For the uninitiated, the Thor is an Android emulation handheld designed in the image of a Nintendo 3DS. A clamshell little freak machine. A pair of screens meets a hot couple of analogue sticks at the key party. Powerful enough to carry around several decades of videogame history in your backpack like some kind of deranged, horny librarian.

Every dead hour of my life now carries the seductive threat of emulation. Whether I am waiting for my iced almond milk latte at the coffeeshop, standing in a grocery store line, or lying in bed bargaining for ten more minutes before sleep, the Thor waits in my pocket vibrating like a bad idea. It has already made it upstairs.

I’ll open the thing with the intention of testing performance, as if that’s something I could even really do, and suddenly I am six hours deep into a Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky ROM hack made by DARKLUCARIO1999 trying to determine whether the rewritten dialogue has made Grovyle more tear-jerking or just more bisexual.

The Thor is my own ongoing affair with adolescence.

I love it.

I have been playing Jump! Ultimate Stars before bed most nights. A deeply unserious DS fighting game built around manga characters from Shonen Jump. It never released in America, which means nobody around me has opinions about it. Nobody is trying to convince me it secretly changed the medium and nobody is posting hour-long video essays titled JUMP ULTIMATE STARS IS MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER featuring thumbnails where Luffy looks like he just watched his family die. The game exists in total peace.

I unlocked the Yu Yu Hakusho world the other night and got Hiei, Kurama, and Yusuke within the span of maybe twenty minutes. I love popping off spirit guns. An absolutely narcotic evening. Better than many supposedly important ones.

That’s another thing. I am beginning to distrust importance.

The older I get, the more suspicious I become of any cultural atmosphere that immediately demands a verdict from you. Everything now arrives pre-loaded with context. Consensus forms so quickly. You are expected to approach art like a juror entering deliberations instead of a person trying to feel something.

Meanwhile I’m lying on the couch at midnight playing an old fan translation of a DS game where Bobobo can fight Yugi Muto. A spiritually magnificent sentence.

I booted up Star Fox 64 3D the other night and became lustful towards my Thor’s bottom half. The lower screen cockpit display beneath the action transforms the 3DS into a tiny science-fiction communications device. You glance downward and see incoming chatter, radar information, little gauges flickering away. It feels wonderfully tactile. Fetishistic, even. The game understands that fantasy lives in secondary details. The dashboard lights and the fake buttons and the delightful illusion that your hands are operating machinery expensive enough to detonate at any moment.

“YOUR DAD HELPED ME LIKE THAT TOO,” Peppy Hare screams.

People say lines in Star Fox 64 3D with the sincerity of community theater actors who want to give the performance of their lives even if there are only 12 people and God in the audience. It’s perfect. Every videogame should sound slightly ridiculous. A little embarrassing. Earnestness is good for the soul.

The Thor is also where I’ve been playing Pokémon Gold for the Twitch book club I’m running. Because the device syncs its clock through the internet, the game’s real-time structure remains intact. Morning arrives in Johto exactly when morning arrives for me. Night falls simultaneously across both worlds. If I pull the thing out at 1:30 in the morning because I want to keep gaming, Goldenrod City is also dark and half-asleep just like everything and everyone else, but the late-night Pokémon are out and the radio programming has changed. Time continues to pass there with humiliating commitment. It’s 1:30am.

Most games abandoned this kind of real-world synchronization years ago because it is wildly inconvenient. It means certain events only happen at specific hours. It means you cannot fully control the rhythm of play and align that rhythm to your personal preferences. The game occasionally asks you to reorganize your actual life around whether or not the Bug-Catching Contest is currently running.

Naturally, this has only made me more attached to the Thor. Pokémon Gold might have plans later. I should probably call.

I love carrying these games around and choosing between them depending on my mood. I love spending twenty minutes with one before drifting to another. The whole experience feels detached from the endless psychic landfill of release schedules and reaction cycles.

But if I’m being honest, I don’t think the AYN Thor is solely responsible for this feeling.

Because I’ve also been deeply happy with my Nintendo Switch 2. Marvel Cosmic Invasion just added Cyclops, my favorite Marvel superhero, and I immediately transformed back into the exact age where seeing Cyclops ricochet optic blasts across a screen felt medically essential. Perfect Tides: Station to Station is my in-system page-turner. Yoshi & The Mysterious Book is out and I am already irritating people about it.

Even stranger: my PS5 had been collecting dust for most of the year. I had decided it represented a kind of gaming relationship I no longer wanted. Then Peter and I recorded our Patreon bonus episode about our thirty favorite games and afterward I reinstalled Batman: Arkham Knight just to make sure I still loved it.

I do.

Which immediately triggered a full DC Comics spiral. I downloaded Gotham Knights. I downloaded Suicide Squad. I texted a friend trying to convince him to buy Suicide Squad so we could professionally enable each other. I’ve even been playing the new LEGO Batman game and having a wonderful time with it.

And listen: these are not all masterpieces. Gotham Knights repeats mission structures constantly. Suicide Squad is messy and overextended. LEGO games are digital jangling keys for adults who know what the phrase “post-Crisis continuity” means.

But, who cares?

Seriously, who cares?

I like driving through Gotham while rain streaks across the pavement. I like hearing Nightwing talk like a CW character. I like gliding toward meaningless side activities after work while Chip sleeps beside me on the couch. I like the feeling of a game accompanying an evening instead of auditioning for the museum in my mind.

There is a Jewish phrase I find myself returning to lately: ayin tovah. Looking with your good eye.

The idea is simple. You train yourself to notice what is beautiful before your brain rushes in like a deranged reviewer inventorying defects. You look for what is alive and generous and trying.

This applies to art and it applies to people and it applies to entire lives.

While I was gaming recently, Sarah dropped one of our mugs in the kitchen and it shattered all over the floor. For a second she looked devastated. She’s a gentle person who hates creating inconvenience for anybody else.

And I remember looking at her standing there in pajamas surrounded by broken ceramic and feeling overwhelmed with affection. The apartment looked beautiful to me. The mess looked beautiful to me. My wife apologizing and scrambling while Chip the dog nervously investigated the shards like a tiny bomb squad technician looked beautiful to me. I thought: this is it. This is the whole thing. This is the life I wanted.

Looking with your good eye changes the world.

It makes you easier to astonish. It makes you easier to live with, to surprise, and to love.

I think a lot of modern life trains the opposite instinct into us. We are encouraged to approach everything like suspicious consumers performing faux-academic analysis on our own happiness. Every movie is a referendum. Every game is a discourse battlefield. Every relationship filtered through the language of optimization and boundaries and efficiency until eventually you are left standing alone in a perfectly organized apartment incapable of enjoying a single thing inside it.

That sounds miserable to me now.

I would rather love Star Fox 64. I would rather get excited unlocking Yu Yu Hakusho characters in an old DS game nobody remembers. I would rather play mediocre Batman games with my friends. I would rather sit on the couch beside my wife at the end of the evening hearing the night version of the Johto battle theme while Chip snores between us.

People will describe these things as small pleasures.

Increasingly, I suspect they are the entire point.

Thanks for reading all that.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 makes me regret videogames.

I thought it was important to be upfront about my position in all of this.

See, I streamed the entirety of the first Xenoblade Chronicles on my Twitch channel and was shocked to discover an exceedingly successful story in the Golden Fleece formula. With clear thematic intention and characters drawn in a way that births sentimentality, it was a joy to navigate the twists and turns of Shulk’s adventure. As I do on my streams, I broke down exactly what the story was doing as I played—how scenes scaffold ideas, how they apply pressure, how they cash out in ways that deploy narrative inevitability and surprise in equal measure. Xenoblade Chronicles understands how to generate meaning.

I couldn’t wait to start Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

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From a distance, it looked like my kind of game. I perceived a stronger emphasis on love and romance. The Driver/Blade system, surely, would dramatize something about close bonds and relational identities. I knew, too, that the game was divisive! I assumed this to mean it took huge creative swings and was bold in its craft.

After about an hour of playing, I began to suspect that every person who had ever praised this game was participating in a coordinated psychological operation against me. The profundity of my disappointment was the most coherent thing the game produced.

Nothing is important to Xenoblade Chronicles 2. It accumulates without direction. Characters are introduced carelessly, and almost nothing is demanded of them over the course of a 60+ hour campaign. They don’t clarify under pressure or sharpen through conflict because both forces rarely arrive in a way that changes anything. The result is a kind of hermetically bloated, anaesthetized sprawl. The story keeps moving, but the people inside it don’t.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 does not feature a story that develops. It extends. It stretches forward, adding material—content, lore—without ever reorganizing around it. Rex, Pyra, Mythra—everyone ends exactly where they began, exactly who you thought they were when you first met them. They show up with a clear shape and spend the rest of the game confirming it. All we gain is information.

Early in Xenoblade Chronicles, Shulk is caught mid-thought. He’s distracted, thinking through the Monado, trying to understand what it is and what it can do. He doesn’t hear Fiora approach him. She calls out and startles him.

The surprise is short lived. She hands him a sandwich. He takes a bite and quickly announces,

“It’s amazing!”

Fiora replies,

“Oh, Shulk, you say that every day.”

The line is so casually affectionate that it almost embarrassed me while streaming. Two people who clearly love each other without needing the scene to scream it at you. An endangered species in videogames.

“Every day?”

The words reframe the moment we just saw. This is lunch. This is something they do. Fiora brings Shulk food, he eats it, he compliments it, and she knows the compliment well enough to tease him for it. The sweetness comes from the routine. It feels lived-in. It feels like it has happened before and will happen again.

“It’s so peaceful. You know, Shulk, I hope every day can be like this, always.”

Now the scene becomes explicit about what that routine means. This is the life she wants. The repetition we just saw becomes a future she is trying to hold onto—a life built out of small, ordinary returns to the same place, the same person, the same exchange.

Shulk is not fully inside that future. He’s distracted by the Monado, pulled into something he’s trying to understand. Fiora doesn’t register that as a problem. For her, this is still the shape of their life. But we can see the tension already. She is describing a life that continues like this. He is already oriented toward something that will break it.

The disruption is already inside of him.

Fiora’s dream, lunch with Shulk, is so modest and specific. She wants the comfort of repetition; a life small enough to continue without bothering others. That would make it safe, right? She wants safety. The story tightens around that desire immediately. The scene worked to make me protective of something before I consciously realized I was supposed to lose it.

This is a story in motion.

What could be discarded as a silly scene meant to demonstrate friendship really gives shape to an entire beautiful world between Shulk and Fiora before the story rips that away. We see exactly how Fiora’s care for Shulk works. Shulk has a tendency to disappear into his own thinking and, in this case, to follow the Monado wherever it leads him. Fiora does not argue with that. She interrupts it and brings him back to something sweeter and more grounded. That pattern is the relationship.

That matters because the Mechon attack does not introduce loss in the abstract. It interrupts something we have already experienced ourselves. Shulk is already fixated on the Monado, but it shares space with something else—Fiora, this routine, this life. When she dies, that space collapses. The Monado doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It takes over. His revenge is not born in the scene containing the most obvious drama. It’s simply what remains. I did not need the game to explain Shulk’s emotional state to me afterward because I had already watched the space inside him collapse. Fiora occupied part of that interiority while the Monado occupied another. Once she was gone, there was nothing left to interrupt his fixation. There is painful innocence in it—the instinct to keep reaching for something after it is gone. A hand extending toward the empty side of the bed.

When Fiora later reappears, the story doesn’t have to invent new meaning. It returns to something it had already built. The tension between who Shulk is with her and who he becomes without her is already in place.

That experience cannot be recreated through a wiki summary or a lore explanation because the meaning is not stored in the fact that Fiora is alive. It is stored in the accumulation of behavior leading up to that fact. You have to see how she fits into Shulk’s life, how he drifts away from her, how she pulls him back, what she hopes their future looks like, and what happens to him once that future disappears.

Now, look at how Xenoblade Chronicles 2 introduces Rex and Pyra.

Rex has already died. He was stabbed through the chest by Jin and wakes up in a space he does not understand, speaking to someone he has never met. She introduces herself as Pyra and tells him where he is.

“This is…Elysium. The land where, long ago, mankind lived in harmony with their creator.”

She tells him what has happened to him.

“You were…killed.”

And then the scene introduces the bond between them through a physical instruction.

“Now, place your hand on my chest.”

Rex hesitates, but only in a way the scene has already anticipated.

“What?! A-are you sure?!”

The hesitation does not open up a decision. It confirms the terms of the scene. Pyra’s body is presented as both the site of the bond and the object through which that bond is made legible. There is no relationship between them to ground this moment, so the scene relies on immediate recognition—coded as intimate—so that the connection does not have to be built.

The scene is designed to be understood instantly by the player, even if it is not meaningful for the character. The game treats immediate recognizability as a substitute for emotional construction. Why build intimacy when you can just give someone enormous breasts and sad music?

As Laura Mulvey describes in her work on visual pleasure, the camera can organize a scene around the display of the female body as something to be looked at and understood immediately, bypassing the need for narrative development. Likewise, Pyra is made meaningful through the way the scene stages her body as immediately intelligible—something to be seen, approached, and accepted before anything is known about her. The framing of her, the physicality of the bond, and Rex’s embarrassed reaction all work together to produce a response that the scene can rely on without building anything between them. The moment reads as intimate because it is coded that way, not because intimacy has been established.

At the same time, the choice presented to him is structured to collapse. He is offered a return to life, a direct path to Elysium—a place he already wants to go—and a position of immediate importance through his connection to Pyra. There is no competing desire, no attachment that this questions, and no cost that registers. The scene does not construct anything resembling a decision.

Rex agrees.

“I’m in. Let’s go to Elysium!”

This moment is the catalyst for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 because it binds Rex to Pyra and commits him to the central goal of the story. It is the point at which his life is redirected and the plot begins in earnest. A moment like this has to do more than establish direction. It has to establish who Rex is and why this decision matters to him.

There is nothing here that answers that question. What am I supposed to get attached to? Rex’s defining characteristic, at least early on, is that the plot keeps happening to him with incredible confidence. The scene behaves as though “teenage boy encounters magical woman” is already enough emotional architecture to sustain sixty hours. What do I learn about Rex beyond his willingness to accept what is offered to him? What do I learn about Pyra beyond what she tells me outright?

The scene provides answers about the world and the stakes, but it does not build a relationship between the people inside it. It does not show me a life that this moment interrupts or a version of Rex that this decision alters. It presents him with a path and tells him to follow it.

The result is that the scene can be reduced to its sequence of events without losing anything essential. Rex meets Pyra, learns he is dead, accepts the bond, agrees to take her to Elysium, becomes her Driver. You miss nothing if you encounter this scene as a summary. There is no additional layer of behavior or relationship that changes how it is understood when it is reduced in this way. It’s just information.

And yet, watching this on stream, my chat disagreed.

They loved these characters!

They waited with bated breath as I approached “big” scenes and major reveals. The chatbox filled instantly whenever a moment signaled importance—humor, confession, vulnerability, grief. The reaction was immediate and assured, as if the scene had already done the work required to earn it.

Very quickly, my chat became much more interesting than the game. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was turning into a kind of nature documentary about the defensiveness of fandom in real time.

I needed to understand the gap between what I was seeing and what I knew people saw in it. There’s a version of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 that exists very clearly for its fans. It’s rich, layered, full of ideas. It’s deep. I was told this constantly.

Streaming the game made that gap impossible to ignore. Every time something big happened—and there are a lot of big things—the conversation moved in the same direction. Not toward what the scene did or how it was constructed, but toward what it meant. References came in quickly. Every scene in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 eventually becomes about Gnosticism if you leave fans alone with it long enough. This cannot be emphasized enough. Somewhere around the fifth mention of Gnosticism, I began to suspect that “Gnosticism” simply meant “a scene that sucks on its own.”

Reader, if you ever see “Perfect Works” mentioned, run.

All of these other Lore signals stretched well beyond anything the scene itself was doing. The moment expanded outward, pulling in material from everywhere until it could support the reaction it had already produced.

You could feel the scene stabilize as it was explained.

That rhythm kept repeating. The game would surge, stall, and then get carried the rest of the way by interpretation. The meaning did not emerge from what was happening on screen. It arrived through the process of organizing what had already been presented.

By the time I was deep into these streams, I wasn’t trying to figure out why the game works. I was watching how people make it work. When people in chat, reacting to my frustration, would ask why I kept playing, the answer was simple. It was because of you. I wanted to see how far this could go—how much meaning could be produced around something that, to me, was not producing it on its own.

My chat would constantly ask me what I thought of whatever had just happened. They wanted a reaction, a recognition that something significant had occurred. But the moments rarely produced one. I could see exactly what the scene was asking me to feel, but I couldn’t locate where that feeling was supposed to come from.

And that difference started to clarify something for me. The problem was never whether the game could be understood. It could be understood in a hundred different ways, all of them available the moment you logged on to Reddit. The problem was that none of that understanding was coming from the scene. It never came from the scene. It always came from elsewhere and afterward— from YouTube essays and lore deep dives, from Wikipedia summaries, from director interviews, from cut content threads, from the language of Gnosticism applied retroactively until everything felt connected. The scene would happen, and then the work would begin. The meaning would be supplied, organized, stabilized.

What I was watching instead was a way of making the scene make sense after the fact. There is so much material—so much content—that, if motivated, you could always make a described story “make sense.”

Jenny Rice gives language to this phenomenon in The Awful Archives, where she describes how coherence can emerge through accumulation rather than through any single, stable act of construction. She writes,

“the (beautiful coherence) of my claim emerges from an accumulation—the adding up—of a repulsive archive. My archive of repulsion could also be called an entelechial formation, as its accumulation feeds a spinning blur that feels like an aesthetic whole.”

Chew on this.

The coherence she’s describing is not located in any one piece of evidence. It doesn’t depend on the parts agreeing with each other, or even making sense individually. The archive she’s working with is explicitly unstable. And yet, as it accumulates, something begins to happen. The mass itself starts to take on shape. It produces the feeling of a whole.

Rice describes what accumulation does over time:

“The contents thicken into a new form altogether. They become thick evidence.… [they] consolidate and coalesce into something stable.”

