Dragon Quest El-Heaven

I hope it’s not nostalgia talking when I say: 

How magnificent,

How charming,

How all-encompassingly perfect

Dragon Quest XI is.  Dragon Quest in general.  It is absolute fucking perfection.

If that’s the kind of thing you dig, that is.  And I do.

I have to say (and this may take some time to say), that playing the Dragon Quest games throughout my life has been a gratifying, eye-opening, and sanity-binding adventure that has spanned more than half of its course.

It all started with Nintendo Power magazine.  Doesn’t it always? I’d been happy in my Zelda and Mario worlds, the Capcoms the Konamis and everyone else fortunate enough to get a license to print games for Nintendo.  Contra.  Mega Man.  Castlevania II – the first game that I purchased (after the Mario and Duck Hunt cross-cartridge).  But also let’s just shout out to Rygar, Strider (or Stri-dar), Zelda II, River City Ransom – hell just listen to the song: youtube.com/8bit/Zelda.mp3

My game world was highly informed by that monthly piece of postal gold: Nintendo Power.  I’d walk home from school, focusing on the moment I’ll pull down the flap of the mailbox and retrieve that blessed volume with my name printed on the cover (later they’d use address stickers).  I had a subscription to NP from Issue no. 2 (cover art featuring a human Simon Belmont holding Dracula’s severed head by his Romanian ponytail or whatever) and it continued well past Issue no. 100.  But there were changes.  

There were a lot of changes and discoveries during that time.  Nintendo Power was teaching me tons – how to read, for one, at least read better, or read with passion.  Also, those were the formative years of my late elementary to junior high school years, so school probably taught me a couple of things as well.

Oh yes, well, anyway – as a loyal subscriber, it felt rather shocking and hurtful later on to learn that if you got a subscription to Nintendo Power, they would give you a free fucking video game.  Yes, ladies and genitalmen, A free fucking $50 at least video game called Dragon Warrior.  It would be free to all.  Free to most.  Free to subscribers.  If you subscribed.  Right now.  See, it wasn’t my time to re-up my subscription to NP, so I never got that free game.  Everyone else did, me, I just got to read about it in stark detail.

But I got to play it, eventually, all right.  My next-door neighbor, B had a copy – possibly free with his subscription – and eventually I think I got my own copy at some weird NES game swap meet in a hotel next to the Bob Evans – but oh yeah – I played it, and it was epic.

Dragon Warrior I was known as “Dragon Quest” in Japan, and boy was it ever.

Good game.  I mean, really great game – they changed all the original Japanese dialogue to match the Olde Timey Englishe tone that the game was going for – “Thou art dead.” was the Game Over message, and “A Drakee Approacheth!  What dost thou do?”  (I continue raving about Dragon Quest to the Drakee but mildly diss it).  All in all, it was kind of a half-assed approach to localizing by today’s standards, but that’s only because we have practiced it again and again and gotten it down to a science by now.  It was extremely clever and creative of them to do it HOWEVER they did it, though, and a free game promotion in crazy old USA?  That shit sold a LOT of magazines.  Lots of people got that game for free, but I’m guessing maybe only 20 to 25% of them finished it.  Max.  

I mean, hell, in a way it was like the Dark Souls of its time.  You have to level up, or be really gud to proceed in that game.  I mean, you just don’t even have the stats to fight the Dragon at the end of the marsh cave until at least… level 5 and LOTS of luck, pal!

That game – Dragon Warrior – taught me to grind.  Level grinding was a guaranteed way to put victory within your grasp.  I took that principle and applied it to my Zelda II game, and wow, with a little stat boosting and downthrust practice, I could really whoop some Hylian ass.  Increased stats are basically a given in games today, but back then, the “growth” of characters was kind of a novel concept because you’d be WRITING over their whole avatar of the game, whereas before, most “power-ups” (such as growth-promoting mushrooms) were temporary, and you’d be dead before long and have to fuck it up again and again.  Dragon Quest had a feel of continuity to it – a game could last months.  For some, it may last years.  

I feel like level grinding now is a kind of “exercise” akin to walking or jogging, if we were to consider electronic games like these “sports,” but fuck sports.  Fuck the Olympics, too, while I have the platform.  But in the RPG Olympics, I say that Dragon Quest takes the gold for all-time best RPG series by any video game creator, ever, and Final Fantasy is probably guaranteed the bronze – assuming they Finally kill the Chaos and test for illegal substances in their shittier entries to the series.  Silver goes to whatever RPG franchise YOU think is the best.  I’m absolutely sure it is.  If you played it and enjoyed it like nothing else, then it deserves your love, respect, and not necessarily someone like me to sing its praises.  But I’m in a singing mood, so let fucking rap about Dragon Quest!

I beat the Dragonlord.  I saved Alefgard.  Several times.  Several times THROUGH.  Game is definitely beatable in a single day once thou knowest that what thou must doeth.  However, I didn’t play another DQ game until about 25 years later – It was Dragon Quest VIII and it was bought used for ¥1000 on a beautiful summer day.

I was a young man in Japan, living with my now-wife in a two-bedroom apartment next to Den-Den Town in the Great City of Osaka.  I even remember the video game store I bought it at – a little place just down the street south of Tennoji Station, a little past where the foundation of the Abeno Harukas building stands today.  A Super Potato store, perhaps, or an indi-er one, and I saw Dragon Quest VIII in the bargain bin for just $10.  I was like, “Baby, I’m buying this game,” and she was like “Good.”  (It must be noted that earlier, the future Mrs. Epicuzi bought my ass a brand new Playstation 2 a Christmas or so earlier, though she has very little interest in games herself.)

It was a glorious time, playing that game in those days.  Idyllic.  It was just so beautiful and fucking fun.  The music, the open landscapes, the fact that all the characters go “bubllululbubublu blblubbbuubu blub,” when they’re talking to mimic their speech.   The same level up chime, the same sound effects, the same brilliant Toriyama character design, the smell of tatami mats in the baked summer air – sure, one of these things is not like the other and I won’t deny that my sentimental feeling for those days plays a big part in mine ardour for thee, o! Dragon Quest, ye.

But really – it is like the very best RPG series of all time.  Each volume of the flagship series is its own unique adventure in its own corner of the DQ Multiverse.  There is a lot of consistency across them, and the traditions live strong today.  I love them.

Three weeks ago, I was browsing the shelves of my local Book Off (a chain of used book, comic, CD and game stores), and came across Dragon Quest XI for the Nintendo 3DS.  This game has been out for at least two years now – I’m guessing that most people who’d ever play it had already played it.  And now they were selling their used copies, and the stores finally had so many in their warehouses that they didn’t know what to do with them all.  

That’s how I got Dragon Quest VIII so cheap when I did, after all.

I called my son.  “Guy?”  

“Yeah, Daddy,” 

“I’m at the Book Off right now.”  

“Oh yeah?”  

“Yeah – and they have Dragon Quest XI for ¥1000.”  

“Cool.”  

“What do you think, should I pick it up?”  

“They don’t have it for the Switch?”  

