nine games that mean something
first of all, what does it mean for a game to "define" you, exactly? it shaped your identity? your world-view? it reflects an aspect of your personality or aligns with your views? it changed the way you look at games entirely and shattered your baby brain? it's all of the things above and more, maybe. it's whatever vibes with me and what i felt at the time, maybe. i don't typically rant about things in a personal matter online as much as i used to, but since nothing really matters anymore and the only way you can know me is to see what i see through my eyes... sure, why not. let's get personal about it.
there are a handful of other titles i could have put on here, like... a zelda game or something, given the impact ocarina of time had on me in relation to my mother who was equally as hyped, but there's no way i could realistically put every game i think has made me who i am today on here.
⚠️ WARNING: There are personal anecdotes about me in here.
1. LEGEND OF MANA (1999):
like i said previous, i feel like this could be a really frustrating title in the hands of someone today. it explains its systems, but also doesn't explain them. you can lock yourself out of quests constantly depending on how you, the player, are literally forced to arrange the building blocks that make up the world of legend of mana... and have no way of knowing you did that. it has confusing maps that make you circle back constantly and NPCs that go missing if you backtrack the wrong way. but honestly, all the unforgiving things about it make me love it all the more. it's like there are still pieces of it to uncover for me if i ever decide to delve deeper into the blacksmithing system, or how to make a golem properly instead of just tending to my vegetable garden meticulously to see what kind of hybrid plant i get to touch. reading an interview 30 years later, it's cute to see the developers at the time were excited to create a game with wrestling moves that are "up to par with capcom" in its gameplay, and that they were so focused on adapting elements they couldn't explore at length in other titles to shove it into this one. but.all in all, it's a game that's very near and dear to my heart. it isn't dark or edgy or as overtly childish as the art seems to imply. it's a quiet struggle to bring love back to the world, where you always have a home to return to and a journal entry for your little cactus to write. i don't know how they managed to land all the succinct story-lines in it so well. they're not long, really. most of them are pretty short: go into the jungle to catch a small creature for an oligarch, help a warrior recover his lost companion, accompany the unscrupulous, stingy merchant niccolo through his adventures in selling his wares. really, it might be thanks to shimomura yoko's talent when combined with the visuals... this is one of my favorite soundtracks for a game ever, ever, ever and it never fails to make me tear up. everything in this game just clicked when i was a child. i rented it over and over and never actually owned it. i played it with my little brother frequently. when our local video store was going under, i rushed to be the one to purchase that psx disc and still own it today. i'm not a big fan of the mana series and don't care to play the rest. honestly, typing this is making me tear up and i don't know why... so maybe that's why it's definitely on this list. it's a game about love! i said that already. but it's communal love, familial love, romantic love... and the hurt that comes with it.
