The Literalist Gaming Manifesto

 First of all, if the title of this post made you assume anything other than "there's at least one term we're going to be taking literally today," put that out of your mind. There's like a dozen different things that have been called "literalist" over the years, and probably more I haven't heard of, so don't assume I'm pledging allegiance to the one that you personally happen to be familiar with. Please just be normal about this.

Moving on:

There's always a big kerfuffle whenever anyone writes a "manifesto" in gaming spaces, because half of people say that manifestos are demands for what everyone else is allowed to do and enjoy, and therefore nobody should write manifestos; while the other half of people say that manifestos are a way of expressing one's own relationship to the subject matter, allowing us to better understand each other and gain new perspectives, and therefore more people should be writing manifestos.

I am closer to the latter belief than the former. Go ahead and write your manifesto. Even if nobody reads it, at least you will have grappled with your own thoughts, which is something not enough of us are doing. You can't grow if the only learning you do is additive (learning new things) and never corrective (discovering you were wrong about something), and a great way to foster corrective learning is through the kind of self-examination that comes with trying to organize and articulate your ideas—which is something that will probably happen if you try to write a manifesto about something you care about.

With my itch to write slowly growing ever since the most recent Gaming Manifesto Kerfuffle, and having adjusted my own viewpoints on a few related topics since last writing about some of them, I now offer a manifesto which converges a few strands of thought I've been tugging on for a while now. Not to tell you what you're allowed to enjoy or how you should engage with games, but to explain the space I occupy, and assert my right to occupy it.

And because I'm bad at coming up with cool names, we're calling it The Literalist Gaming Manifesto.

But First We Have To Talk About Art

When an artist wants to create a piece of art, they have to choose their medium, the "format" that will shape their art piece. Paintings, sculptures, tapestries, mosaics... they all have different ways of speaking to you. They're all art, but each can do things that the others can't—paintings can achieve certain abstractions that could never be built into a sculpture without it collapsing, for example. The artist's choice of format will affect what's possible, as well as how the art's beholder experiences the piece.

Similarly, a storyteller must choose a format as well. Novels, movies, serials, stage plays, and so forth all have different strengths and weaknesses. For example, a book can do things with a character's internality that a movie can't achieve the same way, but film can use subtle background details in ways that text can't replicate. They will all tell stories, but which one the storyteller chooses will influence exactly what can be done with their story, and how the audience will experience it. 

And sometimes, the format chosen by the artist or storyteller is "game."

Perhaps the art piece is about the nature of agency, and so the interactivity of a video game is vital to making the artist's point. Maybe the storyteller wants to get out of their own head and let a story go places they wouldn't normally have thought of, so they use a roleplaying game to introduce collaboration and chance. There's a lot that games, as a format, have to offer artists and storytellers. When you hear people talk about game mechanics as providing "friction" or "texture," this is usually what they're talking about: take a story or piece of art, and let the format of "game" give it texture/friction that you will feel as you move through it.

But what if I told you that "game-as-format" is a repurposing of games, rather than their root nature? In the same way that "wood" can be an artistic medium, but trees have a whole existence outside of how we might repurpose them for art?

Games As Games

I have written before (twice) on the general subject of games being their own thing, distinct from art or other sources of worth. In short, games are fundamentally human, and have intrinsic value, rather than deriving their worth from being a type of art. Games are not a type of art, but a peer to art, capable of existing and having value independently of art, in the same way that art can exist and have value independently of games.

I think what trips people up is that nowadays we mostly think of "games" in terms of media you can purchase and possess: video games, tabletop games, and so forth. We use the word "game" as shorthand for "a possessable object that has a game incorporated into it." But in a literal sense, "games" have a whole existence that's independent of, and much older than, how we're used to thinking of (possessable) "games." A game is just a set of rules to structure play toward overcoming obstacles to achieve an objective within limited parameters. That's it. No computers or meeples required.

The very first time a human threw a rock at a distant object just to see if they could hit it, they were playing a game. And even as tools and resources improved and human creativity expanded to fill the space—pig bladders, pebbles on grids, printed cards, and eventually even digitization—the concept of creating these objects for the express purpose of playing a (literal) game never disappeared. 

But that means we have an interesting intersection that's begun to emerge.

Impact of Perspective

The game-shaped objects that we usually refer to in shorthand as "games" can be created from opposite directions: you can make a literal game, and choose to design components or software to enable it; or you can make a piece of art/story/etc, and choose to put it in the form of a game to get the impact you want. Both intentions will produce objects which have vaguely similar silhouettes as game-shaped objects, but the nature of the thing will be wildly different. 

Similarly, whether the player engages this object expecting a game-as-format or game-as-game will dramatically alter their experience, their impression, their analysis, and everything else about it. And it seems to me, dear reader, that most of you have no idea that this distinction even exists, let alone what your own preference is, how it informs your perspectives and opinions, or how you've been treating your neighbors in the gaming spaces you share.

For reasons that are out-of-scope for this writing, two things are simultaneously true: more people than ever are playing these game-objects, and a growing proportion of these game-objects are "game-as-format" rather than "game-as-game." I believe that a side-effect of these circumstances is that a growing number of people in gaming spaces have no comprehension of games as anything but a format for art or narrative. And like a chain of dominos, this side-effect has its own side-effects, in which people who like games as games are increasingly surrounded by people (even experts!) who cannot comprehend their experiences, desires, joys, complaints, or expertise because they only consider games from the singular perspective of being used as an artistic or narrative format.

Dear reader, it is exhausting.

Hi, I Like (Literal) Games

As I said at the beginning, this is not about telling anyone what to enjoy or how to enjoy it. If you're in love with art-in-game-form, there's nothing wrong with that. You belong in gaming spaces.

Or rather, "You belong in gaming spaces too."

You are a fellow roommate, not a homeowner with a guest. I have had (and witnessed among others) far, far too many conversations where someone who likes games-as-games is told by an art-with-texture enjoyer that they're a "hater" or are "missing the point." And if I have to see one more positivity-poster try to induce a shallow peace by saying, "At the end of the day, we're all [thing that only applies to game-as-format fans]," I'm going to scream.

