Elden Ring, Alan Wake, and the Trick of Getting Players to Care About Lore

 Because I remain obsessed with the game, I recently listened to/watched an interview with Sam Lake discussing the making of Alan Wake II. In it, he made a really interesting point about the delivery of exposition and lore in games - namely, that if you present characters with a lot of deep lore in some grand compendium, players will often ignore it. But if you hide that lore, making it a puzzle to piece together, you inspire players to seek it out.

I was talking with my best friend about the games of From Software, likely specifically Elden Ring. We were talking about game story, and he argued that From's games don't really have much of a story, while I thought they had a deep and interesting story that demanded to be unpacked and explored. Ultimately, we came to a compromise in positions: that we could separate the idea of "story" and "lore," and say that the story of Elden Ring is, while not non-existent, at least deeply enigmatic and arguably thin, while the lore behind that story was every bit as rich as someone who watches the Tarnished Archaeologist, Smough Town, Quelaag, and VaatiVidya would know it to be (Oh, and Ziostorm).

Remedy's games are, I think, present more of a true story in this sense, but there's a similar use of obfuscated lore to draw the player in.

In a sense, I think that the experience of From Soft's lore is almost an out-of-game experience. That game, so to speak, is played watching YouTube videos and, well, writing blog posts (I'm too lazy to be a YouTuber). From Soft's games also happen to be extremely satisfying to play in the moment-to-moment - I think the precision of control (and yes, the difficulty that requires mastery of that precision) makes it easy to come back to these games over and over (I think I've beaten Elden Ring on something like seven or eight characters, though the eighth admittedly hit a point where I didn't really have any new builds I was excited to try). But I think I've relied a great deal on the online community to piece together the world of that game - even if practically ever assertion becomes a matter of interpretation (for example, that the Omens are really just an expression of the wild nature from the Crucible Era).

I think Remedy comes from a place of being a little more accessible. While I think they like there to be some ambiguities in their lore, I think for the most part they want you to have the basic idea of what is going on simply by playing the game.

But, more broadly speaking, I think that Lake's assertion that hidden lore gets players' attention better is correct.

It has been over a decade since I finished the Mass Effect trilogy, but I remember that their approach to the game's lore involved a large compendium one could access in the pause menu. I actually thought this was a pretty successful technique, but perhaps only because that setting was such a detailed, well-thought-out science fiction universe. There were certainly some elements that were open to interpretation - for example, some believing that Shepherd, at the end, has become Indoctrinated by the Reapers (which I don't really believe,) but the setting was one of a technologically-advanced, highly interconnected galaxy where it made sense for this information to be easy to come by.

Still, the information in the compendium was simply there for people who were curious to read/listen to it, outside of the primary gameplay.

Final Fantasy XVI did something interesting, which was its "Active Time Lore," a cheeky riff on its old Active Time Battle system (a term that, frankly, they've re-used to mean different things - the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy has characters build up "ATB charges," despite being a totally different combat system from the original game). Anyway, XVI builds up a Game of Thrones-inspired complex political landscape with many different factions warring against each other in a world with dwindling resources (it's the first Final Fantasy game I've played without one singular world-spanning empire to contend with - there is an empire, but it's just one of several factions). During any cutscene, you can pause and get little one-or-two-paragraph descriptions of the characters, the location, and any major topics that the characters are discussing, and you can also access more of this stuff via a friendly NPC.

But I think in both of these games, complex as those worlds are, I really don't find myself drawn into meticulously unpacking every element of the lore the same way I do with Remedy's Alan Wake and Control games, or From Soft's Bloodborne and Elden Ring (ironically, the Dark Souls series that put From on the map is one I've never been quite as interested in).

I'd also suggest that part of what makes Remedy's lore tidbits so exciting is the fact that they're in-universe sources. While there's a certain unreliability to the narrator of From Soft's item descriptions, there's not really any particular author of these descriptions whose motivations and biases we can investigate. Remedy's most common collectable lore bits are things like Alan Wake's manuscript pages or the various memos found in Control's Oldest House.

In the former case, we're often learning more about characters from the viewpoint of an omniscient narrator - but that narrator is also the eponymous writer, and we know because we're playing as him (or at least half the time as him in the second game) that he sure as hell isn't omniscient, and doesn't even remember writing these pages. Indeed, most of the time we're playing as Alan, we're really playing as the version of him that he is writing at the time, and that version of him is as ignorant as the player is.

Personally, though, I think it's the latter case where this style of lore development works best (I think Alan Wake II is the - as of yet - crowning achievement for Remedy as a studio, but even if I think AW2 is arguably the "better" game, I think I might like Control more. In fact, I might even say that I think Alan Wake II is the better work of art while Control is the better game - but we're comparing two monumental achievements here, so I don't make this comparison to make either sound bad). In part, Control's various memos and files hold a lot of different perspectives. We have, for example, the various Dead Letters, which serve as one-page creepypastas but also mysteries to interpret. Which are genuine and which are just people writing about nonsense (one heartbreaking Dead Letter is a woman who thinks that her neighbor's kid has somehow hacked reality to make her husband die, and is hoping that if the world's a simulation, someone could just fix it. In-universe, probably not actually true, but you can feel the desperate hope that has led her to thinking that just maybe it could be fixed. And, on a meta level, it is kind of true.)

The files, recordings, and other bits of information you can collect in Control can serve to give you some straightforward exposition (such as from most of the Doctor Darling videos) while others create a whole mystery to unpack. The entirety of the "Blessed Organization" is introduced through files and recordings that are not explicitly linked to one another, but when you find all of them and think about it, you start to realize the possibility that there's this grand conspiracy that could be a major threat to the FBC (and, I maintain, helped Alice Wake regain her memories and return to the Dark Place).

Control, of course, lives in that corkboard-and-red-yarn world (a trope I feel the need to point out pre-dated that It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode) and I actually think that this style of worldbuilding kind of activates whatever pleasure centers in the brain that addict the conspiracy theorist, but knowing it's all a work of fiction makes it feel fun and safe to explore. I've long felt that conspiracy theorists are seeking a feeling of esoteric revelation - to know something grand and exciting that others do not. (Such a drive is also part of mystical practices, and things like esoteric alchemy.) And I'll confess that if Control 2 or any other future Remedy title comes out and the Blessed Organization proves to be a major part of the plot, I'll feel a certain glee at being one of the few people who actually knows about it.

Even at this stage, while I think every lore-review of Alan Wake II I've seen is convinced that the "organization" that helped Alice Wake recover her memories was the FBC, there's a little smug nerd in me that feels... a bit superior, I guess, for knowing (not that I do know, as I could totally be wrong) that they've been mislead, and that they'd ignored the clues that I was able to piece together that suggest it was Blessed, not the FBC, that she worked with.

But the point of all of this, even the fact that it's showing a part of my personality that I'm not terribly proud of (I grew up in a very intellectual, academic household, and so I unconsciously developed something of a deep need to be the smartest person in the room - which is something I've been working with a therapist to unpack,) is that by making the discovery of the deep and complex lore of these games a game in and of itself, you get the player to actually care about it.

Sephiroth's Fall

 I started Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's Hard Mode today, playing through the game's first chapter, which is a flashback to Sephiroth's descent into madness in Nibelheim. What struck me when I first played through it was the tragedy of it all - Sephiroth, prior to this incident, looks like he was genuinely a heroic, benevolent figure (albeit one who was fighting for an evil corporate empire, but then, who wasn't back then?) Shinra Manor, the facility that, according to Tifa, provided the bulk of Nibelheim's funding thanks to the rent they could charge for it, is right out of a gothic horror story - a decrepit mansion with dark secrets in its basement. And the story told of Sephiroth there fits well with the gothic horror vibes: a terrible truth that causes someone who once seemed like a noble man to turn into a bloodthirsty murderer.

