February 16, 2025|

Filed under: Editorial, Featured

Passing the Buck Chapter 7: Rated M for “Mario”

In “Passing the Buck: A Game Pass Study,” Wolfman Jew has bought a three month subscription to Game Pass. With only ninety-one days he can’t get back, it’s on him to try as much as he can. Every day he’ll play something, anything, even if it’s only for half an hour, and write down his thoughts. How many games will he play? How many will he finish? How many revelations will he find? And how much of his sanity will be left by April Fool’s Day?

Since “Passing the Buck” has started, I’ve enjoyed trying new themes or goals for each week. Instead of just being “play a lot of things,” I can really focus on an idea. This week, the focus is on the new, mostly. We’ll keep going with The Walking Dead to keep up the biweekly pace, but other than that we’re only playing four new games. These games have absolutely nothing in common, but that made the actual points of comparison I found all the more interesting. It was also, mostly, pretty painless. Mostly.

…Oh, right, technically I broke the “no old games” rule even further on Friday. I reinstalled A Little to the Left so that my mom could try it and Peggle two days before the former left Game Pass. These will not factor into this article.

What I played:

Yakuza: Like a Dragon: Eighteen years after taking a murder rap for a fellow yakuza, bold and brash Ichiban Kasuga leaves prison to find a wildly changed Japan—before his former patriarch shoots him. Left for dead by a homeless camp in Yokohama, he fights gangsters, defends sex workers, engages in mini-games, and fights in the turn-based combat that defined his most sacred text: Square Enix’s Dragon Quest.
The Evil Within: Called to investigate a series of grisly murders at a local asylum, Detective Sebastian Castellanos finds himself trapped in a surreal nightmare world of cannibals bound in barbed wire. But with ammo low and their attacks deadly, he often has to jump between fighting and fleeing within their rickety villages and claustrophobic hospitals.
Minecraft: This most influential of games gives you two ways to explore a grand world magicked up every time you make a file. One has you fending off monsters to slowly amass resources, the other shushes away the danger to let you create as you will, but both are based around a loop of mining resources, building tools and blocks, and placing the latter down to create wild structures.
Lil Gator Game: In an attempt to distract their older sister from college work, a precocious alligator child draws from their shared video game fandom to create a real life adventure on an island. The inhabitants construct quests and cardboard “enemies,” the lil’ gator overcomes them, but in doing so they make real interpersonal connections.
The Walking Dead Episode 4: Around Every Corner: a far cry from everyone’s hopes, Savannah, Georgia is a massive death pit of undead hordes, lone wolves, looted vehicles, stalkers, and rival groups of survivors. The group sneak into the headquarters of one authoritarian gang, now overrun by Walkers, but one member is left to die, Clementine winds up missing, and in pursuit of her Lee is fatally bitten.
A Little to the Left: days before it was removed from Game Pass, I redownloaded the game for my mother to try. She had a good time figuring out several of the puzzles, though the game’s controls and the speed of the cursor gave her pause.
Peggle: Another game I lent to my mom to try, although this one was still on my Series X. It was hard for her to figure out strategies for manipulating the balls, but she did enjoy it.

Sunday, February 9: started, recruited Adachi and Nanba, and completed Chapter 2 of Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

My friend did warn me. I have been open about wanting to start Yakuza as my JRPG of February (and I would like to finish it before March. Who knows; maybe I can even hit Ni No Kuni?), and she told me “it starts with some cutscenes, then a bit of gameplay, then a lot of cutscenes.” And over the course of the first two chapters and then some, that’s what happened. The gameplay—exploring the nooks and crannies of Yakuza’s iconic Kamurocho district, turn-based combat that features environmental mechanics, mini-games about collecting cans—would show up in spurts only to be shushed out. These are fascinating bits of game design I’m excited to dive into further, and again and again I was yanked from them. Chapter 1 alone features so many flashbacks, speeches, and cutaways, with enough soap operatic twists to fill a season of television. Right off the top of my head, we’ve got one baby raised in a brothel and another trapped in a locker, a teenage theater actor turned yakuza turned assassin turned patriarch, an attempted finger mutilation, an actual finger mutilation, an experimental drug that fixes spinal injuries, several back alley assaults, a man turning himself in for a murder he didn’t commit, many nods to the backstories of Kamurocho’s residents, and it takes place on New Year’s Eve. It was exhausting.

Image: Source Gaming. One of the many long-winded, deliciously acted cutscenes of Yakuza. This is in Chapter 1, so Ichiban’s beautiful haircut isn’t here.

