Apologies for the radio silence! After a strange stretch of ever-evolving technical difficulties and a weekend out of town for a family obligation I am finally sending another letter. It’s a bit of a detour from scheduled programming—basically, before my trip I put a bunch of random games on the old 3DS; here are the results. More (not about the beautiful 3DS) soon!
Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call
I first heard about this game’s Switch sequel; I’ve wanted to play it for a while, but it’s fifty dollars, which is fifty more dollars than I ought to spend right now on anything at all, let alone a Final Fantasy rhythm game. Imagine my pleasant surprise at finding that I could play a “Theatrhythm” game on my New Nintendo 3DS XL for zero dollars! (I suppose I could also play it on my Switch for zero dollars, but I haven’t gotten around to that whole operation yet. Besides, my Switch is broken, which is why I haven’t yet purchased Tears of the Kingdom with seventy dollars I also shouldn’t spend. But I digress.)
It’s a fun game. I like the songs. I like pressing the buttons. The button patterns draw your attention to different parts of the arrangement – you’ll begin playing the lead melody or whatever but on the second chorus you’ll switch to pressing in time with the bass part, which maybe you didn’t realize was syncopated in the way it is.
This ties in with maybe the most interesting part of the whole experience for me, which has to do with the quality of the attention a game like this demands. I was struck, when Getting Back Into Video Games a few years ago (especially Japanese role-playing games), by how attention-grabbing the music was. This was not generic film music, designed to manipulate mood below the level of conscious attention: it was brazenly melodic stuff, lush all out of proportion to what I’d expected. It was music the player was meant to notice. (This is an especially difficult balance to strike given how video game tracks will often loop indefinitely, or repeat every time the player enters a combat encounter—it takes a very, very good musical idea not to become stale by the five-hundredth random battle.)
Early console games were, by today’s standards, astonishingly compact affairs: games as sprawling and rich as Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger (to take two represented on the Theatrhythm soundtrack) occupy a couple of megabytes’ worth of space at most. Many of the most interesting conventions of early JRPGs—the theatrical cutscene staging; the “hyper-deformed” sprite design; the constrained musical palette—were pressed into existence by this constraint. (I talk about this at length in that first newsletter, about FFVI.) Companies like Square had to do more, as the saying goes, with less, so the more gripping and interesting the music was—the more playerly attention it took up—the better. I don’t know if this was a conscious thought on the part of the games’ directors and designers, or whatever; it’s just something I thought about while I was playing. While a modern game can get a lot of sonic mileage out of ambient sounds, earlier games didn’t have that capacity. The songs had to really grab you—or, at least, I was struck by the way they really grabbed me.
To connect this back to Theatrhythm: one of the ways this game is different from, like, Rock Band or something, is that Theatrhythm takes as its material music you’ve paid relatively a lot of attention to while doing something else—while something else was going on. Because even if a video game like Chrono Trigger relies a lot on the music to generate the experience, it’s still playing while you’re figuring out where to go, reading dialogue, negotiating terrain, fighting enemies—it is, strictly speaking, a kind of background music. (The term “background music” is not my favorite—I think separating attention into “background” and “foreground” is too simplistic—but that’s for another episode.)
Theatrhythm, then, is a different way of experiencing some very good music that, if you’re playing a game called Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call, you’ve probably already heard a bunch, even if you haven’t ever listened to it intentionally, on its own. (Though, again, if you’re playing a game called Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call, you’ve probably at least pulled up an FFVII OST youtube video once or twice.) It does a good job making this an interesting and pleasurable exercise, which I think means it’s a successful game. Also, you can play—you guessed it—“Corridors of Time” on it. Five out of five stars.
Pocket Card Jockey
In Pocket Card Jockey, you race a horse by playing a few little games of solitaire. This mechanic is actually explained in the game—your character dies falling off a horse in the first scene and then is brought back to life on the condition that they can play solitaire to race instead of actually racing. They mutter to themselves in the game about this. “That’s five games of solitaire,” they say of a long race. “What?” “Nothing.”
