need to be there. It cuts from scene to scene in an instant. When it wants you to go in a certain direction, it makes you do so.

It wasn’t until I googled this game for some reason that I can’t remember that I learned that it tells the story of three different characters. I didn’t like that. I much preferred playing this game and feeling like things were just happening. That’s how I continue to think about the game: things just happen.

At the beginning of the game you sit alone in a restaurant, a gun sitting unloaded in front of you. Pick it up, load it, walk around the restaurant if you want. It (the restaurant) is empty. Walk to the door behind the counter, kick it in, point your gun at the man therein, the game cuts to a black screen with the word “Paratopic” at center,. It cuts again, you’re standing in front of an elevator in a dim and faded apartment building. Minutes later, mid-conversation with your neighbour, the scene cuts. You’re driving a car. Your car moves forward on its own, you can steer. You sit there and listen to static-backed radio stations wherein the hosts speak what almost sounds like English. It’s incomprehensible. Different objects (gun, briefcase, nothing, etc.) appear beside you in the passenger seat as you look and look away.

The whole game is like this; things just happening.

That’s the value of this game to me. It just shows you a bunch of things, little sketches of scenes and conversations and forests and atrocities, and then it cuts away and you’re somewhere else, back in the car. The game ends with you finding the corpse of the character you’d earlier been playing as. It costs $6.92CAD on Nintendo Switch.

This game works from a philosophic foundation that all video games would be better off using. You don’t need things that don’t need to be there. You are playing a video game; you don’t need to lie about that. You don’t need to explain things. Things can just happen.

Because of its total lack of video game bullshit, I was able to show it to a friend who does not really play video games. I was able to put a controller in her hands and let her play the game without having to explain a hundred different terrible mechanics and justifications. She could just play it and sit there and feel creeped out by this work. That’s what happens when you make a good video game; it can be shown to a human being.

And so Paratopic is the first example on this list of what I consider to be one kind of great video game: the Straight Razor. Something so fine and clean and simple that it needs no justification or explanation. It is Good and Well Made and Not Full of Shit.

There are going to be a lot of other games on this list that exemplify these qualities, but let Paratopic be a poster child for what a good, clean, focused video game can do.

8: Videoball

Videoball came out in 2016 and was a commercial failure. It forced its lead designer back to a day job. It’s near impossible to find anyone to play against.

So I never did. I’ve been playing Videoball alone, off and on, since I first bought the game on my laptop in June. I sit there and I play through the arcade challenges, one after the other, and when I get stuck, I go back and play the ones I’ve already beaten.

There’re a lot of good feelings to be had when playing Videoball. You are a triangle that shoots smaller triangles, and depending on how long you hold the action button (any button), the triangle you shoot will be either small, medium or large. All three have different effects. Videoball is a game about holding the action button until you’ve drifted into the spot wherein you feel you have the right angle to release that triangle towards the ball.

It’s a really simple game. You shoot triangles at the three balls and try to hit them towards the opponent’s goal. The opponent does the same. You can only move the balls by shooting them. If you touch the ball with your body you’ll be stunned and the ball will stop on the spot. If you shoot your opponent with a triangle, they will be stunned and pushed in the direction your triangle was going. That’s the whole game. Best played 2 vs. 2. Use the standard arena.

But so I’m missing 1 vs. 2 out of the required ideal play situation. And so I sit with my Xbox controller and play the arcade modes against robots. It feels good.

I guess the best feeling of the game is letting the triangle go at an angle that you’re not 75% sure was correct, and watching it go across the court, and sometimes seeing it hit the ball just where you wanted. If you were playing 2 vs. 2 with all humans, there would be endless opportunities for cooperation and strategy and disaster. As it stands, I’m having a good time watching those triangles hit those balls.

Videoball’s visuals are as clean and straight as it’s design. It’s all just shapes.

There are colours, too.

Today I moved from my sister’s home back to my mother’s home in my hometown. I’m sitting there (here) now, alone in the house and listening to Barely Civil’s I’ll Figure This Out. The house is giant and empty and full of other people’s shit. I hate sleeping alone here.

It’s 8:22PM and it feels like midnight. It feels like I have school tomorrow. I feel tired and like a degenerate. There’s nothing to do.

My friend invited me to my other friend’s house, but I’m not sure I want to go. It’s just a lot of sitting around and watching other people drink. The only thing anyone does is play drinking games. It’s not really my thing right now. I’ve got to read more of my book. 18 more pages today, still.

I’m going to stop writing this now, I think.

Okay, one more go.

I feel dirty and tired and like I’m not a part of time right now. Sitting in a big empty house that has no connection to any world. It’s just me here alone and there’s nothing happening out there and there will never be anything happening again in my life. That’s it.

My life starts again tomorrow. In a new old town, still with no job or purpose or friends to talk to about the things I like. Still no purpose. Still not a real person. Not progressing. That’s how it is right now. I just want to get out and go to Victoria, British Columbia and make friends and play in a band with those friends and play a house show with that band and have people who care about video games the way I care about video games and well maybe be able to actually go outside places and speak to people and meet new people and be happy and feel like I’m aiming towards something and spending time out of my house.

Things are okay right now. They just feel weird is all. It’s fine. I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself to write things. But I’m feeling it a little bit. Like, I spend half the year being excited about writing this thing, but when it comes time to do it all I feel is a vague sort of disinterest about it. Like I’m not in the mood. Like I just want to play guitar and read my book. I don’t feel excited or happy or interested in video games at the moment. Not right now. Life doesn’t feel totally real. I don’t know. None of this is ever going anywhere so why can’t you just totally fucking relax and let yourself just write whatever the fuck you want and not worry about it because fucking blah blah blah who cares it doesn’t matter no one will ever read any of this and you’re just a crazy person in a minus forty refrigeration baseball cap and it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter so it’s fine.

