Sometimes if you're quick enough in Fawcett at night, you can manage to snap a picture of one of its elusive cryptids.

Monthly Media Roundup (May 2019)

The march of time inexorably proceeds beyond my grasp and so I must write another post. I’ve been a bit burned out, just focusing on one diversion (it was Zelda, you know it was Zelda), but after finishing it I recovered enough energy to get a few more things done in the last half of the month. I didn’t watch any anime or read any manga in May, though I did read some 70s Marvel, which I liveblog in my “curry reads comics” tag. Last time I did an actual capital-P Post about my Marvel reading was a year ago after marathoning a full(ish) decade. If people are interested in more of that I could work at making posts for each year of issues I read, recapping the developments and my thoughts on them (which will become more relevant as Events become more common, I imagine). I’ve just got a few games to talk about this month, but I imagine I have a lot to say about at least one of them.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch): 2 years ago I did something I extremely rarely do: stood in line at a Best Buy at midnight for the release of the Switch so that I could buy it with BotW. BotW was also out on Wii U, which I had, but the promotional material for BotW had struck such a chord in me that it justified making the jump for the new console (this would eventually become troublesome when the first model of joycons failed, but, well). I got home, put some ten odd hours into it, and then put it down for two years. I’ve always had a problem where, struck with the intuition that I will end up forming a deep relationship with a work, I will put it off for years. I put off Persona 3 for five years after buying it at launch, and it eventually became the most personal game experience I would have, even seven years onward. I think the two factors that pushed me to finally play through BotW was wanting to watch a friend stream it (but also not wanting it spoiled for me), and needing a distraction for when I was taking care of my cat.

It’s been about two months now since he passed away, and I finally finished the game at 215+ hours about half a month ago. So, I was playing this game as a coping method while preparing for loss, and in dealing with loss. It’s appropriate that the game is effectively both a fantasy about reclaiming at least part of what you have lost, and a colossal exercise in coping. The game is as much about getting distracted from your responsibilities and fucking off to snowboard in the mountains as it is about being aware of the world around you. The Zelda games have frequently used themes of Shintoism to portray harmony in nature and in civilization. I’m currently replaying Ocarina of Time and the cosmogony myth (is it a myth if a talking tree explains it to you?) specifically words the goddesses as “[giving] the spirit of law to the world” and “[producing] all life forms who would uphold the law.” When I was younger (see: early 20s) I didn’t scrutinize the text much but now I figure it’s reasonable to read “law” as “natural order”. It should be noted that for an N64 game, OoT has remarkably good prose. BotW, in transitioning the series in what may be its third main genre (as opposed to the genres of Zelda 1 and OoT), has taken that Shintoist aesthetic and incorporated it into the entire philosophy of the game’s design. More than just being a game whose narrative concerns an imbalanced world, BotW embraces the trends of open worlds and immersive sims to create an immense, varied space where the coded laws of physics are always impacting the experience. Thunderstorms make metal equipment a liability, while rain covers the sounds of footsteps. Wind can sweep away items, fire and high temperatures affect flammable objects (including yourself), and aforementioned metallic items can conduct electricity, which can be used to solve puzzles in unintended ways. Weather changes regularly based on the region and changes the world in tandem. Rain doesn’t just fall, it actively collects, and ponds become bigger, and surfaces become slicker. Each systemic element (pun not intended) that was incorporated affected everything else in the world, and in interviews there were mentions that changing the volume of wind in one area had a butterfly effect on another, causing pots to fly off of patios in a village. It’s no wonder the game took five years to make, considering how rarely glitches occur in the game (and most that I know of have to be deliberately recreated for exploitation). You’re engaging with enemies as much as you are with the environment, and at times even with your own body, creating and consuming food and drink for the purpose of staving off sunstroke or frostbite. As a result, BotW’s Hyrule is immensely palpable, and easy to lose oneself in from how livable it feels.