So here's the actual manifesto part:

• Games don't need artistry or narrative or anything else in order to exist, or to have intrinsic worth.
• Games-as-games are not the same as games-as-format, and expertise in the latter does not translate to expertise in the former.
• Those who enjoy games-as-games have a right to occupy gaming spaces, and trying to shift them toward games-as-format is gatekeeping.
• Enjoying, critiquing, theorizing about, and cultivating expertise in games-as-games is, unequivocally and without reservation, good.

So that's what I guess I'm now calling the "Literalist" perspective on gaming: that there exists a concept of games that is its own thing, fully independent of their potential for use as a format for other things, despite the prevalence in gaming spaces of people who are only familiar with the latter. I suspect that if you keep this in mind during future interactions about games, you'll start to see the distinction everywhere you look. Hopefully that will be as helpful for you as it has been for me.

Thanks for reading.

On Games & Art

There's a statement I keep seeing, which I would very much like to dissect:

"Games are art."

I find it fascinating, because "games are art" is a false statement, but also "games are art" isn't what people actually mean when they say "games are art," and the (true) statement they actually mean isn't as benevolent as they intend it to be. So let's unpack all that.

Let's start with the approximate intent of the statement. Generally, it's a response to a perceived slight against the intrinsic value of one or more games; the speaker stands up in defense of the medium to assert its value by calling it "art." There are two very important assumptions here.

First, this response is built on the idea that the way to establish that a game has value is for it to be art. In other words, "art" has intrinsic value, but "game" does not. The speaker makes no attempt to justify the value of art; they assume that art's value is a given, that any person listening knows that if something is art, then it has worth. But they do bother to justify the game, and do so by associating it with art. They presume that being a game doesn't give it value intrinsically, it only has value because it's art—in other words, a game's worth is dependent on its artistry.

Second—and this highlights a problem with the first—the speaker is only referring to certain types of games. They're thinking of video games. They're thinking of tabletop games. They're not thinking of hopscotch. They're not thinking of "I bet I could hit that tree with this rock from way over here." They're thinking of products. They're thinking of objects. They're only talking about games which you can behold without playing. They're only talking about games you can possess. The kinds of games where you might say, "Oh, I have that one!" when it's mentioned, and not the kinds of games where that statement wouldn't make sense.

A "game," in the truest sense, is a set of rules. It establishes an objective ("go there," "be first," "touch that," etc), provides one or more obstacles ("your opponent tries to do it first," "it's hard to do this on one leg," etc), and specifies limits to how you can go about overcoming those obstacles to reach your goal ("you have to stay behind this line," "you can only move forward and jump," etc). A game need not be an object, or bundle of objects, or digital object. A game is its rules, and gameplay is the recreational enactment of those rules. But when people say "games are art," they only mean the games that are integrated into objects. These game-objects are the only things being called "art," while non-object games are left out of that assertion of value.

In other words, when people say "games are art," what they mean is that a piece of artistic media does not cease being art when you also integrate a game into it. Doesn't sound quite so complimentary toward games when you put it like that, does it?

I can point to a wood carving and say "this is art," and be correct. But to extrapolate from there that "wood is art" would be obviously wrong. That's not a defense of wood's value, it's a diminishment of wood's value. It fails to comprehend the worth of a tree as something with a whole existence independent of art, reducing it to only the use we can get out of it for artistic purposes.

It's the same with games. Games are a foundational aspect of the human experience, whether we involve art or not. Games are not art. Games can be repurposed for art, but art is not their nature, nor do they depend on art for their own value. Games have worth because they're games.

But that's not the point of this blog post. That's the preamble.

While it's true that one effect of the "games are art" error is the devaluing of the kinds of games it's not talking about, it also has the effect of degrading our discussions of the game-objects that are art. In other words, it's impossible to properly discuss—productively, intelligently discuss—these artistic game-objects if we don't even know the difference between games and art, or if we only place value on one half of what they are.

Consider two video games: Disco Elysium, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV—Turtles In Time. I haven't played DE, but I've heard that it's really, really good. I have played TMNT4, and thus know first-hand that it is also really, really good. So we have two video games that are both very good, but they're also very different.

TMNT4 is a side-scrolling beat-em-up, so you won't be surprised that it's more play-focused than art-focused. You've already read more words in this blog post than exist in the entire game, and the extent of the narrative is "beat up Shredder because he stole the Statue of Liberty." That's not to say it's not art at all—consider how different it might feel if you replaced the turtles and goons with various other parties in conflict—but artistry isn't the main thing making it a good game. The actual game part, the gameplay, is highly compelling and satisfying. TMNT4 takes less than half an hour to finish and there's nothing to unlock or collect on additional playthroughs, but it's still something worth replaying just for the experience of it.

Meanwhile, Disco Elysium is famous for its artistry. Even without having played it, I've absorbed from nerd osmosis that its strength is in its writing: narrative, character dialogue, and so forth. I've seen people call it life-changing. Ironically, I have no idea what kind of actual game it is. For all the people I've seen praise it, none of them have talked about it in ways from which I can infer the nature of gameplay. If I'd heard slightly less about it, I could have mistaken it for a movie or TV series. If you modded the game to blank all the dialogue, I suspect it wouldn't be worth playing anymore (whereas if you did the same to TMNT4 you'd barely notice the difference).

The two objects could hardly be more different from each other, yet the main way we think of them both is that they're "good games," and that seems wildly insufficient to me. It gets worse when someone's tastes heavily favor one or the other: someone who likes playing games but is indifferent to narrative art might be (I presume?) disappointed with Disco Elysium, while someone with little interest in gameplay but a passion for narrative art will be equally disappointed with TMNT4.