“Thick evidence” is not better evidence. It is not more precise, or more reliable. It is simply denser. There is more of it. Enough of it, gathered together, begins to feel convincing. And crucially, that feeling of stability does not come from any single part. It comes from the fact that there are so many parts.

You can see this process clearly in “Everything Explained” YouTube videos.

A typical video like this does not hinge on a single insight, perspective, or experience. It builds by gathering. A line of dialogue is pulled from one scene. A visual detail is isolated from another. A mechanic is interpreted through a psychic lens. A developer quote may be deployed. Parallels are drawn across characters, systems, and entire games. The video moves forward not by resolving any one idea, but by continuing to add.

Rice describes this kind of movement as a form of circulation, where material “gains force as it moves,” because it becomes more present, more repeated, and more connected. The parts do not need to stabilize on their own. They only need to keep moving, keep gathering, keep attaching to one another to thicken.

Individually, these pieces might be unconvincing. Some are compelling. Some are stretches. Some contradict each other. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that they accumulate.

As they do, the explanation begins to feel complete simply because there are so many parts. The density itself becomes persuasive. The video gives you the sense that everything has been accounted for, that the work has depth because it can sustain this level of connection. It rewards recall. At some point, media literacy mutates into trivia competitiveness and a kind of memorization Olympics starts to play out. The surrounding fandom then rewards the ability to track references, to recognize terms, to slot each new detail into a growing system. The more you can hold in your head, the deeper it starts to feel.

That is Rice’s “thick evidence” at work. The coherence comes from the fact that there are enough claims for something like coherence to be simulated.

This is where the issues with Xenoblade Chronicles 2 are easiest to see clearly. If we examine a singular moment that should force the story to change we can prove just how flaccid the work is on its own.

If the midpoint is where a story changes, then Vandham’s death and Mythra’s reveal are where Xenoblade Chronicles 2 says that change is happening. This is where Rex should come away with a different understanding of what he is doing and why it matters.

Vandham arrives as a mentor in name and posture only. He speaks in the language of experience, of principle, of hard-won understanding, but none of it is grounded in anything we have seen between him and Rex. The game installs him in that role and then immediately discards him, moving as quickly as possible to the point where a mentor’s death can be used to signal growth.

The scene knows exactly what kind of death it wants. Vandham leaps back into the fight and announces the lesson as he performs it.

“Are you ready, Rex?! Another lesson for ya! Something else you can do with a Blade!”

That is almost comically functional. Even in death, the game cannot resist making him instructional in the most literal sense. He stabs himself with Roc’s scythes, channels energy through his own body, and demonstrates “something else you can do with a Blade.” The scene gestures toward sacrifice, but the text frames it as a mechanic being revealed.

His final appeals to Rex are equally broad.

“Move it! Take Pyra and scram, kid!”

and then,

“Rex! Don’t go dyin’ on me here! You gotta make it! You gotta get away from here now! Live! Live for her! You gotta make it to Elysium!”

This is supposed to be inheritance. The mentor dies and passes something forward. But what is being passed forward? “Live for her” is not a new understanding of Rex’s relationship with Pyra. It is the same goal he already had, shouted at him with more urgency. “You gotta make it to Elysium” only repeats the premise. Vandham’s death, minutes after his introduction, simply tells you this whole journey is a big deal.

Then the scene gives him one last phrase:

“Just go, Rex! Remember to fight your war!”

Again, the sentence arrives dressed as something specific, because “your war” sounds personalized, as if Rex has now inherited a burden clarified through his time with Vandham. If you aren’t familiar with Xenoblade Chronicles 2, you might assume this line is referencing some specific, tragic burden between the two of them. You would be just as correct as someone who has played the game, because the text never provides anything more precise than that. There is no sequence of moments between them that would give “your war” a concrete meaning beyond the broadest possible gesture toward struggle. It can accommodate anything. It can be retrofitted onto any moment where Rex appears to act with resolve. It becomes an empty container, ready to be filled by fans and then pointed to as meaningful.

“Oh please. What a cliché,” Akhos moans.

Vandham’s death gives the story a sentence to remember, a sacrifice to cite, and a moment to arrange later into significance. It does not change Rex in any way the scene itself can demonstrate. It does not alter the goal, deepen the relationship, or force a new understanding of what being a Driver means.

Then Mythra appears.

You have seen this before: The hero’s group is losing at the hand of the powerful villains. The pressure is immediate and physical. Something long withheld is about to be forced into the open in order to survive. The moment is staged as a last resort, the kind of reveal that only happens when your back is against the wall and there are no other options left.

That is the structure the scene reaches for. A secret exposed under duress, something kept hidden because revealing it would change how the group understands the person keeping it. A moment like this should carry a cost. It should force a reckoning. Someone should have to accept something they were not prepared to accept, or reject something they thought they understood. The world should turn upside down.

But nothing changes when Mythra appears.

There is no hesitation, no fracture, no recalibration of how Pyra is understood or how Rex relates to her. The reveal does not demand acceptance, because it does not introduce anything that conflicts with what has already been established. It arrives as escalation in combat and power levels and little else.

It has the structure of a confession, but it does not produce the consequences of one. Unless you invent that.

When Mythra identifies herself,

“I am Mythra,”

the line lands with the weight of revelation. A new identity, a deeper truth, something that has been withheld until the moment it can no longer be contained. But what exactly is being revealed here?

Pyra has already been positioned as an unknown quantity. From the moment Rex meets her, she is withholding information. Her origin, her nature, her place in the world—these are all treated as incomplete, deferred, something that will be filled in later. There is no stable understanding of her to overturn.

Mythra enters as a new name to be learned, and the scene signals that this matters, but it does not force Rex to process that shift in any way that alters his behavior. He does not have to reconcile Pyra and Mythra as distinct presences, and nothing in how he speaks or acts suggests that the relationship has changed or become more complicated.

The shift registers somewhere else entirely.

Pyra’s attachment to the player has already been constructed along a very specific axis. She is gentle, patient, and consistently kind. She speaks with a softness that makes her immediately recognizable as a type. That is paired with an equally immediate visual design: bright red hair, a revealing outfit that draws attention to her body, and proportions that are exaggerated to the point of absurdity. The game does not build a relationship with her over time. It reinforces a configuration. You understand what she is meant to be the moment you see her.

Mythra duplicates that configuration and adjusts the variables.

The focus on the body remains, and it is impossible to miss. What changes is the attitude. Where Pyra is demure, Mythra is brash. Where Pyra is soft, Mythra is sharp. The difference is almost entirely tonal, immediate, and legible without context. The scene does not ask Rex to make sense of this difference. It asks the player to register it.

If the midpoint is where the world turns, something does turn here, but it happens at the level of preference. What had been a single figure of attachment is now split into two options, each defined less by what they do and more by what they represent as types. The scene introduces variation that can be sorted through, debated, and claimed.

For Rex, almost nothing changes. For the fan artist community, however, history has just been rewritten permanently. The midpoint reorganizes the waifu economy more effectively than it reorganizes the story.

Attachment to Pyra or Mythra does not depend on how either of them functions within the narrative, because the narrative has not required them to function in ways that would differentiate them meaningfully. It depends on recognition and preference—on which version of the same underlying design reads as more appealing. They operate as siloed ideals, configurations of personality and body that can be lifted out of the story and engaged with independently of it.

The reveal reorganizes the terms of that attachment. It gives the player more to invest in without requiring the story to carry the weight of that investment.

If you reduce the scene to dramatic action, very little has moved. Rex is still trying to protect Pyra and still trying to reach Elysium. The reveal expands what the audience knows while leaving his behavior intact.

It also depends on a payoff the story has not prepared. A hidden identity requires a prior understanding that can be destabilized. Pyra has been withheld from the beginning. There is nothing here to overturn, only more to add.

What the scene provides instead is material. Mythra’s appearance expands the vocabulary of the game—new terms, new implications, new connections that can be made to its larger cosmology. It gives the audience something to track and remember, something that can be lifted out of the scene and attached to everything that follows.

The moment feels large because it contains so much that can be used. It introduces enough to be worked on afterward, something the story can return to, expand upon, and use to stabilize itself in retrospect. The game behaves as though introducing a second anime woman with gigantic breasts constitutes a philosophical upheaval.

Yet, the story continues on the same line.

Shulk’s story moves in a different direction.

The Mechon attack kills Fiora early. Shulk sees it happen, and the event organizes everything that follows. His attention fixes on the Monado. His movement through the world gains direction. His pursuit of the Mechon carries a clear purpose that can be named and returned to at any point. The story advances through that clarity.

By the time the party reaches Prison Island, that purpose has hardened into a stable resolve. This is the midpoint of the story, the place where that stability is supposed to be tested. The journey up to this point has been driven by revenge. The structure demands a moment that forces that motivation to change shape.

Fiora reveals herself from inside a Mechon body.

Shulk does not pause to interpret what he is seeing. He reacts:

“Fiora!”

The name arrives before the situation can be made coherent. Recognition interrupts the visual information in front of him. The scene holds both at once: the body that should not be hers and the certainty that it is.

That recognition becomes unstable as soon as she speaks.

“My mission is complete. Returning to base.”

The line establishes a present condition that does not include him. Shulk is speaking to Fiora as someone he knows; Fiora does not recognize that relationship. What breaks here is the expectation that recognition will be returned. That is why it hurts so much to watch. The scene gives you both sides at once: the certainty of who she is and the absence of any acknowledgment from her. Shulk recognizes her instantly, and the game traps that recognition against her inability to recognize him in return. The scene holds those two emotional realities together long enough for them to tear at each other.

Plato described love as a search for the person who recognizes you as belonging with them, the one who completes you through that mutual recognition. That recognition is supposed to move in both directions. It is supposed to confirm that the relationship exists for both people at the same time.

Shulk tries to restore it through repetition:

“Fiora! It’s me — Shulk!”

He has to introduce himself to someone who once organized his entire emotional world. The repetition matters. Saying her name establishes recognition. Saying his own name is something sadder: an attempt to restore the connection that recognition used to guarantee automatically. The scene lets us watch that certainty fail in real time. She turns back toward him and does not answer.

The past does not remain safely behind the moment. It pushes directly into it. Into us.

Fiora’s death shaped everything that followed. Shulk’s pursuit of the Mechon. His dependence on the Monado. The structure of his anger. His entire sense of forward motion. Now the person whose absence gave those things shape stands physically in front of him, and none of that machinery knows how to absorb her return.

The effect is as powerful as it is immediate. Shulk cannot move through the world with the same clarity anymore. The enemy stops feeling stable and Fiora is no longer a wound positioned safely behind him. She becomes a living presence ahead of him, close enough to see and maybe just possible to reach. I can feel the story straining to hold them together.

Then, Shulk is tested in a near-immediate scene when Dunban moves to strike Metal Face down for good.

“It’s Mumkhar… He’s not a Mechon,”

cries Shulk!

Dunban cannot comprehend the hesitation. Mumkhar murdered Fiora and brutalized Colony 9. He has spent the entire journey positioned as the natural endpoint of Shulk’s hatred, the shape revenge was always going to take once it finally arrived within reach.

“Have you forgotten everything he’s done? Where is your killer instinct?! Now is the time!”

Shulk agrees with him.

“I hate him,” Shulk responds. “For what he did to Fiora… So of course I want to get my revenge!”

The desire has not faded with time, nor has the game abandoned it in pursuit of a cleaner morality. Shulk speaks with the full emotional momentum of the first half of the story still rattling around inside him. The difference is that Fiora’s return has ruptured the certainty that once made revenge feel simple. A category that previously organized the world cleanly—human and machine, victim and monster—has collapsed in front of his eyes. Fiora already exists inside the very thing he set out to destroy.

“Face Mechon are not like the others. They’re people! Like us! Are you really willing to kill another Homs?”

And then:

“Even if it’s Fiora? What then?”

The question tears directly through the logic that carried the journey forward. Shulk’s original goal suddenly contains the possibility of destroying the person whose loss gave that goal meaning in the first place. You can feel the story tightening around the contradiction as Shulk tries to speak through it in real time.

“When we set out, I wanted to destroy all Mechon. That was my aim. But now… I know that there are people inside. I have to know why.”

What emerges here is a protagonist struggling to keep pace with a world that has become morally unrecognizable to him. The revenge narrative that once propelled the story with such clean and exhilarating force can no longer sustain itself untouched because the emotional reality underneath it has changed shape. Fiora’s return leaves Shulk staring into the terrible possibility that his hatred had always been pointed toward something more human than he understood.

“So, that is your fight?”

Dunban asks.

Experiencing a story and explaining a story are not the same activity.

A scene can be emotionally overwhelming before you fully understand it. In fact, the strongest scenes often are. They produce feeling first and interpretation second. You carry them with you because something in the arrangement of behavior, image, rhythm, and consequence has already landed before you begin searching for language and explicit meaning around it.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 continually reverses that process. The emotional experience so often arrives deferred, outsourced to explanation, reconstruction, and accumulation afterward. The scene ends, and then the meaning begins to gather around it retroactively through lore, symbolism, references, cosmology, outside material, and connective interpretation. What I found myself watching on stream was not people responding to what a scene had just done. I was watching them assemble what the scene could eventually be made to mean.

This distinction matters because Xenoblade Chronicles 2 repeatedly mistakes the existence of connective tissue for emotional construction. A scene introduces one element then returns to it later under tragic circumstances and treats the recognition itself as payoff. The connection, and the satisfaction of making the connection, becomes the primary emotion.

One of the clearest examples arrives near the end of the game in what fans routinely describe as one of its most devastating and emotionally important sequences. Mythra and Poppi find themselves alone together while the rest of the party sleeps. Poppi wanders toward the edge of a ruined city and stares out over the remains of a civilization destroyed by its own technological advancement. The music softens as the dialogue becomes quiet and reflective. Everything about the presentation announces emotional significance.

Poppi, the mechanical Blade, looks out over the ruins and worries aloud,

“Poppi was made by technological advancement too!
Will Poppi… destroy the world as well?”

Mythra responds,

“That’s my problem, too.”

On paper, the scene appears rich with thematic possibility. Both characters position themselves as dangerous creations born from a world that mistook technological progress for human advancement. The conversation reaches toward shared fear and self-loathing. But almost none of this emerges from a relationship that has actually been developed between them. Mythra and Poppi barely possess an emotional history onscreen before this exchange occurs. They are not characters whose bond has been constructed through repeated interaction, mounting dependence, contradiction, or sacrifice. The scene just declares intimacy and asks the audience to experience the emotional weight immediately. Emotional music is playing, that is your cue.

Then comes the promise.

“I promise that, if you ever look like you’re about to destroy the world…
I will do what you asked of me.”

The moment culminates in a small ritual:

“Lift hand up in air, then… ‘boop’ together!”

They high-five, and the scene asks us to accept that a deep emotional bond has formed between them. But nothing in the story has created the kind of dramatic pressure that would allow that intimacy to emerge naturally or inevitably from who these characters are or what they have gone through together. The conversation feels like the installation of information the story knows it will need later. In another version of the game, this exact exchange could occur almost anywhere because it is not arising from the movement of the characters themselves. It happens here because the story needs the promise in place before it can cash it in.

The game retrieves that promise during Pneuma’s sacrifice.

Rex desperately asks Poppi to fly him back across the collapsing structure so he can reach Pyra and Mythra. Poppi refuses through tears,

“Poppi made promise…”

The earlier scene suddenly reactivates. The audience remembers the promise. The connection clicks into place! The moment reaches backward into the story and attempts to convert recollection into emotional payoff.

People told me on stream that this scene made them cry. They pointed toward Poppi’s trembling voice, the sadness in her delivery, the visible pain in her refusal. I believe them completely. I am not a Mechon, I understand that a crying voice can make us emotional almost instantly.

Melodrama has understood this for centuries. Peter Brooks, in The Melodramatic Imagination, describes how melodrama externalizes feeling through heightened suffering, gesture, revelation, and performance until emotion becomes immediately legible to the audience. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 understands this perfectly. The tears, the swelling music, the sacrifice and the shaking voice—all of it is calibrated to produce emotional recognition on contact.

But emotional stimulus is not the same thing as dramatic meaning.

A scene can provoke feeling without meaningfully transforming the relationships, values, or understanding inside the story itself. Empathy alone cannot carry narrative consequence. A person crying onscreen can make us cry through pure human recognition even if the underlying dramatic structure remains unchanged.

Xenoblade Chronicles does return to earlier material late in its story, but it uses recollection to dramatize transformation rather than merely activate recognition. By Chapter 15, Shulk finally stands over Egil, the man responsible for countless deaths across Bionis, including the violence that set Shulk’s revenge in motion from the very beginning. The scene is structured exactly like the culmination of a revenge narrative. Shulk defeats him. The Monado is raised. Everyone expects the killing blow.

Then the game interrupts that emotional trajectory with the accumulated weight of everything Shulk has experienced since he first picked up the Monado. Voices from earlier in the story flood into his mind: Mumkhar asking whether he would kill another Homs for revenge, Gadolt describing Egil’s desire to “break the circle of suffering,” Fiora reminding him that “everyone loved you.”

These moments are not functioning as connective tissue waiting to be retrieved for emotional effect. Each one has already altered Shulk’s understanding of violence, revenge, and the people he once reduced to enemies. By the time he lowers the Monado and says, “This isn’t what I want,” the emotional force of the scene emerges from the accumulated transformation of his worldview across dozens of hours of dramatic consequence.

The scene does not simply remind the audience of prior information. It reveals a protagonist who has become incapable of understanding the world in the same way he once did.

The Poppi promise scene does not evolve in the same way. It waits. The scene installs information early so it can be retrieved later under tragic circumstances, but the relationship itself remains comparatively static in the intervening time. The audience recognizes the earlier setup and experiences satisfaction at the fact that the story remembered itself.

But recognition is not transformation.

You do not lose anything essential by reducing these scenes to plot summary. Poppi promised Mythra she would honor her wishes if she became dangerous. Later, Poppi keeps that promise by refusing Rex. That is the entire dramatic mechanism! The emotional force survives reduction because the feeling is being carried primarily through presentation and empathy cues rather than through accumulated relational consequence.

The scene hurts because someone sounds hurt. Soap operas can do this with a close-up and the sting of a violin.

Xenoblade Chronicles hurts because everything has changed.