The theme of madness and monstrous transformation in gothic horror often pairs well with the more recent genre of cosmic horror. And, as is fairly common, FFVII does contain strong cosmic horror elements.

What I hadn't realized when I played through this the first time was a classic cosmic horror and science fiction trope: the scientists who meddled with things they did not actually understand.

I'd be tempted to put this behind a spoiler cut, but this is all stuff from the original 1997 game, so the statute of limitations on this expired a while ago. Reader beware.

The world of FFVII is one in which the "Ancients" (real name being the "Cetra") once ruled before being overthrown by humanity. (I'll take a moment here to quibble with the idea of any "race" or "family" or "people" being older than any other - in the real world, at least, every human's ancestors have been on this planet for just as long as anyone else's, because they all converge at Mitochondrial Eve. Admittedly, the Cetra are presented as being a separate species from humans, but A: they're clearly co-fertile with humans given that Aerith exists and B: we don't have any origin story in which the gods descended upon the world and put the first humans there). Anyway, when Jenova is discovered by archaeologists or paleontologists (though they seem to be reaching back only 2000 years, which would argue for the former) the scientists believe her to be a remarkably preserved Cetra.

And I hadn't realized this, but Sephiroth reads these studies on them and believes the same: he thinks that, as a Cetra... created by kind of cloning Cetra tissue, that he should thus count humanity as his enemies - the people who wiped out his people. This is what leads him to believe that he deserves to inherit the world and why he feels justified in wiping out humanity.

There are two giant ironies here.

The first is that, in fact, Aerith is a Cetra, or at least a half-Cetra (there are actually a weirdly large number of recurring plot elements that VII borrowed from VI, with Aerith and Terra both being half-long-lost-magical-being and the main villain being a kind of prototype super soldier who develops godly aspirations). Infamously, in the original game (and whether or not it happens in Rebirth is something I'll still consider a spoiler) Sephiroth abruptly kills Aerith. It's not clear to me if he realizes that he's killing the actual last Cetra in the self-righteous aim to reclaim what he thinks is his birthright. It seems rather fitting that the one who might at this point still think he's the rightful "guardian of the planet" thinks that his role is to kill, while Aerith, an actual guardian, seeks to protect and bring about harmony. He's all vengeance and hatred, but Aerith, we see, doesn't really hate anyone (not that she doesn't get mad). And if their respective spells, Sephiroth's Meteor and Aeriths' Holy, represent these two worldviews, despite the fact that he ends her mortal life, on a spiritual level, she's the one who emerges triumphant.

The other irony, of course, is that he's not Cetra. Jenova does look like a human (well, Cetra) woman in the facility where he finds her, but that's not because she is one. In the last major dungeon of Rebirth, we go through the Temple of the Ancients, and there we find records left behind by the Cetra that an eldritch horror from outer space came and devastated their civilization, and it was able to do so because it could mimic others - taking on the form of lost loved ones and seeming like an angelic visitor. Only at great cost were the Cetra able to imprison Jenova, sealing her in the rock where a bunch of Shinra scientists would dig her up thousands of years later.

I think there's an interesting question - and perhaps one that has been explored in the various prequels and side-projects related to FFVII - as to whether Sephiroth was doomed to madness and evil all along. After all, he has some kind of parasitic Lovecraftian monstrosity in the very core of his being. Maybe this was all inevitable. Still, it's remarkable how likable the guy is in the bulk of that flashback. He just goes from good guy to mass-murderer very quickly.

Granted: Cloud is an unreliable narrator in this flashback - he's imagined himself performing the great feats of heroism that Zack did, a close friend whose entire existence he's forgotten about. While Tifa doesn't remember his being there, it seems pretty clear (and I believe confirmed in the original game) that the nameless Shinra Trooper that doesn't get dragged away by the river is actually Cloud - we see him crawling, wounded, toward the Strife house as it burns, calling out for his mother. He was probably just too shy to take off his helmet and let Tifa know that he was there.

But we could also imagine that perhaps the portrayal of Sephiroth in this flashback might not be fully accurate - the story we're told is of a man finding out his life is a lie and jumping real quick to "I'm going to murder everyone." I mean, that could still be the case, this being high melodrama and all.

What Comes Next for the Final Fantasy VII Remake Series?

 I've said many times that no matter what you think of the FFVII remake games, you could never accuse Square Enix of half-assing these games. Taking a beloved classic and making an entire, long game out of essentially each disc of the original, creating a brand-new combat system that blends the fast-paced action of more recent Final Fantasy games with the strategic menu-navigating choices of the original, creating vastly detailed environments and tons of fully voiced characters - it's a whole lot.

Remake came out in 2020 - not long after the Covid 19 lockdowns started, which made it something of a lifeline for those of us suddenly shoved into isolation. It was another four years until Rebirth was released. But this is not the last part of the series. Rebirth ends with a highly significant moment in the plot of the game, but still leaves a good portion of it to go.

So, what can we expect from the next installment? And when can we expect it?

To talk about this, we're going to go into spoiler territory, so here's a cut for the spoiler-averse.

On the Subject of Remakes of Classic Games I Never Got Around to Playing Back in the Day...

 I never played Max Payne. Back in the day, this being the year 2000 (which, as an elder millennial, I have a hard time processing the fact that it was nearly a quarter of a century ago - I saw a meme at some point that said "Millennials think 1970 was thirty years ago," and that hit hard) Rockstar game out with this game and with Grand Theft Auto 3, a game that arguably launched the "open world" game as we know it now (I'd say largely in the way that the "missions" in that game took place in the same open world space that you could explore outside of the main story).

I have, as this blog can attest, recently finished the second part of Square Enix's remake trilogy of the beloved Final Fantasy VII. Announced long before the first of this trilogy was announced, I think most people expected it to be a pretty direct translation of the older game, but with upgraded graphics and full voice acting.

Instead, what Square did was to re-build the game from the ground up, expanding the game (the entire first game in the trilogy takes place in what is basically the original game's introductory hours, all in the dense and dystopian city of Midgar) and even introducing plot elements that contradict or at least supplement the original's story.

In the last year, I've become an obsessed adherent of Remedy games, for whom Max Payne was their first big hit. I never played it, though. I have a sense of it - the game's ambition was to give an action game the same depth of story that you usually only got in an RPG (you know, like Final Fantasy games) and so it was presented as a big hardboiled detective story involving conspiracies, personal tragedies, and vague references to Norse mythology.

Remedy is a small studio, but their recent successes with Control and Alan Wake II have given them a bit more resources to work on multiple projects. Aside from AW2's DLC expansions, we know Control 2 is in the works, along with a couple of other projects that I don't think have official names yet, but they're also planning to remake Max Payne 1 & 2.

Notably, Rockstar, which published the original games, made a Max Payne 3 around 2010, but this didn't involve Remedy. Still, the studio was able to secure the rights to remake their original games.

Remedy has also started making forays into a larger connected universe for their games - Control and Alan Wake explicitly take place in the same universe (though it's also a universe in which human thought and perception can overwrite reality, so we might say more broadly "cosmos.")

Remedy's games in this time have also been driven largely by the creative leadership of Sam Lake, their creative director, who is something of an auteur for the games (though I think he's the kind of artist who might not love the idea of a singular author for something as collaborative as a game - I honestly think the fact that Tom Zane refers to himself as an auteur is an indication that we shouldn't trust him). Lake was both the main writer for the Max Payne games as well as the model whose likeness the character's face was based on in the first game (though not in 2 or 3 - actually, 3 uses voice actor James McCaffrey as the model - something that Lake has said in retrospect he felt stupid for not thinking to do with the original. It just wasn't a common thing back then to do that with voice actors).