7: Fire Emblem: Three Houses

My sister asked me what I wanted as a gift for Christmas 2019. I sat and thought and tried to decide between asking for Dragon Quest XI and Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I eventually decided that Nintendo first-party games are always good and beautiful and worth getting on Switch. This may have been the wrong decision.

I love Fire Emblem: Three Houses in the same sick sort of way that I love bad emo music. It’s dumb and funny and so long and bad and I love it deeply. At one point during my 50 hours with the game, I wrote into my phone’s notes app “This game feels like an episode of The Weekenders! I love it!!”

So much of FE:TH is spent doing nonsense. I think maybe the entire game might just be nonsense. You’re just wandering around this kind-of-ugly school, talking to kids who want you to, like, go find their belt in the auditorium. It’s awful.

I don’t want to talk about the battles.

I guess the reason you keep playing this game until the end is because you’ve developed some bizarre attachment to your obnoxious students. Hilda, Lysithea, Bernadetta, Claude, that rude asshole one (remembering now his name is Lorenz), the one with the glasses that likes painting (Ignus? Something like that), the big one that I actually do not care about at all and never will (fucking Ralph), the blue-haired one who hates herself because she feels as though she is irrevocably fucked up (Marianne? Marietta?).

There are some real good things in this game. Hilda, a pink-haired axe-wielder, at first seems like a one dimensional ‘lazy’ character. She doesn’t want to train or battle, she just wants to sleep and lie around and do nothing. 15 hours into the game, during a conversation between her and your character (a female teacher named Price), it is revealed that the reason she does not want to battle is that she is deeply afraid of dying. She explains that she likes her classmates, but she would never die for any of them. All of a sudden she’s a human being.

This game was nice. It was the second big game I played once the pandemic started. I’d moved back home, finished my final university essays and exams, and found myself unemployed and living alone in an empty house with no conceivable thing to do. I spent hours each day playing Fire Emblem and trying to not lose my mind. Seeing those kids, those dumb, annoying, sometimes poorly-animated kids wander around and whine about their various ridiculous and deadly serious problems helped me to calm down. Seeing my playtime in the game slowly go up each day helped me to feel better-anchored to the passage of time.

And so I arrived at the end of it in probably May, feeling a real fondness for the whole thing. I still do. It was just a thing that I spent a lot of time with when I had nothing else to do. I’m glad it was there.

I’ll maybe just say that at the end of this game, you get little one-paragraph explanations of what all the characters go on to do after the ending of the game. Some of them get married, or take over their family kingdoms. My favourite character, a blonde, deeply-angry and -driven young woman named Lysithea, had some motivation throughout the whole game that I can’t quite remember. I think she wanted to save her parents from something. She’d been experimented on as a child, and it had ensured that she would die very young. She was driven because she knew she would be dead in her early twenties.

I don’t remember what happens with her inevitable death, or where her parents had been, but I do remember her final paragraph. It stated that after the final battle, Lysithea reunited with her parents and receded into the desolate forest town from which she came, and was never seen again. And that was it. That was the end.

Thinking about Fire Emblem: Three Houses makes me weirdly emotional. It’s been a hard year to remember.

This game is stupid and goofy and it was there for me and I will remember it.

6: Into The Breach

Into The Breach is a game about getting rid of everything that doesn’t need to be in a strategy game. It’s clean and simple and always telling you everything you need to know.

The Epic Games Store says I have 6 hours, 25 minutes and 8 seconds played in the game. I imagine 90% of that time was spent with me staring at the screen, hands in my lap, thinking about what to do. It’s a game that reminds me of playing chess in high school against my one friend who was slightly worse than me at chess. I sit there and stare at a small handful of decisions for long stretches of time. Something about that experience feels good.

It’s story is a thin, crisp coat of pain on the concrete walls attached at right angles to the floors of the game’s foundation.

I guess that I don’t have many strong emotions for this game. It’s just a really well-made thing. Like a comfortable chair that I sit in once every couple weeks. It doesn’t bring any strong memories up. I don’t know how much I’ll really be thinking about it for the rest of my life.

Though, I guess, it does have a lot of things that I would like the sort of video games I hypothetically one day make to have. It’s clean and simple and elegant. I don’t know.

I feel like I don’t have anything else to say. Let’s talk about something else, then.

I got an email today from an online magazine saying that they appreciated me sharing my work, but that unfortunately I would not be selected as a finalist for the essay contest. Well, that’s fair. The essay I wrote was kinda wild, I guess.

I think it had a good ending though.

It ended like this:

And so you walk away feeling nothing, and when you leave the warehouse the sunlight hurts your eyes and your head in a way that feels ridiculous, since the sky is grey and the cloud-covered sun has nearly set, anyway.

Well there. At least the whole thing isn’t wasted, now.

5: The Beginner’s Guide

The Beginner’s Guide is maybe a high artistic achievement. It feels like one of the few games I’ve played that I can really sit around and think about for a long time. It’s ambiguous in the way that leaves me feeling things about it a lot.

Throughout The Beginner’s Guide you play through video games made by a fictional person named Coda, and are walked through those games by Davey Wreden as narrator. I played the game through the first time thinking Coda was a real guy.

But so Wreden walks you through all these small, experimental games, and he tells you things about the games and about his ideas about them and about his and Coda’s relationship. They’re all first-person.

I guess what we’re thinking about throughout the game is art and meaning and where those things come from. Wreden tells us his ideas about what the games mean, and always notes that this is just his interpretation. It’s some real good David Foster Wallace-type literature. Who is Davey Wreden? Who made these games? Who is Davey Wreden talking about when he talks about these things? Which Davey Wreden are these things coming from? The video game developer or the game character? Who’s writing the book?