2. TALES OF VESPERIA (2008):
has it really been that long. i need to start with the xbox release date, because i literally went insane after playing the demo and decided i needed to purchase a xbox 360 for one reason and one reason only. honestly, looking back, i'm not sure how i even played the demo? i must have downloaded it via my japanese account on the PS3, then decided to go backwards and play it localized. anywho, i had never purchased a console for a single game before. i put 300+ hrs into that disc, combing the game at least two or three times. then i mailed it out to a friend and purchased the (at the time) japanese-only PS3 version to pump another 300+ hrs into this title. could i read all the NPC dialogue fluently? no. could i understand all the kanji in yuri's moves, like 蒼破刃 and 幻狼斬? no. i would probably do a better job of it now. but i pushed myself pretty hard at the time for the sheer love of the game, following japanese guides on how to achieve all the side-quests, and i think that "pushes myself to understand something no matter what when i'm motivated" part of my personality was at play here in overdrive.to me... the cast in the game is perfect. i'm so enamored with their struggles and their growth even now. i even like the third act, which is notoriously disliked and admittedly has its issues, and... the things that feel tacked-on, like a few scenes with flynn and the majority of patty's backstory being shoved into the latter half of the game... like. when tales of is GOOD, it's insanely good. the characters have their backstories and motivations fleshed-out through their interactions with each other, instead of it being shoved into a document or described as having happened off-screen. it's the perfect formula for me, and especially when developing an important character like estelle, i think. she's the epitome of the "sheltered princess" archetype to me in the most genuine sense, forced to reckon with a lineage unknown to her that was born into. she decides dying is the only way to make up for the sins of her person and the danger she represents, and gets push-back from everyone in the party, but almost everyone has their dying is the best choice moment. the game is very much about self-sacrifice, but is also like, DON'T sacrifice yourself if it means losing everything you stood for. bamco's tagline for it is ""RPG that upholds justice", and while i'm not sure if it lands the message entirely (though i think it's more in yuri vs. duke, than yuri vs. flynn, but that's an argument for another time), they do end up reforming the basic mechanics of their world so that everyone can live more comfortably. the law can't always enact justice. a single human life can't either since people will always judge their own actions as acting accordingly. but finding faith in humanity again and acting together is definitely better than losing faith in it entirely to commit a "necessary act" of extinction all on your own, right? finding hope for a better future... that's probably what makes it such a nice game to come back to, on top of the fun game-play and the characters that made me go insane.
i'm sure everyone has their moment, but i remember exactly when i became disillusioned with "politics" and "people in power". in my early teens, i went through a national disaster event that killed nearly 2,000 in my area and left even more homeless. the people above us pointed fingers at each other in a struggle to send help. the help they sent was misguided... and they denied the aid from other countries while we sat around in our filth without water and power for weeks. i remember my friends online were looking up my mother's name to see if i was even alive. so, like. needless to say, i think a protagonist like yuri lowell is really refreshing, even if his methods aren't exact. he's very human.
play tales of vesperia... the opening video is also goated as fuck.
3. FINAL FANTASY IX (2000):
the first time i kept up with an upcoming release of my own volition, mostly through magazine articles at the time. it's going to "return to the old final fantasy," whatever that means. it sounds cool. the character art looked outstanding and vibrant and they were going to have full-blown 3D cut-scenes more frequently than previous titles. i had already sold all my devices around then to make enough money to afford a playstation, accumulating copies of both ffviii and ffvii (played in that order). what could possibly be more amazing than the dancing sequence in ffviii? before i could save up enough for a copy of ffix, it came out and i rented it... too eager to wait for enough pocket change or a birthday or something. and then i cried harder than i ever had playing a game in my life. a really popular vtuber for hololive, kotone, did a lets play of ffix about five years ago, and i tuned in out of curiosity. the best part was seeing her go through those exact emotions i had as a kid. she was crying on stream earnestly... but this was also like, baby's first game about grief. about coming to terms with your own mortality. and really, about finding a place for yourself in the world.the title song is literally "A PLACE TO CALL HOME".
i already liked the game, but it seems like i always come back to it when i'm having a hard time. my parents divorced when i was young. suddenly, my single mother couldn't afford where we lived. we had to move hundreds of miles back to stay with her parents, only there wasn't enough room for me. with no home of our own anymore, i split from my family for a while and lived with my aunts. i don't remember a whole lot from the time because frankly, i was pretty numb about it and didn't talk to anyone. no one talked to me about it either and we just carried on, a poor family made poorer and segmented beyond what i had ever imagined. i became a person who, in the eyes of others, was strictly defined by my tragedy. a game about emotional displacement must've been a comfort to me, because i distinctly remember replaying it as soon as we had a "home" again (and the hurricane would hit a month after this, body-slamming me mentally at the time lmao). we moved so often and so much when i was small that "wandering" felt almost like a permanent state of mind. an outcast like me... the outcasts of ffix.
the replay value of the game is pretty low unless you're crazy for the narrative like me. the builds will always be the same, and the path rarely strays. but "we met, we laughed, we held on fast, and then we said goodbye"... it's a game that's very me.