When I first started playing at release, I was a bit disappointed to discover that villages existed in-game, as early promotional material and the state of the Great Plateau you start on painted a picture of a lonely world. In the end, the soundtrack and vast amount of uncolonized land does give an understated sense of melancholy that defines the game, though the fact that every five steps you’ll find a Korok micropuzzle waiting to YA HA HA and fanfare at you betrays that a bit (I still love those Koroks and their puzzles, don’t @ me). The NPCs in this are numerous, though, from the occupants of the villages to wandering traders, and their personalities are all distinct and charming, and probably the best I’ve ever seen in a game, or at least in a long time. If this game wasn’t railroading the Link/Zelda relationship so hard, I would have liked a Dragon’s Dogma-style “date any NPC (within reason)” mechanic. I’m just going to have to start a “NPCs you should marry” side-tumblr.

Another defining aspect of the gameplay, and easily what makes the game surpass arguably every other Zelda, is how Nintendo heard the decade or so of complaints about the linear Zelda lock-and-key formula being reiterated to the point of stagnation, and, after great success with A Link Between Worlds’ item rental subversion, just decided to make everything optional. You do the tutorial on the Great Plateau, and, if you feel especially gutsy, you can beeline it straight to Ganon. He’s in horse-riding distance, or running distance, if you’re tenacious. Will you make it to him, survive the hordes of enemies, and take him down? If it’s your first time playing the game and you haven’t learned the systems, probably not. Is it possible? Absolutely. Much like how the monthly cycle of a Persona game is a proverbial Rocky training montage of preparing for The Big Fight, everything you do in BotW is in preparation. A lot of open world games can feel dissonant in that you’re incentivized to be distracted as a player and make your own fun, meanwhile the protagonist keeps saying “I’m gonna get bloody revenge on the mafia boss!” during bowling matches. There is still, unavoidably, a sense of urgency played up for narrative sake in BotW, since Impa insists Zelda is waiting and can’t hold Ganon back forever, but it’s all much more narratively justifiable, if you want that. You know, because Zelda is for hardcore roleplaying.

I couldn’t resist a second playthrough, even after logging 215+ hours, so I went ahead and started a separate file on Master Mode, Nintendo’s weird in-house, in-franchise rebranding of, uh, a hard mode. Previously it was called Hero Mode. Why do you--well, okay, I know why they do it. They’re likely trying to distinguish it from a “we just tweaked the numbers” hard mode, and also want to make it feel less threatening than something labeled hard mode. If they’re going to go to the trouble to make it a distinct form of play, they want to try and appeal to everyone. And it is fairly distinct. All enemies are bumped up one rank, so a red bokoblin is blue, and a blue bokoblin is black, and so on. There is a new strongest rank of enemy, though in my run I did not seek them out. There are enemies (and treasure chests!) perched on flying rafts, which can be one-shot with proper bow aiming, but also carry dangerous elemental arrows, and can alert all other enemies in the area. Stealth is much more difficult, and pointless early in. All enemies regenerate up to a third of their health, including bosses! Though, that can be temporarily interrupted by inflicting any amount of damage on them, so it behooves you to be on the offense. Less autosave slots! This wasn’t a problem for me. Guardians randomly delay the firing of their beams! This was absolutely a problem for me and I avoided them entirely in my run. In the beginning when tools and resources are scare, particularly on the Great Plateau, Master Mode is at its hardest, and its most thrilling. Rather than aimlessly exploring, I was pressured to decide where I knew things were, and beeline it to them. Sometime in-between two of the four main optional dungeons, I had amassed enough valuable resources that the game had settled back into the same kind of difficulty as normal mode. Bosses were a little harder due to regen and my resources being somewhat scarcer, but they were manageable. Competently performing flurry attacks (upon successfully dodging attacks at the last second) was extremely valuable to me, but I imagine with enough food in my inventory, I could have brute forced my way through a lot of the fights (though, uh, obviously thou wouldst like to live deliciously (please hate me for this phrasing)). I chose to forego the Master Sword for the sake of challenge, and beat Master Mode with only seven hearts, in around 25 hours. You should play Master Mode, it’s fun.

