I have a thing for stupid long Japanese Role Playing Games.

On a surface level, that doesn't sound so bad. I have a genre that I know I like which happens to have a high hour-to-dollar ratio, so I'm still getting plenty of bang for my buck. They're very easy to get into a nice flow state once you get the hang of the mechanics. They're typically story-driven, which keeps me invested beyond the allure of a grindy feedback loop. I generally love the aesthetic – some are a little too anime for even my tastes, but I'd be a lying fool if I said that Xenoblade Chronicles 2's visual style isn't a huge guilty pleasure of mine.

So what's the problem?

Over the last two years, I've played through or started a laundry list of JRPGs. There's been Persona 5, Kingdom Hearts III, Dragon Quest XI, Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy IX, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy XIV and all its expansions, both Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition and Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Dragon Quest VIII, Bravely Default II, and, my latest mistake, Persona 5: Royal, because I'm a sucker for the original's soundtrack and wanted to see what the fuss was about with the third semester tucked away at the end.

Before you look at that list and get concerned for my well-being, I can at least assure you that a) I did NOT finish all of these, and b) quarantine gave me a lot of free time. However, I felt it was time to pause and take stock of what I've been playing and if there's anything I'd want to change.

The Time Commitment

Let's take the above list and cross-reference it with HowLongToBeat:

Again, many of these were games I started but didn't finish out, so please don't worry too much about me. I did work through all of Final Fantasy XIV though, so maybe worry just a little bit about me. I've also been going through One Piece since COVID hit.

Actually, definitely worry about me.

The time commitment for these titles is non-trivial. If the world engrosses me, I don't actually mind spending dozens of hours with these games - I'm still content to fire up FFXIV and listen to the music while spamming the jump button in different zones, which is worth my subscription fee alone. When you're grinding through these types of games one after another, however, you really start to question if you could have spent your time better. I don't mean solving the global pandemic or spending time with your loved ones - I already set aside time for at least one of those two. I just wonder if I should try spending my gaming time working through a string of shorter games rather than focusing so heavily on these behemoths?

The Repetition

When you binge RPGs like I do, you come out of the other side realizing they all blur together a bit. How much do the turn-based battles in Perona 5 Royal really differ from Bravely Default II (answer: the music)? Does exploring every nook and cranny of a Dragon Quest town really stand out from doing the same in Xenoblade Chronicles (not particularly, but both are designed with such obvious love and attention to detail I'll happily scavenge random homes ad naseum)? These experiences differ in nuanced ways that I love picking up on as I naturally ascend to Wholesome Hot Takes' resident bearded JRPG guru, but you can't deny the inter-repetition hopping from game to game.

That's to say nothing of the intra-repetition inherent in each title. Everything I'm spilling on the page now came from a crisis I had playing Persona 5 Royal and realizing I wasn't enjoying it quite as much as my first playthrough of the original two years prior. The real hooks of P5 are the story, world, characters, and vibrant aesthetics, which are all so strong that anyone playing for the first time won't notice the hours slipping away, but on follow-up runs the repetition of the game can really sink in. Hours of (required!) randomly generated floors in Mementos, battles that mostly play out exactly the same due to the emphasis on a) ambushing enemies so you always act first, and b) clearing every battle on the first turn with an All-Out Attack before the opposing demons can act, and the overabundance of dialogue saying the EXACT SAME THING all begin to grate long before the credits roll.

None of this is unique to Persona 5. The grindy nature of RPGs is apparent anywhere you look and is honestly part of the appeal. There's plenty of nights after work where I just want to zone out and play a mindless Skinner box while listening to a YouTube discussion video or podcast, and RPGs are perfectly suited for that role. After being stuck on the same genre for so long though, it really does start to eat at you how often these games are willing to waste your time. Maybe it's worth exploring some titles with more variety and engagement in the moment-to-moment gameplay?

The Growing Backlog

I own a lot of games. Part of it comes with slowly growing a collection over the years, as the only other hobby I've sunk this much time into is finding new music. I try to be careful with my spending and only buy something if I know I'm finished with what I'm currently playing, either because it's beaten or I've lost interest, but the backlog finds nefarious ways to spread its roots. A dangerous factor is the annual holiday season - that's when I look at the games that came out in the last year that mildly interested me but not enough to splurge on and end up asking for a handful for Christmas. The other culprit comes from the modern era of subscription services. Thanks to PS+ and Nintendo Switch Online, I've claimed dozens of free games over the years that I haven't even bothered to try out and see if I like. Everytime I claim one, that's another "on the list", and that list will always grow faster than I can churn through meaty JRPGs.

There's plenty of discussions online around how to mentally approach a backlog. It's easy to feel overwhelmed and view it as a massive anxiety-inducing checklist. Thankfully, I don't really feel that anxiety, nor do I want that to be a motivating factor in how I spend my free time - I don't wake up in a cold sweat over the fact my copy of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is still sealed three years later. I just occassionally look up at my shelf and think "Hmmm, I'm sure I would like that, just haven't gotten to it yet." Well, why not make some time for them? Sealed cases are kind of ugly anyways (sorry collectors!), and it's a cheap way to try something new!

What to Try Instead?

If it's not obvious, I'm taking a break from long-winded JRPGs in favor of trying to clear out some stuff I already own that doesn't fit into what I normally play. I'll still get my grindy fix with casually leveling other jobs in FFXIV (turns out I don't hate tanking!), but otherwise, I want to try a variety of stuff I've already owned for ages but never prioritized. I've already been at this for a few weeks, and even if I haven't loved everything I've touched, I'm already finding some gems (Celeste deserves every bit of hyperbolic praise that's been thrown its way since its release).

This isn't the first time I've tried this. Over ten years ago, I created an account on Backloggery.com to catalog what I own and what I've beaten and used it for a bit to track what I wanted to play next. I've recently gone back and updated it with my current collection. This list is far from exhaustive of everything I've ever owned, but it at least covers everything in my current apartment, physical or digital. Feel free to follow along there to keep up to date with what I'm working through. There's plenty of dated blurbs written by 14 year-old me, so don't say I didn't warn you.

The real reason I wrote this post was to announce a new series for the blog: Backlog Blurbs! To convince myself that this hobby actually means something, I've decided to start blogging some general thoughts around games in the backlog. In particular, I want to hone in on how experimenting with other genres helps me to define and refine my overall tastes and find some insights around what I look for in my entertainment. Each post will cover a handful of titles, so I expect the format to be similar to Irregular Album Roundups.

Will this amount to anything meaningful? Probably not! This is just an indulgent exercise for my inner nerd to get some writing practice again, so allow me to reclaim some street cred by throwing out that I am digging the last minute of Built to Spill's "Distopian Dream Girl". An Irregular Album Roundup will happen soon, I promise.

Been a while, huh?