I know what comes next because I have already lived through the ritual. Someone will explain the game back to me. They will account for every symbol, every callback, every hidden linkage between scenes. The cosmology will expand outward. The archive will thicken. One explanation will lead to another and then another.

Rice describes conspiracy discourse as a proliferating evidentiary structure whose force emerges not from any singular proof, but from recursive accumulation itself. The archive grows persuasive through movement, density, and circulation. Connections become emotionally satisfying because they continue connecting.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 often produces this exact interpretive posture in its most devoted defenders. The game encourages the player to experience emotional meaning archivally. Every weakness in dramatic construction can be stabilized later through another connection, another recovered piece of lore. The story does not merely invite interpretation. It trains the audience to confuse interpretive accumulation with emotional consequence.

At a certain point, the lore master ceases to function as an interpreter and starts functioning as an archivist, desperately preserving the sensation that all of this connective material must add up to something greater than the dramatic experience itself ever delivered. I watched people construct elaborate scaffolding around scenes that, in another context, would barely survive a freshman creative writing workshop.

This is why appreciation for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 so often seems to strengthen with distance from the experience of actually playing it. “The game gets good thirty hours in,” fans will tell you. Then it gets even better once you spend enough time in the subreddit, the wiki, the lore threads, the YouTube essays, the diagrams explaining Klaus, the Trinity Processor, the hidden symbolism of the Architect, the real meaning of Pneuma. One explanation leads to another and then another. The archive keeps expanding. The game keeps improving somewhere else.

Eventually, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 achieves its ideal form completely outside itself. The story becomes easiest to love once nobody is actually playing it anymore. You no longer have to experience the scenes, the pacing, the dialogue, the relationships, or the dramatic construction moment by moment. You can hover above the entire structure at a safe analytical altitude where setup and payoff appear simultaneously, where every loose thread finds a connection, where every emotional weakness can be revised through retrospective explanation. The story becomes easiest to love once it has been flattened into pure coherence.

This is what Rice understands about proliferating archives. Density begins generating its own persuasive force. Connections feel meaningful because they continue connecting. Accumulation itself starts to register as depth.

And so the lore master keeps building.

At a certain point, the entire activity stops resembling dramatic experience altogether. The player becomes an archivist managing emotional evidence after the fact, endlessly thickening the structure surrounding scenes that never fully lived on their own. I watched this happen constantly while streaming the game. The moment I expressed uncertainty or emotional distance from a scene, someone in chat or Discord would rush forward breathlessly to stabilize it. They would explain the callback, the hidden parallel, the symbolic resonance, the Japanese terminology, the later reveal that recontextualizes everything. One explanation would lead to another and then another until the scene sat embalmed beneath a mountain of connective tissue. Every answer arrives carrying three more hyperlinks.

What struck me was how rarely these defenses described an immediate dramatic feeling. People were not telling me what the scene did to them as it unfolded. They were reconstructing the conditions under which the scene must have been meaningful. The emotion was always deferred somewhere else: another scene, another reveal, another symbolic connection still waiting deeper in the archive. Feeling itself had become hypothetical. People were describing emotional experiences they seemed to have arrived at academically.

We are all becoming more thick.

We are all becoming experts at explaining stories instead of experiencing them.

Thanks for reading all that.

IGN, in its review of Pragmata, calls it “a video game-ass video game.” The phrase is meant to signal the presence of gaming sensibilities that are impossible to ignore—systems and structures that would collapse if removed from the act of play and placed into any other medium.

But unless we go further, that designation does not tell us why it matters or if it’s even any good. Do all video games not appear video-gamey? The start screen, the pause button, the save file, the life lost to a mistake. These are not exceptions; they are the conditions of the form. To point at them is not to say anything about the work. It is only to confirm that it belongs to the category we already knew it occupied.

To review a video game and call it a particularly video gamey video game is maybe not a good critical approach. Shall I also confirm that the novel contains sentences?

The problem in Pragmata is not that this language is necessarily wrong. It is identification, not analysis.

The game splits player action between Hugh and Diana, and it does so through two incompatible modes of control. Diana operates by parsing enemy machines—she exposes weak points by navigating a grid-like interface, inputting cardinal directions through discrete commands. Each move is either correct or incorrect. There is no gradation.

Hugh, by contrast, moves and aims through less-precise analog input. He runs, jumps, and shoots with a looseness that allows for drift, hesitation, and error. The player is tasked with operating between two different logics. One system is exact and robotic. The other is approximate and human.

This difference is the point of the entire game. It’s also why Pragmata is so excellent.

The hacking sequences are not a detachable layer or a concession to game design convention. They are how Diana understands the world. Her interaction with machines is not expressed through movement or aim but through navigation of systems that reduce action to cold and precise decisions. The interface is a representation of her capacity. It determines what she can do and how the player can think through her.

The player is asked to align with two different forms of agency—one grounded in continuous adjustment, the other in binary resolution. The effect is not just “video-gamey” mechanical variety. It is a shifting identification between the imprecision of a human and the certainty of a machine.

And this is where the positive use of “video-gamey” becomes especially frustrating. Pragmata is praised in many reviews this way because it feels good to play and because these systems click in a “satisfying” way. But instead of explaining that alignment the language at our disposal stops at recognition and calls it a virtue. You could perform the exact same appraisal after watching some videos of Pragmata.

“Video-gamey,” then, is not analysis. It is identification. It’s safe. Nobody has ever been wrong about a video game being a video game. It reports back the obvious and leaves the work untouched. Our task is not to point at mechanics, but to account for what they do. Not to say that a game feels like a game, but to show how it feels at all.

The work is already there.

Are we?

Thanks for reading all that.
a copy of Pragmata was provided by Capcom PR

I read it, then I open a new tab and start searching. The message gives me just enough to feel responsible about a random text promising money—a university name, a researcher, a phone number. I find the department page, the study listed, and a contact email that matches. It all lines up faster than I expect, which is all I need to believe I have found an answer.

Outside, families are getting out of cars. Kids in pastel shirts with the fold lines still pressed into them, dresses that look like they were chosen ten minutes ago and already need adjusting. Someone is carrying a tray covered in foil and someone else is calling back into the house for something they forgot, like the day will fall apart without it.

Oh, right! It’s Easter Sunday.

I go back to the message and click the link.

The survey starts easy. Age, location, a few baseline questions you can answer without thinking. The first question about being Jewish is enough to give it away, and the next few only confirm it. Israel, Jewishness, the whole thing lined up so neatly it feels polite.

“Do you feel more connected, less connected, or about the same to your Jewish identity when you encounter criticism of Israel in the media?”

“In the past few years, have you become more involved, less involved, or stayed the same in your participation with Jewish organizations or community events?”

“To what extent do you agree: criticism of Israel makes me feel personally targeted as a Jewish person?”

“Have recent events made you more likely or less likely to express your Jewish identity publicly?”

It’s obvious what they’re trying to do. Not just sort or measure, but decide what I am and see if I come back the way I’m supposed to. I answer them anyway and I don’t overthink it. I’d hate to disappoint.

When it ends, I’m back at the text thread on my phone.

“Scientifically selected.”

What does that mean?

I call the number this time. A researcher answers, so I tell him I just completed the survey and I have a question about how participants are chosen. He gives me the version that probably matches some kind of official documentation he painstakingly wrote for someone, somewhere. He says something about methodology, and then something about outreach. I let him finish, but then I ask again, more directly.

“I understand, but what got you to me, specifically?”

He tells me it was a keyword search across a large dataset of personal information, mostly names. “We use identifiers like that to build the sample.”

“Right.”

“Can I help you with anything else, Mr. Steinberg?”

I can’t help but picture it. A long document or some kind of database and my name is sitting there, waiting for someone to go looking. Control + F to profile and there I am.

Outside, a kid is being turned around by the shoulders so someone can fix his collar. He doesn’t argue. He just stands there and lets it happen. Another one is already running ahead, shoes stiff enough to make running look odd, but it’s not enough to stop him. Someone calls after him to slow down.

I reflect on the last week—I had been talking about Hasan Piker online and the accusations of antisemitism against him. My posts end up clipped, cited, and my name read out loud by people on television. A library emails me asking if I’d like to come speak. They say they’re looking for Jewish authors.

I tell the researcher I want to be clear about something the survey is getting wrong. It’s important to me to be one of these numbers, to say plainly that criticism of Israel doesn’t make me feel less Jewish. If anything, it’s the opposite.

What actually feels hostile is being told that my being Jewish is supposed to line up with a state, that there’s a correct way to account for myself and I’ve already been entered into it. I tell him that what affects me isn’t criticism of Israel, but the sense that I’m already standing somewhere before I’ve decided to, that the position has been prepared in advance and I’m expected to step into it.

I hear him typing away before he’s able to respond to me. I wait.

“Mr. Steinberg, would I be able to file you away for future test opportunities?”

“File away.”

He thanks me for my time.

The call ends and I’m back where I started:

“Scientifically selected.”

It’s just so smug about itself. It makes it sound like I was chosen or like something about me stood out. But that’s not what it means. It just means I’m filling the role I was always made to fill. It means I’m the kind of thing you get back if you go looking for me.

Steinberg.

Stein. Berg.

It was never subtle. Two pieces snapped together and handed down. I’ve been walking around with it my entire life. A name for me. An instruction for you.

And outside, they’re doing the same thing, it’s just more obvious and has better lighting.

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Kids in clothes that don’t fit yet, being told to hold still while someone fixes them. A hand on the shoulder, a sleeve rolled, a look that says try again. Nobody calls it anything because nobody would be that dramatic. But you’d have to be willfully stupid not to see it. This is how it gets done. Small corrections, repeated until we stop having to correct anything. Give it a few years and it all starts to look natural. It was always going to turn out this way.

“Scientifically selected.”

Of course.

I want to think I am the man. I want to think I am Jake—the one doing the building, the one with intention, with control, with some claim to what happens next.

But I’m just what came out of the other side. I have been put together out of whatever was available and then dragged into the light and asked to explain myself like I had any say in the matter.

Outside, the families are still at it—straightening collars, fixing sleeves, sending the kids forward like this isn’t the whole damn project. Like this isn’t exactly what they’re doing. And the kids go along with it. Of course they do. It works for them. It settles into something they can live with.

“Scientifically selected.”

I am Frankenstein’s monster.

It was always in the name.

The children outside celebrate Easter.

He is risen.

Thanks for reading all that.

“What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately.”

Steinbeck opens the body and leaves us to read it. So much of us is built to communicate, to reach across the space between ourselves and another—to be read and known and understood. And still we misunderstand each other constantly. The signals are there, always there. You’ve seen them in heated arguments, in the yielding certainty of an apology. And yet the exchange falters. What was meant one way arrives another, bends slightly, just enough. You’re mad. Or hurt. And you’re sure you’re right.

What a frightening thing.

There is a children’s game called Operation that promises otherwise. The body is a diagram laid out perfectly for you with a clear objective: keep your hand steady and remove the obvious problems in front of you. The four-legged charley horse in the thigh, the butterfly flitting in the stomach, the heart, just barely cracked, begging to be removed.

It is, in its way, a flattering fantasy. You are careful. You are a competent adult. The problems are labeled, the space is sterile, and, most importantly, you have the hands for this.

But you drift too far. The edge catches and the board erupts with a sharp, graceless buzz that jumps from the body on the table into your own hands, into your own chest. You have made a mistake, and for a moment it feels public—some small failure of control exposed, one you didn’t know you were carrying until it announced itself. What do these people think of you now?

That buzz follows you. It has long left the table, but it’s still there, reverberating.

You step forward, ready to move on, and something catches—a voice. A hand at your shoulder. Professor Oak, stopping you at the threshold of the tall grass before you can take another step. Not yet. Not like this. This isn’t you, right?

The world of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen steadies itself around you. It does so immediately. You begin in a small town with a clear path forward and each step confirms that you are capable of achieving what is being asked of you.

But that first interruption—Oak’s hand at your shoulder—is not just the game pausing long enough to hand you a Pokémon. It is a correction. An insistence that you cannot move through this world by rushing ahead, that understanding here requires something slower.

It is a lesson Oak’s grandson never quite learns. He is always ahead of you, clearing the next obstacle before you’ve had the chance to see it for yourself, and for a long time it feels like he is winning, like he understands the world better because he moves through it faster. The illusion would hold, except you meet him, over and over, and beat the snot out of him so consistently it’s a wonder he can smell you—or anything at all—later.

Still, the game asks you to linger. Talk to people! Notice what is offered rather than what is taken, You knock on doors and are pulled into small, strange acts of care—a backrub for a seasick captain, a set of gold teeth returned to someone who had misplaced them—and are given things in return, sometimes useful, sometimes not, but always as a consequence of having stopped and paid attention.

You take your time and the world begins to give itself over in pieces and somewhere in that accumulation the shape of the experience begins to shift. What first felt like the simple progression of an RPG reveals itself instead as something else entirely—a structure that folds acts of kindness and attention into what you might have otherwise called a power fantasy.

And even then—even as you learn to move this way, to slow down, to pay attention, to read what’s in front of you—the game is already exceeding you. It doesn’t feel that way, but the signals are there, clear and reassuring: type advantages with obvious answers, levels that indicate relative power, a mass of gauges and dials and registers that suggest you understand what you’re seeing and how to respond to it. You begin to to believe that what’s happening in front of you is fully within your grasp.

When you lose, you can approximate why—you got too close to the edge.

You aren’t even close.

The game has been fooling you this entire time.

The first gym you encounter is locked. When you return, it is exactly as you left it. You aren’t.

Lavender Town works similarly. You arrive having already prepared for it, though you don’t remember preparing. A move learned by strong, surrounding Pokemon in the area will prove super effective against the ghosts you are about to face. A decision you barely registered becomes the difference between holding and folding. The solution was provided before the problem had a name.

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And once you start to notice it, it’s everywhere. Pokémon placed where they seem to understand each other before you understand either of them—Mankey and Jigglypuff sharing an early route, one restless, the other trying to put everything to sleep—encounters that answer one another, a Pikachu appearing just rarely enough in Viridian Forest to suggest its place at the top of the food chain, a Diglett’s Cave tucked just out of the way that unravels Lt. Surge if you happen to wander into it, an an Abra that disappears before you can act, leaving you with that brief, stupid feeling that this might have been your only chance and you blew it, a Snorlax blocking your path long before you have any idea how to move it, small arrangements that feel right before you can say why they are right, all of it building toward a sense that the world knows what it’s doing even when you don’t.

The game is arranged to produce meaning you feel before you can articulate it.

Like any relationship, you are just spending time. You go through things together, small and large, and you trust that something is accumulating in the background, something that will eventually justify all of it, all the time, all the effort, all the small humiliations you’ve agreed to call normal. You point to moments, to milestones, to arguments you’ve survived, and the way she looked at you once—maybe twice, or maybe you imagined it—and you stack them up like evidence, like you’re building a case you might one day have to present in your own defense.

This is why everything works, you tell yourself. This is why we’re still here.

But do you actually know why she loves you?

You can see another player’s team. Their six Pokémon and their levels and their moves and their gauges and dials and registers. You can see the badges they’ve collected and even face them in battle and watch how it all plays out in real time. But you will never know their relationship. Not the way they do.

You won’t know why they kept that one Pokémon too long, or why they taught that move, or what happened on some route they barely remember that changed everything that came after. You can read what’s in front of you and make sense of it. You might even be right.

And still, you will not know what it means to them.

What a frightening thing.

Thanks for reading all that.

You have a large following online. People follow you because you are an authority in the fandom. You have memorized background information. You can identify a reference on sight. You know the names of minor characters, unused assets, and obscure details from games released decades ago. When a new game appears, your boots are on the ground. Screenshots and clips get posted. Your audience watches because you can explain what everything means and tell them why this thing is so important faster than anyone else.

While promoting The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Brie Larson said,

“When I watched the movie, it was almost just like this sensory overload of like everything I’ve ever loved and played and watched throughout my whole life. I just felt like bombarded by all the references, and every single frame is just filled with references.”

In Pokémon fandom, there is Joe Merrick.

Merrick runs Serebii.net, one of the largest Pokémon fan sites in the world. When a new game releases, the expectation is that the site will catalog everything as quickly as possible. The race is to know first. Serebii knows first.

A recent profile fawns over him, describing him as “more dedicated than you will ever be.” The evidence is simple. He has skipped life events and parties when Pokémon news might drop. He checks for updates when he wakes up. And he will argue with anyone online when it comes to being correct about information surrounding Pokémon and its associated companies.

A few days after Pokémon Pokopia launched, he posted on Twitter:

“And that’s credits for Pokémon Pokopia after almost 30 hours of gameplay
Absolute masterpiece of a game. GAME FREAK, Koei Tecmo and TPC did an amazing job with this one. It bodes well for future Pokémon games.”

This is the ultimate Pokémon fan. It would be ridiculous to suggest anyone understands Pokémon better than him. You can find the answer to any question on Serebii dot net.

This is what it means, now, to “understand” a game. Because once a text becomes something to be cataloged, there is no longer any room to encounter it. Only to extract from it. The game stops being a place you move through and becomes a container of information to be emptied.

In Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag describes a mode of criticism that treats art as something to be translated into a set of meanings that can be extracted and explained, and she argues that this does not deepen our engagement with a work so much as replace the experience of it with a method for handling it. “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’”

What she names here is an approach to art that prioritizes what can be said about it over what it feels like to be inside it. In games, that shift is everywhere: a Pokémon becomes a set of stats, a battle becomes a question of optimization, a story moment becomes sanded down into what it is “really about.” Each of these translations produces something simple that can circulate cleanly online, but in doing so it strips away the conditions under which the work might be encountered as alive.

Understanding, in this sense, forecloses experience. It gives you the answer in advance.

This is the lore master.

I arrive in a new area. What is Bleak Beach? Who should I talk to? What key items should I be sure not to miss?

The place itself is a long gray stretch of shore where weeds the color of bruises push up through rusted metal and broken concrete. Wind moves through the tall grass with a dry whisper, the sound of rummaging through old papers. Buildings sit half-eaten by the earth. A stairway leads nowhere. The world here tried very hard to become something else and failed.

And here, I am a Ditto pretending to be human.

