Joshua Rivera | The Verge

I went to the Stranger Things finale in theaters and the strangest thing happened

2026-01-06T12:00:00-05:00

The parking lot was packed. That’s the first Strange Thing.

A little background. Just about every mall is struggling now, but the Neshaminy Mall in Bensalem, Pennsylvania is more or less comatose. As Defector‘s Dan McQuade, a lifelong Pennsylvanian and mall fan, wrote in his fond remembrance of the shopping center, the once bustling complex is mostly a shuttered ghost town, with half of it set to be demolished. There are only two real reasons to go there: a well-stocked Barnes & Noble and the AMC movie theater.

And people do go there for the movie theater. It’s one of only three theaters in the Philly area with an IMAX screen, making it a destination for fans of prestige formats. I’m there often in my job as a critic, and I’m used to the IMAX auditorium being a full house. The parking lot outside of the theater at 8PM on New Year’s Eve, the night it’s showing Stranger Things 5: The Finale, however, was on another level. The concession line was overwhelming (tickets were free, but to reserve a spot guests bought a $20 concession voucher), and waits for snacks more involved than popcorn, soda, and candy were substantial. The energy was infectious. It was the most crowded I’ve seen a theater since Barbenheimer.

This was disconcerting. I knew, intellectually, that Stranger Things was a big deal. Netflix, notoriously opaque but quite ruthless in pruning shows that do not meet whatever metrics it does not share, has always treated the show like its Avengers or Star Wars. Regular PR blasts trumpet all manner of impressive stats, new episodes cause the service to crash, and the cast and iconography show up in ads and brand deals that no other Netflix show gets. Season 4 put Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” back on the charts, one of many nostalgic hits the show has brought roaring back. Even in the dodgy world of streaming data, it’s clear Stranger Things has a big audience and remains a phenomenon even if later seasons are not the critical darlings the first was. It can be much harder to feel this.

There are many potential reasons: an increasingly fractured internet, the diffuse and curatorial nature of online fandom, Netflix’s conversation-killing binge-release strategy, and long gaps between seasons that snuffed out any sense of momentum. There’s also the show itself. Analyzing Stranger Things is not that difficult; the show has always more or less just meant what it said. There was no mystery it proposed that its characters wouldn’t solve, no reference that the show’s creators wouldn’t talk about (either themselves or through the show), and its narrative was almost entirely unconcerned with the world beyond Hawkins, Indiana. Even the Upside Down, the show’s other-dimensional realm of horrors, is so barren and empty that the final season declares its true nature to be a bridge and not a place, linking our world to the actual home of the show’s supernatural horrors. (And another surprisingly barren landscape.)

In practice, this makes Stranger Things a show that feels complex, but is quite easy to follow. Which also makes it the sort of thing all kinds of people would watch together. And maybe even drive out to a dead mall for on New Year’s Eve.

The second Strange Thing: According to the woman who scanned my ticket, this was the busiest she had seen this theater since Black Friday 2024, the weekend Gladiator II and Wicked both premiered. Back then, she remembers being told that theater staff expected 8,000 people for the day. On this night, they expected a crowd of 1,000 people to turn up over one hour.

I saw entire families, many in pajamas. Friends young and old. Lots of couples. There were Hellfire Club T-shirts, Demogorgon crowns and popcorn buckets (purchased in advance, from Target). Everyone was taking group selfies, posting photos or Instagram Reels of how crowded the concession area was. It’s New Year’s Eve, and everyone is having a ball.

Behind me in the concession line I met a woman named Gia who came with her daughters. They had been watching together since the first season in 2016 and love that the show’s exciting, “with lots of things happening.” They told me that they were nervous for the finale, “scared that people will die.”

“I like the nostalgia it brings to me, even though I didn’t grow up in the ’80s.”

There was a lot of that sort of talk. I overheard someone saying they thought Dustin was going to die, despite Steve’s efforts to save him. In the bathroom just before showtime, a teenager lamented how long his little brother was taking to wash his hands. “I swear to god,” he said. “If I miss a single fucking minute of this I’ll kill myself.”

I met one couple, Adam and Tiffany, who drove an hour to be there. Recently engaged and in their late 20s and early 30s, they began watching Stranger Things individually, as teenagers, before they started watching together. (He said this was season 3; she said it’s 4.)

“I like the nostalgia it brings to me, even though I didn’t grow up in the ’80s,” Adam said. He grew up watching E.T. and The Goonies, so he feels an affinity for the era in spite of his youth. He also loved the government conspiracy elements. “The first season it was really prevalent, with the MK Ultra stuff that it depicted. People didn’t know about it and it was a great way to expose people to it. I really enjoy that attitude the first season had and it kind of continues, especially in the latest season — the government does not always have your best interest in mind.”

Tiffany, for her part, feels like “we really have grown to know and love all of the characters, you know? I’m not ready to cry tonight.”

I must confess that I was continually surprised by all of this. I’ve grown accustomed to the asynchronous way most modern entertainment is enjoyed and discussed — often apologetically, as everyone triangulates how much of which shows they’ve seen and can talk about. Sports are among the only reliably communal experiences we get in front of our screens. Television as the characters on Stranger Things experienced it was communal, in shared living spaces where the screen fought for attention with the world around it. Television as Stranger Things fans have experienced it is virtually private, watched on a phone or laptop or TV at your convenience.

One last Strange Thing: Even for me, a Stranger Things hater, watching the finale in a packed house was frankly incredible. The crowd cheered early and often: when fan favorite Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) is saved from plummeting to his doom by his rival Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton); when newly minted fan-favorite character Derek Turnbow (Jake Connelly) gives the villainous Vecna the finger with his “Suck my fat one!” catchphrase; when Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) stares down the massive, arachnid Mind Flayer in the finale’s climactic battle. When a character is thought to have died, a chorus of sniffles works its way through the room.

There is a sincerity to Stranger Things that is at odds with the cynicism of its marketing and imitators. The Duffer brothers are enthusiastic imitators that are happy to share their crib sheet, but they’ve always been open about what they’ve intended with Stranger Things. Despite all the dissonant things they’ve put inside of it as the show grew in every possible way, hopscotching from genre to genre often nonsensically, it remains a coming-of-age story about all the ways one can grow up.