In any case, this game is great. The solitaire bit is straightforward, if often challenging; but there are all sorts of other mechanics in play during the races that make the game weirdly deep. During the races you’re forced to make trade-offs—harder solitaire games result in greater benefits, but the penalties for losing are also severe. You can’t put your horse in a bad mood. (This is a good rule for life in general.) What I’m saying is, the decisions are interesting; and that, apparently, a good game makes. If I play it too much, I get that kind of hollow feeling I associate with spending hours farming dreamfoil in World of Warcraft, but if I play it the right amount, it unequivocally rules. Five stars out of five.
Rusty’s Real-Deal Baseball
I say the 3DS is my favorite game console, and it sort of is, but the Switch is probably my actual favorite Nintendo console, for a variety of reasons, few of which are interesting (for example, I owned one first). One of the reasons it’s more fun to say that the 3DS is my favorite, though, is because the Switch is so, like, normal. It’s innovative in its way, but it’s really very straightforward: here is the screen; here are the buttons. (The idea of being able to play portable games on a larger screen was an old one—the Game Boy Player peripheral, for example, let you play portable Nintendo games through your GameCube; or, like, the PSTV and PS Vita were separate consoles—and they were both kind of a mess—but I do think that combination sort of paved the way for the Switch, too.)
In any case, the main takeaway from this experiment in playing a bunch of 3DS games is something I kind of already knew, which is that it was so goddamn weird. I wasn’t playing video games when it was an actually alive console, so I don’t know what it was like at the time, but compared with Nintendo’s (excellent!) first-party Switch games, the 3DS seemed to fuel a kind of deranged inspiration.
Inspiration might be too strong a word for Rusty’s Real-Deal Baseball, but it’s definitely deranged. It’s a free-to-play game, but instead of microtransactions for gacha pulls or whatever, you haggle with a depressive dog in order to purchase baseball minigames. If you argue well with Rusty, you get to buy the minigame for $1.50 instead of $4. (There was some fear that the game wouldn’t work after the 3DS store closed, but it worked for me, although I didn’t pay anything for any of it, or for any of these games.) There’s a whole story arc involving his ten children, and a cooking class, and some scissors, or something. In any case, the baseball minigames are uniformly satisfying—they feel superb. There’s a really good bat-crack noise. Perfect game. Five stars.
Weapon Shop de Omasse
I played this game for twenty minutes. It’s an RPG where, as the title suggests, you work at the weapon shop, helping out adventurers who come through and complain about being low-level. It’s chill. You use the touch-pad to hammer out swords and stuff. I’m going to play more of it. It reminded me of Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, which I also want to play. Just now, I couldn’t remember the title Recettear and could only think of “Recitatif,” a stunning Toni Morrison short story that I highly recommend, although it’s important to note that, like the rest of Morrison’s work, it’s tonally and mechanically quite different from every game I’ve ever played on my Nintendo 3DS. If you’ve ever played a 3DS game that resembles a Toni Morrison book, please let me know! In any case, I’m giving Weapon Shop de Omasse five stars.
Liberation Maiden
This, like Weapon Shop de Omasse, is a game by the company Level-5; it was actually sold alongside Weapon Shop in Japan, in a package called Guild01, alongside a weird Yasumi Matsuno game called Crimson Shroud and a game where you run an airport. That those four games came in a package is itself is very funny and cool.
Liberation Maiden is a weird shooter where you play as a mech pilot who is also the President of Japan. She yells a lot in little cutscenes and then you fly around and poke things on the touch screen to blow them up. The controls took some getting used to but once I was in the groove it was pretty fun, and the vibe is thoroughly excellent. It was directed by Goichi Suda, whose The Silver Case I have played the first twenty minutes of, and who is responsible for several more famous, rather different games, like No More Heroes. Whatever. Giant robots are cool. 5/5 stars.