“Who’s writing the book?” is a question that’s come to me a lot while reading Infinite Jest. It came loudest when, maybe 500 pages into the book, the writer of the book said “And has anyone mentioned the shape of this guy’s head?” and I thought “Yes. You did. The book did. It’s big and square we already know that, the book’s said it many times.” and the book said “It’s huge and square.” and I thought “Who is writing this book and who was writing it before and who is writing the footnotes?”

So, yes, The Beginner’s Guide has me thinking book-type thoughts, which I guess is probably one of the better compliments I could give a video game. It’s also really beautiful sometimes.

There’s a scene (and here “scene” means “game”) wherein you find yourself in a beautiful home in a dark, snowy place. Upon entering the building there’s guitar picking and airy, distant singing and you’re asked to please straighten up the house. You do so over and over while Wreden talks about how happy Coda was while making this particular game, how he’d been in a really good place. It’s really calming. I could hang out in there for hours.

Coda left that good place soon after, I guess, because things get dark. There’s prisons and labyrinths and obelisks and desperate, shaking narration. It’s a lot to think about.

4: Portal

Okay, well, so let’s maybe start at the beginning.

A friend and I were talking about something on Friday January 31st, 2020. At some point in this conversation, the video game Portal came up. I don’t know how this happened. This friend of mine was not someone who liked video games. I obviously brought it up. I must have been reading the Action Button Review of Portal from 2008. I must have brought the game up. My friend had recently bought a new laptop for school because her old laptop had been a slow brick house. She got one of those Windows ones with a touchscreen that can be folded back into a pretty-big tablet. She downloaded Steam so we could look at the game because well I guess there was nothing else to do this Friday night. She made a Steam account. She searched up Portal. She saw it was only $11.49CAD. She said something like “Oh, it’s only $11? Let’s just buy it!” She was not great with money. She bought it. She did not have a lot of money. “Come on, $11? Why not!” she said. She was that kind of person. I figured Well, yeah, cool, let’s do it. We started playing the game. We started drinking.

I was worried it wouldn’t be very enjoyable for us. I was worried she would have wasted her $11. It was pretty immediately clear that that was not going to have happened. The game was beautiful. We took turns playing. It was haunting. The game was so still, so clean, so direct. Everything was straightforward and simple and showing you what you needed to be shown. The walls were a sickening, sterile white. A robot voice spoke to us.

We continued drinking and playing for a long time that night. We didn’t go anywhere. We both agreed that the game was great. At some point, while she left the room to use the washroom, I felt a lot of things at once. She returned, and I said “This game is minimalist performance art.” I felt that that was true in my bones. Saying it aloud felt good in my head. I’d had a lot to drink. She laughed. I laughed. The next morning we both laughed. We agreed it was ridiculous and dumb and meaningless. I couldn’t help but feel, then as I do now, that I was a little bit right.

We continued to play the game throughout Saturday. As the puzzles got harder, I began to be the one playing more, with her by my side drinking and talking and playing music. Again we went nowhere. The game felt as though it was still deep within itself.

The next day we woke up, sad and detached and hungover. We drank coffee and sat in the living room and played more of Portal while her roommate watched a documentary about Aaron Hernandez. It was Sunday February 2nd, 2020. We both watched the end of the documentary. The roommate reminded us it was Super Bowl Sunday. I felt that warm, dark assuredness that I had class the next day, that I had things I should have been doing, that I could not feel good. I remembered that I’d promised my roommates that I would meet them at the bar near our house to watch the game. I’d agreed to take part in some sort of gambling game. Later I would find out this entailed filling out two sheets of questions about what sorts of nefarious and irrelevant things would or would not take place in the game that day.

I sat and stared at nothing and put off the cross-town walk that would be required of me to get to the bar. My friend and I continued to play Portal. It felt like the end would be soon.

The puzzles got harder, they took longer, my clouded brain felt farther away from my hands and the screen. I planned in my head the exact latest time I could leave the house while still making it to the bar in time. We beat the game. The song played. We did it.

I said goodbye to her roommate and to her and left into the dark afternoon. It was cold and wet and I had a hood up over my toque. I made it to the bar and my roommates pushed a beer-full glass towards me and I drank it and I drank a few more. I filled out the gambling sheet. We watched the game. I accidentally won a free Travis Kelce Super Bowl LIV jersey. I put it on that night. I have not put it on since. It’s in a closet somewhere.

The game ended. My friend drank and ate too much and vomited beside a bridge while my other friend urinated a meter from his head. I took a picture of the scene. We walked home and played video games and I watched them get high. One month later I moved out of that house and left those roommates to finish the semester back in my hometown. One month after that, I graduated. Two months after that I found myself at a parent’s friend’s empty cottage on Lake Huron. On that June Saturday I left early and drove back to that college town to see that friend, the one who’d bought Portal. We sat and drank and talked about a lot of really happy things and laughed hard remembering all of those terrible memories. We drank until very late and played ridiculous drinking games and enjoyed each other’s company. At the end of the night, we hugged, and then she went to her room and I slept on the couch. The next morning we drank coffee and talked about our hangovers. Her roommate showed up and I helped her father and younger brother move her things into the home. It was awfully warm. I drank water with my friend and decided I’d best head out. She walked me to my car and we hugged and said our goodbyes and that it had been nice to see each other.

That was six months ago. I haven’t seen her since. I haven’t talked to her since September. I played Portal 2. I played Portal, again, this time alone, on my own laptop, and thought about her, and thought of that terrible Sunday afternoon when we beat that great game. It took a lot less time to beat, the second time around. Through all the drunken excitement and hungover malaise, somewhere in my brain the solutions to those puzzles were still stored.

It just…wasn’t as much fun that way.

