Video games are getting too big. It’s a familiar refrain I keep hearing from friends of mine, regardless of what else they’ve got going on in their lives. Some of those who say this are people like myself – parents who might play a game for 30-60 minutes at the end of a long day. Others are simply people who have more than one hobby, and have found that keeping up with the year’s slate of major video game releases leaves time for little else. And then there are people who have gaming as exclusive hobby, and still, even they don’t even have time to play all of the things they’d like to.
I love adventure games and RPGs, but looking over the year’s calendar of releases, it’s easy to see the problem. It would just be impossible to play everything that I’d want to, despite how poorly-regulated as my gaming habit tends to be. After all, almost every game has 100 hours of content, and next year there will be even more games out competing for my attention.
It’s hard to believe that, once upon a time, games weren’t so focused on being so addictive. Take Link’s Awakening, which I just finished on my Analogue Pocket: 8 main Dungeons, which probably take an experienced player 30-40 minutes to complete, and a few side quests. Overall, I finished the game in less than 14 hours, and mostly played it in 20-30 minute bursts that easily fit into my schedule.
That’s one of the things I miss the most about retro games, and why I still like playing them so much. Games like Link’s Awakening and Final Fantasy Adventure, which I played earlier in the year, feel more like creative projects – endeavors to craft a memorable but finite experience for players who craved innovation and novelty. Far from being like today’s massive life-replacement experiences, I found something touching and true in Link’s Awakening allegory-like narrative.
“This is all a dream,” Link’s Awakening tells the player. “We’ve poured our best ideas into it, and hope you love it.
“But really, player, it’s a dream. And out there is your life. And you should want to wake up”.
There’s one segment of Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth’s many ending scenes that has stuck with me, months after finishing the game. The scene takes place in an alternate reality Midgar, where the lifestream has dried up and the planet has died. Here, Cloud has just awakened from a coma, and has gone on an impromptu date with Aerith in the Sector 5 slums, hoping to have a nice time in the last days of the crumbling world.
Unfortunately, Cloud and Aerith’s date turns out to be a pretty bad one. First, Cloud tries to buy Aerith a piece of jewelry, but whichever one he picks turns out to not be for sale. Later, Cloud and Aerith encounter a street vendor who offers them a host of candies to choose from, but no matter which of the colorfully packaged treats they select, the vendor guilts them into trying her own experimental homemade candies instead. The candies aren’t very good. Finally, Cloud and Aerith encounter a street photographer who is taking photographs of couples on the street. Unfortunately, he has only one shot remaining on his last roll of film, and decides to take another couple’s picture instead.
This scene really resonated with me because, as Sinatra sang, “that’s life”. And the resignation here underscores a lot of life’s disappointments that we all experience day to day, even when things we are supposed to enjoy end up not being very fun. But also, I feel like this scene might aptly describe Square Enix Creative Business Unit I’s feelings about their own work: in Rebirth, they’ve prepared a buffet of options for fans, but not matter how many of their wares they unpack and place on the table, their own game must be a singular experience that will likely not meet everyone’s, or even anyone’s, lofty expectations. They’ve offered their absolute best work, and now it’s up to the players to have a positive experience for themselves by not letting the negatives define their experience. “That’s life!”
For several years, I’ve been telling myself that I’d get around to playing The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. As a JRPG-lover like myself, the Trails series has been an embarrassing blindspot that I’ve meant to rectify time and time again. But, opportunities would come and go, and I would just keep finding excuses to not start the game.
When I finally secured a Steam Deck pre-order back in mid-2022, I told myself “now’s the time”. Trails in the Sky would be the first game I played on my new console. Tragically, though, Trails in the Sky has a status of “incompatible” on the Steam store’s compatibility page. I did some research, and I found pages of comments on Steam, reddit, and even from the developer themselves reassuring me that, with one minor caveat (an anime cutscene intro does not work), the game was perfectly playable on Steam Deck.
For some reason, I did not start the game.
I gave into the hype and played Tunic instead. Then I played Unsighted. Then I dicked around with American Truck Simulator and Final Fantasy XIV. Then I played Pentiment. Then I broke up with my Steam Deck (I’ll explain that in a minute) and went back to playing my Switch, apparently for a whopping 347 hours in 2023. It was starting to look like I would never find a reason for the Falcom RPG to be elevated to my “now playing status”.