“They might, but it’s like 4000 at least.”  

“Well, yeah, I guess you should probably buy it.”  

And I did.  And it was the best ¥1000 I’ve spent all year.

For one thing, my son (the one just on the phone with me now) had recently cleared (or “beaten” to you Westerners) Dragon Quest IX.  It is needless to say that I am a very proud father of both of my kids.  But Guy found DQXI (not a typo) to be so good that he ended up buying his own copy for the Switch (¥4000 used).  We had a good race going for awhile.  I was about 20 hours in, and he was RE-playing the parts he had on my copy for the 3DS.  I was ahead for a long time.  Then he caught up, and our levels were neck and neck for a few days, and then I had to go to werk and he had summer vacation, oh hell he CLEARED the whole damn game weeks before I would – or will – you see, I still haven’t beaten it yet.  

God damn, I gotta get on that.  

Let me just say I’m taking my time.  I’m grinding.  I’m crafting.  I’m technically still working here at home, okay?  I’m trying to read the Japanese script and learn new words from it, okay?  Yes, I’m playing this game in Japanese, and it’s not a big deal, but it does slow me down here and there.  Life is damn busy and demanding, but for some things it is more rewarding to take it slow than speedrun the game in two weeks like my son.

And oh may damn, it is a rewarding game with a wonderful story.  It’s in the words of a great man and Questor of Dragons himself, “Unfuckwithably solid on all platforms.”  You said it, mang.  Even on a dirty-ass 3DS screen the game just kicks ass and stomps slimes.  

God damn, dad, clean your DS any time this decade?

Those magical feelings I had in my Summer of Dragon Quest VIII?  Those days I look back on with a unique flavor of fondness and memory?  I am living them again a decade later in the Summer of Dragon Quest XI.  These are the good old days as I know they will be looked back upon.  We art blessed.

Right.  Back to the grind.

The Book of Genesi

I’m a good consultant of the past. You can come to me to redress any issue that ever happened over the entire course of history or time, because there’s a good chance I have a record of it somewhere. In a journal, in a half-finished story, in comics, notebook illustrations, CD-Rs and cassettes, and of course whatever’s still rattling around in the old noggin.

I have the luxury of remembering just about everything that ever happened (at least when it comes to the things that really matter – video games, for one thing), not because my memory is excellent, but because I have just enough free time to not let go of the past, forgetting to seize time by the reins and gallop forward like most do, throwing themselves into the work of their passion, or down dark or light-dubious paths to their respective demises – nope, I stay fixed at a tortoise’s pace, sweating and living just like everyone else, but with a secret knack for hoarding time and memories.

It gives me time to write accounts of the past like this one, and with my newfound powers, I will resuscitate, re-litigate, and probably reiterate that I am the Master of this new telling of the past, and how / what a telling it shall be.

This particular episode – we’ll call in the first in a disjointed string of infinite episodes happening throughout the spectrum of dimensional-integrated spacefuck, shall be called:

Genesis, Book One

1:1 In the beginning of the 16-bit era, God thus spoke: RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE 1:2 And we rose to live out the tale of the Altered Beast. 1:3 And it was cool.

Cool kids had Genesises. God that plural looks awful. But no, I’m serious – some of the coolest kids I knew had a Sega Genesis long before I ever put an SNES controller in my hand. My best friend, K had left town after third grade, and we had grown up Nintendo together. That kid was so fucking cool, he’s still like my best friend today. From about 1987-89, we played the ghostridden fuck out Ninja Gaiden, Mario, and Rygar and knew each others’ mental catalog of soundtracks and skills when it came to anything NES. And then the motherfucker just left. Well, it wasn’t his fault. His family moved to Colorado for about a year, and then by next fall of 1990, BOOM he was back! And he had a shiny new Black Genesis with him.

That was fucking baller – a Genesis in 1990? Man, you had to be way ahead of the curve. I remember when his family came back just to visit during Spring Break that year like a preview, and I got to try it out – he had Revenge of Shinobi, a Fist of the North Star Game titled “Last Battle” and of course, Altered Beast and remember just being fucking awed by it. Fucking Sega, what had you made!? Or what you had made!

Another friend of mine who was in my fourth grade class, S, had a Genesis too – his house was where I probably played one for the first time. I liked S, and we had some things in common – Ninja Turtles, skateboarding later on, but visitng his house was comparatively rarer than when I used to hang with K. For one thing, he had a huge dog – like a boxer or something named Peg, and she was very sweet, but I’m not crazy about dogs, plus Peg a very slick coat and stinky smell, so for that one reason, I guess that I didn’t hang out at his place as often. Nah, I won’t blame it all on the dog.

But I remember that I’d have put up with the smell of 100 dogs just to continue ONE MORE TIME in Ghouls and Ghosts back in that year that K was gone. God, I was entranced by Capcom’s greatest iteration of the G&G series on the G. I played that game so much that first weekend that if his house was an arcade and a credit was a quarter, I would have spent like $50 at least. That shit was damn addictive, and the fact that the Genesis sound chip could use actual human voices blew me away much like chimpanzees are freaked out by magicians on the other side of their enclosure’s glass, but that was more of an Altered Beast perk.

Ghouls and Ghosts was its own special thing – finding the right weapon, maintaining your armor, not getting turned into a duck – plus that soundtrack, holy shit, I really do think it’s the best entry in the Makaimura series. The bosses and graphics were unlike anything I’d seen in my cute little Nintendo world. The first boss was a fucking giant suit of armor with a demon’s head on the end of one of its arms, and used at least 16 colors making it look like something, well, out of the arcade! That was the only thing you could compare it to at the time – Arcade Graphics, ha! S did have an arcade in house, and I guess it was the feeling one gets when you’re in an arcade and you’ve somehow found the custodian’s keys, and you’ve deftly set all the games to Free Play mode. I just couldn’t get enough of it.

Eventually, though I managed to conquer Satan or whatever in that game did move on. With like, life and stuff, too.

Did I mention K came back in the fall of 1990? Hell yeah. That summer before fifth grade, we’d hang out, play with lighters, listen to DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s Homebase album and play the fuck out of both his Genesis games as well as our healthily maintained Nintendo libraries. Best of both worlds shit, and I remember K was even good enough to lend me his Genesis for a period of time – like the whole console and his entire library of games for like a MONTH (INCLUDING STRIDER) – HOLY FUCK BALLS!

Now that was a good time. During it, I beat the fuck out of G&G, got a pretty good character going on Sword of Vermilion, could get to the last boss of Strider (still never beat that amazing Genesis version, I’m afraid), and I know at some point I beat Revenge of Shinobi, too — god damn, I remember K and I straight rocking out to the soundtrack of that one. It was cool shit. We loved the soundtracks to all those fucking games and later on would sample them mercilessly in the pursuit of creating original rap albums, which is another story for another book in another bible.

The funny thing about cool kids and their Genesises, though (god, we need to do something about that plural), is that when I had possession of K’s, yet ANOTHER friend from another portion in my Venn Diagram of friends, J came over and became just as hypnotized by it as I had been. As many had been . As many more should have been and yet fewer will be. Was I now the new cool kid with the Genesis?