The hands I wear are approximations and my feet are guesses. When the grass grows too high I reshape my arms into long flat blades and sweep them through the weeds, the stems giving way with a soft fibrous sigh. The land opens up in small clearings wherever I pass. Greener than it was before, surely.

Slowly, I organize. A planter moves two steps left. A bench slides back against a wall. A row of flowers forms a line along the path. The world begins to settle into squares that make sense to the human picture in my mind—little Tetris blocks of order snapping together across the beach. A place I might recognize as home.

The islands in Pokopia have been abandoned by humans. Only Pokémon remain. And yet the work continues. As if the next boat might appear any moment on the horizon. As if a human might step onto the dock and say, yes, this is exactly how I left it.

So, I trim the grass a little closer. I straighten a crooked sign. Somewhere along the way it becomes clear what kind of creature I am in this place.

I am a dog waiting for my owner to come home.

A note appears one day tangled in the branches of a tree that has forgotten how to grow leaves. The paper is thin and stiff with age.

“We managed to track down the renowned Kenzo, owner of the largest building in the area, for a special interview! ‘My family has dreamed of constructing a building here for generations,’ said a tearful Kenzo, with Machamp by his side. Machamp had also helped with the construction.”

A family dreaming of a building for generations. A Machamp lifting beams into place. Pride in the weight of stone and steel. The sense that if something large enough were built here it might anchor the future in place.

The beach has swallowed the building now. The dream inherited by the weeds.

Still, I move the benches and cut the grass and build small homes with small kitchens and narrow bedrooms and place the beds where beds are supposed to go, where our beds once were, or something close enough to pretend, and I straighten the tables and clear the counters and make the rooms presentable in case anyone should arrive, in case someone remembers the way back, in case the shape of things is enough to call them home again, in case.

I arrange the world into shapes that might be legible to someone who has abandoned me.

I wait for it: the impossible sound—the quick patter of shoes in the entryway, the turn of a doorknob that has not been touched in years. I wait like something trained to wait.

I am my own dog.

It is difficult to say where these feelings fit within the structures that dominate how we talk about games online.

Wikis cannot host this kind of experience, because it cannot be extracted into memorized trivia. YouTube essays, meanwhile, tend to organize themselves around creators presenting their playthroughs as correct accounts of what the game is, which leaves little room to dwell on something this private without breaking the illusion that the insight is obvious, something the audience has arrived at on its own—or worse, inviting the familiar correction that it “isn’t that deep.”

The note about Kenzo, for example, becomes valuable exclusively because of what it can be made to connect to elsewhere. It is pulled out of the place you find it and repositioned as an answer to a long-standing question from another game: the man in Vermilion City, standing beside a Machop, building something whose purpose was never explained.

Now, finally, we know the answer!

He was building a building.

A viral post celebrated this factoid as the resolution of this Pokémon mystery:

“Pokopia just casually solved a 30-YEAR-OLD POKÉMON MYSTERY!!!
It’s a very small worldbuilding detail that won’t matter much to many people, but is a lore drop I have been waiting for since I was 6 years old 😭😭😭”

In the accompanying video, the creator shouts: “It’s here, my childhood dream! Chat, I am not kidding. This lore here. I’m so happy I could die!”

And what is striking is not just the intensity of the reaction (which, in addition to being good and fun, we can easily excuse for the sake of the performance culture that surrounds streaming), but the form the meaning has taken. The note has been converted into something that can be understood entirely out of context. You do not need to walk along Bleak Beach or notice the way the buildings collapse into the earth or feel the strange compulsion to restore the world to order. In fact, playing the game only gets in the way of this kind of understanding, because it introduces too much that cannot be easily extracted.

What matters is that two points can now be connected across time: the man, the Machop, the building. A piece of information has been secured and the loop is now closed.

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And so the note ceases to function as a fragment of a lost place, or as a trace of a dream that failed and was absorbed back into the landscape, and becomes instead a solution that completes something outside of itself. The building and the note are no longer something you encounter; they are facts you know.

This is not a quirk of one post or one overexcited reaction. It is a way of seeing that has become so familiar it rarely registers as a choice. Once a game is understood primarily as a collection of answers, everything inside it begins to reorganize itself around that assumption.

You can watch this happen in how people talk about Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, where years of discussion have hardened into a set of conclusions that feel self-evident.

Psyduck, my favorite Pokémon, is often completely misunderstood. It “should” be Water/Psychic, people say! It already has psychic moves and that typing would provide an attack bonus on those moves. Psyduck is then evaluated as a set of outputs that fail to align cleanly, but what people miss is that Psyduck’s entire character is built on that misalignment. Its psychic powers arrive as headaches and brief flashes it cannot sustain. To formalize those powers into its typing is to resolve the tension that defines it, to turn a creature shaped by instability into one that functions correctly. The perceived error only appears once the Pokémon is treated as something that ought to succeed on command in a player-imagined meta context.

A similar logic governs how Gengar is discussed under the physical/special split in Generation III. Because Ghost-type moves are physical and Gengar’s strengths lie in Special Attack, it is often framed as mismatched, another case of design working against itself! But this judgment begins from the assumption that the system exists to maximize offensive output. In that frame, anything that does not convert cleanly into damage appears deficient. What falls out of view is that Ghost, here, is defined more by what it avoids. Immunities to Normal and Fighting. Gengar does not fail to meet an intended role; it occupies a different one, structured around absence rather than excessive force.

Even the broader shape of the game becomes difficult to perceive once everything is filtered through the search for answers. A walkthrough can tell you exactly when you receive Surf, but it cannot account for the form those steps take. Surf is earned after conquering a maze that punishes excess movement by returning you to the start. By the time you emerge, you have proven your skill in traversing the land. Access to the sea then builds on that learning with a new scale, a release that feels proportionate to the constraint that preceded it.

Once the question becomes how do I get Surf, that structure disappears. The answer takes its place, and with it the sense that what mattered has already been captured.

But the process does not end there. Once a game has been converted into a series of answers, the demand for answers begins to escalate. It is no longer enough to know where something is or how it works. The search extends outward, into developer interviews, behind-the-scenes material, and even unreleased or datamined information, as though the work itself were no longer sufficient to sustain attention.

What begins as curiosity hardens into a strict appetite.

Shigeru Miyamoto describes a similar movement when he talks about the pursuit of hidden secrets in games. “When pornography escalates, it eventually crosses into the grotesque,” he says. “It’s reached a point where it isn’t measured by common sense anymore. It’s just people getting bored and looking for stronger and stronger stimulation. We’ve hit a wall.” The comparison describes a process in which repetition dulls sensation and creators are left searching for something that will still register. Escalation becomes the only available move, and the work reorganizes itself around whatever can still feel like discovery.

The long tail of the “tera leak” makes this visible: years of unearthed “secrets” delivered in advance, each one smaller than the last, each one confirming that there is less and less left to encounter.

A small detail is no longer enough. It must resolve something longstanding, connect across decades, close a loop that has remained open. The Kenzo note cannot remain a fragment, a trace, a small and fragile piece of a larger mood. It must become an answer that can be declared.

And so the experience of the game is reorganized around that demand. Not what is here, but what can be extracted from it. Not what it feels like to move through a place, but what can be said about it once you leave. At a certain point, there is nowhere left to go. This is the wall Miyamoto is describing—the loss of the ability to encounter art.

Susan Sontag names the alternative more directly. “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” The problem is not that we have failed to understand these works, but that we have understood them too quickly, too completely, in ways that leave nothing behind.

“Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there.” The instinct to extract and solve every mystery prevents the work from appearing at all. “Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”

To play differently would mean allowing a moment to retain its integrity. To walk along Bleak Beach without asking what it refers to. To read the note and leave it where it is. To accept that not everything is pointing somewhere else. Let the building stay buried.

“The function of criticism,” Sontag writes, “should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”

Can the lore master give this up? Is it possible?

“In place of a hermeneutics,” she writes, “we need an erotics of art.”

An attention that does not immediately convert what it finds into a shareable clip, but stays with a work long enough for it to press back, to reveal something new on return.

The lore master cannot do this. He already knows too much.

Thanks for reading all that.

There’s a particular strain of Gamer anxiety underneath that math. The fear that sacred skill will be eclipsed by spectacle. That the match will be decided not by skill or strategy but by a spinning roulette wheel of mushrooms and shells. You can see it right now with Mario Kart World discourse—where the brilliance of the racing can evaporate for players under the impression that a long straightaway cedes too much power to the items one draws. As if chaos weren’t a designed constraint you’re meant to master.

Tennis seems particularly vulnerable to this imbalance. The worst version of a Mario Tennis is one built around a glowing on-screen gimmick that functions as a pace-killing win button flattening rallies and overriding the slow accumulation of pressure. It’s so easy to imagine this nightmare version of the game where the pleasures of mind games and shot selection are sacrificed for the fleeting delight of Mario bullshit.

Mario Tennis Fever takes that anxiety and turns the temperature up. A fever doesn’t replace the body—it intensifies it. The Fever Rackets don’t smother rallies in Mario bullshit; they dramatize and literalize the strategy and skill of normal tennis. The feeling of overpowering your opponent. The dread of being cornered with nowhere left to run. What tennis usually communicates through subtle shifts in tempo and positioning, Fever throws in your face.

By declining to “balance” tennis against Mario bullshit, Mario Tennis Fever exposes the equation as a bad premise. The game indulges completely in tennis—its pressure and momentum—and deploys Mario’s aesthetic to heighten the drama.

Mario Tennis Fever is the best Mario sports game ever made.

That claim becomes clearest in the way the Fever Rackets themselves shape the game. A mud racket will create a small swamp that slows the opponent’s movement, compressing their side of the court into something claustrophobic. Ice disrupts footing, stealing precision at the very moment the point demands it. Fire and lightning lay down their own hazards, turning open space into distinct threats. And if you’re skilled enough to layer two effects at once, you begin to understand what players mean when they say they’re “owning the court.”

But none of this control is guaranteed. Any trap can be cleanly reflected and sent back to bloom on your own side instead. The court does not tilt because you pressed a button; it tilts because you executed with precision.

Tennis is not just about returning shots. The most talented players dictate the terms of movement itself. The game is a contest over space. Momentum is the sensation that space has tilted in your favor. Fever Rackets make that tilt visible.

Allow me, dear reader, a short departure. When I was a teenager playing baseball at a level slightly beyond my natural gifts, everyone was bigger and stronger than me. Kids stepped off the bus looking like they’d driven it there themselves, like they’d bought beers on the way. I had one weapon: a 12-to-6 curveball that snapped downward with a violence out of proportion to my body.

When it worked, the field contracted. The plate drew closer. The batter’s disposition revealed itself to me with the clarity of an HD close-up. I wasn’t overpowering anyone; I was rearranging the space. I dictated when they swung and at what. And I want to be precise about this: the sensation I am describing wasn’t in my imagination. It was momentum. It was in the atmosphere. Ask anyone who was there! As real as the mud I spawned on my opponent’s side of the fence in Fever.

Maybe you don’t know this feeling. That’s fine. Just understand this: the rackets do not manufacture dominance. They make it legible.

Character design deepens those invisible pressures. Donkey Kong’s reach and slice pressure invite a territorial style of play, stretching rallies wide and daring opponents to test his range. Bowser’s backhand, thick with topspin, drags opponents toward the corners and forces them to recover from compromised angles. Boo, maybe armed with the Ghost Racket, turns rallies into acts of misdirection, obscuring trajectories and inviting second-guesses—like a batter at the plate who cannot trust themselves to know what’s coming. Choosing a character is about the strategy you inhabit and how you occupy the court. Not everyone is built to overpower.

As such you cannot drift through matches with a universal strategy. What are you good at? How do you respond when your chosen identity falters?

Maybe you don’t know this feeling. That’s fine.

Those questions reach their fullest expression online, but it is worth noting that the single-player offerings are polished and generous. Three themed challenge towers culminate in a giant Bowser encounter that weaponizes his newly absurd reach. After what feels like a final test, players unlock one hundred optional trials, each with three-star completions for the obsessive. There is also an Adventure Mode, a modest three-hour campaign that nearly every critic correctly identifies as onboarding. And yet some still penalize the game for its brevity, as though this campaign were meant to bear the full interpretive weight of the experience. The Gamer has been trained to believe that this is where the text of a videogame resides simply because it is authored and curated.

But this Adventure Mode is simply instruction. Swimming lessons are not the Olympics, and Little League is not October. Preparation is not performance. The text of a sport has never really been found in authored set pieces or curated spectacle. It lives in competition between two active and thinking opponents. Part of the dissonance comes from training. Nintendo has always been synonymous with the prestige of single-player design. Players have been conditioned to assume that the core of a Nintendo experience resides in its “adventure.” When Mario Tennis Fever offers a brief, functional tutorial instead, many read absence where there is only misidentification.

Mario Tennis Fever is not structured around its campaign. Online is the text.

Online is where the sport becomes an adventure. You encounter other competitors and begin to recognize what they do that you cannot. You steal what works. You shore up the skills you lack. You learn to defend against patterns you did not know existed. Growth is not inevitable here, the way it is in a single-player campaign engineered for eventual victory. There is no RPG freely distributing skill points to guarantee your ascent. The only question is whether you have the discipline to pay attention and improve.

The Fever Rackets, again, are the visual indication of how you are doing. I cannot adequately describe the sense of defeat when my entire side of the court is covered in poopy mud because someone has outplayed me so profoundly.

Of course, not every player leans into traps. Some abandon them entirely in favor of rackets that extend reach, randomize bounces, or drive opponents deeper into the back of the court. They wager on pressure instead of obstruction. This choice is equally as expressive. These players refuse the flourish of obvious traps on the battlefield for something colder: they let you defeat yourself.

Maybe you don’t know this feeling. That’s fine.

Online is where the game blooms because it is where human creativity collides with competition. A single-player mode can test you, but it cannot reveal you. It cannot produce the shock of recognition that another person can—the moment you realize someone across the net sees the court more clearly than you do. The moment your patterns are read and your best weapons are returned casually.

That is the ecstasy and the humiliation of sport. I still remember the kids who stepped off that bus, how much bigger they were than me, how that affected me. Online produces that same tightening in the chest. There is always another player with calmer nerves and cleaner execution. The ceiling doesn’t exist and the content is inexhaustible. There is always something to learn, steal, or endure.

A single-player mode can pretend at testing you and will ultimately deliver a resolution. In doing so, it can create the feeling of mastery. You are the champion!

But that’s not a sport and it shouldn’t be a sports game. Meaning must be produced in exposure. A sport reveals your habits and limits while you measure the distance between who you believe yourself to be and who you are when another competitor forces the truth out of you. That is the drama Mario Tennis Fever is chasing.

Somewhere, someone is already better than you and they just stepped off the bus.

The rest of the game is only introduction.

Thanks for reading all that.

“Why can’t they just make a version for people who love the book?” Me in November.

“I’m already pissed and I haven’t even seen it yet.” Me in December.

“It’s a brilliant marketing move, I’ll give it that. You have to get people in seats.” Me in January.

“Did you see the reviews? People are saying it sucks. One outlet called it smooth-brained.” Me in February.

And so we walked to our local movie theater hand in hand on Valentine’s night, the lowest of expectations sitting squat in our chests. We found seats D9 and D10. I snuck Jake a chocolate coconut square I’d smuggled in my purse. We watched exactly 28 minutes of ads, and then Emerald Fennell’s vision rolled in.

An hour in, I found Jake’s eyes in the dark. “I like the movie,” I whisper-confessed in his ear. “It’s fantastic,” he whispered back. We giggled and, united in our shared taste, turned back to watch more. The second half of the film ended up being much weaker than the first, things unraveling almost as soon as I’d said it, like I’d uttered a curse. But still: I liked the movie.

My taste generally hinges on something very simple, yet increasingly absent from our television screens and book pages: substance. “Wuthering Heights,” the book, is all substance. And while the movie advertised its incredibly forward stylization, substance exists underneath the sex that was meant to sell, though it isn’t Brontë’s substance — it’s Fennell’s.

The film opens with child Cathy and child Heathcliff, two amazingly well-cast characters paired with effective and compelling storytelling — a feat in itself, since as Jake aptly asked me afterward, how often does the “flashback” version of two characters ever end up being your favorite part? (Yeah, barely ever.) I can’t decide if it was the performances or simply Cathy’s shocking white-blonde hair and Heathcliff’s puppy-like, brooding brown eyes that hooked me in. I was surprised, while watching these early chapters, that despite all the differences between the book and the movie — Cathy’s brother Hindley does not exist in the movie, instead replaced by an addicted and abusive father — I just felt grateful to be watching Cathy and Heathcliff run around onscreen, grateful that some modern day work was giving life to these characters.

The childhood portion of the film ends with Heathcliff taking a beating for Cathy, her father forming the scars that will characterize an adult Heathcliff’s naked back. It’s this back that forms the opening shot of our journey into Cathy and Heathcliff’s adulthood, and we understand what every scar is supposed to mean: equal parts carnal and tender, the scars turning Cathy on in their most violent, despicable, dominatrix interpretation — he has done this for her, he has mutilated himself for her — and anchoring her love for him in their most altruistic, open-hearted interpretation: he has done this for her, he has sacrificed himself for her. I’m not a BDSM girl, but I can only imagine that abuse and trust are linked in this kind of reciprocity, trust enabling far-out forms of abuse and travels into far-out abuse deepening trust.

The film’s next sequence is where I give it its flowers: one of the most honest, plausible discoveries of eroticism to make it to our media screens. Where else might an upper-class Victorian-era young woman like Cathy learn about sex than by accidentally witnessing Joseph and Zillah going at it in the barn one night? And what could pin her eroticism more steadfastly to Heathcliff than Heathcliff himself covering her eyes and mouth to protect her from impurity and discovery while she watches? What follows this scene is a sequence of events in which I can only think of the characters as brave: very brave of Cathy, to run out to the moors to masturbate behind a rock, and very brave of Heathcliff, to stick her hand in his mouth upon discovery of her. The fantasy will live in Cathy’s head a little longer, though; she doesn’t quite have the bravery to act on it yet, though it’s not self-consciousness that stops her, but her own narratives about class and dignity. No wonder that shit sizzles and marinates inside her for the next five years, unable to be achieved by her putting her husband’s hands in the same position over her face, heightening what Heathcliff is capable of in her own mind and narrowing what arouses her until it is him alone.