Interludes and Errata: awfulcomingdown Presents the Top 10 Albums of 2020

2020 was the first year of my life where I found myself finding a lot of new albums that I really loved. It was like the first time I’ve ever really followed new releases in what felt like a really enjoyable and meaningful way.

Because of this, I would regret not putting out a little list of my favourite albums of the year. So here they are: The awfulcomingdown Top 10 Albums of 2020:

10. songs by Adrianne Lenker

I’ve never really been a Big Thief guy, but I have a perverse sort of place in my heart for Adrianne Lenker as a human being, for reasons I will not go into. This is to say I’m always more interested in her solo work. This album is just her with a guitar, written and recorded alone somewhere in Massachusetts. In the Bandcamp description she says she fell in love with the cabin she was renting in Western MA in March. She says “The one room cabin felt like the inside of an acoustic guitar — it was such a joy to hear the notes reverberate in the space.” A couple of days ago I was in the empty former-bedroom of my girlfriend’s mother. I was alone in an empty space with an acoustic guitar on the 29th floor of a Toronto apartment building. The sound of the guitar was like nothing I’d heard before. songs is what making music is about. It’s a document of the value of playing music for yourself.

9. Floral Prince by Field Medic

This album cemented its place on my list the second time I heard “it’s so lonely being sober”. The sound made its way to my bones. It’s just Kevin Patrick Sullivan with an acoustic guitar and his voice. The chords are C G Am F G Am G C F G C. Pick the strings however you want. I’ve played this song maybe a hundred times on my guitar since I first learned it. The line that always gets me most is when, after the first refrain of him singing “it’s so lonely being sober,” he says “feeling proud / and my stomach’s feeling better.” It’s such a hopeful and sad little celebration. It’s one of my favourite lyrics of the year.

8. Shore by Fleet Foxes

I listened to this album a lot this year. It was one I’d just throw on any time I was driving around, to get groceries or whatever. It’s clean and calm and smooth and has a feeling that comes from a lot of things that are often not accessible; nature, the ocean, warmth, friends. On “Sunblind,” Robin Pecknold sings, “I’m gonna swim for a week in / Warm American Water with dear friends.” It’s a warm, sad reminder of the good things and people in the world.

7. I Had Everybody Snowed by Growing Stone

This album came out eleven days ago. If I have any future regret about its place on this list, it will be that I didn’t put it high enough. It’s an album made by a now-sober man that is solely about being a drunk. Instead of writing any more about it, I’ll just say that my favourite line from the album perfectly summarizes the feeling of pushing yourself to drink so much, trying to get that good feeling, that warm glow it once gave you, to the point where you’re making your life worse and not even having a good time doing it; you’re just sad and desperate and dejected. The line is:

Morning came early

And no one got lucky

Or picked up their garbage

Or anything

6. Ways of Hearing by The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

There’s a humming bird

That looks just like David Byrne

Ways of Hearing is a slow, quiet music. There’s always strings. There’s often male and female vocals overlapping with one another, not fighting for attention but instead seeming like they’re hoping you’ll be distracted by the other and miss what they’re saying. “Joseph Stalin” is my brother’s favourite song of the year. If you’re looking to sit in a darkening room, looking out the window at dusk, this is the music.

5. Notes On A Conditional Form by The 1975

“If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)” has earned a place in my top 3 The 1975 songs of all time, along with a definite place in my top songs of the year. “The Birthday Party” is one of my friend’s favourite songs of all time. Matt Healy sings: “Saw the girls and they were like / ‘Do you wanna come and get fucked up?’ / Listen, I’ve got myself a missus so there can’t be any kissing / ‘Oh don’t be afraid, you better wise up, kid / It’s all adderall now, it doesn’t make you wanna do it.’” What a relief.

4. Welcome to Conceptual Beach by Young Jesus

If you’re looking to spend 46 minutes floating and feeling good about things, you should hang out with this album. There’s some ten minute songs. I love those. It’s a big, complicated, ambitious, aspirational, vast and expansive album. Sitting in my mother’s car in a Walmart parking lot on August 16th, I got a text message from a person I’d not spoken to in 7 years. As I read the message, the music got quiet, with only the sound of shiny strings being strummed. John Rossiter began saying “I wanna be around and live it.” He said it over and over. I put my phone down and stared over the steering wheel at the mostly-empty parking lot. The engine was running. He started getting louder. I leaned back and felt myself nearly crying. He was yelling now. The tears wouldn’t come out. “I wanna be around and live it.” He was screaming. My face crumpled and I couldn’t understand why. The tears almost came. Maybe they did. The music cut out. He stopped yelling. The shaking strings faded out. It was silent. I put my seatbelt back on, drove out of the parking lot, and headed South. I didn’t know where I was headed.

3. Melee by Dogleg

“Kawasaki Backflip” is my most listened to song of the year. This surprises me. When I checked this, I hadn’t really listened to the album since it came out in March. When I think about the album while not listening to it, I maybe don’t feel that much about it. I was never able to see Dogleg live. By the time the album came out I was no longer anxiously walking around a university campus, my #1 reason for wanting to listen to horribly intense emo music. I don’t think about the album all too much. But then I put it on, and I hear that opening faded riff, and I know that there is about to be a fucking explosion; I know there is always about to be one.

2. Lament by Touche Amore

Touche Amore is as intense a music as I can enjoy. It’s loud and fast and Jeremy Bolm is always screaming. It’s also insanely melodic. It makes me want to dance. During what was maybe my worst mental episode this year, reeling from the combination of a destroyed tooth and a hurtful comment made by someone close to me, I stood up from my washroom floor and left the room and told my friend I needed to be alone for a bit. I grabbed my laptop and a beer and opened a google doc. I put on my headphones and played Lament. It was the exact sound of how I felt. Desperate and shaking and about to fucking collapse, with an absurd, exciting optimism always pulsing throughout if only as a result of the great melodies of the songs. “I talk myself out of myself / When I’m overwhelmed,” he yelled. It’s an album about feeling better, and on the last song Jeremy Bolm sings — this being the one moment in maybe his entire career when he’s singing and not screaming — two of my favourite lines of the year:

I’ve healed more than suffered

and

I found the patience for jazz

Nothing this year felt as much like getting better as these two lines.