It’s the secret weapon of the show, the way it’s not just about the four D&D-playing kids getting older, but their older siblings on the cusp of adulthood or their parents who sank into bad patterns and had to do some growing of their own. In this last season, the show leaned into its age, introducing younger siblings who are about to face things the core four did; caring for them is their final step to maturity.

Stranger Things‘ relentless focus on nostalgia can make it easy to forget the present it aired in, and what it must have been like to grow up in that time. If you were a child watching it, you were a child watching when Donald Trump was elected the first time, when covid-19 took the world out from under you, when social media let our worst horrors beat a path right to your pocket. Your very own personal Upside Down.

“Life has been so unfair to you, so cruel,” Jim Hopper (David Harbour) tells his surrogate daughter early on in the finale, when Eleven is committed to dying in her fight against Vecna because she believes she doesn’t belong in the world anymore. He tells her to fight to imagine a life beyond the horror. “I know you don’t believe you can have any of this. But I promise you, we will find a way to make it real. You will find a way to make it real, because you have to. Because you deserve it.”

It’s a line that collapses the fourth wall, escaping the Hawkins / Upside Down of this movie-fueled vision of 1987 to crash right into the final moments of 2025. The roomful of fans, young and old, here with their families and partners and friends, taking selfies, hooting and hollering, haven’t just spent 10 years with characters on TV that feel like friends. They’ve grown up, and watched each other grow up, through hell. And the kids, young adults, and grown-ups of Stranger Things have gone through hell with them. A ludicrous, nonsensical nightmare parade that has, in some ways, rendered them unrecognizable from the people they were 10 years ago, the way bookish Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer) has now become a rifle-toting monster slayer.

Marking the end of that journey in a theater full of people who have been on it with you? What a way to close out a year. What a nice note to start a new one on, going back out into the world with all your fellow fans, looking for the right side up.

It’s ugly, it’s beautiful, it’s how you know a game might be a classic

2025-12-08T13:16:56-05:00

At their biggest and most expensive, video games all sort of look the same. The reason often comes down to simple economics: More resources means more costs that need to be recouped, and historically the way publishers have done that is by being comically risk-averse. Hence the glut of semi-realistic rocky wastelands that look like death metal album covers where everyone is some kind of Wild West fetishist, or the hero shooters that all look like Pixar but shredded as hell and ready for fan artists to go places I shall not.

On occasion, however, new visual ground is staked. Octopath Traveler 0 is an example of this. The third game in the Octopath series is a lot of things — a newcomer-friendly prequel, a reconfigured adaptation of a mobile game, a pretty great JRPG — but it’s also the end of a 2025 victory lap for the art style that publisher Square Enix has dubbed “HD-2D.” It’s a bold experiment that is now a fixture of the release calendar — and also highly unusual in how much it communicates. An HD-2D game from Square Enix is a statement about what old games it considers classics worth revisiting, and what new games should be received as such.

“The HD-2D style began with the idea: ‘What if we revived games from the Super Famicom, the golden era of pixel art, using modern technology?’” Masaaki Hayasaka, producer of this year’s Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake, told The Verge via email. First used in 2018’s Octopath Traveler, the art style is meant to evoke the pixelated texture and feel that characterized 16-bit role-playing games like Final Fantasy VI, but with the depth and detail afforded by modern 3D graphics. The developers at Square and Octopath co-developer Acquire cleverly achieved this using Unreal Engine, which allowed them to render — and, crucially, light — Octopath like any modern game, placing 2D characters that looked ripped from a CRT screen in a world designed to look great on a modern screen. The hope was that, as a new role-playing franchise debuting on the then-new Nintendo Switch, Octopath Traveler would immediately be seen as both thoroughly modern in its design, but also classic in a way that courted nostalgia-prone gamers.

It worked. After the sales success of Octopath Traveler, Square Enix trademarked the “HD-2D” name (but not the style), a signal of commitment to its new aesthetic paradigm. Then a funny thing happened: The next two HD-2D games from Square were not Octopath sequels, but the tactics RPG Triangle Strategy and a remake of 1994’s Live a Live, one of the most highly acclaimed Super Famicom RPGs to never get an official English-language release. Both released in 2022, these games are where HD-2D stops becoming a novel quirk and more of a design ethos for the publisher. An HD-2D game either seeks to be the ultimate pastiche via original titles like Octopath, distilling an era’s worth of hits into a crisp new package, or it is a loving re-creation of a game that deserves a new day in the sun.

“There lies an opportunity to create room for the imagination, which is unique to the pixel art style”

The pattern holds: Octopath and its sequels continue to be the only original HD-2D titles in the SNES-era JRPG style, with Triangle Strategy holding down the tactics game end and next year’s The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales seeking to do the same for Zelda-style action RPGs. On the remake front, Square Enix has released Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake with great ceremony, following last year’s take on Dragon Quest III. (The backward release order reflects the order Square prefers players play them in.)

In both contexts, HD-2D has largely been a hit with critics — or at least, critics predisposed to playing the games they all lovingly homage. “It’s a gorgeous style that goes beyond a pure retro look to create something timeless,” writes Polygon‘s Oli Welsh in praise of Live a Live‘s use of the style, “an extension of a classic ’90s video game aesthetic into the present, which deepens and enriches it whilst staying faithful to its original character.” Many reviews of Octopath Traveler or its sequel call the games “beautiful” or “gorgeous.” Square Enix’s stated goal of pioneering a visual language that does the tricky work of being nostalgic and modern at the same time seems to be a resounding success.

“Perhaps some players may view games with pixel art as something old,” said Octopath Traveler 0 producer Hirohito Suzuki, who also spoke to The Verge via email. “But there lies an opportunity to create room for the imagination, which is unique to the pixel art style — and there are no limits to one’s imagination.”

Of course, there’s a fun little cheat here, one that the Octopath developers noted when describing the development process for a 2019 Unreal Engine promo video. It’s that the HD-2D look owes just as much to PlayStation-era titles like Xenogears and Grandia as it does the Super Nintendo games, making the style a much wider synthesis (and perhaps less novel) than it is frequently billed as. That is, however, no reason to sell it short — Square continues to demonstrate surprising variety with its HD-2D titles. According to Hayasaka, understanding how much leeway the HD-2D approach affords is crucial to its successful implementation.

