February 15th

Welcome back readers.

Psst want to help tell unaccountable armed thugs to fuck off? New Itch bundle.

Just two weeks left on the clock for our Fansite Jam! Yes, that means I need to get a move on too. Surely I can complete a second article before the jam closes. Surely.

Regarding my weekly Patreon plugging, I need to be a little more frank this week and highlight that we’re close to meeting our monthly operational costs, but not close enough, so our finances are dwindling. We’ll have more details on where we’re at soon, but the short of the matter is we need more support to keep doing things the way we are, but we want to be doing more than what we are. We want to try out new things, different things, and more community things! But we also need to keep the lights on. Please help us out?

This Week in Videogame Blogging is a roundup highlighting the most important critical writing on games from the past seven days.

Relooted

We’re mostly running with sets of three this week. Our first two sections are game-specific. This one concerns the recent Afrofuturist parkour heist game Relooted. I think it’s worth your time.

• Relooted challenges who gets to own and tell African history | AV Club
  Wallace Truesdale contemplates history and genre in Relooted‘s effort to correct the narrative (Further Reading: TreaAndrea M Russworm on the erasure of Black history in games).
• ‘You Are Not Thieves’ | startmenu
  Artemis Octavio highlights Relooted‘s strength as an interactive invitation to be curious about African histories.
• Relooted Is A Big Black Middle Finger To History Controlled By White People | Kotaku
  Ash Parrish lauds a full-throated rebuke of the treasure hunter genre.

“Often, you’re liberating burial vessels or human remains. Nomali and crew don’t talk about skulls or toros as mere anthropological curiosities. They get pronouns and names. It was a powerful, painful reminder that those bones were once living people who deserved more dignity than being put on display like so much fine china. For as much as I enjoyed the game, I hated the feeling that this fantasy of stealing back the bones of venerated ancestors would be the closest thing to justice that my extended cultural family would ever get. But Relooted isn’t only painful, it’s also joyful and a clever rebuke of the treasure hunter stories it inverts.”

Yakuza Kiwami 3

Another high-profile release this week is not leaving quite-so-fond impressions upon the writers I’ve surveyed, who question both the ethos and execution of the Yakuza 3 remake.

• Análise: Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties é um remake chocho que não entende a graça do original | GameBlast
  Hiero de Lima finds that Kiwami 3 understands little about its own source text, instead heaping the trivialities of more recent entries into an indistinct and incoherent package.
• Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties review: How not to do a remake | VGC
  Ashley Schofield finds that Yakuza 3‘s remake is mostly a downgrade (Further Reading: Ashley’s previous writing on Kiwami 3 and its casting of Teruyuki Kagawa).
• Yakuza Kiwami 3 Constantly Disappoints | Gamer Guides
  Lexi Luddy did not like Kiwami 3.

“I love Like a Dragon, it is my favorite video game franchise. It has made me reflect on how I think about masculinity, femininity, and gender. It’s made me interrogate my politics, and believe that I could do anything I set my mind to if I am willing to reach out to others for help. That’s why it hurts even more to reckon with the fact that Yakuza Kiwami 3 is a failure on nearly every level. While the original Yakuza 3 was never my favorite in the franchise (the clunky controls and slower pace were a harsh adjustment coming off of Kiwami 2), as a remake, Kiwami 3 takes the most emotionally important game in the series and grinds off all the charm and personality, only to replace it with filler side content, objectionable recasting, anachronistic character beats, and retcons that break the series’ long-running continuity, leaving me dreading the future of the series.”

Record Keeping

I’ve grouped three rather different pieces together here, varied as they are in structure in scope. I’ve arranged them, based on their foci, on a loose continuum from history, to rumour, to ahistory.

• Ultima IX | The Digital Antiquarian
  Jimmy Maher situates the last, worst Ultima in its time and place, and among its peers (Further Reading: Hiromasa Iwasaki on the role of Roe. R. Adams III in writing Ultima IV).
• Did Dhalsim Get His Name from a Curry Restaurant in Osaka? | Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games
  Drew Mackie contemplates competing origin stories for Dhalsim’s name–or even just parts of his name (Further Reading: Drew’s previous investigation of Sodom).
• Down In Bermuda (2019): The Cozy Erasure of an Entire Territory | GlitchOut
  Oma Keeling rips into a cozy game that imagines Bermuda without (checks notes) Bermuda.

