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Oh, yeah, I forgot I like video games. And video editing. I’ve had a few posts incubating for a while, but I feel like a proper vanity post today. Here’s some of the games I’ve been playing recently.

Persona 3 Reload

Rather than ask what needs to be said about Persona 3, the better question is what Persona 3 has said about me. I’ve always had this weird complex where I’ve been reluctant to play games that I know are going to sucker punch me in the feels. This, I told myself, would be the game to break that complex.

Persona 3 – the FES release – is special. Not to me, of course, but to Razzle. He told me this would be a commitment, and I didn’t doubt him. I had two options: Was I going to go my whole life not experiencing the things that probably helped him become one of the coolest people I know, or was I going to commit?

From the minute I started (and I’ve gone in totally blind), the whole experience has enraptured me: The characters, the dialogue, the music, and the many, many plot threads have made me laugh; they’ve made me cringe; they’ve pissed me off; I’ve come close to crying a few times. A work of fiction it might be, but it passionately screams at you with every hour God sends that, here and now, it’s alive.

Time, and what happens when we run out of it, are never not major themes in this game. This is a coming-of-age story in which all of the characters slowly come to realise their finitude in different ways. This is something all of us have a stake in, well before the advent of mechanical clocks that reshaped our understanding of time:

https://brologue.net/2024/01/06/thought-i-d-something-more-to-say/

Here I must return to a previous post on Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, and my failure to make any mention of finitude, or the modern philosopher more obsessed with finitude than any other – Heidegger, of course:

https://brologue.net/2023/12/27/death-and-work/

Heidegger applied a different framing to time – rather than say we have time on Earth, he said we are time. Finitude, Burkeman writes, “defines us, as humans, before we start coping with anything at all.” It is acceptance of the awareness that, quite simply, this is it:

Life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out – indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month.

As the protagonist1, you are given choices as to what to do with your time. Therefore, you are always pushed into time itself. It’s very difficult not to notice when the transition sequences mimic the second hand on a clock; the game progresses according to a calendar; a boy appears at your bedside before every full moon, as a harbinger of ‘the end.’ You form bonds with people who have lived their lives, those who have yet to ‘live,’ and some who may never live at all.

Don’t think for a single second that this means your primary concern is how you should spend your time. A great tragedy of our era is the belief that time is some sort of currency, or commodity. At every turn, the things you do in this game ought to remind you that time has network effects – the more of us there are to share it, the more valuable it becomes:

https://brologue.net/2024/01/01/f-is-for-friends-who-do-stuff-together/#u-is-for-u-n-me

We may not be able to share that time with everyone all at once, but that’s okay.

All this talk of limited time can be stressful, even painful, and Persona 3 of course indulges our anxieties. The message it’s trying to send, however, is aligned with Heidegger: that avoiding our finitude is far more morbid than accepting it could ever be.

Of all the members of the SEES squad, I think Junpei, so far, is most exemplary of this. He endeavours to maintain this bravado, that he’s always on top of things, but you can tell from spending five minutes with him that, within his inner, private life, he is tormented by his insecurities – primarily, his results at school, what he wants to do with his future, and so on. You can stand outside his door on evenings before exams and hear him scream in frustration.

Junpei indulges in the avoidance and denial of his finitude – he wants to get everything done that he knows he ought to, but constantly finds distractions to make him feel like he’s in control. Not only is fighting the Shadows the only thing he feels he’s good at in his life, when SEES destroy the Dark Hour, no-one who has any authority over him will recognise his efforts, and he won’t be a Persona user anymore. Just plain old Stupei. A loser with no real accomplishments.

I told you in a previous post to watch out for Junpei. So far, he’s the only character whose backstory I know nothing about. It’s not ironic that the character who appears to be the most open is the one who is, in actuality, most closed off from everyone else. He can be selfish, jealous, and hit on girls with all the charm of jet-black hair slicked back with beef tallow, but he is supportive is in his own way. I hope.

I’m partway through the game, and I daren’t look at hashtags in case of spoilers, but I’m looking forward to seeing how the story develops. I will be wildly wrong about some characters, right about others, and that’s what’s made this game so enjoyable for me. It’s Razzle’s game. It just wouldn’t be the same if I didn’t share my first-time experiences with him – someone who has carried his experiences for years.