4. OBORO MURAMASA (2009):
oh, thank god. this one will be shorter.this game is here because i'm obsessed with japanese history and period aesthetics, right? right. okay... there's more to it than that, even if running through wheat fields with a sword held high is the height of coolness to me. but. i think this is the first game where i felt comfortable acknowledging how attracted i am to the women in it. ghost women with huge tits. fox women with huge tits. raijin is a huge, burly woman with a massive ass. like... okay, this is the least articulate section in my list, but. the game is gorgeous and made with love and very horny. the story is also very much about karmic retribution and the transience of a war-torn feudal society. i've got a huge passion for japanese historical periods and the all-pervading force of youkai, so seeing stuff like the nue and mermaids specifically from ryuugyuujou, the supernatural undersea palace, is and was super cool.
the game itself makes you do a significant amount of annoying backtracking, has some frustrating segments as far as how levels are divided and what you can jump on, but the boss battles are pretty solid. so is cooking. it's a breathtaking game that deserves a better localization, which it's getting!! apparently! next year. i'm so excited. 😭
5. FATE/GRAND ORDER:
something most will probably find it cringe for me to list. it's not the beginnings of my foray into type-moon, or fate/. i watched the DEEN version of fate/stay night around 2006 and then fell heavier around the hype of fate/zero's release. i don't really want to go into my deep love of fate/ in general here, which i think... has been one of the only things i've been consistently into for a majority of my life! it's the soshage, the "social" game, that has had me meet so many friends i still have to this day and has enriched me to the point that i could never consider it a waste of time. sorry to the entire medium of visual novels or whatever. i can recall every single major life change i was going through as the protagonist was being thrown around in all sorts of ways, from the entire earth bleaching itself white to having to contest bygone ages of myth in parallel worlds that sometimes felt entirely divorced from our own. all the jobs, the aggressive attempt at changing my career path, loss of family members, and then finally moving hundreds of miles away from all the support systems in my life that i had known up to that point to live somewhere new... fate/grand order was with me through all that. for all that some of the events have pissed me off, and it's not always perfect in its representation of certain myths or regions at times, it's helped be a jump point for my endless curiosity. thanks to the characters being so rooted in real-world history, mythology, and/or classic literature worldwide, it often drives its players to learn as much as they can about a subject that interests them. and that's fine, isn't it? it's nice when something inspires you to learn something more. i've gone down some pretty deep holes in trying to reach the conclusions that some servants have come to, like why is rama so young when it's probably just preference, only to find instances where there ARE anecdotes or what-ifs that support that. and i think it's consistently crazy that the team working on this game is nerdy enough to be like, yes, sieg's noble phantasm is an amalgamation of old norse words made into a modern compound word, no, we're not going to explain how we came to that conclusion. i remember asking higashide directly on twitter during the apocrypha event what it meant, and he simply told me it was old norse... back when their accounts were less popular and you could get a reply. i was just like, damn. it took me hours to find a dictionary in japanese that might even hint to what this means, and my one afternoon of diving was nothing compared to whatever he constructed in his brain as to sieg's relationship to fafnir. i love the dedication the team has to the ideas they set out to do, and the way it's one of the only soshage that still feel "doujin-like" in all its creativity.english-speaking fans are always calling for the game to blow up and die, but the dedication fans have for their oshi here is insane. yes, we will read the entirety of the mahabharata and spend time digging up vedic calendars to try and read the stars and determine arjuna's birthday. yes, we will go on pilgrimages to real-life locations to take a picture of our artoria pendragon plush at king arthur's grave in somerset. there's a subset of fans currently trying to help petition against authorities that are planning to pave over the castle where setanta was born, a legendary place concerning the myth of cú chulainn himself. there are fans who compile historical anecdotes and construct thicker books of lore related to "characters" you can roll for to sell them as doujinshi booth and toranoana. the fan-base is exceedingly dedicated, and i think that's one of the other reasons why it's come so far, outside of... you know. capitalism. i visited dun scaith to snap some photos out of curiosity, knowing it’s the legendary spot where scathach trained setanta. i’m also planning a pilgrimage next year to check out several historical sites linked to takasugi shinsaku and yoshida shouin. which would be cool on its own, but honestly, without the inspiration from fate/grand order, i wouldn't be half as hyped. and i'm happy that i'm so excited about it... happy that i found figures that are genuinely inspiring in some ways to me personally and exciting to learn about thanks to this game. i don't ever want to stop. i want to go everywhere and see everything. the end of part 2, cosmos in the lostbelt, tells you to let go and see the horizon on the morrow. but i did that. i did that, but there's still so much to see and learn.