While not officially canon in the Remedy Universe, because of the fact that Rockstar owned the rights to the game, the character and stories of Alex Casey in Alan Wake are basically just Max Payne. We find out in Alan Wake II that Casey is actually a real person, and that Alan's popular novels were inspired by Alan's visions of Casey's work, which Alan thought was just his active imagination. Notably, like in the original Max Payne game, Casey's physical model is Sam Lake and his voice actor is James McCaffrey, making the connection to Max Payne all but explicit.

So, that brings me to the remakes.

I think it's reasonable to assume that the remakes will be just that - more along the lines of the remakes we've seen of Demon's Souls or Shadow of the Colossus (which were both done by the same studio, I believe,) and which are basically just faithful recreations of the games with stunningly well-done updated graphics (I remember seeing Demon's Souls paused in photo mode and realizing that the individual rain drops in the Storm King fight seemed to be animated separately).

But given the audacity of Square Enix's approach to remaking Final Fantasy VII, I almost wonder if we'll see some substantial changes to these games.

One of the biggest challenges, though, is that James McCaffrey died not long after the release of Alan Wake II. His voice is such a huge part of what makes Max Payne Max Payne, and so I imagine it would be very difficult to find someone to replace him to record new dialogue (though I'd far prefer casting a sound-alike over the ghoulish notion of recreating his voice via AI).

If the plan is just to remake the games as they were but with modern graphics and perhaps tweaked and refined gameplay, it might be easy enough to just use the original recordings and maybe clean them up.

On the other hand, I personally have an appetite for Remedy's particular brand of weirdness and would be excited to see a connection made in these games to the larger RCU.

And I say that despite being very skeptical about the idea of shared universes. The MCU was such a huge success in this field (at least up through Endgame) that it was kind of disheartening to see how so many other franchises failed to actually make it work (DC, theoretically the franchise that should theoretically have the easiest time replicating it, basically couldn't make it work and now seems to be having more success by jettisoning the idea of a shared universe.) But I guess I don't find it grating with Remedy for two reasons:

One is that the properties here are new enough that it doesn't feel like they're being shoehorned together. Control was written from the ground up to coexist with Alan Wake, even while it very much stands on its own. Even dating back to the "This House of Dreams" blog, Remedy was playing with the idea of a government agency that looked into paranormal happenings (as late as Quantum Break they were the "Bureau of AWE" - I like FBC better).

And that ties into the second reason: that this is really inspired not by the recent MCU-style shared universe, but borrows instead from Stephen King's oeuvre, in which each story introduces its own rules, but there's an implication of an overlap - that Danny Torrance's Shine is actually the same as Alain John's "Touch" in the Dark Tower series. There's literal overlap, like how the protagonist of 11/22/63 meets a couple of the kids in the Loser's Club from IT back in the 1950s, but with few exceptions, you don't really feel like you have to have read everything King has written to get what you're reading.

But I also get that my lack of prior experience with Max Payne might make me more open to changes - much as my lack of experience playing Final Fantasy VII has allowed me to feel fine with most of the changes the remake trilogy has made to the story and even gameplay (while I've been frustrated by Square's abandonment of traditional turn-based combat ever since Final Fantasy XII, I actually love the way that the remake trilogy's combat work).

In other words, I'd be happy to see the plot of these noir/hardboiled stories tweaked to imply a connection to the broader RCU. Maybe that makes me a philistine or a rube. But I've also seen even just in the gap between Alan Wake and Alan Wake II how Remedy has evolved in their skill at telling stories through games, and while I think game preservation is a crucial goal that is woefully underserved, I think that's what a remaster is for, not a remake.

FFVII Rebirth: Questions Remain

 I beat FFVII Rebirth. I don't really want to get into anything specific here because talking about the ending will naturally involve spoilers.

Spoilers ahead:

Fixing (by Replacing) Vulnerability in 5E

 Having been playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth for the past month or so (I've logged over a hundred hours in the game - which does include when you're paused, to be fair,) it strikes me that one of the core aspects of the Final Fantasy series is elemental vulnerability. Nearly every monster has a weakness to one element or another, and while there are also plenty of physical attacks to use, many of these enemies are best dealt with by applying the appropriate damage type.

Damage types are also somewhat more limited in Final Fantasy. Damage can be either physical or magical, and then magical damage can be either "non-elemental" or of one of the elements - in VII Remake and Rebirth, at least, there are four elements, which are Fire, Ice, Lightning, and Wind. Fire is often useful against humanoid enemies, Ice often best against beasts, lightning usually best against constructs and robots (given FFVII's modern/futuristic setting, robots are pretty common) and Wind is often best against flying enemies, though there are exceptions to all of these.

In the VII Reboot series, they also implement a system of "pressuring" and then "staggering" enemies. Pressuring an enemy usually requires doing something specific, like dodging or perfect-blocking certain attacks or, most often, hitting them enough with the element they're weakest to. Pressuring, I believe, also increases the rate at which you build up their stagger meter, at which point the enemy gets stunned and takes bonus damage.

While Pressuring and Staggering are cool, I think they'd be hard to implement in a TTRPG - Final Fantasy gets away with being able to have a lot more happen in a fight than in a TTRPG because each "turn" is more like a quick decision made by a single player in a fast-paced game, and the number of actions taken over the course of a fight would take hours to resolve at a table.

Now, damage vulnerabilities are certainly a thing in D&D 5E. But they're rare. And I think the reason is that vulnerability is too strong a mechanic.

I love using Skeletons as low-level monsters. For one, I'm always a fan of spooky vibes in my broader fantasy worlds, but also I like them because they're pretty straightforward but unquestionably magical.

Skeletons are, also, one of the few types of monsters that have a vulnerability - and not just any vulnerability, but one to a very common damage type: bludgeoning. A skeleton only has 13 hit points. That means that in most cases a normal hit from a first-level character will not be able to take one down (unless you're using a d10 or higher weapon) but most skeletons won't be able to survive two hits. But if you have a maul, a warhammer, the catapult spell, or you're a Monk that is punching and kicking, you'll be literally twice as effective at fighting these things.

Here's the thing: when a monster is designed to go down in two hits, it's not actually that big of a problem if they go down in one.

Where this becomes a bigger problem is boss monsters.

The Lich is already a somewhat flawed stat block - I'm sure that very good DMs who are very good at thinking things out ahead of time can make them deadly opponents, but as a creature that's basically designed to be a campaign end-boss, its rather pitiful 135 HP is fairly underwhelming. (I've seen at least a YouTube thumbnail that suggests having a literal thousand zombies between the Lich and the party, which I think could work, possibly, but boy would it be a pain to run). But given that a Lich is often a kind of skeletal wizard, you could imagine giving it the same vulnerability to bludgeoning damage. But this could effectively halve its already low HP.

The thing is, I like rewarding players for thinking to use a damage type that should work well on the type of monster (Mummies and Mummy Lords do, in fact, have vulnerability to fire damage, but as a result, I think a Mummy Lord would be even harder to make a real threat to a party, despite clearly being meant to act as a powerful boss monster).

I sort of wish that most monsters had a vulnerability, similar to how they work in Final Fantasy.

However, I think the problem lies in the doubling of damage.

D&D is a game of rocket-tag - especially at high levels, really the only way to keep a monster up for more than a couple rounds is to ensure that there are minions that require the party's attention before they can focus-fire the boss.

So, if the party happens to have the right damage type available to them (and surely the fun of having a vulnerability is for them to have it) you run the risk of trivializing a monster that's supposed to be a threat.

What to do?

Well, though I haven't sung its praises in a while, we can look to how MCDM's Flee, Mortals! introduces something akin to vulnerability with its Vampires. The book's Vampire and Vampire spawn (though not its named "villain" vampire) have something called "Radiant Aversion." This causes them to take an additional 10 damage whenever they are dealt radiant damage.