"Games are art" becomes a problem here. It frames artistry—the arena in which DE excels—as being the source of worth, as being the point of game-objects as a medium. "Games are art" would (very wrongly) assert that Disco Elysium is a better game than TMNT4, rather than just a very different one, simply because DE is more artistically strong. This is unacceptable, because games have intrinsic human worth as games, whether there's artistry involved or not. "Games are art" functionally (if not consciously) denies this fact.

To be clear, this devaluing of game-ness isn't just theoretical; it has practical consequences as well. For example, I don't have a ton of money, but I occasionally find myself with a bit of discretionary funds and think of buying a new video game. Unfortunately, my Switch is now filled with games I never play anymore, because I would buy something that was highly praised as a "good game" and discover that what they really meant was that it was good art, and failed to inform me—and perhaps didn't even realize themselves—that it was a bad game. I've basically stopped buying games on recommendations or reviews because this happens so consistently.

I've often said on social media that gaming spaces are increasingly filled with people who "don't actually like playing games," and this is what I mean. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with someone having little or no interest in actual gameplay, nor anything wrong with such a person liking a game-object primarily for its artistry, nor anything wrong with us sharing such an object's fandom despite opposite interests.

But better communication, better comprehension, will make us better neighbors in these spaces.

I'm happy to share the TTRPG space with the folks who repurpose them for improv theater, but I do need them to stop telling me that my own (literal) roleplay-gaming is actually just a primitive attempt at their collaborative storytelling. I don't need my fellow Pokémon fans to enjoy the old-school, attrition-based JRPG gameplay of Red/Blue, but I do need them to stop telling me that all the changes since then are just quality-of-life improvements on what's otherwise the same play experience. I don't need publishers to make every game to my own tastes, but I do need there to be a way to tell how much game is in their game before I buy it.

I could keep going and going on this forever, but at some point I'm just making the argument for the value of good communication, which for any given reader is either unnecessary or hopeless, so I'll not belabor the point. In any case, this post is long enough as it is.

So yeah, games and art are two separate things. The main way many of us engage with games is through objects that are simultaneously games and art, but we do a disservice to games when we fail to differentiate the two. 

Games matter.

Thanks for reading.

A Sane Review of Pokémon Legends ZA

It seems that online discussion of Pokémon Legends ZA mostly comes in two forms: critics saying that the graphics being less than photorealistic makes it unplayable slop, and fans saying that if you're experiencing anything less than unending joy it must surely be because you're one of those haters who think the graphics make it unplayable slop. Myself being an intelligent human who likes games and Pokémon, I thought I'd take some time to share some valid observations on the game. Welcome to a sane review of Pokémon Legends ZA.

A few particulars: first, yes, I played the game. I played through to the end—credits rolled, got the "Fin"—but haven't done the postgame or DLC, so this is a review of the main game. The other stuff is functionally a separate experience, so there's no reason to blend them into the same review. Second, I played the Switch 1 version. I assume that means some of the technical aspects are better on the Switch 2, but I can't verify that; either way, what I describe will be the floor.

Speaking of which, let's go ahead and make that our first section of analysis.

Production & Presentation

As you may recall, Pokémon Scarlet/Violet had serious quality issues—not in the "I demand higher quality" sense, but in the "this literally struggles to function as a piece of software" sense. Thankfully, PLZA is at least a finished product: it doesn't randomly crash, you won't witness randomly spinning limbs or other body horror on your player character, or any of that kind of thing. Which should go without saying for a major release from the most profitable franchise in human history, yet here we are: acknowledging that it clears the benchmark of existence.

Okay, elephant in the room: let's talk graphics. The infamous argument is about textures and tree realism and whatnot, which I think implies the complaint comes from people wanting the game to look photorealistic, like modern GTA and RDR types of games. Obviously this is absurd, as creating photorealistic landscapes and filling them with colorful cartoon animals would be weird as hell (as would suddenly shifting to realistic depictions of those creatures to match said landscape). What you could compare to, however, is other cartoon-styled games, like Kirby and the Forgotten Land. That game does have more detail and visual polish, so it's disappointing that PLZA isn't as clean and evocative as it could have been. On the other hand, KFL has a lot of focus on environments and not that many character models, while PLZA has a ton of character models that all look much more polished than its environments do. "How good are the graphics?" is a question that has different answers depending on whether you're looking at the buildings or the critters/people. And while it would have been nice (and should have been doable) for the environment to look as polished as the goobers, it's also true that when you're actually playing the game you don't really notice it that much. It's not distracting, not hurting the experience.

However.

Graphical polish is not the only facet to presentation. Character movements and expressions are often stiff and lifeless. Vinnie sits at a table like he's an alien trying to blend in despite having never sat down in a human body before. People's transitions between movements/poses are broken and clunky. Some of the facial expressions (especially shock) look like a kindergartener's first attempt at theater. Camera work and establishing shots can get weird—like when Taunie/Urbain is going to show you how to do a dodge roll, there's a sequence of about 3-4 different camera shots of them just standing still, waiting for nothing, before they finally do the thing. Damn near every time two or more humans were interacting, I was in pain.

Then there's also the voice acting issue. Now, much like with the graphical fidelity issue, I don't think we need to fully voice every line in the whole game. That said, there's a range of "types" of dialogue, and some of them beg for voice more than others. Like, some background NPCs have a single line, and it felt fine for those to just be speech bubbles or text boxes. On the other end of the spectrum, some of the cutscenes looked like movies whose existing audio had been deleted: fully-articulated custom animations, bespoke mood music, detailed sound effects, even lip movements where the words would be, and then vocal silence. I actually, physically, real-life cringed at that. There should have been voice (or the scene shouldn't have been made to look like it was expecting voice). The scenes were made for voice, but it wasn't there. Felt like it was ripped out after the fact.

Also, in between those two extremes, there are scenes that are just people talking to each other. Do those need voice? It would have been nice, but I'd have settled for Zelda-style gestures and chirps. It definitely needed something, in part because there were scenes where I lost track of who was talking, because they only visual cue was lip movements. If there was voice, or if each block of text began with the speaker posing and chirping, it would have been much more digestible. So, bit of a failure there as well, even if not quite as bad as the "major" scenes.