But the real kick in the teeth? The thing that really maddens me? It’s that I actually really like the cutscenes! So far the story’s great, if perhaps a bit overwrought. Ichiban would probably be a stock protagonist in another plot, but he’s extremely fun here as a yakuza with an inexplicable hero complex inspired by, of all things, Dragon Quest. Everyone is eccentric in their attitude and mannerism, which elevates what might otherwise be stock crime drama characters. The yakuza politics and homeless camp are fascinating stuff, and I’m excited to learn more about my disgruntled nurse sidekick Nanba. And while there’s plenty of excellent acting across the board, I’m most taken with George Takei’s performance as Ichiban’s evil boss, which is stony, sad, and lightyears away from his “I’m gonna post a meme on Facebook!” persona. Arakawa’s like a tree with its bark stripped, tough but raw and aching. This story is way, way too concentrated right now, but it’s also really good and I feel a bit sad for sometimes wanting to shoo it away.

I spent several hours playing Like a Dragon. If it hasn’t been apparent by now, I try to prioritize one new game at a time before they enter the rotation. I’ll play it and The Evil Within tomorrow, and I’ll put most of the commentary on the freshest face. Assuming I don’t bounce off the latter, of course, but it’s a Shinji Mikami survival horror game; I think I like my chances. Today’s goal was merely to get past the prologue and enter the “real” game, and I’m not sure I managed that. I’m in the third chapter of fifteen, but I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. Ichi hasn’t even thought up his inevitable plan to stop Arakawa’s dastardly yakuza conglomerate. Gameplay sections are quick and linear (except for the part where I walked into an arcade and played the 1985 SEGA arcade classic Space Harrier for a few hundred yen). Still, this helps. From a surveying perspective, I’ve got an idea of the gameplay loops, the storytelling methods, and how this will, like Persona 3, both demand long sessions and probably allow short ones. And from a purely aesthetic perspective, I learned that I’m cool with this. Yakuza is fun when it’s a talky, well acted drama about loyalty and abuse, and it’s fun when I’m beating the daylights out of a Level 2 enemy named “Capitalist Punisher.” Looking forward to seeing more.

Monday, February 10: started and completed Chapter 2 in The Evil Within, and re-recruited Adachi, completed Chapter 3, entered Ounabara Vocational, and got the Sujidex and Poundmates apps in Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

The Evil Within should’ve grabbed me when it came out in 2014. It’s survival horror; I enjoy those, especially Resident Evil. And it was directed by Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami after he left Capcom, acting as something of a response to his magnum opus Resident Evil 4. That might’ve been my favorite game before The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. So why didn’t I play it? I don’t know, and though there’s no real need for it, I want to. Maybe it was because the game sounded less interesting, or maybe it was because I had largely stopped using my Xbox 360 by then. I could’ve felt burnt by his and Suda51’s mediocre collaboration Shadows of the Damned, since that was part of my losing interest in Suda. My mind says it’s because a Zero Punctuation video dissuaded me from it, but I gave up on Yahtzee Croshaw before the game came out. Apparently this game has ties in my brain to several men whose work disappointed me. What I do remember is some sensation that it simply had an aura that didn’t appeal to me. Suspicion. Which makes it a perfect choice for this now that I’m eleven years older and incrementally wiser.

To some extent, this suspicion has so far proven itself. The first hour of The Evil Within was mildly unsatisfying—though I’m keeping on with it in the hopes that it’ll get better over time. And truthfully, any version of this game was gonna struggle. You can’t help but compare it to the near-impeccable RE4, and that makes this thing’s already big flaws even more pronounced. Like, there’s less combat and more sneaking here, but the sneaking is rote and constrained. There are more environmental tricks you can play with, but they feel like one-off gimmicks and not emergent tools that can help or harm you. It’s far more serious, adopting intense cinema film grain and a letterbox format, but it also lacks the specificity and personality of Mikami’s games, Shadows of the Damned included. The surreality is more forced. Mostly it reminds me of Saw, all rusty and mean. That’s not particularly compelling, especially since I can’t see the core at the heart of the product. I can’t deny that I found the first few sneaking sections very tense, but I also didn’t think they were very good as pieces of gameplay. Overall it feels distant in a way I feel deeply but am finding hard to put into words. Fuzzy, perhaps, like finding a poorly taken photo and trying to parse its subject.

Image: Source Gaming. The Evil Within feels almost like a rough draft, especially after having played more of it in the coming days.