Kokuga
Also played this for like, twenty minutes. It was sweet. You drive around a little tank and shoot stuff. It’s top down. It was directed by Hiroshi Iuchi, who did the classic “shoot-’em-up” (“shmup”) game Ikaruga, so I thought it would be really fast-paced, but it was actually sort of methodical in a way I liked, or at least the first twenty minutes were. It was good. I never thought I’d like shmups (god, what a word) because I am pretty bad at video games, but last year I bought DoDonPachi Resurrection on a whim on sale and proceeded to play it for like, sixty hours; I sucked the whole time and it’s the best game in the world. Anyway, Kokuga is cool. I’m glad it’s out there. I’m going to play it more. Five stars out of five possible stars.
HarmoKnight
After playing Theatrhythm I was like, whoa, do I like rhythm games? This was stupid, because I knew I liked rhythm games. I grew up going to my friends’ houses and playing Rock Band and then I’d fall asleep and they’d take a bunch of cold pills or whatever. I started a new Neopets account once when they were high and babbling and wound up totally crushing the card game I’d sucked at when I was nine. That’s not a rhythm game, but it was in the same room as the guy’s Rock Band set-up. High school owns.
In any case, this game does not feel meant for high schoolers; nor does it feel meant for adults. That usually doesn’t bug me, and I wouldn’t say it bugged me here, exactly, but I did notice it in a way I usually don’t, or something; but that’s okay. In HarmoKnight, you play as a little fantasy land guy who has to do something to save something…? I don’t really know, even though you can’t skip the cutscenes, which are too long.
Saving the kingdom or whatever entails maneuvering your guy, who runs at a fixed speed, through some chill side-scrolling platforming. (It’s not quite 2D—maybe 2.5D is the best term for it? The camera pans back behind you sometimes. It’s Super Mario 3D Land-style fixed-camera 3D. It’s a good way to do things!) As your guy runs, enemies and holes in the ground and so on pop up; you negotiate them in time with the music.
I’m being snarky, but it’s really a very well-presented and put-together game. Something so schticky could easily play like shit, but it’s a pretty good time. You’re just hanging out pressing the buttons. That’s all you ever do in a video game, I guess, but it really feels like you’re doing that here, both in how it’s kind of boring and in how it’s very pleasant. Like Pocket Card Jockey, HarmoKnight was also made by a weird spinoff team at Game Freak. I get kind of stoned and play it for like twenty minutes at a time and feel pretty good about it. God bless us all. Five stars.
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers
First of all: having two colons in your title: a powerful play. Soul Hackers is the sequel-spinoff to (of?) the Sega Saturn game Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner. Devil Summoner was tself a spinoff of the original Shin Megami Tensei game for Super Famicom ,which was itself a spinoff of a Famicom game (also released on PC) called Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, which was an adaptation of a trilogy of novels).
As is probably evident, there’s a bunch of Shin Megami Tensei games; I certainly haven’t played all of them, though I’ve played a few. Soul Hackers seems like their exact average.
To be clear, this is a compliment. I sunk a lot of time into this over the course of a couple nights; it’s almost definitely the game on this list that I’ve played most. Like a lot of the SMT games, the game mostly consists of visual-novel style dialogue interactions and first-person 3D dungeon crawling; like all of the SMT games (including the Persona games, which count—this is a controversial claim, but it shouldn’t be), Soul Hackers is built on a foundation of rich, deep turn-based combat.
The comparison is a bit tired, but useful: it’s kind of like Pokemon, insofar as you have to assemble a team of creatures that will fight for you, balancing elemental weaknesses and strengths. Instead of little animal dudes you “catch” various figures from world myths and religions (including, eventually, gods, archangels, etc.). You have to argue with them to get them to join you, and they’re really stupid and ridiculous and, even at their nastiest, sort of obliquely adorable. There’s more to it, including a rewarding, disturbing mechanic where you merge “demons” (because they’re all called demons, at least in translation) with one another to create new, more powerful demons. In any case, it’s all very satisfying.