Here’s a little gameplay SPOILER:

Something I haven’t done, but would like to eventually do, is avoid the main dungeons and just head straight to Ganon. When I played Master Mode, I wasn’t totally confident, and did the dungeons for the resources. After watching some speedruns I learned that if you skip the dungeons, and therefore the main bosses, you have to fight them all at once immediately before the fight with Ganon, without breaks.

That. Sounds. Great.

Wandersong (PC/Steam): Have you heard about Homestuck?

Okay, wait. Wait. Come back, wait. Stop leaving. PLEASE.

Okay, I got the most inflammatory sentence out of the way. Now that we’re eased into that: Wandersong is unignorably influenced by Homestuck. Homestuck conjured a lot of baggage, from having a really difficult, pretentious, arrogant author (I should know, I gave him the benefit of the doubt for way too long), to having some unfortunate narrative turns, to being a billion words long. Wandersong invokes the vaster-than-God scope, the minute and personal perspective of the heroes, and its inclinations toward emotional intelligence (it still surprises me Homestuck had these moments given the author’s deeply unsympathetic sense of humor), and… condenses it! It also makes it a light puzzle-platformer and is about performing music (note: not rhythm, you don’t have to have ANY rhythm), and looks like a Paper Mario game. It is very charming, very funny, very optimistic, and most surprisingly, uncompromising at times. Wandersong says that you, despite your role, are capable of great things, especially self growth and change, as long as you commit to it. If, faced with the consequences of your bad decisions, you choose to double down and keep at it, you will reap what you sow. This is distinctly different from Undertale’s brand of pacifism route optimism, where “no one has to die!” This brand of optimism is a measured but enthusiastic “you can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved, but you can save the rest” and I think that’s a uniquely valuable message.

I was a little confused about the resolution of the communist uprising chapter, but I recall the game bringing my cynicism into question, and the most important thing a work can do is make you question yourself.

(Also, if any of my mutuals are low on funds but interested, I do have a drm-free version I can share.)

Minit (PC/Steam): I don’t think I actually have a lot to say about Minit! It’s very fun and curious and short. You play a little… duck… thing, and you pick up a cursed sword which kills you in one minute. Then you wake up the next day, and die in a minute. Then you wake up the next day. Having only sixty seconds of vitality, you have to optimize your exploration. There’s a slow-speaking old man who you will die listening to, but the hint he gives at the end of his sentence will lead you to something valuable. There’s a guy in a bar angry about the lack of music. If you change the music, he will probably dislike it. If you keep changing the music, you might live to see him like it. There’s a boat ride to a tropical island you have to grit your teeth and wait through. Not all of the events are slow, some are quick bouts of hurried exploration. Most of it is, given the time limit. I’d say more, but given the overall length (it took me about an hour to finish), I’d risk spoiling a sizable fraction of the experience. It’s about $10, though I got mine in a Humble Bundle Monthly subscription. The spec requirements are very low, so your laptop can likely run it.

A Hat in Time (PC/Steam): Heads up, I’m gonna get into a lot of spoilers for this game, including endgame spoilers, but also heads up, the story isn’t really the point in this game. This is a game about tone and platforming. That said, I’m gonna be talking exclusively about the weird ideas in this game, and if you want those weird ideas to be a surprise, then just skip ahead until I put up big letters.