J and I had grown up playing Sierra computer games – King’s Quest, Gold Rush and the like, but he also had a healthy love for the Dragon Quest (nee Dragon Warrior) series on the NES. When he experienced the Genesis at my house, though (why do I doubt he remembers this moment as clearly as I do?), man, that kid was HOOKED. I forget what his jam was, but for all intents and purposes, it might as well have been trying to kill Beelzebub and Satan in Ghouls and Ghosts.

I remember getting a bit frustrated with him as became increasingly dismissive of my presence in my own fucking house. I’d be like “hey you know you can double jump and shoot 8 shurikens at once? And he’d be like “Yeah, no doi. Can I get something to drink?” It was like he didn’t need me around, like AT ALL while he stared into the abyss and chucked his projectiles at the hordes of programmed enemies. I knew the addiction well and let it slide as best I could.

It’s not easy being the cool kid with the Genesis. Ain’t all roses and rainbows or goofs and goblins and shit!

Anyway, I fucking love the Genesis, and think that that whole console war thing between Nintendo and Sega was a fucking proxy war using we consumers who could only afford one or the other, to fight it for them. Fuck that noise!

I will concede. It’s true in some places that Genesis does do what Nintendon’t – one example is showing blood and the gorier fatalities in Mortal Kombat 1. Also, Sonic the Hedgehog. Okay fine – yes, it’s true, but there’s also like a ton that Nintendid what Genedidn’t… Segadon’t.. whatever the fuck – Sega didn’t do: Final Fantasy, for starters. Sega didn’t do fucking Zelda. Sega didn’t do Mario, Sega didn’t have Nintendo Power goddamn magazine. It’s such a weird statement, but you have to give them credit for inciting that Us and Them mentality with a slogan as catchy as it was.

Incidentally, the Console Wars today are so stupid that Sega now happily makes games for Nintendo systems, and Nintendo refuses to participate in the stupid charade of war altogether, now matter how much Sony and Micro$hit egg them on. “We’ll fucking make VR out of cardboard, turn a plastic circle into a catch-all exercise device, and put a another company’s IP into Smash Bros. What you got?”

“Uh, we’re gonna release Halo again.”

“Don’t forget Madden!”

“And John Madden’s Footballs 2.03K!”

I imagine that there are many cool kids today who enjoy a wide range of games and other experiences. They are the future, after all. And I bet the drugs they take are fucking fantastic, too. But they’ll never be as cool as my other friend M, who rocked both a Super NES AND a Sega Genesis in 1991.

(And he was actually kind of a douchetool.)

Holy shit, I remember this kid, M was gifted ToeJam and Earl AND his brand new Super Nintendo on the same day that winter (okay maybe it was Christmas). He was rich, and I think his dad was the senator or former senator of our state. I VERY rarely hung out with M, but my friend B was in his class, and the weird Venn Diagram of friendships intersected in my favor when I was invited to stay over at M’s on that glorious, glorious day.

We actually played more ToeJam and Earl than anything that night, even though I had been sweating and maybe even drooling bullets in anticipation for the new 16-bit Nintendo system. TJ&E was so fucking fun and just genius in its zeitgeist of cool funky young people’s culture. It stands the test of time and doesn’t violate any of our modern day sensibilities.

Jammin’

RAP

TOE Jammin

(Big Earl).

RAP RAP RAP

(Big Earl)… Sorry – I’m just remembering the feature in that game that would allow one or both players to just jam sound effects over the bass-poppin’ BGM to that game. Your character would dance and snap and say shit like, “Jammin!” according to the button input and was such a fun distraction.

I also remember the titillation of finding the secret level, Level 0, which had a 1-up granting lemonade stand, and a hot tub with cute girls in it – and you could go chill and chat with them! Like, you could have Earl’s fat ass jump in the hot tub and press C to spit some game at the girls, and they would “giggle” or “titter” in response. Don’t tell any of the culture police out there, I guess, but that shit was sexy as fuck. Kinda. For a 12-year old.

M was pretty cool, I guess, but some of the coolest kids who had Genesisisises? I hadn’t even met them yet, and they were off being cool in a world that I had no knowledge of and no jurisdiction for chronicling over. Also, let’s hear it for kids who were never taught not to put prepositions at the sentence’s end. Cool in somebody’s world, I imagine.

Let’s talk about J. No wait – J was the kid who went crazy over my.. K’s Genesis and then his family moved away… Guess we’ll have to name this guy.. Jon. That could be his real name or not.

In 5th or 6th grade, I met Jon, and Kelly and I both ended up becoming pretty good friends with him. Jon’s family had a Genesis, but Jon had gone to another elementary school across town. I didn’t meet Jon until well after that crazy night at [redacted]’s house, but Jon would throw these CRAZY fucking sleepovers in like 6th or 7th grade inviting like 8 or 9 kids to his big-ass house, and I’d be one of them from time to time, oh lucky me!

The game at that time which I played like a maniac until like 3 in the morning (most of the kids at these things didn’t sleep all night) the first time I stayed at Jon’s? Road Rash. I think that was made by E fucking A. The Genesis version? The absolute best, never replicated in any meaningful way on any other console. EA’s also never done anything of comparable value since. Well, maybe, I don’t know – but the Genesis version of Road Rash was tits, and I knew that Jon was cool as fuck. Today he’s my DM in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that’s been going on for like three years. He and his brothers played the Phantasy Star series, which of course I had heard of but didn’t play myself, one because I didn’t have a Genesis of my own, and two, Final Fantasy was my RPG jam, but mostly one, because I didn’t have a fucking Genesis. They say it’s awesome and intense and traditional as anything out there, but today the Phantasy Star series is so monstrously extensive that I just wouldn’t know where to begin.

I’d meet another cool cat later on down the line, way after Genesis games and even Saturn games had pretty much stopped being made. I don’t know if it was the Genesis he had growing up – the Sega CD, perhaps – but damn that guy was cool. Still is. We’ll call him C and he’s a reader of this dead ass blog – that’s how fucking cool C is. I won’t embarrass him or myself any further, and should probably be working on something important or life-related now. Lunch, perhaps, then more Dragon Quest XI.

Mein Kraft

Minecraft is a gift from the gods, or at least a creation of those with the spark of God on earth. This fucking electronic world, man, it gets to me sometimes.

Nonetheless, I maintain that Minecraft is a gift from blessed creators, and I’m pretty sure I can prove that a Scandinavian kid named Notch was an entity who really existed, that he really made this game, and really sold it to Micro$hit for 4 billion or whatever. Or maybe that’s what Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney for, but who gives a fuck?

Don’t know why that’s important – the important thing is, the gods dropped a gift in our lap, and now it is our free will that will steer us through the epic godhood of our own universes, built block by block, until a god simply cannot build anymore.

Such is godhood in Minecraft.

There is something else that the game is doing for the minds and souls of digital gamers and navigators of the increasingly electronic earth. That is creating gap-fillers that will assist in the integration of humans and machine – the singularity that will change everything and combine our organic life and digital life inextricably.