“The definition of HD-2D is actually very simple, and if you create characters and monsters as pixel art and place them on top of a 3D background, that alone technically works,” Hayasaka said. “Of course, this alone wouldn’t capture the HD-2D-like quality, so from there, you’d sort everything from the color palette, effects, and camera to firmly create that ‘atmosphere that feels right.’ That’s incredibly important and is the crux of HD-2D games. So, I believe the secret to success for any HD-2D project lies in having an art director who could grasp that feeling and sensibility.”

“None of the five titles released so far look exactly the same”

The original HD-2D efforts like Octopath and Triangle Strategy are ironically the least visually expansive, hewing to similar muted color palettes and papercraft diorama-like staging. Colors make or break these games, as overreliance on any one range of shades will threaten to flatten the planes and jeopardize the illusion of depth. These shortcomings are made up for by astounding visual crescendos where light illuminates a scene in a way that feels frankly impossible. The remakes are more colorful. The Dragon Quest games are downright maximalist in a way that barely bothers to evoke pixelated landscapes, leaning more on the “HD” side of “HD-2D” and the strength of Akira Toriyama’s distinctive character and monster designs. They create an opulent backdrop for the simplicity of a master cartoonist’s work, and the result is equally, if not more, affecting.

“Even under the umbrella of HD-2D, none of the five titles released so far look exactly the same,” Hayasaka said. “There are countless ways to broaden the changes made between them, from the color palette to how much of the pixels’ grainy texture you bring out. That’s why I believe it’s an expression method that still has plenty of room to grow.”

“Timeless” is another word that’s used a lot in relation to HD-2D, in a way that speaks to its success and carefully considered deployment. The aesthetic is one born from insecurity — the developers at Acquire initially wanted to make a classic 2D pixel-art game, but were worried that it wouldn’t be seen as sufficiently modern. That conflict is one of the core tensions of video games, the push and pull between artistic expression and technological progress. Art is a moment captured in time, of the time it’s made even if poised to transcend it.

Games, however, are also tied to their technological moment, and technology can be embarrassing. Pixel art smudged to hell by 4K monitors, dialogue rendered oblique or childish because of memory limitations, music made for limited sound chips awkwardly filling 5.1 surround sound speakers. More than most other art forms, the makers of games must decide: Should limitations be preserved, or forgotten? Are compromises made for tech’s sake enduring artistic choices, or temporary acts of pragmatism?

The beautiful delusion of HD-2D is in thinking that there might be a way to craft a perfect version of a game that can survive the ravages of time. A way of rendering a game that is reverent to the past but not embarrassing to the future. Flattering to the history of games but also our modern sensibilities, which prize convenience and ample “quality-of-life” features. There is, however, no escaping these questions. We will age and change, as will technology and our relation to it. It is beautiful to try and transcend this, and it is beautiful to fail, as most of us will. Video games all look the same, until they do not.

The Outer Worlds 2’s satire has a Microsoft-shaped problem

2025-10-29T13:13:30-04:00

Almost immediately in The Outer Worlds 2, the player receives news of a corporate shake-up: Auntie Cleo and Spacer’s Choice, two of the in-game retail brands, have merged to form Auntie’s Choice. Less a chain of stores and more a feudal power, Auntie’s Choice manages its employees — serfs, really — with the cruelty of the balance sheet, its military business far more important than the faux-cheery public-facing purveyor of somewhat-useful crap customers can’t get from anyone else.

The fictional business news parallels real-world business news. Right before developer Obsidian Entertainment began work on The Outer Worlds 2 in 2019, the studio was acquired as part of Microsoft’s game developer shopping spree. Less than a decade later, Microsoft’s gaming division doesn’t seem to be flourishing despite its incredibly deep bench of talent; in 2025, the company’s games efforts have largely been characterized by price hikes, layoffs, lopsided priorities, and an all-consuming interest from the company’s top brass in becoming an AI company.

Yet Obsidian is still here, and it has something to say about this stuff. At least, its new role-playing game, which casts players as an agent in a cheerily fascist organization that becomes embroiled in a conflict between a megacorporation and a totalitarian government, might have a few things to say about it. The studio itself? It’s a little less clear.

The Outer Worlds 2 creative director Leonard Boyarsky and game director Brandon Adler are not in the business of making games that respond to any specific moment — games take so long to make, after all, and fun is their fixation. They do acknowledge that their game’s scenario can feel quite topical. “Tim [Cain, co-creator of the Outer Worlds franchise] and I have always made games that are about what happens when people get power,” Boyarsky told me in a Zoom interview alongside Adler. “We’re expanding on that continually.”

Boyarsky and Cain (who announced his “semi-retirement” in 2023 but still does contract work for Obsidian) are co-creators of the Fallout franchise and have deep roots in the computer RPG scene, having worked on a string of cult classics like Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and the little-played but deeply beloved Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. Their influence is everywhere, establishing modern RPG trends where factional conflicts and institutional mistrust are leveraged to generate interesting problems for players to solve.

The Outer Worlds games are best understood as another run at Fallout. Both franchises use a divergence in American history to spin out bizarre far futures defined by lopsided institutions. Fallout imagines a nuclear golden age post-World War II, where the science fiction of the ’50s became science fact, before a 21st-century thermonuclear war turns the world into Mad Max-style wasteland in which players eke out a mean, odd existence. In The Outer Worlds’ fictional history, President William McKinley is never assassinated, an antitrust movement never materializes, and the robber barons of the early 20th century run rampant for hundreds of years. Hence the heavy layer of corporate satire, which Obsidian expands in Outer Worlds 2 to become something darker.

In the first 15 minutes of the game, players are hit with:

a glib conversation with a mascot for one of those retail companies owned by a defense contractor;
a TV show clip that suggests a level of Starship Troopers-esque propaganda;
an overt Starship Troopers-esque propaganda ad encouraging citizens to rat on each other.

There’s a meaner undercurrent to the sequel’s iteration on The Outer Worlds’ corporate humor, one that tugs at a thread linking corporate overreach to fascism’s rise. At least, I think there is. Maybe Obsidian thinks so too?