1. you can never have a long enough head start by floral tattoo

Here is an album that’s not about getting better. It’s an album about being in the dark. It’s an album that came out January 3rd, one that I listened to for the first time walking home in the cold dark of London, Ontario. I played it many times walking home from my friend’s house during sad, shaky mornings that winter. I played it on my radio show. I listened to it enough to start to feel like it was the first time in my life I’d been right there for the release of a great album. I tried writing about it in a coffee shop in a mall while waiting two hours for my friend to pick me up at the beginning of Spring reading week. I didn’t listen to it much once I’d moved back home. I haven’t listened to it for a while, until now, sitting in the now-completely-dark living room of my mother’s home. It was daylight when I sat down to start writing this all. No one else is here. I guess my favourite song on this album has become “(my life fell apart this year)”. It was “Life in Colour” at first, and then “(redding forest fire / fermi)” for a long time. I guess in all that time not listening to the album, “(my life fell apart this year)” began to be the one that stuck out in my mind. I listened to it, just that one song, a couple of weeks or months ago. I guess that was what decided it. There’s an explosion, in that song. It’s the thing I’m always chasing; the desperate celebration. There are monologues about working jobs and trying not to kill oneself. There’s chanting about twisting and swerving and confusing the ones that we love until another voice comes in, and it screams: “I’m letting go.” The music disintegrates and erupts and the voices continue to chant “When I’m 25 / I will look back on / all this mess and think / I was worried for nothing,” while this voice continues to scream “I’m letting go.” Eventually the screaming fades out, and so does the chanting, and there’s just drums being played, and you can’t help but feel like this is very sad music, but that that sadness sounds beautiful, and that this complete darkness is meaningful.

There will be things after it.

3: Metal Gear Solid 2

What I like about making games is that they don’t survive. You can’t play old games as game machines are constantly changing. The Japanese proverb that says ‘you discard your shame when you travel’ is what games are to me. Games should remain in people’s minds and in history. That means that people forget about the games we make, which is good.

-Hideo Kojima

I bought Metal Gear Solid 2 off my friend. He’d gotten a big box of games at a garage sale for $20 and said I could look through it and see if there was anything I wanted. I went through and pulled out three games and asked him how much.

He sold me Dead Space, Mass Effect 2, and Metal Gear Solid 2 for $10. I haven’t played the other two yet. I don’t have an Xbox.

I took home Metal Gear Solid 2 and put it in my PlayStation 2. I played the first six hours of the game. I loved how long the cut scenes were. It was hilarious. I hated playing it. At the end of Christmas Break in January 2020, I figured I was done with the game. I left my PlayStation 2 in my childhood bedroom and went back to school.

Three months later I’d moved back home and decided to put the PlayStation 2 away. I couldn’t do it, though. Not yet. I had to boot up MGS2 one more time. Just to make sure.

I turned on the game. I had no idea what I was doing. I was at some insufferable moment wherein I was supposed to use a sniper to locate and then shoot a bunch of motion-sensors so that they wouldn’t set off explosives so that I could cross a bridge without it being destroyed. I didn’t even have a sniper.

I googled how to find the sniper. I watched a video of someone else shooting the sensors. I got the sniper and shot the sensors.

I kept playing the game. It kept being boring. At some point it became charming.

I remember, earlier on in my playing experience, during December 2019, having a distinct feeling. It was this: I get that this game is cool, and that Hideo Kojima is a wacky guy who was doing some stuff that must have been real wild in 2001, but I just do not think this game is good. It sucks to play and it’s boring and dumb. I still thought the 15-minute-long cutscenes were pretty funny. But I was done with the rest of it. I thought I don’t understand people who like this game.

This is all a long way of saying that I didn’t start to like this game until very near the end. At some point I started to find the gameplay kind of goofy. It seemed alright. The story was doing some funny stuff, I thought. This game’s alright.

But so the ending. I don’t know whether it’d be interesting or not to directly talk about the things that happen at the end. Not the plot or anything. I don’t know what happens in the plot. I don’t think I ever really understood what a Metal Gear was. But there are some things that happen, there, at the end. A lot of things.

Raiden gets caught, and he gets stripped naked and strapped to a metal board. Someone lets him free. All of a sudden you’re playing as a naked man. When standing still Raiden covers his genitals with his hands. Somehow you never see them, the genitals, even while fighting and running.

So you’re creeping around this factory, naked and weaponless. The Colonel and Rose keep calling you. The things they say get progressively more horrific. Things get desperate. Things start to be said about things.

I played the end of this game alone in my childhood bedroom at night. The emptiness of the house made me shutter. At one point the Colonel called. He said “TURN OFF THE GAME CONSOLE NOW.” I got up and shut my bedroom door. I needed less empty space around me. I needed to be enclosed.

After finishing the game, I went and wrote some weird stuff and put it somewhere on the internet. I think I called it my favourite game of all time. I was feeling intensely. I said that I thought Kojima had read Baudrillard and Lyotard and Jameson and maybe George Berkeley. I called it “Our Sad and Messy History”.

At the end of the game, after things have been resolved, Raiden stands in the streets of New York. There are montages of real-life footage of the city. It’s one of the better moments I’ve had in my life playing a video game.

During the montage, Solid Snake speaks. Allow me to maybe contradict Hideo Kojima’s statement, and allow him to maybe do the same, by writing out what he says:

Life isn’t just about passing on your genes. We can leave behind much more than just DNA. Through speech, music, literature and movies, what we’ve seen, heard, felt; anger, joy, and sorrow. These are the things I will pass on. That’s what I live for.

