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What I've Been Up To - Oct 2024

Video games!

They're real. Do you know what else is real? Sonic the hedgehog. It's true. He's real, he's strong, and he's my friend. Okay, not really—we're like acquaintances at best, but when I pass him on the street, I say hi and he just sort of nods back, so I feel like that's got to be worth something.

Thanks, Ken Penders (Bobby Schroeder)

So this one isn't actually a video game: it's a tumblr blog. But I've spent the last two weeks binge-reading it from start to finish (or, well, to current-point-of-hiatus) fully one and a half times and counting. It is, in fact, the impetus.

Bobby Schroeder is a writer and gamedev whose blog I'm subscribed to via RSS feed. It's a fun read: she has a compelling conversational writing style, and writes a lot of review-type stuff. You might also know her from Super Lesbian Animal RPG (aka SLARPG), a game which has been on my to-play list for uh years now. But at the top of her regular blog she has this tumblr blog linked, which is a project dedicated to reading through the entire 25 year archive of the Sonic the Hedgehog comics published by Archie. And some others.

I read the now-most-recent post ("The Lara-Su Chronicles") about when it came out, and then completely forgot about the project as a whole. But I really do recommend it, or at least the articles she's written on Archie Sonic and one of its oddest recurring writers, Ken Penders, if you don't feel like journeying through just over 300 pages of (admittedly very funny) archive.

As I journeyed, a few things struck me. One: via internet cultural osmosis and Snapcube's Real-Time Fandub series, I have an odd level of familiarity and compassion with and for these characters for someone who has never successfully played a Sonic game. (I tried Sonic Mania in April of 2020 and bounced off it, hard. In retrospect, the calendar might have had more to do with that than the game itself.) Two: in its later years, and especially under the writer-artist team of Ian Flynn and Tracy Yardley, the Archie Sonic comic got really good. And hey, wait a minute: Flynn and Yardley are still making Sonic comics, just in a new universe, under IDW publishing. I've heard of those. I've heard they fucking rule. The conclusion is clear:

I need to read the Sonic comics.

But okay, wait, let's back up: there's more than just comics to these characters. Before I read the comics, shouldn't I try playing one of the games again?

Sonic Adventure (Sega Dreamcast)

THIS GAME RULES!

This! Game! Rules!

Okay, I knew I wanted a game that focused on characters—especially more-than-just-Sonic characters. I knew, also, that Sonic Adventure had been something of a soft reinvention of the characters back in 1998. I also knew it had a cool-looking woman in it named Tikal who I knew very little about but maybe died? And that was fascinating to me. As it turned out, Sonic Adventure was perhaps the perfect choice.

If you're not familiar, Adventure splits itself up into six "stories"—little mini campaigns focused on a single character—each happening simultaneously and intersecting with each other, but able to be chosen between at any time from the main menu. You can follow Sonic (we know him), Tails (his buddy), Knuckles (the red one), Amy (AMY! !!!), Big the Cat (oh haha yeah), and E-102 Gamma (who?) through the game's plot. Which also rules! Messy and weirdly-animated, with voice acting which is perhaps just a tad over the top, Sonic Adventure is nevertheless extremely heartfelt and sincere, in both its drama and its comedy. It's fucking great, even though Big's fishing minigame frankly sucks.

Because in addition to being tied together by interactions with the other characters that range from the incidental to the extended, the six stories are tied together via strange visions each character has, which only form a coherent story once you-the-player have seen all six(+), which is a very compelling angle to take. These link back to both Tikal (I knew she was important!) and the overarching story of the entire game, told in perhaps the most compelling way possible.

Some other things about Sonic Adventure: the music fucking rules. Perhaps it's public knowledge that Sonic games have killer soundtracks, but I was kinda blown away. When I was showing it to my brother, he did (correctly) point out that it feels like, instead of choosing an emotionally fitting piece, they just put dance music into every scene. Which is true. But that also fucks. My favorite tracks include My Sweet Passion (Amy's theme), Open Your Heart (the main theme), and E-102 Gamma's Theme.