Okay, a couple of final notes for this section. Framerate was fine. I don't know what the framerate actually is, but I don't recall any humanly-perceptible drops. It's possible it happened during chaotic moments when I might not have noticed, but at the very least there's no Lagtree Thicket in this game. There was some amount of pop-in occasionally, but not like in SwSh where you'd run into something before it was visible. Also, it's possible this is better on the Switch 2 version.

Gameplay

First, let's talk about the tutorials. Other discussions on this boil down to one person complaining that the tutorial is three hours long and then somebody else pointing out that hey, you're an adult, this could be some eight-year-old's first Pokémon game, they need things explained. So here's the thing: nobody who played Pokémon Red/Blue had ever played a Pokémon game before, and it didn't have three hours of tutorials. None of the early generations did. You got the absolute basics through a few minutes of tutorial play, then there was a "Trainer School" where you could get more info if needed, and then the rest you either figured out through play or got tips through background NPCs giving a line or two (but only if you stopped to talk to them, and even then it's less than 10 seconds).

The tutorial problem is not necessary. It's the result of the choice to incorporate that information into story elements and characters. They could have explained move-swapping, for example, by having a pop-up the first time you open the menu with a 5-move pokémon in your party, instead of doing a whole forced tutorial scene that ends with Ivor being impressed that you've mastered the art of learning moves. ("But they needed to introduce the character!" Yeah, but that could have been done any number of smoother ways, after you'd been turned loose to play the game.) Even when a bit of teaching is siloed off into a minor NPC interaction, it's gone from the 1-2 lines of optional text of yesteryear to a whole Side Mission involving a long conversation with a little girl and beating up her favorite pokémon so she can learn to love Beedrill as much as Kakuna, along with waiting for the animations of activating and clearing the Side Mission.

Battles

Tutorials aside, let's look at how most of the game actually plays. The battling is mostly for trainers, whether randos in a nightly Battle Zone or characters dueling you at certain story checkpoints. The real-time battles are mostly pretty fun! It's the same traditional sets of moves, except the system they plug into is different. For example, Speed no longer determines who goes first, so you can't assume your fast attacker can do an OHKO sweep without taking a hit. Also, in the Battle Zones, you can sneak up on people and launch your first attack before they know they're in a battle. (What's that old saying? Every RPG eventually pushes you to be a stealth archer?) There are also battles against Rogue Mega Evolved Pokémon, which are kind of their own thing: they're oversized, they have bespoke moves that you'll have to run around the battlefield to evade, and they have inflated HP to make the battle last long enough to be a big event.

The battles are not without issues, though. I mentioned before that the software was basically stable, but I've seen some problems in the battles. You have to target the enemy pokémon to get your button prompts to execute moves, but sometimes those button prompts randomly disappear even though you're still locked on, so you just stand there and take a beating until you realize what's going on and cycle the lock off and on again. Also, many moves are blocked by terrain obstacles (trees, etc), but since you can't directly control your pokémon's exact positioning, this creates random failures rather than offering tactical options. Also, you have to aim the camera at the enemy to target them (which is fine), which means if the Rogue Mega flies up in the air, you have to look up to get a lock (also fine). But there's one Rogue Mega battle where the [REDACTED] never leaves the ground, but it's really tall and for some reason only the upper half counts for targeting. So you can go toe-to-toe with it and have it filling half your screen, but you can't fight back until you look up.

Exploration

I think the modern fad of open-world games set in large, mostly-wilderness maps set people up with bad expectations that made "whole game is in one city" seem more negative than it is. A better way to think of it is that the street level of the city serves as an access hub for playable elements. The streets themselves are simple and mostly just lined with shops and NPCs, but there are also access points to little "chunks" of other stuff. The simplest is the Wild Zones, but also there are backyards that will take work to find an entrance to, there are rooftops with rare pokémon and items that you need to find a way to reach, and so forth. Exploration is about finding a new access point (ladder, holovator, breakable obstacle) and seeing what you can find within the connected zone, then heading back to the street when you're done. Personally, I found it pretty engaging.

Also there's scaffolding, which forms obstacle courses full of valuable items. It doesn't involve your pokémon in any way but I found it way more fun and satisfying than I expected. And they're everywhere.

Catching Wild Pokémon

Trailers advertised that you catch pokémon in Wild Zones in the city, which I think made it sound more restrictive than it is. There are birds and bugs throughout the city, but there are also rare pokémon like Eevee and Dratini in various places that you can find early on, which is part of what makes the exploration feel exciting and satisfying. Wild Zones do give you the bulk of your captures, and more zones open up after each major story checkpoint, thus sort of pacing out your access to more variety and power (and makes finding something "early" out in the city feel special).

The capture process is similar to Legends Arceus in that you can sneak up and throw balls without battling. Of course, doing that means they're at full HP, which will make some critters hard to catch. You can battle to lower their HP and try that way, and even if you KO them you'll still be given one last chance to capture them. But if you keep spamming balls and failing, they'll eventually become enraged and be immune to capture unless you KO them. Overall, this feels like a good implementation.

But there are problems. Somehow, the throwing that was pioneered in PLA actually got worse since that game. Both games let you lock on before you throw, but that's not a guarantee that you'll hit. PLA addressed this by letting you manually adjust while locked, or freestyle it with the aid of motion controls for precision aim. PLZA doesn't offer either of these options. Either you lock on and use exactly the aim it gives you, or you aim manually with just the stick (which is nearly impossible, especially if the pokémon is moving around). Also, it's weirdly common to be able to throw balls through a pokémon without hitting. I've had times where I was hiding behind a pokémon that was sitting still while I through ball after ball, watching each one disappear into the pokémon's flesh.