2020's been a bizarre year. Being stuck in lockdown for over nine months now has slowly sapped away all of my motivation. When this started, we all tried to take it in stride and use it as an opportunity for self improvement. I was working on various drafts for this blog (many never got published), going through an online course where you build a computer from scratch (I got the hardware and assembly language done but never finished writing its compiler), worldbuilding for my D&D campaign (still ongoing, but the campaign moves slowly enough where I can't really do much work in advance), etc. As the year has gone on, I've slipped into doing only the most passive activities which require the least amount of minimal effort just to distract myself until life returns to normal. This hasn't necessarily been a bad thing – I've experienced all of Final Fantasy XIV and am at the halfway point in One Piece, both massive projects I never would have done otherwise – but it has left me with little creative energy compared to what I felt this time last year.

All of this is to say that this has been a long time coming, and I was right to dub this series as "Irregular". Time to clean up a draft from...let me check my git history...November 16th(!) and get something published. Merry Christmas!

Songs of Moors and Misty Fields – Empyrium (1997)

To quote myself from another Irregular Album Roundup, "I like my black metal with folk interludes to break up the pacing and let my ears rest for a bit." As the winter's rolled in, the days gotten shorter, the wind grown bitter, and my patience for humanity worn thin, I've been drawn back more and more towards this style of music with melodic riffs, screeching vocals, gentle acoustic interludes, and moody synth passages.

Empyrium delivers all of that in spades on their sophomore album. I first sampled its follow-up, the entirely acoustic neofolk Where at Night the Wood Grouse Plays, and I'm sure glad I rewound back to an album more akin to Ulver's Bergtatt than its own neofolk follow-up Kveldssanger. This is more than a Bergtatt clone – the song structures all feel more refined and deliberate than just "black metal with some acoustic bits". Hell, I don't even know if black metal is a fair label for this group. The harsh vocals and general atmosphere feel closer to black metal than other subgenres, but even when the album is "heavy," there's always enough melody and slower tempos to stand apart from the frenetic tremolo picking riffs of its brethren. When the metal is put away, there's a ton of traditional folkish variety to be found, but none of it is ever overbearingly grandiose like the most excessive symphonic groups can. If there's a moment that captures what I like most in this album, it's the bridge around 3:41 in closer "The Ensemble of Silence". It's a quiet acoustic bit with a somber synth melody that challenges you to dim the lights, stare at the ceiling, and wonder what you could have done better in a year like this.

Recommended Tracks

1. "Lover's Grief"
2. "The Ensemble of Silence"

When The Night Comes - The State Lottery (2010)

The review that sold me on this album cites Bruce Springsteen, Paul Westerberg of The Replacements, The Gaslight Anthem, The Hold Steady, and Titus Andronicus. Look pal, if you wanted me to listen to an album that badly, could have you namedropped any fewer of my favorite bands?

When The Night Comes is my favorite album I've found this year from a band I didn't already know. Released in 2010 at the peak of Springsteen revivalist bar rock, The State Lottery bring out the best of the style - a vocalist who can't really sing but whose lyrics wear their heart on their sleeves, sloppy playing and production that reek of a boozey live performance, and snaking back and forth between conventional song structures and longer, more nuanced epics. If I had to boil it down to a few words, hopefully "Titus Andronicus's The Monitor, now with saxophone" will suffice. Most tracks are beer-soaked anthems for screaming alongside your pals before getting some late night Nando's. By the time you're finished with "Fourth Street", you just might be fooled into thinking you had a blast listening to this record.

Then "Spring, 2008, Detroit" kicks in. Suddenly, you've split from your pals at Nando's and are walking alone in the cold with naught but a beer jacket for comfort. All those pervasive thoughts that have been lurking in the back of your head come the forefront and are more crushing than ever. Slowly sobering up, you stumble over the curb and mumble to yourself about all the problems that you were hoping to avoid with this night out. Still feeling just a bit of the booze as you approach the door to your apartment, you softly sing a little chorus in a quiet defiance of the world: "And we hoped that the night would not come." Turning the key, a defeated follow-up slips out: "But it came. And it stayed."

So yeah, "Spring, 2008, Detroit" is the best punk ballad this side of Titus Andronicus's "The Battle of Hampton Roads." Check it out! Maybe you won't find it so delightfully depressing.

Recommended Tracks

1. "Coming Alive"
2. "Stories"
3. "Little Song"
4. "East Jordan"
5. "Spring, 2008, Detroit."

Honeymoon - Beach Bunny (2020)

Have you ever wondered what would happen if Alvvays fully leaned into pop punk/power pop? Maybe it's just the similarity in their vocal styles, but I like to think they'd end up something like Beach Bunny.

Honeymoon is a breezy 25 minute listen replete with fun guitar hooks, catchy vocals, and a surprising amount of variety given the short runtime. Right off the bat, we've got straight pop punk in "Promises", unconventional Hop Along guitars in "Colorblind", and a gorgeous ballad I swear could have been an unreleased Alvvays song with "April". The Internet tells me "Ms. California" is ripping of "Stacey's Mom," and I guess it's there, but honestly all I hear is "You Belong With Me"-era Taylor Swift. I'm not complaining either way.

I showed this to my girlfriend, and she liked it with the caveat that "every modern indie girl sings like this." Well, I say keep it coming - I love this shit.

Recommended Tracks

1. "Promises"
2. "April"
3. "Ms. California"
4. "Colorblind"
5. "Cloud 9"

Palimpsest - Protest The Hero (2020)

Well, this was certainly a surprise. 2005's Kezia struck a huge chord with me in high school as I realized a band younger than myself wrote a compelling progressive metal album about the wrongful execution of the titular woman told from the point of view of a prison priest, a prison guard, and Kezia herself. Meanwhile, all I'd accomplished in life was nearly complete the Sinnoh Pokedex in Pokemon Diamond as a fifth grader.

Yeah, the Sinnoh Pokedex, not the National Dex. And I didn't even finish it. Damn Milotic.

The moment that sold me on Kezia back then was the second half of "Turn Soonest to the Sea" where the technicality takes a backseat for two minutes as Rody Walker triumphantly belts out his hope for a future where "No woman is a whore" (OK, so maybe I was easily impressed by lyrics back then, but I genuinely like the politics of Kezia). It's one of the few moments where I remember hearing just one part of a song for the first time and rewinding it over and over on the spot. This huge hook provided an anchor to keep returning to while I slowly parsed out the diddly-do's of the technical riffs and cemented them in my head. After dozens of listens, I finally knew these songs in and out, even when they were at their hardest to follow.

Why does this matter with Palimpsest, Protest the Hero's first full album since 2013? Like "Turn Soonest to the Sea," the moment that sold me this time was the second half of "From the Sky," this time a searing chorus on how history and photography have downplayed the ties of the Hindenburg to Nazi Germany. I'm not here to get political or wax philosophical- I'm just here to say that, musically, this section is immediately powerful and once again serves as an anchor to the insanity that surrounds it. Palimpsest is rife with these moments, which make it accessible to newcomers while also being rich enough in detail to reward repeated listens as these riffs shift from proggy nonsense to catchy. Try not to headbang or fist pump to anthems like "All Hands".