We need to pass the torch, and let our children read our messy and sad history by its light.

Metal Gear Solid 2 is worth something. It’s got something in it that’s worth thinking about. It’s got something that great art has. It’s got something like literature. It’s informed by cultural theory. It worthwhile.

I don’t know if I’ll ever play it again. I dislike so much of it. I know that I still love those long cutscenes, and still love Raiden, and will forever love Hideo Kojima. I know that this game gets at something so few things do. Thinking about that bizarre contrast, between its literary quality and its mundane video game existence, I wonder if maybe Hideo Kojima has accomplished his goal: most people will never read this book.

2: Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

I’ve been writing these entries and feeling a little stressed out by them. Stressed might be too strong a word. I’m going to try to have a good time with this one.

I don’t really know where to start with Getting Over It. It’s one of the greatest games of all time. It’s a video game that should be put into some sort of and any video game museum. It’s a game that fully capitalizes on the potential of video games. It’s a game about climbing a mountain.

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is a game that is very honest about what’s happening. All of the objects in the game exist exactly where they look as though they exist. I’m having a little thought in my head about how the sprite vs. hit-box relationship in video games (this is to say where it looks like something is vs. where the game actually considers it to be (i.e. where you can make contact with it etc.)) is really similar to the the conversation in Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous wherein Hylas pleads with Philonous and says that there must be some real-world material substratum underneath the mind-dependent images that we perceive as being objects. The hit-box is this supposed substratum, and the sprite is the image that we perceive as being the thing itself, even though in the code of the video game it literally isn’t. The image isn’t the thing, the hit-box (in coding called objects) is the thing. Holy shit.

Anyway, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy gives us a world wherein the substratum and the images are exactly the same. This is to say the sprite and hit-boxes line up exactly. When you put your yosemite hammer in the indent of a rock, it will hit it exactly when it looks like it will hit it.

At the beginning of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, Bennett Foddy tells us about a game called Sexy Hiking. He says that at the beginning of this early internet game, there is a tree that is nearly impossible to climb over right at the beginning. You forced to sit there and poke at it and fuck with it and try things and see what happens. It’s kind of what all great video games should be: something you poke at.

I haven’t beaten Getting Over It. I might never. I recently fell from a very high area back to the very beginning of the game. I’m currently at like the fourth obstacle again, just opening the game up and climbing around whenever I feel like it.

Okay, I made it back up to the top of that building with the fridge at the bottom of it, waiting.

I wrote in my notes somewhere the first night I played this game that it’s life-affirming, that it reinforced two important ideas in my head.

The first was that video games matter and are worth pursuing. This was when I was still learning to code and using Gamemaker to make some god damn games. I don’t do that anymore.

The second was that my ideas matter, and that people’s ideas matter, and that your ideas are worth fucking pursuing even if no one else on earth gives a fuck about them, because if you keep pursuing them you will find people who really, really do (give a fuck).

When I started writing that out, I was gonna say that the first lesson’s importance had faded, while the second was still crucial. This isn’t true. They’re both still vitally fucking important. They’re everything.

I don’t make video games anymore. I focus on the other things I do. I write about art, I write fiction, I play guitar, I write songs. These are the things that are important to me. They matter and I am getting better at them.

There are a lot of different ways to contribute to making great art. This is one of the reasons learning about artists’ lives (whether they be video game developers, musicians, animators, writers, whatever) is so exciting: it reminds me that there are infinite ways to create things and to get to the point where the things you’re creating are good and meaningful and worthwhile. It’s really important.

And so I don’t make video games anymore, but what I do is a lot of things that I deeply love and care about; things that will or could one day make me a valuable contributor to the creation of a video game. The point is to just keep fucking going, keep pursuing whatever it is that you enjoy doing and the ideas that matter to you, so that one day you’ll find the right people in this world who value this work and these ideas as much as you do and you’ll be fucking ready.

So, no, I haven’t beaten Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. I might never. But I for damn sure will be here for the rest of my life, coming back, poking, experimenting; climbing that fucking mountain.

1: Earthbound

In 1994, Mother 2 was released in Japan. In 1994, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was released in Japan.

In 2020, I played Earthbound and read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I accidentally did this simultaneously.

I started Earthbound on March 2nd. Shortly after, I finished reading Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes. I hesitated for some time deciding what book I should take next from my university library. I had planned to have The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle be the last book I ever read during my time at the university. After a lot of thinking, I decided I would just start reading it, right then. I thought maybe, just in case something were to happen, I should start reading it now, to avoid any possibility of me not having the time to read it later in the semester.

Less than two weeks later, classes were cancelled. I packed my essential belongings and moved to my sister’s house an hour East. A couple of days later, I moved back to my hometown, where I’ve been living for eight months now. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle would end up being the last book I ever took out from the D.B. Weldon Library.

So I found myself home, finishing up essays and exams and preparing to graduate into nothing. I played Earthbound everyday.

I guess the thing to say with Earthbound is that yes, I think I consider it to be my Favourite Game of All Time. I guess the other thing to say would be that yes, huge amounts of this game are boring and repetitive and tedious. It’s a lot of pressing A to select attack in turn-based-battles. It’s slow.

I sort of learned how to chill out with a game. How to just calm down and not worry too much about if I was getting anywhere, or if I was having fun. I learned to just play the game and relax. I learned to let myself die and to just try again. I ended up spending 40 hours with the game.

So, I don’t know, yes, Earthbound is my favourite game of all time, though maybe that’s a little bit by default. It’s the most a video game I’ve played has felt like a Haruki Murakami novel. It wouldn’t be until after I’d finished both Earthbound and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that I would learn that Shigesato Itoi and Haruki Murakami published a collection of short stories together shortly after the releases of these two masterpieces. Wild stuff.