Also, it's pretty short. Like, I was able to play through the whole thing in I think under a week, while simultaneously living my regular (fairly busy) life. This is great. [I want shorter games with worse graphics Sonic meme goes here]

The original version of that panel is Sonic listing off a jillion tree puns. Why do I know this? Because it was on Thanks, Ken Penders!!

IT ALL COMES TOGETHER

Sonic Rush (Nintendo DS)

I have generally less to say about this one, mostly because I haven't finished it yet, but despite my noticing the same things that pissed me off enough to drop Sonic Mania, I've been sticking with it.

I mean, I do think 2D Sonic games are just harder than 3D ones—at least, harder than Adventure. The experience of playing Adventure was vastly different from playing Rush, even though they both have hold-the-direction-as-crazy-things-happen and little powerups you collect by jumping on them and confusing ambiguities about when you can hit an enemy and destroy them versus when they hurt you on contact. It's way easier to figure out what's going on when the camera zooms out to let you see more than two feet ahead of you, for example, and the homing-spin-dash does wonders. So do the differing level objectives in different characters' stages (again, with the probable exception of Big, whose fishing minigame I do not like).

So why have I been sticking with Rush when I fell off Mania? I mean, I don't really know! Maybe it's the characters: Blaze the Cat is here, and she is so incredibly cool. Blaze is the character who through my pop cultural osmosing I found the absolute coolest. I dunno, maybe it was gender envy. Her being here—and not just here, but playable, a co-star, and shown to be on every level the equal of Sonic (her speed, her skill, her cool six Sol Emerald macguffins that she guards and is searching for). Amy—who I love dearly, especially in Adventure!—didn't do any of that. And it's not just Blaze: her stoic internal monologue plays off of Cream the Rabbit's polite and friendly 6-year-old-ness in comedic beats that are legitimately excellent. Sorry, had to take a break from my dimension-saving quest, a kindergartner invited me to her house for tea.

Maybe it's the music: Hideki Naganuma did the soundtrack for this game! The Hideki Naganuma, of Jet Set Radio and Lethal League Blaze fame! It's good, yes, groovy and fun, but it feels oddly like "another Hideki Naganuma soundtrack". Not in a bad way, but not in a revolutionary one either. Still, it's there.

But probably what's keeping me with Rush where I hung up on Mania is the calendar. Put simply, it's not April of 2020 anymore: it's not what was in hindsight the worst time of my life to try and get into a new game, especially an unforgiving one like a classic Sonic 2d platformer. Because I still game over after drowning and having no way to save myself, and it's still deeply frustrating, but now after I yell through my teeth I have the emotional capacity in my life to pick up my DS from where I put it down and start the level over again. I'm learning how to play a Sonic game, which involves learning how to die and keep going in ways I'm not used to, how to get a Game Over right at the end of a zone's Act 2 and just start again. I couldn't do that in April 2020 because the onset of a global pandemic at a critical time in my life was hemorrhaging my mental health. But now I can.

Okay, hopping back in here with some more thoughts after actually finishing the game (or, well, Blaze's story—I got Sonic's to the end boss but I don't really want to fight the final boss twice right now)—this game is great! Charming, lovely, fun. Very hard. Wasn't expecting such a jump in difficulty from Adventure, but Rush (and, I think, 2D Sonic games in general) like to throw you into the deep end and watch you drown from time to time, which kills you instantly. Anyway. I love Blaze, even more than I did before, and now I'm emotionally invested in Blaze and Cream the Rabbit having a goofy friendship. The music rules: here's A New Day to prove it. I think listening to the tracks over in the sound room makes them stick out far more in my brain than they did during the hectic gameplay, and they are still very Naganuma, but that does admittedly rule. The game is hard, really hard, in a way that I'm not particularly used to, especially with the bosses, but I do think it was worth it. My final impression is absolutely a positive one. It's cool!

(Update again: I finished the whole damn thing. Great game.)