Mable & Emma

There's a scientist named Mable who recruits you to do "research tasks" in exchange for rewards (almost exclusively TMs). This feels like a callback to PLA, where people didn't know much about pokémon so you needed to observe them in various ways: catch them, feed them, defeat them, watch them use certain moves, evolve them, even scare them off with scatterbangs. This is like that, except it's nothing like that. Instead of doing anything that even thematically feels like "research," you're mostly just filling your Pokédex. Ultimately it just comes down to making sure you Gotta Catch 'Em All if you ever want to teach your Gyarados Earthquake. But of course it has to be introduced in-universe via a character and even more tutorial time.

There's also a detective named Emma, a side character with a little bit of story relevance. Most of your interaction with her is, you guessed it, tutorials. She introduces the concept of Side Missions: incredibly dull and uninteresting tasks behind which are locked an unpredictable mix of worthless potions and rare or even unique items. And unlike PLA, which at least softened the tedium somewhat by making most of the Side Missions feel like they're contributing to easing human-pokémon relations, these just feel like busywork that was added because someone said they were required. Honestly, probably one of the worst parts of the game.

User Interface

Does Game Freak not have any UI people working on these games? Consider this: open the main menu and go to your satchel to look at an item, such as a TM. The lower-right part of the screen is a rather large text box where you can see a description of what the item does. But for some reason, they put that description into tiny, barely-readable text that's squished into about a quarter of the available space, while the rest of the box is empty and wasted. Whose idea was that? Similarly, the text used in lieu of voice in the major cutscenes is just floating over the visuals (no text box), with only a faint shadow to help with contrast, making it often nearly unreadable. Shameful.

The map has problems too. You can turn on guidance Side Missions and main story quests so you can find your way around, and you can also pin a followable waypoint. But you can only place one such pin, and you can't place any other sort of stamps or markers. Did you spot an item you want to try to reach but you're in the middle of something so you want to mark it to come back later? Fuck you. Did you find a spawn point for a rare pokémon and want to catch another tomorrow? Fuck you. Want to remember where that unlabeled mint market is once you have the money and some final party members? Fuck you. Stumble across the place to trade in Colorful Screws and want to remember it because the game won't acknowledge it and put it on the map until you're 20-30 hours in? Fuck you. 

Story

I'll try to keep this vague, but the story is mediocre at best. You're introduced as a tourist, but next thing you know you live there and you've promised to spend every day helping three sets of people (Mable and Emma, as described above, plus the main cast). Then, you learn about Rogue Mega Evolution, and immediately start a series of unrelated mini story arcs, each centered around a different random set of characters. The usual "true strength comes from your bonds" pokémon line makes you Very Main Character. In fact, you Main Character so hard that all the other people you met in those unrelated mini stories all come together to coordinate your day-saving. Hooray?

That said, the story does introduce a broad cast of characters, and many of those characters are fun and interesting—which I think is what a lot of people nowadays actually mean when they say something has a good story. I like Naveen (also fuck Lida for violating his privacy), Canari and Gwynn are both fun (and I ship them), the little worldbuilding gag with Corbeau is fun, and so forth. But actual story? Eh. SV was better, I think.

Faces & Fits

If you like seeing cool new character designs, dressing up your own character, and taking selfies with your pokémon (or even the NPCs), this game has you covered. I know I've talked a lot of shit about a lot of aspects of PLZA, but Pokémon continues to put lots of banger character designs in their modern games. This applies not only to their outfits, but also to their personalities and general vibes. (Shout out to Canari for the honor of being the first Pokémon character to swear on-screen.)

Thankfully, we have full wardrobe customization this time, unlike the school uniform fiasco of SV. Also, none of the customization options are gender-locked (which combined with how rival selection works to cause the Kalos Mass Feminization Event). That said, I personally felt the options were limited. Certain items (like jumpsuits, very large pants, and shirts worn exclusively on top of other shirts) seemed weirdly overrepresented, while other items (jacketless shirts, alternate colors of the default shirts, or skirts that are not actually skorts instead) were weirdly absent or underrepresented. The hairstyle selection felt similarly skewed (though mixing colors is pretty cool).

Additionally, you can go to any of a number of cafés and get picturesque views of your OC having coffee with their pokémon buddy. They even brought back "following pokémon," letting you have one of them out of their ball and following you around (which was necessary for how battles work). Sadly, though, they removed the feature from PLA where you can then turn around and interact with them. Boo.

Conclusion

I hope you're not expecting a numerical score, because I'm not gonna do that. You should see by now that it's got a mix of strengths and weaknesses that are all over the place. If you wanted a good story, you're probably going to be disappointed. If you thought you wanted a good story but actually you wanted a cast of fun new characters, you're probably going to be delighted. If you wanted a good game, you're going to more-or-less get it but have to suffer through some bullshit along the way. If you wanted to play dress-up with your OC and take selfies with your favorite pokémon, you'll probably love it.

And if all you wanted was to get to the postgame stuff, guess you'd better find a different review.

Something About Difficulty

(UPDATE 09/27/25 — Within a day or two of this post going live, the referenced article by InnerSpiral was rewritten from scratch. It's at the original URL, which means my attempt to link to the piece I'm critiquing now instead links to the new article. It also means the original piece no longer exists, so there's no way to verify how much of the original backlash was internet hate or legitimate criticism. So I guess you'll just have to take this entire post as a hypothetical thought exercise. Oh well.)

Recently, a post on the InnerSpiral blog, titled "Difficulty Isn't Everything," made the rounds on social media. Frankly, it got under my skin, and has been on my mind for days. But part of the reason I have this blog is so that I can write stuff down to get it out of my head, so I'm going to try that here. I'm going to break down some of the problems with that post in an attempt to exorcise it from my brain.

Now, to be clear, InnerSpiral's article isn't all bad. The ostensible point is that it's okay to play Easy Mode (or to play games that are easy by default), and the author rightly cites that the concept of easy/variable games is nothing new in gaming history and should therefore not be viewed as some sort of new intrusion or corruption. I'm in full agreement with all that, and if that had been the entirety of the article, I'd have applauded it, maybe even saved it to deploy later as needed.

Unfortunately, that's not the whole article.