I’m somewhat hesitant to be critical of A Hat in Time because despite a number of weird Things about it, I recognize that it’s quite popular with a lot of people, and that always makes me pause and want to figure out what it is that makes it pass the bar for others. My guess at this point is that it invokes nostalgia through its unmitigated imitation of games that came before. The games it chooses to ape are all your childhood’s Greatest Hits, Wind Waker (which it most resembled in its earliest development), Super Mario Sunshine/Galaxy (which it most resembles now), Banjo-Kazooie, Psychonauts, etc. It never really surpasses those games, for me, and at times cribs from them to the degree that it obscures the game’s own identity. After all, what you enjoy may help define you, but you wouldn’t say it’s your personality. Well. Unless you kin the Gamecube. I guess. There are bonus levels to the game’s different “worlds” (I thought they were different planets, since your hub area is a spaceship, and you access them via different telescopes, but it turns out it’s just one planet?), and you can collect photographs, which sequentially tell a story about the residents of that “world”. Psychonauts did this because each level took place in the mind of a character, and the photos together told a story about the character that fundamentally changed the way you thought about them, and made the whole game feel richer as a result. I collected the photos for all but the DLC levels in AHiT (those are Really Hard), and of those five or so worlds, none of those bonus photos told me anything that changed how I thought about the characters. There’s a dock town run by a mafia (s-sorta) led by a chef, but did you know they all used to work at a processing factory before going there? There are two manipulative bird directors who are fighting over the same studio to produce their own film and win an award, but did you know they… wanted to be directors since they were kids? There’s a devil analogue who steals people’s souls if they wander into his forest, but did you know he was a prince, and the princess was mad he talked to another girl (it was a flower girl, he was getting flowers for the princess), and imprisoned him until they both the prince and princess turned into evil ghosts? That’s the only one that comes close to being an “oh” moment, but I don’t think it does for the reasons the writer was hoping for. In general, these are prologues without substance.

Speaking of substance, the game has a bit of an issue with theming. At least, it does at first. The first town is the previously mentioned dock town, run by a mafia. By “mafia”, I mean a bunch of meatheads who talk about how they like punching people, and refer to themselves individually, in the third person, as Mafia. Mafia loves to punch the poor and the birds. Mafia is a one-dimensional character copy-pasted across 20% of the game. Mafia laughs. They’re run by a chef, but also they can’t cook, so there’s a cat chef in hiding who routinely swaps out their food with his so no one has to eat bad food. I don’t know why, when the town has maybe three non-Mafia character. He does eventually leave and board your ship, so maybe he’s just looking for something to do. The leader of the mafia also boards your ship, for a joke and to sell you an upgrade. The mafia are also afraid of mud monsters, or aliens, or something. There’s a girl with a moustache named Moustache Girl who wants to use your Time Macguffins to overthrow organized crime, and Hat Girl decides that’s a no-go. There are giant faucets around the town that replace all the water with lava. You might be noticing these things have little to no connection. You might be suspecting this level was made first when the dev was inexperienced. I might be suspecting this. It’s fine.

Later worlds do a much better job of theming. There’s the movie studio split between two birds. One of them a penguin, who prefers science fiction, the other a…

...hmmm. I suspect this guy, The Conductor, is an OC the director has had for a while, maybe since childhood, that they just decided Is A Bird, and carried it into the game, since the game occasionally is like... bird?? Alternatively, it’s some sort of corruption of Woodstock from Peanuts. Possibly both. Anyway, this guy just wants to make movies that take place on wild western trains. He has a strong fake Scottish accent, and the penguin, named DJ Grooves, is some sort of disco Elvis. They’ve both hired owls as actors, and some crows have snuck onto the train set (the crows are so obviously the G-Men from Psychonauts’ Milkman level it bothers me a bit). This is already a little busy, but it’s okay! Birds, movies, two distinct genres, and you trapped in-between them, just trying to collect your macguffins. It works. You take part in both of their movies, and your performance in both determines the winner, when suddenly… CORRUPTION WAS AFOOT, and you have to explore the depths of the studio and engage in a showdown.

Another world is a spooky forest where your access is restricted by completing certain contracts for the devilish character. Sometimes it’s murder (reasonable), exploring a haunted mansion in survival horror format (ooh!), fixing the plumbing in a well (wait, what), and doing mail delivery (back up back up). Half of that works. The finale of the forest makes up for it, though. This game insists on most of its bosses having like 4-5 phases and breaks for dialogue and the gall required to get away with that honestly earned my respect. They’re pretty fun times.

