CHICAGO—With dumbfounded question marks and astounded exclamation points littering the margins of almost every page, the handwritten annotations found Wednesday in a secondhand copy of The Autobiography Of Malcolm X made it painfully obvious that the previous owner of the book was white. “It’s amazing how many of the notes in here start with ‘But what about…’ or just say, ‘That’s going a little too far,’” the volume’s current owner, local man James Hawkins, told reporters as he flipped to a page in which Malcolm X is accused of reverse discrimination in a pencil scrawl underlined three times. “Every time the text refers to something like the ‘devil white man,’ the phrase has been circled and someone’s written ‘Hmm…’ off to the side. And when it starts mentioning the Nation of Islam, they just wrote ‘Terrorist?’” Hawkins went on to observe that the annotations don’t go past the first chapter.
With Resident Evil 4’s remake due out this week, Capcom’s marketing for the title is swinging into high gear, and while that would not normally move any of my needles, this little anime they had made for the game is just too good.
Its full name is “Resident Evil 4 Anime PV Resident Evil Masterpiece Theater – ‘Leon and the Mysterious Village’ EP 1″, which isn’t the catchiest, but it at least gets the point across. It only runs for 56 seconds (and that’s including title screens), but it is 56 seconds of pure joy for anyone who has ever played this game across its 117 previous releases.
“Story of my life” indeed, my guy:
Resident Evil 4 Anime PV Resident Evil Masterpiece Theater – “Leon and the Mysterious Village” EP 1
If you were thinking that animation style looked familiar, that’s because—as the credits at the end state—the clip was made by storied Japanese studio Nippon Animation, who among many other things are known for their old show Masterpiece Theater (hence the name in this case) which would showcase short anime episodes every week that were adaptations of existing works.
While the remake isn’t out until March 24, reviews for the game went live last week, and for the 188th time people are finding that, yes, Resident Evil 4 is a good video game:
Out March 24 on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, the Resident Evil 4 remake updates one of the best entries in Capcom’s long running survival horror series. Following in the footsteps of previous remakes for Resident Evil 2 and 3, the newest game still sees Special Agent Leon S. Kennedy sent to a Spanish village to rescue the President’s daughter from a weird cult. This time things are just much prettier, the controls and UI are more modern, and there’s some new content like additional side-quests.
A number of places like IGN have given the game perfect scores, and it currently sits at over 90 on Metacritic. At the same time, not everyone is under the remake’s spell. “Several smart changes; a few disappointing cuts,” tweetedEdge magazine’s deputy editor, Chris Schilling. “When it’s good it’s brilliant, but largely in the exact same ways as the original.”
The internet’s been buzzy of late for the freshly announced Persona 5 spin-off game, Phantom of the Night (P5X). Fans were intrigued by the new characters, but they were also excited to meet their old favorites again. But when I looked at the screenshots, I noticed one person missing: Goro Akechi. What gives, Atlus? You can’t just pretend that Persona 5 Royal’s main antagonist wasn’t also the series’ most compelling character. He was a true member of the Phantom Thieves group, and his haters can die mad about it.
Goro Akechi is a high school student who acts as a rival for the main protagonist of Persona 5. In the original game, he’s known for betraying the party after pretending to be their friend. He also does this in the enhanced Royal release, but this 2019 update of the game adds additional scenes for him. These social interactions make Akechi feel more like a deeply troubled friend, rather than a shithead cop who had a change of heart at the very last second.
Like most RPG antagonists, Akechi has a tragic backstory. His mother died when he was young, and he grew up as an orphan (who generally face considerable social stigma in Japan). Akechi wanted revenge against his neglectful and cruel father, so he cooperated with him in order to get close enough to assassinate him. Unfortunately, his father also planned to assassinate his son all along. Akechi eventually recognized that the protagonist is a similar person to him, and chose to sacrifice himself to ensure the escape of the heroic Phantom Thieves.
It also helped that in Royal, players got to spend more time with him in an entirely new arc. The post-game added a new semester in which reality has been completely changed. In this altered Tokyo, every character has their personal tragedy undone, and each person lives a happy life. This is the only scenario in which Akechi can be saved. However, he rejects the artificial world and the false happiness that comes with it. Since he’s implied to have died in the original plotline, defeating this world’s owner means he will cease to exist. He doesn’t care. For him, dying is preferable to living under the thumb of some higher power.
But I wanted him to live! When you pursue the ending in which the artificial world is destroyed, Royal teases the possibility that Akechi might have survived. And so I held my breath for the possibility of being able to see Akechi again in the sequel game Scramble. I never ended up finishing that musou game despite completing so many others. Akechi wasn’t in it, and that was definitely part of the reason. I wasn’t terribly invested in a P5 in which he didn’t exist.
I hoped that it was a fluke. Akechi is good, and he deserves to appear in other spinoff games. Now it seems like P5X might let me down too, and I’m starting to lose hope that Atlus remembers who he is. This is homophobia, and I won’t stand for it. Atlus, give us my feral bird son or give me death.
While Japanese games of varying genres are enjoying success these days, the 2000s and 2010s weren’t as kind, especially in Western markets. Since then, there’s been a lot of speculation as to why Japanese games struggled during these years, often from westerners themselves, with some pointing to key game design trends. But recent comments from Final Fantasy’s creator Hironobu Sakaguchi suggest that the decline of unique console hardware, exclusives, and cultural differences is the likely cause.
By the late 1990s, Japanese games like Final Fantasy VII, Chrono Trigger, or Castlevania had become must-play experiences for their inspired stories, excellent technical presentation, and engaging gameplay. But the following two decades were a different story. Anticipated entries like Final Fantasy XIII failed to reach sales expectations with the rise of Western RPGs such as TK (and many felt that train came off the rails starting with 2001’s Final Fantasy X). Newer attempts at franchises like Sakaguchi’s Blue Dragon on Xbox 360 in 2006 were met with lukewarm reception at best. Meanwhile, Western-made games like Mass Effect had become the new gaming sensations. While some may point to declining interests in traditional, linear forms of storytelling in games as a likely reason, Hironobu Sakaguchi suspects that dramatic changes in the hardware used to play games presented a tough road for Japanese devs to follow.
Sakaguchi: ‘Consoles like the NES and PlayStation were very specific hardware’
Speaking to IGN along with Castlevania senior producer Koji Igarashi, Sakaguchi discussed why he feels Japanese games were of “higher quality” for systems with ‘“specific hardware”’ like the NES or PSX. The answer, as many students of video game history might suspect, has to do with those very consoles. With specific hardware configurations produced by Japanese manufacturers, devs at the time had to become experts in how to best utilize these devices, and there was no language barrier to gaining these skill sets. Sakaguchi said:
“[Specific, Japanese-made consoles] made it easier for Japanese developers to master the hardware, as we could ask Nintendo or Sony directly in Japanese. This is why—I realize it might be impolite to say this—Japanese games were of a higher quality at the time. As a result, Japanese games were regarded as more fun, but when the hardware became easier to develop for, things quickly changed.”
Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi added that the “long history of PC culture” in the West was better adapted to the hardware trends that would follow in the 2000s, a trend which continues to this day. The PS5 and Xbox Series consoles more closely match PC hardware than dedicated gaming boxes perhaps ever have. That change wasn’t easy.
Igarashi describes the journey as a tough growing pain. “Japanese developers could no longer rely on their speciality as console developers,” he said, “and had to master PC development.”
While some may be quick to point out, perhaps, that the PS3’s unique and troublesomeCell Broadband Engine certainly fits the criteria of “specific hardware,” it was maybe too specific. Though Sony made incredible promises for its performance (and odd commercials), its unique architecture was a chore for developers around the world, leading Sony to pivot away from it for the PS4. But the 2000s and 2010s were also a time where Japanese games, particularly Final Fantasy, made the switch to multi-platform releases. Devil May Cry 4 was another notable series that made the jump to other platforms. This shattered the trend of focusing on a specific set of hardware constraints. And at the time it didn’t really go over too well. It seems natural now to expect a Final Fantasy to appear on multiple consoles, but the announcement of XIII coming to Xbox 360 was quite the surprise in the 2000s.
Sakaguchi believes that where we play our games also makes a difference
Sakaguchi also said that the “cultural differences” between Japan and the West make meaningful differences in what kinds of games are made. “In the West,” Sakaguchi said, “children often get their own room from a very young age, whilst in Japan the whole family sleeps together in the same room.” He continued, “such small cultural differences can be felt through the games we make today […] I believe that cherishing my Japanese cultural background is what attracts people towards my games in the first place.”
While I for one can say that my private bedroom probably enhanced my experience of Final Fantasy VII, Sakaguchi’s comments concerning focused mastery of specific hardware likely explained why such epic experiences often felt so unique to the platforms I was playing them on. Or maybe that’s just the nostalgia talking.
In 2023, Pokémon is part of the fabric of our lives. It exists all around us, has for decades, and even if you’re not a fan you will at least know the basic premise.
They’re Pokémon! You catch em all! They fight, they faint, they go in a little ball, there are some kids, some of them (the Pokémon, not the kids) look like dinosaurs, some of them look like animals. You would know that much just be being alive in the 21st century, as you would have been exposed to the series, repeatedly, everywhere from the movie theatre to the supermarket to the clothes section of a department store.