The Binding of Isaac: Repentance

Edmund McMillen, you little fucker.

This game is a brainworm and I love it. I used to bring a cracked version of Afterbirth into school on a USB and play it at lunch – or, when no-one was looking, during class time. A friend and I used to take turns trying to get as far as we could, but I don’t ever remember playing past Womb II.

To my horror, I realised what a hot minute it’d been since I last played Isaac, and promptly bought Repentance during the Winter sale. I had played a little bit of the Antibirth mod, so I was stoked to see that most of it was incorporated into the official game.

For those who’ve never played the Binding of Isaac… Uhh… This blurb’s a bit stiff but it’s got the gist:

The Isaac of Isaac: ReIsaac is a randomly generated Isaac…

Want to watch a 3-hour video essay on what makes this game so good? Look upon this video by Kirbyster, ye mighty, and despair:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWfRn5wUzbo

Actually, don’t despair. Just play. The best part about Isaac is that, when the planets align and you get a really good run going, it makes for a good war story. Here’s some of mine from Greedier mode:

This run was the embodiment of squeaky bum time. Judas only starts with one heart, so on average you’re going to be entering Ultra Greed with less health than other characters. On the other hand, Book of Belial grants him more damage, and on the normal floors, you go through enough waves where you can use it multiple times. In addition to grabbing a bunch of good damage and tears-increasing items, this turned me into a DPS machine.

What makes Ultra Greed squeaky bum time is the second phase of the fight. I keep telling myself to not stand near the doors in case of Brimstone lasers, and yet I keep getting hit. The attack where Ultra Greed tries to land on top of you and sends shockwaves every which way will never not be bullshit. But let the record show that, on this run, he became back his money.

And then I put four coins into the donation machine before it jammed. COOL!

Repentance did the unthinkable – for every character in the game, there now exists a ‘tainted’ version you have to get through [SPOILERS REDACTED]. Not all the tainted characters necessarily make them more difficult than their opposite numbers, but almost all of them do make you think differently about how you play the game.

Tainted Isaac is limited to eight passive items at a time, but every opportunity you get to pick up a new item, you get two on a cycle. Pickups, trinkets, cards/runes/pills, and active items behave the same. Here, at the start of the run, I managed to pick up Magic Mushroom, and it only got better from there. One random Ipecac and Tech X later, and I had the boss-shredding combo of all time.

Clear Rune plus Algiz was just rubbing it in – you’re telling me I can use this active item to give me 20 seconds of invincibility against one of the game’s most bullshit bosses? Yes please! This is, as Kirbyster points out, Absolute Isaac™ – one item’s effect cascades into another, and another, and another, and few roguelikes can claim to emulate this to the extent that Isaac does. There are very few cases in Isaac where you expect two items to interact with each other, but they don’t.

The base game is fantastic, but the modding community really takes it up a notch. There’s a bevvy of fantastic mods that make the experience a bit easier – ones that describe what items do in-game, ones that make Isaac pog or grimace whenever there’s a good/bad item in the room, graphical mods, the list goes on.

In truth, what’s really taken up my time recently is my final Smash Ultimate project, Ten Tiny Things About Olimar. I decided to just release each Thing as its own video, and jettison the CG I was going to do. It’s been two years – my viewers deserve something. The CG scenes would be really cool, but they’re not essential, and I just plain don’t have the time to do them to a standard I’d be happy with.

Hats off to the folks in the Ultimate 3D art Discord – you lot make the magic happen. Maybe I’ll get the chance to work on a 3D project some other time…

I’d rather leave this project to a post all its own, but in ending things off, here’s the first two videos you can watch on YouTube right now:

  1. By sheer coincidence, I gave him the surname Nada – “nothing,” in Spanish – and, as it turned out, the SEES squad are the Fool arcana (The zeroth card in the tarot deck). Most everyone he meets, then, calls him ‘Nada,’ with the appropriate honorific. So, while I know the protagonist has a canonical name, he’ll always be Nada to me. ↩︎
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