However, a certain plot point in Yakuza suggests that these games might have an unexpected connection. Evil’s Detective Castellanos is in a nightmare world of imagery whose meaning hasn’t yet revealed itself. Forests, flames, and barbed wire. I suspect that as we continue, we’ll tie them to the killer in the white hood, and hopefully the core will manifest with that. But Ichiban also has a skewed view of the world, because that hero complex is now causing him to view every mission, move, and adversary from a fantastical and factually incorrect lens. In his RPG-addled mind, every thug in the fictional Yokohama district of Isezaki Ijincho (which has replaced Kamurocho as this game’s setting) is a “Sujimon” carrying wild powers and dysmorphic proportions. When he turns on the Poundmate app and hires Yakuza 1’s Gary Buster Holmes as an ally, he imagines the brawler’s hands as spiked balls. A forgotten bat half-buried in the ground is Excalibur, wreathed in lightning. One of the things that intrigued me most about Yakuza: Like a Dragon is that it’s a JRPG in a franchise that—zombie spin-off aside—is pretty grounded. To my understanding there’s no magic or extreme supernatural tropes. This soft explanation gives the game a zesty spice, where it can have that gonzo JRPG energy and that soap operatic Like a Dragon energy. And it adds a lot to Ichi’s character, showing his utopian vision as so utterly alien that it warps his sense of place. It’s kinda like the longstanding Regular Show fan theory that the leads only view their castmates as yetis and goblins, which makes it perfect that Rigby actor William Saylers has shown up as the curmudgeonly manager of a brothel. I’m doubtful that the other games of this week will keep this track going, but it’s neat having two games about heightened realities.

Tuesday, February 11: started and built a house in Minecraft, completed Chapter 3 of The Evil Within, and completed the Seiryu Clan dungeon in Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

The first half hour was an exercise in frustration. I spawned into my procedurally-made overworld, tried mining dirt and wood, and repeatedly struggled to make anything. Forget diamond swords or working calculators; I couldn’t figure out how to place the basic crafting bench to make those things. When night fell, Zombies, Skeletons, Spiders, and a wily Enderman repeatedly killed me. Once I figured out how to drop dirt and wood cubes on the ground, I still died before finishing my first house, and again and again as I walked across a sea to get back there. Moving my squat LEGO man around was unsatisfying. So with all that I’m stuck with the biggest issue of all: how the hell did I spend two and a half hours building another house in Minecraft before forcing myself off the console? How the hell did I then spend another hour fixing it up?

Image: Source Gaming. Apologies, but this is the best image quality you’re gonna get from me on Day 1 of trying Minecraft. It is pretty cool having what’s objectively a huge house after just a few hours of work.

Well, it’s the act of building. Once I decided to make a second house, this one on a sandbar far closer to the spawning point, the world’s most popular video game started to click for me. Creating blocks is mostly clear once you figure out the controls (though I did accidentally place a block in front of my door at least once), and it didn’t take long for me to find a real sense of ownership. This was my work! I dug out the sand, crafted it into sandstone, and placed dozens, maybe even hundreds up to form walls. I made three birch doors to keep out the zombies. I dug a massive mine under the mainland with wooden and metal axes, and I kept digging under the house and sticking wooden planks as a sinking floor. And when I jumped back in later, I added a massive side room—though a zombie did get through the open walls and led to yet another death, because this game is really tough even on easy. The mansion was ugly and a poor use of Minecraft’s iconic voxel graphics, but I made it. And so while I wasn’t sure what to expect and suspected I’d bounce off it, I want to continue. Not in Survival Mode, though. The day / night cycle added context to why I had to build the house, but it got in the way of why I wanted to build the house. So the next time you see me in Minecraft, I’ll be trying the nonviolent mode. Already got some ideas.

In other news, I fought through Yakuza’s second dungeon after getting through the inevitable section of The Evil Within that homages the village battle, the one from Resident Evil 4 that helped it upend the games industry. The latter was the least interesting experience of the day; I’m continuing to find the whole thing unsatisfying and dipped down to the easy difficulty setting the game helpfully describes as being for “the weak and fearful.” Exploration feels rudimentary, and the game’s chainsaw guy (who’s conveniently also the Garrador guy) is tough but not particularly memorable. And while I’m still having a lot of fun with Like a Dragon, today had what’s been my first real hurdle: the grinding. One bad guy wouldn’t let me enter a dungeon until I made enough scratch to be kitted out with some gear. For all that Ichiban loves beating up low level goons in JRPGs, it’s a pain as the guy directing him. Enemies either drop too few yen and EXP or are way too strong. A lot of the time, I was patching up my losses by spending much of the cash in restaurants, relying extensively on Nanba’s healing skills, and occasionally getting KO’d and losing half my money. Very EarthBound and Pokémon, both of which are natural points of contrast. Unfortunately, it also seems like your ability to successfully flee a battle is heavily dependent on things out of my control, but… that’s something best discussed on a different day. Either way, this was a day with a lot of friction and some notable accomplishments.