Instead, those good bits are mixed 50/50 with some pretty shitty stuff, ranging from the usual hijacking of disability justice language (very common, not gonna repeat the rebuttal here) to outright disinformation and hypocrisy driven by what I call "content-consumption brainrot" (the stuff I'm going to talk about here).

Misrepresenting the Cartridge Era

InnerSpiral speaks of the history of difficult games, starting with the quarter-devouring arcade cabinets (sure, we all know about that) but then going on to assert that home console games in the cartridge era only added challenge as a way to pad play time. She has a whole section on this, but to sum up in her own words: "On early consoles, difficulty was padding, making three hours of content stretch into thirty."

There is a lot to unpack with that assertion. For starters, thinking of games—especially their quality or worthiness—in terms of "hours of content" is an extremely modern mindset, one which InnerSpiral is projecting backwards onto what was actually a very different gaming culture. This is part of what I mean by content-consumption brainrot: the idea that the point of a game is to consume it (reach the end once) and that its quality is judged in part by how many hours it took to do so. That's not what the gaming landscape was like back then. You didn't have games releasing at a breakneck pace that left everyone jumping from one game to the next in their backlogs. You didn't talk about games as containing a finite number of hours that you deplete and then it's over. You largely didn't care how "full" a game was, because if it was any good you were going to replay it over and over and over again. Repetition was the norm. Hell, "replayability" was one of the categories that Nintendo Power magazine used to rate games (right alongside things like graphics and controls) because that was an important factor in how "good" a game was. You know what wasn't on that list of traits? Length.

So the idea that cartridge games were commonly "padding" their "content" (via challenge or otherwise) is completely false, a projection of one era's culture onto another. But there's another thing about this too: the idea that challenge was used to pad content presumes that challenge is some sort of additive, as though the default, natural state of all video games is to be easy, and the only reason one would be difficult is if you added difficulty on top of it for some outside reason. If capitalism had never existed, InnerSpiral seems to suggest, then video games would have all been easy—at least, until Dark Souls connected failure to worldbuilding, thereby inventing the first legitimate reason for difficulty in a video game, according to InnerSpiral.

But this is false too. Remember, video games didn't spring into being from nothing; they are the expansion into a digital medium of the physical games that have existed for nearly as long as human civilization. And guess what? The millennia of games that humans have played have not all been easy. Some have! Many have! But others have been difficult, and it's not just to collect quarters. Games are fundamentally human, and they have always come in all shapes and sizes, all types and varieties, and yes, all levels of difficulty. 

Hard games are normal. Easy games are normal. Different games having different levels of challenge has always been normal. It is good to acknowledge, as InnerSpiral does, that Easy Mode is not some new intrusion into gaming. It is bad to assert, as InnerSpiral also does, that Hard Mode is some new(ish) intrusion into gaming. 

Also Some Other Things

Okay, so I think that was the main bit that I needed to get out of my brain, but there's a couple of other points I want to hit, too. (Were you expecting good organization and pretty section headings? Like I said earlier, this is mainly a brain purge.)

I mentioned earlier the concept of content-consumption brainrot, and it's bigger than just the assumption that games should be measured in hours. It's also the way people think they're on a timeline—get the latest "content" (game, TV series, whatever), consume it as fast as possible, and hope you finish in time to join the hype on social media before everyone moves on to the next one. The brainrot tells you that you must be Part Of The Moment, consuming the same content at the same pace as everyone else, or you'll be some sort of isolated pariah with no community. That's what makes the extra-hard games stand out: some of the people who wanted to Be In The Group get stuck, fall behind the fast-completers, and feel left out. It's basically just FOMO. 

Of course, the correct response to that is to simply recognize that a million strangers all consuming the same content at the same time is not a "community" that you can be "part of" in any real way (that's half of why the HP fandom is Like That, for fucks' sake) and just focus on playing what you like playing and let the rest pass you by. When people can't make that mental shift, though, they have to find a reason that their FOMO anxiety is actually someone's wrongdoing, so they go to the old standby of stealing "accessibility" language to moralize it. If the most important part of video games to you is being able to tell other people who reached the credits that you too reached the credits, then you might actually just be obsessed with being seen as a winner.

Oh yeah, another thing:

I can't be the only one who noticed the hypocrisy, right? Like, this whole thing was ostensibly about how the Hard Moders tell the Easy Moders that they're not Real Gamers™ and that their preferred degree of challenge is illegitimate. Which, yeah, that's bad, they shouldn't do that, Easy Mode is legit. But then like... InnerSpiral doesn't specifically say the same thing back to the Hard Moders in the same words, but she does assert that challenge is pointless and hollow and if you like hard games it's only because you have unexamined nostalgia for a capitalistic exploitation engine. Are we really gonna pretend that's any different? It doesn't become not-shitty just because someone else did it to you first in the other direction, or just because you used different words to do it. Not to mention, neither Hard Moders nor Easy Moders are a monolith. No need to attack the entire concept of hard games and everyone who likes them just because a loud minority of them are shitty. Fucking hell.

Oh, and another thing:

That whole bit on the "artistic vision" argument? So you've got the idea that this-or-that game wouldn't be the same if the difficulty was reduced, so InnerSpiral points to examples like Celeste, a famously difficult game with powerful Easy Mode options, as proof that the whole argument is invalid. In other words, InnerSpiral asserts that if a couple of example games can keep their "artistic vision" while on Easy Mode, then every other game can too. Please tell me I don't need to explain how obviously stupid that type of argument is. You can see that yourself, right? Fuck.

So Anyway

Long story short:

Games are for everyone, but no game is for everyone. Enjoy the ones that are for you, and let the ones that are for other people go.

This Is Not a Daggerheart Review

First of all, like most people at the time of this writing, I haven't actually played Daggerheart, just read portions of it.

Second, I mean it when I say this isn't a review, but I know how you are, so I'll tell you this: based on first impressions from reading, I think Daggerheart is pretty well designed for its intended experience, and also I have zero interest in ever playing it. Do with that what you will.

But I do want to talk about Daggerheart. There are basically two things I want to talk about. Maybe they should be separate posts, but they're not going to be.