The best level to play is, unsurprisingly, the first DLC. I say unsurprising because it’s clear the dev is learning as they go, and the level design improves as they go along. Aside from bonus levels, the first DLC takes place on a massive cruise liner titled the SS Literally Can’t Sink. Ha ha. It’s split into three parts. The first part has you exploring the many interconnected rooms of the ship to find broken shards of a macguffin, the second part has you taking that mental map and using it to frantically complete multiple timed fetch quests at once, and the third part, now that you understand the ship pretty intimately, capsizes the ship, requiring you to traverse frigid waters and overturned scenery to retrieve babies and the ship’s incompetent but adorable baby seal crew (the seals speak in hewwo talk, the game is unforgivably loaded with memes but let me have this). This progression is my favorite in the game, and while I haven’t bought the Nyakuza Metro DLC, I’m looking forward to it.

The ending level had me a bit bewildered at first because in the beginning when Hat Kid refuses to use time powers to stop organized crime, I saw it as a hamfisted way to create tension between Hat Kid and Moustache Girl. Apparently it was working up towards the moral of the story. In the final level, Moustache Girl has stolen all the macguffins, and possessing ultimate power, becomes corrupted ultimately, and summons everyone in the world to her Bowser castle to be judged and die. On first glance, I thought “well, sure, that’s sensible,” but when Hat Kid finds the support of all the villains in the game, I was a little confused. The villains sacrifice themselves to give you infinite health, explicitly stating that they’ll just come back through time magic if you win so who cares (cool stakes), and you overcome authoritarianism with the support of corrupt hollywood, organized crime, and the literal devil. This would be fine if at some point Hat Kid, you know, took them on a Zuko Quest to face turn all of them, but that doesn’t happen. They just all decide “hey yeah, fuck this girl! Also we don’t have time for the nuance this might require!” After all is said and done and you collect all your macguffins, you’re given the choice of leaving the defeated Moustache Girl a single macguffin so she can defeat the mafia (whose side are we on) or just saying nahhh. Neither appears to make a difference, but maybe in a year or two we’ll get a DLC that makes you regret your words and deeds. You try to fly your ship to your home planet, and the villains all grab on to your ship, which is in space, begging you not to leave. I seriously suspect they intended to incorporate face-turn scenes and just couldn’t find the time, because nothing but physical proximity implies these guys would have any emotional attachment to Hat Kid, and that’s a bit of a stretch. Anyway, Hat Kid brooms them off the ship to plummet down to earth and flies away. Sheds a tear about the whole thing. In the end, the moral was that Order good, but too much Order bad, except if you are Hat Kid, in which case Chaos good. Or maybe…

After finishing the game I decided to look into any left over secrets, since my completion score was in the 80s of percents. Turns out that if you use the camera badge to finagle the free look feature into a marginally open armoire somewhere on your spaceship, you can find a shrine to Hat Kid with a couple skulls, a bunch of blurry photos, and some strange symbols. If you doing this while wearing the mask that lets you see the secrets of the dead (for platforming and puzzle purposes, of course), there’s a bunch of alien text you can decode. And then there’s some youtube channels. And a twitter account. All sharing more of those decodable ciphers, all talking about vague dreamy apocalyptic histories and dark betrayals. Or something. That’s right, this game’s got a fucking ARG. I cut things off there. If the developer Gears for Breakfast is gonna make an occultist grimdark sequel to A Hat in Time, they can put up a trailer for it.

OKAY I’M DONE TALKING ABOUT A HAT IN TIME, the short of it is that I had a lot of mixed feelings but had fun.

How did I end up talking more about A Hat in Time than Breath of the Wild? What are my priorities?

Well, that’s everything I finished in May! Will I get back to anime and manga in June? Guess we’ll see! Again, let me know if you want me to do year-recap Marvel posts, since my liveblogging is mostly just shitposts, and the occasional attempt at thoughtfulness among those posts feels kind of out of place. Honestly, I’m probably gonna do that anyway, but it’s nice to see interest. If you read all this, thanks a lot! Go play Breath of the Wild and Wandersong.