Wednesday, February 12: started, gathered 55 animals, and completed Lil Gator Game and started a world in Creative Mode in Minecraft.

There’s a lot to love about Lil Gator Game. It has a gorgeous autumnal look and excellent cel shaded graphics for depicting it. The score is great and surprisingly robust for a relatively small sandbox. Dialogue for some characters has that “self-aware, lampshading” style you see in a lot of indies, but it’s only for a few and everyone’s written distinctly. And warmly, too—this is a very sweet world, which is nice after a week that’s thus far pitted me against age regression fetishist yakuza bosses, mangled butchers, and irritatingly accurate archer skeletons. Moving around is great in particular, especially when it comes to Zelda staples like climbing, paragliding, and surfing on your shield. Which is good, because like those games, this wants to foster a sense of adventure. There’s no map, no waypoints, even the objectives are hidden after you get them. It does mean that it can be a bit of a pain to, say, retrace your steps to the amphitheater because you fell off a cliff and had to find your way back. Fortunately, getting back is fun thanks to the excellent game feel. It’s even fun to wail on the immobile cardboard “enemies.”

But it’s that Zelda atmosphere I like the most. Like Yakuza (and a lot of indies), this is openly indebted to the experiential nature of playing games. The lil Gator and their sister do not hide their devotion to Nintendo’s greatest franchise, particularly The Wind Waker, Breath of the Wild, and the standoffish original The Legend of Zelda. In the early cutscenes and frozen snippets of their previous adventures, you see how playing games—as actual games and in real life role play—connected them. This kind of thing isn’t inherently that interesting, but the lil Gator’s attempt to reconnect with their sister is. Their idea is to turn an innocuous summer camp island into a LARP session, with themselves as Link solving quests. And I find this really neat because of how it recontextualizes the tropes of my favorite video game series. The monomania of high fantasy reaches a comical fever pitch by having the NPCs go out of their way to invent quests for the Gator. Some of them are deliberately grindy or action-packed, while others are borne out of whatever tsuris they’re going through. Tropes like shield surfing and stamina management are filtered through a cozy game aesthetic. The cardboard enemies are dead ringers for ones found in, well, the kinds of games that inspired the Gator, Ichiban, and me. There’s this odd meta filter through the whole story, where your job as the hero who does everything makes you act as a catalyst helping this community of eccentric kids. I think I was intrigued when I saw trailers for it, but the execution is delightful and far beyond what I wanted.

Image: Source Gaming. They’ve got the sword, the shield, the paraglider, but what this game takes most from Zelda is a joy that comes from exploring a place. In a way, its attempt to capture exploring a “normal” land makes it feel closer to Zelda 1 than most.

And while I was able to write those two paragraphs after having beaten most of the game, hitting the credits after putting them to paper let me see it all come together in a finale that was insightful, sweet, and still focused on that experiential feeling. The development of the fantasy town, the dive into the Gator’s mind, and the reunion with their sister felt interactive, even with the copious dialogue. I could not help but feel a sensation not unlike the one I found in Minecraft. It was a world I contributed to, if only slightly. And it was a world of people united by… not strictly video games, but the communal act of fantasy and play. Real big grin I had on my face, finishing it. Afterwards you get a few postgame power-ups for tracking down any animals you missed. I’m not sure I’ll take up the offer. Lil Gator Game does not demand 100% completion; if there are any residents unaccounted for, I’m happy to let them be. I might buy this one in the future, but only to go through the story again for its own sake. For now, I’m going to keep working on these other games. I see Creative Mode has some fun tricks.

Thursday, February 13: started and completed The Walking Dead Episode 4, completed Chapter 4 of The Evil Within.

