Fire Emblem: Three Houses
It’s me, I’m the guy who hates Fire Emblem, but gets bullied into playing it anyway. After 6 months of peer pressure I caved and bought Three Houses. Don’t misunderstand Three Houses’s position in the list the list though. I don’t think it’s a bad game, but it’s definitely not for me.
Strategy RPGs in general just aren’t my thing. The gameplay is painfully slow and tedious and tends to stretch on far too long. 3H goes back to the typical FE gameplay after Shadows of Valentia mixed things up. I quite enjoyed SoV’s shorter, snappier battles interspersed with 3rd person dungeon crawling. 3H did at least keep the time rewinding mechanic that SoV introduced, which I greatly appreciated.
The biggest draw of Fire Emblem games is usually the characters though, and 3H does a good job of developing them and endearing them to you. Even before I played the game I knew I would like Bernadetta, and afterward, yeah, I do, even if she doesn’t get as much development as she deserves. Lorenz is a piece of shit that’s fun to hate, Sylvain has hilarious himbo energy, Linhardt is always a mood, and the only two students I poached from other houses, Lysithea and Rafael, were my perfectly contrasting adoptive children.
I played only one route (Edelgard’s), so I’m sure there’s plenty of story I’m missing out on, but god was this one route a slow burn. Barely anything of consequence happened prior to the time skip. It spent 30 hours setting things up for very little payoff in the post-timeskip. Yell at me to play the other routes all you want, but I left like I was done after this one run. There’s no way in hell I’m going back for three more.
Three Houses isn’t terrible but Shadows of Valentia remains the Only Good Fire Emblem.
Mega Man Legends
I’ve never been much for Mega Man games, but adventure and Mega Man? And even more peer pressure? Sure. Sign me up.
Let me address the elephant in the room first. The controls for both MML games are unbelievably terrible. The games were made before the Playstation had dual analog sticks, so I understand the challenges of making it work, but good god does it feel bad to play. The d-pad moves you forward, backward, left and right, and turning is handled by LB and RB. It’s hard to describe in words just how clunky the controls are, but they’re a major barrier to an enjoyable experience.
By around the midpoint of MML1, I felt like I had adapted to the controls and could focus on trying to enjoy the game. I was quickly surprised by the structure of the game as an open dungeon crawler that reminded me of Legend of Grimrock 2. Legend of Grimrock 2 is a fantastic game, so that’s a pretty big compliment.
Exploring the ruins was definitely interesting for a while, but navigating them without a map got pretty rough after wandering around repeatedly trying to find that one exit I needed. Traversing the ruins beyond the first time wasn’t particularly interesting either, since the vast majority of enemies are dealt with by locking on and holding the shoot button until everything is dead.
The story is generally forgettable, but the Bonne pirates are a big part of it and are absolutely a highlight. They’re basically Team Rocket, and we all know Team Rocket is the best part of Pokemon. The very end of the game goes to some pretty wild places though.
Mega Man Legends 2
The sequel takes some of the weird ending bits from the first and runs with them. I distinctly remember watching the intro cutscene and thinking “Wow, this feels like a Trails game.” because of the sense of a complex and detailed world it assumes and develops. The story overall was much more engrossing and goes to even weirder places. Looking back, it seems odd that MML is related to the run-and-jump platformer Mega Man games; they’re just that distinct. That’s not a bad thing though. I love this kind of wild shit.
MML2 removes some of the openness of the original and focuses more on discrete dungeons with a more Zelda-like design. I definitely appreciated the dungeons actually having some designed progression, even if the sense of exploration is heavily tempered. The design shift combined with an actually useful map makes the dungeons far smoother to play. Unfortunately combat isn’t much more complex. Several of the sub weapons are slightly more useful, and there’s one (1) fight that requires using the invincibility frames on the dodge rolls, but the majority of the time is spent simply holding down the shoot button and waiting for the target(s) to die. The digger tests are especially bad about this, since every enemy needs to be killed to progress. I gave up on the S rank test very quickly because of how terribly tedious and tightly timed it is.