It's pretty simple, right? But I think it solves a lot of problems. FM!'s Vampires have 204 hit points. So, you're guaranteed to knock off an extra 5% (or so) of their HP if you can get any radiant damage in there. A crit Divine Smite that lands for 10d8 (about 45) damage is going to get boosted a little bit by this to be 55 (on top of the weapon damage,) so it definitely feels like a bigger impact but it won't one-shot your monster. But if you hit it with a Sacred Flame (doing 9 damage on average at tier 2) you'll more than double that.

There's a reward there for picking the correct damage type, but you're also not going to trivialize the encounter by using it.

Of course, in a game like Final Fantasy, access to different damage types is typically not hard to come by - in VII, I'll usually try to equip every character with Materia that allows them to cast the four main elements, and in Rebirth in particular your characters can unlock free abilities that deal those damage types, meaning every character will at least be able to provide three of the four, if not all four, on-demand even without the right Materia equipped.

But in D&D, your options are more limited or at least harder to swap out. A Wizard is usually going to have only one, maybe two damage cantrips. That does provide some recourse if your main damage type is something a monster is resistant or immune to, but it makes it far harder to target a particular type to take advantage of - in other words, your damage type is more often a liability than a boon.

Still, it looks like the new Sorcerous Burst cantrip will at least give Sorcerers some huge versatility in this regard.

I think in my homebrewing of monsters, I might implement more of this style of "damage aversion" to give players a fun tool in fighting monsters.

FFVII Rebirth: Past the Point of No Return

 Well, I couldn't quite do it.

In order to fully 100% the game (as far as I know) I'd have needed to beat every minigame at the highest score in order to gain the materials to craft all the enhanced accessories, which is required to get to the highest crafting level in order to make the Genji armor pieces. Then, I'd have to beat the "Ultimate Party Animal's" high scores in all the games at the Gold Saucer (which may have gotten me the necessary materials).

I tried. I tried so damn hard. But oh well.

In fact, there are bouts at the Musclehead Coliseum at the Saucer that are designed for level 70 - my characters are level 49 at this point. This is clearly meant to be post New Game Plus in hard mode. (Indeed, some even don't unlock until you've finished the full game).

So, I'll take some consolation from the fact that I've done some very hard things - beating Gilgamesh was probably the biggest challenge the game has thrown at me (and that after the second, third, and fourth hardest). But it was time to progress the story, and that means hitting Rebirth's point of no return.

Spoilers ahead:

FFVII Rebirth's Omega Dungeon?

 Despite growing up in the 90s (born in the mid 80s), who played Secret of Mana and Mario RPG during that decade, I must confess that my first Final Fantasy game was X, and I played it in my Sophomore year of college, back in 2005 or 2006. In that game, very late in it, you gain the ability to travel back to areas that you passed through on the very linear pilgrimage that makes up the essence of that journey. But along with all those old locations, you also get access to the Omega Dungeon, which is basically the super-hard area that is tougher than the endgame dungeon for the main story. I had a different level of patience back then, so even after defeating the final boss of that area, I kept wandering around grinding monsters there until I could take them down in one or two hits, which led to the most hilarious final boss experience in which I only had to smack Yu Yevon - basically the evil being who has made himself the god of that world - in two strikes.

Level caps, of course, prevent this kind of thing in more recent games. But I'm given to understand that most Final Fantasy games have that extra-hard thing you can try late in the game to give yourself a really profound challenge.

Spoilers ahead.

FFVII Rebirth Travelogue: Seeing the End of the Road

 Gotta hand it to Square Enix: they make games that last a long time. That's not always a good thing: I never finished Final Fantasy XVI because I ran out of steam trying to complete all the sidequests in the increasingly bleak and empty world of the game. But while FFVII Rebirth's side quests vary in quality, I've really been enjoying my trek across its world from the Grasslands to the Nibel region.

However, I've hit a point where I'm pretty sure I'm near the end of the game. Of course, that doesn't mean I'm near the end of the story - there's a whole third game (I assume only a third and not a fourth) in this reboot trilogy that I suspect I'll be in my 40s before I get to play (Rebirth came out four years after Remake).

At this stage, I have a single side-quest left, but it's a doozy - trying to get a bunch of high scores at the Gold Saucer. On top of that, I also have the conclusion of the game-spanning Protorelic questline, which I think is essentially this game's version of FFX's Omega Dungeon. It appears to involve facing off against two super-powered summons at a time - I tried fighting Bahamut and Titan and found myself... well, my ass got handed to me.

Plot stuff to follow:

FFVII Rebirth Travelogue: Nibel Region and The Split-the-Party Dungeons

 It's interesting: Remake never let you pick your party composition - the story dictated who you'd have available, and so you'd always just happen to be missing Tifa or Aerith or Barret (maybe at some point Cloud?) and of course Red XIII was technically there but not controllable.

Rebirth is a far more open game than Remake was, and while it's debatable if it's truly an "open world" game (so many games are that the specificity of that descriptor has kind of faded) it makes perfect sense that the game allows you to swap out your party members (I'd actually have liked if you could sometimes have Cloud hang back - story-wise in most parts the full party is there, and you even hear combat shouts from "back line" characters in the midst of a fight).

With seven characters playable in this game (Cid and Vincent will have to wait for part 3) and three pre-set party groups, the path of least resistance is to simply have each non-Cloud party member have a partner that they share one of your pre-set parties with (you can even build out the characters' manuscripts to focus on getting Synergy abilities with Cloud and their usual partner).

However, sometimes the game will force you to change things up.

The Nibel region is either the last or second-to-last region you unlock in the game, I think (the ocean might be an additional one) and is, of course, the site of Cloud and Tifa's hometown, which we see burned down in a flashback at the start of Rebirth but find mysteriously rebuilt when we enter the area.

The town has now become basically a rehabilitation facility for people with Mako poisoning - or at least that's the official story. But the various cloaked figures who have been shambling all the way from Midgar (apparently booking passage on a cruise ship somehow?) seem to be heading here.

Naturally, anything involving Shinra is suspect, and with a little meta-knowledge, we know there's something sinister going on.

It appears that the robed figures are all SOLDIERs, and I'm assuming that the cause of their affliction is from injected Jenova cells cultured from Sephiroth. We've seen fiends fuse with some of these guys, so I'm expecting that the "Reunion" they are talking about is some kind of horrifying eldritch body-horror.

Anyway, Cloud, Tifa, and Yuffie go up to the abandoned reactor on Mt. Nibel, where we start to see how unreliable the events of that flashback at the start of the game were (Cloud forgot that Zack was even there, and again I'm more or less 100% sure that the acts he performs in the flashback were actually Zack, and the nervous Shinra grunt was actually Cloud - what's odd is that Tifa takes so long to mention that he got the details wrong, but I guess she's worried about triggering him).

Actually, one thing that I wonder about the writing of the game or possibly just the dialogue choices I've made, but the relationship between Tifa and Cloud does actually seem to me to be pretty purely platonic. Aerith clearly likes him, and is trying to bring him out of his shell (and aren't we all in love with Aerith?) but given the ways he's internalized aspects of Zack's personality, it's a little weird (personality-wise, what we see of Zack feels way more of a kind with Aerith - you can see why they'd have been a couple).

Anyway, the journey up into the old reactor sees Yuffie discovering that war between Shinra and Wutai has begun again in earnest, even if it hasn't been announced. Yuffie is... I don't know that I'd call her annoying, but they're really telegraphing that this kid has a big reality check coming for her. She says that the "Interim Government" is actually made up of a bunch of SOLDIER defectors, which sure as hell seems like a Shinra-run black op (and given that we've seen one of the Wutai leaders planning that war with Rufus Shinra, that seems to confirm this idea). Yuffie is clearly younger than the others (Cloud we get a canonical age of 21 for - it's insane that he was a soldier for Shinra at 16, but then, JRPGs really skew their characters younger. I'm assuming Aerith and Tifa are about the same age). Perhaps because I'm now 37 I relate a lot more with Barret.