“We don’t talk about the fascist aspect of it, but we all end up in situations where we don’t have control. Even people in power, whether it’s the real world or these games, I think people in power are as much victims of the system as anybody else,” Boyarsky said. “They think they’re in control of these things, but no one person can actually wield as much power as people want. Because you’re grown up in the system, you react based on how you were raised in the system, your beliefs that have come up through being told what’s right and wrong by your parents or society in general. So we all find ourselves in situations where it’s just like: I have no idea how I got here. I guess I gotta make the best of it.”

I tell Boyarsky that sounds like a very video game-y view of the world, and ask why he thinks games are an ideal medium to tackle these quandaries. He tells me that, at least when it comes to The Outer Worlds, the themes came from a convergence of his and Cain’s interests. Cain, he says, loved the idea of a Futurama-inspired setting, leaning into the silliness. Boyarsky says he wants this game to keep that, but push toward something more difficult and less goofy.

“My thing was always — and this is something that we really continue to dig into — we all tell ourselves stories,” Boyarsky said. “That’s how we cope with the world, with reality. That’s built by how you’re raised and what people tell you when you’re younger. But when people co-opt that story, they can control you very easily.”

These are all potent ideas, but they’re also thick with irony thanks to events largely out of Obsidian’s control. Some of them involve geopolitical issues well outside the games industry. But others lie closer to home for developers that are now owned by Microsoft.

“All I can say is that the irony was not lost on us when we were in the middle of making the first game. Railing against corporate power and all this stuff — and we were bought by Microsoft!” Boyarsky says. “But we’ve only had support from them. They liked what we were doing with the first Outer Worlds, and they support us making this game. We’ve had absolutely no pushback or messages from on high telling us don’t do this, or make sure you do this.”

While it may be true that Microsoft has not interfered with Obsidian’s creative processes on The Outer Worlds 2, the company certainly had preferences on how the leads at the studio discussed it. The game, with Boyarsky’s interests in exploring the plight of what happens to those who aren’t in power when people with base interests come into power, seemed particularly relevant to Microsoft’s business entanglements with the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

Before we get further, a Microsoft rep interrupts to note that the company’s latest statements on the matter can be found online, and that they wanted to keep the conversation with Obsidian “focused on the game.”

So let’s focus on the game: Early on you can accept a quest that, depending on your choices, might send you to retrieve something from the Ministry of Accuracy. Like the name suggests, it’s a propaganda outfit. Read through the terminals found there and you’ll see how it works: Reports from all over the region are funneled through the Ministry, where workers “sanitize” them to make sure they align with the messaging of the space colony’s ruling power, The Protectorate. Art imitating life for Obsidian, once again. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

_{The Outer Worlds 2 is out now on the PS5, Xbox, and PC.}

This RPG series does everything wrong, and it’s working

2025-09-19T09:01:52-04:00

In case it wasn’t clear, The Last of Us made it obvious: at their very best, big-budget video games should be comparable to prestige television, so much so that adapting one for HBO is a relatively straightforward affair. This bar-setting exercise is further exemplified by other PlayStation franchises marching toward adaptation: Ghost of Tsushima is set to be a film and anime, God of War has Prime Video aspirations, and Horizon Zero Dawn, previously on its way to becoming a Netflix series, is now being adapted for cinemas. It’s not an accident: games at this scale are a high-risk affair, too expensive to just be games.

Some developers, however, make it look easy by taking the exact opposite approach. Japanese developer Nihon Falcom, an early trailblazer in the RPG space, has steadily built out one of the grandest stories in video games with its Trails series. Thirteen games deep, the Trails games span the continent of Zemuria and the nations within it, juggling personal relationships with a wider interest in the march of history and how cultures and governments respond to the destabilizing advance of modernity. What Falcom has done here is astonishing and unparalleled for a single studio of its size — which, according to Bloomberg, sits at 68 employees — and it did so by resisting the mainstream gaming impulse to equate lavish expense with quality.

If most big-budget games are chasing the sensibilities of prestige TV, Falcom’s games are comparable to the soap opera: affordable, modest affairs that are not as widely acclaimed as their peers but passionately followed by a small but growing audience. (Sales of the Trails series sit at 8.8 million copies.) What they lack in visual flair and technical prowess (which is a lot) they make up for in narrative complexity and long, rewarding character arcs (which is astounding). The pleasures of the Trails series lie in watching small-stakes hangouts curdle into gut-wrenching conflicts as characters’ individual struggles get subsumed by political machinations and ideologues who seek to hijack technological progress for their own bigoted ends.

Under company president Toshihiro Kondo’s leadership, Falcom has been working to grow its audience slowly, narrowing the gap between Trails games’ Japanese releases and their worldwide localizations, partnering with other studios to bring its older titles to modern platforms, and, in its most confident step of all, releasing a new ground-up remake of the first game to give the curious the perfect on-ramp. That remake, Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, is more than just a reworking of a cult favorite. It’s a document of Falcom’s progress — the studio’s technologically crudest game remade with the gloss of its most recently localized installment, 2022’s Trails Through Daybreak II.

The result is spectacular. 1st Chapter takes a clunky, patient turn-based RPG and transforms it into a slick and modern experience, incorporating 21 years of Falcom’s growth alongside innovations cribbed from other games, like Persona 5. Systems are thoughtfully layered to combine both action- and turn-based RPG mechanics with pizzazz; players that enter a fight with a clear strategy will be able to execute it while hardly feeling like they’re in a turn-based encounter at all. Those who like to take things slow can also kick it old-school, like nothing ever changed.

Of course, such an effective remake will then make things a bit awkward for those who want to continue on. 1st Chapter is the first half of a two-part story about Estelle and Joshua Bright, adoptive siblings who join an outfit of civic-minded mercenaries and discover a grand conspiracy in the kingdom of Liberl. A remake of the sequel seems to be underway, but after that, there are nearly a dozen more games across multiple sub-series, each set in a different region. Each sub-series has its own central plot and advances the wider Trails story, each presages future titles and references back to previous ones, and each is available on different platforms and has its own design quirks and difficulties. Playing them all can be a real headache.