Team Bonne Rocket is back as well and they’re still pretty important and they’ve got me wanting to play The Misadventures of Tron Bonne sometime soon.
MML2 unfortunately doesn’t do much to improve on the controls, making them still a major hindrance. With the first game under my belt though, I had adapted as well as could be expected, but I just need to air a grievance here: the lock-on system is hot trash. I can’t begin to count the number of times it locked onto the wrong target, forcing me try to position myself just right so that it picks what I want. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to cycle between targets once locked on. If it chooses the wrong one, then too bad. Either kill it or try to work around it.
The biggest advantage 2 has over 1 is how hard it goes on world building. The intro cutscene sets the stage for a complex and nuanced world with a number of factions, each with their own goals, and the rest of the game follows through on that. The third game’s cancellation is most disappointing to me because it felt as if they had only just finished setting up their world and were ready to go hog wild with making an interesting use of it.
Twials of Mana (2020)
I had played the SNES version of Trials of Mana just last year, so it was interesting seeing the contrasts with the remake. My biggest complaint of the original was a lot of jank, with many small issues that individually were at most slightly annoying and showed how difficult the development was, but combined to slightly sour a masterpiece. The remake is actually similar in that sense, but with different specific issues.
The first issue anyone will notice with the game is the voice acting, which ranges from aggressively mediocre to utterly absurd. It’s objectively terrible, but I couldn’t help but enjoy the B-movie aspects of it. It was very clear that some of these people had absolutely no acting experience and others were given absolutely no direction.
While it does miss out on the beautiful pixel art in the original, and the remake clearly isn’t a high budget title, I think it’s perfectly adequate visually, with all of the old designs being well adapted for 3D.
The original game’s battle system was quite simple by modern standards. The biggest change in the remake is fleshing out the battles a bit more, making them more dynamic and allowing for more thoughtful character setup. I found myself not minding fighting random enemies for probably 10 hours because it was surprisingly satisfying. The elephant in the room with the battles is the difficulty though. Even on the hardest difficulty, I found even late game encounters posed very little threat to me (with 2 notable exceptions). They’ve since added additional difficulty levels, however they’re not accessible on a first playthrough, which is a shame because one more step up from the difficulty I played on would’ve been perfect for my first playthrough.
Overall it’s a bit of a shame that the Trials of Mana remake didn’t have much money or time behind it, but for what they had, they created a solidly fun action RPG with a bit of jank, much improved combat, and probably stays too close to the original for most everything else.
Wonder Project J2
Last year I randomly heard about this obscure N64 game about teaching an android girl to be more human and was immediately very interested. I even ended up streaming the entire game on twitch. It’s certainly a very weird game, being somewhat reminiscent of the Princess Maker games - far removed from the sort of game I would normally play - but I’m glad I played it. The main character, Josette, is wonderfully endearing. Unlike other games in the genre, Josette has her own personality and she’s very good at expressing it. She’ll often run up to the camera to ask you various questions while emoting with some wonderful and cute sprite animation. It makes her far more believable as a person, which is ironic because she’s actually an android.
The game takes place on an island called Blueland, where Josette was sent by her late father to learn to live with humans. You do this by sending her to a variety of locations around the town to interact with the various characters and objects scattered around. Her home, a submarine, is where she can interact with the objects you buy to teach her various lessons, improve her stats, or just have some fun. There are a few sections, such as piloting the submarine in the waters around the island where the player takes direct control, but almost all interactions are answering Yes/No/Neutral to questions or giving general directions to Josette.
As lovely as Josette and her antics are, the game can be frustrating, especially in the latter half as you run out of things to do. There are some curiously specific and arcane sequences needed to make progress in certain areas, and that’s on top of having to cycle through all of the accessible locations to find an important event you need to see. After about 5-6 hours, I started referring to a guide to get me back on track whenever I lost the thread of progression and I feel like this was the right choice. Otherwise I could easily have seen myself flailing around uselessly for several more hours.