Actually, as a note, back in the Corel part of the game, I was stunned by the tonal whiplash - between going to a giant amusement park to being kidnapped by a Mad Max-like desert gang to then doing what is essentially Mario Kart on Chocobos to then having Barret's very Spaghetti-Western-style confrontation with his old friend who has become a murderer and, oh yeah, is Marlene's actual father. This is a story that goes from very dark and serious (my roommate is playing through Remake, and in a meeting Hojo straight-up talks about forcibly breeding Aerith to create more specimens of Cetra genetics, which is, like, holy shit - most evil character in the game) to utterly goofy (basically Cait Sith).

Anyway, the other forced-party-selection we get while Cloud, Tifa, and Yuffie go up the mountain is the first segment where we actually control Cait Sith as the party leader, with Barret and Aerith tagging along. We go into Shinra Manor, exploring the facilities below. And this involves what might be the most frustrating puzzles in the game.

Cait Sith can summon his robotic moogle mount to toss various boxes, but the controls to do this require very precise use of the control stick, and even when the little aiming reticle says you're aimed at the right thing, it often doesn't work. I cannot tell you how many boxes I had to throw to get enough Mako into a little power generator. There are also some enemies that Cait Sith has to fight solo that are genuinely very difficult.

Each character, of course, has its own special abilities when you're directly controlling them. Cait Sith might be the one with my least favorite set up. He's a character who can do physical damage in melee or magic damage at range, but unlike Yuffie, who has two very clear modes to do so, it seems like Cait Sith switching kind of arbitrarily. And when he has to solo creatures that will start retaliating with big damage when they take one type of damage or the other, you really want to have that kind of clear, precise control.

I think I'm most comfortable with the four characters who were playable in Remake, who largely play pretty similarly (Aerith's gotten some changes) and of course we got a preview of Yuffie in Intergrade (and as far as I can tell she works similarly - I think they might have changed how the Synergy attacks work). Tifa is a character I spent most of Remake not really getting, but when I figured out how to properly use Unbridled Strength, I actually started really liking her. Red XIII I realized I have more fun with when I hold down his attack button to do his big spinning attack, and I generally like using his Vengeance meter to fuel his various "Watcher" abilities rather than actually going into Vengeance mode (for one thing, any ability that can heal a large amount without consuming MP or Items is great in my book - I've had Aerith keep Pray equipped basically the whole game, and that makes it actually a really massive party-wide heal, the only downside being that it takes two ATB charges).

One of the odd things about the Nibel region is that I've completed all the Chadley Intel stuff but have not yet gotten the Protorelic quests, so I just have those four dots not yet filled in. I suspect I need to finish up stuff in Nibelheim before that becomes available.

Anyway, while not fully in the end-game, I suspect I'm getting there. Things feel like they're building to a climactic moment. Still very unclear on what is going on with the weird alternate timeline in which Tifa and Barret are dead but Biggs and Zack are still alive.

FFVII Rebirth Travelogue - From Gongaga to Cosmo Canyon

 It's interesting to see the various environments in Final Fantasy VII. What little of the original game I had seen as a kid was all in Midgar, the massive modern/futuristic metropolis. Remake, the first entry in what I believe is intended to be a trilogy of FFVII re-visits, extends the Midgar portion of the game into an entire game in and of itself, so 2020's release more or less helped contribute to my sense of the game as being very Midgar-focused.

Of course, Rebirth starts off with the party having left Midgar, moving on to the town of Kalm, and makes a full game out of what I'm given to understand is the middle act of the story.

This has its plus sides and its minuses. The plusses include that you get to see a lot of the world. At this stage, I've gone from the Grasslands region to Junon's more coastal area, then over to the expansive Corel region, which includes a tropical coastal region and a big desert (there's also a giant mountain, but this is treated to an extent as a kind of transitional area without any of the big "world exploration" stuff). Then, there's Gongaga, a tangled jungle filled with lots of cliffs and caves (which so far has proven to be the most difficult to navigate).

Some spoilers crop up here and there:

Could You Do Dawn-Age D&D?

 One of the central assumptions in D&D, and frankly most fantasy, is that the world is old. In D&D in particular, the oldness of the world presents you with some golden opportunities - you get many generations (or strata) of bygone civilizations whose relics and even whose villains might emerge in the modern day or be discovered in dungeons.

My own homebrew setting, for example, has a fully futuristic era in the distant, 20,000 year past that ended in a catastrophe that unleashed new eldritch abominations worshipped as false deities by psychotic cults and led to a genuinely horrifying millennium of apocalyptic terror, with history as it is generally known only starting after that point.

While I love having the supernatural at play in my fantasy settings, I do tend to still prefer a world that has some resemblance to the real world, and that includes the fact that human history is just a minuscule portion of our planet's. That means accounting for billions of years of the planet's existence prior to the events of one's stories.

But, that being said, fantasy is, I think, nearly indistinguishable from myth except for the fact that it's explicitly fictional. And given the pre-scientific time that human myths' foundational texts come from, most (or at least the texts known most widely in the west) severely underestimate the world's age, placing the emergence of humanity not long after the creation of the world itself.

The era of the world's creation is invariably momentous, and the events that take place in that first era set the stage for the future dramas and conflicts to come. Consider, for example, how the kind of "first act" in Tokien's cosmos is the Music of the Ainur, and how Melkor's desire to basically improvise his own hellish jazz solo in the middle of a symphony so that he can be the star of the concert is what introduces evil to creation. Tokien's world of Arda (of which Middle-Earth is a continent) goes through multiple eras before there's even a sun and moon - first with two great lamps, and then those lamps are replaced with two great trees, and only after those are killed are the sun and moon created.

So, could you run a campaign set in a Dawn Age? One in which the world is young, and the player characters are among the first or second generation of mortals?

In some ways, this would be very difficult, but I think there's an aspect of this that is actually quite fitting:

Player characters in D&D are powerful. And the figures of legend in the distant past of fantasy settings tend to have super-human power. Frankly, at least in 5E, player characters quickly become essentially superheroes.

But let's talk challenges:

D&D loves ancient ruins and relics of lost civilizations. If humanity's (or the mortal races') history dates back only a generation, then basically nothing was around long enough to be a lost civilization. At best, if we're going for maybe a generation past the beginning of the world, you might lament some great person's downfall and the loss of their creations.

Likewise, the very nature of something like a fiend as a distinct thing from a celestial might not have taken place yet - Asmodeus, for example, in D&D's lore, is thought to have been a fallen celestial (though somewhere it was suggested that he's more akin to a Great Old One, and that "Asmodeus" is only the avatar of the great serpent Ahirman, which lingers in the Nine Hells recuperating from its fall into them... which actually could work for a celestial past too).

    This, then, raises an interesting wrinkle, and gives you some wiggle room: is this the beginning beginning, or just the beginning of the mortal races on this world? In Christian tradition, the beginning of the world happens some time after Lucifer's rebellion against God, but I don't know if there's a canonical timeline there.

Let's also talk aberrations. Technically, this creature type can mean a few different things, including the results of botched arcane experiments (essentially having a bit of overlap with hybrid-creature monstrosities like the Owlbear) but I think most people generally associate aberrations with the Lovecraftian ancient beings like Aboleths and Mind Flayers (I'll note here that Kraken, as described, feel like they could easily also count as aberrations, except perhaps because they were created by the gods rather than existing in some before-time).

    I'll probably write a post some day about how aberrations don't actually really fit in D&D if you want to run it as pure fantasy rather than partially sci-fi - there's such an overlap between them and demons (not so much devils) that you almost need to genre-bend to make them work. Luckily for me, I adore genre-bending and blending my sci fi and fantasy together, so it works great!