But for now I must chop wood.

And build like no one has ever built before. Minecraft saved me. At work. With nothing to do. It plays well on an iPad, and can easily be switched to a ‘work mode’ application such as Pages, where I type this blog and look like I’m working when students and faculty suddenly walk in and interrupt my divine toil, generating existence and breathing of life into worlds of blocks.

It’s hilarious – I’ve been an amateur builder in that game for over a decade now. Meanwhile, some dude at Purdue is building the entire fucking campus. I always thought it would be cool just to replicate the Onion, or Purdue Memorial Union as the actual students call it. I once made the main stretch from the Grant St. entrance that goes past the Sweet Shop and the Arcade and realized with some regret – okay this is a pretty damn massive project. And promptly found another way to spend 300(000,000) hours of my life.

The singularity can’t happen soon enough. As my clock runs out in this mortal husk, it takes more and more energy to store more and more data – the memories pile up and I am loathe to erase them in the name of freeing up space. Processing power is being hampered by back pain and stress levels are threatening strikes in the medulla oblongata – those damn reds! Do not let their Unionizing message reach the amygdala, or we will have let something else take over – something dark, perhaps chemical will have stolen the mantle reserved for the Machine part of me that will organize, process, and put to use all the knowledge accumulated in this lifetime. Automate me so I can go back to playing Minecraft, living, and acquiring more knowledge and skills. Then automate that process so that I can learn ever more. Also, go ahead and automate my Minecraft game – build The Onion from my memory so I can use my leftover conscious brain to go play MOTHER 3 and learn how to cry again.

If Micronut$ offered to install Minecraft in my head so that I could further the cause of AI, I would say absolutely not, fuck you, you’re totally the wrong people to be developing that shit. If Notch offered to break me off a cool mil to do it, I’d probably pass on that, too. But you know what? I’d do it for Nintendo. Call me humanity’s most epic fandude and gameboy, but I just trust them and think a legacy like that would be dope.

It is a grand fantasy, though, is it not? Minecraft, the frog DNA in bridging the gaps between man and machine. Let this coupling extrapolate its potential and watch the feedback loop swirl.

A Timeline (subject to exponential and dimensional change)

Year XYZ

Singularity occurs. Human consciousness merges with digital processors and data storage for memory-based retrieval systems.

Year XYY

Audio-visual data processing reaches human levels of image and sound replication.

Year XXY

Dreams can be recorded and played back.

Year XXX

Dream audio-visual data processing reaches super-human levels of image and sound replication.

The first hack is into a person’s dreams, and basically the plot of Inception becomes reality.

Something needs to be done about dopamine and seratonin regulation in newly merged minds – some off-brands of combined consciousness accidentally create Terminal Man-style junkies, whose computers can’t get enough dope for their human half, then allow themselves to take over all processing functions.

Year VXX

The machines push for more control as human input is whittled down to base minimum levels, allowing the human mind to learn and enjoy all the pleasures of the world – video games, literature, music, language learning – all of it digital, but all of it real and once existing – well, everything except those dreams – allowing the human mind to play in hacked dreams was probably a mistake – on the machines’ part.

However, I finally have enough time to get good at Cuphead, and I have fun navigating noobs through Dark Souls in VR so realistic that I sometimes throw up.

Year VXV

There are now more people who have merged than have not – whether they know it or not. The payment systems in a digitally regulated democratic economy all but demand it because the calculations are ever changing based on actual supply and demand of 95% of all physical resources in the world. Anything sold in the open market is part of it, so only weapons and narcotics and endangered crap and stuff like that is not a part of this economy. The values fluctuate by billionths of a cent every second and are automated so that no one runs out of money and no places run out of resources.

Years VXW

Groups of humans break off to rebel against the machine integration, thinking that they are sacrificing too much of their humanity. Using hacked dreams as a back door, they steal both the plot of Inception AND the Matrix and… okay, now this is getting way too derivative.

For now, it is enough to chop my wood, build my world and mine my craft. Gods bless us gods, once and all (except for Micro$hit who can suck a Creeper’s dick).

Tezeta Plaguemaw Goes to Camp

It was resignedly night when he rode down and out from the mountains into the foothills of Ambarino.  The sunset had guided him down the dusty shimmer of the last path down and now he was relying on the lamp trussed around the light barding of his horse, praying to the disinterested gods of this land to guide his way toward the place where the sky above wasn’t a complete inky black...

I’m not really great at writing westerns.  I’ve seen the best – it ain’t me.

However, Red Dead Online gets you thinking somethings and sometimes.  And here I am to catalogue them in the tome that is all holy, this stupid blog whatever it’s called EpicuzisuckiT entry 2021:

To tell the truth, I never played the Story Mode of Red Dead Redemption 2.  I sort of digested it from a distance.  I saw the South Park episode, have friends who have played it, one in particular who explained that he would “do the hunting and while he was at work, his wife would do all the cooking in the game.” They had a good trade-off in that family.

I did, however play the every sun-loving fuck out of RDR 1 — there are entries somewhere on this cursed tome – but maybe that is back in EpicuzuplayiT 1: When I was a young man.  We all talk shit when we’re young, and man, I’ve talked a LOT of shit about a LOT of games up here.  Sometimes I even drank liquor drinks and wrote in this blog, why there may even be a Kingdom Hearts entry back there when I’m even tipsy!

Things are different this time around, in good old / bad new 2021.  We should all have the chance to let the past be the past and yeah I’ve been a jerk/amateur but I want one thing to be perfectly clear about one thing that hasn’t changed around here:  These games are fucking EPiC cuz I Play Em, and precisely because I do, that’s my personal guarantee.

So let the Epic of Tezeta Plaguemaw nee “Teeth like the Sun” commence or comanche or whatever the fuck.

Tezeta Plaguemaw was born to a frontier man by a frontier woman.  This was common on the frontier in the year of our Lord, 1888.  Or ’89.  Or whatever.  One parent was native, the other was not.  For all we knew about his past, he could have been descended from the god-like race of the shinobi from the Far East where shadows die twice.

Here on the frontier, they still may yet die again and again, too.

Because it’s a video game.

And Sekiro was too fucking hard, so I’ve come back to cuddle in the comforts of RDO where Tezeta has a successful trading business, moonshine operation, does some bounty hunting, and all kinds of mischief in between.  He’s died about 100 times, I’d say – falling, getting shot, blowing up, jumping off cliffs with his horse, Darknut.  

Well, at least back when it was Darknut.

Darknut was replaced by Light (don’t ask her full name), best horse money can buy – white as the moon and fast as its shine.  Now Tez pilots an old blue nag called Bluedozer who he’s trying to get into shape, and she’s a beast to behold.  An honest filly, now, she earns her weight in hay every day.

Say hi, Bludy (*don’t call her Bludy, buddy)

When I abandoned the game last time, I had just paid like $800 in game dollars for Light, but Blue had been sitting in the stable the whole time.  She was essentially my spare tire in case Darknut died, but that happened pretty rarely, or at least un-frequently.  Light was an Arabian Stallion, (and still is).  Fast as fuck but I feel like her hearing wasn’t very good because I could be calling her for minutes from like not that far away and the bitch ass nag wouldn’t never come.  