Wonder Project J2 is a pretty obscure game in the west because it was never localized. I played using a fan translation, which I thought was fairly well done with only a few awkward lines here and there. That makes emulation the only reasonable way to play for those who don’t speak Japanese, but that leads to another issue: the game emulates very poorly.
It’s primarily a 2D game on a console only meant for 3D. It accomplishes this by rendering sprites onto flat planes that it places and moves in 3D space, and most emulators do not handle this well. It took me multiple hours of trial and error to find a combination of emulator and graphics plugin that wouldn’t render the game with awful-looking artifacting around the sprites. The artifacting is the main issue through most of the game, but then there are a variety of other severe emulation issues in the final act of the game. I ended up finding the singular video on youtube where these scenes weren’t horribly broken and streamed that instead, because they’re unwatchable otherwise.
Wonder Project J2 is a wonderfully charming, if sometimes frustrating game that’s a pain in the ass to emulate. I would love for it to get an official localization and modern port (and maybe some gameplay streamlining) so more people can experience it, but that’s never going to happen. Instead, you can go watch my full playthrough on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxENPX5rAVs&list=PLctN8oDccDac7ZZtRiSjnNKr0dXI4Rh-K
Shantae and the Seven Sirens
It’s a new Shantae game. It’s definitely a Shantae game… and that’s about it? It’s got the bright, cartoony and bouncy style with some solid, but rather basic metroidvania gameplay. Seven Sirens changes the transformations to be instant and context sensitive, which is a welcome change because it means you don’t need to fiddle with dances again. It also seems a bit faster than other Shantae games. Everything moves just a little bit (but noticeably) faster. I’m still not sure if I like it, but after an hour or two I had acclimated to it.
So yeah, it’s extremely a Shantae game. A solid one. No major problems, no major highlights. Doesn’t play quite as good as Pirate’s Curse, but I prefer the return to a normal metroidvania structure after Half Genie Hero.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps
Hot damn is this game pretty. Easily the most visually impressive game I played this year. It’s not just pretty though. Ori 2 is longer, bigger and plays even better than the original.
The addition of actual weapons for Ori to use is a big one. It gives the combat a more immediate and tactile feel. In the first game, combat was done by shooting homing shots from your energy orb friend, and it could make the player feel disconnected from the fight, as they just had to be near the target and mash the attack button. Letting Ori get in on the action opens up encounters to be more precise and diverse.
Despite the combat changes, Ori’s highlights continue to be its escape sequences. Ori 2 does include several actual boss fights, though they don’t quite have the same punch as an escape. The escapes weave together Ori’s very fluid and fun movement skills with some light platforming, powerful music and impressive setpieces to make some very impactful scenes.
The inclusion of sidequests and an upgradeable town feel a little strange at first, but they do a good job of adding additional optional content by making smart contextual re-use of the existing world.
Ori 2 is just about a straight upgrade from the first game, and writing this has made me want to actually replay it. I never ever replay games without a good reason.
Paper Mario: The Origami King
Paper Mario is a series with a lot of Capital-D Discourse surrounding it, and I don’t want to touch that with a 100 meter pole, so I’ll keep this brief.
Origami King maintains the wonderfully sharp humor of the rest of the series and returns to a more open and connected world that I vastly prefer, much like TTYD. Partner characters are back as well, to a lesser degree, but they serve to add a sharp dose of personality to their chapter, and for me, that’s really all they need to do. Some of them even went above and beyond and managed to have a serious, emotional character arc that didn’t feel out of place in this funny comedy game. Huge respect for that.
The most controversial change is the ring battle system. It makes the battles more like puzzles where you try to line up enemies in certain patterns for maximum damage. The regular battles are fine, I suppose, but they do get old fairly quickly. The boss battles are a completely different beast. They have you rotating and sliding rings to create a path for Mario to walk, picking up items, powerups and attacks along the way. I’m in the minority here, but I adored the boss battles in Origami King. Each one introduced its own unique mechanics that required devising strategies on the fly other than simply hitting the boss hard.