The story is fine. It’s a sequel to a game I didn’t play, so it’s a bit confusing—why is everyone so chill about demons being everywhere? Who are these people? etc.—but whatever. The dungeon design is also a bit blah—but to this I also say whatever. SMT rules and this game kind of rules too even if I probably won’t finish it. Five stars, I guess.
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2 Record Breaker
The 3DS was a great system for Atlus, the company responsible for the Shin Megami Tensei series; Soul Hackers is one of eight SMT games released for the console between 2011 and 2019, including the fourth flagship entry. Shin Megami Tensei IV is probably the best among them, but taken together they make a really interesting set of variations on a solid theme.
Anyway yeah this one is called Devil Survivor, not Devil Summoner, even though you summon as many devils as you did in Devil Summoner: whatever. Like several 3DS Shin Megami Tensei entries, this is a remake of an earlier game for the regular DS. (One of these, Strange Journey Redux, is possibly the straight-up creepiest game I’ve ever played. It also contains maybe the most masochistically-designed dungeon I’ve ever seen.
In any case, Devil Survivor 2 is really good. Like the first Devil Survivor, it’s a tactical RPG—it takes place on a grid; you move your team around the map, advancing and retreating, flanking and surrounding, etc.
I played a lot of the first Devil Survivor. It’s remarkable how fast SMT hits its stride as a tactics RPG—more on that in a bit—but I struggled with it, because the writing was almost surreally bad. And not in an unobtrusive way, like some of the narratively blander Fire Emblem entries I’ve played. At its best, it achieved a kind of goofily heady fever-dream vibe; mostly it was not at its best. Which, like, whatever, but the improved story and acting makes the sequel immediately more appealing.
Like in a lot of other SMT games, in both Devil Survivor and Devil Suvivor 2 you’re hanging out in Tokyo when the situation becomes rapidly and mysteriously apocalyptic. Demons invade the world and you get an app on your phone that lets you summon and control them. (This tension—between the ancient supernatural and modern technology, especially modern communicative technology—underpins the SMT series; it’s one of the reasons that, even at their narratives’ worst, there’s something interesting going on.)
The game’s structure is interestingly pared-down. Time progresses in half-hour increments; between mandatory battles, you choose story events to attend from a menu; these events progress as relatively basic dialogues, and which you choose affect the game’s narrative. It’s like Soul Hackers in this regard, though Soul Hackers does do the thing where you get to zip around a city overworld as a little arrow, which is chill as hell.
In any case, the story is fine, but the mechanics are excellent. The turn-based, element-focused combat system proves really well-suited for a tactical RPG. It’s tricky and exciting. I died a few times but it never felt stupid, which I take as a good sign. It’s an interesting time. Five stars.
Dillon’s Dead-Heat Breakers
I played the first level of this. I had to make a “Mii” avatar to play it. (In hindsight it’s much easier for me to admire how virtuosically unhinged the Wii’s branding was. The letters “ii” comprise the supermajority of the words “Wii” and “Mii.” According to a Scrabble dictionary, there are only 32 words in English that have two consecutive i’s in them.) As it turns out, the 3DS has a feature which converts a photograph into a Mii; the one it came up with for me was, well, not Nintendo’s happiest creation, and I am choosing to blame the lighting.
The game starts and your avatar gets turned into some kind of fursona-ish rabbit creature and stuck behind the wheel of a gigantic, uh, vehicle of some kind? It’s like a tank or something? You’re in this crazy Mad Max burnout apocalypse world and the vehicle is being chased. Then you gain control of another character (the Dillon of the title, who’s some kind of mecha-aardvark or something) who blows up the the vehicles chasing your avatar’s tank thing by bumping into them. Then you get into some weird city and can walk around and talk to people. That’s as far as I got. It was awesome. Five goddamn stars.