"History is a fabric woven by humanity over the ages. Love is its thread, while hope is the hand that weaves it towards a dazzling future."
the figures in fate/grand order have their eccentricities exaggerated and their history blown up to a grand scale, but what i love and will always take with me are the themes of humanity striving to define the future. of wanting to use your second chance at life to grasp at a wish you couldn't achieve and deal with those feelings seemingly left behind in the now. but only the living can shape it. the dead are meant to push you forward.
6. DIGITAL DEVIL SAGA (2005):
honestly not sure what to say about this one. i was busy snatching up the copies of "rare" atlus PS2 titles at the time off ebay, before they became a bajillion usd, and ended up playing this in... 2009? i think? maybe 2010? it changed the way i feel about a majority of the games i play. i'm playing this, but i could be replaying digital devil saga, you know? but it's the only title on this list i haven't replayed, so it's a little hard to rant about it. i remember hitting a crucial plot point in the second game that shocked me so abruptly that i saved and went to bed.the inescapable cycle of samsara is a prevalent theme in a lot what i like, so naturally this is a very mecore game. but i think what makes it even more me is that being a "demon" in this is just a means to explore desire, liberation, and control. and the cannibalism is really, really sexy. so are their half-demon forms.
7. DONKEY KONG COUNTRY 2: DIDDY KONG'S QUEST (1995):
monkey
THE PERFECT GAME!! i spent a lot of my childhood playing this with my mother. it's a test of patience. a test of who is getting better at the game faster. but what's even more interesting to me is that for as much as i adore this game, i've never been the kind of person to seek out platformers en masse because i enjoy this one so much. i think it's so perfect in essence to me that i feel kind of fulfilled? the music, the rendered environments, which, were really crazy at the time because 3D platforming just wasn't a thing yet. i don't think this is woven into the fabric of me to the point that i'm obsessed with bananas or monkeys or something, but i love the old donkey kong country platformers a great deal. yes, yes, you could say the clash of nature vs. technology in the games is apt, as it ramps up in the background. the ancient temples in the early levels slowly give way to mass-produced factories that spew out pollution and start to corrupt the natural world of donkey kong, the debate somewhat of a false dichotomy in the real world for all the technology we actually rely on. i'm weak to it. mother 3 could've been on this list. but it's like, not the main reason i like these games, or this one in particular.
i just love that little monkey. that's my son. put this game in a museum.