These days Horsie Death (as the old West doctors call it) has been somewhat frequent as of late, that Bluedozer will die and Light will come running in like an ambulance and it’s like, “What happened to Blue?” And she’ll say, “I don’t know,” and she say, “I thought she was with you,” and I say, “I fast traveled, why didn’t she? and Light will say HORSES CAN’T TALK and also, what the fuck, be careful around cliffs.  These horses are so fucking gorgeous, it’s a damn shame when they Axl Rose off a mesa or something and break their horsey necks.  I’ll let the pictures speak now:

—

“I’d rather pet a pig,” said Cripps, the bearded old hobo who ran Tezeta’s Trade Post.  

“Don’t listen to him, Chikuwa,” said Tezeta to his dog.  “He means his mother, but he is out of nickels.”

Chikuwa was a good boy and the old 19th Century trogolodyte could fuck right off.

“Har de har, Teeth Like a Pet Cemetary,” he said, whittling a dead squirrel carcass Tezeta had turned in last time along with about a dozen other dead animals and their parts.  “You gonna sell this fucking wagon full of dead bullshit I turned into art?”

The wagon stunk and left a trail of animal blood and viscera in its wheel ruts.  Today it was loaded with various pieces Cripps had crafted, and were all tied down to the bed with what looked like deer intestines.

“This is art?” Tez asked, picking one of the supplies off the cart.

“It’s a fuckin canteen lined with the petrified stomach of an alligator, wrapped in its own child’s skin.”  Cripps could be grim in description, but it did not dispel him of his conviction about the quality of his work.  

Tez refused to remember the alligator family he had slaughtered so that this water vessel could come into existence.  He’d slaughtered hundreds of such creatures, but to remember each and every one, their agony, their lives extinguished, their corpses littered about the swamp drizzling blood downstream – it could drive a man mad!  Good thing it’s just a video game.  Tezeta would pray for for their spirits over dinner and smokes.  He decided to cook a stew.  Or maybe he’d just stop by the still for a vat of moonshine….

——

See?  It’s all one long narrative, but a lot of it is just a matter of course.  I go through horses, we go kill things – it’s the circle of life, baby, and Tezeta is a good life.  It is an exclusively online game, too, so the encounters are unpredictable, at least they can be up to a certain point, but RDO always has new surprises.  You could run into these guys for instance (show picture of Mario and Luigi in RDO – you know the one, it’s sick.

Now these guys know how to play Epically

Far from Final Chronicles

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles

has many modes

of both party and difficulty.

It can be difficult to party with others.

After a 3 or 4 month break from FF:CC,

I thought difficult mode would be playing on multi-player mode, and no one showing up so all of the difficulties of soloing in multiplayer arise.

For example, you cannot equip a spell stronger than one what you have.

Which should make sense.

But the item-slotting you have to do for every stage will not let you “double up” magic (two Fires make a Fira, three make a fiagra etc.).

Doubling-up can only be done by two players casting at the same time.

This is a rare occurence when no other players show up.

However, I discovered the true difficult mode of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles was not embarrassing myself in front of the other players when they DID show up – man, was I outclassed.  Those dudes and dudettes must not have taken the 3 month hiatus.

The first two came in together, and one started casting some kind of Time magic, possibly Hastega, and later in battle would cast shit like Meteo and Firaga – all by his or herself.  I waffle on the gender because I couldn’t tell – I couldn’t even tell who I needed to cast my stupid little Antidote spell on when they got poisoned.  I never could turn all the purple hearts red.  

Anyway, nobody really needed the antidote spell that bad.  Cure, yes, but after every major battle, one of those two ultra mages cast cureaga on everybody in the party and then summoned the goddamn meteors again.  I’d actually never seen the spell in action.  I’m going to find out how to get a Meteo Ring right this very fucking moment.

from game8.co‘s entry on the subject:

HowtoGettheMeteorRingArtifact

The Meteor Ring is obtained from the post-game dungeon, RainyRuins, for getting a high amount of bonus points. There are 4 different reward pools in Rainy Ruins, so if you have an adequate amount of bonus points there’s a 1/4 chance that it will appear. In our experience, we had 308 bonus points in single-player when it showed up as a reward.

Fuck.

They say there’s no leveling in this game, but that’s not exactly true.

Each stage gives you an artifact that improves something in your stats.

And if you beat the game, it looks like you can continue collecting them from beyond the vale of sanity.

And if you never stop collecting artifacts…

It shames me to say that I have not beaten this game, which must drive my friend – the only one who games more epiccally than I (who has platinumned 53 of the last 54 games he’s played), completely mad.  Frankly, it drives me mad, too.  I am known for straight up abandoning these games – for the second or third time in 10 years!  Maybe fourth!

There’s something about this game that keeps me from beating it.  It could be the relentless pursuit of artifacts that you collect indefinitely until you run out of artifacts to get or one day you wake up, say, maybe I have enough.  Maybe I can do this.  How DO I beat this fucking game, anyway?  I actually don’t know.  I just collect Myrrh for Village of Fawlty, and I’m in my 8th year of doing it, too.

That’s right.  In 2020, I set on a journey from my hometown of Fawlty.  My name is Poertzifil, and my family of alchemists are a bunch of fucknuts who don’t understand me.

Don’t mention the FMA Doujin

I’m serious, brother

When it’s just me and Mog, I’m a pretty badass caster, myself.  I can triple up magic and kick most shit’s ass.  You could call me a Solo Caravaneer, but look again: One Abomination, One Moogle – that’s a duo if I ever played one. Mog’s got me, and I’ve got Mog… to carry the fucking cage.

That’s the other pain in the ass of Multiplayer – someone has to carry the Crystal Cage to protect the party and advance the stage, and I don’t use voice chat. I don’t really want to hear the actual screechy voices across the globe screaming “take it” OR “i got it.” I mean, I just assume everyone who uses voice chat has a screechy, unbearable voice. That’s how it is on the GTA Online servers, anyway. Eventually I just grabbed the damn thing and decided I’d be the carrier, since I was the host of the dungeon after all…  

Anyway, we burned our way through the second iteration of Tida Village and no one died.  I even went home with an Elven Mantle, boosting my defense by 2.  The dungeon was clear, so I dissolved the party and typed this.

My next mission should really be beating the game, but I’m not sure I have enough goddamn fucking artifacts –

and so the cycle continues.

Regifting the Trojan Horse

I woke up at about 5:30 in the morning to play video games in the still, kotatsu-warmed darkness before werk.

And decided to beat Hollow Knight.

I’d put the game down about a month or so earlier, after about a solid month of courtship in the Kindgom of Hallownest or whatever – a month can blur some of the details. I’d gotten incredibly far and remembered that I had quit (not quit – hiatusized) after failing the final Colosseum challenge for the 3rd or so time in a row. So then I was like fuck it and the next day… hmm, check PSN here, what’s free this month and…

Ooh, Red Dead Online is only $5? Holy shit, yes, I’ll take that, please – bye, Hallownest and happy Hollow-Ween!