Which is why it’s sometimes extremely fun to look back to the times we didn’t all know about Pokémon, and there are few examples better to illustrate this period of human history than this commercial (uploaded by Dinosaur Dracula, who found it on an old VHS), made for the US market in 1999 for the Pokémon trading card game’s launch in the market (the first video games, meanwhile, had only just been released in the US in late 1998):
How the hell are we going to market this to American kids?, you can hear the suits asking across a 90s boardroom table, before someone raises a hand and tentatively says like sports, they know sports, and everyone else cheers and slaps each other on the back and says you just bought yourself a raise, Thompson.
It’s not the worst idea! To its credit the commercial has aged extremely well, helped by the fact Pokémon still has an incredibly active tournament scene, and at no point is it ever embarrassed or afraid to embrace what it is. OK, maybe the “You got game” part has not aged well, but everything else has.
The following contains spoilers for The Last of Us show and both games.
Inevitably, someone will read everything I write here and chalk it up to “being mad about the show doing something different from the games,” but reader, I implore you to consider that just because something is different, that doesn’t mean it is inherently good or above critique. I’ve got beef with the version of Ellie in HBO’s The Last of Us show. The show has constantly been oscillating between big swings and faithful recreations, and some of its departures from the game have certainly been for the better. But certain scenes, dialogue, and even behind-the-scenes discussions surrounding the character of Ellie are leaning into a narrative that I think already does her journey through violent grief a huge disservice and we haven’t even seen it through, yet.
To get it out of the way, none of this is on Bella Ramsey, who portrays the young girl in the adaptation. She’s doing an excellent job with the material she’s been given, and it’s been a truly refreshing experience in even the most faithfully recreated scenes to see Ellie played by a teenager. Ashley Johnson’s performance in the game still captured the character’s youth, but it had the polish of an adult playing a child character. No, my beef is with showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, who are leaning harder toward a narrative suggested by The Last of Us’ marketing, rather than the one that plays out in the games themselves. I’m specifically referring to how the show frames Ellie’s relationship with violence, and how it portrays her not as a child who had to learn how to fight to protect herself and the ones she cares about, but as the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a kid who kills animals in their backyard for fun.
The showrunners say Ellie is “activated” by and likes violence in the show
Initially, I didn’t pick up what Mazin and Druckmann were putting down when I first watched the series’ premiere episode. In the final scene of the episode, Ellie witnesses a brutal murder of a FEDRA soldier at the hands of Joel, played by Pedro Pascal. She watches in what I initially read as shock, but as Mazin describes it in the Inside the Episode video for the pilot (skip to about the 4:30 mark), this isn’t a stunned silence. It’s her being “activated.” She “likes” watching the violence unfold. She likes the idea of being defended to brutal ends, and the idea of this dude getting “punished” for the indiscretion of holding them at gunpoint.
Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku
Perhaps, at the time, I read her silence as shock because of my familiarity with the game, where she repeatedly expresses shock and discomfort early on at the lengths Joel must go to to keep them alive. But the framing of Ellie as a person who actively likes violence rather than one who turns to it out of necessity has become much more apparent throughout the season’s run. Episode three, which is otherwise a beautiful story about how violence is sometimes the end result of loving and protecting someone in the post-apocalypse, has a scene where Ellie finds an infected pinned down by a bunch of rubble. Rather than dealing with it efficiently and getting back to business, Ellie takes her time to hover over the poor bastard and look him over like he’s a dying animal. She slices open his head with her switchblade and sees what’s under the skin of an infected. When she finally stabs him in the head and kills him, she pulls back with a satisfied expression that’s unnerving. Again, Ramsey is putting in the work here.
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Joel never sees this scene unfold, because it’s important that he views her as an innocent kid and not a weird, violence-loving pervert, but, horrifyingly enough, the character who does see this side of her is David, the predatory, cannibalistic cult leader she meets in the series’ eighth episode. When he’s got her caged up in his cannibal kitchen, he says he can’t let her out because she would take her switchblade and gut him. Which, like, you’re a cannibal who kidnapped her, so spare us the judgment when she naturally wants to kill someone who abducted her. But he goes on to say she has a “violent heart.” Which, unfortunately, I guess is true in this version of the character.
The reason this doesn’t sit well with me is because it’s not only fundamentally at odds with Ellie’s story in the game, but because it feels like it’s rooted in a simplistic and reductive view of her story in the source material, a view that was largely perpetuated by Naughty Dog in its own marketing campaign for The Last of Us Part II.
What is Ellie’s relationship with violence in the games?
Let’s rewind to the beginning of Ellie’s story in the game. When she and Joel first meet, she’s not had a ton of exposure to violence. At least, not the kind of human brutality Joel would expose her to throughout the first game. When Joel kills the FEDRA forces there, Ellie is taken aback, having thought they would just hold them up as they made their escape. Eventually, Ellie comes to accept the necessity of this violence as they make their cross-country journey, leading to her first kill in order to save Joel from a raider. She’s sick about it, and it results in tension between her and Joel because she picked up a gun despite his deliberately never giving her one. The two then bond over him teaching her how to use a rifle and then giving her a pistol. It’s a point of newfound trust, and it illustrates that Ellie takes on violence for necessity’s sake.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
The equivalent scene in the show is a painfully drawn-out sequence where Ellie shoots a raider in the leg and while he pleads for his life, Joel tells her to get to safety while he handles it. Then the two jump right into talking about the effects killing can have on your soul. In an abstract way, this feels like it’s setting up Part II’s themes in a more overt way, which has been a running theme throughout the season. We can see the show pretty deliberately leading into the events of the sequel for season two with a number of things, including references to characters like Dina and framing Joel’s actions in a sympathetic way. Part II sees Ellie going down a dark, violent path, so perhaps the thinking here is that by asserting Ellie is a violent person, the things she does later will seem more consistent with our understanding of her character. But the foundation of Ellie’s relationship with violence is fundamentally different, and I don’t think it’s for the better when, in the games, the contrast between who Ellie was and who she became is so fundamental to her story.
Part of what makes The Last of Us Part II effective is that it feels like a transformative story for Ellie. She’s gone from a child who was horrified by Joel’s violence to a young adult who travels to Seattle in the grip of righteous fury. She goes on this crusade to find a group who killed Joel and at least kill Abby, the one who dealt the killing blow. She goes under the pretense that this is what she wants to do, but as she goes on her revenge tour, each subsequent kill wears on her.
The death of Nora, which is a loaded scene for a lot of reasons, is where this starts to become clear. Ellie commits one of her most heinous acts of violence in the game during an interrogation, and in the next scene, she’s overwhelmed with guilt at the lengths she had to go to. She has to be comforted by Dina, afraid her partner will see a monster where she once saw a future. Next, in an attempt to extort information about Abby’s whereabouts from her friends Mel and Owen, she tries to use Joel’s signature interrogation technique of asking one party for information and confirming with the second. If the information matches up, she knows it’s accurate. If not, well, that’s up to her discretion. But despite her attempts, the confrontation goes off the rails and ends with Ellie killing both of them in a messy scrap. She then realizes Mel was pregnant, and is immediately overcome with anxiety at having killed an innocent party. Throuhgout her spiral into violence, Ellie is repeatedly confronted with the possibility that she’s not cut out for what she signed on for.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
Eventually, she leaves Seattle without killing Abby. The fact that she killed everyone other than the person she views as most responsible for Joel’s death wears on her, but Dina is growing sick from her own pregnancy, and everyone around her is telling her this is the best course of action. They argue that Abby losing those close to her is an equivalent punishment for taking the life of Joel. She reluctantly goes along with the plan, up until Abby shows up at their hideout and forces her to go along with the plan by way of a beatdown and a threat.
After this, Ellie tries to live a normal life in the post-apocalypse by living on a farm with Dina and their son JJ. But she’s still dealing with PTSD surrounding the death of Joel, and ultimately leaves her family behind to pursue Abby once more. Once she tracks her down to Santa Barbara, California, the two come to blows one more time. Ellie gets the upper hand and nearly drowns her on the California beach. But in a moment of clarity, she lets Abby go, realizing this was never going to bring her the peace she wanted.
What does violence actually mean in The Last of Us?
Whether driven by survival or grief, The Last of Us has never framed violence as something characters take an overt pleasure in. Sure, when Ellie kills Jordan—who was a snarky piece of shit—in Part II, it’s satisfying to fuck him up. But it has an underlying meaning beyond Ellie liking acts of carnage. The fact that she has gone through a fair bit of the series uncomfortable or traumatized by violence makes her giving into it a moment of noticeable change, and her repeated struggle to persevere in her quest illustrates that despite her compulsion, this isn’t who she is.
HBO Max
Meanwhile, the showrunners are over here telling us that this is absolutely who Ellie is. It’s alluding to a version of this story that feels more in line with Naughty Dog’s marketing of The Last of Us Part II than it does the story it actually told. As a person who found Ellie (and Joel and Abby, for that matter) profoundly sympathetic by the end of the sequel, it’s worrisome to me that HBO’s version of her is leaning into a perverse vision of what violence means in The Last of Us.