Yet people still seek Trails out, still want to embark on this strange journey through Zemuria. Part of the appeal isn’t just the story being told, it’s talking about the story that’s told. The unique structure of these games allows people to talk to each other across the fictional time and space of its setting. Talking to someone who is a sub-series or two ahead of you, or playing out of order, is like corresponding with someone in another country: Things are a little different here, but a lot of what you love is also present. Let me tell you about it.

Everything about this is deliberate. In a 2019 interview with Eurogamer, Kondo stated that the studio’s founder, Masayuki Kato, made the express decision to focus on writing while others chased graphics. “As time progressed, other companies began putting a lot more manpower into graphics. We realised we’d need well over 100 people solely focused on that,” Kondo said. “But our founder [Kato] realised if we can get a writer who knows how to write good stories, and is able to build up their knowledge as a writer, that’s something we can make a sales point going forward.”

It’s not limited to Falcom, either. Other studios have found success this way. RGG Studio’s sprawling Like a Dragon saga continually wrings new flavors of gangster melodrama out of the same locations and characters, carefully expanding its scope to include new game mechanics and locales, finding new fans along the way. Similarly, Atlus built its massive Shin Megami Tensei franchise on grueling dungeon crawlers that weren’t afraid to be quite similar, applying the designs of Kazuma Kaneko in new contexts, widening the franchise’s appeal by shifting genres and tones until striking it big with the most recent Persona games.

This recycling of design work used to be frowned upon by video game fans and some press, who demanded some kind of graphical novelty accompany every release. All sorts of dirty words would be attributed to this process, from “asset flipping” to the more broadly popular accusation of “lazy devs.” Indulging in this attitude has led to the current graphical arms race, with its skyrocketing costs and widening gaps between new game releases. But there is another way. It’s a very old way, one that is reminiscent of the 8- and 16-bit eras, where technological progress was prized but not so ruthlessly pursued, because their visual fidelity had not yet put them in spitting distance of Hollywood.

Video games are not film or television, but they all can connect with people in ways indifferent to the money spent to produce them. For Falcom and Trails, it’s about building the most singularly sprawling story in video games, which the studio achieved by putting its resources where fans care most, and getting around to the rest when it was possible. And what’s incredible is that in spite of these games’ uneven visual quality, their niche anime appeal, the lack of a massive staff, and a frankly daunting number of installments totalling many hours of gameplay — the team just might pull it off.

_{Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter launches September 19th on Steam, the PS5, and the Nintendo Switch / Switch 2.}

Tiger and the need to complicate the world we grew up in

2021-01-23T11:00:00-05:00

The year is kicking off with what’s becoming a loose tradition: a documentary about a renowned ‘90s athlete that aims to shade in a more complete picture. This time around, it’s Tiger, a two-part HBO Sports documentary about golf superstar Tiger Woods. Like The Last Dance, which chronicled Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls while reflecting on his entire career, Tiger attempts to complicate the prevailing narrative of a legend defined by his meteoric rise and equally steep fall.

Even if you didn’t know golf, you probably knew about Tiger Woods. If you came of age in the ‘90s or early aughts, it was impossible to not know about the man who brought raucous, Michael Jordan-levels of celebrity to golf — a sport so traditionally restrained that Adam Sandler was able to make a hit comedy where the only real joke was “what if a golfer got real pissed off all the time?”

Tiger Woods was a phenomenon. He had the sort of generational talent that becomes synonymous with a sport while simultaneously redefining what’s possible — despite (or because of) the fact he was so different from what came before. It also might be why Tiger Woods’ fame as a golfer was equally matched by his notoriety as gossip fodder, as his addictions and indiscretions piled up for a fall as ravenously chronicled as his rise.

Throughout most of its roughly three-hour runtime, Tiger feels like a Behind the Music special narrowly focused on Tiger’s life: directors Matthew Heineman and Matthew Hamachek are very interested in Woods’ early years as a child prodigy and the complicated relationship the golfer had with his controlling father. It’s against this backdrop that Tiger holds the golfer’s entire career and public life up for scrutiny: it portrays his unprecedented successes as owed in part to the arguably abusive upbringing his father gave him and his descent into painkiller addiction and infidelity as the response of a man who was lost after his father died.

For the most part, Tiger is successful at humanizing the person behind the headlines, even if it works at a remove. Woods himself mostly appears in archival footage, with the exception of a brief surprise appearance at the end of the film. His story is mostly told by the people who were around him at the heights of his renown: friends, rivals, journalists, and lovers form a motley crew of people caught up in the hurricane of his fame. It’s a good exploration of the casual dehumanization that’s part and parcel of modern celebrity, but at the same time, the film is so limited in scope that it can’t quite escape the lurid fascination it’s ostensibly critiquing. This is especially true in its second part, which veers into sensationalism by treating Woods’ sex scandal — the second widest-known thing about him — as a suspense narrative.

Much like The Last Dance, Tiger almost hits the mark. But the production is hindered by its subject’s involvement. Woods didn’t let anyone get too close to home, which means Tiger is missing the insight you can get with a strong critical lens. Both compensate for this by focusing on the phenomenon of fame over the men themselves. These are stories less about people and more about culture in a way that’s wholly unique to professional sports.

Athletes make for a good measuring stick of our cultural biases because their existence tends to raise certain possibly uncomfortable questions: how much agency do we afford them? How much do we fixate on their perceived moral failings? How much pushback do we give when they don’t stick to sports? Race is an inextricable part of these stories, too. Black athletes make millions for executives and entertain fans — which leads both groups to a strange feeling of ownership over them. It manifests as a benevolent frenzy when they are performing, and it can be terrifyingly hostile when they are not.

For Woods, that sense of public ownership manifested itself in the continual headlines in the early 2000s about his bad behavior. He wasn’t punished by the public just because of a salacious tabloid culture; he was punished because people felt like he tarnished the lily-white image of professional golf. He stepped out of line. It’s not hard to make the leap to other unfairly maligned athletes: Colin Kaepernick overstepped when he protested police brutality; Serena Williams has been raked over the coals for not being “sportsmanlike enough,” which is code for, ironically, what happens when a woman behaves like one of her male colleagues. Some people who like the Lakers hate that LeBron James is vocal about current events. These biases aren’t new, and they’re not going anywhere. They’re a part of how we tell our pop culture stories, bad-faith arguments that often dictate how these stories are framed in our memory.