And off I rode into New Austin!

It is difficult to say when a game is quit, or in this case, hiatusized.

I rather like to think that no game is quit – simply put on hold, but there are exceptions:

1. I will never play Halo or any Halo game ever. Not cuz I quit – I just don’t want to begin! Missed the train on that one and also fuck Halo and fuck Micro$tuff. Stuffit.
2. Uhh…
3. hm.

Yeah, other than that, I don’t think there’s any game I straight up said, “I quit – it’s over – I shall never finished this troublesome game!” It’s just a matter of when I do get back to them before I die. Should I die, will I be able to pick up and finish the tasks in the afterlife? Or is that going to be my personal ironic Hell – finish every game you ever started, starting with Super Mario Bros. – the table top arcade console version you played at the Pizza Hut in 3rd grade and totally set a weird trajectory for your life.

(Actually my first digital game was King’s Quest)

Well, liking video games isn’t that rare.

Loving them. Living them. That’s rare.

So anyway, I thought I ought to write something about RDO since I’ve been playing, and dare I say living the Westworld dream out there for a good solid month on its own. Also wanted to brag that I beat Hollow Knight. I can’t simply go back to RDO and ‘beat’ the game, to use a Sean Bean gesture, although in total I only spent 30 hours playing Hollow Knight, and have clocked well over 130 in Red Dead Online.

vs

This is a game that can never end.

It’s pretty great though. It’s the epitome of EpicuziplayiT – epic precisely because I play it, and I would like to document more of this journey Gunter Oniyama style, so stay tuned in 2021, EpicuzureaderS.

Captain Tez

In Elite Dangerous today,

I delivered synthetic meat and progenitor cells.

And a bundle of explosives to the Hutton Orbital.

Comfiest space ship ever

Asked where I could get my free Anaconda, and they gave me a good price on the cargo.

Bought like 10 mugs and all the Centauri gin I could carry.

Went on an odd courier / trucker route through the great void of space, hopping to various points of light scattered brilliantly through the Milky Way.

Put on the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets’ High Visceral pt. 1 (through the ps4 spotify). Ah. Am I in heaven?

“I found God in a Tomato” played as I maneuvered out of whatever port I was in and realized in horror that I had gotten tricked into a data transmission contract that sent me to the OTHER station that takes a light forever to reach:

The Katzenstein Dock. God damn it. I’ve made the journey before but god does it take forever. Why do these people (no offence, Mr. Katzenstein, the Huttons are assholes, too) build these space stations out in the middle of nowhere?

I guess because if they wanted human company, they’d have stayed on earth.

I am literally shipping Hutton Mugs to the Katzenstein Dock. Fuck me.

Well, let’s see just what they go for over there! Hmm. The price is not listed on eddb.io

But this is interesting – the silver sold at Katzenstein dock goes for a splendid price at the Abraham Lincoln…

Perhaps our friends out in the buttfuck middle of 36 Ophiuchi are not simply longing for that kind of Sol-itude… sorry, I shouldn’t judge. I’m the greediest meanest fucker flying around in the galaxy, and I look like Walter White from Breaking Bad.

Wear a mask. Safety, bitch.

It’s been a long journey for me in Elite Dangerous, mostly undocumented, and played solo despite the vast online world and millions of Commanders playing today. MMOs sometimes make the best single player games, my friends, especially if you play the game like I do, which is epiccally. This is my story. The story of Commander Tez finding his way to his ancestor’s “home.”

Got my Sol Permit about a year after getting my ship.

Now, I can visit the Abraham Lincoln Station orbiting Mother Gaia Earth itself to browse the latest fighter ships in the Galaxy. And that’s just what I’ma do after this two-hour drive to Katzenburg.

But to be honest, I’ve never done combat outside of the tutorial. It’s probably awesome. I should probably ask for help on r/elitedangerous but those guys are too good. Besides, I don’t need human company. I’ll fight from the comfort of my own remote space station in Osaka. No, not that one, but once the State of Emergency is lifted, I sure hope to get back there, too.

Meanwhile, in Red Dead Online, Captain Tez’s ancestor, Tezeta Plaguemaw (yes, relation) runs a successful moonshine and delivery business out of the State of Lemoyne. “I should open a bar. So I can cut down on delivery,” he thought as he shot a squirrel for his trade goods and delivery business.

For more of his exploits, follow @tezetandarknut on twitter

Can you believe those two knuckleheads have their own twitter account? Don’t forget we do, too. @epicuziplayit

Walk Like a Zenithian

Dragon Quest Walk came out for mobile devices in Japan this week, and I am having the slime of my life.  If you love Dragon Quest games, then this is just awesome.  If you’re bored of Pokemon Go but have the unshakable compulsion to keep playing it for three years straight so that walking around earns you intangible wealth and worthless prestige, then… well, let’s just say this game came at a wonderful time.  I want to keep the commentary to a minimum today because I’d rather make this a useful document: 10 tips for playing Dragon Quest Walk.

#1 Build your house in an accessible place

At a certain level, you will be able to build your very own home.  You can place it just about anywhere in the world, from anywhere in the world.  You’ll want it to be close enough that you can physically reach it from time to time because being there is the only way you can arrange the interior and use it to rest your party for free. 

#2 Build your house in a busy place

Your house will appear on the maps of other players if they’re nearby, so try to put it somewhere with a lot of foot traffic or places like schools and fast food shops where other players might be lurking.  Visiting and being visited are both ways to add players to your friends list, so get out there and make some friends!  You can change the location of your house once every 24 hours, so pack it up if you feel the need to move to a new neighborhood.

#3 Guaranteed drop enemies have other rewards

An enemy that shows a 100% mark will definitely drop an item such as a soul or seemingly meaningless Gold.  By all means, collect all the GP and souls that you can, but don’t be surprised if you get a C or D rank from these guys.  The real value of these monsters is that they also appear on the maps of other players, so hanging around the places is one way to meet other players IRL if that’s your thing. 

#4 Don’t throw away garbage souls (yet)

Equipping souls is turning out to be a major factor when it comes to powering up your party members, and you’ll probably only have eyes for A and elusive S ranked ones (yes, S ranks do drop from normal enemies!).  You can only hold 200 souls at a time though, so at some point you’ll need to make space and get rid of all the worthless crap.  Instead of throwing them away, upgrade them!  Two D ranked souls can combine to make a C, three Cs make a B, and so on. 

#5 Visit the landmarks in your area to collect souvenirs

Special landmarks all around Japan will offer quests that reward special regional souvenirs that you can collect and probably send to your friends.  I visited Osaka’s Tsutenkaku tower today and all I had to do was choose another location to visit in order to get a Takoyaki Slime.  They may even offer you an extra souvenir to share for the low price of 100 pink gems.  There seems to be a slight bug at the moment though, because in spite of having over 7000 gems at the time, the game told me I had 0, and offered to redirect me to the gem store where one can spend actual money on them.  Hopefully this will be remedied soon because there are 100 different souvenirs to get, and I can’t be the only one who refuses to pay real money on a free to play game.  It’s the only way to win!