Still, if you want a setting in which the gods didn't just arrive on some existing world and create people to inhabit it, but truly created the world itself, it's going to be hard to work in those ancient aberrations (though the sometime-rumored notion that the Mind Flayers are actually time-travelers from a distant future does kind of solve this issue as well).

A lot of mythologies have multiple groups of divine beings. In Greek Myth, the Olympians are only the last couple generations of gods, with the Titans pre-dating them, and beings like Gaia predating them. Norse myth has the Vanir and the Aesir. I suspect that these might both be instances of syncretism - the active incorporation of multiple religious traditions to promote social cohesion between the adherents of different faiths - especially likely in the Norse case given that the Aesir and Vanir are foes who eventually become allies.

But if we're using the Greek pantheon as inspiration, this gives us another interesting question: are the gods of our Dawn Age the gods that will be prominently revered and worshipped later on in this setting?

Again, given the degree to which player characters grow in power in 5E, I'd almost be tempted to suggest that the party could actually be that second generation of gods.

And in that sense, I think the appeal here is that, while coming up with a backstory for a D&D character can often be very fun and a chance at creativity, this kind of campaign would encourage forward-thinking about legacy.

Like many others, I recently watched the second part of Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Dune. Dune, of course, has plenty of prologue history in it - it's set about 20,000 years in the future (don't let the year in the story fool you - it's 10,191, but not by the Gregorian calendar, but dating back to the formation of the Spacing Guild, itself happening about 10,000 years from now,) but what's interesting is that the first book's chapters each have an excerpt of from history books written about Paul's ascension to becoming Emperor, and given how the later books of the series go, Paul's reign itself is looked back on as a golden age of kindness and justice compared with the brutality of his son's millennia-long reign as God-Emperor (even if Paul's reign is filled with war and genocide).

Thus, the first book, so far in our future, could be described as a kind of Dawn Age myth for the civilization that follows (naturally this is, of course, a lesson for anyone thinking about their era as the only one that matters).

In a weird and very different way, in the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, the first book of the series, The Gunslinger, takes on this kind of mythic quality as well, with the title character Roland traveling through an almost dream-like experience and the boy he finds in the desert, Jake, only later able to recall those experiences from a life that isn't consistent with what actually happened to him.

I'll concede that it might be too hard to create a campaign based on a world that is brand-new. But I do think there's perhaps an opportunity, if you have a consistent table that is also invested in world-building and storytelling (which might be a big "if,") to do something really cool by imagining the grand expanse of time that might come between campaigns.

Critical Role has been a great opportunity to see a single campaign setting change and evolve and feel the impact of multiple campaigns, but it's still on a pretty human scale - I think that campaign 3 is only about 30 years after the events of campaign 1.

I'd be excited to see a legacy that extends thousands of years.

Entering the Golden Saucer

 I guess at this stage this is more like a video game travelogue. The Corel region in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth appears to be three if not four regions in one. After the cruise ship from Junon (with a fun little interlude that involves a cosmic-horror monster) the party gets to Costa del Sol, where Rebirth's sense of stakes and urgency are at a classically JRPG-level of conflict and the party has a fun beach vacation while keeping an eye on the mysterious robed figures.

Oh, spoilers ahead.

Final Fantasy and the Minigame Obsession

 So, don't get me wrong: I'm having a blast playing through Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. While I don't have the deeply ingrained nostalgia of others my age who played the original game when they were eleven, I genuinely really like the cast of characters, and on top of that feel really grateful for Remake coming out at sort of the perfect time to help lift my spirits at the onslaught of the Covid 19 pandemic.

I also think that Remake and Rebirth have hit a real sweet spot when it comes to blending the strategic gameplay of the old FF menu-based ATB system with a more action-focused approach (something that I think the other recent game in the franchise, FFXVI, failed to do - the action gameplay in the first couple hours was great, but it never felt like it grew beyond that point).

Unlike the relatively linear Remake, which paused occasionally to give you periods of downtime to do sidequests, Rebirth opens up into various world regions with a big checklist of things to accomplish before moving on. You don't strictly have to do these things, but I am doing them (the sole exception being that I didn't do all the Junon Queen's Blood stuff, which I now regret because it turned out the intermission period after finishing Junon and going to Costa Del Sol happened to have a giant Queen's Blood tournament.

Hitting Costa Del Sol then dumps you into a ton of minigames (I actually practiced playing Tifa's theme on the piano long enough to do decently in the full performance). Between playing essentially Rocket League as Red XIII, a shooting gallery, a series of Queen's Blood puzzles (boy did they go all in on that!) it did feel a bit like I was waiting a super long time to get back into the action.

And some have been downright frustrating. I still don't feel like I have a solid feel for Queen's Blood strategy - I mostly seem to have to restart a match over and over until I stumble into a winning play.

I get the sense that Square Enix's philosophy toward game design is "more is more," and to a degree I can appreciate that - I really like hanging out with these people, and given what I know of what happens to Aerith at least in the original game, I'm not really in a rush to move the plot forward (though I wonder what time shenanigans will ensue and if she'll be ok - at some great cosmic cost - there's definitely some cryptic stuff going on with her that I suspect is not from the original game).

Anyway, I seem to have hit the third "go around and do exploration and side quests" part of the game. Oh, and Yuffie has joined the party finally!

But I'll leave with this complaint: why the hell does Barret not get to get some cool beach clothing? I get that he likes the sailor suit, but I think this is discrimination against big guys with broad shoulders and barrel chests and I will not stand for this injustice!

Putting Together the Various New FFVII Rebirth Mechanics

 FFVII Remake was the first in the trilogification of 1997's beloved seventh entry in the Final Fantasy series - itself the quintessential JRPG series. VII's original release did introduce some new ideas, mechanically, as all the games have, but was still true to the classic JRPG formula in which most monsters you fight occur in random encounters, on a separate "battle screen" that abstracts the movement and action into a turn-based system.

VII Remake did what Final Fantasy games have been doing since XII (or I guess XI, but as an MMO, I kind of don't count XI or XIV as part of the core series, regardless of their numeral legitimization) and tried to break out of that old system and put a little more action and continuity with the overall game world into it.

But unlike the solutions I've seen in XII and XVI, I actually thought that they did an incredible job balancing this drive toward fast-paced action while retaining the strategic decision-making from the old turns-and-menus system of the past (I suspect I'd have liked XVI a lot more if it had just copied this combat system... and also made Clive's friends and allies into full-fledged, controllable party members).

Rebirth thankfully retains the basic premise of Remake's combat system. Once again, regular attacks build up ATB, which can pool into a maximum of two charges, and most spells, abilities, and using items take one of these charges. The character you have direct control over will typically build up ATB quicker, so if you want to keep it simple you can just focus on their abilities, but as you get more comfortable with it, swapping characters constantly starts to feel deliberate and reasonable.

Each character has a unique ability outside of the ATB-fueled "abilities" in their main menu that gives their basic attacks a different rhythm. Cloud, for example, can swap between a speedy single-target Operator Mode and a heavier-hitting AoE mode that makes you slower called Punisher Mode. Barret's arm-gun can fire a quick burst of damage, but then needs to recharge before you can do this again, the special ability button allowing you to spend a second or so speeding up that recharge time.

I think these are the same as they were for the previous game, though Aerith's might have changed, and post-Remake, Red XIII has joined as a full-fledged playable character with his own unique ability. I'm given to understand that Yuffie, Cid, and Cait Sith will join up later in the game, though Vincent Valentine, while appearing in Rebirth, does not appear to be playable in this part either (perhaps similarly to how Red XIII joined the party without being playable in the last part of Remake).