Unfortunately, Part II’s marketing campaign lost the thread of grief and love-driven violence that’s at the core of the game and swaths of the internet think The Last of Us is about how violence is bad, and players should feel bad for doing it. How did this interpretation become so prominent? Naughty Dog itself said this is what the game is about. In an interview with Launcher, series director Neil Druckmann described the dueling protagonist structure as having been at least partially inspired by his witnessing of an Israeli soldier’s lynching (there’s an argument to be made that centrist Israeli politics run through the game’s veins), and a desire he felt to hurt those responsible. This was followed by immense guilt and a desire to explore that idea in Part II’s structure. The idea is that you would play through Ellie’s segments killing Abby’s friends, then find out at the end that Abby killed Joel in her own grief.
I don’t think it’s wrong to be judgemental of Joel, Ellie, or Abby’s actions. The game itself is pretty overtly critical of them throughout. Ellie’s killing of Abby’s friends is always treated as something that comes with a cost, as nearly every kill she commits is framed as mentally taxing on her. Abby, meanwhile, spends her entire half of the game trying to make up for the way she tortured and killed Joel because she’s trying to “lighten the load.” But nevertheless, we have to act out the play until it reaches its natural conclusion, which leads to the same dissonance we can feel in the first game’s final segment where Joel kills several innocent people to save Ellie.
For characters like Joel and Ellie, violence is a language spoken in a world where they’ve learned and been taught that it’s the only way they can communicate. It’s all the things that the characters feel, that they navigate, that they express through violence (or, in key moments, the choice not to use violence) that really matters. The desire to protect. The desire to avenge. The decision to forgive. But despite Part II delving into themes of grief and forgiveness through violence, the narrative that this series is about violence permeates through how we talk about it. That’s on Naughty Dog because that was the message the studio put out. But I find everything the company said about the game in marketing materials and interviews, such as the assertion that the game was “about hate” when it was first revealed, suspect after it became clear the studio had been deliberately obfuscating what Part II actually was. I understand this was done in an effort to keep the shocking event that sets the game in motion hidden ahead of launch, but the second Joel died instead of showing up in scenes the trailers showed, I approached the game with no further preconceptions.
Image: Naughty Dog
The sanding down of The Last of Us’ thematic makeup is Naughty Dog’s own doing, but that framing was what people had to work with. Much of the criticism surrounding Part IIfocuses on its relationship to violence, concluding that it’s meant to be a heavy-handed lesson in the cost of giving in to some base urge to harm one another. In post-release interviews, Druckmann has gone on record saying that the company’s messaging around Part II wasn’t reflective of what the game was actually about. But that’s the video game industry. Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to put these games in front of people, and 20+ hour experiences must be reduced to bullet points you can put on marketing copy. It ultimately didn’t affect the prestige of the franchise, as Part II went on to sell 10 million copies and earn countless Game of the Year awards. However, HBO’s television adaptation feels cognizant of the series’ decade of discourse in a lot of ways, and in this case, not for the better.
In some ways, this has worked out in the show’s favor, because stories like Bill and Frank’s get to take on new life as a sign that love is worth living for instead of being a cautionary tale about how caring about people is bad for your self-preservation. But this particular change feels like it’s an odd turn toward a marketing campaign that has ultimately soured a lot of the discussion around The Last of Us and the character at its center. That marketing and the ideas it helped to cement hang over the series to this day. It can be hard to see past those notions when you’re actually playing through a game that, if it is viewed as being about how violence is bad and you should feel bad for doing it, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It does hold up, however, when viewed primarily as a story of grief and, ultimately, acceptance. After watching Ellie go through so much inner turmoil as she fought her way through her demons while playing Part II, I don’t understand why the show seems to want us to view violence as something that excites her rather than as something she’ll one day reluctantly resort to as her own pain manifests. Yeah, some people will read this and minimize it to some kind of adaptation purity nonsense. I just hope the core of what The Last of Us is isn’t squandered under what a marketing team said it was to fit all its nuances on the back of a box.
PALO ALTO, CA—Noting the eerie feeling of being surveilled, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly expressed concern Tuesday that Facebook was listening to him after he received a targeted ad for a shirt that read “I Just Laid Off 10,000 Employees.” “How could it even know I just said that? It’s got to be using my goddamn microphone,” said Zuckerberg, adding that he had all his privacy settings turned on, and yet Facebook was pushing this item perfectly suited to his tastes. “It must have been listening to the party I was having to celebrate the layoffs. Sheesh, I’ve got to delete my cookies more often. It’s so invasive to feel tracked like this. It’s a little dystopian how it just showed me a shirt that says ‘I went to HARVARD and destroyed my FRIENDSHIP and love hunting with SPEARS.’” At press time, Zuckerberg confirmed he had bought the shirt from the advertisement.
Like most people who require water to live, you probably like H20 a normal amount—but you definitely don’t like water as much as this famous Nintendo fan. They’re so well-known and beloved that they’ve even been featured in the official plumber website for the Super Mario Bros. movie.
Super Mario Bros. Plumbing is a website for a fake plumbing service where Mario and Luigi come to unclog your pipes. Not like that, you pervert. Anyway, the website is an elaborate movie marketing campaign that even features a real live van tour. If you look down at the carousel section of the website, you’ll see a review by someone named Pipe_Dreamz. “Amazing looking water courtesy of the brothers,” it says.
For the non-chronically online, Pipe_Dreamz is likely a reference to a Miiverse user named MARIO WiiU. They spent at least a couple of years commenting on the graphical quality of video game water on Nintendo’s official forums. Their bio describes them as “a hardcore Nintendo fan” who has been playing the publisher’s games since 1985. Despite being a Nintendo gamer since the Nintendo Entertainment System, they felt that the Wii U is “an amazing system.” You do you, buddy.
Since Miiverse was discontinued in November 2017, a new account claiming to be MARIO WiiU has appeared on Twitter. However, there isn’t a viable method to confirm that they’re the same person (A conundrum that they’ve addressed publicly). I have my doubts. The original water commentator had posts that were unrelated to water, and the new account only contains tweets about water. So the account is likely run by a fan of the water liker.
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This isn’t the first time that Nintendo of America recognized video game water’s biggest fan. Three years ago, the publisher tweeted “Nice water” alongside a clip of Paper Mario: The Origami King.
The Miiverse may be gone, but the spirit of MARIO WiiU lives on.
Today Capcom streamed a new “Capcom Spotlight” event on Twitch and YouTube. While the cat was already out of the bag on its biggest news—a Resident Evil 4 demo, out today—there was plenty more to see, too.
If you’d like to watch it yourself, you can find the stream archived here. That said, here’s everything we saw in today’s Capcom Spotlight stream.
Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection
Capcom
Capcom kicked off by showing off Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection again, which includes all 10 mainline entries in the Game Boy Advance’s fun strategy-tinged, chip-collecting RPG series. Director Masakazu Eguchi, presenting himself in the guise of “Mr. Famous,” explained the new Buster “MAX” mode and how the collection will include digital versions of the 499 previously physical “Patch” cards that interact with the later games in the series. The online play sounds robust, too.
This Legacy Collection, split into two volumes, is hitting Switch, PS4, and Windows on April 14.
Street Fighter 6
Capcom
Street Fighter 6 made its customary appearance and revealed its fourth and final in-match commentator, Japanese actress Hikaru Takahashi. With her addition we now have two Japanese and two English announcers. (We also saw muscled helmet enthusiast Marisa beating the crap out of my main grappler, Zangief. She seems cool.) Street Fighter 6 is due June 2.
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Capcom Town and Capcom ID
Capcom
Apparently Capcom is working on a “digital theme park,” called Capcom Town. Let’s let the video explain. It also announced a new “Capcom ID,” a login that will be required for online play in some future games. Hooray.
Exoprimal
Capcom
The team-based dino-battling online shooter Exoprimal appeared again, this time showing more story scenes. Looks cool. Despite apparently not being a live-service game, the game seems riddled with optional extras, including a season pass, pre-order bonuses, copious character costumes, weapon skins, etc. It’ll be interesting to see if the fatigue for this sort of cruft we’ve just seen with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will surface here too.
Anyway, it’s coming to all the major platforms but Switch on July 14, and will be on Xbox Game Pass day one. A two-day open beta test will start on March 17.
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
Capcom
We got another peek at the HD remaster of the Nintendo DS cult hit Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. I’m sure fans will dig all the little bonuses it’s getting, and it’s coming June 30 for Switch, PC, Xbox One, and Windows.
Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak
Capcom
Monster Hunter Rise’s Sunbreak expansion has a release date: April 28, 2023. Love that iconic theme music. Capcom will also be holding another digital event in April to talk about the next major update, ver. 1.5.
Resident Evil: Death Island (CG movie)
Capcom
Finally, Resident Evil time. A brief glimpse of the upcoming CG film Resident Evil: Death Island looked suitably creepy; it turns out I don’t care for undead swimming crawly things. Not ashamed to say it. Hopefully I’ll be prepared come its summer release. Jill’s in it too, by the way.
Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw Demo
Capcom
Ah, the main event. The big news? Resident Evil 4’s demo is out today. Unlike many modern game demos, the Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw Demo will not be time- or launch-limited, so you can go nuts in that iconic starting village scene as much as you like. The demo’s out on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, and Steam.
So, my take? Nothing mind-blowing, but a pleasant showing for sure. I’m looking forward to some of these, though none on the level of Dragon’s Dogma 2. What did you think?
No, I don’t want the smoke.Image: Team Ninja / Kotaku
After about 40 hours of hellish action and sitting around level 95, I’m stuck on Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty’s last boss. I guess that makes sense. This is the end of the game, after all, so of course the finale would be difficult. But reaching this point was perilous for one specific reason: Despite being one of the most approachable Soulslikes, those dual-sworded assassins in Team Ninja’s latest RPG keep kicking my ass, and I hate it.
Wo Long comes to us from Team Ninja, the developer behind the Nioh games and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. Starting in 184 AD and taking you through the historic Three Kingdoms period, Team Ninja’s newest action-adventure tasks you with ending a peasant revolt helmed by the Taoist in Black, Yu Ji. As the steroid-like drug Elixir proliferates on the battlefield, you’ll encounter all manner of foes, from ruffians like Zhang Liang to zombie soldiers and everything in between. You’ll face off against plenty of wild foes, but none of them strike fear in my heart as much as those stupid assassins.
In Wo Long’s early levels, most of your clashes will involve hardened grunt soldiers and roided-up demon animals. There are a few tougher warriors sprinkled throughout, intelligent and persistent enemies who know the game’s mechanics as well as you, performing copious dodges, critical blows, and deflects that illustrate their battle prowess. These can prove hard exchanges if you’re impatient or spammy. However, slowing down to understand the game’s controls will prove that even the direst of foes, including the infamous warlord Lu Bu, can go down like chumps. It’s not until the second or third main battlefield that you start seeing my dreaded assassins standing in wait, hiding behind an environmental object or biding their time in a building’s ramparts.
Aw shit, here we go again…Screenshot: Team Ninja / Kotaku
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These dudes are the worst for a variety of reasons. They don’t immediately aggro when you walk past, so they can stab you in the back before you know you’re in a fight. They’re incredibly fast and have long, painful combo strings that are difficult to predict and frustrating to deflect. And despite their light armor, assassins can take a bit of a beating. These dual-sworded jerks are a nuisance to fight even one-on-one, as they dart around the battlefield, sprinting in to slice you up before flipping out to throw darts that afflict you with a status effect like heaviness (which slows your movement) or poison.
Worse still are the moments when you fight multiple assassins at once. Because they’re highly skilled fighters, battling against two or three of them by yourself is an insane challenge that could lead to heated gamer moments.
He’s kinda killing me right now…Screenshot: Team Ninja / Kotaku
I remember one instance late in the game when, after dispatching some wolves, I approached a tree-lined pagoda thinking it was safe to just waltz in. As I walked a stoned-covered pathway toward the red, multi-tiered building, my greatest nightmare—two assassins—descended from the branches. They sent me to my grave shortly after, and did so repeatedly every time I dared approach their prized pagoda. No matter how many times I tried, deflecting this attack and dodging that one, the assassins turned me into minced me for the wolves.
It got so heated that I think I gripped my PS5 controller too hard; now it makes a strange rattling noise whenever I pick it up. Something had to be done about these assassins terrorizing my Wo Long playthrough. So, what did I do? I called in all the reinforcements I could and we went in on them. No one can stop my gang—not even those terrifyingly formidable assassins.
I still have to put an end to the Yellow Turban Rebellion by eviscerating the Taoist in Black, and that one, final boss he’s sicced on me, but at least I can rest easy knowing that my hated assassins are largely dead now. That is, until I double back to grind out a few levels in preparation for the final fight again. Maybe my nightmares aren’t completely over, but with the homies that have sworn to get my back, I’m not so scared to face them. Though I’ll totally admit I’m traumatized; I don’t want to see the glint of those dual swords ever again.
Northampton, Massachusets officials have greenlit a plan to create and install four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-themed manhole covers to celebrate the fact that the massive franchise was originally created there. And to pay for it, the town is using funds intended to help rebuild towns and businesses affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The pandemic (which is still a thing, even if a lot of people are trying to pretend otherwise) devastated cities and businesses across the United States starting in March 2020. So in 2021, congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 aka ARPA. This was a nearly $2 trillion economic stimulus package that was designed to help the country recover faster from the various effects of the pandemic as well as to try to deal with the ongoing recession. After barely passing in congress, President Biden signed it on March 11, 2021. As a result, Northampton, Massachusets received $4 million that the town and its officials could put toward its Covid-19 recovery efforts.
And that’s, I guess, how we ended up here: With a city spending $20,000 on TMNT-themed manhole covers.
WCVB
As reported by WCVB, the four manhole covers will be located along Main Street and each one will represent a different turtle. This isn’t just a random choice, as the city was the original home of Mirage Studios, the place where the TMNT franchise was born. Since their creation in 1984, the turtles have expanded beyond comics into movies, cartoons, games, toys, you name it. So, I get it. TMNT is a big deal to the town. But it still seems odd.
According to the city’s breakdown of where all the ARPA money is going, the idea behind the custom manhole covers is to “invigorate downtown arts” via a “public art tribute to the Northampton-born Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” That’s all well and good and checking the list of other grants, it’s clear more important projects are getting far more resources from the city. But I can’t help but wonder if that $20,000 could be better spent on helping more people directly. Or creating a tribute to a far superior show, Disney’s Gargoyles.
Neo-noir comedy Pokémon: Detective Pikachu came out in 2019, and it was surprisingly good. In the era of risk-averse studios rebooting and remaking everything under the sun, a sequel seemed inevitable. Sure enough, one was already in development when the first debuted. No one’s heard about it since. Until today.
Deadline reports that Portlandia co-creator Jonathan Krisel is currently in “negotiations” to direct. Progress! Chris Galletta, the writer behind 2013 indie dramedy The Kings of Summer, is reportedly attached for the screenplay. Ryan Reynolds, who voiced Pikachu in the first movie, hasn’t said anything publicly about it, but will have “some part to play in the upcoming sequel,” according to Deadline’s sources.
Pokémon: Detective Pikachu was adapted from the 3DS game of the same name and told the story of a budding Pokémon trainer and a crime-solving Pikachu that try to unravel a vast pharmaceutical conspiracy. It takes place in a near-future world where computer animated Pokémon mingle alongside humans in ways both bizarre, mundane, and often funny. The film was lighthearted but not overly saccharine, and went on to post $433.2 million at the box office on a $150 million budget. So four years later, it’s not clear what the holdup is.
Legendary Entertainment, the film production company behind it, teased a sequel in early 2019 claiming 22 Jump Street writer Oren Uziel was signed on for the screenplay. Then in 2021, Justice Smith, who played Pikachu’s human side-kick, ominously told fans, “I think we have to just kind of bury our hopes.” Things seemed bleak. Last month, Polygon finally asked Legendary what was going on, and the firm claimed the project hadn’t been killed. Now at least we know they weren’t entirely full of it.
In addition to his work on Portlandia, an offbeat sketch comedy show about early 2010s hipsters, Krisel also co-created Baskets, a dramedy about a professional clown played by Zach Galifianakis. Both shows would no doubt have been improved by the inclusion of Pokémon.
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The term “Soulslike” generates a specific kind of game in the mind. It conjures something that’s hard as hell, with fearsome bosses to beat, intricate levels to explore, tight combat to experience, and a world rife with enough lore to fill several tomes. You may call games in the genre alluring, unforgettable, and sometimes super cheap, but if there’s one word you likely wouldn’t use to describe Soulslikes, it’s “approachable.” Until now. Team Ninja’s Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is a terrific game, one that excels in so many of the ways we’ve come to expect from great Soulslikes. It has brutal, pulse-pounding combat, a haunting world, and some memorable bosses. And the fact that it manages to deliver on all of this without compromise, while also being the most accessible Soulslike to date, is nothing short of a marvel. In other words, next to Nioh 2, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty might be my fave Soulslike.
Wo Long is the latest Soulslike from action game aficionados Team Ninja, whose previous efforts in the genre comprise the Nioh franchise. Set in 184 AD during the Later Han Dynasty, the game tasks you with stamping out the Yellow Turban Rebellion, a peasant revolt that sought to disrupt ancient China. However, weaved into this mythically fictionalized retelling of the historical events of the Three Kingdoms period is an even greater threat than the poor, emboldened to rise up by some bad dude. Nah, it’s a mystical drug called Elixir that’s corrupting the lands, poisoning the people, and raising the dead.
This is what you, a nameless militia soldier you customize through Wo Long’s impressively robust character creator, are actually fighting against: Not just the brainwashed poor, but also the grotesquely transformed, as the power-hungry jerks who take Elixir either die and come back as zombies or have their bodies forever changed with new limbs and animalistic features. In narrative and environmental terms, Wo Long is a lot like Nioh 2, but in ancient China with a dash of Bloodborne horror, and that’s dope.