Recommended Tracks

1. "Canary"
2. "From the Sky"
3. "All Hands"

Shadowbringers: Final Fantasy XIV OST - Masayoshi Soken (2019)

We all knew this was coming. On November 14, I finally caught up in the story of Final Fantasy XIV seven months and three days after impulsively starting XIV the same weekend the VII Remake came out. I've already written extensively on my love of XIV, so I won't bore you with the details. I just want to quickly highlight how good the soundtrack to the most recent expansion, Shadowbringers, is.

Let's start with the main theme. It's got all the structure of a wild 6 minute prog song - after a short melancholy vocal line, we're thrust into a twangy guitar riff fit for a gun-slingin' badass starring in a Western and walking the final paces of a duel against the local sheriff. Hope you're quick on the draw.

Something's a little off with the vocals, though. Some are whispered, some are chanted, and some are digitally distorted beyond recognition. I don't listen to enough industrial music to label this as "industrial", but that's the word that feels best here, so I'm sticking with it. As the song twists and turns, the riffs move from sly chord progressions to straight rockers before the biggest kicker for me - a violin playing "Eternal Wind" from Final Fantasy III. As the lone Westerner who started the series with V and then III as a kid, hearing the main theme of an underappreciated childhood favorite featured so prominently is a thing of beauty.

The main theme has, like, at least five melodies that crop up as motifs across the soundtrack. A personal favorite is the boss theme "Insatiable" which turns up the vocal weirdness to 11. Parts are hype while others are moody and reflective, an unusual choice for a boss theme that works wonders in context of the story. I also have to call out Amh Araeng's theme, "Sands of Amber" which is literally a lofi hip hop beat to relax and study to. It even got my girlfriend's attention, and she normally hates Final Fantasy music after it's looped a few times.

Finally, I really don't want to say much out of fear of spoilers, but the last 20% of Shadowbringers is the best storytelling Square Enix has done since the turn of the century, and the environmental themes of these final areas, "Full Fathom Five" and "Neath Dark Waters", are somber, reflective pieces that will fill you with emptiness as you wonder if maybe these crazy cultists we've been fighting since 2013 aren't so bad after all.

Now put this album on Spotify with the rest of the soundtracks, you cowards.

Recommended Tracks

1. "Shadowbringers"
2. "Insatiable"
3. "Sands of Amber"
4. "Full Fathom Five"
5. "Neath Dark Waters"

Modern Final Fantasy: The Narrative

April 10, 2020. A Friday which I requested the day off from work. I woke up at the crack of dawn without an alarm, made a pot of coffee, sat in front of my PS4, and wrote the following in a notebook:

Prethoughts - woke up with sense of urgency, magic, and wonder not unlike a child on Christmas knowing that Twilight Princess awaits. This game has one job - reinvigorate the modern FF franchise by taking what once made it so great and reconstructing it for the modern age. They said they wouldn't make this until they felt FFVII had been surpassed. That clearly didn't happen. May this be a chance for the fellows at Square Enix to take a step back, reorient themselves, and learn how to eventually surpass VII with a wholly original game.

Let's mosey.

This was, of course, the release day of the decades-awaited Final Fantasy VII Remake. I wrote this as a preface to my various notes and live reactions as I played through the game which felt so important to keeping the dignity of one of my favorite franchises alive. We all know the narrative. After 2001's Final Fantasy X (my second favorite game of all time), the series had a rough track record. XI was "the online one." XII was generally well-liked but criticized for its protaganists and live action gameplay. XIII polarized everyone with overly linear design, zero exploration, lackluster characters, and gameplay you could easily auto-battle through (hey, at least the music was nice). XIV was another "online one", albeit this one with a horrific launch, landing a 49 on Metacritic. XV was a semi-return to form, but was stuck in development hell for a decade before release, and was clearly half-baked in more than one regard as a result. For a long time, the mainline Final Fantasy series has been middling in mediocrity. No recent releases have had those moments to cement themselves in gaming culture forever. Cecil's musings over committing genocide in IV. The opera scene in VI. Aeris's death in VII (so iconic even Robert Pattinson has admitted it made him cry). When was the last time a mainline Final Fantasy game embedded itself in the public consciousness?

The VII Remake was, all in all, definitely a return to form for the series, and I took copious notes while playing in hopes of eventually writing a definitive review on the subject. That review never happened. Truth be told, another game took the spotlight and occupied my thoughts. The very same weekend the VII Remake launched, I spontaneously took the plunge alongside a good friend from college into my first proper MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game. I gave XIV a shot.

Best Kept Secret

Time to spoil my opinion - Final Fantasy XIV is, without a doubt, the greatest Final Fantasy game I've played released after X in 2001. I haven't fully played through all of its expansions, but I already get the sense that by the time I've finished, I'll hold XIV as the greatest in the series and as a serious contender for my favorite game of all time. This doesn't seem to be an uncommon opinion amongst fellow XIV players - I've seen countless players say that by the first expansion Heavensward, XIV has had the best Final Fantasy story in decades. I agree, and yet this runs counter to the common narrative outlined above. It's possible I'm just out of touch - after its disastrous launch in 2010, XIV exploded in quality while I was in college and too busy balancing Math, English, and Computer Science classes to pay attention to the current landscape of the FF community. I kept tabs on how XV was recieved and generally agreed with the overall consensus, but XIV completely evaded my radar for years on end. After graduating and finding a steady 9-5 (although lowkey the 8-4 life is way better and highly recommended), I found myself with oodles more free time to throw back into the gaming of my youth. All this free time was initially wasted(?) in stupid long JRPGs like Dragon Quest XI, Persona 5, and getting so good at Kingdom Hearts II that I made it to the Sora vs. Roxas fight on Level 1 on the highest difficulty.

Roxas, alas, still kicks my ass so hard that my Level 1 playthrough is as over as his summer vacation.

This naturally came with keeping closer tabs on the online gaming community's opinions, but even then, XIV and its expansions were hidden from view. The only reason I bothered to check out XIV was this video by JRPG enthusiast Clemps, where he cites the Shadowbringers expansion as his "Favorite Thing" of 2019. I'm eternally grateful that his video made me curious enough to check out the game, but it's bizarre to me that despite keeping general tabs on what the JRPG fandom was into these days, XIV's revitalization of the franchise seemed completely unnoticed. Instead, the JRPG subreddit won't shut up about the Trails of series. I bought the first one a few months back. Maybe I'll get to it next year. I still have all of XIV and One Piece to get through.

Look, I was one of those people too. In the above narrative, I called XI and XIV the "online games", and that's all I ever knew them as. Playing an MMO always had a stigma around it to me. You had to have a decent PC, you couldn't play very well on consoles, you had to be so invested that you'd pay a monthly subscription fee to continue to access content you've already paid for...this was antithetical to a younger me who grew up exclusively with consoles and buying used copies from GameStop to save a precious penny. I have zero data to back this up, but I would not be surprised if JRPG fans, the genre perhaps most adverse to multiplayer offerings (save for Pokemon), had similar reservations about MMORPGs growing up. Let's throw all that to the side for now. XIV is the revitalization the Final Fantasy series deserved well before I finally gave it a chance, and I can assure you that XIV has made the series great again.