“All you might need for a cozy indie puzzle game that builds on the colonial erasure of people’s realities, the portrayal of the indigenous as magical, as unreal, and the complete silence on the violence of the imperial project, a dominance over history. It is forever ancient. Forever forgotten.”

Rogue-Playing Game

Now let’s move into a genre section, looking at RPGs. Is a roguelike deckbuilder a kind of RPG? I’m running with it.

• Legend of the Sacred Stone: The Article of the Game of the Movie | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi finds a lot to like in this stylish Taiwanese ARPG/movie tie-in.
• The Spirit Lift Generates Tension By Encouraging Exploration | Bloomed Wings Blog
  Cind checks out a deckbuilder that’s operating in Scream territory and doesn’t forget the Rogue-liking.
• God Won’t Forgive You For Following His Will | Stop Caring
  Guilherme Alves traces the widening separation between Dragon Quest and its goddess, both mechanically and thematically (Further Reading: Yussef Cole on Elden Ring, religion, and cosmology).

“If Dragon Quest has, over time, secularized itself through mechanics, then Dragon Quest VII accomplishes a different kind of disenchantment entirely: ontology. It secularizes the architecture of the world, revealing a cosmos in which acting in God’s name atomizes creation instead of redeeming it, scatters it into broken continents and isolated histories, like shards of scripture manifesting as geography – with its lessons and metaphors, everything that scripture is supposed to convey.”

Step, Walk, Kick

Okay. You got me. I’m not sure I can quite articulate what links these next three single-game analyses outside of a certain liminal whimsy. That and they’re all quite good.

• Fallson | Arcadence
  Nicholas Capozzoli muses on climbing games, climbing films, infantile masculinity, and the Foddy of it all (Further Reading: Kayin on Baby Steps).
• Despelote (2025) | Breaking Arrows
  Steven Santana traces the porous, dreamlike transition between past and present, recollection and recreation in Despelote.
• firewatch is for yearners | underleveled
  Moises Taveras revisits the tragedy and triumph of Firewatch‘s doomed situationship (Further Reading: Rachel Atchley on Firewatch).

“Firewatch is for the yearners. Always has been. It is for the romantics. For those well-versed in desire. For the messy bitches out there. And for as long as I’ve known anything about love and longing, I’ve known it to be the hardest thing we do. Firewatch, which came out around my first (and amateurish) brushes with unvarnished and messy love, was highly instrumental in my understanding of that notion.”

Critical Chaser

Theory, practice, and no strict boundary between.

• A Dialogue with Austin Walker | Unwinnable
  Autumn Wright sits down for a wide-ranging conversation with Austin Walker that thwarts easy summary (Further Reading: Autumn’s previous conversation with Joshua Rivera).

“It’s almost like we’re holding onto a bar that’s on a seesaw, and right now we’re really close to the center, so we don’t have a lot of leverage. But the way history works is sometimes you slide to the edge of the bar and you get a lot more leverage. And it’s a little leverage because we’re writing about video games to fairly small audiences, but there are moments when that stuff changes. The only reason that things went the way they went in 2016, 2017, 2018, in the Trump era, was that we happened to have had a pretty mature critical faculty. We had built websites for this stuff already. Waypoint launched before Trump won the election, and if that hadn’t happened, none of the stuff we ran for those years would have run. And again, that stuff didn’t change the world, but I do think that it was part of a project around engaging with those ideas. And I think we lost that. I don’t think we won that conflict of ideas, but I know we would have lost it more if we weren’t there trying to have it. We would have had greater losses to people who were not just doing the work of cultural criticism, but were doing the work of propaganda.”

• Nioh 3 perfects a certain brilliantly soulless style of game design | AV Club
  I think (???) William Hughes liked Nioh 3 (derogatory???).

“Nioh 3 is, in other words, a game that exists, thrives, and potentially fails solely in the hands. It will give you as much of itself as you’re willing to accept—regardless of how crammed your gullet already is. It has no soul, and wouldn’t know what to do with one if it did. But it does inspire the kind of fascination inevitably produced by a machine that has been engineered meticulously for a singular purpose. It’s huge, aggressive, and—if I didn’t need to put a few more polish passes on this review—I’d probably be playing it right now. The crux is this: It’s impossible to imagine a better Nioh game. Whether that’s an expression of praise or damnation is left for the reader to decide.”