Materia appears to work the same way - you determine what spells and other bonuses you get by socketing these balls of magical energy into your weapons and armor (armor being more of a bracer of some sort). Materia will grow more powerful as the person wearing it fights battles, which unlocks things like upgraded spells (Fire becoming Fira and then Firaga). Note that the party starts at level 15 in Rebirth, so even if you had fully-maxed-out stuff in Remake, it doesn't carry over.

Each character of course has their own category of weapon, such as big swords for Cloud or Staves for Aerith, and like in Remake, each individual weapon has its own unique skill, but if you use the weapon enough and perform the actions to gain its proficiency bonus, you'll unlock that skill regardless of what weapon you're wielding - meaning that you'll want to gain that ASAP and then swap to any new weapon you've gotten to collect them all, and then when you've done that, pick the weapon with the stats you prefer.

Now, let's move on to the new stuff:

In Remake, most of your character progression was linked to various spheres in your weapon upgrades. Rebirth has kind of separated these out - the weapon unlocks new passive bonuses and materia slots as it levels up (meaning you might be inclined to swap them even after getting their proficiency bonuses, unless I'm misinterpreting something here - the weapon leveling might actually be character-focused rather than tied to the item). The other things, which include new abilities and passive bonuses, are now handled via a character's "Folio." Essentially, it's a bit like a book that charts the character's development, and you have to go to bookstores or little vending kiosks to spend skill points in your Folios. Still, this feels fairly similar to the weapon spheres from Remake, and it's free to assign the points you have and you can always reset them for free.

Probably the biggest mechanical addition is Synergy Attacks, which... I'll be frank, I don't entirely understand yet.

And that's in part because it's really two things.

While you're holding R1 to block, you'll get a menu of attacks to choose from. These attacks are unlocked in your Folios, but they're all tied to one of the other characters - for example, if you have one of Cloud's abilities that works with Barret, you'll need Barret in the active party to use it.

These can be helpful - Barret has one that gives him and an ally momentary damage immunity, for example, and there are some that launch Tifa in the air to punch flying enemies - as an alternative to your regular attacks. But they'll also build up a kind of bond over the course of a fight that will eventually allow Limit Break-like Synergy Attacks between two of your characters.

I... I don't really know exactly how these work. But boy, when they do, they land like a freaking nuke.

So, there's a pretty deep level of complexity to these systems. I honestly think that the Remake combat was close to as good as one could get, so while the Synergy stuff is cool, I'm still not 100% sold that it will make combat feel particularly better.

This is just scratching the surface - there seems to be a kind of "relationship level" that Cloud has with the other party members and I don't know if that's tied to Synergy attacks, story stuff, or what. I've already put 14 hours into this game and feel like I'm a substantial chunk into the game's second major area, but I suspect I'll have to be halfway through at least to really get the full feel of it.

Am I Mad to Be a Compeltionist in FFVII Rebirth?

 I didn't finish FFXVI in part because I got burned out on all the side quests. That game's world was clearly very carefully built (if, admittedly, they clearly wanted to make Final Fantasy Game of Thrones) but the side quests were like Vanilla World of Warcraft-level oldschool in design - go to this place and collect these things off the ground kinda stuff.

But even if I kind of liked Clive and definitely Cid in XVI, I think that that game suffers profoundly by being primarily a single-character game (also, the lack of real strategic decisions as to what abilities you use, instead really working more like a God of War-style action game... and forgetting that GoW is secretly an environmental puzzle game with brief combat interludes).

But FFVII's cast of characters has 26 years of enduring appeal, and personally, I find its quasi-modern fantasy world really exciting to play in, even if, after escaping Midgar, you find yourself in a more classical fantasy grassy area (the town of Kalm looks like a perfectly preserved European village that is nonetheless a hub of modern life - it's one of the prettiest RPG towns I've been in).

Anyway, Remake was a pretty linear experience, with, essentially, a handful of chapters full of side quests, but most of the story taking you through the plot at a pretty good clip. There were side quests, but they were kind of confined to these particular phases of the game.

Rebirth opens the world up a lot - not only do you now get to choose your party composition (in Remake the people in your party are always determined by the plot, and even though Red XIII joins you near the end, you never get to control him as a full party member,) but the world really opens up in this big area to explore.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly given the way that Square Enix does things, the map gets populated with a hundred different things to do and find.

There is a... a lot of tutorial stuff early in the game. And that includes the very secondary game of Queen's Blood, which the game wants you to get into and search out special cards to add to your deck. But there's also all of this world research that the weird little Chadley kid (who's really a cyborg) wants you to do.

Still, for whatever reason, I'm not feeling terribly impatient to get to the plot - perhaps having the lengthy prologue in Nibelheim satisfied that desire for the time being - so I'm honestly just enjoying hanging out with these characters and killing monsters.

There are some new systems I haven't totally gotten the hang of. Folios are a little easier to figure out - in addition to weapon upgrades (which seem simplified compared to Remake) you'll also get these "Folios" that allow you to grant the characters certain active and passive abilities (the passives taking the place, it seems, of the stuff you got with the weapon upgrades in Remake). More confusing is Synergy attacks, which I genuinely haven't figured out yet - usually I seem unable to actually use them and I don't really know why.

Still, plugging Materia into weapons and armor still gives you spells and other abilities, just like the last game (and I assume the original) so to a large extent I think I need to just get back into practice. Unlike XVI and, you know, Elden Ring, I think there's far less of an expectation that you'll perfectly dodge all the attacks.

Anyway, I'm likely ok to move on to the Swamp area past the Grasslands, but for now I'm just going to check all the boxes and try to unlock the Titan summon materia.

Stepping Back into FFVII with Rebirth

 I must be unusual of my generation of video game nerds in that I never played Final Fantasy VII. When it came out I was just getting into console gaming, and I only had Nintendo systems, on top of being in a Mac family. So all the avenues to play this now-beloved game were closed, and I never got around to it.

But it was hard to escape the existence of the game and its plot being the kind of nerd who would eventually have a gaming blog, and so I've had this vague sense of the game for a long time (a friend had it on PC, and I remember seeing the Midgar freeway escape sequence).

2020's Final Fantasy Remake, which had been announced like a decade prior, brought these beloved characters into a hi-res, modern game, which I thought did an amazing job combining SquareEnix's drive toward more action-oriented gameplay while retaining the strategic menu-based gameplay of classic Final Fantasy (something that Final Fantasy XVI I think failed to do, leaning so far into the action side of things that I grew bored with it as it was basically just about using any and all of your abilities as soon as they came off cooldown).

But Remake only remade the first section of the game - the adventures taking place within the city of Midgar. What had, I'm given to understand, been only the first three or so hours of the original game was blown up into a full game in its own right.

Beyond this expansion, though, Remake also introduced some new plot elements - a notion that this was not going to be the same story, precisely, but a kind of alternate timeline.

Er, spoilers ahead.

The Epic Finale of Tears of the Kingdom

 I realized just now that this is the first new Zelda game I've beaten since the release of Twilight Princess, the first game I got for the Wii back in 2006. To go eighteen years without doing so is kind of nuts, but in my defense, there are only two games between then and now to have come out - Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild. (I did play and beat the Switch remake of Link's Awakening, but given that that is, as I understand it, a pretty faithful recreation of the 1993 Gameboy title, I'm not counting it as a "new" Zelda game.)

Tears of the Kingdom is, like Breath of the Wild, a big open world game, which means that the "main quest" of the game is a relatively small fraction of what exists there. I could, of course, spend many more hours hunting down every shrine, doing every side quest, but I suspect that the assumption Nintendo has is that you'll only do part of it. (Unlike my obsessive Elden Ring playthroughs in which I've done nearly everything on like seven different characters).