Daggerheart Gold

Let's start with how Daggerheart handles cash. The Daggerheart SRD says that its gold is "an abstract measurement" of wealth, which is reflected in the units presented: handfuls, bags, and chests, rather than units of currency. It goes on to explain that 10 handfuls add up to one bag, and 10 bags add up to one chest. This "replaces" the traditional mechanic of having your wealth measured in pieces of copper, silver, and gold, with 10 coppers adding up to one silver, and 10 silvers adding up to one gold.

Yeah, it's literally the same mechanic, they just changed the names on the denominations. Nothing's actually different. This is fascinating when you consider how many people are praising the "new system" for making things "less fiddly." Hell, traditional fantasy games had already moved on from triple-denomination currency to the much simpler decimal gold, so Daggerheart is actually a step backwards toward detailed tracking of each denomination. Yet here we are.

There's so much about the TTRPG community that we can unpack from this. I've often noted that people have been critiquing bookkeeping (whether of gold, arrows, rations, etc) for decades while their alternatives added wrinkles instead of smoothing anything out. Now with Daggerheart Gold, where it's literally the same thing under a different name, we have an especially concrete—and, importantly, highly visible—example of this. It is revelatory that so many people will complain about a mechanic being too fiddly but then praise alternatives that are even more fiddly. Obviously, it means it was (for these people, at least) never really about a process being fiddly, but that in turn means a couple of other things that are more interesting. 

One is that if it's not about being fiddly, it must be about something else. What could that be? I can only speculate, but my best guess is that it's about identity. Some folks in the TTRPG community mentally associate "knowing how many coins and arrows you have" with a certain type of person, experience, or play culture that they don't want to engage or be associated with. Give them an alternative with a different "feel," like a vague-sounding name change or a step-down supply die, and now they feel sufficiently separate from that out-group. Again, this is speculation on my part, but it tracks with the kinds of in/out group dynamics (like deeming every fantasy adventure TTRPG to be guilty of all of D&D's crimes) that are rampant in the space.

The other thing is the lack of perspective. I think people really honestly believe that they're seeking (and finding) simpler, less-fiddly alternatives to the "change a number" mechanic. This suggests a mixture of two things: a lack of game literacy (to recognize the similarities and differences between mechanics) and a lack of self-awareness (to recognize one's own reasons for gravitating toward one mechanic over another). If we're being honest, the TTRPG community has room for growth in both areas, so this tracks as well.

Clarity of Intent

What I've observed of people's reactions to Daggerheart is that they're very polarized. Some people are looking at it and saying "what the hell is this" while others are singing for joy. I think there's a good reason for this split, and it has to with the difference between the definitional nature of RPGs, and what Critical Role actually does with RPGs. They're not the same thing, and that's where this fork in the road comes from.

You see, roleplay-gaming—that is, the act of playing a roleplaying game in the straightforward sense—is about stepping into the shoes of a person in a real-to-them world, and using their authentic interactions with that world as the conduit through which gameplay (the literal playing of a game) occurs. By contrast, what Critical Role has been doing all this time is to repurpose an RPG into a sort of scaffold for improv theater, something to be performed. To put it another way, roleplay-gaming is about gamifying your proxy experience as an inhabitant of a world, while Critical Role is about performing unscripted theater while some game elements are sprinkled in for spice.

The two are fundamentally different, and you could see the tension all the time. There was a constant give-and-take between the nature of games, rules, and roleplay on one hand; and the interest in having enough control to craft a compelling and performable narrative on the other. So when the CR team decided to publish something of their own, which direction do you think they'll go? Will they make an RPG and continue to strain against it, or will they create something that's designed to do exactly what they've been trying to do all along? (It's the latter. Please tell me you understand it's the latter.)

As I briefly mentioned at the top of the post, Daggerheart seems (from an initial reading) like it knows what it wants to do and isn't shy about doing exactly that. And what it wants to do is to give a little structure and support to folks who are trying to collaboratively create fantasy adventure narratives to be performed as improv theater. You know, like Critical Role does.

And that's where the community reaction split comes in. If you're like Critical Role, if you too are a Theater Kid™ who's been trying to master the art of making an RPG get out of the way of your improv theater, then Daggerheart is extremely exciting to you! Instead of needing to fight against the rules of a game and the internal consistency of roleplay, Daggerheart platforms your creativity and invites you to wield it. However, if you're more used to roleplay-gaming, if you want a playable game and a tangible world, then Daggerheart likely feels like a big nothing-burger, as there's not enough connective tissue to do anything with it if you're not filling large amounts of space with your own improv.

Done Talking Now

Bye.

Human To Do

Humans do things.

Humans do things for lots of different reasons.

We eat, drink, and sleep because our survival requires it. We go to work as part of a transaction to get things we need or want. We fix things that break so that we can keep using them. We rest so that we can continue to do things later.

But there are some things we do that don't have such practical, productive, or transactional value, but they still have worth, and that worth is inherent. There are things we simply do because we are human. It's human nature to do them, therefore they have worth. They don't derive their worth from productivity or practicality, they have "human worth." Social bonding is human to do. Learning and exploring is human to do. Telling stories is human to do. Making art is human to do. The list goes on. Doing these things requires no justification, because simply being human means these are the things you do.

To put it another way, suppose that through some hard-fought victories we managed to end scarcity and exploitation within your lifetime. Your food, shelter, health, and safety are all guaranteed with minimal daily effort. Nothing else requires your attention. What would you do with yourself all day? The things you would find worth doing after the world was fixed, the things you do when you don't need to justify what you do—these are the things that have human worth. These are the things that are human to do.

And if it's worthwhile enough to do when the world has been fixed, isn't it also worth doing now, if you have the opportunity? If we say that our goal is a world where people are free to do these things, but we demand justification when someone carves out time for these things right now, then we are hypocrites. Fundamentally human activities require no justification.

It is with all of this in mind that I want to talk about games, and how we relate to them.