One of at least four major Osaka souvenir dispensers

#6 Use WALK mode!

Walk Mode is a kind of autoplay feature that will have your characters fight every monster that appears and smash every item pot that comes into your range.  It is very useful when you are on the move because each pot heals 40% of your HP and MP which will keep your team healthy enough to fight the monsters.  It also reduces the risk of being hit by cars and running into shit when you’re out and about.  The auto-fight AI is generally pretty smart and will handily slay just about anything the game throws at you, at least between quests (more on this later).  Walk mode is also nice when you’re idle at home, work, or in transit, although you may have to click on the enemies manually if you are not actually walking around.  You’ll want to fight A LOT because leveling up is the only way you will survive the Boss encounters later on.

#7 You can beckon enemies that are out of reach

When in Walk mode, you may see some monsters outside the periphery of your party’s radar.  Touching them on the map will get their attention and make them start walking toward you so you can fight them for the sweet ambrosia of XP of which there will never ever be enough.

#8 Starting a new quest can make the enemies tougher

You’ll probably be on a mad tear to unlock new quests as soon as you get them.  Unlocking them is fine – you’ll want to spend those blue crystals before you max out, but once you unlock a new quest, you’ll be asked if you want to begin the new quest.  Around the middle of Chapter 2 you may have to consider this more carefully because once you begin one, the map enemies will be at the recommended toughness level which can be considerably higher than when you’re not in an active quest.  If there are wyverns appearing, do NOT use blindly use Walk mode because they will fuck you up with fire breath and the battle AI is not smart enough to get rid of them first.  Tougher enemies mean more XP, but you’ll have to be attentive in battles until you complete (or abandon) the quest – then you can go back to passively earning XP in Walk mode.

#9 Wait until level 20 before changing jobs

Unless you REALLY have an attachment to a certain class and want your main character to become one as soon as possible, wait until you hit level 20 before you begin multiclassing.  The reason is that at level 20 (and 50!) your character will get a stat boost that carries over to other classes.  Otherwise, you’re just starting over from level 1.  Don’t worry – any levels and experience you earned in any class will remain, and you can switch back any time – but to really power up, you’ll want to grab all those carry-over perks – perhaps especially the +15 defense that comes to level 20 fighters – good stuff for the whole family.  Also, the most recommended cycle of jobs I’ve come across from other players is Mage to Cleric, Cleric to Fighter, Fighter to Martial Artist, Martial Artist to Thief, and Thief to Mage.

#10 Grab some headphones!

One of the best features that Square Enix got just right on the first try is the ability to customize the sound settings and play audio from other apps in the background.  Not meaning to disrespect the great works of Koichi Sugiyama, but it is quite possible that you will tire of hearing the same Dragon Quest tunes over and over.  Turn the music down to 0, the sound effects to a 1 or 2, and then listen to whatever the hell makes you happiest when you’re taking long walks around town.  Podcasts, Music and Spotify all work and make all the difference in the world between going on an endless mindless level grind or actually enjoying your time out in the great wide world.  

  

Animal Crossing for the Telephone is worth every dollar I never had to spend

To whomever wrote the “Nintendo should be ashamed of themselves” article in regards to the mobile app Animal Crossing, you, sir or madam, are a douchewank.

Let me explain in no gender specific narrative what this game is, means, and does.

We’ll start perhaps, with the history of Nintendo, who have run a successful game-making company for more than 100 years. In the late 20th Century, they invented a home game entertainment system that resurrected the idea of interactive digital entertainment in the home after Atari fucked it up and managed to convince the public at large that these so-called “video games” were nothing more than a fad best blamed on the overoptimistic spawn of the baby boomers. Perhaps a close relative of yours called it the “Intendo.”

Fast forward 20 years, and this same company continues creating home entertainment products including games and characters that pass the test of aging trends in ways the clothes you wear now will not. They continued to make games. They continued to make systems and games with the same characters of previous iterations in new and inventive ways. And though the gaming community has its share of opinions regarding which one wasn’t as good as the others, no franchise be it your Metroids, Marios, Zeldas, Smashes, Karts or Kirbys has ever been renounced as trash – until your stupid ass came along. Well, no, I take that back because it’s not true – you are one of thousands of multicellular butt-dwelling organisms who would tear down Nintendo on a regular basis be it for pay, publicity, or maybe just getting the wrong console for Christmas. Fuck you.

I am not saying that Nintendo can do no wrong. I’ll be the first to say that Donkey Kong 64 is a piece of repulsive binary waste, and that no portable Zelda game should ever be considered canon. You and I could probably agree that the Phillips CD-i ones make for a good joke, if only you had the capability for levity, but you’ve all too lately spent your credibility as being a real human by denouncing the company Nintendo as a whole, and a-hole is what you are.

How dare you. How motherfucking dare you say that Nintendo should feel ashamed of making Animal Crossing for the mobile phone. May I ask, before my profanity and insults reach illiterate levels, how much did you pay for this game during your evaluation period? Was it a lot? Can you write it off in your W-4? How about your W-10? Did you miss a meal because you needed to fashion a fashionable bench before some ostrich threatened to temporarily leave your campground? Did someone else reach level 20 before you?

If you answered 0 or “no” to any of the questions above, you’re still playing it wrong, and I think you have mistaken a phone application for a AAA release.

This whole Battlefront II debacle has left a ton of us with the digital equivalent of blaster shock, battlefront fatigue, PTSW, or whatever the fuck you care to call it. Their model was shit and we spoke up, and goddamn if we didn’t beat the bastards by making them literally change the game as we immortalized and memefied their failings while at the same time, the FCC stuck a big yellow dildo up all our internets. And even though EA is literally a secret society of dead pet molesters, we, the people who play games arrived at heretofore unseen lofts of entitlement, and we became, for lack of any more perfect word, cocky.

Cocks. We’re dicks. We expect the game companies to cater to us.
Overconfident. We think that we can rally against the companies that make shit for us and expect us to buy it, and be outraged that they would think to make a single motherfucking dollar off our joy.
Like a male rooster – looking to fuck that sweet sweet hen and create an egg that when I crack open to make an omelet, horrifies me with the embryo of a chick that left under its mother’s feathery cunt, would have been born unto this horrible world to make more eggs for me to make more omelettes.
But mostly dicks.

There is a big difference between FTP (Free to play) and SABOMATGRINABBABOSTMSYHAGT (spend a bunch of money and then get raped in the ass by buying a bunch of shit that may s.? actually I forget the rest of that acronym something to do with microtransactions). The point is Battlefront II cost a ton to acquire and had all the shit on the disc – unlockable by inhuman feats of time or privileged splurges of money. And that’s bullshit – it’s an uneven playing field. We had every right to be pissed. But what it does not entitle us to is to denounce the whole Free-To-Play model that has been a boon for the digital industry and given gameplayers the world over endless hours of entertainment for which they didn’t have to spend a fucking dime. A FUCKING DIME.