In Team Ninja’s Nioh 2 follow-up, a captivating, dying world
Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Fengxi Boss Battle
It’s telling that development producer Masaki Yamagiwa cited Bloodborne as “a new form of motivation” that inspired Wo Long, because the world is lathered in similar Lovecraftian imagery. It takes its time in reaching the depths of depravity, however, with the game steadily building on the horror as the story’s stakes ramp up. You start at the tail end of a fiery onslaught on the Yellow Turban Rebellion, the environment a desecrated mess of ransacked homes and burnt trees. After battling a few Yellow Turban lackeys here and a possessed rendition of Tony the Tiger there, you’ll encounter the first of many two-stage bosses, Zhang Liang, who ingests an Elixir ball and grows a snake-like arm covered in blood-filled crystals. It’s a haunting, 1v1 battle on a moonlit, flower-covered field as Liang swings his now-deformed left arm in the hopes of crushing you to death so that darkness reigns. Things only get grosser as you slash your way through each distinctly detailed locale.
This isn’t an open-world game, though. There isn’t as much freedom here as in something like Elden Ring. Instead, Wo Long’s level structure is more reminiscent of Team Ninja’s Nioh 2 and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. As the narrative unfolds, you’re taken (via lore-filled loading screen) to the subsequent location. Sometimes this is the lavish Mt. Tianzhushan, with its vibrant pink-colored leaves, lush bushes, and glistening waterways. Other times, it’s the devastated Guandu, crumbling to pieces as veins protrude from the array of suspended buildings. All the while you’re set on a fairly linear path, with a few available shortcuts to make backtracking less frustrating: ladders to reach an upper level, a bundle of wood that acts as a stepping stone, and so on. In its world design, Wo Long is focused and intimate, hooking you in with little details like rotting produce in abandoned villages and decaying bodies pierced on the battlefield, visual elements that breathe life into an otherwise desperate, dying world.
There’s an oddly captivating quality to that desperation, one that helps drive home the game’s broad view of humanity: We are power hungry. If it serves us, we will do what is necessary to get power. Wo Long explores that and the sacrifices people will make to achieve power in an on-the-nose but nonetheless enthralling way. Through Elixir, the drug that essentially unlocks the host’s unstoppable inner demon in exchange for their life, an ultimate big-bad can pull the strings while everyone lusts after the thing he’s in full control of. There’s political intrigue as warlords like Cao Cao and Sun Jian debate the best strategy to put an end to the war, while Elixir stealths its way through the ranks because of fools too weak-willed to maintain vigilance in the face of power. There’s even romance and heartbreak, as characters profress their unyielding love for each other just before taking their last breath in the icy ground. It’s dire, but it speaks to just how destructive power is when chased by the corrupt.
Wo Long is the most accessible Soulslike I’ve played
Probably can’t even feel it, hyped up on all that Elixir.Image: Team Ninja
I’ve made the comparison that Wo Long is Nioh 2 but in ancient China a few times in my impressions of the game, but now having played through the whole thing, it feels even more applicable. If you’re at all familiar with the Nioh series, Wo Long will feel like coming home. That’s not to say that all the same pictures are hung in the same spaces or that all the same furniture is placed in the same rooms. There are some notable differences that set these two Team Ninja games apart, particularly when it comes to combat and difficulty. Wo Long is significantly faster in its animations, meaning the pace of engagements is much quicker here than what you see in the Nioh games.
This might make for a more challenging experience, but because Wo Long demands and rewards aggression, the increase in speed is a boon for anyone who wants to treat these games as a sort of hack-and-slash adventure. By relentlessly attacking an enemy, you raise your spirit gauge while diminishing your opponent’s. Think of this dual-colored bar at the bottom of the health gauge as being similar to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice’s posture meter. Completely drain an enemy’s spirit and you’ll open them up for a devastating fatal strike which, in most cases, kills in one hit and, in all instances, lowers their morale ranking.
This morale ranking system is a vital component—the backbone if you will—of Wo Long’s understanding of difficulty within the Soulslike genre. When you play these masocore-like games, you’re sometimes relegated to farming for experience points to increase your level high enough to deal with whatever foe that’s putting you in a quick grave. You could switch up your build. Maybe try out a new armor or weapon. But the only way to really grow stronger in most Soulslikes is to accrue enough XP to buff yourself. That’s all true in Wo Long, too. However, exploring ancient China and raising battle flags, this game’s version of Dark Souls’ bonfires, is another way to become more powerful because planting flags increases your morale.
Similar to God of War’s power level system, upping your morale ranking in Wo Long increases your damage resistance. So, if you encounter an enemy with a morale rank that’s higher than yours, you can bet your ass is in for a beating. But if you pull up on a sucker with a lower morale rank than yours, well, it’s likely curtains of them. And it’s not just battle flags that affect your morale, as raising the smaller marking flags dotted across the map establishes the floor (the invisible fortitude rank) that your ceiling (the morale rank) can never drop below. In this way, scouring the map is not only encouraged as a means to find new goons to fight and loot to collect. It’s almost required to make it through the game. It’s through this morale ranking system that Wo Long’s accessibility begins to shine.
The morale ranking system makes up just one prong of Wo Long’s approach to accessibility. The other comes in the form of reinforcements, which you can call upon at the various battle flags you’ve planted. This is a blessing because so often, Soulslikes are largely these individual affairs with obtuse multiplayer offerings. There’s multiplayer here, too, but in an expansion to Nioh 2‘s benevolent grave summoning mechanic, Wo Long lets you call up an NPC homie whenever you want, so long as you have the required tiger seal item to do so. (The consumable is pretty easy to come by, found on dead enemies and in random chests around the maps.)
You could always use a partner or two on the battlefield
Here’s A Soulslike That Anyone Could Play, Probably
Through summoning, you can fight alongside a plethora of historical figures, such as general Sun Ce and warlord Liu Bei, while tackling the game’s many difficult and unpredictable enemies. The best part, though, is you don’t always have to summon; Wo Long will, more often than not, start you with an ally already in tow as part of the game’s mesmerizing narrative. So, you’ll roll up to, say, Guigugou Valley in Ji Province, ready to battle with warrior brothers Guan Yu and Zhang Fei at your side. You can heal your reinforcements when they go down in combat and they never leave your company unless you decide to whisk them away with a different consumable item. Team Ninja understands that Soulslikes are, at times, far too punishing for the laygamer, and this inspiring reinforcement mechanic seeks to remedy that difficulty.
It’s these two elements, the morale ranking system and the summoning of reinforcements, that make Wo Long the most accessible Soulslike I’ve played in…maybe ever. Sure, there are no real accessibility options for adjusting things like damage taken and enemy visibility. Features like those seen in The Last of Us Part I and Rachel & Clank: Rift Apart would go a long way to opening up the genre to an even wider audience. However, just by implementing some design choices that both encourage exploration and galvanize the idea of seeking help, Wo Long makes it evident that developers can create their punishing games without wholly gatekeeping the experience. Hell, when I was getting bodied throughout my time with Wo Long, I just summoned a comrade or two and all of a sudden, I felt empowered to take ancient China head-on. If this is the power of friendship, then Soulslikes need way more of it.
Don’t get it twisted, this is still a very hard Soulslike
Now this is an asshole.Image: Team Ninja
With all of that said, Wo Long is still a hard-ass Soulslike. There are a plethora of grunts that have no problem showing you the casket to rest your head in, and they’ll do it with the quickness if you’re not careful. On top of difficult jerks, the world itself is out to get you as you can take massive damage after a fall and can be reduced to a single health point when taking an unfortunate dip in the water. But nowhere is the challenge more pronounced than in the intimidating boss encounters, fights with screen-filling demons like a malformed, tentacled cow or terrifying soldiers such as helmsman Lu Bu.
It’s these moments that feel like familiar territory for Soulslike players, those who associate grueling difficulty with the genre. And they are very challenging skirmishes that demand attention, skill, and patience, lest you get clapped in one hit. But again, thanks to the morale ranking system and summoning reinforcements, these engagements aren’t as insurmountable as they may first appear. The enemy might be obsessed with power, but strong friendships can’t be easily broken. That’s the penultimate lesson I took away from Wo Long.
That’s what I hope developers in the genre and players of these games take away, as well. Sometimes, you need help to take down an army, especially one with demons and evildoers high on performance-enhancing drugs. Doing it yourself is possible, as shown in something like Bloodborne. But as 1986’s The Legend of Zelda put it, “It’s dangerous to go alone.” So, why not take some reinforcements with you? You’ll be grateful you did.
During today’s Pokémon Presents, we finally got a look at the upcoming and highly anticipated Pokémon Sleep app. It was accompanied with an adorable live-action promo and some actual in-game footage.
In the app coming later in 2023, you can check out all the irresistibly cute ways these creatures nap and sleep, and maybe they can help your sleep schedule out a bit too. Described as a “game that makes you look forward to waking up in the morning” (good luck), the game has an isometric perspective, and features many of the familiar faces taking it easy and catching some Zs. Check out all the details here:
As befits a Pokémon game, the title features Professor Neroli, “who’s researching Pokémon sleep.” That sounds like serious, academic business for sure, but it seems rather straightforward in practice. Basically, all you need to do is leave your smartphone within reach of your bed, and the game will measure your sleep. In the video, we got a quick look at how that all works.