Let me be clear: This stuff is nowhere in the book. It’s doubtful whether there was a sensual or sexual nature to Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship at all. If you’re asking this reader, it’s just not in the text, though I can understand how the book’s passion, married with our modern understanding of love (and sexualization of the time period; corsets and accents and such), causes people to read between the lines.

But while sex was introduced where it hadn’t been, the sex the film explored felt earned, a necessary and crucial facet of Catherine and Heathcliff’s magnetic connection, and that’s truly all I am ever asking for when people stuff sex into our media. If it’s connected to truth and has a point, then I’m here for it.

My glazing of the film pretty much ends here, as the tightly pulled spool of tension Fennell expertly wrought during the first half completely slackens after Heathcliff’s return. What transcends in the film is different than what transcends in the novel, though as a Brontë fan, the most electric moments for me are when her lines come out of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s mouths. “In whichever place the soul lives,” Margot says, placing her hand over her heart; in the book, Cathy places her hand over both her heart and her head, but maybe that’s too complex for modern audiences. And they dropped my favorite line from Cathy’s speech: “My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.” Again, maybe that’s too complicated — in the book, Cathy loves both Mr. Linton and Heathcliff, simplified in the movies to her seeing her fiancé as just a money bag.

Emily Brontë’s writing is strength mastered, a strength beyond effort, like a clap of thunder or a cliff shaking down every brute crash of an ocean wave. I feel about Emily Brontë’s writing the way Heathcliff does about Catherine: “And Catherine has a heart as deep as I have: the sea could be as readily contained in that horse-trough, as her whole affection be monopolized by him!” Emily Brontë is not a trough, not a pool and not a river; she is the depths of the fucking ocean, her power eons deep.

Who else could write the most perfect ending line to any book ever? “I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.” “Unquiet slumbers” lives in my head rent-free.

Why is it so hard to translate Brontë’s genius onto the screen? Ironically, it’s because it’s not sexy enough. Brontë brings complexity and truths that don’t fit with our narratives, truths that we’re uninterested in exploring. We don’t want a story about two people with a soul-level connection whose purest forms are children running and playing on the moors, just as their ghostly imprint will do for eternity. Imagined on the screen, that concept quickly becomes saccharine. It’s perhaps better to funnel that truth into the explicitness of a sexual relationship; maybe that’s something Fennell understood, and it wasn’t about selling tickets, after all.

Thanks for reading all that. You can follow Sarah Leonhardt’s blog here, and read her winning short story for The Letter Review Prize here.

Moritz has been kicked out of school for failing his exams. His father screams at him about the humiliation of being the man with the son who failed. Worst of all, Moritz has not slept. Every night, his hands become tiny wolves that claw with hunger—scratching and scarring—until his body gives in and sleep breaks apart completely. He wakes to the proof and does not allow himself to look or think further. He only cleans himself up each morning, careful, as if cleanliness could undo the night. He moves through the day half-asleep, his mind fully awake, his hands quiet for now, he hopes to avoid those dreaded dreams and certain mirrors. He is careful around others, afraid they might see the scratches and know what made them. More terrifying is the thought that they wouldn’t need the evidence at all.

One night, Moritz Stiefel wanders into the woods with his father’s pistol hidden on his person, and there he runs into Ilse. She’s taken with Moritz. She asks what he’s looking for. If only he knew. She tells him she’s on her way home, asks if he wants to come, and when he cannot answer, she asks if he remembers how they used to play pirates—when everything was lighter. But, if Ilse can see how much they’ve grown, then she can see what he has become. “Moritz” she says, trying to wake him from his walking slumber. He is afraid she is already looking at it.

He cannot reminisce. Remembering would require him to measure the change between then and now, and he does not trust what that reflection would reveal. Memories of a boy who could play at monsters are replaced with the knowledge that he has become one–but no! He does not look. Moritz does not do sadness. Not even a little bit.

He tells Ilse to walk home on her own.

I have always connected to that refrain from Moritz. “I don’t do sadness.”

As a writer, and as a person, I have never wanted to lead with my own pain and depression and fears. Pain is too often deployed as a shortcut to depth and meaning. Pain is already annotated, just a defense mechanism for those desperate to be understood.

I want to write about joy instead. About desire and feeling light. I want to write about being thirteen and auditioning for the school play—The Mouse That Roared—because Rachel did, and I wanted to be where she was. It was my first play. I got the lead, Tully Bascombe—I still remember the name. Rachel played opposite me.

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Every single one of these games trots him out without an ounce of respect.

In the Mario & Luigi games, we know that putting a boot on someone’s head is how Mario does combat. Battles revolve around jumps and reaction timing. Items are scarce, semi-random resources you deploy with actual stakes–throwing a fireball is actually cool.

In Super Mario Odyssey, he is an acrobatic god, chaining dives and throwing Cappy to cross impossible gaps, all while capable of possessing the entire taxonomy of God’s creation—from the humble Goomba to the magnificent T-rex.

In Mario Kart, he makes Sonny Hayes look like a wuss. Mario drifts across the knife’s edge and abuses item boxes to destroy his enemies. Catch-up mechanics exist solely to help the rest of these chuckleheads keep up, but no amount of rubber-banding is ever going to get that unusually horny fanbase a game called Rosalina Kart.

Mario is incredible! Have you seen his serve? Have you been to his parties? Have you trusted him to treat your colorectal dysfunction?

I’m getting away from my point—sorry.

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So, there’s a Jewish idea called Shiv’im Panim laTorah, which means “the Torah has seventy faces.” The idea is that the same words can be read in seventy different ways over the course of a life. Seventy ways to respond to a paragraph of prose. Seventy different, valid ways to feel about a movie or a video game. It’s why your best friend can fall head over heels for that awful guy—the one who says he wants to “build an empire” with her, referring to his drop-shipping business.

If she can find a valid way to translate that guy in her head to something lovable, surely there are other valid ways to translate Mario into Super Smash Bros.

Because what we have right now is terrible.

In Super Smash Bros., Mario is a flaccid standee. In what I can only assume is an attempt to honor the entirety of Mario’s vast history, we’re left with a character who isn’t any specific Mario so much as the pose of Mario—a vague outline gesturing toward decades of games without committing to a single one of them. Pressing the special button dribbles out a tiny fireball that bounces across the ground a few times before snuffing itself out. Embarrassing and illogical. Mario doesn’t even have a Fire Flower.

And then there’s Mario’s down special: FLUDD. You know, from 2002’s Super Mario Sunshine, a popular choice for the bottom of any Mario tier list. In Sunshine, FLUDD lets Mario hover, clean toxic sludge, and propel his running to absurd speeds. In Smash, after charging it up(?), Mario sprays water to gently push enemies away. Thank God we included that! If there are seventy ways to translate Sunshine into Mario’s moveset, this one is comfortably in the bottom sixty.

Whenever Super Smash Bros. comes up, people are quick to praise the auteur genius of series director Masahiro Sakurai, and I get it. Many characters in Smash Ultimate feel meticulously, even lovingly translated into a fighting game. The Hero from Dragon Quest brings a full menu of game-changing abilities straight out of a turn-based RPG. Kazuya Mishima retains so much of his Tekken moveset that experienced fighting game players can execute real combos—things these mascot platformers were never built to support.

You know what Steve, Min Min, and Piranha Plant have in common? You probably have no idea who they are—and yet they’re all better represented in Smash than Mario.

By wedding itself to Smash’s oldest, safest movesets and an imagined, flattened “default Mario,” the series has sanded him down into a sauceless tutorial dummy—a character designed less to express anything interesting about Mario than to politely exist so new players can learn which button is jump.

Updating Mario’s moveset is the boring answer. The real problem is the insistence that Mario must be singular at all. Smash needs to stop asking which Mario matters and start asking a better question—one Dragon Ball games answered years ago. The answer for Mario in Super Smash Bros. is Goku.

Dragon Ball games begin from a premise Smash refuses to entertain: Goku cannot be contained within one or two slots on a character select screen. Goku, indeed, is many things.

In the latest Dragon Ball fighting game, Sparking Zero, playable characters include

• Goku (Kid)

• Goku (Early Z)

• Goku (Mid Z)

• Goku (End of Z)

• Goku (Super Saiyan)

• Goku (Super Saiyan 2)

• Goku (Super Saiyan 3)

• Goku (Super)

• Goku (Super Saiyan God)

• Goku (Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan)

• Goku (Ultra Instinct)

• Goku (Daima)

Spend enough time on the character select screen and you’ll probably come across Center-Left Goku and Wife Guy Goku.

Dragon Ball demonstrates clarity without compromise. Each Goku is an altar to a specific era of the character’s remarkable history. Mario’s own chronology of titles and mechanics stands just as tall—Smash just refuses to embrace it. What would Smash look like if it treated Mario the way Dragon Ball treats Goku? Not one Mario, but several!

Super Smash Bros. is often described as a kind of playable museum—a living archive where movesets and mechanics function as citations, and characters themselves invite players to explore other games more deeply.

If we take that idea seriously, Mario’s treatment is especially embarrassing. Mario has never been a singular idea; he has always been a series of answers to different mechanical questions, shaped by the ambitions of each game he appears in. The Mario who learns combat through timing and counters in Mario & Luigi is not the Mario who masters momentum and possession in Odyssey. The best version of Super Smash Bros understands these disparate Marios as identities to be honored.

• Mario (8-Bit)

• Mario (64)

• Mario (Mario & Luigi)

• Mario (Tennis)

• Mario (Sunshine)

• Mario (Odyssey)

• Mario (Kart)

• Mario (Party)

• Mario (Mario Maker)

This framework scales cleanly across Smash’s entire roster. If the game is serious about being a playable museum, then it should lean harder into visual and mechanical specificity. Imagine a Pikachu rendered in flat, two-dimensional pixel art. A low-poly Donkey Kong pulled straight from the Nintendo 64 era squaring off against his modern redesign. Metroid Prime 4’s Samus facing Super Metroid’s Samus, each designed within the language of their time. Super Smash Bros. has always been a crossover fighter. It’s time to make it a crossover between eras.

Of nearly equal importance, this approach would reinvigorate Smash’s already rabid speculation culture. No more desperate guesswork about increasingly minor characters or third-party wannabes clawing their way onto the roster. If versions are on the table, an entire universe of previously unconsidered possibilities suddenly opens up. The question stops being who gets in and becomes something far more interesting: which version of your favorite character do you want to fight as?

For ten dollars, Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero lets players purchase six DLC characters—two of which are Goku.

I want Super Smash Bros. to make me buy Marios.

I want 70 different Marios.

The version included in the box is just nothing to me.

Thanks for reading all that.

I think I get why a lot of people might just quit on Octopath Traveler 0 right there. It’s squeaky, pitched high, bending toward the register of a wide-eyed cartoon character. Is this a voice meant to quickly charm me? I wonder who it’s supposed to work on.

“Rinyuu’s stew is the best in the realm!” Velnorte shouts.

The couple insists we share a meal at their table. Payment, Rinyuu calls it. She prepares the meal herself and sets the bowl down on the table. There’s no hesitation in the movement. The thought of assistance doesn’t even occur to Velnorte. Rinyuu’s blindness—I almost forget it’s part of her character.

Earlier that day, a monster came out of the snow. I killed it because I could and because the game had already taught me how to fight. Velnorte and Rinyuu would not have survived otherwise. The stew is their thanks, and it is the reason we are still here, seated together as the light fades early outside the windows.

The stew goes quickly. Velnorte chats us up while Rinyuu clears the bowls.

He tells me who he is. He belongs to the Scarlet Wings, a military order assembled from former criminals and held together by a lust for power. Velnorte is an alchemist. The Scarlet Wings force him to work on a special elixir meant to give their leader ultimate power. The promise, as it is framed to him, is simple: finish the elixir, or Rinyuu will be punished.

There is something in the way he talks about all this. An exasperation that sounds like a death wish. The sense that he has already accepted everything this will cost him. Velnorte is a dead man walking.

“She’s not from these parts,” he says, nodding toward Rinyuu. “Her family is scattered across the continent. We live together as a couple now, but sometimes I wonder if I can truly make her happy.”

When Rinyuu learns the truth, she turns herself over to the Scarlet Wings so that Velnorte can be free. Without the threat to her safety, Velnorte can continue his life’s work on his own terms.

Her plan does not work. The Scarlet Wings use her as bait to get Velnorte back. Rinyuu is left near the summit of a mountain, beaten badly enough that I cannot help but wonder if she’s dead already. But we know what kind of story this is: Velnorte finds her alive. He reaches her just in time to believe everything is going to be okay.

The Scarlet Wings surrounds us and a climactic boss fight kicks into gear. The fight is long and challenging. We win because winning is the only direction video games go in. When it ends, I get the sense that the snow is falling harder than it was before.

Velnorte helps Rinyuu to her feet. He tells her that her sacrifice would not have let him continue his scientific work. The elixir that the Scarlet Wings so desperately want is one he only started to create to give Rinyuu sight. There is no version of his life or dreams that does not include her.

“I want to be where you are,” she says.

One of the Scarlet Wings is still alive. He pulls himself up from the snow and shouts after them, demanding to know why they should be forgiven, demanding to know what happens to the people left behind. “Don’t you care about anyone other than yourselves?!”

He charges forward and shoves Velnorte.

Rinyuu is standing just behind him. She loses her footing and falls off the peak of the snowy cliff.

“Rinyuu…?” Velnorte whispers.

The villain monologues about something none of us really hear.

When Velnorte screams, and he does eventually scream, it is as if he was falling off the cliff himself.

We dip to black.

Time passes.

When we return, Velnorte welcomes us into the house. He smiles and asks us to stay for dinner. He tells us that Rinyuu has something on the stove. “Her stew is the best in the Frostlands.”

I forgot about the stew.

Our character never tasted it and it did not become an item that healed our health pool. I don’t think anyone ever even remarks on its flavor. The stew does not exist for me in any mechanical sense.

Velnorte loved that stew.

“Rinyuu!” he calls, “Look who has come to visit.”

She does not answer.

“Rinyuu!...”

Maybe if he could hear that voice one more time, then he could find forgiveness in this house. Maybe if the stew returned to the stove, heat rising, scent blooming, the assurance that the evening would end the way it always had, then the world might stop punishing him for loving something so completely—and so ignorantly of the qualities I mistook for flaws.

He calls her name like Orpheus singing into the dark, trusting sound to do what the living body no longer can. He calls her name like Lear bending over Cordelia, begging breath to answer back, measuring the world by whether it will return her voice to him. He calls her name like Hamlet declaring love only once there is no one left to hear it, like Macbeth speaking into the space where meaning has already fled. He calls her name, he calls her name, he calls her name, and it pours into the air, into the spaces where he once imagined the outline of a life he was so desperate to share with her.

“Rinyuu!”

I wish I didn’t say that thing about her voice.

—

I am not saying Octopath Traveler 0 has a good story.

When people talk about story in this series, they are usually talking about the structure. Do the characters meet. Do their arcs cross. Do the separate paths eventually lock into something communal and legible for The Gamer. Octopath Traveler II is widely regarded as a dramatic improvement over the first game in the series largely because it answers that demand more directly: there are paired chapters and shared confrontations, alongside a clearer sense that these people exist in the same narrative space rather than just the same world map.

That framing has become the primary lens through which the series is evaluated. I believe this to be as close to a fact as a claim like this can be.

Like Octopath Traveler, Winesburg, Ohio is built out of discrete lives. Each chapter centers on a different character, briefly entering their interior world before moving on to the next. There is no single arc that gathers these people together, only the accumulating sense of a town composed of adjacent stories.

Sherwood Anderson gives us Winesburg as a place defined by what its people have managed to love without being undone. Over time, those attachments become fixed, and each life narrows around a single feeling or memory that can no longer be relinquished. Anderson offers an explicit theory for this early on. In the beginning, he writes, there were many truths, all of them beautiful. Trouble begins when a person takes one truth as their own and attempts to live entirely by it. That truth becomes distorted, and the person who carries it becomes what Anderson calls “grotesque.” This is not a judgment so much as a description of pressure. Love, faith, and desire are survivable until they become singular—until they crowd out everything else and demand to be protected at all costs, like a limb held too tightly until circulation is cut off.

What’s striking is how gentle Anderson remains toward these people. He does not mock them for their narrowness or punish them for their fixation. Instead, he insists on the intimacy of it. Again and again, he asks the reader to look closely enough to see what has been preserved inside these distortions, what sweetness has gathered in places others have learned to avoid. “Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples,” he writes. The apples are misshapen, but their sweetness concentrates in odd places, available only to those willing to taste what does not announce itself as good.

The book ends with George Willard leaving town. He boards a train and goes elsewhere, carrying Winesburg with him as a sequence of encounters rather than a problem he has resolved. The people he leaves behind continue on as they were. Their lives do not open into clarity, and they do not suddenly recognize one another differently because George has known them. The town remains intact, and incomplete, as he departs.

That is the pleasure Winesburg, Ohio offers: the recognition that what appears from a distance as failure or limitation may, up close, be the only way a person has managed to love at all. Seeing this clearly does not require fixing it.

—

Thanks for reading all that.

10. Octopath Traveler 0

I’m only about 15 hours into Octopath Traveler 0, which means it’s too early for me to declare a serious judgement about the title in the eyes of The Gamer. Still, it’s forcing me to admit that the Octopath series might be one of my all-time favorites.

This is exactly what I want out of a JRPG: turn-based combat where my choices in and out of battle feel substantial, an art style that is equal parts fun to look at and evocative in my imagination, and a melodramatic story delivered with passionate conviction. I’m genuinely delighted every time a new character appears, in the same way I am when I encounter a Pokémon I’ve never seen before.

But the hot sauce with Octopath 0 is that it actually has subtext, which still feels pretty rare in video games. The surface story—about a protagonist who’s lost everything and balances a life between revenge and rebuilding—is solid genre stuff. What’s more compelling is that the game is interested in how stories are recorded and distorted over time. It recalls the looseness and subjectivity of Middlemarch or Herodotus’ Histories, where interest in static lore and timelines is discarded in favor of more competitive perspectives.