I beat the second to last chapter of The Walking Dead in one sitting. For the three previous ones, I took two days each. I’d stop at what seemed like the halfway point and never was, take a break to soak it all in, and return to see exactly how Lee would get himself out of whatever predicament I left him in. Not this time. And while I wanted to take care of it in one day and give the remainder of the week to the three other games I’m juggling, that’s not the reason. Fact of the matter is that Episode 4 is just paced for that. The sections at the house, on the streets, and in the sewers underneath Savannah are all short; they’re individually satisfying but clearly teases for the adventure at the elementary school / survivalist compound. They all have their rising and falling tensions, but unlike Episode 1 (where you’re jumping from one situation to another), 2 (where you’re soaking in one new setting), or 3 (which has a similar structure but feels languid and exhausted thanks to the death of Kenny’s family), this is all about building up one giant set piece. A great one at that, constantly jumping between different stories and optional scenes and a lot of that great, hyper-tense storytelling.

Image: Source Gaming. There wasn’t really logic or morality behind why I dropped Ben. It just seemed more interesting for the story.

This also leads the game to feeling a bit different. Divergences in the plot feel bigger and smaller at the same time; I might’ve dropped the millstone Ben to his death—look, he asked—but it’s also clear that Episode 3 newcomers Omid, Christa, and Chuck were always incidental to the Lee / Clementine / Kenny trio. And while I was interested in seeing the hilariously acrobatic survivalist Molly joining the team, that seems out of the cards no matter what. This is not a bad thing, to be clear, even beyond the fact that this has always been about choosing between flavors of bad. Right now, we’ve got “penultimate episode of an HBO season” energy, where you have choices but are mostly reaping what you sowed from the last three games. When Kenny tells Lee that he’ll stick by his true friend’s side for one final adventure, saving Clementine before our hero succumbs to a zombie bite, I could see all the forks in the road and tense conversations that led him and the algorithm to saying just that. But the story’s also absolutely stuffed with plot points, from rival groups to a creepy mystery man who talks to Clem on her walkie talkie. Even if you want to see how those shake out, a lot of it is obscured: the authoritarian Crawford group has been eaten alive before you confront them, the creep only comes back as the last minute cliffhanger for the second time, and the gang doesn’t have the time to process Ben’s screwups or genuine pain.

These may seem like complaints, but they’re not, and Episode 4 is simply designed to be an explosive climax in a way that doesn’t betray the gameplay. I think it works really well, and I’m looking forward to seeing it all come together in two weeks. This is largely for the benefit of my own neuroses, but I’m looking forward to Episode 5 taking the bottom position of the Week 9 header. The only game that’ll be referenced that way four times. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for The Evil Within, whose fourth chapter has only further highlighted my frustrations. I had to run away from multiple near-invincible monsters in bad chase sequences, the graphics are so gnarly that it’s actually hard to see anything, and the imagery and setting are painfully indistinct. One thing I keep thinking is that this is a game set in America that doesn’t feel American in any cogent way, and it’s not like Mikami hasn’t made several games set in the U.S. that do. I’ve often said that one of Resident Evil’s best qualities is its ability to capture the aesthetics of American cop and action movies from a distinctly Japanese perspective. This feels like more of a mush. That it does not capture a distinct region or history of my country isn’t, like, bad, but at least to me it highlights a fundamental lack of cohesion. This world is not clear. Also, the gameplay is boring and Castellanos is a pig and it’s super derivative.

Friday, February 14: completed Chapter 4, recruited Saeko, joined Part-time Hero, and gained the ability to switch jobs in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, continued work in Creative Mode in Minecraft, and turned on A Little to the Left and Peggle for my mother to try.

So far, the story of Yakuza is a stew of three main flavors: grand soap operatic crime drama, overexcited JRPG power fantasy, and relatively serious social commentary. It’s a surprisingly deft combination of tastes, largely because they actively work together. I mean, it’s not only Ichiban, but it helps when you have a deftly written 42-year-old shōnen protagonist who supports sex workers, rails against systemic abuse, and loves basically whatever the game wants him to do. Consider this a hot take if you’d like, but he’s exactly what Mario would be like in an M-rated game. Its gameplay flavors—a mix of Dragon Quest tropes, back alley brawling, strange mini-games, and arcades full of optional SEGA classics—feel less cohesive. At least, not in the battles. Like a Dragon has a pretty standard JRPG frame, and while it’s buttressed by a lot of really fun things, I don’t think they necessarily add to the combat. A big feature is how Ichiban (and basically only Ichiban) can automatically thrash foes with nearby traffic cones and bicycles, just like Kazama Kiryu did across the seven preceding Yakuza games. It’s really, really cool to see it happen, but “see” is the optimal word because it’s dependent on him being physically near these things. You can’t actually move him around the battlefield. There are also real time mechanics sprinkled into this turn-based engine, but it’s mostly just that enemies can be stunned and recover if you take too long to follow up the hit. And retreating seems to depend on whether Ichi’s able to make a 180° turn, or at least that would explain why I died in one fight a few days ago after he repeatedly tried to run towards a building. My complaints are not that these are “bad” things, but that they are good things that demand to be taken further.