Screenshot: Nintendo / Kotaku
If you’ve ever used a sleep app before, this ought to look very familiar. You get a rough average of the overall time you were asleep (and not staring into the blinding light of your phone, doomscrolling on Reddit for six hours…you know who you are), and some fancy stat readouts for various bits of sleep data. From the trailer we can see this includes info like the actual time it took for you to fall asleep.
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Your sleep data gets crunched into one of three sleep types: “Dozing, Snoozing, or Slumbering.” Pokémon whose sleep type matches yours will appear in the game, which is an easy and adorable way to start to get a sense of how well you’re sleeping. And it’s not all boring clinical sleep terms; as we saw in the video today, one unlockable sleep type is “Goofy Sleep” and features a Slowpoke adorably sleeping on its back.
As someone who’s cycled on and off various sleep apps for the past few years and haven’t found one that sticks, this one seems easy enough to understand, and looks fun. Maybe a solid eight hours a night is in my future after all.
The release of The Last of Us in 2013 already marked a remarkable shift in narrative tone for big-budget, so-called “AAA” games. However, for some of us, 2014’s DLC chapter, The Last of Us: Left Behind, proved to be even more remarkable. It took mechanics that, in the game proper, had been used in nail-biting sequences of life-or-death desperation and repurposed them as the stuff of bonding and relationship-building, leading us to feel Ellie’s connection with Riley not just through cutscenes and pre-written dialogue but through play, in the purest sense of the word.
Now, the episode of HBO’s adaptation based on Left Behind is here, and it’s very good on its own terms. The storytelling fundamentals still work, even with the interactivity that made the game so striking removed. (A number of sequences built around that interactivity, including one in which Ellie and Riley have a contest in which they throw bricks to break car windows, and one in which they hunt each other with water rifles, are understandably totally absent in the episode.) However, because Left Behind was a particularly remarkable example of what’s possible when AAA mechanics are used in new and exciting ways, I don’t feel that there was really any hope of this episode reaching the same highs. The game was one of the very best, most innovative and moving AAA experiences of the decade in which it was released. This is—and I don’t mean this as an insult at all—a very good episode of a mostly very good TV series, and it does benefit from a few music cues that the game lacks. On top of that, Bella Ramsey and Storm Reid are both exceptional, and defixfnitely make this story and its deeply felt emotions their own. Let’s get into it.
A tale of two malls
First, let me touch on the biggest change between this episode and the game on which it’s based. In both, Joel’s been seriously injured, and Ellie must find some supplies with which to treat his wound. Here in the show, we experience Ellie’s mall flashback while she rummages for supplies in a house where she and Joel are hiding out, and the only real thematic throughline between the action of the “present” and the “past” of the episode is that what Ellie goes through in the past informs our understanding of why she’s so desperate not to lose Joel in the present.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, she’s actually got Joel locked up in an old storefront at a Colorado mall, and the flashbacks to her night at the mall with Riley are interspersed with action set in the “present” in which she searches this other mall high and low for medical supplies. Playing the DLC, you probably spend about as much time in the Colorado mall as you do in the Boston one, and as Ellie, you must fight infected stalkers, solve some environmental puzzles, and survive some very challenging combat encounters with men who are hunting Joel and Ellie. The Colorado mall also has a number of details that trigger associations for us as players with the Boston mall. For instance, both have a restaurant chain called Fast Burger, and in the pocket of a body she’s searching, Ellie finds a strip of photos created by the same type of photo booth she and Riley use at the mall in Boston.
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Meanwhile, all TV show Ellie has to do is look in the kitchen for a needle and thread. She doesn’t know how easy she’s got it.
This hopeless situation
In the episode’s opening scene, the injured Joel tells her to leave and she says “Joel shut the fuck up!” reminding us, as the last episode emphasized and this one will drive home, that she has known too much loss already, and she’s not about to give up on him.
He tells her to go to Tommy. She covers him with a jacket, gives him a fuck you look, and walks out of the room, and into the flashback that dominates the episode.
She’s running listlessly in circles in a high school gymnasium. On her Walkman (yes, an actual Sony Walkman, which she also has in the game) she’s listening to “All or None” by Pearl Jam. It’s from the 2002 album Riot Act, so it would exist in the show’s timeline where the outbreak occurred in 2003. Without spoiling anything for those who haven’t played The Last of Us Part II, Pearl Jam does figure into the game in a way that likely won’t, for timeline reasons, play out the same in the show, so this at least lets the band’s work be heard in the TV series.
Screenshot: HBO
(Incidentally, none of this stuff with Ellie in school is from the game. Some of it may be based on material in the comic book series The Last of Us: American Dreams, but as I haven’t read that series, I can’t say for sure.)
Soon, a bigger girl starts giving Ellie shit, telling her to pick up the pace so that the whole group doesn’t get punished. When Ellie says she doesn’t want to fight about it, the girl says tauntingly, “You don’t fight. Your friend fights. She’s not here anymore, is she?” With that, Ellie decides she does want to fight after all.
Cut to some time later, and Ellie’s sporting a nasty shiner. A FEDRA official, Cpt. Kwong, notes that her behavior has been particularly bad for the past few weeks and that his bad-cop approach in response—tossing her in the hole multiple times—hasn’t worked, so he tries the good-cop approach, giving her a heartfelt talk in which he suggests that she’s too smart to throw her life away, but that seems like exactly what she’s determined to do. She can either keep misbehaving and end up a grunt, doing grunt work until she dies in one unfortunate circumstance or another, he says, or she can swallow her pride and someday become an officer. His impulse is rooted in a bleak view of humanity—”if we go down, the people in this zone will starve or murder each other, that much I know”—but Ellie nonetheless seems persuaded, for the moment.
Ellie’s room, featuring a poster for Mortal Kombat II
Later, Ellie’s in her room as the rain falls outside. She’s reading an issue of Savage Starlight, the significance of which I first talked about in my recap of episode five.
Setting the comic down, she stares at the vacant bed across the room before a lights out call prompts her to try going to sleep. For a bit, the camera lingers on details in the room, like a small stack of cassettes that includes A-ha’s greatest hits compilation and an Etta James tape, both of which feature songs we’ll be hearing before the night is out. Also on Ellie’s wall are dinosaur drawings, space shuttle diagrams, and, amusingly, a poster for the 1987 sci-fi comedy Innerspacestarring Martin Short, Meg Ryan, and Dennis Quaid.
We also see a poster for Mortal Kombat II. Yes, this reflects one of the biggest changes to the source material that we’ll get to later in the episode. However, what you may not know is that, when Left Behind was remade for The Last of Us Part I, the developers also snuck a Mortal Kombat II poster into Ellie’s room there, confirming (via retcon) that the game does at least exist in the game’s universe as well, likely because they knew by that point that MKII was going to be taking the place of The Turning in the TV adaptation.
Riley and Ellie’s reunion gets off to a rough start when Riley (Storm Reid, Euphoria) sneaks into the room and puts her hand over the mouth of the sleeping Ellie. Ellie panics, knocks Riley to the floor, and grabs her switchblade before she realizes who her attacker is. When she sees that it’s actually her best friend, the exposition starts flying fast. Riley’s been gone for three weeks because, after a long time spent “talking about liberating the QZ,” she’s actually decided to do something.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
This triggers complicated feelings in Ellie, who refuses Riley’s request to come with her and have “the best night of your life” because she has to get up in a few hours for drills “where we learn to kill Fireflies.” Yeah, these friends are in a tough spot, seemingly on opposite sides of an ideological (and real) conflict. As Riley predicted, though, Ellie quickly relents, the chance to spend a few hours with the friend she’s been missing so much apparently too tough to pass up.
What’s FEDRA vs. Fireflies between friends?
After they make their escape, Ellie is surprised that Riley seems less inclined toward conflict than usual, telling her, “You can’t fight everything and everyone. You can pick and choose what’s important.” “Are they teaching you this at Firefly University?” Ellie asks, and it turns out they are. A minute later, as they’re sneaking through an old apartment building, Ellie’s flashlight starts giving out. “Firefly lights are better,” Riley teases. When Ellie declares that “one point for the anarchists,” Riley says, “We prefer freedom fighters.”
In a moment that’s new for the show, Ellie and Riley find a man’s body in a hallway, with some pills and a bottle of hard liquor nearby, which they snag and take swigs from on the rooftop. In the game, they instead raid the camp of a man they were on friendly terms with named Winston, who, remarkably for someone in their world, died of natural causes. He has some booze in a cooler that you can drink. The show’s Ellie handles the liquor much better than her game counterpart, who spits it out.
After begging Riley to let her hold her gun, Ellie asks, “So, what happened, you started dating some Firefly dude and was like, ‘Uhhh, this is cool, I think I’ll be a terrorist’?” It’s a striking line because it’s both an obvious joke and it also seems to be Ellie perhaps trying to feel out Riley’s attitude toward boys, as if she’s trying to determine if there’s any chance Riley reciprocates her feelings. (Nothing like this is said in the game.) Soon, Riley tells the truth: she encountered a woman—Marlene—who asked her what she thought of FEDRA. Riley replied with her honest opinion, “they’re fascist dickbags,” and with that, she was in. Ellie starts to push back, regurgitating some of the same bullshit Cpt. Kwong told her earlier about FEDRA holding everything together, but rather than let it devolve into an argument, Riley says they’re on a mission, and leads them onward, hopping across many a rooftop on the way to their destination: the mall.