I don't know if there's some secret scaling, but while I did complete all the Divine Beasts in Breath of the Wild, I never felt quite ready to go face off against Calamity Ganon, and kind of ran out of enthusiasm as every cool weapon I had lasted about long enough to kill a single monster. I wonder if I were to go back and play it again (and maybe do so on the Switch rather than the Wii U) I might enjoy it more. But then again, the games are so similar in presentation, gameplay, and the world itself that I suspect I'd only miss the innovations from Tears of the Kingdom.

Still, let's talk about the finale.

What Exactly Are the Depths in Tears of the Kingdom?

 It's kind of embarrassing. After playing tons of Tears of the Kingdom, I've only now just noticed something that was kind of staring me in the face:

The Depths are the inverse of Hyrule.

Let's back up.

The first Zelda game I was ever really aware of was Link to the Past, though the first I played was Ocarina of Time. I got my N64 in 1997, only a year after I had gotten my SNES, so the two systems for me more or less overlapped - I'd buy used games from Funcoland (by the way, if you're young and don't remember Funcoland, imagine a cool little indie game store where they have a ton of consoles with the latest games running in banks along the walls so you can try them out, only as a national chain. Sadly, they got eaten up by Gamestop) and so, for example, after finding Samus to be my favorite Super Smash Bros. character, going back and picking up Super Metroid.

In A Link to the Past, the concept of it is that you have both the Light World and the Dark World. The Light World is your classic Hyrule, with Hyrule Castle at it center, while the Dark World is a once-beautiful Golden Land that was corrupted when Ganon seized the Triforce of Power. The Light World has plenty of enemies, but the Dark World is everything turned up to greater levels of spookiness, and has Ganon's Pyramid of Power in its center. The game uses these two worlds cleverly for some puzzles, where you might need to swap between them to get past barriers. It also divides the game into two distinct segments - the first part in which you have three dungeons to complete in the Light World, and the second part, in which there are I think eight dungeons in the Dark World (three of which occupy the same spots as the Light World ones).

Ocarina of Time would repeat this idea in a different way. The two versions of the world are separated instead by time, with Child Link going through an era in which there are problems, but overall Hyrule is at peace, and Adult Link in a world in which Castle Town has been utterly devastated and Ganondorf has destroyed Hyrule Castle and replaced it with his ominous floating fortress. Various parts of the world are different, like Zora's Domain flooding over or Lake Hylia draining.

Subsequent games didn't so much do this "two versions of the world" thing, though they did typically divide the main quest into two main phases, usually collecting some group of items from the first few dungeons and then a separate set of items from later ones. One could argue Skyward Sword had two versions of the world in the Sky and the ground level, but in practice this mainly allowed them to turn the ramp-up to the dungeons on the surface something of dungeons themselves (ironically the last game before Breath of the Wild was maybe their most restrictive, least open-world entry).

Anyway, given that Tears of the Kingdom largely reuses the same map from Breath of the Wild, I guess I wasn't thinking too much about this idea of a parallel world.

In fact, Tears of the Kingdom has three layers to its world - the surface, which is, again, mostly the same as it Breath of the Wild, and then the Sky, which is a bit more like Skyward Sword's sky area, having only a relatively small surface area of isolated sky islands that are tricky to get to, and then the Depths.

The closest equivalent to the Depths I can think of in other games I've played is The Maw from World of Warcraft's Shadowlands expansion - specifically in its first patch, before the Maw was made a little less hostile.

The Depths are taxing - there's no civilization to be found here, and it's hard to see. One of the biggest goals in exploring the Depths are to find the various Lightroots. Not only do these act as fast-travel locations, but their light both allows you to see farther (Brightbloom Seeds are a consumable and collectable resource that you can toss around the place to get reasonable lighting in a small area, but hte Lightroots are both permanent and have a far larger radius) and their light will cure Gloom, which prevents you from healing hearts that are affected. The Lightroots are also the only way to fill out your map - until you can get those giant beacons of light, you can't really see the overall layout of the surrounding area.

While perhaps not as hard-limited as the Maw was in WoW's 9.0 period, it'll take a while in Tears of the Kingdom before you can really afford to take extended trips to the Depths.

The Lightroots have odd names, but I realized only recently that the names are familiar if you spell them backwards. In fact, they are all the names of Shrines on the surface of Hyrule.

This has actually come out as a huge strategic hint for me in figuring out where Lightroots might be - if I look at my surface map and find a shrine I've discovered, I can just look directly below it and place a beacon and I'll find a Lightroot. I don't believe there's a similar connection to the ones on the Sky Islands, but this is still pretty helpful. Likewise, if a Lightroot is found in the depths, you can infer that there's a shrine above it on the surface.

Naturally, my interpretation here is that the Shrines and Lightroots are likely connected. The shrines seem to be a kind of purification and recycling system for magical power - taking evil magic and transforming it into healing light magic. And I think that the output, essentially, is in the Depths, pumping light into this place of darkness.

This realization about the connection between the Shrines and the Lightroots, though, led me to realize something else that had been staring me in the face:

The Depths are an exact inverse of the Surface.

I think the first thing that I realized was that you could find Bargainer Statues beneath all great goddess statues - the ones in the wellsprings of Wisdom, Courage, and Power, as well as the one in Hebra Canyon. But then you look at the Shrine/Lightroot connection, and then you look at the topography of the Depths.

The thing is, while the Skyview Towers give you a pretty enormous swath of the surface map - there are only like twelve of them - your map of the Depths requires pretty diligent Lightroot-hunting to get a big view of it.

But now that I've done a fair amount of that, the truth is revealed: the Depths' topography is the exact inverse of the Surface. Wherever there is a tall mountain in Hyrule, there's a deep pit. Where there's a canyon above, there's a giant ridge below.

This has led me to wonder something:

The Depths can be reached simply by diving into big holes in the ground - the "chasms," as the game refers to them. These take you through a pretty solid chunk of earth surrounded by gloom before you fall down into the Depths.

But what if that seemingly physical relationship is masking something bigger? What if we're actually traveling across dimensions?

What if the Depths is The Dark World?

Naturally, there are big differences here. The Dark World, for example, is a shadowy reflection of the Light World, but is physically similar. Death Mountain, for example, is a mountain in both versions (I also think it's uniquely called the same thing in both worlds. Both have a spooky woods, but the Lost Woods in the Light World is the Skeleton Woods in the Dark World.)

Still, it's not like Hyrule looks the same in Tears of the Kingdom as it did in A Link to the Past (while Death Mountain is still roughly in the northeast, Kakariko Village is almost exactly on the opposite side of the map). Zelda games tend to reimagine the world significantly between entries (with the Tears of the Kingdom probably the biggest exception when compared to Breath of the Wild).

The Depths even has its own weird skybox - a kind of brown-gold haze.

What is interesting, though, is that unlike the Dark World, which seems to, at the point we get to it in Link to the Past, be fully saturated in the dark sensibilities of Ganon, the Depths has evidence of less evil elements, like the various Zonai mines and processing centers, and the decidedly true neutral Bargainer statues (which, again, are placed in a position equivalent to the goddess Hylia on the Surface, suggesting that the Bargainer might be essentially the primary god of that realm. (The fact that a Bargainer statue speaks to us through a Hylia statue on that plateau where we wake up in Breath of the Wild raises all manner of disturbing questions.)

Unfortunately, the Depths is a little thin on detail. Compared with the surface world, it's pretty homogeneous in terms of aesthetic. Other than Zonai constructs and Yiga clan bases (appropriate to see them there given that the Yiga sigil is an upside down version of the Shiekah one) it's kind of all just gloom, desiccated/petrified trees, and gloom-empowered monsters. I could have imagined a version of the game in which the Depths were more fleshed out as a kind of mirror world to the Surface, but I think that they might not have been able to do as much with the sky islands.

Still, conceptually I find the Depths to be kind of fascinating.