When it comes to FTP games, I expect that there is a crowd of folks who pay for content, bonuses, upgrades, and the like. But I’m not one of them. My victory lies in being able to enjoy the content for absolutely zero monies – that all of my feats are earned by merit and effort alone, and thank the developer for the time it takes off my commute to work. Sometimes I thank them for the time it takes off of the workday itself. One second I’m bored, the next, I’m invading somebody’s castle, or fighting legions of axe-wielding cats, or growing and selling weed, or catching and battling Pokemon, or making a campsite for my animal friends – none of whom are dicks.

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is a game in which you kill time by building a campsite, customizing your RV, catching fish, making furniture, and shopping for clothes. May I ask what in the fuck you were expecting when you downloaded this game for free? Are you mad because money can be spent to speed up the progress? You shouldn’t be. That’s a golden standard. Let’s get the fuck over it – if you paid nothing to play it (and that doesn’t count getting free copies of retail games by your employer) – just play it, and join the millions of us who are just glad to take a moment out of the shitfest known as 2017 to chill with some friendly familiar fauna for fucking free. And speaking of things you shouldn’t be doing, maybe stop playing games on your phone because you sound bad at it. May I recommend one of the tens of thousands of titles on consoles, many of which were made by a company you think should be ashamed of themselves, upon which you can spent countless hours having incredible adventures and irreplicable experiences? Starfox 64 – great game – fun as fuck – available for the SNES, SNES Retro, Wii, and Wii U – but if you hate spending money, just get an emulator and download it onto your computer. Don’t worry – I won’t tell anyone. After all, you are a thief who would steal Nintendo’s dignity by compelling them to hang their head in shame for a free offering to their adoring fans.

What say thee, low fellator of rodents? Take thy thumb from out thine mouth and bite mine penis. Sure it’s not as good as the DS, 3DS, Gamecube, or even 64 version of Animal Crossing – but it’s fucking free, and it’s fucking fun enough to play on a lunch break. And stop spending money on free games. Those that can will, and those that do need not feel ashamed of themselves, either, as they’re giving money to a worthy cause: the creation for more fun and potentially epic shit to play. There’s enough information out there to let you know where your cash is worth spending, but your fucking article? Well, that’s just misleading and slanderous!

Breadth of the Styled

Breath of the Wild: no plot spoilers, but I am going to, you know, talk about the game, so if you don’t want to know anything about it, maybe don’t read this.  In fact, it would be far better for us all if you closed this browser window, picked up a Wii U or Switch controller right this moment and either purchased or began playing this game immediately because you have to.  I said so.  And only if you willfully disregard my words should you proceed down this page (see how I did that?)

I am amazed at just how fucking hard the new Zelda can be.  It is very easy to equate difficulty in a game with the ancient Dark Souls code: Dying is learning; Get gud, bithc.  Indeed, Death is a red-faced scolding mentor in Breath of the Wild, and more on-hand and ready to dispense its wisdom than in any other Zelda title.  Can you say one-shot kills?  Because you will get fucking wrecked by enemies and missteps alike in a way you haven’t experienced since the old King’s Quest games.  Or if you played Dark Souls, then Dark Souls.

One could make comparisons to other games all day long, and that’s just what I’m going to do because I want to have a comprehensive list here that touches on so many other titles that it reveals and spoils near to nothing for its confoundedness.  Also, I have a whole day at work with jack fucking shit to do except pine for the gorgeous terrain of Hyrule and wish that I was home.

1. Dark Souls – did this; read the paragraphs above (or don’t).  Any game that can one-shot you in a battle that is technically possible to win is fucking Dark Souls.  But are we not forgetting other elements besides the sheer difficulty that makes both of these games so remarkable?  How about the flowing, singular, contiguous environment?  It all fits together and what you see is really there.  Also, enemies remain dead for a time, then come back to life after a fashion.  You collect weapons from them, and you will have to switch up your arms according to the situation.  Also, it’s fucking hard.
2. Skyrim – that’s an easy one – yes, in this chapter of The Legend of Zelda, yours is a sprawling open country that could take you a finite forever to walk from one end to the other, but it can be done, and done convincingly because Nintendo fucking borrowed the godcraft necessary to make Hyrule the gigantic living world it has always deserved to be.  It is outstanding.  And I hold up the example of Skyrim for its rich variation of natural occurrences such as mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes, as well as the contrivances of its sentient inhabitants.  We got wild animals, too – and we shoot / stab them for food.
3. Red Dead Redemption – remember Grand Theft Horse?  Well, we got wild horsies, all right, and riding them through the land is a treat sweeter than Chex Mix with Lembas Bits for your wearying journey.  They are magnificent beasts, and some are blue.  Not sad blue – blue blue.  Toilet bowl blue!
4. Wander and the Colossus (Shadow of the Colossus) – So, in addition to the horsies mentioned above, scaling vertical surfaces is critical in this game – as critical as jumping is to Mario, to make a sort of tawdry familiar analogy.  Oh yes, and you can jump, too, with the push of a button, for the first time in any Zelda game since II: The Adventure of Link – which now that I think about it is a rather stupid title.  What Zelda game is not an adventure of Link?  Anyway, climbing requires stamina – just as it does in Colossus, and there is a meter that must be monitored when in use and expanded for greater odds of success – just as it must in Colossus.  Indeed, the mechanic is practically lifted straight from the game, but I don’t begrudge it too much, since games where you climb on shit are usually fucking rad, and this is no exception.  The colossal natural and wrought structures that Link must negotiate are a marvel to behold, and often afford you glorious views from their summits.  Actually, I want to take something back – fuck the stamina meter.  The game is complicated enough, and managing stamina is perhaps the least necessary or meaningful pains in the ass that we could do without.  But hey, in for a rupee, in for a.. silver rupee, I guess. 
5. Final Fantasy XV: I’ve come up with a new recipeh!
6. Portal (2): The shrines you visit in Breath of the Wild are technical trials devised by the sages of old which serve to teach Link the finer points of his enchanted artifacts and their many useful functions.  They are wonderfully reminiscent of the laboratory testing chambers of Aperture Science, and each one is more devious than the last.  Link’s clever manipulation of physical law and magical instruments give players a whole game’s worth of mind-diddling puzzles to solve and wrack their brains upon.
7. Uhh.. Zelda?  Because this game is Zelda through and through.  The silent protagonist, the Trifecta of Hero, Heroine, and Villain, the setting, the fantastic races and other annoying humanoid dildoes who dwell there, the puzzles, the beauty, the subtle horror and dread, the tools, the Sword, the enemies, the all-consuming desire to restore the worthy land of Hyrule to peace and prosperity, the chickens, the.. well, the list goes on longer than my shitty list of other games this one resembles.  Or maybe it doesn’t and I should have put my last item somewhere in the middle.  Nevertheless, after but a single major dungeon I can say with swollen and presupposed authority that this is an exceptionally outstanding addition to the Zelda series, with exploration and discoveries that will assuredly continue to delight for months and months to come.  ‘Tis epic and I fucking love it.  Oh yes, and Lynels are dicks.