Of course, there’s a different and more positive way to view these, which is to bring back the “stew” metaphor. The Like a Dragon franchise as a whole has always been invested in giving you a smorgasbord of content. It is legendary for how many mini-games and side stories it can stick in each entry. Over the course of six days, I’ve collected cans, played darts, fought off evil drowsiness ghosts in a theater, searched for a crawfish (who’s currently a hostage in need of a ransom I can’t find), dropped coins into arcade cabinets, and played a terrible and hilarious Mario Kart parody. Few images of the series are as iconic as the stone-faced Kiryu beating a thug into the ground and then immediately partaking in karaoke. A week into my first game, I’m a certified fan. These things are a powerful reminder of how alive and frenetic Ijincho can be, and how it’s under the threat of both gangs and moralistic conservatives. They can be fun and silly to experience as a player. These diversions are also flavors; for consumers of fiction they make a setting feel real, for residents they give us communal spaces, and for tourists they can be exotic. This is not the place to dive into the political quandary of how we engage in spaces that were not made for us, but it’s worth noting that every single one of us becomes a digital tourist when we turn on a game. This has historically been Like a Dragon’s other most acclaimed trope; people love Kamurocho and Ijincho because they allow them to explore a community that feels lived in. And I think that part of why they do, at least in Ijincho’s case, is because Ichi loves the mini-games as much as any of us.

Image: Source Gaming. Perhaps the most fun part of the combat is what it says about the JRPGs it takes as influence. It’s able to perfectly capture their energy without having, like, devil seed comets or all-powerful god monsters.

The second-to-last thing of note I did today was to finally unlock the Job system. Like Dragon Quest, the game lets you mix and match character classes. And like everything else in this game, it filters these tropes through Like a Dragon’s gritty realism and finds hilarity, since I’m pretty sure a lot of this is only in the main character’s head. My new hero Saeko has become a violent hostess who can spray bad guys with champagne; after a few more soul-searching chats in a bar, she’ll be allowed to change jobs to be a dominatrix or gambling manager. Adachi is now a bouncer for a club that may not exist, since his fancy suit only shows up in combat. And Ichiban can take a myriad of identities, even though the best one is clearly the breakdancer. He has more classes than the other characters because he’s the main character, and that’s how main characters work in games, but his personality demands it. He wants to wear these hats, and he wants to do good, and in his head these are one and the same. That’s why he’s Mario. Mario is and has always been an engine for dynamic player expression; it’s what drives him as a mascot and why he has endured. In Nintendo games, the act of being Mario is a power fantasy in which becoming better and having fun casually are both tied to doing good. You master the Triple Jump, explore every World, run around, and eventually Bowser will be stopped. And I think that in keeping with the meta undercurrent, that’s what Ichiban’s adventure is about. He’s found a space in the “gray zone” of homelessness, vice, and predominantly victimless crimes in which video game heroism can flourish, where self-empowerment is directly tied to selfless behavior. Time will tell if this reading is accurate, or if his quest will actually pain out, but it’s led him to being one of the best protagonists of “Passing the Buck” thus far. How could he not be? He’s M-rated Mario!

Saturday, February 15: continued working on my project in Minecraft.

I always planned to have at least two days for Minecraft. The game has a Survival Mode and a Creative Mode, and it would be journalistically wrong to not try both. Fortunately, I enjoyed the game enough on Tuesday that I was going to play more of it (and I’ll probably goof around in Creative to some degree for the rest of this project), but there was always going to be at least a day spent just building things. Not necessarily buildings, but I did have one idea: a map. My goal would be to loosely recreate the Kanto region from Pokémon Red & Blue, maybe adding its neighboring region of Johto if I was feeling spicy. If I wanted to go further I could try some Zelda map, but a 2D grid representing a game from 1996 seemed easy. Easier than making a whole building, at any rate. When I got started today, Saffron City was a seven by seven grid; it was originally 5 x 5, but I wanted to expand and had to retroactively push its neighboring towns out a bit. Dirt blocks were routes, colored terracotta showed each Gym’s Type, and Mount Moon and Lavender Tower give a greater verticality. All of that was done today, and I’m excited to keep going. But all of that work happened after I wrote the first draft of today’s entry, and in the days beforehand setting up this simple task proved surprisingly difficult—so much so that I almost considered giving up entirely.