One Last Note From Jake: Everyone says this game only gets good dozens of hours in—I have no idea what they’re talking about! It’s good from the jump. The words on the page are GOOD. The voice acting is a delight! Stop mashing through dialogue and enjoy the ride, baby.

9. Promise Mascot Agency

Michi, a yakuza fixer, begins Promise Mascot Agency by slicing off his own pinky finger as an act of apology after a job goes wrong. It’s a classic yakuza image, but then Michi is forced to move to rural Japan, where he must revive a mascot agency and restore the local community, before an anti-yakuza curse kills him–but the first mascot he meets is a sentient severed finger named Pinky. The game does not call attention to the connection. I wouldn’t be surprised if plenty of players miss it entirely. But, it was a signal to me that Promise Mascot Agency was thinking about something. Which had me absolutely hooked.

From there, the game opens up into a story about labor, and community. You’re assigning mascots to gigs, negotiating contracts, and reinvesting profits into local infrastructure. There are a lot of wacky plots and weirdo mascots, but the game is almost entirely focused on saying something delicate about collective effort. I commend any game willing to say something deep without taking itself so seriously all the time.

One Last Note From Jake: Can you imagine if they got Gritty for this game?

8. SpongeBob SquarePants Titans of the Tide

I hope I look back on 2025 as the year I remembered how much I like SpongeBob.

Here’s the thing: I usually find platformers—both 2D and 3D—pretty boring. I don’t know! Doesn’t it all feel a bit convenient? Like an obstacle course carefully designed to ensure my own success. When I look at a level full of platforms and boxes, I can already see myself at the end of it, which makes actually playing through it feel like a boring trip on autopilot.

Enter the sponge.

The Sponge and Bob of it all really do a lot for me in this setting. It recontextualizes so many platforming contrivances within a world and aesthetic language I already like. It’s much harder for me to get bored jumping between platforms and whacking bad guys when genuinely funny SpongeBob characters are spouting off lines the whole time. Most 3D platformers wish they had a setting as flexible or as enticing as Bikini Bottom.

One Last Note From Jake: To be honest with everyone, I found a lot of the platforming trickery here on par with—if not more interesting than—something like the beloved Astro Bot.

7. Mario Kart World

Let’s get something straight: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is a boring, bad video game. It wasn’t interesting when it launched on Wii U, with its barely noticeable anti-gravity mechanic, and the only thing compelling about it on Switch was that it was a console-quality Mario Kart you could play handheld. 8 Deluxe didn’t become interesting until it received massive amounts of DLC, and even then it was just content stacked on top of nothing particularly special. New tracks can be perfectly driven on your first attempt because the game itself is so static. Calling the courses “new” feels like a lie when they might as well be skins.

Allow me to cut my 8 Deluxe complaints short and just come out and say it: oh my god, Mario Kart World is actually fun to play!! The laid-back open world aims for a feeling completely foreign to Mario Kart. Knockout Tour isolates the most interesting part of a race and repeats it over and over in a butt-clenching vehicular royale. Most importantly, the skill ceiling of actually driving has been dramatically raised. Jumps, wall rides, rail grinds, weird items! You can’t just turn your brain off and instinctively drift around corners anymore. The game is asking you to think in a way Mario Kart 8 Deluxe never did. What an achievement!

One Last Note From Jake: I am deeply worried about people who don’t like this game.

6. Simpsons Fortnite

I could probably spend the rest of my life trying to decode the exact chemistry that made Fortnite’s Simpsons season so appealing to me. Part of it, surely, was timing. Dear God, I was stressed when it came out. So, Fortnite is a game that doesn’t really ask you to learn anything. It’s all recognition and reaction, which made it perfect for playing almost every night with my friend Peter as we decompressed after a long day. Simpsons Fortnite became something I treated like medicine.

Now, before anyone jumps in to say, “You just like talking to your friend!” please settle down. This is my free blog. But also, that’s not all that was happening here.

Much like how SpongeBob enhanced my experience with 3D platforming, there was something inherently silly and strangely memory-forming about The Simpsons specifically being folded into Fortnite. The integration was so competent you’d think the game had been built from the ground up with Springfield in mind. Familiar landmarks, familiar voices, good gags. Something genuinely hits different when you tell your friend to meet you at Burns Mansion and then immediately get gunned down by Marge Simpson. When you replace that sentence with original Fortnite stuff it’s just kinda nothing, right?

I cannot even remember what’s going on in Fortnite right now even though I have been playing. But I remember all the spots in Springfield. I remember the particulars of Flanders’ house. I remember the nights talking to my friend. That counts for something.

One Last Note From Jake:

5. Marvel Cosmic Invasion

Marvel sucks so bad right now and I’ve fully accepted that I will never get another Ultimate Alliance game again, so god bless Marvel Cosmic Invasion for just being an actually good beat ’em up.

Everyone loves the Ninja Turtles game this same team made a few years back, but I never fell in love. The character movesets felt a little too samey, and the game leaned hard on gimmicky levels—on-rails skateboarding, etc.—that pulled focus away from what’s actually fun about the genre.

Cosmic Invasion takes my notes. The roster is large and genuinely varied, with characters clearly built around fighting game-inspired kits. Everyone feels distinct, with clear utility and just enough depth to give you real choices moment to moment. Some levels and bosses are obviously designed with specific heroes in mind, which actually encourages you to experiment instead of just sticking with your favorite and brute-forcing the whole thing.

The tag system, though, is the real revelation. The worst part of any beat ’em up is getting knocked down and sitting there, waiting through invincibility frames in time-out. Cosmic Invasion lets you swap to another hero instantly when that happens. The same button also calls in assists and extends combos, which keeps fights fluid and low on downtime. The second this game gets one more substantial mode—please let it be a roguelike—it’s going to be an all-timer for the genre.

One Last Note From Jake: Please add Cyclops.

4. Hades 2

There’s a part of me that genuinely believes Hades II is Game of the Year.

There’s also a part of me that knows exactly how much is wrong with it: how much of it mindlessly sequelizes a brilliant first entry, how much of the player-obsessed character writing is forgettable at best and embarrassing at worst. The fact that I cannot stop playing anyway is a real testament to its mechanical genius.

What can I even say? I’m sorry! I’m a simple idiot! Every sequence of fights escalates at exactly the right tempo. Every weapon is a joy to learn and experiment with. Every boon, aspect, or whatever other customization layer they’ve added is meaningful and fun, without ever turning into the kind of spreadsheet nightmare other games love to inflict on you.

Do I care what I’m doing or why I’m doing it? No! Oh, we are taking a trip to a bathhouse to deepen our bond? Jesus Christ, shut up! Let me play the world-class thing you built in here. It’s so good. It’s so good. Just don’t think about it too much.

One Last Note From Jake: Supergiant Games should make a platform fighter.

3. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy

I read 34 books in 2025, but before I go to sleep, I really only read one thing: comic books. This year, though, I picked up manga.

I love loading up the Shonen Jump app and scrolling through the absolute nonsense laid out in front of me. A manga about a badminton player and a basketball star falling in love? Yes, obviously. A long-running series about a superhero who can defeat any enemy with a single punch? Load her up. A manga my friend recommended about a guy who becomes a chainsaw demon? That one was kind of boring, but I still enjoyed absorbing this new ritual every night.

I bring all of this up to say that The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy feels like having an entire years-long manga series ready to binge, but in a video game. More than once, I swapped my tablet for my Switch 2 and a pair of headphones and played in bed for hours, quietly praying my wife wouldn’t wake up and see whatever embarrassing hoopla was happening on my screen.

I don’t want to make too much out of this game, truly. It reliably dishes out solid twists and cliffhangers. There’s something interesting happening around dehumanization under fascism. But let’s be so for real right now: you do need to be okay with a lot of manga and anime contrivances, including a cast of characters who often say and do the same things over and over again (like Haikyu!!, which I mostly liked).

Still, The Hundred Line is a fun game to think about. It became a fun routine. It was a genuine delight to binge, and I think there’s just enough meat on the bone to override the occasional groan-inducing character.

One Last Note From Jake: The way people talk about anime/manga/JRPGs online is incredibly strange and in 2026 I will investigate this further.

2. Pokemon Legends Z-A

That’s right, boo me! Boo me all you like! It will only make me more powerful!

Pokémon Legends Z-A takes a real step toward the Pokémon game I’ve been asking for since I was, like, seven years old: action combat. In addition to giving commands, trainers can now move their Pokémon around the battlefield, dodge attacks, and take cover behind obstacles. This changes everything.

This is the first Pokémon game where the very first battle is genuinely exciting. Type disadvantage be damned. Keep circling your opponent, look for openings, and choose when to commit to an attack on purpose. Learning what this new battle system could do—and how it recontextualized familiar moves and Pokémon—gave me a sense of discovery I haven’t felt from this series since Red and Blue on the Game Boy.

Another first: online battles are actually fun. Instead of the usual tired meta theater, the game opts for a four-player battle royale. Success isn’t about memorizing spreadsheets or playing Reddit detective; it’s about instincts, positioning, and timing your attacks. For the first time ever, I feel comfortable recommending Pokémon online play to a normal human being.

One more first while we’re here: actually good boss fights. Rogue Mega Pokémon battles introduce unique mechanics that push beyond the standard rhythm of landing one or two super-effective hits and calling it a day. The fights are longer, tenser, and built around a real sense of danger, with time pressure and movement doing just as much work as raw damage.

Is the game perfect? Not even close. But for me, personally, it’s one of the biggest and most compelling steps forward the franchise has ever taken—and I cannot believe it’s finally real. Can Pokémon meaningfully iterate on this? Or will I be left wistfully dreaming about Z-A for years to come?

One Last Note From Jake: If Game Freak abandons real time combat I will become the Joker.

1. Blue Prince

I played Blue Prince alongside my wife. I was on the controller and Sarah was on the notebook.

“Should we write that down?” I’d ask, staring at a series of stained glass windows.

We played the game the way you read a difficult book together—slowly, deliberately, in conversation.

“What did you think of that part?”

“What do you want to see next time?”

Every puzzle we uncorked felt like a shared victory and a moment of genuine learning. The best feeling.

Blue Prince is probably the most readerly game I have ever played. Not just because there’s a novel’s worth of story hidden in the walls of the Mt. Holly Estate, but because of how the game paces understanding. It’s a game about collecting pages, putting them in order, and then sitting with them long enough outside of the game to figure out what they mean. Most games are not this patient.

People who bounce off this game tend to hate writing things down. They hate being shown a puzzle that feels too simple, followed by one that feels impossibly complex. They keep asking where the form is, where the structure is, where the invisible hand is that gently spoon-feeds meaning at the perfect speed to ensure success. If you try to constantly move forward in Blue Prince, you will choke. The game needs you to stop, revisit, reflect, and change how you think.

This is why we hate Wuthering Heights the first time we read it. And yes, that’s because we’re stupid—or, more generously, because we’re impatient. Being challenged feels bad before it feels good. Revisiting something requires admitting you didn’t fully understand it the first time. Games culture is especially bad at allowing for this. We demand immediate clarity and immediate payoff. Blue Prince asks for real time instead.

My wife is very good at all this stuff.

She is, of course, the love of my life, and every joy I have is either because of her or elevated by her. I know that by saying this I’m giving a few weirdos ammunition to discount my Game of the Year, but truly, I hope you eventually come to find and appreciate a life and a love like mine.

Playing Blue Prince together felt like learning how to read better together. How perspective is the ally of interpretation and how access to another will only better lead you down a path of ecstasy and discovery.

“Should we write that down?” I ask, dying to know what she’ll say next.

One Last Note From Sarah: There is pretty much one way I like to spend my Saturday mornings: sitting on the couch next to Jake, lattes in hand from our morning walk with Chip, playing some kind of enthralling, puzzlicious video game.

The sad fact is, we don’t always have a game like this — one that we’re equally invested in, one that leads us to problem-solve, debate, and cheer out loud together, one that is just as engrossing for the person not manning the controller.

Blue Prince has become the standard I measure all other couple video games against (is that a category of video games? It should be).

The best parts of Blue Prince:

1. the puzzle wasn’t stupid, and

2. it was a substantial, long-lasting game, dinner not dessert, delivering so much content.

For weeks, Blue Prince gifted me my favorite Saturday mornings, and I look back at our Blue Prince weekends as one of my most cherished times of the year.

Thanks for reading all that.

It dumps me into this cramped, noisy little arena where the colors feel like they are a result of a cartoonish infectious disease. There’s a filter over everything that makes the screen look like it’s been recorded onto a VHS tape and then microwaved. Things move in ways that don’t line up with the shapes I expect: blobs split, lines arc, bullets wobble and I die fast.

And not in a clean way. A hiccup and I’m gone.

I do a couple more runs, just to make sure, and each time my brain bounces off it. I can’t track anything. I don’t know what’s in the foreground and what’s set dressing. I turn the game off.

I log onto Fornite with my friend Peter. We talk about our jobs, our anxieties, and Twitter drama.

Half the time I’m barely registering the game. My fingers are doing all the moving and shooting on autopilot, glued together with a thousand hours of muscle memory.

We survive long enough to hit Top 10 a bunch of times without trying that hard. Whole games pass where we’re barely aware of the match at all, only snapping back to the present when someone’s shooting at us or the circle closes in before we noticed it had even started to move. In one night we play for four hours, easy. I go to bed thinking about some random story Peter told me, one I want to tell my wife about when we wake up the next morning.

The next day, I boot up Morsels again.

I don’t usually revisit games that annoy me; there are too many other things to play. But something about it sticks. I go in with a different plan this time: instead of brute-forcing the early rooms, I decide to be smart and read. I pause the game and discover a manual and start paging through the entries for all these little trash creatures the game lets you play as.

In my head, this is where everything clicks. The manual will tell me what I couldn’t see. I’ll learn what each guy actually does, which attacks pierce, which enemies explode, which hazards are safe to step on. This is the part where the game meets me halfway.

That is not what happens.

The manual is a wall of weird descriptions that tell me almost nothing useful about how to stay alive. Goofy portraits, blocks of text only large enough to satisfy a quick nibble, a font that leans into the same chunky, gunky aesthetic as the rest of the game. It’s cute in theory and completely unhelpful in practice. I squint my way through a handful of entries and come out knowing less. Yeah, these things are thematically clever and gross and funny, but I still don’t know which one I should bring into the next room or what specific threats I’m supposed to be preparing for.

It feels like the game doesn’t care about me. I set it down.

Until the third visit.

The third time I play, I go in mean. I’ve decided the problem is my attitude, not the game. I tell myself I’ll push harder, be more aggressive. I stop trying to play it like a cautious roguelike where you clear the screen methodically and start treating it like a twin-stick brawler that happens to be set in a putrid sewer. This feels good, for a moment. I thread through some danger, land a couple satisfying shots, clearing rooms faster than before. My confidence spikes.

Then.

I’m down to one heart, cornered by a mess of enemies that all look half-melted. There are bullets, or spores, or something flying at diagonals. There’s a glowing pink fuzzball on the ground that I’ve already walked over once, maybe twice. I’m trying to dodge everything at once and keep track of my own projectiles. The room is a blur. I die.

I die.

I’m dead.

Morsels.

The part that pisses me off is not the death. It’s realizing I have no idea what, exactly, killed me. There was no feedback! Was it that pink thing? Did it hurt me once or three times? Was it even dangerous? I’m used to deaths that make some kind of visual or mechanical sense. This feels like getting shoved in a crowd and later learning a stranger’s elbows cracked my rib. Who hurt me? I’ll wonder later in the doctor’s office.

It’s here that I do something petty and satisfying: I go into the settings and turn off the fake VHS filter. It’s cute, sure. But, it must be absolutely murdering my ability to read the game. I flip it off. Suddenly, the image sharpens. The colors separate. Hazards stand out more. The art looks less romantic and more like information.

And I die. I still die. A lot. But I’ve taken something back from this game.

Don’t you dare separate my “tweaking the settings” from my actual run; they’re the same fight. The game’s style is one that exerts pressure. My refusal to tolerate that style without editing is is my own counter. Modulating the settings is my gameplay.

This is around when my brain starts pulling the friction discourse out of its drawer.

A lot of people in and around games talk about friction as if it’s a moral category.

A “good” game doesn’t just hand you everything, it resists you. It slows you down. It makes you work. But most of the time, when people say friction, what they mean is a little extra texture layered on top of something fundamentally legible. A bit of jank. Some awkward timing. A slightly confusing map. Enough inconvenience to make you feel like you overcame something, without ever threatening your basic understanding of what’s going on.

Morsels is not giving me that kind of friction. It’s adding a little spice to a dish I already love. It’s forcing me to confront how many of my instincts are actually just the result of repeated genre training.

I’ve been playing video games for long enough that I can look at a screen and immediately sort most elements into categories: threat, safe, collectible, decoration. Red barrels explode. Spikes hurt. Shiny orbs are good. Enemies telegraph their attacks with glowing windups and big sound cues. Even in games I’ve never touched before, I can “sightread” my way through them, because everything is built out of familiar visual grammar.

Here, that grammar is scrambled. A lot of things that look dangerous aren’t. A lot of things that look like background will kill you. Some creatures move as if they’re scripted, then suddenly change direction in a way that doesn’t match the silhouette you’ve filed them under. The screen is full of stuff that, in any other game, would be clear, and here feels like it’s lying to me.

None of that would matter if the game were dull underneath. The problem, or the hook, is that the actual moment-to-moment play is interesting enough to keep tugging at me. The guts of it are classic roguelike structure: small rooms, randomized layouts, different enemy sets, little permanent upgrades if you make it far enough. On paper, this is familiar territory. But the way it’s executed makes the usual comfort behaviors fall apart. The randomization doesn’t feel like a neat system shuffling tiles; it feels like someone dumped the contents of a trash can down a stairwell and you’re trying to sprint up while everything bounces off your face.

The whole game takes place inside some kind of intestinal superhighway clogged with runoff and garbage and half-living clumps of junk. Everything you fight or recruit looks like it was scraped off the bottom of a street. Gum, smoke, filters, sludge—little avatars of the stuff everyone tosses aside without thinking. It’s gross but also weirdly pointed: every room feels like you’re wading through the physical consequences of people not bothering to pay attention.