Which brings us, finally, to

The Sonic IDW Comics

, which are really good. Like, they're soooo good. And I've only read the first volume.

The thing is, I didn't need to play all those Sonic games to start reading, because the creative team very intentionally introduces you to Sonic and his supporting cast, one at a time: in the first 4 issues, we meet and learn the skillsets and characters of Tails, Amy, Knuckles, newcomer Tangle the Lemur and—yes—Blaze (and you'd better believe I was hootin and hollerin when she showed up on a full-page spread). The setting is also efficiently characterized: it's set after one of the recent Sonic games, I don't know which, but I don't need to know because the comics tell me everything I need to: there was a resistance, Eggman lost, he's vanished, his robots are still around, someone new is behind the scenes.

The comedy is sharp and joyful. The fight scenes are dynamic, well-choreographed and clear. The characters and colors are vibrant and pop off the page—Amy is characterized as the hyper-competent brains behind the resistance who also happens to be nursing a public crush on Sonic, and it's just so great. There's a sequence where Sonic looks all cool and Amy momentarily gets all blushy before snapping herself out of it and going back to arguing with him about important things.

I really would recommend it—even after only having read 4 issues, the first book!—to anyone with a passing interest in the characters or the games. It rules and I love it. New passion!

Things that aren't Sonic, like Fire Emblem (2003, Gameboy Advance)

This week I finally finished Fire Emblem, the seventh game in the Fire Emblem series and probably one of the best?

Look, I'm big into this series. I know my Chroms from my Corrins. I do in fact keep a running list in my head at all times of what my favorite Fire Emblem game is, what Fire Emblem game I'd most easily recommend to which people, which ideas I think are cool but underdeveloped or poorly utilized and recurring tropes throughout the series.

Fire Emblem is the game that is most user-friendly, best-written, and most (if you'll permit the phrase) emblematic of the series as a whole. I love Three Houses, its modern design sensibilities like disabling permadeath, and its robust tutorialization, but the monastery open world and the open class system and tutoring mean that it's a distinctly different experience from what "Fire Emblem" has been. Similarly, Thracia 776 has some of the coolest, wildest mechanics and most dynamically linked-to-gameplay storytelling of any Fire Emblem, but it is impossibly obtuse and practically requires save states and a lot of patience if you (like me) don't particularly like it when your characters die off. The only one that comes close is Path of Radiance, but Fire Emblem just ekes it out for just how user-friendly it is.

There's a reason for that, obviously: it's the first Fire Emblem released outside of Japan, so no wonder that it has a step-by-step tutorial for its every facet and a mini-campaign to introduce you to series concepts before throwing you in neck-deep. No wonder it has characters who help you by advising you on the best course of action for the next chapter and how to recruit people there, a concept which it is BAFFLING has never made a reappearance. Singlehandedly, the advice about the next level makes Fire Emblem leap to the top of the list for what a starting place or first game in the series should be.

But then, the story's no slouch either. I've been doing this thing a lot lately where I compare Fire Emblem with its most direct contemporary, its predecessor: technically, it's a prequel to Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, featuring Roy from Super Smash Brothers. Because I wanted to get the references, I played that game first.

Don't do that! The Binding Blade fucking sucks!

Okay, look, fine, it's still a Fire Emblem game, which means mechanically it's got the same compelling core that's propelled the series for the past nearly thirty-five years. It's even one for the Gameboy Advance, which means it has a lushly beautiful artstyle and color palette. Unfortunately, it has very few other points in its favor. The story and writing in particular are dry and bland to the point of tedium: like a few other Fire Emblem games, there's definitely a good story buried in there somewhere, but it's told to us in the least interesting way possible. The support conversations it introduced to the series don't help at all: they're universally short and dull, barely fleshing out characters beyond a cardboard cutout if at all.

Fire Emblem fixes every single one of those problems. By being a prequel to a game whose plot was a traditional-to-the-series globe-spanning dragon-fighting adventure, pulling in every nation, Fire Emblem is forced to have its story take place in the shadows: instead of fighting kings, you duel a secretive gang of assassins and a hidden cult. This immediately forces the game to dig into its characters and especially its setting, which gives the game a sense of depth.