I started a new project on Wednesday with the title “Wolfman’s Kaleidoscope,” and instead of actually going ahead I simply decided to make a colorful pyramid of colored glass blocks. It was just a test and relaxing exercise, as I’ve often liked doing that in programs like MS Paint. After it was large enough for my taste, I decided to get going with the intent of starting with Kanto’s central hub Saffron City, only to have a bit of a problem. See, every time you start a new Minecraft project it procedurally makes an entire world, one filled with entire biomes, villages, and caves. These spaces are absolutely mammoth, and even though this was largely going to be a small space I didn’t want to bulldoze an entire island’s worth of dirt, stone, and sand. So on Friday, after coming back, I decided to build a long, long bridge of dirt blocks out into the sea. This Kanto would be a new, artificial island. But even that was hard. The game doesn’t seem particularly designed for such large scale creation and is a bit finicky when you’re placing blocks in the air or water. I wasn’t sure I was going to have enough space, even for a collection of five-by-five towns. Unsure of what to do or where to go, I had my character rise into the air and survey the land. You can do that in Creative Mode. I flew up, looked at a nearby arctic island, and flew ever higher and further. And soon afterwards… I was lost. I could not find a clear symbol of where I was going, and the rainbow ziggurat that took hours to make turned out to be microscopic in such a view. Faced with the prospect of making a new level or settling down somewhere else or what, and feeling defeated, I just kept floating and looking for that arctic island.

Image: Source Gaming. This section was written during the early afternoon (hence why it’s about what I did on Friday). Afterwards, I played and actually started this Kanto recreation. It’s humble and incomplete, and I don’t know how that guy and his horse got stuck here, but you can see Sabrina’s Gym and Mt. Moon at least.

This process, which ended up taking what felt like an hour, was surreal and strangely awe inspiring. Beautiful biomes abounded, like a desert or a mushroom forest or a giant mound of cherry blossoms with an inexplicable lava stream. I’d look down and see a surprising glow, the heat of a volcanic block, and wonder if it could give my glass blocks a glow (it can’t). My phone or laptop was playing an emotional, philosophical video essay, and it created this sense of unbelievable natural overwhelm. I was subsumed in a massive, oddly beautiful digital world, one that wasn’t crafted by engineers but invented the moment I pressed a button—and destroyed just as easily. Minecraft felt dominating, intimidating, yet serene. Desecrating this world for a dumb exercise seemed a phenomenal waste. At the same time, I was still desperately searching for this stupid, half-made project and fretting that I would never find it. So I tried one last thing and pulled out a telescope. In Survival Mode, making a Spyglass demands amethyst and copper, materials I’d never have the patience or ability to find. Here, you just look in the tool menu. After a few looks, I actually found the pyramid I made and floated down. I made it even larger afterwards; I made it taller and wider then, and today I simply shot a tower of red and purple glass straight into the sky so that I’d never be lost again. Since then, I’ve spent today working on this floating island and finding plenty of interesting problems and solutions. It will be a lot of work to do even this mild, unambitious project. A month and a half’s worth, potentially. The past two days have made it abundantly clear that Minecraft may accommodate you, it may empower you, but it does not break easily.

Outro: we’re at, in terms of days, the halfway point of “Passing the Buck.” I’m not sure how that will shake out in the number of chapters, but ending just past the middle of February makes this one slightly convenient. It’s like how I beat Persona 3 Reload, whose final boss you fight on the in-game January 31, on the actual January 31. Strange in retrospect that it didn’t come up. There’s a kismet to the numbers, though maybe it’s silly to think about them that way. I mean, I probably shouldn’t lead people to thinking I have apophenia. Especially since if I keep it up I’ll probably start freaking out about how I don’t have a ton of time left and still so many things I’d like to try.

Image: Source Gaming. The gang casually discusses some of Ben’s work.

If we discount the three exceptions I ended up taking, this was an experiment with four new games, all of which are very different in scale, budget, genre, script, graphics, tone, intended length, year of release, and pretty much everything else. But that probable apophenia often leads me to find odd connections, and the one that comes to mind the most was a sense of surprise. Treat this as the artificial framing for a conclusion that it obviously is, but it’s true. I really was surprised throughout the week.