The short of it is that I love Origami King and rank it up near Thousand Year Door as my favorite Paper Mario. That’s my opinion. Don’t @ me.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
New Horizons was my first foray into Animal Crossing (unless you count Pocket Camp, which I do not). I don’t usually play video games for the kind of escapism Animal Crossing provides, but it came along right as COVID was wrecking havoc on my anxiety. Having a (mostly) safe, idyllic island to escape to whenever I needed was very much appreciated. Eventually (after about 2 months) I had my island in a state I was quite happy with, and I lost almost all of my drive to continue. I would need some meaningful long term goal to keep my coming back, but stringing me along for as long as it did is extremely impressive, when most open ended games rarely keep me interested for more than a week.
Monster Hunter World: Iceborne
It’s just more Monster Hunter World, but slightly colder. The clutch claw is a great addition that allows for some fun strategies, like forcing monsters to run into walls, knocking them out and doing damage. The final boss is cool as hell, but also a fuckin’ asshole. Other than that, there’s not much more to say that doesn’t apply to the base game. More Mon Hun World is definitely a good thing.
Xenoblade Chronicles DE
Another game I played relatively recently that got a remaster this year. Xenoblade Chronicles should need to introduction. It was my favorite game I played in 2017, and it’s received some solid improvements with DE. Other than the obvious graphical updates, it includes massive improvements to the user interface and some tweaks to the difficulty.
The UI changes are, to me, more important than any visual upgrades because of how much cleaner and more efficient it presents necessary info. The original game was abysmal in this department. In particular the improvements to sidequest tracking made me far more interested in actually completing them. It’s even more hand-holdy this time by even showing you the path to your objective. This is really just a bandage over the issue of too many inconsequential sidequests that I had with the original, but for the scope of Xenoblade DE, this was probably the best way to go about it.
The difficulty adjustments aren’t particularly apparent until the late game, but that’s where the original started to fall apart. There were some particularly punishing walls that took me a number of tries originally. In DE, those same bosses died on my first attempt with no grinding. At first I assumed I was just more skilled with the battle system my second time through, but no, some fight mechanics have been toned down significantly to be quite reasonable.
At the end of the day it’s still Xenoblade Chronicles, but with some extra polish, and that’s a very good thing because Xenoblade Chronicles is one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played.
Xenoblade Chronicles Future Connected
Future Connected is to Xenoblade DE as Torna is to Xenoblade 2. It’s a short bonus game that takes most of the mechanics and some of the characters from the main game and tells a supplemental story.
In this case, the story follows Shulk and Melia exploring the remants of the Bionis shoulder and trying to re-take Alcamoth from an extra-dimensional entity called the Fog King. If I’m being completely honest, the main plot of defeating the Fog King is a little weak for a Xenoblade game. Future Connected works much better if you view it as a vehicle for the development of Tyrea (especially her relationship with Melia) and the High Entia in general. Most notably, it introduces and develops the two nopon stowaways, Kino and Nene, who also happen to be two of Riki’s littlepon. Kino and Nene are incredibly adorable and I feel as if they’re fleshed out as much in this short 12 hour side story as any one character is in the base 60 hour game. I love them so much.
Mechanically, the game is extremely similar to Xenoblade DE. The biggest change being chain attacks being replaced by union strikes, which have teams of nopon prospectors attack with varying effects. The prospectors are scattered throughout the Bionis’s shoulder and need to be found to add to the power of the attack. It doesn’t really add very much to the battles, but the effects of the union attacks can be very strong if used strategically.
Future Connected doesn’t have the strong mechanical evolution or story of Torna, but it’s got its own interesting cast of characters and world design. It’s not up to Torna’s quality, but it’s not far behind.
Trails in the Sky FC
Hoo boy. It’s time to write about Trails. This should probably be a separate essay, but I want it included here. First thing to mention is that these games all share one overarching story, world, and set of characters, so I’m ranking them as a whole and discussing them in chronological order. I’ll try to avoid spoilers as best I can, but some are inevitable by simply discussing the games.
I had tried Trails in the Sky FC (First Chapters) once a number of years ago, but fell off of it after an hour or two. Recently, I was in the mood for a turn based JRPG and some “light” nudging from a friend made me give it another go. Considering there are 4 Trails games on this list, I think you can guess how it went.