I keep pushing through a few more runs, dying in ways that feel mysterious.

Eventually, I quit. Again.

And I text Peter: “Burrrrrnnsss”

Ten minutes later we’re back on the Simpsons Fortnite island, talking about our favorite ice cream flavors. Peter says cake batter. Disgusting. We’re missing shots we should’ve hit, getting revived while complaining about the sweats.

Suddenly, it’s 1am.

Fortnite makes me forget about stuff in a way that Morsels never does.

I’m not sure which one of us that incriminates more.

Me or the game.

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Thanks for reading all that

She’s singing something — a phrase she keeps circling back to. It sounds like the start of a song, or maybe the middle of one. I’ve been trying to piece it together in my head for weeks. When she finally records it, or plays it for someone who isn’t me, I’ll recognize the bones of it immediately, and it’ll still feel like something that I had first.

The words come half-whispered: I know who you think of most. Sometimes she changes the rhythm, sometimes the tone, like she’s testing something about the line. Waiting for it to break.

“You always pick him,” she says, nodding at the screen.

“Ryu,” I tell her.

“You ever get bored of him?”

“I like his spacing.”

“That’s such a you answer,” she says. “What does that mean? You don’t want to get hit?”

On screen, Guile throws a sonic boom and I block it clean. I know it by heart—the safe distance between my sweep and his kick. I punish the whiff, the sound effect brittle and perfect in the speakers. It’s the first time all week I’ve done something exactly right.

Summer adjusts, folding one leg over the other, her heel nudging against my hip. I can feel the warmth of her skin through the blanket. She tilts her head and watches my hands instead of the screen. “You make it look easy,” she says, like she’s complimenting a magic trick she doesn’t believe in.

“It’s just timing,” I tell her.

She hums again, the same phrase — I know who you think of most — except now it’s slower, the vowels pulled long. It doesn’t sound like accusation yet. It will later.

We’ve been together for almost a year. The kind of year that feels full even when nothing’s happened. Same diner, same parking lot, same drive home. Same Magen David glinting against her collarbone making me…

I’m leaving for college in a few weeks. She’s not. She says she’ll visit, that her band’s trying to record this fall, that her parents can’t afford tuition this year anyway. “It’s just logistics,” she says, but her voice always betrays her.

I lose the round and she leans closer. “I think you always jump too soon,” she says.

“I know.”

“You always say that too.”

When I finally win, she scoots forward until her knees touch my back. Her hair brushes the top of my neck. She’s close enough that I can smell her shampoo, some coconut thing she buys from the grocery store down the street. Her breath lifts the small hairs near my ear. She doesn’t say anything, just reaches over and takes the controller from my hands. Her thumb grazes the button. The static of her skin on mine makes the plastic warm.

“How do you do the fireball again?” she asks.

I tell her the motion—down, diagonal, forward, punch—and she tries it, rolling her wrist like she’s tracing a half-circle in the air. Nothing happens. She tries again, and again, the movement too sharp, too fast. Finally the screen flashes blue, and the fireball shoots across the stage, hitting Dhalsim right in the chest. “Holy shit,” she says, shoulders dropping, like something in her finally let go.

She drops the controller onto the blanket. It thuds softly. She leans back against the headboard, knees pulled up, and stares at the ceiling like she’s waiting for something to appear there. I don’t know what to say. I want to tell her I’m scared to leave, that every part of me feels smaller lately, that I keep rehearsing goodbyes in my head and none of them sound right. But I don’t.

The match keeps playing. Dhalsim destroys her while she’s choosing to not pay attention.

She tilts her head toward me. “Do you think we’ll still talk when you go?”

“Of course,” I say.

She nods once, eyes still on the ceiling. “You’re getting better at saying what people want to hear.”

I’m getting good at the spacing.

The TV flickers. The fan turns lazily above us. We lie side by side, not touching, both of us pretending to watch the screen. The light jumps across her face in pulses—blue, orange, blue, blue, blue, blue.

She sings the line again. I know who you think of most. Her voice is thinner now, like the song has worn through. I don’t look at her. I keep my eyes on the game, though the match has already ended. The characters are frozen on the continue screen, bodies breathing up and down in loops.

“Are you tired?” I ask.

“Not really.”

“Should I turn it off?”

She shakes her head. “Leave it.”

We stay like that. A few inches of space. The quiet of two people trying not to move first.

When she shifts, the bed gives a small sigh. Her arm slides over the sheet, stops halfway, waiting for something I don’t say. I reach for the controller but touch her wrist instead. Neither of us corrects the movement.

She turns toward me, slow enough that I could have stopped her if I meant to. I don’t. The kiss lands like it’s been falling through the air for months and finally found a place to hit. She tastes like salt and something sweet I can’t name because I’ve never been good with taste words. Her fingers dig into the back of my neck, and for a second I forget about the game, the other summer, and the leaving.

There’s so much heat, the kind that brands itself into memory before you even think to notice, that glows quietly in the body for an infuriating number of years. The kind I’ll measure against every future girlfriend who tries to love me.

She presses her palm against my chest, The controller slips to the floor. I hear the Continue? Timer tick down on screen. I feel her heartbeat through her skin—quick, then slower, then quick again.

I feel the rhythm of it all behind my eyes. The pulse before the fade to black.

–

After, we lie facing opposite walls. The shapes of our bodies linger in the reflection of the dark screen. The air has cooled. I have cooled. When did the TV turn off? I wonder, staring at the outline of her hair in its reflection, a dark blur rising and falling in the faint light from the window. Her shoulder shifts once, small and tired.

“You’re quiet,” she says finally, her voice half-buried in the pillow.

“No, I’m not,” I tell her. “Just thinking.”

She waits a moment. “You’d tell me if I did something wrong, right?”

“Wrong how?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Forget it.”

There’s a faint red mark on her shoulder where my thumb had been, shaped like a half-moon. I keep watching it, waiting for it to settle back into her skin, the pale and freckled skin I’ve seen a hundred times and still feel stupidly drawn to, like I might find something new there, something I’ll miss on a day less important than tomorrow.

She pulls the sheet up to her neck and turns onto her back, the bedsprings giving a small sound. I can’t tell if she’s looking at me or the ceiling. I start counting in the dark—days until I leave for college, until I make a group of friends, until I spend more time with one girl in that group than the rest because I secretly like her. Days until people notice. Days until I act. Days until I’m in her bed.

Logistics, right?

The longer I count, the faster Summer slips away.

“I know who you think of most,” she sings.

She rolls onto her side, facing away, then scoots back toward me the way she always does before falling asleep—her usual invitation. Her hip finds my thigh through the sheet. I stay still. I’ve memorized the distance I need to close. She waits, then exhales, a sound caught somewhere between disappointment and acceptance. Probably one more than the other. I glance toward her shoulder again in the dim light. The mark I left is already gone.

I close my eyes. The dark fills with light and noise again—the stage I’ve played a thousand times. Ryu throws a fireball, easy to dodge. Guile ducks low, sweeps, backs off, resets. The timer ticks down, each number becoming more vital. They keep moving, both of them holding ground, waiting for the other to risk it first. In the final seconds, Ryu takes an uppercut midair. I always jump too soon.

When they release Street Fighter III, everyone says it’s better. It definitely looks better. The characters seem older somehow—more confident and easier to like. My friends and I play it in the dorm common room after class. They laugh a lot. None of them ever even knew Street Fighter II.

Summer’s band releases a song that year. It’s a hit.

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Thanks for reading all that.

My son is in his room, bent low over Curious George, the paperback curling in his hands like a creature that trusts him. He reads aloud in fragments, to himself more than to me, and he speaks of George as one speaks of a companion encountered daily on the walk to school—a friend whose mischief is never punished and whose leaps never end in harm. A friend who never ends. “George tries things,” he says, certain and proud. “When I grow up, I’ll try things too.”

The words lodge under my ribs like coins swallowed, glinting there, still. He does not know how many times I have already watched him try—and fail, and fall, and fold back into silence. He does not know how many times I have unspooled the hours, reeled him in, rewound the world until the tape snapped in my hands. He does not know that tonight waits for him like a wolf in the bushes. He does not know that the story has only one ending.

From the kitchen, I hear him calling, a note that carries down the hallway with the brightness of a bell struck and struck again.

“Dad! Want to see my favorite?”

His voice cuts me open every time. He appears in the doorway, the book hidden behind his back like contraband, his smile the unbroken smile of someone who has not yet seen the trapdoor at the bottom of the world. When he reveals it, it is Curious George Makes Pancakes.

George spills, George stirs, George redeems. Batter everywhere, townsfolk fed, laughter, forgiveness. The neatness of a story. My son turns the page with reverence to the scatter of blueberries, the secret ingredient. His finger rests there. “This is the best part,” he says.

And I wonder—if he chose it because of me, if he remembers the way I eat them by the handful, the way I hoard sweetness. Or if it is only chance, only the comfort of color. Stories seduce you into believing the smallest choices matter, that fruit folded into batter can stave off hunger, that love folded into time can stave off loss.

He looks at me again, waiting, asking, the same question always. “Want to see my favorite?”

The clock collapses because I collapse it. The air thickens. Twelve minutes stretch and snap. He is gone. He is here again.

He is still here.

He is still here.

My name is Rewind.

He is still here.

And I say yes. Yes, of course. Show me. Show me again.

My son.

My son is in his room, paging through Curious George Makes Pancakes. George tries things. George never stops trying. And I have made trying into my faith, my ritual, and my wound. I flip the moment, burn the edge, scrape it clean, flip it again.

I scorch time black, and still I taste the blueberries, bright against the char.

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Thanks for reading all that.

Not the adult simulacrum where you drive in for the weekend, drag a duffel into the guest room, and spend the next forty-eight hours pretending your physical presence isn’t an intrusion on the routines of a recently-married couple that has long since made peace with different bedtimes and mismatched morning alarms. I mean the genuine slumber party—the exposed, wired, too-sugared, too-late-night delirium of the thing itself. The slumber party that was less about sleeping than about carving open time, hollowing out a bubble of hours so fragile and so perfect that morning, when it came, felt like the betrayal of a parent flicking on the hallway light.

I thought I’d lost that forever. We all do, right? We grow up, we marry. We learn to ration our evenings, to weigh the consequences of staying up too late against the responsible and brutal calculus of the day ahead.

But then, last week, I had a slumber party. With my friend Peter.

We didn’t sprawl across sleeping bags in some paneled basement and we didn’t leave behind a nest of soda cans and peanut M&M wrappers, though God knows I thought of them. Instead, we logged into Borderlands 4. By midnight the game had taken us by the hand—no, by the throat—and pulled us back into the bouncy house of boyhood: two friends who should have known better, wide-eyed in the glow of our respective screens, trading stories while plundering bandits. The game offered up its endless carousel of guns, its shimmering chests of loot, and one hemisphere of the brain could idly weigh the virtues of fire rate against corrosion damage while the other hemisphere—unguarded, unafraid—talked about life, about the state of things, about The Horrors, about women we had loved or tried to love, and about our feelings.

And feelings are, though you’re not supposed to admit this, the key ingredient to a slumber party.

Borderlands 4 would have you believe it’s nothing more than a hyper-masculine hallucination: rippling muscles, grotesque violence, characters whose abrasiveness are their entire personalities. A frat house with rocket launchers. But somewhere beneath the nonstop screaming, something else is happening. The women are powerful. The queer and non-binary characters claim center stage. Every NPC seems compelled to declare their horniness in a way that feels equally opportune and democratically mandated. The sheer gratuitousness of the violence has cleared out enough room—it has created a layer of protection—for tenderness to bloom, an irony so sharp you can only accept it on faith. You enter for the guns, but you stay for the closeness.

That night, I wouldn’t have been closer to Peter if we’d been outside carving our names into cherry trees or burying our beer bottles in my dad’s yard.

When was the last time I did any of those things? When was the last peanut M&M? The last catch-up coffee with that particular old friend? The last conversation with a parent? Lasts don’t announce themselves with trumpets. They end with the smallest of closures and, if you’re not careful, one day you’ll realize you can’t remember what slumber parties were even about.

But I can.

At some insane hour, we found Claptrap in a dumpster, just his eyeball piece because he’d been knocked around and taken apart by bullies. I reassembled his body, piece by piece, until he looked almost whole again, and when he begged for his final part he told me, “Please rookie, without my wheel I’m just a yellow toaster…with depression.” And in that moment, absurd and tender, I thought: this is a slumber party. To be ridiculous and sad, together, in the smallest hours of the night. To laugh until you almost cry, to share something you didn’t know you were going to share, to let yourself be stupid and vulnerable.

The next morning, I got up a little later than I normally would and I told my wife: I had a slumber party last night.

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Thanks for reading all that.

You need to play this game.

But let’s pause for a moment.

I know you’ve recently gotten into Pokémon. You’ve spoken about enjoying the mainline games with your son on the Kinda Funny Gamescast. You’ve built teams, learned type advantages, sparked those electric jolts of connection between the game and real life. This is the stuff that’s made the franchise endure.

So, congratulations. I am writing this now because you are finally ready.

Ready for a game that demands thought, strategy, and empathy—and ready to share it with someone who will cheer, worry, and scheme alongside you. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is perfect for this exact moment. It’s a game about mentorship, friendship, shared triumphs, and what you choose to do when the world is falling apart around you. A storybook RPG begging to be played by a dad and son on the same couch.

So, what exactly is this game in terms we can all understand? It’s a dungeon-crawling RPG with roguelike elements. You begin with a personality quiz that casts you as a human transformed into a Pokémon. Then you meet your partner. They need you as much as you need them. These two characters are always on screen and both are nameable. Greggy and Benny, saving the world together? Brilliant.

Now, for the core gameplay loop—you like Moonlighter, right? Randomized dungeons, unpredictable encounters! Except here, combat is turn-based, snappy, and tactical. Every Pokémon move is cleverly translated into grid-based logic: Karate Chop only hits the tile ahead, Bubblebeam cuts through in a line, Earthquake rattles the entire room.

Already fun, right? Now add items. These precious, make-or-break resources need to be managed with the same discipline you apply to bullets in Resident Evil 4. What you choose to bring into a dungeon—and the wisdom to decide when the right time to use it might be—can be the difference between pressing deeper or crawling home in shame.

And have you ever thought that mainline Pokémon battles take forever to get interesting? That too many battles feel like you’re just pressing any attack to win? Mystery Dungeon laughs—a saliva-wet guffaw—in the face of that notion. You’re shoved straight into the fire. The tension arrives immediately. Remember those Persona dungeon runs where you’re sweating over dwindling SP and debating whether to turn back? That exact juice is here, in a bright Pokémon wrapper.

And speaking of Persona—who doesn’t love a story about bonds? Red Rescue Team gives you a cast of eccentrics and oddballs who are funny, flawed, and endearing. They’ll tug on your heartstrings one moment, make you laugh the next, and raise the stakes higher than you’d expect from a game where you play as a Bulbasaur. By the end, I promise you’ll add at least one new all-time favorite Pokémon to your roster. Psyduck is my ride or die.

Now let’s address the Donphan in the room.

Tim Gettys—who has probably never once uttered the words “Mystery Dungeon”—is a poké-fraud. Don’t even ask him about these games. Ignore him. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t deserve to know. But you? You could be the one. Gregory Daisy Miller doesn’t need anyone’s permission, right?

Especially since, as I mentioned, this game is already sitting there on your Switch. A bold claim, sure, but if you’ve downloaded the GBA app then it’s waiting. And let me be clear: this isn’t one of those embarrassing effigies to nostalgia. You know what I mean. Nobunaga’s Ambition drops on the SNES app and games media freak-os are out here calling it a must-play. Please. Or F-Zero Maximum Velocity hits the GBA app and suddenly everyone’s concussed enough to pretend it’s the thinking man’s Mario Kart.

Red Rescue Team is not ironic retro-gaming. It is not manufactured valor. It is not “good for its time.”

It’s just good.

But the people don’t know.

The regulars. The normals. The fakers and lames.

But you, as the resident Pokémon scholar at Kinda Funny—don’t you want to plant your flag here first? Don’t you want to show everyone the depth and breadth of your critical understanding of this franchise?

Don’t even feel like you have to read the rest of this. Go on, get out of here, big boy. Thank me later.

Still here? Then let me introduce myself properly: I’m Jake Steinberg. I’ve written about Superman—your guy—and about Persona 4 Golden. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how stories reveal who we are when we’re tested. And that’s why I know this game belongs in your hands. Not as a fan pleading with you, but as someone who understands your taste.

And here’s where I get really honest, Greg. If you don’t play this game, it’s not because you’re too busy. It’s not because your backlog is too deep. It’s because you’re a scared little baby. Too addicted to the quiet comfort of guzzling the latest releases and assigning them an 8 out of 10 on the Kinda Funny review scale. Too happy to admire Hawlucha from a distance. Too scared to face the fact that there’s an entire Pokémon spin-off franchise tailor-made for you, and you’ve just—what?—ignored it? Missed it? Let Tim Gettys distract you with shiny Pokémon?

Or maybe Greg Miller just can’t handle a Pokémon game unless it’s holding his sweaty adult man-hand around every corner.

Come on, Greg. Red Rescue Team is waiting for you, right now, on your Switch. It’s time to give it a shot, isn’t it?

Best,
Jake

Thanks for reading all that.

Natalie was in the grade above mine, a year older and therefore infinitely older, a whole lifetime of experience in that small difference. She wasn’t the sister of a friend, or a friend of my brother’s, or a friend of my other brother’s, and so she arrived in my world without preface.

Our fathers stood by the register and shared the handshake of parents who orbit the same drop-offs and town parking lots. They smiled the dual smile grown-ups always manage: one with the mouth, another tucked away, folded into the mustache and crow’s-feet. Sometimes that second smile was lowered onto me like a tablecloth. This time it was reserved for each other.

I used to wonder—and still do—what fathers talk about when children are not listening. Was it only weather and the price of gas, or was there another grammar altogether, a language hidden in the rhythm of their pauses, one I had yet to unlock?

Natalie’s father caught me staring and gestured toward the cabinet glowing in the corner, its screen pulsing in blues and oranges like stained glass in that greasy cathedral of cheese and pop syrup. “Street Fighter?” he asked, his voice bending into a smile. Then he called out, “Natalie!”

