written 18 march, 2024

i have an essay due this thursday, so of course i'm procrastinating with a whole new project :)

i'm not sure what to do with this yet! but i really want a space to chat about what i've been enjoying recently without having to post it to some kind of indexed review site like backloggd – too many eyes on my writing, too embarrassing!!

i've been on an SMT binge recently. i had nocturne on my backlog for so long but i finally bit the bullet and abandoned my ff7 playthrough in favour of it and i'm sooooo glad i did. i think it's a masterpiece; it's one of the best things i've played in recent memory and i'm saddened that, to my knowledge, there isn't too much out there like it. as of writing i've just finished digital devil saga too, also a fantastic game that i want to write about soon, but not quite as singular! i borderline hated my time with smt4, dropped strange journey because the battle system wasn't clicking with me (i do respect that game though) and i don't have time for the personas rn.

writing on this throwback site about how much i yearn for the ps2 era is probably gonna seem so gauche in a few years but, like, what was going on back then!!! everyone has already pointed out how it was basically the perfect hardware / budget range for AA experimentation, not too expensive to make a game but not too limiting in fidelity either, but i think there's something to be said for how weird and postmodern AAA games got for a few years in the early aughts too. nocturne just hits some kind of note for me, it amazes me that atlus had the confidence to make such a deeply minimalist game. JRPGS are usually known for their sheer breadth, but the big ps2 SMT reboot was instead a tight 30 hour experience with a cast in the single digits, where you explore one of the most deeply lonely game worlds ever made.

i love it. it's like the main conceit behind this series taken to its absolute extreme. you and about four others are given an empty world to shape as you see fit, armed with the knowledge from your lives pre-apocalypse. every character who appears is free to become a living, breathing figurehead of their ideology. you're not in a ruined world where those alive still cling to their previous society, you're in an uncanny purgatory that barely resembles the former tokyo. i fully think the game's cast would be less interesting if they acted more ‘human’! some early cutscenes suggest that the demi-fiend really is running around a fully-sized ruined city, complete with all the remnants of life that the conception would likely leave behind, but everything the player sees is entirely abstracted, in the most literal reinterpretation of SMT's 2D dungeon-crawler roots possible. everything is so visually odd. several dungeons are just a system of caves, but they're lit in such a strange way that they still manage to feel memorable and alien. the structures that start existing after the conception happens barely resemble real architecture. the mantra's headquarters are a surreal tower of geometric shapes, free of those pesky real world concepts like “texture” and “material”.

(to be continued <3)