Screenshot: HBO
When they arrive, Riley arranges a pretty cool reveal for Ellie, having her friend stand in the darkened shrine to capitalism before flipping on the power. Ellie gazes in awe as everything becomes illuminated. Riley promises to show her “the four wonders of the mall,” and their adventure truly begins.
Take on me
The Last of Us becomes the latest prestige TV series to use the A-ha hit “Take on Me,” a song that also figures into the game’s sequel, as Ellie experiences the wonder of escalators, or as she calls them at first, “electric stairs,” for the first time. Amazed by the contraption, she races down them, races back up them, walks in place, and, perhaps trying to impress her crush and probably feeling the effects of that swig of alcohol she took earlier, just generally acts like a total goofball.
As they make their way toward Riley’s first wonder (which is now the second wonder because Ellie was so wowed by the escalator), they pass a movie theater with a poster out front for a film in the Dawn of the Wolf series, the Last of Us universe’s stand-in for Twilight. Briefly stopping to regard the display at a Victoria’s Secret, Riley comments on how strange it is to her that people once wanted that stuff, then starts laughing while trying to imagine Ellie wearing the lacy lingerie. Riley moves on, but Ellie takes a moment to check her look in the window, clearly concerned about the impression she might make on Riley tonight.
Just like heaven
Riley tells Ellie to close her eyes, and as she leads her by the hand to the mall’s next wonder, we’ve gotten enough insight into Ellie’s feelings that we can imagine how exciting it must be for her, that high school electricity you might feel at the slightest physical contact with the person you’ve been dreaming about.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
The wonder is indeed worthy of the build-up: a stunning carousel, lit up in golden lights. This is, of course, straight out of the DLC, the source of some of its most iconic images, but new here is the fact that the carousel plays a music-box version of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” and I think the lyrics of that song sum up how Ellie feels in this moment pretty well. Like the game on which it’s based, this episode is full of unspoken emotion, which makes it all the more effective. Ellie’s smile, beaming at Riley as the carousel spins, says more than words ever could. Find someone who looks at you the way Ellie looks at Riley here. The two have another drink, and Ellie continues to bask in Riley’s presence.
But such moments never last, and as the carousel grinds to a halt, Ellie’s mind is interfering with what her heart feels, turning over questions again about Riley’s allegiance to the Fireflies. “Did you really leave because you actually think you can liberate this place?” she asks, making the question sound every bit as dismissive as it reads. When Riley protests that it’s not a fantasy, that the Fireflies have set things right in other QZs, Ellie tells her that they could do that too, “if you come back. We’re, like, the future.”
Screenshot: HBO
Riley doesn’t seem hopeful about her prospects with FEDRA, telling Ellie that Kwong has her lined up for sewage detail. To Kwong, Riley is doomed to the kind of grunt work she told Ellie she could avoid if she plays her cards right. This is new for the show, and makes it that much more clear why Riley wants a life outside of what FEDRA has in store for her.
Pictures of you
Next up on Riley’s tour of wonders is the photo booth, another classic moment from the game. When the DLC first launched in 2014, this moment felt impactful because it featured some then-novel Facebook integration, allowing you to upload images of the specific poses you had Ellie and Riley strike to your feed. It was a way for people to share the experience and connect over their feelings about it. It’s a bit strange to see a moment that was initially designed not just for interactivity but for social media integration be recreated without these elements that once made it so special. It’s still a sweet scene, of course, but this is one case where the game will always be the definitive experience for me. At least the show’s Ellie and Riley actually get a printout of their photos, albeit faded and colorless. The game’s duo got only their memories of the experience.
As they head to the next wonder, Riley talks it up, saying “it’s pretty dang awesome and it might break you.” Ellie tells her not to oversell it, but she hasn’t. She tells Ellie to stop and listen, and in the distance is the unmistakable cacophony of a video arcade. Yeah, Ellie is stoked. Standing before Raja’s Arcade in all its noisy glory, she says, “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Mortal Kombat II vs. The Turning
The arcade’s got Centipede and Tetris, Frogger and Daytona USA, all alive and ready to be played. But there’s one game they want to play most: Mortal Kombat II.
This is one of the episode’s biggest departures from the game. There, the machines in the arcade remain off, and the most Ellie can do is imagine playing with them. (As I discovered when re-playing Left Behind for this recap, there’s a hidden trophy you can get here, a little self-deprecating joke from Naughty Dog. If you approach and interact with a Jak X Combat Racing arcade machine in the back corner, Ellie will imagine playing it for a bit. When she’s done, she comments to herself, “That game is stupid,” and you get the trophy, called Nobody’s Perfect. Oof, was Jak X really that bad?)
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, it’s not Mortal Kombat II that they play, but a fictional fighting game called The Turning, and Ellie can only play it with her imagination. As Riley narrates the action, and as Ellie imagines it so vividly that she can hear the game’s announcer as well as the sound effects of battle, you enter a series of onscreen inputs to pull off attacks, blocks, dodges, and, finally, an ultra kill. Yes, The Turning was clearly inspired by Mortal Kombat, so the genuine article makes for a pretty fitting replacement.
In his own commentary piece, my colleague Kenneth makes a strong argument that something is lost by having the characters actually play a game, rather than merely imagining one. I definitely agree that the way it plays out in the game is much more poignant. It’s just one more thing that Ellie will never get to really experience. At the same time, I think the interactivity of the sequence was central to its impact, that just seeing Ellie imagine the game and input sequences would have little of the same effect that the scene conjures through the device of having you do it, and in lieu of that, I think swapping in Mortal Kombat II, a game so many of us have our own memories of playing, allows us to feel some deeper connection to the scene. For me, it’s another instance, like the photo booth, where the TV show was never going to fully recapture the power of the game on which it’s based.
Screenshot: HBO
Kiss me, kill me
Bella Ramsey does a great job of capturing the intense excitement and supreme cluelessness of a gamer girl who’s literally never played an arcade game before, and it’s fun to watch both her and Reid react to the game’s legendary sound effects, and to Mileena’s famous fatality. Eventually, playing as Baraka, Ellie gets a win on Riley, who tells her how to do his fatality. Baraka impales Mileena on his blades and the girls lose it, and in the excitement, we can tell, even if Riley can’t, that Ellie really wants to kiss her. The moment passes, though, and Ellie protests that she has to be back home in bed soon. However, Riley tells her that she got her a gift, and that’s enough to get Ellie to tag along for a bit longer.
In the food court, Riley’s got a little camp, where she gives Ellie volume two (actually “volume too” lol) of Will Livingston’s series of pun books, the same one she’s been torturing Joel with throughout the series. In the game, Riley gives it to Ellie just after you ride the carousel, and you can spend a while reading jokes to Riley if you like. (My favorite of the bunch: What’s a pirate’s favorite letter? ‘Tis the C.)
In the show, however, Ellie’s delight in the new treasure trove of punny goodness is short-lived, as she finds a bunch of explosives Riley has made. Riley says that she would never let them be used on or anywhere near Ellie, but Ellie doubts that her supervisors would care what Riley has to say about that, and she storms off.
Riley gives chase and tells Ellie that she’s leaving, that this is her last day in Boston, which is enough to get Ellie to stop. “I asked if you could join so we could go together,” Riley says, “but Marlene said no.” In the game, Riley phrases this sentiment a bit differently, telling Ellie that Marlene “wants you safe at that stupid school. I’m not even supposed to come see you.” The reasons why Marlene might be looking out for Ellie from afar—even before knowing Ellie was immune to cordyceps—will become clear in time, if you don’t know them already. Despite Riley’s heartfelt plea, expressing her desire to spend some of her little time left in Boston with Ellie and to say goodbye on good terms, Ellie remains furious, and storms off again.
Love and truth in the Halloween shop
She thinks better of it, though, and turns around before she gets too far. Trudging back through the mall, she hears screams and fears the worst. Charging into the store the screams are coming from, she’s confronted with a spooky sight indeed: some sort of mechanical Halloween jumpscare device letting out the pre-recorded shrieks. Here it is, the Halloween store, the final wonder Riley had in store for her. (In the game, you actually enter the Halloween store first upon arriving at the mall. This scene effectively combines that one and one near the end of the DLC.)
Riley’s hiding out in the Halloween store, and tells Ellie she was saving it for last because she thought she’d like it the best. “I guess it was stupid,” she says. “I’m fucking stupid.” Ellie sits down. It’s time to talk about some real shit.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
“So you leave me. I think you’re dead. All of a sudden, you’re alive. And you give me this night. This amazing fucking night. And now you’re leaving again, forever, to join some cause I don’t even think you understand. Tell me I’m wrong.” Yeah, I can see how Ellie’s got some emotional turmoil going on at the moment.