And I heard it—the depth held inside a parent’s syllables. Nat-uh-lee wasn’t Natalie at all; it was shorthand for: keep this kid busy while I talk to his dad about whatever it is fathers talk about when they think no one is listening.

I don’t remember the match clearly. My memory insists it lasted for hours, whole pies’ worth of mozzarella bubbling in the oven. What I do remember is that Natalie knew things. Things I hadn’t guessed at, couldn’t have guessed at. I thought I understood video games—the joystick, the six buttons, and the brutal calculus of winning.

But Natalie seemed to sense something else beneath the surface. She tapped the joystick in odd diagonals, brushed the punch button with a hesitation that felt intentional. And every so often—like lightning in a bottle, like rumor made flesh—the impossible appeared. A burst of flame leapt from Ryu’s hands. A hurricane tore across the screen. I thought they were martial artists. She revealed them as magicians.

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I’d heard whispers of these moves on the playground, or wherever kids swap rumors. Someone swore his cousin had seen one, someone else said a camp counselor could do it. I believed them the way I believed in Santa Claus or love at first sight.

But Natalie made the impossible ordinary.

I, meanwhile, was mashing buttons—graceless, clumsy—a child pounding an untuned piano, praying for something like music to come out. The game itself was no smoother: its fighters stiff as toy soldiers, their punches landing with the bluntness of wood, their jumps ballooning into the air and hanging there too long, like balloons set loose at a birthday party. When I managed a hit—a small victory, a glancing blow—I turned to her, hungry for the faintest recognition that I wasn’t altogether hopeless. But she was already elsewhere, eyes fixed on the bright otherworld humming inside the cabinet. Understanding something I just yet couldn’t.

I never won a match. Not even close.

But, man, she was astonishing.

And yet the details slip, even now. What did she say to me? Did I introduce myself? Was I so bold? My memory insists our game lasted for hours, but the fuzziness around the edges produces an anxiety I can’t shake. I only hope I haven’t invented her—that she wasn’t some trick of neon light and longing, a phantom conjured by pepperoni smoke and adolescent want.

When Tony Roni or his brother finally called out, “One large pep, Rogers!” Natalie let the joystick fall, her hands dropping to her sides like she’d been holding a secret too heavy for too long. “Good games,” she said, smiling at me, a lie I treasured anyway. Then she trotted off toward her father, and I was left in the glow of the cabinet, surrounded by the musk of pizza and the sharper, newer scent I barely understood, a hormonal quickening I would later learn to call desire.

She was only a year older—just a year—but she already knew how to reach for things I couldn’t yet see. I had so much to learn—about Street Fighter, about girls, about everything.

Thanks for reading all that.

Donkey Kong: Bananza is not about Donkey Kong.

It is about God.

Watch some gameplay and you might not immediately see it.

The premise of the game and its entire appeal is obvious, right? You are Donkey Kong: a hulking, grinning force, a fist with fur. A powerful, acrobatic ape running, jumping, climbing, and smashing through levels in pursuit of banana-shaped crystals. A collectathon, some might say.

There are similarities to Nintendo’s Super Mario Odyssey, right? You take advantage of a suite of movement and traversal tools to navigate an environment and collect crystalline collectibles. There are sights and sounds, UI elements and aesthetic flares reminiscent of Mario’s globe-trotting adventure.

The difference—the conceit—is that this time, you are the ape!

But you’re not.

You’re not!

All of Donkey Kong’s acrobatic prowess falls in the face of his ability to manipulate the environment. You are not the gorilla. You are the fist above the gorilla, the hand behind the joystick. You are God.

Donkey Kong is a costume, a cartoon skin stretched across a force of nature. A punch is an edict. Mountains crumple like bread. Rivers flatten to glass. Forests bow into mulch. Creation obeys.

Unlike the humble, human Mario, you do not think. You do not plan. You do not hesitate. You obliterate.

And in the obliteration there is thrill, yes—but there is also absence.

2.

Banandium Gems—crystalline bananas—are the premise and the problem.

They are everywhere. You find them embedded in walls, in trees, and beneath pools of magma. They are not hidden. They are not earned. They are not staged for discovery.

Unlike the curiosity-tugging, ethereal pull of a hidden Korok seed in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, or the micro-exercise in platforming of claiming a Moon in Super Mario Odyssey, the Banandium Gems of Donkey Kong: Bananza do not represent gameplay sequences as much as they represent moments.

The game’s various worlds are cookie dough, and the Banandium Gems are chocolate chips pressed into every square inch—almost always in reach, and always the same. You punch through environments and a gem appears in front of you.

Punch here, gem.
Punch there, gem.
Punch again, gem.

The earth is frosted with them. A confection without recipe. A sweetness without shape.

Again, in Super Mario Odyssey, a collectible Moon signals intention. A sparkle on a rooftop pulls Mario’s attention; the player wonders: how do I get there? The environment is a riddle, and Mario’s suite of moves—his wall jumps, his hat throws, his lunges—are the verbs by which you tease out the answer. The puzzle is in the path. Each collectible carries a contrivance, a miniature story of attention and ingenuity.

Bananza’s gems are not questions but calories. The path is always forward, always downward, always more.

Consumption replaces progression. The only story is that of the blow. You are not uncovering anything. You are not solving anything. You are not even moving toward anything.

You are eating cookie dough straight from the bowl, one fistful after another, mistaking the endorphin rush of a silly ape grinning at the screen and announcing, “Oh, banana!” seven hundred and seventy-seven times for structure.

3.

And, of course, because Donkey Kong crushes everything in his path, nothing has structure. The levels—the worlds—are bowls of content strewn about randomly. There is no sense of challenge or difficulty. Nothing is building.

You know this immediately. In the very first world, you encounter smaller monkeys chipping away at the earth with pickaxes and tools. They labor. They scrape. They inch forward. They work. And then Donkey Kong arrives. He does not need tools. He does not need labor. He is stronger than all of them, stronger than anyone, and he eats the very gems they extract. Gems we are told are rare, valuable, hoarded by villains. Gems that are supposed to matter.

Donkey Kong consumes them instantly, endlessly, thoughtlessly, to empower only himself.

So what is being said here about power and strength? What is the moral of this fable?

That Donkey Kong deserves to devour the world’s resources because he is big enough to take them? That muscle beats labor, always? That might is not only right, but righteous?

A level is supposed to build. A world is supposed to crest. But here, no tension accumulates. No triumph emerges.

There is only content.
More content.
Always content.

4.

The lack of structure extends to what gamers will call the story.

When Donkey Kong first meets the game’s deuteragonist, Pauline, she claims she is afraid to sing in front of people. She suffers from stage fright!

This exposition is given when the game requires Pauline to sing so that Donkey Kong can access a “Bananza Transformation.” She immediately conquers her stage fright, performs perfectly in front of the crowd, and unlocks DK’s new form.

Nevertheless, almost every other time Pauline talks throughout this game, it will be to lament her stage fright. The very thing she conquers upon introduction remains, allegedly, her greatest barrier.

This is odd!

Every single time Pauline needs to sing, she does so with gusto. There is even a literal button in the game that you can press to make Pauline sing at any time. If I press the left bumper, Pauline’s trembling stops. So her fear, then, is a toggle. One I can manipulate to suit my needs at any moment.

Like a God.

What are we doing here?

What is Donkey Kong: Bananza saying about fear, or music, or transformative power?

5.

Bananza transformations allow Donkey Kong to become large, hulking versions of different animals you encounter along your journey. The transformations rely on reserves of gold you collect that are, conveniently and endlessly, placed across every single area of the game. Gold is your gas. But song is the ignition.

The power of music—and of, maybe, conquering your alleged stage fright—is only available as long as you are consuming gold. Sure.

But what does Donkey Kong actually do for Pauline? He carries her to the end of levels.

What does Pauline actually do for Donkey Kong? She is a tool. She is a song. She is the ignition key to transformations, an object of utility dressed in different outfits.

Why did the game go in this direction?

Anything could have activated the transformation. But the connection here is based entirely on fleeting meta-connections for the player, rather than any in-universe explanation. Pauline had a hit single in Super Mario Odyssey, so singing is a thing she does.

It’s a thing she does!

So in Donkey Kong: Bananza, it is the strongest form of magic because it is something you recognize.

6.

During the game’s finale, the villain group that has plagued your entire adventure is quickly discarded and immediately forgotten. The antagonists are replaced not by another villain, but by a cameo.

King K. Rool is a surprise entirely manufactured by recognition, rather than build-up.

The player remembers the bulging crocodile, therefore the confrontation matters. The memory pretends to be momentum, and nostalgia stands in for narrative. Bananza mistakes the glimmer of the past for the spark of the present.

Pauline reacts to him like he’s a random stranger (which, to her, he is), while the player is meant to gasp in surprise and delight. There’s no conceivable in-universe setup and payoff. No crescendo.

What Bananza offers lacks any material sense of integrity because it doesn’t care about offering something complete. Nintendo fully believes “people will like this ending because it’s fun for King K. Rool to come back,” and superfans gobble it up because it makes them feel important and in on the joke.

It’s all just content.

King K. Rool is another bite of chocolate chip waiting to be consumed.

7.

By the end of the game, Donkey Kong disappears and a delightful refrain sets in.

Cookie dough. Calories. Cookie dough. Calories.

Who cares what DK thinks about King K. Rool showing up?
Who cares what he thinks about arriving in New Donk City?
About what happened in the game, or what happens next?

You are not Donkey Kong. You are barely even the player. You are the God watching creation unfold.

You don’t doubt. And you definitely don’t question.

Pauline sings on command. Void Co. exists stage left. King K. Rool arrives on schedule.

Everything is automatic. Frictionless. Empty. Planned. Predestined. Rehearsed.

Zebra. Snake. Gorilla. Ostrich. Elephant.

The shapes pile up, a bestiary of options, and each one collapses into the next. You are all forms, and therefore you are no form. You are every animal, every element, every weapon—and therefore you are empty. The promise of power is that it should change you, that it should matter. Here, it does not.

Here, power is costume jewelry. Something you try on and discard. Something you collect like another gem, another calorie, another bite of dough.

Even lava, the most persistent enemy across the platforming genre, can be sucked up like orange soda as long as you activate the divine Elephant form.

Nothing resists.
Nothing stands.

8.

Nintendo has been doing this for years.

Tears of the Kingdom gave you god-tools—Ultrahand, Ascend, Reverse Time—because “cool.” Because “fun.” Because players like it. Dragons appeared because dragons are cool.

In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you were mayor, then island rep, then omnipotent scheduler of time and shaper of land itself. No one asked why. No one asked what it meant.

Bananza is the next verse of the song: powers without reason, twists without scaffolding, godhood without consequence. Only here, it is thinner, less witty, less alive.

9.

You do not play Donkey Kong. You play with Donkey Kong. He is not the hero of the story, but the avatar of your unchecked appetite. You bend him. You flatten the world with him. You devour gems through him. You feed the upgrades into your god-body until the shape is meaningless. And yet, nothing is yours. Nothing is earned. Nothing is tested. You become a sum of calories. A chain of transformations. A hollowed-out God.

Seven hundred and seventy-seven gold bananas.

A little girl sings to you about how far she has come, and you mistake it for depth. You mistake it for meaning.

But Bananza is a profoundly empty game with little more joy than the base mechanics of smashing and scooping. It is an extended tech demo. A playground without rules. A sandbox without shape.

What is a game without structure?
What is a story without a spine?

Just content.

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Thanks for reading all that.

1.

Elden Ring is hard, right?

When people talk about difficulty in games, they’re usually talking about punishment.

Bloodborne, Dark Souls, Lies of P—these are the games that throw you back when you fail. They slow your progress and make you walk. You die, and they push the win further away.

This might be obvious in the Soulslike genre, but it’s not exclusive to it. Osu!, Cuphead, Ghosts 'n Goblins, Spelunky—in all these games, the alleged difficulty comes from how harshly they respond to your failure. The idea of a “hard game” to The Gamer is defined by repetition with consequence. When a boss beats you, it costs you time, progress and resources. The punishment is the difficulty.

But imagine losing to that same boss, only to be revived mid-fight with the boss now at half health. You’re still doing the same fight. But suddenly, it doesn’t feel hard anymore.

Isn’t that funny?

The task is the same. Your moveset unchanged. Mechanics untouched. You’re being asked to perform identically, but when the punishment vanishes, so does the “difficulty.”

Difficulty, in these cases, is derived not from what you are doing, but from the psychic distance placed between you and the win. When you finally grasp victory, you call it hard because most games would never make you take the same walk twice.

But the actions themselves—the timing, the reactions, the reads—aren’t especially demanding for the Gamer who’s been playing action games for a while. These games don’t ask you to learn anything new. They don’t teach. They just ask you to endure.

Is that difficult?

2.

If you want to know what difficulty really looks like, notice what The Gamer avoids.

The YouTube reviewer sees it once, maybe during Summer Game Fest. The chronically online poster doesn’t bring it up at all. The mainstream critic hands it off to a niche freelancer, someone who’s fluent in its language, but whose value is always for rent.

This is not the prestige game or the emotionally rich indie. This is the game that asks for more than The Gamer is willing to give.

Street Fighter 6.

League of Legends.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

These are the games that come with qualifiers. When they do get reviewed—if they get reviewed—the writer must first confess their skill level. “I’m no expert,” they’ll say. “I’m not competitive.” Then they’ll pivot to safer territory: how well the game onboards new players, how accessible the single-player content is, whether it feels “welcoming.”

These games are not part of the assumed cultural conversation around video games—not because they’re obscure, but because they resist victory. So they’re siloed. Everyone knows these games are popular. So why doesn’t The Gamer rise to face them?

Because they’re difficult.

Not punishing. Difficult.

They’re not designed to make you feel heroic just for showing up. They don’t offer the narrative of “eventual triumph.” There’s no walkthrough to look up. No build to exploit. You can’t “get good” by listening to someone tell you what to do. There is no shortcut to fluency. The game is the learning, and the learning is the game.

And learning—really learning—is hard.

That’s why so many of us quit piano. Why we don’t understand our microbiomes. Why billionaires still exist, I guess. Learning is incremental, humbling and inconvenient.

Learning is hard.

Fighting games, in particular, demand that kind of learning. They demand your humility. To play them at all, you must fail. Embarrassingly. Loudly. You will be bodied, publicly. You will get a message from a stranger telling you to stick to unranked. Then you’ll watch yourself lose—frame by frame, inputs displayed, your idiotic instincts made legible. You will see your panic. You will see your patterns. And you will have no one to blame but yourself, you big idiot.

And unlike the Soulslike, there is no walk back.

There is no hallway to retrace or resources to recover. The fight is the game. The repetition is the practice. There is no performance outside the performance. No space to recompose yourself. No game to massage you into believing you are making some kind of progress.

Because fighting games are instruments you learn to play.

Maybe at first you’re just trying to make the sound right. Then, you learn some chords and can string together something like a basic melody. Eventually, something clicks. You stop thinking. You start playing. You reach a threshold. Then another. And another. There’s always further to go in pursuit of mastery.

Fighting games are not here to punish you.

They are here to teach you.

When was the last time you learned?

3.

What does it really mean when The Gamer says a video game “feels good?”

The shooting in Destiny feels good. It feels right. You’re thinking of other games. Other games that we say feel good.

It reminds me of when I was in undergrad and I learned about Heidegger’s “ready to hand” philosophy. The idea was that you don’t really think about your tool, what you’re doing, or how it works. Everything works exactly how you think it should. When you drive a car you don’t think about the pistons firing. There’s no friction between desire and result.

The guns feel good.

The guns are engineered to flatter me.

The guns made me feel good about myself.

The gunplay is tuned just so—the aim assist is so aggressive, the feedback crisp. I feel competent the second I pick up the controller.

And why shouldn’t I? I am The Gamer.

Sometimes I see people point to Crash Team Racing as a game that doesn’t “feel good.” The drifting is too tight or too technical. When compared to another racing game the distance between desire and result is far too wide.

So it’s clunky. It’s bad.

It didn’t immediately validate my status as The Gamer.

4.

Mario Kart World is easy, right?

When you put your hands on the controller, it plays more or less how you expect a Mario Kart game to behave. Sure, you can jump now. And ride walls and grind rails. But have you ever needed these tools to win before? Absolutely not. You’re good at drifting.

Between traditional three-lap races, you drive along these open-world intermission tracks. The flow is less choreographed and the expectations are looser. These roads are wide, straight, and relatively quiet. But beneath them, there’s a hum of desire.

You might come across one of these routes while moving across the overworld map. But there are no quest icons. No arrows. Nothing telling you what to do. That low hum returns.

Figure it out.

Sure, if you collect a Peach Medallion or complete a P-Switch challenge, you’ll get a sticker. A reward. But what if you spend your time studying a piece of track? Memorizing a sequence? Practicing a new route? What do you get then?

And then you're back to racing online.

You hope the game selects a familiar three lap track. You’ve seen Reddit threads and BlueSky posts begging for a “Classic Mode” that removes the interstitial segments entirely. And you get it. You’re competing and you want the part of the game you already understand.

But the vote lands on the intermission track from Acorn Heights to Boo Cinema. You sigh. You race, begrudgingly.

You start off doing well. You have done a good job of collecting coins early on. You’re ahead of the pack in first place.

And then you’re stranded. You find yourself on a long stretch of highway with no options. There are no corners to drift around and no mini-turbos to build like you had done before in Mario Kart 64, Mario Kart Double Dash, Mario Kart Wii, Mario Kart Super Circuit, Mario Kart 7, Mario Kart 8, and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

Then, the items attack.

A blue shell arrives.

This game is cheap! You are punished for being good! Punished for being in first place when a stupid highway came along with no options!

You finish in 5th. You wonder why Nintendo would make a dumb, bad game like this.

But I play with people who are actually good at Mario Kart.

They memorize tracks. They knowingly manage their placement in the race. They inspect courses and invent strategies. And you know what else they do? You know what I notice every single time I play with a group of actually competitive Mario Kart players?

They win.

They win spectacularly.

They win in a way that makes me realize how serious the game can be.

They win in a way that tells me there is still so much to learn.

Because Mario Kart World is hard.

Will you figure it out?

Thanks for reading all that.