Yet the first draft of a celebrity narrative is rarely an accurate one. It’s a managed story, carefully orchestrated by publicists and corporate interests. Star power means money, and money must be protected — yet celebrity also dictates that famous people appear relatable, that the wider public be privy to some aspects of their personal lives. And thus, infamy is sticky. If you’re Tiger Woods, the headlines can be hard to shake.

It’s also rare that pop culture affords the notorious a careful reappraisal. Lately, the stars of ‘90s gossip headlines are getting a better rap than most, sitting at the confluence of an industry in dire need of content and an audience voracious for new stories about the heroes they grew up with. Though it’s imperfect, Tiger can serve as a reminder that the easy stories aren’t necessarily the ones we should be telling. In truth, we should meet our heroes — and think about who the villains really are, too.

In Search Party, the journey from poster to influencer to monster is a slippery slope

2021-01-19T15:49:46-05:00

Much has been made of Search Party as a uniquely millennial show, like it’s a brunch line you can watch other people stand in. It’s true that the HBO Max comedy — initially about finding a missing acquaintance — is absolutely drenched in the iconography of privileged millennials; their world is Instagram-friendly and the characters are all in a self-serving relationship with New York City. But it’s also a show with a uniquely online worldview: where everything, no matter how remote, is happening to you, personally, all the time.

The new season of Search Party, which premiered last week, starts in a wildly different place than the series began. Unbeknownst to her friends, protagonist Dory Sief (Alia Shawkat) is being held hostage by an obsessed fan, imprisoned in his basement. Her friends, on the other hand, are frankly too busy to notice she’s gone missing. They’re dealing with a rush of newfound notoriety after literally getting away with murder, which happened in the show’s first season. (Later seasons have chronicled that fallout.) The very public trial in season 3 has granted Dory and her friends — her ex Drew (John Reynolds), and her best friends Elliott (John Early) and Portia (Meredith Hagner) — a degree of fame they’ve never had before, and this latest crop of episodes shows them getting used to it.

For Portia and Elliott, this notoriety is all they’ve ever wanted, and they happily use it to sell themselves: the former for a role in the film adaptation of their ordeal, the latter as a conservative pundit. Drew, wracked with self-pity, leaves the city in an attempt to live in obscurity. Dory, on the other hand, languishes alone. It’s a pretty good joke to pin a protagonist’s survival on her hopelessly narcissistic friends.

Despite this season leaning more into the show’s thriller aspects, Search Party is still resolutely a comedy that keeps its knives out for its subjects — the coddled, internet-ruined millennials who love to post. While most of the show’s plot is concerned with IRL actions like going places and talking to people, its allure is closely related to the thrill of posting and the intoxicating effect of being able to mythologize yourself in the eyes of a growing number of followers.

But the posting life is a dangerous one. Search Party, among other things, is a slow-motion horror story about how the millennial snake eats its own tail. Fundamentally, it’s a show about what happens when we believe the lies we tell about ourselves and then what happens when those same lies expand outward and make contact with an impressionable public.

In its scenes that take place in the basement of a deranged fan, Search Party becomes a series about what happens when other people take the lies you told about yourself as gospel truths — about the suffocating vacuum that’s left when you realize people stopped caring about what’s real a long time ago. At the heart of it all is Sief: poster-turned-influencer-turned-monster, acquitted by the public but damned by her own conscience. She’s also imprisoned by the sort of parasocial relationship she first formed with her missing classmate and then encouraged others to build with her.

It’s worth noting that Dory doesn’t actually post much throughout Search Party. Even so, the reductive optics of social media are still how she and her friends interact with the world: everything is a place to be seen or not be seen; there are names to tag along with the constant negotiation between their occupations and their ambitions.

None of this is terribly different from the way upwardly mobile young people have navigated New York City in popular culture — you could say similar things about Sex and the City — but Search Party focuses its satire on how quickly millennial life has proven that a lifestyle of consumption can quickly become consumed itself.

WandaVision is an ode to sitcoms

2021-01-15T16:42:49-05:00

When times are tough, the sitcom is a refuge. Like late-night talk shows, the multicamera sitcom is one of the oldest formats in television. It’s affordable and efficient for the people who produce it, and comforting and familiar to viewers. Problems are introduced and solved in 30 minutes or less, usually with the realization that they were never that big of a deal in the first place. Characters have signature tics and catchphrases we love them for; in time, they come to feel like our friends. The best of the bunch are syndicated long enough that we’re able to introduce them to our children. What a pleasant thing it is, to retreat into the uncomplicated pleasure of a sitcom — a half-hour white lie to tell ourselves whenever the real world feels like a little too much.

Perhaps this is why WandaVision, at least at the start, takes the form of a sitcom. The new series, which premiered its first two episodes on Disney Plus today, is the first Marvel Cinematic Universe TV show made for Disney Plus. It’s also the first MCU project following 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, arriving after a year without any new MCU installments. As a comeback, it’s an odd one: the first image you’re greeted with is two Avengers side characters inexplicably being reintroduced as a married couple in the theme song to a black-and-white ‘50s sitcom. They’re driving to their new home, she in a wedding dress, he in a dapper suit, delighted to start their idyllic life together. But something feels off.

The boldness of this play — and the way it is precisely the opposite of what we know Marvel movies to be — makes it a perfect return. It’ll be intriguing for super fans curious about what the point is and how it might connect to the larger franchise, and it will be intriguing to those who might feel a little burned out on superheroes.

Marvel projects are gilded genre lilies. They like to pay lip-service to one genre of entertainment — Ant-Man has the cadence of a heist movie, for example, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier is kind of a conspiracy thriller — while they mostly serve as vehicles for generic action sequences. WandaVision, in at least its first two episodes, seems more sincere than that: the first episode plays its conceit of classic sitcom homage almost entirely straight.

As WandaVision presents it, Wanda Maximoff and Vision are a married couple who have just moved into a well-to-do suburb. They’re trying to fit in while also hiding the fact that he’s a robot of sorts and she’s got superpowers. In the premiere, this manifests in a very Bewitched-esque plot where Vision invites his boss home for dinner without telling Wanda. (She saves the day by using her powers to create an impressive meal without anyone noticing.)