Riley tells Ellie that she doesn’t know everything. Unlike Ellie, Riley remembers what it was to have a family, for a little while at least, and the real sense of belonging that came with that. Now the Fireflies have chosen her, and she senses a chance for that kind of belonging and purpose again. “I matter to them.”
Screenshot: HBO
Ellie softens a bit, and tells Riley that she’s her best friend and that she’ll miss her. Riley proposes “one last thing,” and Ellie agrees, before Riley tosses her a werewolf mask and grabs a spooky clown mask for herself, masks they both also wear in the game. She puts on Etta James’ “I Got You Babe,” the same song that features so prominently in the game at this pivotal moment, and begins dancing atop the display case.
For a while they just enjoy the moment, but what Ellie is feeling is too strong to be contained, so she takes off her mask and pleads with Riley, “Don’t go.” Just as in the game, Riley agrees, almost as if she’s been waiting, hoping that Ellie would ask her this. Ellie kisses her, then apologizes, to which Riley responds, “For what?” It’s a beautiful and cathartic moment, and a painful one, too, since we know their happiness ends even before it has a chance to start. It makes for a fascinating contrast with the third episode, which charted the love story of Bill and Frank across decades. Here, we get the love story of Ellie and Riley, not quite in real time but not too far off. This night lasts only a matter of hours, and yet the memory of it will be with Ellie forever.
I feel like “don’t go” is a bigger ask on Ellie’s part here in the show than it is in the game, since she knows that FEDRA has Riley pegged for grunt work, and it’s a lot to ask someone you love to resign themselves to a life of such limited possibility just to be with you. But I’m sure that in that moment, she thinks that together, they can create something better. And who knows, maybe they could have.
They barely even get a chance to imagine what that future might look like, however, before the infected we saw earlier roars and runs in, putting up one hell of a fight before Ellie finally finishes it with her switchblade. Not before both of them are bitten, however, and just like that, their dream future evaporates.
“I’m not letting you go”
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
And while future Ellie rummages desperately in the house for something to help Joel with, past Ellie, thinking her fate is sealed, smashes shit in a rage before collapsing next to Riley. Riley says they could just off themselves with her gun, but she’s not a fan of that idea. Taking Ellie’s hand, she says, “Whether it’s two minutes or two days, we don’t give that up. I don’t want to give that up.”
Screenshot: HBO
Rummaging in the kitchen, Ellie finds some needle and thread and returns to Joel. For a moment, she takes his hand, interlocking her fingers with hers. She’s not letting him go. Then, she begins to sew.
Yesterday during Sony’s State of Play showcase, the fighting game community witnessed three character reveal trailers for Street Fighter 6. I say three, but if we’re being honest with ourselves, the only street fighter who’s on anyone’s mind is one Cammy White. So let’s count the many ways that Cammy’s reveal left gamers smiling.
Capcom
As you can see from the trailer above, Street Fighter 6’s roster will include the stalwart standby Zangief, a newcomer named Lily, and the aforementioned Ms. White. Although the general look of these road combatants has been common knowledge for a while on account of the game’s leaked character art hitting the interwebs, many Cammy appreciators both old and new are saying the leaks didn’t do her new threads enough justice.
Instead of rocking her vintage twin tails and green leotard, SF6 Cammy is sporting a short bob, Union Jack jacket, and yoga pants. While deviations on an iconic look typically ruffle gamer feathers, folks online absolutely adore Cammy’s new digs. Twitter user UltimaShadow X pointed out how Cammy’s SF6 streetwear is yet another example of video game character designs ‘[getting] hotter” when they get extra articles of clothing.
Eagle-eyed fans have also noticed a nifty new anime reference. Twitter user Fighting-Games Daily spotted a new, knee-breaking throw in Cammy’s arsenal, and the wince-inducing new move is actually a reference to the same throw she did in the 1994 anime film Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie.
One last brief snippet of Cammy’s SF6 trailer that’s been making the rounds on Twitter doesn’t depict any of the special forces agent’s killer kicks, but a particular idle animation, specifically her very exaggerated back stretches. Horndog bait for sure, and potentially the start of a new trend à la the Guilty Gear Strive “Jack-O challenge” that swept Twitter back in 2021. This one looks a bit easier, at least. Fan art is already starting to proliferate:
All told, the UK gal’s revamp has left a very positive impression on the Street Fighter community. Though the real test of her influence will be if Cammy mains in the States start putting gravy on their chips.
Shiny Pokémon are typically just a rare aesthetic anomaly, but one new addition in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet may have some competitive edge if you’re using a shiny variation: Tatsugiri.
The combination dragon- and water-type Pokémon already made a splash in the competitive scene because of its compatibility with Dondozo in double battles. Tatsugiri is able to hop inside Dondozo’s mouth and give it a stat boost. There aren’t a lot of examples of specific Pokémon having contextual interactions with their battle partner, so just as a cool gimmick, Tatsugiri and Dondozo have become a pretty notable competitive team since they debuted in Scarlet and Violet in November. However, Wolfey, one of the top competitive players in the scene, points out that using a shiny Tatsugiri can maybe help you get one over on an opponent.
Tatsugiri has three forms: its curly form, droopy form, and stretchy form. Each form gives Dondozo a different stat boost, and which form you’re using is most readily identifiable by its color. When you have a Shiny Tatsugiri, that makes things a bit trickier, because not only are these different colors than their original, the Shiny droopy form is very close in color to the standard curly form. Wolfey suggests that the closeness in color is in and of itself a deceptive advantage, as the opponent might have a harder time distinguishing one form from the other.
The one glaring flaw in this strategy is that shiny Pokémon have stars that appear around them when they’re sent out to the field, which would signal to an opponent that they’re looking at a shiny variation. This can throw a wrench into the strategy, though these are less noticeable in 2v2 battles where the camera won’t focus on Tatsugiri as it’s sent out. The strategy relies on your opponent’s either ignorance or lack of attention, but it’s still an interesting idea.
Countering Tatsugiri and Dondozo is all about knowing what buff to expect, and to adjust your plan accordingly. If Dondozo gets an attack boost, having a strong physical defender would be ideal. If it gets a defense boost, having a stronger special attacker that can circumvent the increase entirely is the way to go. Dondozo can be a powerhouse with the right composition, but preparing for what Tatsugiri boosts is how you keep it from wiping out your team. A shiny Tatsugiri might not fool every player, but it’s an interesting wrinkle to the Pokémon’s competitive career, which has already been fun to watch unfold since Scarlet and Violet’s launch.
The world received some very sad news earlier today when we learned that legendary English football commentator John Motson, whose career spanned decades (and included very long stints in video games), had passed away at the age of 77.
Even the most casual English-speaking football fan will know his work, regardless of whether they knew his name or not. Motson was one of the most endearing commentators in the sport, beginning his career on radio in the 1960s before moving to TV shortly after. He didn’t retire until 2018, having covered ten World Cups, ten European Championships and, incredibly, over 2500 games in total, on both TV and radio, domestically and internationally.
As familiar as Motson’s work was to anyone catching a game on TV or the radio, he’ll be almost as familiar to a whole generation of gamers. Given his prominence in the actual commentary booth, Motson was chosen to be the first (English) voice of EA Sports’ FIFA series, beginning with its first foray into the world of CD-based games in FIFA 96. Which means he was also the main commentator for FIFA 98, which as we’ve covered here previously is the greatest sports video game ever made.
John Motson Commentary | FIFA 98 | Goodbye To My Childhood
Motson’s last FIFA game as the main commentator was FIFA 06, after a decade spent working alongside some of the greats of the business, like Ally McCoist. He did, however, make a nice little return over a decade after that, as part of FIFA 19’s singleplayer story campaign, which featured a flashback moment that only Motson’s iconic commentary could bring to life:
FIFA 19 The Journey – Jim Hunter and the first 10 minutes
Motson, who passed away “peacefully in his sleep”, is survived by his wife Anne and his son Frederick.
John Motson, legendary football commentator, dies aged 77
I know this isn’t the most pressing issue facing the video game community, but I just think it’s funny: someone at Ubisoft has finally got around to fixing a bug that has impacted one particular version of Assassin’s Creed on one specific platform that has been bugging people (or maybe just one person?) for years.
You might experience unexpected game behavior while playing this PS4 game on your PS5 console.
Still, like I said, not a huge issue. But still an issue, one that would have been logged somewhere at Ubisoft, far enough down the list of priorities that it didn’t get fixed at the time, but on the list nonetheless, waiting to be tackled by somebody, anybody, whenever they had the time.
That time is this week. The series’ Twitter account posted this earlier today, saying that an update be released tomorrow specifically targeting this very bug:
We’re happy to announce that Assassin’s Creed Syndicate will receive an update tomorrow, February 23, on PlayStation 4. This update will provide a fix for flickering issues when playing on PlayStation 5.
Sweet, sweet Delta-8 Baked Bags’ Coned are the ice cream inspired edibles that are packed with rich chocolate infused with smooth, chill, Delta-8 THC.
Thank you for reminding me to dig this out and replay it. Not because I want to enjoy it flicker-free—I never had it on PS4, I have it on PC!—but because this is a deeply underappreciated entry in the series, and one I’d love to revisit in the wake of the more recent games being just a bit too much.