8. METAL GEAR SOLID 3: SUBSISTENCE (2005):
there's a string of consistencies in this list of nine games, and now that i've hit this title, i can firmly pinpoint it as being "something that doesn't seek to conform in its identity". maybe not in all of them, but it's definitely there. the metal gear solid series is a prime example of this. i had no idea what metal gear solid was really about for a good while, though. it's just some game my dad wants to play on my PS2, and bought, and never touched more than once. nothing all that special. a game with guns and helicopters. there's a guy named snake or raiden in it or whatever.it wouldn't surface in my mind at all until way later, when whoever i was dating at the time wanted me to buy him metal gear solid 3: subsistence. i was like, sure. why not. but once i started playing, i was captivated by the game’s presentation and the different ways to approach it, whether you chose to blow everything up or use precise stealth tactics. player and actor (protagonist) in these games obey a fantasy that binds them together, whether that be the fantasy that the boss is someone who must inevitably be put down by more violent means, or the fantasy of redemption as a soldier. games already had cutscenes that moved me, but this is the first time they felt explicitly cinematic in the sense that this game wanted to show me a narrative straight out of a book, or a movie, but most importantly, still be a game at the same time. "a snake is afraid of a man that is naked, but pursues a man that is clothed." naked snake is content with letting a curtain block his view of the changing geopolitics until his former mentor helps him realize he needs to reject how the military-industrial complex treats its soldiers. i won't claim the auteur that is kojima is the perfect director or that all of the writing is good. but i do confidently think that mgs3 is some of the best in the series, a game that has a strong identity and pushes the question of what it means to be "loyal" to your country. i'm anti-patriotic to the core. it always bothers me when people give into the lowest common denominator statement from some politician that claims to be doing everything right. i just don't trust authority like that, and the emphasis on nationalism always feels like a move to subjugate the working class and those below them. it's a system that's used to dehumanize others. i love where i live, but not my country, if that makes sense. and i never will. all that aside, though, the game itself...
is just so unforgivingly fun in how it gives the player the freedom to do things i never thought a game would let me do. spin snake around in the menu until he gets sick and throws up. let him stay absolutely filthy after dragging through a swamp, only to have the soldiers notice him by smell. speed up your PS2 game-time to kill an elderly boss instead of fighting him outright. wrestle a caiman. kill an animal during the fight with ocelot to see him criticize you. there are too many little details for me to list that make this one of the greatest games i can think of, and it's all thanks to the original team and that desire to make something that doesn't harmonize with the rest of the gaming world.
9. GANBARE GOEMON: YUKIHIME KYUUSHITSU EMAKI (1991):
japanese period game #2. or #1, considering i played this first. it was released in the united states localized as, "the legend of the mystical ninja". i wonder why my mom decided to purchase it out of all the things on display? the redrawn cover is kind of crazy. it isn't the only game she'd buy for the system with a heavy ancient japanese aesthetic at the time, "mysterious ghost world" being localized as pocky & rocky.
before talking about all the little ways i love it, i guess it's here because it was the first time in my life i distinctly remember playing something that felt like... it had been altered. that even at five or six, i recognized this was a japanese game. there's no way they're eating pizza in old old japan, right? (this was literally edited from a rice ball to an icon of a pizza). i could feel my brain as a child expanding to automatically accept cultural norms that just didn't exist where i lived, like... if you hit these deer in nara you have to pay a fine. this is how i knew there were deer in nara before even seeing a picture of the place, and that they were strictly off-limits. and maybe this is how people feel when they think about kids getting on huge yellow school buses like it's the norm all thanks to movies that promote the american hegemony, but it feels a little more innocent since it's mostly fiction. this game is how i just came to accept giant octopuses as a thing, and that ghosts wear slips of paper on their heads, and ninja fly on giant kites and throw bombs. it's where i learned the concept of the dice game cho-han without knowing what it's really called, or what betting on horses might conceptually look like and how valuable gradius is. it's the beginnings of my passion for learning. a curiosity that would span a lifetime.
also, the music is really good. so good i bought it on vinyl...
i was so close to putting the N64 title for this niche series here instead, because it's like? equally as important to me for some reason. maybe in that it was one of the first things that had me engage with distinctly japanese humor, which did Not get raving reviews in american publications at the time... but got raving reviews with me personally. anyway. ganbare goemon is a niche, dead IP that is even cuter now that i can understand goemon's heavy edoben. i'm excited to go back and replay the games in japanese instead of relying on their botched localizations. the weapons upgrades are so casually seamless when they pop out of enemies, and the exaggerated world is so vibrant.