Anyways, FC follows Estelle Bright (one of the best female protagonists in any game) and her non-blood-related brother Joshua as they travel around the kingdom of Liberl training to be general do-gooders called Bracers while looking for their missing father. They travel to each of the cities in the country, doing various odd jobs for the local Bracer guild and getting caught up in some bigger shenanigans along the way.
FC is a very slow burn of a game. It takes it time by focusing on building the world and its characters for much of its run time. This could end up being dull and boring, but the charming and idyllic Liberl felt grounded and almost cozy with just enough plot to string me along through the main story without losing interest.
The game ends on quite a cliffhanger with many threads still left unanswered, but that’s because FC is basically only half of the full game. The other half is:
Trails in the Sky SC
SC (Second Chapters) picks up immediately where FC leaves off, with Estelle waking up the very next morning. She quickly sets out on a quest to reunite with Joshua, taking her all across Liberl again. Where FC was the build up, SC is the payoff, as the plot takes a more central role, with the final third of the game in particular being a long, incredible, wild ride that concludes with one of the most satisfying and impressive endings to a JRPG. Even though the main story is wrapped up nicely, it leaves many, many threads trailing off into the distance. This is only the first big step in the Trails series.
Wow, it’s hard to talk about SC without spilling spoilers everywhere, so I guess I’ll get into the battle system of both games, since I’ve come to appreciate it greatly. The battle systems of FC and SC are almost identical, with the biggest change being that SC includes combo attacks that honestly aren’t very useful. Battles take place on a rectangular grid that player characters and enemies can move around on. They’re turn based, but the turns are based on a continuous timeline, where everyone’s turns are based on their speed stat.
Actions include a basic attack, arts (which is the Trails word for magic spells), movement, using items and crafts. Arts are rather straightforward compared to other games. They all cost EP, which is basically just MP or Mana, and they have a casting time. Casting an art will move your turn down on the timeline, so it often requires some planning to account for the delay. Crafts are a bit different. They’re unique to each character and use a different resource called Craft Points (CP). CP is mainly gained by taking actions or taking damage in battle, though there are some other sources, making CP something of a limit break gauge. Most crafts only use a small amount of CP to do a wide variety of effects, but there are also S-Crafts which consume all remaining CP (as long as it’s over 100) for a very powerful and flashy attack. Alongside S-Crafts are S-Breaks. As long as a character has 100 or more CP, they can at any time trigger an S-Break, consuming all of their CP and moving their turn to the top of the timeline to perform a pre-set S-Craft.
The most interesting part of the battle system to me is the timeline and how many mechanics play around it. There are a number of crafts that can delay an enemies turn, and a few that can advance an ally’s turn, and arts that can boost or drain speed. What really brings it all together, though, is special effects on the turns. Randomly throughout the battle, certain points on the timeline will have special effects associated with this, such a guaranteed critical hit, increased strength, an HP heal, and more. Manipulating the turn order through all of the methods available to ensure your characters get those important bonuses is the most satisfying part of a battle.
Trails in the Sky the 3rd
Sky 3rd again picks up shortly after the previous game, but this time Estelle isn’t the main character. This time you’re following around Kevin Graham, a priest of the Septian Church as he investigates the aftermath of SC. Things get out of control pretty quickly as Kevin, his partner Ries and others get transported to the bizarre dimension called Phantasma. Sky 3rd is structurally quite different from the other games. Instead of exploring Liberl or the greater continent of Zemuria yourself, you descend through the levels of Phantasma, exploring dream-like versions of previous areas.
The major characters from the previous games return and are here for some good old fashioned character development. Descending through Phantasma might be the main goal, but the real highlight of the game is the various special doors. Each door has some requirement to enter and take some story or character thread that’s already been established and expands on it in sometimes-interactive scenarios. They effectively create launching points for plot threads multiple games down the line while making the world even more fleshed out and interesting. Did you know there’s an organization in Trails that’s essentially just the SCP Foundation, complete with the bonkers supernatural artifacts? This game is where that’s first expanded on.