Quietly, however, things get stranger. The ads in the show seem a little off. In the second episode, there’s an unremarked-upon time jump; the iconography of the ‘50s gives way to the fashion of the ‘60s. There’s also no allusion to Maximoff and Vision’s career as Avengers or anything they’ve been up to in previous Marvel movies. (The show does not mention that Vision, as far as we know, is dead — killed by Thanos at the end of Avengers: Infinity War and not brought back to life for Avengers: Endgame.)

Slowly, the fantasy starts to crumble. The characters joke about how Wanda and Vision do not have an anniversary or favorite song; and then, more overtly, the show offers glimpses behind the curtain to suggest that Wanda and Vision are being watched or that things that do not belong in this Pleasantville-like setting are somehow seeping in. The comics-literate will tell you that there is a good reason for all of the mannered strangeness. The Wanda Maximoff of the comics literature has been known to manipulate reality, and it would make sense that WandaVision might be building to that kind of revelation.

But no matter how and when WandaVision decides to explain itself, the comics lore of it all is only as good or interesting as the story it’s embedded in. WandaVision works well enough without too much knowledge of the decade of films preceding it. Fundamentally, you’re watching a superhuman couple that’s seemingly trapped in a sitcom. It makes even more sense, however, when you recall these characters shared a moment of severe trauma the last time they were together. It makes you wonder if maybe this is where they want to be. Sitcoms are a great place to hide when the world gets to be a little too much.

In its third season, American Gods is the most fascinating disaster on TV

2021-01-15T12:36:44-05:00

One of the miracles of any good television show is that it even works at all. First consider the countless people working across departments and disciplines needed to make a single episode happen; and then consider that they all have to do it anywhere between eight and 20-ish times a year, and that the result has to make sense to millions of people who cannot wait to be unimpressed. There are a lot of places to mess up! And yet we hear about so few mistakes. Which is why it’s a pretty big story when something as large as American Gods goes awry.

The Starz drama was a special kind of disaster: it premiered to considerable acclaim only to fall to pieces in between its first and second seasons, losing its high-profile showrunners and several cast members. Between the second season finale and the premiere of the latest season, the show’s new management fired Orlando Jones, whose fiery portrayal of the trickster god Anansi was beloved and one of the show’s brightest stars. (Allegations surrounding Jones’ dismissal are troubling.) This makes the third season more surprising: after all that chaos, it’s turned out totally fine.

Season 3 also doesn’t resemble what drew many to American Gods in the first place. The radical experimentation is gone. There are no fiery monologues, mind-bending sex scenes, or powerful vignettes that evoke the immigrant experience and humanity’s relationship with faith. American Gods is no longer interested in that sort of thing. Instead, it’s concerned with rebuilding itself and doing the fascinating work of making a season that’s equal parts a total do-over and a straightforward continuation of the story that started in episode one.

And so we are reintroduced to Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle), a man living under an alias after a falling out with his employer, Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane). Quickly, we’re reminded why: Mr. Wednesday is not just some impossible boss. He’s Odin, the Norse All-Father — and also Shadow’s IRL dad. Until recently, Shadow was driving Wednesday across America to recruit the country’s forgotten gods, soliciting their aid in a coming war between them and the nation’s new ones. (I should probably note here that in the world of American Gods, worship is what makes them godlike, so the forgotten old gods are mostly normal people with a few mythic tricks.) These new gods represent our modern obsessions: new media, technology, and so on. But Shadow is done with that. He makes a home for himself in Lakeside, Wisconsin, an idyllic small town where gods new and old will hopefully leave him the hell alone.

Naturally, they do not, because Shadow has a part to play. So does his dead wife Laura (Emily Browning), who has been wandering Earth as an undead revenant with the leprechaun Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber, sadly missing this season outside of some flashbacks), along with an eclectic cast of gods and those who know them.

All of this is rather perfunctory. The third season of American Gods is an attempt to restore lost momentum from the second season, taking advantage of a grace note in the novel it’s slowly adapting — its protagonist’s sojourn in a small town — to rebuild itself. The show can’t introduce many new pieces because it’s too busy trying to account for the old ones, and its tools are limited because it has committed to a relatively faithful adaptation of the novel on which it is based. Its destination is already set, which means that in the meantime, the show has to get a little creative in how it gets there.

The result is something that’s underwhelming to watch but fascinating to think about. In our modern, tightly managed, IP-driven entertainment environment, it’s rare to see an ongoing production implode in such a catastrophic manner and then somehow manage to right itself. In this, it’s a pretty good reminder that television is a uniquely malleable and chaotic medium. (This despite the recent popularity of the prestige format, which often has shorter runs and planned endings that make it easy to forget that having a strict narrative plan is often a recipe for disaster in TV.)

Actors depart, new showrunners are brought in, and the collaborative nature of the medium makes for stories that veer far away from what was originally intended. Consider Breaking Bad, which initially planned to kill fan-favorite character Jesse Pinkman, and began its acclaimed final season with a shot that the writers did not know how they would justify.

American Gods’ third season effort to right itself has undoubtedly left us with a lesser show — call it the underwhelming cable adaptation as opposed to the exciting premium project it started as. But its chaotic journey is also a worthwhile reminder: despite all the promise of peak TV’s bold new frontier where just about any kind of show can be made, this is still the old gods’ domain.

Dickinson’s second season trades death for fame

2021-01-11T15:57:27-05:00

Writing is often the domain of obsessives, and Emily Dickinson — at least, the witty, chaotic version of her portrayed by Hailee Steinfeld on Apple TV Plus’ Dickinson — gives herself over to her obsessions fully. In the first season of the show, which is an irreverent, Riverdale-style take on the life of the famed young poet, her obsession was Death, played by Wiz Khalifa. (Like I said: irreverent.) In the latest season, Steinfeld’s Emily is obsessed with fame. Lovers of dramatic irony have a lot to dig into here.

The new season of Dickinson is a lot like the first: equal parts over-the-top comedy and earnest teen soap. But this time around, the show has a touch more restraint. It keeps the outrageous excess — Dickinson’s second season is still an anachronistic comedy whose teens behave as if they were in a modern CW soap, while its adults are all caricatures of 19th century historical figures — but it builds in a little more self-control.

