Xator Nova

Note: This was originally posted in Twitlonger in April 6th 2018. I'm reposting this as a commemoration of the anniversary of Isao Takahata's departure. When I was a child, probably around four-years old, there was a TV show that most children of my generation used to watch, which was called "Marco - From the Apennines to the Andes" . It was the story of a little poor boy who travelled across the ocean to find his sick mother. I didn't know why at the time, but there was something very unusual about this series compared to other children shows I used to watch. Maybe because it was the very first Japanese animation I had seen, with the roughness that comes with it in comparison to children's entertainment in the West but even with more series under my belt, I realized that I was watching something more akin to real life, to more normal sentiments like loving your family, and wanting to do everything for them, regardless of your age. This was my first...

Gris is the worst game of 2018. Gris fails as an architectonic construct because as much as its imagery suggests beauty, the interaction with the world is empty. The details that are visually presented don't exist to the gameplay, creating a sensorial dissonance. Travelling through the landscape suggests going through stairs or small bumps of road, but the real input is pressing left and right, like if everything was flat. Gris fails as a platformer because there's no grace to the gravitational movement, no punishment for jumping wrong, no enrichment to use platforming for exploration. If you miss, you'll simply fall over and try again until you get it. Its only purpose is to trick the player that they're doing something while advancing and clearing puzzles and collectibles in order to justify that it's a game. It's so simple-minded that one wonders why it's there. It is inept as a statement about overcoming depression because of its vagueness: Instead...

Pokémon was born out of Satoshi Tajiri's will of sharing his experiences as a child to search for, capture and collect insects outside his home, alongside the curiosity to see the creatures and the ingenuity to get them. To him, the games of his era could be better, which is why this fixation could help him to reach the desired level of sophistication. Many elements are in fact coherent with this approach: The focus on capturing wild enemies, their differences with domesticated creatures, random encounters exclusively on wild areas, the intent of making each creature unique in elemental affinity and moveset, the turn-based combat as a representation of giving orders to your creatures, etc. To achieve this, Pokémon needs a world where the player can navigate through, explore and discover. Game Freak would take for this the established structure by Dragon Quest as a stat progression through accumulation of experience points to gather levels alongside a lineal advance led by a na...

Fire Emblem is based on two important aspects: The abstraction of the epic narrative within the videogame language, portrayed through the grid system to accentuate the scope of the conflict; and the human component, reflected in the permanent death alongside the characterization of the soldiers to provide gravity and seriousness to the strategic elements, according to the series creator Shouzo Kaga. His intention was to make a dramatization of warfare conflict, reminiscent to the epics of yesteryear that as an enthusiast of war history interested him. That's why even the first game has a Greco-Roman aesthetic, and the narrative style felt impersonal to the secondary characters. The presence of the world, and the repercussions of the war in the community took precedence to magnify the imponence of the conflict. In essence, Kaga was a classicist. After his departure from Intelligent Systems, Kouhei Maeda would join, who as main writer and later director would define a turning poin...