An Exercise in World Building

I mentioned above that I'm reading the One Piece manga right now, and it has a lot in common with XIV. Both are massive undertakings that will take hours upon hours to get caught up on, without either story being properly concluded as of today. Both are subdivided into "arcs" ("expansions" in the case of XIV) which hone in on specific settings and their various internal strifes and resolutions. Both have lots of story in between these major arcs which end up impacting future arcs down the road, with clues and foreshadowing often left years in advance before the main plot turns its focus to these conflicts. Both take the time to build multiple internal settings which dive into the culture, history, politics, mythologies, religions, you name it of various locales. Both carry an attention to detail which reveals how much their respective writers care about their worlds and purposely make them as immersive as possible.

I have another piece in mind for how I think One Piece is the perfect Dungeons and Dragons campaign, so I'll leave the comparisons for another time. However, I really can't emphasize enough the depth of XIV's worldbuilding. Let's get the obvious complaints out of the way - the base game (colloquially called A Realm Reborn or ARR) isn't necessarily the greatest story. It takes its time to slowly introduce you to the world and has a lot of padding in between mission critical story beats. However, this is all necessary for slowly setting up some of the most compelling conflicts in the series.

Fair warning - I've just recently started the Stormblood expansion, and I'm told its follow-up Shadowbringers is easily the highlight of the entire experience. However, I still want to call attention to the post Realm Reborn (also called the 2.x patches) and Heavensward narratives. 2.x is a puzzle for me - I was warned for weeks on end that 2.x would be a brick wall to get through before you get to "the good stuff," and admittedly, this was true from a gameplay perspective. The quests were relatively boring to the point where I could only do a handful at a time before getting distracted by something else. However, the narrative that's built up here slowly weaves several different plot threads that were fascinating to keep tabs on, including:

1. A refugee crisis being exploited by local merchants
2. A denounced heretic slowly gathering followers in the name of a misunderstood cause she views as just
3. A monarch hoping to revamp her current government into a proper democracy
4. The rise of a group of cultists, neither living nor dead, hoping to manipulate each of your actions for their profit
5. A close ally hoping to build his own military force independent of other nations and their squabbling politics

and so much more. My friend and I jokingly referred to this section as "Anime Game of Thrones" and frankly, the ending of the 2.x story is worthy of a penultimate episode in the best GoT seasons. All of the threads listed above intersect in a climax that has to be seen to believed. I won't spoil anything, but the finale leaves you on the run and taking refuge in the foreign nation of Ishgard, and it's here in the Heavensward expansion that XIV really comes into its own.

Heavensward spends the majority of its time as a case study of this new nation of Ishgard, and there is a lot to take in. You learn about its aristocratic make-up, its theocracy, its religion, its history, its motivations as a country, and slowly begin to unravel a myriad of falses beliefs the Ishgardians have held for over a thousand years. There's plenty of conspiracies, politics, and diplomatic relations with a nation of dragons to get invested in, and by the time the credits roll, you'll have a thorough understanding of the region and have completely upended its citizens' worldviews.

It would be one thing to stop there, but the story immediately after Heavensward gives a natural follow-up to the original game's climax. After uprooting an entire nation's national identity, there's bound to be some residual conflict, and XIV goes to great lengths to explore how various Ishgardian citizens respond to the aftermath of Heavensward. I realize I'm being vague as I don't want to spoil anything for newcomers, but this series of quests assured me that XIV isn't just about getting you your big climax with a visually awe-inspiring final boss (although rest assured, Heavensward has just that). This game is conscious that it takes place within a world and goes out of its way to explore the cognitive dissonance the players' actions have imposed on the world at large. The greatest compliment I can give is that I have sympathy for all sides in this conflict and still think about these issues, which in my eyes is the real triumph of XIV's storytelling.

Community During Quarantine

Despite its heavy focus on story, XIV is still an online experience. You will see other players running around the world. You'll see them performing...questionable actions to one another in the public eye. You'll team up with other adventurers to tackle various dungeons, bosses, and raids as you slowly explore the deepest corners of Eorzea. As the real world is currently plummeting into what feels like a post-apocalyptic isolated hellscape, this sense of community has been a powerful thing to experience during quarantine.

Hell, even the very few toxic players I've encountered have been warped into good memories. My friend and I tried out one of the earliest raids, the Crystal Tower, just a few weeks after starting. A fellow party member kept giving poorly worded advice, and when I complained that I was trying but having a hard time with it being my first run, he kept spamming "READING IS FUNDAMENTAL" to the chat. It stung a little in the moment, but my friend and I have never stopped referencing that phrase as a joke several months later.

In short, if Wholesome Hot Takes ever has a merch section, you can expect a "READING IS FUNDAMENTAL" T-shirt and laptop sticker.

Thankfully, these instances have been few and far between. The vast majority of the time, FFXIV players have been nothing but kind and generous towards baby-fresh-eyes newcomers like myself. I joined a Free Company (what other MMOs call "guilds") early on, and I've enjoyed keeping up with their antics in their private Discord and have receieved their help on more than a few occassions as I plow through the main story to catch up with them. When I arrived at the final dungeon of the base game, I was greeted with seven other supportive veterans who asked about my experiences so far, gave some pointers, and gave me a sense of pride for completing the base game for the first time.

My fondest memory in XIV, however, was entirely unplanned and had nothing to do with dungeons, bosses, or any gameplay elements at all. While playing online with my friend, we happened to stumble across a mass gathering of folks in the Gridania amphitheater. Upon further inspection, we realized that we'd stumbled into a virtual graduation ceremony for all the high school/university graduates who didn't get to celebrate their achievements in person due to COVID-19. One by one, the grads were introduced in the chat with their various accolades to step onto the stage and accept their "diploma". My friend and I then proceeded to crash their virtual after-party filled with music, streakers, and spraying virtual champagne on each other.

It brought a tear to my (admittedly at the time, tipsy) eye. My girlfriend thought it was kind of lame. Fair enough.

Look, COVID has been a rough time for everyone. As a software engineer who's well equipped to work from home, I understand I have it better than most right now. I've still suffered the pangs of loneliness during these last few months, and have resigned myself to the fact that life could very well be like this for at least another 12 months. The XIV community has been a surprising outlet during all of this. Between random mass gatherings like a graduation ceremony to a few simple exchanges between party members during a 20 minute dungeon, playing an MMO during these times has made a marked difference on my mood simply from the social interactions at play.

Game For All Moods

My mood's still going to swing back and forth, but thankfully, XIV is an expansive enough game where no matter what mood I'm in, I can always find something to mess around with. I'm a very narrative-driven person (my English degree can't be ignored), so the majority of my time is spent advancing the main story. However, there's plenty of days where reading through a bunch of lore-heavy dialogue isn't really how I want to spend my time. So what else is there to do in XIV? On random occassions, I'll find myself

1. Wandering the world and taking in all the visual sights
2. Redoing earlier dungeons with newcomers to get them sweet Experience Points
3. Trying out some of the other "jobs" (classes). I'm mainly a Summoner, but I'm tipping my toes into the Dragoon waters as well.
4. Working on getting my own room in my Free Company's house and planning its interior design (it's currently just a table and a poster and I couldn't be prouder)

and plenty more. XIV has plenty of content, and I'll admit that most of it is grindy, but it's always relaxing when you want to immerse yourself in the world without having to think too much about the main story. Interior design is its own black hole - when played in a certain style, this game is basically Animal Crossing: A Village Reborn.