I came into Yakuza: Like a Dragon expecting a wacky, adult-oriented Japanese RPG with crazy characters, hilarious antics, and cool music. And it is (although none of the songs thus far have gotten anywhere close to the “Receive You the Hyperactive,” the theme for series fan favorite Goro Majima that blew up after the game came out). This is a game whose dedicated healer has “spells” that include falling asleep on a strip of cardboard and burping into a lighter. But what has struck me since playing on Sunday was the deftness of tone, the strength of its lead, and the way that RPG format works in conjunction with them. This is a world that is wacky, but also cruel and abusive and deeply empathetic. Ichiban has been a surprisingly rich main character—I’ve gone back to edit the first day’s entry and keep feeling a bit embarrassed at having described him as “stock”—and he’s helped keep things running. But he’s also central to the meta undercurrent, where you’re seeing the world partially through his imaginative and whimsical eyes. The turn-based combat and the office building dungeons and the magic powers are just how Ichi processes a world that’s already exciting and filled with wonder. Which is fascinating. That, the extent to which these ideas are being taken, is something I fully did not expect. Great stuff.

Image: Source Gaming. A cool-looking enemy from a bad chase sequence in The Evil Within.

I came into The Evil Within expecting, well, “Resident Evil 4 with less of a combat emphasis.” I guess I was expecting something more overtly referential, but also something more distinct. Unfortunately, The Evil Within doesn’t do either, and it feels more like a mossy clump than anything grand or special. It’s gross and gory, but its scares feel incoherent. Its world is, well, boring. The whole experience was one of disappointment and exhaustion. I don’t think I’m gonna keep playing it. Perhaps I will try its sequel at some point in the next month and a half; it’s supposedly a lot better and more distinct. But I gave this a lot of rope, much more than I gave to other games I gave up on. My semi-secret plan was to beat the fifth chapters for it and Yakuza and get to the one-third mark for both of them. With Yakuza, I’m a bit blue that I didn’t make it because I love the game and want to beat it relatively quickly. With this one, I’m not sad for playing as much as I did, I don’t consider it a waste or time that could’ve been spent in Ijincho or Wolfman’s Kaleidoscope (even though I’m realizing that I actually don’t have that much more time left), but it’s hard to imagine it suddenly reversing course.

I came into Lil Gator Game expecting… I don’t fully know, honestly. I knew about its graphics and Zelda homages (and that it was published by Playtonic, whose debut title Yooka-Laylee aggravated me to a degree I thought impossible when I played it), but nothing else. Mostly I wanted something cute, liked, and kinda anodyne. All of that happened, but the strength of its meta flourishes blindsided me. In a way, it’s an oddly fitting companion to Yakuza, which also tells a story about a character way, way too inundated with playing and experiencing games. A lot of where both games succeed comes from that, because they’re both interested in the experiential and communal aspects of this stuff. This was not a throughline I had anticipated in the slightest.

Image: Source Gaming. Lil Gator Game‘s a real treasure.

I came into Minecraft expecting to be bored, frustrated, and largely nonplussed by the experience. I’d put in my requisite two days to try the Survival and Creative Modes, get what I could out of it, and let it be afterwards. Instead, I found the process oddly invigorating. Survival was too repetitive for me to keep going, but it was actually fun fighting for just the materials to stay alive and slowly creating something of mine. And Creative has been stymied not by material limitations (although there are a lot of weird elements and mechanics I’m still figuring out), but by my own energy and creativity. It challenges me in a way that I didn’t plan on. And that’s why it was the biggest surprise of all, because it was compelling and exciting beyond my expectations. I’m looking forward to poking around in it for a while. I’m not sure how much I’ll talk about it beyond making a note of whatever major progress I make in my little experiments. But it’s another great example of something that can bend to your needs as a player. That I will try to express on here.

This week was, on the whole, a great example of what I wanted from this series all along: a sense of constant surprise and excitement. I’ve got two new games to add to the rotation, which is a bit of a risk when I’ve spent most of the time inundated with big games, but I think they’ll complement Indiana Jones and Fable. It was also just something I needed to do, to feel a lot of new energy again. That being said, I’ll move a more conservative tack again for next week and prioritize what I’m still working on… mostly. See, I’ve got my eye on three new games, and not to be too enigmatic about this, but I only expect to beat one of those three that week. The goal next time is gonna be to see how big this backlog can get, and how much I can cut it down. I mean, when has a strategy like that ever gone awry?

Read all of “Passing the Buck” here!