Well so okay, I guess there’s one important moment to talk about. There’s a moment in Earthbound and a moment in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that seem deeply connected.

Here they are:

400 or so pages into The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, many, many pages are spent slowly detailing the event of a Japanese man being skinned alive during World War II. He’s been captured, along with his fellow Japanese soldier who is recounting this story to the book’s main character, and is being tortured for information. He doesn’t give up the information, and so he is slowly skinned alive, and Murakami describes this in sickening detail. I was sitting in the D.B. Weldon Library reading this and having to stop every once in a while to look around and remember everything was okay. But so okay, the point is that 400 pages into this book that begins with a goofy guy named Toru wandering around his neighbourhood looking for his cat, we find ourselves staring down a man who can no longer close his eyes because his face and eyelids have been peeled off by an enemy soldier. This is what I love about art: things being hidden deep into long works; things that you could never be told of; things you just have to find.

And so 25 hours into Earthbound we meet the fourth and final party member, a Chinese prince living in a kingdom in the clouds named Kenny. When we meet Kenny and begin playing as him alone (the other party members in a far-off part of the world, unaware of Kenny’s existence, other than Ness, who is dreaming of the following events after eating “Magic cake”), we’re told that it is time for Prince Kenny to undertake his final trial, and that we must “Go to the ‘Place of Emptiness’ and endure this final test.” You leave the palace, and walk over to a narrow cliff with a rope on it. Kenny climbs the rope and sits atop the peak, facing the player. The screen goes black, and we enter the first-person battle screen against a large, disembodied head. The head says:

“To complete the trial, I am going to break your legs.”

He does it and you lose HP.

“Next, I will tear your arms off…

I shall then take your arms and feed them to the crows.”

He does so and your HP goes to 0.

“Now, I’ll cut your ears off.”

He does so and the game’s sound cuts out. It’s silent.

“(So, Prince Kenny.

No legs, no arms and no sound…

By floating words through the air, I must ask you…

Do you care if I take your eyes?)”

He does so and the screen goes black.

“(So, Prince Kenny.

Now, I can only communicate directly with your mind.

Your mind is all you have left…

In the end, I will take your mind,

though you probably don’t want to allow that, do you?

So…you can’t answer? You can’t even move?

Are you sad, are you lonely?

If you lose your mind, you also lose any feelings of sadness.

I will take your mind, Prince Kenny, know that I will possess it…)”

So it is that 25 hours into a children’s video game about a young boy living in a brightly-coloured cartoon America saving the world from time-travelling aliens, we find ourselves witnessing/experiencing the mutilation of a child first-hand.

This whole thing gave me that same stunned, sick feeling as the skinning scene in the book. All this darkness hidden beneath the beautiful, charming veneer of friendly entertainment. It’s the reason I read books; it’s the reason I play video games; it’s the reason I like art.

I’m really glad that I finally found in Earthbound the feeling I’ve been looking for in my favourite medium for the past three years.

But I guess it’s time to get back to looking.

An Epilogue

Well, there it is. I actually wrote something I’d been planning to write for nearly the entire year. I wrote this over the course of like 12 days, one entry a day. I’m sitting here on December 24th, wondering about it all.

I’m feeling a little bit like maybe I’ll be writing less about video games in 2021. I wrote my new year’s resolution into my phone’s notes a couple days ago, when it suddenly popped in my head. I wrote:

write more fiction

write more songs

I think those are the things I want to pursue. I feel pretty certain at this point that video games will always be a part of my live, but I guess I’m feeling like they won’t be the center of it. They maybe already aren’t.

I’m feeling like writing about art in general is something I’m drifting away from. I’m feeling more and more like I just want to make art. I want to write fiction; I want to write songs. I keep feeling like that’s maybe what I’m better at. I guess I don’t know.

So, anyway, that’s the end of this. I hope if you’ve read it you’ve gotten something out of it. I hope it wasn’t just me saying nothing about nothing. I hope there was some good in there.

This is the most I’ve worked on a personal thing in my life, and so I know there’s at least value in that. There’s always value in doing things.

I guess I’ll end this with a quote from a book I’ve been reading this year:

Until you can do it without thinking about it, play. Just do it. Forget about is there a point, of course there’s no point. The point of repetition is there is no point. Wait until it soaks into the hardware and then see the way this frees up your head.

Happy holidays, I wish you good luck in the new year, and every year after that, too.

Here’s to hoping we can all just keep doing.

-Chris Price, 12/24/2020

[teaandgames]

Yooka-Laylee Review

The ‘Collectathon’ is an odd genre. Collectibles are present in pretty much every game these days but they’re usually forgettable. A side dish to the main course of plot progression. Collectathons pull out those little collectibles and make them the entire point of the game. It feels odd to me because every other game feels at least somewhat structured; guided. There’s a sense of go here and do this. Collectathons are just go here and screw around. Collect pages, feathers, whatever. Have a good time. And I never really got into them, back in the day. But in the golden era it was Rare that was king. Games like Banjo-Kazooie and Conker’s Bad Fur Day put them on the map.

Then Microsoft waved its wallet in Rare’s direction and the collectathon quietly died away. Until now, that is, with Yooka-Laylee. Playtonic have waved their hands over the corpse of those 90s games and brought them back to life. This is no homage either, Yooka-Laylee would fit in perfectly with the rest of Rare’s heyday. Of course, that’s for better or for worse and your opinion of Yooka-Laylee is going to depend on how much you like Collectathons. My ramblings won’t change that. In which case, this review is going to attempt to answer the question of whether Yooka-Laylee has developed its own uniqueness. Why play it instead of just going back to Banjo-Kazooie?