A Series Reborn

If it's not clear by now, I'm head over heels for Final Fantasy XIV. I recently played through The Last of Us: Part II and was actively annoyed that it took me away from XIV's story. I can't stop humming its soundtrack. Its hooks are so deep in me that it's really the only game I'm actively interested in right now. As someone who's already a massive Final Fantasy fanboy, XIV has been a blessing for me during quarantine, and maybe it's the game for you, too.

FFXIV is currently free to play all the way through the Heavensward expansion - if this article interested you, give the game a shot and feel free to friend me. I'm a Miquo'te (...yes OK, I'm a cat girl because the outfits are more fun) on the Brynhildr server named Prinith M'whiskers, and I hope to see y'all on the fields of Eorzea and beyond.

While the world's going to shit, here's a few records I'd been rotating through back when my commute was over 30 seconds.

Swimmer - Tennis (2020)

I never sampled Tennis before this album. I knew they were termed "indie pop" which I unfairly surmised to mean "ever so slightly off-kilter pop songs that I probably wouldn't return to" and never gave them a chance.

Well, I've listened to their latest release Swimmer, and you know what? These are ever so slightly off-kilter pop songs that I can't keep away from. Swimmer's nine tracks are loaded with variety, from chamber-pop(?) opener "I'll Haunt You" to tempo-shifting drum-and-piano "Need Your Love," dreamy 80s synth-pop "Runner" to late-night-tropical-walk-on-the-beach-with-a-loved-one (or LNTWotBWaLO, it'll catch on) soundtrack "Tender as a Tomb". Each tune's already bursting with identity, but what really seals the deal are Alaina Moore's vocals. She's not one to belt out a song, but every earworm of a line is delivered with a honey-soaked confidence and have enough twists and turns to make your ears gleefully perk up every time.

Swimmer's short 31 minute runtime works in its favor. Although nothing on here will blow you away, its short length and smart pop sensibilities makes Swimmer an infinitely relistenable album when you're not really sure what record to reach for.

Recommended Tracks

Honestly, every track, but if I'm pressed:

1. "Need Your Love"
2. "How to Forgive"
3. "Runner"
4. "Tender as a Tomb"

Instrument Soundtrack - Fugazi (1999)

Two decades before the Internet made it cool, Fugazi dared to ask – "What if lofi hip hop beats to relax/study to already existed? And were GOOD?"

This blog doesn't support a comment section (yet), but I'm sure if it did, I'd be getting a lot of hate mail right about now. Don't worry – I enjoy lofi hip hop beats as much as the next guy (hit me up in the nonexistent comments with your favorite lofi Square Enix compilations!), and I know this album falls squarely outside of that category. However, this demo collection is lofi, is filled to the brim with quirky Fugazi rhythms and beats, and is great to relax and study to. Before coronavirus turned me into a house zombie, I took the metro to work everyday. In between sounds of the train's rickety shaking and loud-mouthed passengers who never understand that wearing headphones does NOT mean their end of the conversation is muted too, I'd been working through a dense history of the wargaming and fantasy literature that inspired the original Dungeons and Dragons. This is not an ideal environment for loud music with vocals, but Fugazi of all bands kept me sane and focused on my reading for many a trip. Who needs binaural beats when you've got demos as chill as these?

There's some fun oddballs in here too. "Afterthought" is a meditative 90 seconds that Toby Fox should have stolen for the Undertale soundtrack. "Turkish Disco" grooves along with an irrestible bassline forming the backbone of a fun little improvisational piece. Then there's everyone's favorite off this album, "I'm So Tired." A two minute piano ballad with Ian MacKaye at his most vulnerable, this song sounds nothing like Fugazi but sheds light on an alternate timeline where MacKaye captured audiences for years with spellbinding ballads about bitter apathy. I wonder if 2020's doing any better in that timeline.

Recommended Tracks

1. "Afterthought"
2. "Turkish Disco"
3. "I'm So Tired"

The Fallen Crimson - envy (2020)

You know a band is either pretentious and boring or pretentious but actually kinda really good when they can't be bothered to capitalize their own name.

Japanese hardcore outfit envy have been releasing music for over two decades, but I never tried them until The Fallen Crimson released this year. Bands that have been around for that long are typically putting out drab and uninspired drivel (hello, Rivers Cuomo!), but I find it hard to believe an album this good was released so late into a band's career. More than just your average hardcore band, envy bring enough elements of post rock to the table to transform their already ungodly riffs (seriously, "Fingerprint mark" is headbanger of the year) into emotional rollercoasters.

If you want a perfect sampler of this album, check out the run of "A faint new world" into "Rhythm" and "Marginalized thread". This trio encapsulates everything I love about this album, featuring screams set against frantic and dissonant tremelo picking, spoken word vocals paired with the seething furor of a sound clawing to burst, dreamy and contemplative passages with emotional guest female vocals, triumphant life-affirming riffs, and a ferocious climax sprinkled with blast beats. It's a lot to take in over just 15 minutes, but envy's careful and lively pacing ensures nothing overstays its welcome, and everything gets the perfect amount of time in the limelight.

Recommended Tracks

1. "A faint new world"
2. "Rhythm"
3. "Marginalized thread"
4. "Fingerprint mark"

Our Last Sunrise - Aurora B.Polaris (2016)

I came across this album on a YouTube compilation video called Wonderland whose thumbnail features a fisherman just chilling with his dog casting out his rod to catch a whale. A whale in the sky. I purposely clicked on this video hoping it would inspire me as I prepared for my upcoming D&D campaign set on the back of a giant behemoth roaming the world (if that at all sounds familiar, just wait until the next album). It pretty generally hit the spot as background music until seven minutes in. That's when "Departure To The Front Lines Of Our Heart" hit like a Xenoblade titan sized truck.

Some necessary context: I love old school 90's Japanese Roleplaying Game (JRPG) soundtracks. Nobuo Uematsu was literally my most-listened-to artist of 2019. Much to my girlfriend's dismay, I shrieked from the comfort of a Prague Airbnb bed upon reading the news that Square Enix would be releasing all of the Final Fantasy soundtracks on Spotify. The genre's focus on simple melodies warped through the lens of complex orchestral pieces on primitive MIDI hardware reveals the lengths legendary composers like Uematsu and Yasunori Mitsuda would go to in spite of the technical limitations put on them.

While many modern game scores have lost this sense of flare and style in favor of generic orchestral action movie scores, modern JRPG's still stick with the above approach to songwriting, albeit with the wide possibilities of full orchestration in front of them. Songs with simple and repititve melodies are given the chance to evolve and morph these little motifs into all the possible variations they can.