You can’t play The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky on Switch, but if you could, maybe I’d have gotten around to it sooner. People make fun of the Switch in 2023, but it’s still a perfectly good console that runs most games I’d like to play to an acceptable standard. When the Steam Deck came out, a lot of people talked about it like it was a “Switch-killer”, and I certainly thought my Switch would be decommissioned after my first few sessions with the sexier Valve device, but the Steam Deck (still) has two main drawbacks, at least as far as I’m concerned:
It’s Heavy as Shit
The Official Dock Sucks
As it happens, I’d wanted to use the Steam Deck as both a portable and a living room device at one point, but I just kept running into problems. The biggest one of these was that the Dock just seemed to hate my TV. Its display would shutter and blink constantly, and sometimes it would not display at all.
I worked the problem for an hour or so, but eventually, I gave up after a rare “gaming date night” with my wife turned into a night of her sipping wine on the couch, scrolling her phone and watching me as a sat on the floor troubleshooting. Instead, we decided to play a game on the Switch, because the Switch just works. Our evening was salvaged, and my Steam Deck was ushered off to an empty drawer where its battery gracelessly drained completely over the next 9 days.
No harm, no foul. I had a great year playing my JRPGs on my Switch. I sunk about 80 hours into Octopath Traveller II, many of those hours in the console’s portable mode whilst on a train or in the work cafeteria, but also via longer sessions docked to the TV (and sound system) on weekend nights (the Octopath Traveller 2 audio and soundtrack is glorious, by the way, especially hearing it come through a real set of speakers). I played Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster, DragonQuest, and Phantasy Star much the same way. Then I played Super Mario RPG (2023) and fell into a hole. It was such a special experience for me that I wanted my next game to be something that could be just a special. I thought again about Trails in the Sky, a game beloved by many, just sitting installed on my Steam Deck for over a year now. I thought “now’s the time”.
With great trepidation, I plugged my comatose Steam Deck into its Official Steam Deck Charger, and prepared myself for my next great video game experience. Later that night, I made myself a cup of chamomile tea, and sat down on the couch with the Deck. It was time to finally play The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky.
I played it for an hour or two, and then put the game down. It felt slow, with lots of inconsequential writing. Over the next several nights, I kept going, knowing that many good RPGs take time to get going, and armed with the knowledge that many before me had made it through this common complaint regarding this particular game and its subsequent entries. Around 8 hours in, the magic of the game was starting to work on me. I was starting to care about the characters, and the world around them. I was becoming invested in what would happen next.
Unfortunately, after a week of daily Steam Deck sessions, my wrists were also starting to strain under the device’s immense weight.
I tried propping the Deck up with a lap pillow, but it only worked so well. It was then that I knew that, if I wanted to keep playing The Legend of Heroes, I’d have to once again see if I could get the Dock to work.
Long story short, my Steam Deck dock wasn’t outputting to a display that my TV liked, so once I manually changed the display to something I knew my TV could handle, it was relatively smooth sailing. Pretty weird that I had to do that, and I wish I’d have thought of it back months ago as my date gaming night was slowly melting away, but whatever. No harm, no foul.
Now, life is good. I’m relaxing on the coach on a Friday night, playing The Legend of Heroes on a 55″ flatscreen, and I’m finally getting some good use out of my 8bitdo Pro 2. I’ve got a lot of Trails left to play – more than enough to get me through the holidays, and then some – but truly, now that I’ve figured out this docking situation, the “sky” is the limit. I’m living the dream, something close to the exact ideal circumstances that any gamer with a real affection and interest in old video games hopes to find themselves in one day.
Next up, maybe I’ll figure out how to get that emulator audio to stop crackling.
I grew up on meaty PS1 RPGs like Star Ocean: The Second Story. In fact, I think I played that one in particular at least twice. So, it was a foregone conclusion that, when Nintendo dropped the trailer for the game’s remake in a Nintendo Direct earlier this year, someone knew they had me in the crosshairs of a homing missile.