Well, for one thing it’s effin’ gorgeous. I know using graphics as a selling point is a little frowned on but when the entire point of the game is explore every nook and cranny of the world, you need that world to look good. And Yooka-Laylee’s does. Its first world, Tribalstack Tropics, is a good example of this. It’s very bright with a vibrant colour palette. Bright greens and blues; ivy hanging off stone walls and thick shrubbery everywhere. It’s cartoonish in style, which explains why it’s so bright, but the brightness feels in line with another game I’ve got on the go, Nier Automata. It’s amazing how the sun can make things look so much better. Just a shame that it burns me so much, really. Even worlds that I’m not that keen on, like the Casino, look really nice.

Traversing the world isn’t too bad, either. It’s controls are certainly nicked straight from the 90s. You can jump, swing, shoot things, collect powerups and glide. It’s the basic platformer toolkit, which is handy in a way but other than the duo’s gimmick (the projectile is Laylee’s echolocation and Yooka grabs things with his tongue), there’s nothing really that stands out. No matter, it does the job. Your different moves are also drip fed to you, which I quite liked. Not least because it gives us a reason to collect stuff but it also unlocks further challenges as you go, meaning you return to old levels. A sly way of keeping us playing which goes hand in hand with the ability to enlarge worlds for extra challenges. It was a good progression system and seeing the new bits slotted into the familiar was great, even if by the end you can unlock and enlarge in one go.

One thing that leapt out at me when I first started my jaunt around Tribalstack Tropics was how smooth Yooka (and Laylee) felt to control. Bar awkward moments such as sliding down things, they never veered off in a direction I didn’t ask for. There were no Mario moments where I end up screaming about how I definitely did not push that button. Smoothness is very important in a platformer and Yooka-Laylee definitely scores points on that front. Unfortunately these points are then removed, thanks to the camera. While a patch has supposedly improved it, it is still a nuisance. It frequently swings around the wrong way and more than once it locked in place, leaving me to make leap of faith jumps. The result is that Yooka’s face should be perfectly flat by now.

The camera doesn’t dampen the experience too much, however. There were no Pagies (the big collectible) that I found too unbearably difficult because of it. Indeed, at times I wondered if Yooka-Laylee was just a bit too easy. I seem to be showered in Pagies just by turning around. Still, it makes up for its relative ease via innovation. At any one moment I might be smacking a giant golf ball into a hole, bouncing around as a weird mutant flower (don’t ask) or fixing a sewage pipe so a stranger doesn’t drown in his own faeces (REALLY don’t ask). While there are a lot of simplistic Pagies, Yooka-Laylee shines when it turns itself on its head. Coupled with that are some fun boss fights (except the final one, I’ll get to that), which range from fighting a giant ice face to… an entire planet. Yooka-Laylee is weird. I like that.

Less fun are the mini-games that go along with it. In every world there are two characters that offer them. One is Rextro, a glitchy dinosaur that gets the piss taken out of it at every opportunity. Poor bastard probably doesn’t even have the memory left to feel insulted. Anyway, he offers you the opportunity to play a bunch of old arcade style games when once you bring him a ‘Play Coin’. They’re pretty basic and their charm wears thin quickly but you get a Pagie from it so you can’t really skip it. Most are passable, bar one that resembles a ‘Flappy Bird’-esque game, which drags on for too long. The other mini-game is a cart ride, featuring Kartos, which is less annoying but also very samey. They feel like last minute additions to an otherwise decently polished world.

But this is a Rare-inspired game, so the gameplay is only going to fill up half of it. The other half is the humour and I’m glad to say that’s mostly intact. There’s a fair bit of scatalogical humour, which I’m not usually that hot on, but it’s sparse enough to still be funny without falling to level of a secondary school English classroom. The main villain, Capital B, and his sidekick Dr. Quack (who is literally a duck sealed inside a gumball machine) both have funny dialogue, as do most of the characters you meet in the wild. Yooka and Laylee fall a touch flat; Laylee especially gets on my nerves. Part of that is that they all talk in Banjo-Kazooie-esque grunts and squawks, which gets old very fast. My favourite character is probably the move salesman Trowzer, not least because he’s a graphic representation of how snakes can wear trousers. Well, they’re more like shorts. I guess ‘Shawtz’ doesn’t really have the same ring to it.

I’m actually feeling pretty positive towards Yooka-Laylee. While the later levels lose some of the spark, particularly the casino which is based around collecting tokens (which spew out of everything), it’s generally a positive experience. That is until we get to the final boss fight. No amount of business-related puns can save that fight. It’s long, frustratingly so. Capital B goes through about six or seven different stages and there’s no health pickups and, most damning of all, no checkpoints. So if you die on the awkward final stage that requires using the flying ability (which does not control very well, by the way) you have to go right back the start. It’s not an amazingly difficult boss fight, just very tedious.

So, is there a reason to pick up Yooka-Laylee over one of the older titles? Well, on the one hand the duo is weaker (Laylee especially is just annoying) but time has made the collectathon a smoother, polished experience. And because Playtonic don’t have to worry about cartridge space they can push the boat out, which leads to some innovation. Every level has a scientist that can transform you into something else, for example. It’s a very simple game through and through; a soft experience. I doubt I’m going to think much at all about Yooka-Laylee after I finish this review but I’m happy I played it. It’s not great, and I doubt it’ll appear in many game of the year awards, but it’s a fun time sink. A frustrating camera can’t kill a smooth as silk platformer that looks, sounds and plays good. Pros -Smooth platforming and solid controls -World looks great -Funny dialogue -Good progression system -Nice music -A snake wearing trousers! Cons -Annoying camera -Annoying Laylee -Annoying final boss -Annoying mini-games Yooka-Laylee Developer: Playtonic Publisher: Team 17 Release Date: 11th April 2017 Play it on: Windows, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch Played on: Windows

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