This overly long prelude may explain why The Last Sunrise, an EP with no relation to video game music at all, is totally my jam. This music gives me the same vibes modern JRPG soundtracks like Octopath Traveler or Xenoblade Chronicles 2 do, with "Childish Love" and "Departure To The Front Lines Of Our Heart" in particular inspiring listeners with their own visions of the colorful and the fantastical. The other three songs are a little hit-or-miss, but I genuinely adore these two tunes for the childlike wonder I feel when I close my eyes.

Recommended Tracks

1. "Childish Love"
2. "Departure To The Front Lines Of Our Heart"

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 OST - Yasunori Mitsuda, ACE, Kenji Hiramatsu, Manami Kiyota

I have a lot to say on Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I unabashedly love this game for its setting and worldbuilding alone, but just about every piece of this game's quality armor exposes some chink for my game critic's blade to pierce. Nearly everything is equal parts good and equal parts bad.

Except for the soundtrack. It is flawless and must be protected at all costs from invasive game critics.

I knew this soundtrack was rocking from the moment the first battles punched me in the jaw with the semi-proggy "Exploration (Combat Theme 2)", but nothing could prepare me for the monstrous jam that was "Counterattack". If your aesthetic includes "big, epic, and kinda dumb" like mine does, you'll appreciate that every big, epic, and kinda dumb climactic moment in XC2 is perfectly synced to this titan of a track. This bad boy's got it all – quiet electric guitars slowly building tension towards the chorus, ridiculously triumphant strings to get anyone hyped, a smooth bridge for the bass to just do its own thing for a few bars, and the general sensation that you can kick that smarmy and suspiciously sexy anime villain's ass anyday. If I ever piss anyone off enough to make them want to kill me, I sincerely hope this plays while they get their revenge on me. They deserve it.

Elsewhere, the soundtrack shines best with its stunning environmental themes, each of come with their own day and night versions. Exploring the wide open plains of Gormott, the eerily beautiful innards of Uraya, the mechanical wastelands of Mor Adain, and the frigid snowstorms of Tantal wouldn't be the same without these evocative tunes that always capture exactly what's in front of you. These songs are seriously so good I can't listen to them while working because they distract me with memories of the worlds I'd seen and conquered throughout XC2.

Recommended Tracks

1. "Counterattack"
2. "Gormott"
3. "Mor Ardain - Roaming the Wastes"
4. "Tantal - Night"
5. "Gramps (Fonsett Village)"
6. "Garfont Mercenaries"
7. "Kingdom of Uraya"
8. "Friendship"
9. "Exploration (Combat Theme 2)"

Here's a new series filled with musings on various albums I've come across that you deserve to know about. Not quite reviews, yet not quite blurbs. No set timeline. Let's just call them general recommendations.

The Piss, The Perfume - Hayley Mary (2020)

Every few months, I stumble across a song from The Jezabel's 2016 Synthia and face a "Where are they now?" crisis. Opener "Stand and Deliver" remains artsy synth-pop perfection in my eyes, and their knack for fast-paced hooks kept "My Love Is My Disease" and "Pleasure Drive" staples of my workout playlist. Please, please stand and deliver a follow-up soon!

This crisis is only halfway resolved through frontwoman Hayley Mary's debut EP. It's neither the Jezabels in band composition nor in sound, but it is a surprisingly addictive guitar-driven pop-rock affair that's cemented itself as my favorite 2020 release so far. "Ordinary Me" doesn't do much for me, but the other four tracks all carry such tight songwriting and choruses to warrant near daily rotations during my commute. The title track's infectious energy by all means deserves to be on a radio near you.

Oh, and this music video features some top tier dance moves.

Recommended Tracks

1. "The Piss, The Perfume"
2. "Like a Woman Should"
3. "Holly"

Rhythm, Chord, & Melody - The Reign of Kindo (2008)

Is progressive dad jazz rock a genre? Can we make it a genre? We can also throw Steely Dan in there and call it a day.

The Reign of Kindo are a progressive dad jazz rock band who infuse buttery smooth pop songs with trappings of progressive rock and jazz instrumentation. If the word "progressive" scares you off, don't worry - The Reign reign themselves in enough to avoid noodly guitar solos that stretch song lengths well past their due. The focus is always on Joseph Secchiaroli's smooth-as-hell adult contemporary vocals, who pumps out emotional crowd-pleasers time and time again.

This focus unfortunately means certain songs live and die by the vocal performance. Opener "The Moments In Between" is sonic bliss during its soaring chorus, but follow-up "Breathe Again" is hampered by lyrics about tracking and murdering someone who stole your kids' Christmas presents. It reads like unironic dad Taken fan fiction (can we make that a genre too?). "Nice To Meet You" suffers the opposite problem with a saccharine chorus that could use a little bite. It's a shame when misteps like this overshadow what are otherwise at least perfectly competent musical tracks.

"Competent" is probably underselling these guys' chops. The real highlights of this album are when the band comes together to hammer out a freeform atmosphere behind the more measured vocals. Drummer Steven Padin especially plays with a barely contained sense of control in tracks like "Great Blue Sea" and "Till We Make Our Ascent".

The only real problem I have with this album is that it's just a little too smooth and polished at times. Maybe it's just my musical tastes, but I'd like to see this band wild out a little more or at least write more songs with a biting edge to them.

Recommended Tracks

1. "The Moments In Between"
2. "Great Blue Sea"
3. "Let It Go"
4. "Till We Make Our Ascent"

Vengeful Spectre - Vengeful Spectre (2020)

I don't care what genre purists say - I like my black metal with folk interludes to break up the pacing and let my ears rest for a bit. Bands like Ulver have been doing this since the beginning of the genre, and it's a staple of my favorite bands since then. The Chinese black metal outfit Vengeful Spectre follows this trend but mixes it up with a variety of Eastern folk instruments seldom heard in a genre that's primarily Western.

That's not to say Vengeful Spectre is a one-trick pony that deserve a minor footnote in history for what instruments they play. They more than back it up with inspired songwriting that interplays traditional Chinese instruments with ferocious riffs. "Wailing Wrath" is an early highlight with slower 3/4 sections that layer Chinese folk instrumentation on top of melodic black metal riffs. Elsewhere, the take-no-prisoners "Rainy Night Carnage" barrels forward with the sound of ancient armies massacring one another on the battlefield. I can't say I've heard anything that sounds quite like this band. Heartily recommended for anyone who likes a little melody with their black metal.

Recommended Tracks

1. "The Expendables"
2. "Wailing Wrath"
3. "Rainy Night Carnage"

I Look Like Shit - Jeff Rosenstock (2012)

I can't believe I never heard "Twinkle" until recently.

For years now, Jeff Rosenstock has been my musical comfort food. Between his previous group Bomb the Music Industry! and his prolific solo career, this man has penned so many anthems around his anxieties that I can spend hours listening to him when I'm in a bad mood. I wrote a college essay on his influence on the Pay What You Want model. I regularly have dreams of seeing him live. I force him down the throats of everyone close to me. I consider WORRY. the Abbey Road of punk. I love this man.