To be clear, I am not talking about the broader concept of "play." Play is indeed very natural; humans aren't even the only creatures to do it. It's a very broad umbrella, covering pretty much anything done recreationally—one might even argue that it's not so much a thing to do as it is a way of doing things. By contrast, game-play is a specific activity. Play doesn't become game-play until you've opted into the constraints of a game: a set of rules that puts made-up obstacles between you and a made-up goal for no other purpose than to structure your play around them.

The playing of games has "human worth." Games need no justification, because playing games is simply human to do. It is therefore tragic that so many people try to demand that justification, and it is further tragic that the usual response is to try and offer such a justification (which in turn wrongly validates the demand).

Sometimes I see people demand that games be leveraged as a communicative art to send a message, that games must Have Something To Say. Others will respond that games should be allowed to not Send A Message, because they offer "escapism," a vital respite from a weary world. They will argue with each other about this or that game and whether it is sufficiently justified by Message or Escape. However, the argument of "which justification is enough" is itself invalid, because games have human worth and do not need justification.

Certainly it is possible for a game to send a message, or offer an escape to another world, or tell a compelling story, or provide beautiful imagery, or any number of other lovely things. Many games do! But they don't need to in order to be worth making and worth playing, because playing games is simply human to do. Games have human worth all on their own.

We see evidence of the denigration of games in other ways, as well. For example, a decades-old problem in the video game scene is that many people think of video games as needing to feel like movies in order to be good. We have culturally acknowledged cinema as a valid artform (but not animation, hence all the bad live-action remakes of good cartoons, but I digress), and thus video games must aspire to emulate movies—this is part of where the graphical fidelity arms race comes from. Although there's nothing wrong with a given game emulating movies, it's wrong to think games as a category need to do so. No artform's peak lies in the emulation of a different one, and games are no exception. Games have human value on their own.

Speaking of movies, our cultural disrespect toward games also manifests in a version of the "talking over a movie" problem. You see, even among innately human activities, nobody likes all of them in equal measure. This means that sometimes, for example, someone might join friends on movie night but care less about seeing the movie than about hanging out with their friends. The movie is effectively just a backdrop for social conversation, rather than an object of interest on its own. That's how you get people talking over movies. Thankfully, we have largely normalized the idea that such people have a responsibility to consider that others in the room might be interested in the movie itself: if someone talks over a movie (without making sure everyone else is cool with it first), it's widely accepted that it's the talker who's the jerk. We don't blame the movie-enjoyers for having weird hangups and getting worked up over nothing.

Unfortunately, we have yet to fully establish the same norms for games. In physical games—meaning games where there's no computer to automatically enforce the rules—the people who don't like games as much often feel culturally empowered to narcissistically assume their priorities are the norm and disrupt the game in pursuit of their other priorities. Those who were interested enough in the game to resist that disruption are often treated as "picky" or "obsessed" or "missing the point." That we can have the same behavioral dynamic but with opposite conclusions about Who's The Asshole is illustrative of how far we have to go in terms of culturally acknowledging the human value of games.

I hope someday this changes. I hope we can start seeing the humanity in games enough to stop demanding their justification, to stop seeing them as emulations of "better" mediums, and to stop treating interest in them as a character defect.

Maybe someday.

Yakko's TTRPG List

 This morning I was stricken with the insane whim to answer someone's "Other TTRPGs besides D&D and Pathfinder?" question over on BlueSky by listing about 100 of them to the tune of the "Nations of the World" song that Yakko sings on Animaniacs. 

Since I went to the trouble of doing that, I figured I may as well transcribe it here, where it will be ever so slightly less ephemeral than on BlueSky. Enjoy.

< Verse 1 >

Lancer, Ryuutama, Fabula Ultima, anything PbtA;

Ironsworn, Tidebreaker, Against the Darkmaster, Cyberpunk, Journey Away;

Dungeon World, Dragonbane, Vampire the Masquerade, Mothership, BESM;

Avatar Legends and Over the Edge and Forbidden Lands, Smallville, Lumen!

There’s Shadowrun, Sword World and Stars Without Number and Star Wars and Star Trek and Masks;

There’s Worlds Without Number and Tails of Equestria, Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast

< Verse 2 >

There’s Mutant: Year Zero and Wretched-and-Alone and OSR hacks black and white,

There’s Sentinel Comics and Mutants-and-Masterminds, Apocalypse World and Firelights

The Quiet Year, Daggerheart, Break, Basic Roleplay, Deadlands, Coyote and Crow,

Dungeons: the Dragoning, also The Dragon Prince, Dungeon Bound and Wanderhome

There’s Marvel Heroic and Edge of the Empire and Shadowdark and Gubat Banwa,

There’s Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer Fantasy, Heroic Chord and Those Who Wander

< Verse 3 >

There’s Legend of Five Rings and Animon Story, Knave and Cairn and Into the Odd

Stacks of Goblins and GURPS, Tales of Myriad, Locus and Cortex Prime, Diesel, Stonetop

Against Fall of Night and Five Torches Deep, there’s TMNT-and-OS,

Urban Shadows, Exalted, Pendragon and Earthdawn then Blades in the Dark and Vortex

There’s Burning Wheel, Elric and Scion and OSRIC and Mork Borg and Earthdawn and Cypher

There’s Mage: the Ascension and Golden Sky Stories and Megalos and Terminator

< Verse 4 >

Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and Dungeon Bitches, in charity bundles galore

Monsterhearts, Genesys, Magical Kitties, and Rangers of a Broken World

Take 5 and Traveller, Remarine, Rolemaster, Gumshoe and Songs-and-Sagas

Solarcrawl, 13th Age, Fist, Hard Wired Island, and Heroes of Cerulea

There’s Aether, Godbound, Armour Astir, and Beacon, Core 20, Bolt, Quest, and Arise

Leverage, Fellowship, Fate Core and iHunt and…

His Majesty the Worm, 

Monster of the Week, 

Feng Shui and 

Foxfire and 

Mouseguard and 

Runequest and 

Solo But Not Alone 5!