We get a lot of remakes these days, but they’re often modernized as-if to say “here you go, we’ve brought this game up to the present.” Second Story R, too, is more of a remake than a simple remaster, but its reverence to the past strikes as pretty singular – it’s more pixel remaster than port, unwilling to leave any nostalgia dollars on the table in the exchange for convincing younger players that it isn’t old.
I admire the detail that has been taken in recreating the classic Star Ocean entry to make it look and feel – if not function – like the 1998 from our best memories. But, along the way, I’ve also found the retooled version of the game to be uncanny.
I’m about 20 hours into the game, and I am tearing through it with the quickness and efficiency of an NFL quarterback dissecting an underachieving defense. Is this because I beat the game twice – probably – over 10 years ago? Maybe, but the more likely thing is that the game has been subtly redeveloped and designed in ways to polish off all of those rough edges that might have once made it a more deliberate commitment.
Private actions (the game’s primary relationship and side quest vehicle) are now displayed in menu of things you might want to do. Fast travel gets you to them in moments. There are more subtle tweaks that speak to rebalancing, also: I’m overlevelled despite not grinding at all, and have more Skill Points and Battle Points (for leveling up my various abilities) than I know what to do with. Star Ocean: The Second Story was never a difficult game to break, and the remake makes it even easier.
“Was it always this easy?” and “was I always this good?” are some of the thoughts that have run through my head as I careen over the section of the game that once required exchanging the games physical discs. Star Ocean: The Second Story will always have a cherished place in my memory – a place, for better or worse, feels more jeopardized the longer I commit to this beautiful recreation. As Bob Dylan once wisely sang, “You can come back, but you can’t come back all the way.”
There’s no shortage of personal affirmation to be found in today’s selection of indie videogames. But no matter how well-meaning, a game can’t talk to me about my depression.
I started playing Chicory recently, and there’s so much to admire about the game. I’d even say it’s a great game, with a totally original core idea: instead of going from zone to zone fighting a bunch of creatures and doing the occasional mind-numbing puzzle, you progress by doing art and coloring in the world. But just as often as people talk about Chicory’s novel core idea or incredible soundtrack, they mention something else. They mention the game’s story, and the inspirational themes, and the inspirational themes it serves to struggling artists or creatives of any kind.
Not content to merely challenge players to overcome some obstacle, it seems like a lot of games these days want additional points for relating with the player, perhaps even addressing their mental health – and they’re often rewarded for doing so. A few years ago Celeste was released to overwhelming praise and an outpouring of comments to the effect that the game was some kind of panacea for depression and self-doubt. And over the last few years, the Game Awards even had a category honoring games about “important” subjects called “Games for Impact”, which is typically filled with indie or smaller-studio selections centered around mental health and identity.
This hasn’t been sitting particularly well with me, but it wasn’t until playing Chicory recently that I feel like I was able to start to articulate why.
The thing is, Chicory (and many games like it) want to talk about my mental health; here, it’s my depression and my self-esteem issues. The problem is, Chicory doesn’t really want to go there, does it? Behind the pretext of a conversation is something else, something more (perhaps unintentionally) insidious. Chicory, like Celeste, wants to sell me a sort of commodified answer to the conversation. It wants to acknowledge my struggles, and present me with what is sees as affirmation that my struggles are real, and that I matter.
OK, that’s fine. But I don’t believe it. And isn’t that the case for most people suffering from some form of depression? Unfortunately, these games don’t offer much in terms of solutions or even tools, and there’s nothing for your to learn if you don’t want to. You can embrace the pixely glow of the Chicory’s commodified inspiration or not. It’s up to you. Perhaps you might even be made to feel like not buying or not liking the game is even like pitting yourself against the ideal version of you who wants to overcome your problems.
By the way – I’m not saying I need, or even want, a game that can truly help address the mental health of its players. That’s what professional help is for. But professional help is expensive, and hard to find. More than a few indie games want to be recognized for helping their players deal with mental health issues that should be handled by a trained professional. But are these games real psychology, or are they just a new wave of cutesy, millennial and zoomerfied self-help?
The Tingle Review 