Despite this, I never got around to checking out his debut solo album until this year. It didn't seem to garner the same critical responses that We Cool? and especially WORRY. did, and it's easy to see why. This feels more like an unrelated collection of recordings than a cohesive album, and looking at it track-by-track, the quality is equally haphazard. The only song I outright dislike is the Pulp cover "Dishes" (it's the boring kind of ska), and there's plenty of tunes elsewhere that lie in the "pretty good" tier, but three songs in particular earn their spot in the Rosenstock canon.

"Twinkle" is a classic Jeff opener, starting with a hint of melodic balladry before bursting away into high-octane pop punk driven by lyrics that read like an anxiety-soaked stream-of-consciousness. "Bonus Oceans" is instrumentally more muted and less electric, but still builds towards a melancholy climax about looking around at your life and wondering "What the hell happened?" Then there's the regretably named "The Internet Is Everywhere". I hate to say it, but I ignored this song for a while based on its title alone. My mistake, as it's actually an intimate and lo-fi acoustic track about wishing a former friend all the best despite a noncordial end to the relationship. It's a deeply personal yet universally applicable examination of a growing maturity over the years.

But seriously, "Twinkle" is top-tier cathartic Jeff.

Recommended Tracks

1. "Twinkle"
2. "Bonus Oceans"
3. "The Internet Is Everywhere"

A Pyrrhic Existence - Esoteric (2019)

If you had asked for my opinion on funeral doom metal before I heard Esoteric, I probably would have told you "that genre certainly exists."

I first got into metal through the prog side where speed and technicality were everything. Atmosphere was great and all, but I wanted atmosphere hammered into my ears through the howling frostbitten winds of black metal or short acoustic breaks in an Opethian epic. Funeral doom never grabbed my attention - playing riffs slower than tectonic plates didn't cut it for this attention span.

Then, on a Christmas morning whim, I sampled Esoteric's latest album. I only listened to the opening track, "Descent", which on its own is longer than some of the other albums on this list. This 28 minute epic captured my imagination and evoked imagery no other metal song has before. Through its ploddingly heavy riffs, I could imagine walking through an ashen wasteland with no signs of life around me. Death and decay surrounded me as the howls of lost souls pierced my ears, but still I pressed forward, spellbound by the promise that something awaited the end of this seemingly futile trek.

If that sounded worse than a first attempt at a creative writing class, that's because I never took a creative writing class. I did, however, read enough mythology growing up to know that this band evokes the pits of the various underworlds I'd always read about as a kid. This journey stretches on for a whopping 97 minutes, but Esoteric always finds some trick to pull out of their hats to keep things varied without ever losing sight of what makes funeral doom special - atmosphere.

I'm happy to report that this has served as a gateway to the genre for me. Skepticism's Stormcrowfleet and Ahab's The Call of the Wretched Sea now grab me with their own mournful takes on the genre. If you like extreme metal at all, give funeral doom a shot - it really is its own thing in a genre crowded with seemingly endless subgenres differentiated only by slight nuances.

Recommended Tracks

1. "Descent"
2. "Consuming Lies"

NOTE: This article was originally published on March 18, 2019 on the original Wholesome Hot Takes tumblr blog.

Image Credit: Jason Wilson/GamesBeat

Since the New Year, I’ve already chipped away at three monstrously huge RPGs out of Japan (this is what happens when you live by yourself and it’s too cold to venture outside). I played Persona 5 all the way to completion, clawed through Kingdom Hearts III twice, and saw Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age through the end of its massive postgame. Persona 5 was a fresh new take on the JRPG genre with half of its gameplay serving as a high school simulation of all things and a constant fear of improperly budgeting time as a resource. After finishing mere days before Kingdom Hearts III’s release, I declared it my favorite game since The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Kingdom Hearts III was a game I’ve been waiting literally half of my life for, and while parts of the ending certainly rubbed me the wrong way, it was still one of the most emotionally fulfilling experiences of my life as I watched my one remaining childhood wish finally granted.

Dragon Quest XI was an overly traditional JRPG that did little to move the genre forward in a series I have zero nostalgia for.

It was my favorite of the three.

Dragon Quest XI is living proof that entertainment doesn’t always have to be innovative to be great. It’s neither a daring subversion of story tropes nor is it a mechanical leap forward for gameplay systems that have been set in stone for over three decades. On the contrary - every major story scenario and plot point has been done before, and anything “unique” in its core battle mechanics can still be traced back to games as early as 1995’s Chrono Trigger. Instead of breaking new ground, DQXI’s development team focused on honing in on what’s already been done and refining it to such a perfect degree that the 140 (!) hours it takes to complete everything it has to offer simply melt away.

A World Worth Living In

Dragon Quest XI’s world is not deep, but it’s rich with detail. Very few of the characters you meet along the way have very much depth (although if you want it, Sylvando’s backstory definitely has some for you), but it’s the way that the world slowly builds up a sense of interconnectedness that keeps it feeling lived in. Main characters have pasts that intersect in interesting ways (and no, not that “We apparently grew up in the same orphanage” bullshit from Final Fantasy VIII). NPCs scattered across various towns will slip hints that they know each other. Even the little side quests you engage in or books you comb through on random bookshelves can reveal little tidbits about a character’s past. Few characters are actually complex enough to write a provoking analysis on, but everyone is given the chance to feel like they exist and impact others in Erdrea to some degree, making the world one the player can live and breathe.

On the surface, Dragon Quest XI’s pacing resembles that of a shounen anime. You go questing from town to town. Each town has a unique flavor and a specific problem facing the locals. You hear ‘n’ deal with their issues, maybe collect a colored orb with some vague relevance to the main plot, and move out to the next brightly marked location on your map. Rinse and repeat.

Fun fact: I personally can’t stand the pacing of shounen anime. Try as I might, staying invested in loosely connected arcs that can last for dozens of episodes at a time culminating in multi-episode climaxes of seven simultaneous fights kills the pacing for me. Thankfully, Dragon Quest XI sidesteps this issue through exceptionally tight pacing. Pick up the game for more than two hours, and you’ll probably go through an entire town’s arc where you’ll explore the area, meet the locals, discover the fairy tale trope that’s bothering them, and finally go out and take care of it. As you’re interacting with the game the entire time, the pace becomes player-defined and never devolves into an arc going on and on and on to the point of nausea.

These perfectly sized narrative chunks keep the momentum going, even when the overarching plot is barely progressing. What’s more, each one is rich and detailed enough to leave a lasting impression on the player. I recently did an exercise while I was bored in the shower and recited every main scenario the player encounters as they traverse Dragon Quest XI. I not only remembered each of the dozens of little encounters, but I found myself grinning at the specifics of each one and how they wormed their way into my heart despite their relative brevity.