3rd seems to be a fan favorite game with how much it sets up the subsequent games, has some very quirky and fun elements, and ends with some surprisingly hard hitting storytelling. I definitely see those aspects of it, but there are many small issues I take with it, the biggest being the structure and the distance of everything created by the majority of the game taking place in what’s basically an illusion.
Trails from Zero
Zero is the first of the two games in the Crossbell arc, which were never officially localized in the west. I played it using the fantastic fan localization from the Geofront team, applied to a legally obtained copy of the Japanese version. If you have any interest in the Crossbell games, you should check them out https://geofront.esterior.net/. I’m actually a little proud of myself for managing to buy the game through a Japanese website using only my ability to read katakana and my experience with user interface design. Anyway, onto the game itself.
Trails from Zero follows Lloyd Bannings, Elie MacDowell, Randy Orlando and Tio Plato as they establish the Crossbell police department’s new team: The Special Support Section (SSS). The SSS is a team that’s meant to directly help the individual citizens with their problems, very similar to the Bracer guild, but the SSS is totally nothing like the Bracers you guys, I mean it. While the events in Zero aren’t directly linked with what happened in the Sky trilogy, the events of the previous games absolutely have an impact on the story and meaningfully shape it. This is one of the things I really love about the Trails series. Every game is part of one world and timeline and story that tightly connects them all.
Zero pulls back on the cast of characters and focuses on those four main SSS members: Lloyd, Elie, Randy and Tio. Focusing on so few characters gives them plenty of time to develop, making some of them among my favorite in the series. Randy and Tio really stand out as very fun characters. Lloyd is a solidly distinct JRPG protagonist, and Elie is… well, she’s kinda bland, unfortunately, but she fulfills an important role in the story and is a pleasant person.
The biggest departure from the other games is that the nation of Crossbell is actually quite small. Far smaller than even the small kingdom of Liberl. Instead of the sprawling countryside or vast depths of Phantasma, you’ve got the very dense city of Crossbell and very few small towns on the outskirts. I actually really enjoyed this smaller, but denser world since it gave me the opportunity to get to know each nook and cranny much better. A strong familiarity with a game world not only makes it more memorable, but it creates a bigger impact when story events disrupt it.
The SSS goes all around Crossbell doing various Bracer-like-but-definitely-not-Bracer tasks and gets caught up in cases involving shady politics, organized crime, and more. The various factions and people vying for control of the city creates an interesting dynamic that manages to drive the story in a fairly believable way. It had me contemplating how these power struggles would play out.
The final chapter of Zero is a fan favorite and I agree completely because of how intensely the story escalates. It pushes each character’s arc and produces a wide range of emotions. I remember being genuinely creeped out in one section by playing at night in a dark room. It was a wonderfully exciting conclusion that set my expectations for Trails to Azure very high.
I’m currently waiting for Geofront to finish their patch for Trails to Azure and god, the wait is painful. I need the next Trails in my veins ASAP (the Cold Steel series is another issue).
Outer Wilds
Yell at me about recency bias all you want because I’m writing this on the same day I finished Outer Wilds, but no single game has invaded my thoughts so strongly in quite a number of years. The 240 hours of Trails games I played this year may have used more brain thought cycles, but my measly 20 hours with Outer Wilds isn’t far behind.
Many people I’ve spoken to seem to not be aware of Outer Wilds at all, which is downright criminal. Outer Wilds has you play as a young Hearthian (a 4-eyed goblin-esque creature) embarking on their first space flight. It soon becomes apparent that you’re mysteriously stuck in a time loop, and your only option is to use the limited time in each loop to explore the solar system and figure out what’s going on.
Outer Wilds captured me by doing so many things right, but above all else, it sparked a sense of curiosity and wonder to a degree I haven’t felt in many years. Dozens of times in my playthrough I found myself mouth agape in awe wandering through an unexplored location for the first time. The story and environment of Outer Wilds are incredibly imaginative and thought provoking. As a nearly life-long fan of space exploration science fiction (Star Trek, Star Wars, Farscape, Stargate, Space Cases (the Star Trek Voyager-like show on Nickelodeon in the late 90s) and more), Outer Wilds exemplifies those general themes and reminded me why I love the idea of exploring space so much.