So does its extremely wise choice to have not one but three lords whose deaths cause a game over, because a recurring problem in Fire Emblem games is permadeath. Yes, it lends possible narrative weight and variability to your actions and different playthroughs, but at a severe cost: once a character joins your army, they can no longer take an active role in the story or cutscenes. After all, in any given playthrough, they might be dead at that point! The usual way this is evaded is by providing the main character (whose death is always a game over) with one or two NPCs who exist entirely to converse with them and to further the plot—usually some sort of old tactician, or perhaps a princess who's being protected. But this can make it feel like there's a disconnect between the two games: the story game, where your Marth or Roy or whomever talks to his pals; and the gameplay game, where you move people around a map. It's difficult to get invested in the "story" game because it feels so separate from what you're actually doing, and because those characters frequently feel as though they only exist to hamfistedly further the plot (which admittedly they usually do).

Three main characters solves this, because with three main characters, you can have scenes. You can have dynamics. Most importantly, you care about them, because they're your coolest and most unique units on the map! And by having 3 main characters, the traditional main character problem is solved: frequently Fire Emblem's protagonists are blandly heroic, but Lyn, Hector, and even to an extent Eliwood are interesting people who play off of each other in fun and engaging ways!

Because the character writing is strong, too. Support conversations suddenly are revealing characters' philosophies or pasts, allowing them to meet people who they hate or love, allowing real, actual relationships to grow instead of having six lines of stating dry facts. It makes the characters, the world, and the game as a whole that much more vibrant. Which rules!

Having a game that generally rules also makes it easier to overlook the flaws that it carries over from Binding Blade. Bear with me: I'm about to get real technical about constitution.

So in the Fire Emblem series, speed is a very important stat, because if you're faster than your opponent, you get to attack them twice instead of once. But your speed gets cut by the weight of the weapon you use: heavier weapons, like axes, are therefore harder to attack twice ("double") with. In some games, this is as far as the math goes, but in the Binding Blade and Fire Emblem (and a few others), the weight of a weapon is itself cut by whatever your character's Constitution stat is. That is, characters with higher Constitutions are better at using heavier weapons, which tend to be more powerful, making them essentially better characters. (There are a few downsides to high Constitution, but they're very minor so I won't get into them here.) Constitution, unlike something like Strength or Magic, also isn't a stat than can increase when leveling up: only via rare items.

So what's the problem? Well, society believes that women are smaller than men. So women in these games, on average, have lower Constitution stats than men, making them worse at wielding powerful weapons. So women in these games, on average, are worse than men.

That's not just bad, it's terrible! Atrocious! A horrifying example of structural misogyny in action! But also, it bothered me much, much less than I anticipated it would on moving from the Binding Blade to Fire Emblem, because the rest of the game is just so much improved. I no longer felt the need to vent my frustrations. Did it still bother me? Yes. But now, instead of being the latest largest problem on top of the stack, it was nearly the only one, and seemed much less bad for it.

So What's Next

I'm gonna be honest, while I was writing this one I started and have nearly finished playing Sonic Advance for the Gameboy Advance, which is real fun. So I'll probably bring that up, and maybe its sequels depending how fast I get through them.

I also wanna talk about Star Wars: X-Wing, the DOS game from the early 90s, which I got big into a couple months ago and then sadly fell off once I reached a particularly difficult level. I'd like to get back into that as a whole, because it's both really fun and fascinating as an artifact of its time.

Speaking of 90s PC games, I've also nearly finished Thief 2: The Metal Age, which everyone (correctly) lauds as one of the best games of all time. So I'd like to chat about that, too!

What else…well, more Sonic comics. More other comics, too, hopefully! We'll see what I have time for. Oh, and I recently started playing a campaign of Blades in the Dark, which is going excellently. Maybe I'll write about that! Maybe I won't! Maybe I'll write about something else I have no way of predicting—we'll find out!

Thanks for reading!