In the show’s first season, the ethos of transgression for transgression’s sake resulted in some moments of poor taste; the show, which is about teens in white middle-class Amherst, would frequently drop hip-hop beats to underline how edgy they were, for example. The series often undermined its irreverence by calling too much attention to it, and if there’s one big improvement in what’s been shown of season 2 so far — the first three episodes of which are streaming now — it’s in that particular regard. In season 2, Dickinson is content to merely be the show it is: which is, in fact, pretty great.

In the second season’s premiere, Dickinson breaks the proverbial fourth wall and addresses the viewer directly, calling attention to the difference between the show and the actual history of Emily Dickinson’s life. It notes, curiously, that the story is moving into a portion of Emily’s life that is not as well-documented: the start of what would be a 30-year seclusion where the only thing scholars know she did for sure was write, and write a lot. Future episodes may or not make this clear, but this kind of prologue makes you wonder about the show’s intent. Dickinson is a tongue-in-cheek retelling of history that’s already inventing a lot. What might noting the ambiguity of historical record signal? More departures from history?

And so Dickinson’s new season wrestles with what could have been. Emily is tempted to forgo her longstanding practice of writing only for herself and her friend and former paramour Sue — who’s now in a troubled marriage with Emily’s brother Austin — and she’s entertaining the thought of being published. Meanwhile, new players enter. Samuel Bowles (Finn Jones), the editor of the Springfield Republican, might have an interest in publishing her.

Returning characters have their storylines develop. Henry (Chinaza Uche), a Black man who does work for the Dickinsons, for example, is starting to secretly publish and organize Amherst’s Black community. This is all to say that the second season of Dickinson is starting to make a more pronounced effort to be more than a progressive take on a white woman’s story, albeit one played by an actor of color. It seems to have ambitions to be a progressive and very funny take on the era as a whole, and that makes the world of the show even richer.

In Dickinson, Emily’s world is expanding, even as we know from history that tragedy looms. Soon, she will recede from the world; soon, the nation will split in two and erupt in open warfare; and soon, all of these young people will find their perceptions of their equally young nation challenged.

It’s the sort of thing Emily would write a poem about.

2020’s best epic was the X-Men’s struggle to build a better world

2021-01-04T09:00:00-05:00

For the first time in what feels like ages, the entertainment I looked forward to most was a handful of monthly comic books about the X-Men. Week after week this fall — a time absolutely lousy with great books, movies, TV, and video games — what I really wanted most was to pour over words and pictures about Marvel Comics’ deep roster of mutants, and a story about them unlike any I’ve seen before.

It can’t be understated how bold and interesting X-Men comics are right now. Following a soft reboot in the twin 2019 miniseries written by Jonathan Hickman with art by R.B. Silva and Pepe Larraz, House of X and Powers of X (the best place to start reading), the mutants of the Marvel Universe have banded together to form the mutant nation of Krakoa. They have decided they are tired waiting for humanity at large to accept their existence and will instead build a place for themselves, whether or not humanity at large likes it.

“Did you honestly think that we were going to sit around forever and just take it?”

These mutants — former heroes of the X-Men superhero team and their former adversaries alike — have banded together on the terrain of a living island (also named Krakoa) to begin the messy business of building a nation. There is a new language, new rituals, new creeds — the building blocks of a culture are being made in real time. The results have been among the best comics of the year, full of political intrigue, love stories unfolding across millennia, and yeah, even a whole series (Maruaders by Gerry Duggan and a lineup of killer artists) about pirates.

This messy, complicated new status quo is comics at its best, rich with possibility and things to daydream about. It even made a 22-part crossover — the absolute worst stunt that modern superhero comics love to pull — utterly compelling. X of Swords, as this crossover was called, swept this newfound nation into a magical struggle in an unknown world, as the X-Men were forced into a tournament where they had to fight challengers with swords. This was the premise that was supposed to fuel twenty-two whole comic books, and they absolutely did it, subverting every expectation about what a story like that could entail along the way.

Most of the fun of these comics comes from seeing how the wider world reacts to Krakoa’s existence, and some of the conflicts are wild. In one early X-Men story, Krakoa is invaded by an elderly trio of radical super-botanists named Hordeculture (seriously). In X-Men #4 — one of the first and very best comics released in 2020 — the leaders of Krakoa go to Davos and dress down the economic leaders of the world over dinner. In the more action-oriented X-Force, Krakoa is threatened by international black ops squads sent by people who see Krakoa as a ticking time bomb.

For this moment, they just feel like stories made for anyone curious enough to read them

But mostly, in a year full of news that was a nonstop assault for anyone but a few — mostly white, mostly wealthy — X-Men comics were a joy, simply because they’re a story about characters who, by definition (every big X-Men story must note how they are hated and feared), are always losing and finally showed them refusing to play the same broken game.

“The world has told me that I was less when I knew that I was more,” Cyclops says, early on in House of X. “Did you honestly think that we were going to sit around forever and just take it?”

Part of what makes the X-Men endure is that there’s a certain malleability to the mutant metaphor. For years, fans and writers have compared the X-Men to the struggle for Civil Rights; more recently, the metaphor has been embraced as an exploration of queerness. No matter how you read them, if you’re from some kind of marginalized group, it’s easy to identify with the seemingly futile struggle of having to advocate for yourself and others in spaces hostile to you, spaces you should belong in if it weren’t for systemic injustices that have shut you out. I have tired of the fight for diversity in spaces that are only interested in the optics of diversity. There is something cathartic and beautiful in a story where Cyclops — the face of the X-Men for just about all 60 years of their existence — says we’re all done taking it. He’s found an answer he believes in, and he’s going to do the work to make it real.

It also helps that, currently, the X-Men are a comics-only concern. Sure, they’re still owned by Disney and since The New Mutants came out this year, their previous film franchise is not even that far in the rearview. But they’re also not yet a slide on some presentation about the next four years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, at least for a little while. They’re not a reminder of their owner’s stranglehold on the wider entertainment industry. For this moment, they just feel like stories made for anyone curious enough to read them. Stories for people trying to find an answer that they believe in, to build a world they want to make real.