A small, but very important detail I want to touch on is how the world is presented. Specifically, the entire game world is completely seamless. From taking off, to traveling through space to landing and exploring the depths of an alien planet is all done seamlessly without even taking control from the player. If I ever get around to writing more in my metroidvania design series, I’ll go over how creating the sense of a consistent and cohesive world is a very important part of creating a believable and memorable game world. The world of Outer Wilds pulls this off shockingly well, feeling like it’s surprisingly real.
I have a lot more to say about Outer Wilds and spoilers are inevitable, so if you plan to play Outer Wilds yourself (and I very strongly recommend you do), skip to the last paragraph.
I would describe Outer Wilds first as an exploration game, then a puzzle game, and third, a horror game. Space is filled with unknowns, and the unknown is inherently scary. Outer Wilds leverages this heavily. Walking along a narrow bridge above a black hole as a planet breaks apart around you, drifting through misty brambles with colossal hungry anglerfish everywhere, and tumbling down shafts with invisible death gas are absolutely anxiety inducing, if not outright terrifying, but if anything, as a generally anxious person, this pulled me in even more. Before long, I had such a strong drive to learn more about this solar system and what the Nomai who inhabited it were up to, that I pushed through my anxiety without a second thought (with one or two exceptions) and ended up punctuating some important moments with a bit more adrenaline than normal. Being stuck in a time loop alleviates some anxiety too, since the worst consequence of (most) actions is dying and simply restarting the loop. The game very quickly trains you to expect to die, since you die at the end of each loop anyway. A lack of consequences tempers anxiety and fear, so that the tense moments leave you, mostly, with the adrenaline boost. Honestly, if Outer Wilds hadn’t set itself up as well as it did, I think the anxiety would’ve been a major hindrance to my enjoyment.
While most actions in Outer Wilds have no consequences, one in particular does, and it’s quite special. In the endgame, you need to power the Vessel using the advanced warp core found in the Ash Twin Project. The Ash Twin project is the thing actually causing the time loop, so taking its power source means it’ll be your last loop. You won’t be able to come back from this. When you’re ready to do this, you’ve likely explored every planet and know exactly what needs to be done. The anxiety when taking that warp core is wholly different from anything else in the game. Previously, there may have been urgency to do something before the loop reset, but this time there’s no going back, no do-overs. This is the urgency of something that matters. Something that will have lasting effects. Something that can cause you to truly fail. The first sense of real urgency since beginning the game hits very hard, and it’s underscored with the amazing track “Final End Times” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShkghHvLXls - a variation on the track played shortly before each loop ends. When I realized what I would need to do I had to wait until the next day to steel myself. This cautious, yet mad dash to the Vessel, through the deadly anglerfish brambles, before the sun explodes isn’t something I’ll soon forget.
At one point I got to thinking “I really love the exploration, but does it really need a time loop?”. Being interrupted because it was time for the sun to explode can certainly be annoying, so how plausible would it be to remove that aspect? The time loop features prominently in the story, which is fascinating in its own way, but I realized a much larger aspect is how the game uses the progression through the loop to do things you just couldn’t reasonably do with essentially static time. The Hourglass twins are the best example of this, but my favorite is The Tower of Quantum Knowledge on Brittle Hollow. The only reasonable way to get in is to wait for its landmass to fall into the black hole and follow it to explore in zero-g. Outer Wilds would lose a lot of its charm without this temporal dimension.
I’ve rambled on long enough, so I’ll just conclude by saying that Outer Wilds is a game that feels like it was made to appeal specifically to my interests, and then push me to the edge of my comfort zone just enough. It’s still fresh in my mind from just finishing it, so perhaps my opinion of the game will cool with time, but for right now, Outer Wilds is a game that has a lot of emotion attached to it.