My favorite example: around 20 hours in, the protagonist finally gets his hands on a boat and can set sail anywhere across the world map. As he sails out into the open sea, a mermaid named Michelle (get it?) asks him to find a human who once offered his hand in marriage. You visit this man’s hometown only to find a prejudiced mistrust of mermaids and the revelation that the man she speaks of died dozens of years ago, survived in name only by his stoic grandson. She discovers this truth and pulls herself up onto the shore, triggering her death near her lover’s tombstone. This leads to you discovering the underwater utopia of mermaids to converse with their queen about Michelle’s fate and what to do next.

In just that short little segment, you get a new species of creatures (who speaks exclusively in rhymed couplets which is adorable), a town whose prejudice is a not so subtle allegory for stereotypes and racism, the tragic fate of those who devote themselves to a long lost love, and you get to explore an aesthetically beautiful underwater city. Keep in mind this game has dozens of episodes like this, and each are as carefully crafted as the next. As you slowly navigate the world, these little details create the sense that the world is richly crafted, even if no one particular part is overly complex or deep.

Repeated Visits

The secret sauce to DQXI’s world building is spaced repetition, and it’s here that spoilers come into play. Fair warning.

Halfway through the experience, Dragon Quest XI pulls a plot twist that is daring in the context of itself, but not within the genre. The bad guy wins and effectively triggers a apocalypse. Given the light-heartedness of the game up until this point (come on, literally EVERYTHING in this game is a pun), this definitely comes as a surprise. Of course, you, being an astute player of classic 90s Japanese games (is that fair to assume?), recognize this trope as a continuation of what Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy VI have done before. It’s still too unexpected for you to roll your eyes at a cliche, but immediately you wonder, “How can this game possibly better what those classics got right over 20 years ago?”

Like those two games, Dragon Quest XI’s second act has you revisiting every past location to see what’s happened since the villain took a massive floating tree that’s literally the source of all life and chucked it at the center of the world. The spaced repetition of returning to towns dozens of hours later keeps this from being an exercise in tedium and rather a mechanism to feel the way this world persists beyond little episodic misadventures. To begin with, our silent, unnamed protagonist with impossibly silky locks (I unoriginally christened him Michael, although perhaps Fabio would have been more fitting) revisits his previously demolished hometown of Cobblestone only to find it’s now the last bastion of hope for humanity led by none other than the knight who’s been pursuing you for the last several dozen hours. Setting aside your differences, you fight to protect the townspeople and agree to join forces for the remainder of your quest.

What’s that? A purple-haired major antagonist joins your party after realizing the error of his ways?

Yeah, Chrono Trigger did that, too.

What DQXI does exceptionally well is the way its second act is ultimately wrapped up in the past despite the horrific ongoings of the present. Even in this opening bit, the subplot that really hits home is the history of rivalry between the knights Hendrick and Jasper, and how the bitter jealousy of the latter drove him down the road to darkness. As you revisit more and more locations and track down the remainder of your party, the subplots you encounter are increasingly less tied to the fact that some freak with a mohawk blew up the Earth and are more intertwined with events that happened before the game’s main story even started.

Perhaps it’s finally saving your younger sister after a terrible accident turned her into gold. Maybe it’s reliving the final moments of your parents’ lives in their attempt to save you and giving their souls the eternal rest they deserve. It could be finally confronting your father years after abandoning him and his notions of chivalrous masculinity in favor of how you believed your individual talents could make the world a happier place. Every major plot point in the second act turns away from the present drama to focus on the wrongs of the past and the way they haunt Erdrea’s citizens more than anything for years to come. No matter the present, the past becomes their future.

This theme carries over into the less gripping but still engaging third act. After the credits roll, reloading your save file gives you the chance to go back in time, defeat what’s been the main villain up until this point and prevent the apocalypse, and confront the real baddie who’s been pulling the strings all along. Like every story beat in this game, this comes across as a trope on a surface level: secret villains not being revealed until the very end are littered across old school JRPGs, not the least of which include a sudden last-minute trip to the freakin’ moon to fight the alien Zeromus in 1991’s Final Fantasy IV. However, Dragon Quest XI still puts in the care for this last section to be relevant towards the theme of the past becoming our future.

See, Dragon Quest XI has a familiar Chosen One narrative. You’re the reincarnation of a legendary hero, who is heavily implied to be the reincarnation of the hero Erdrick from the original Dragon Quest trilogy on the NES. However, in an interesting turn of events, the true ending reveals that both you and your legendary ancestor are in fact the ancestors of said hero Erdrick. Players who have followed the series for decades have found their own past tales to suddenly take the form of the game’s future. These are the subtle touches that make Dragon Quest XI worth experiencing and talking about, even if it’s not as daring as a Virginia Woolf narrative.

Pepped Up

This review has been devoid of the battle mechanics of this game up until now. That’s because although they have received the same love and attention to detail as the rest of the game, they aren’t quite the strongest part of the experience. In fact, any legitimate criticisms of DQXI can be directed here:

1. Dragon Quest XI is too easy (at least until the third act, a.k.a. after the first 80 hours of gameplay)
2. The most interesting part of Dragon Quest XI’s battle system, Pep Powers, are so locked away behind invisible random dice rolls that you can’t constantly keep them in the back of your mind as you evaluate your options in the turn-based combat

I don’t mind so much that the game is easy. If anything, it means that no part of the game stands in the way of your average Joe enjoying the world and story progression. The second point is the more troubling issue. Dragon Quest XI’s Pep system is, on the surface, the clear highlight of its mechanics. As characters take damage, they are more likely to become “pepped up” and gain significant stat bonuses for the next few turns. If multiple characters are pepped up at once, they can collectively cash in their pep status for a “Pep Power” where they team up for a super attack that can dish out damage to enemies, provide stat buffs for the entire party, and trigger other bonuses in the current fight. The obvious comparison are the Double/Triple Techs from Chrono Trigger. In addition to being plain useful, these are enacted with drop-dead gorgeous animations to boot.

Unfortunately, the sheer randomness of when characters are pepped up leaves much to be desired. Like Final Fantasy IX’s “Trance Mode,” there is zero visual indicator of when a character is about to enter this heightened state. As a result, it’s impossible to plan around. Players instead just go through the motions as they’re working through boss encounters. If a Pep Power happens to become available, that’s great, but otherwise, players can’t strategically plan to trigger them and pull them out as necessary.

Memories of the Past

In the long run, these minor complaints don’t actually mar the experience. Dragon Quest XI probably isn’t going to be remembered for its core gameplay, but I do believe the experience wouldn’t be as effective in any medium outside of a video game. The greatest moments in Dragon Quest XI are walking into a town for the first time after a major story event. Early on, it’s likely the first time you’ve been there period, and you’re struck in awe of the colorful architecture and the sense of cohesion that builds as you wander around conversing with its citizens. As you progress, you’ll revisit these towns dozens of hours later, but things have changed enough where you want to revisit everyone and find out what’s been going on in their lives. This continued sense of exploring a world that truly feels lived in is what kept me coming back day after day for hours on end, and it’s why I feel a gaping pit in my heart now that it’s all over.

In any case, you better believe I’m picking up the definitive edition for the Nintendo Switch later this year with an orchestrated soundtrack and even more character-focused plot points to explore.