Rundown (5/10/2026) Neverness to Ever Less

This Week’s Topics:

Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Neverness to Ever Less

…At this point, I have developed a habit of going through a fresh hell of gacha live service gaming every summer-ish season. This is partially an attempt to fill the hole in my heart left by the demise of my beloved Dragalia Lost, and a way to force myself to confront the state of a growing and increasingly dominant strata of gaming.

Zenless Zone Zero was almost a banger action RPG with a truly endearing world, yet it was inhibited by the fact that it was a gacha game, built on repetition and a slightly confused foundation for its world building. Tribe Nine was an action RPG in the shape of a live service, full of the deliberate structure and artistry, but due to its chosen monetization model and slow rollout of content, it died within nine months, never to be finished. Persona 5X was effectively a B-studio’s spin-off attempt at a Persona 5 soft sequel with a new cast of characters and oodles of reused or reconstructed assets. Unfortunately, everything in the game took twice as long as it was designed for user retention, keeping them busy, and keeping them hungry for power.

Back in 2021, I expressed concerns about how Genshin Impact would lead to a surge in popularity for console-style gacha live services and how these games would affect what millions see games as and what they would want games to be. Five years later, my concerns have only been validated, because all of these games have the same core problem as Genshin. They take what should be a standard single-player console title, an action RPG of some flavor, and inundate them with tasks. With dailies, weeklies, side quests, collectibles, an overly stuffed main campaign, and a constant sense of FOMO, a concern over being able to do everything in time, and discouraging them from player-directed behavior.

Everything is turned into a task, into an objective, and is meant to confer the player some manner of tangible reward, however minute and meaningless.

Go to the quest log to check this. Go to the battle pass to get your reward. Mark off your achievements. Upgrade this character. Check this event to jot down your progress for this reward. Go into this sub-mode menu to collect the rewards for the side activity you just completed. It’s relentless. It’s obnoxious. Shut the fuck up, video game! Stop making me dig through a web of menus every ten fucking minutes just so I can get some meaningless EXP items and a fourth of a single pull. If I wanted to fuck around with a complicated web of menus, I’d organize my files, do some work for my day job, or play around in a damn spreadsheet. You are not a spreadsheet, stop acting like one!

These games are so terrified that players will get bored, will drift away to another app that they overwhelm them with micro-tasks to keep them engaged, going from one bit of content to the next. This works in menu-based games, as all you are doing out of bespoke instances is menu interaction. Menus are the point and the player is primed to view menu interaction as their primary verb. With everything from Granblue Fantasy to Umamusume, this fixation on tasks, on menus, feels more appropriate, as that is what these games primarily are. Menus with cool shit tied to them!

However, this design approach was retained even as gacha live services evolved past these menu-based worlds and adopted the primary form of third-person RPGs. These title borrow a whole host of techniques and language from decades worth of third-person action adventure games, most of which are decidedly not menu-driven experiences— they are action-driven experiences. Anybody familiar with this deluge of titles will be able to detect how awkwardly and ham-fistedly these elements are added to an experience, spurring them to do micro-tasks that would not be present in the games they are clearly drawing influence from.

The interjection of these menus and micro-tasks urges them to go from objective to objective while ignoring just about everything else. To me, one of the core defining elements of this subset of games, if not games in general, are the parts where you are not actively doing anything. The freedom to walk around a village to see the sights, talk to NPCs just to hear what they have to say, or simply do things for the innate pleasure of doing something, without expecting any tangible reward. When visiting a new place IRL, you look around, at the big details, the small details, and try to appreciate the place for what it is, and video games let you do that without any social stigma attached.

When one is scrambling to get a dozen things done, trying to make progress during a brief allotted time and agaisnt a deluge of ticking clocks, player-directed expression is mechanically discouraged. Player agency is secondary to what task was thrown into their hands, and the sheer deluge of stuff to do makes one’s first, and potentially only, hours with one of these live services a bombardment of tasks with rewards of nebulous, if not meaningless, value. It’s an experience that I only grow to dislike the more I go through it. The more times I see it repeated across games, the more convinced I am that this will come to be viewed as an intrinsic part of a video game in the eyes of some people. Eventually, these micro-tasks, needing to visit a web of menus to pick up rewards, and check in on inventories every ten minutes, will become a part of games, period. Yes, even if something is not a live service.

Neverness to Everness— god that name sucks so hard. NTR— no, that’s the Japanese abbreviation for cuckold porn. NTE wants to be an anime urban action adventure sandbox title in the vein of Grand Theft Auto. One with a bit of Like a Dragon here to flesh out its world and characters. And a murky gumbo of other assorted influences that all build up a single-player story-driven action adventure affair with copious amounts of lore and characters. However, despite this, the highest and greatest influence of this game is Genshin Impact, with sprinkles of other recent Genshin-likes, such as Zenless Zone Zero, added for good measure.

How this influence is felt can be best epitomized by its menu, a cluster of icons that the player is guided to bop through to complete their dailies by visiting menus and submenus in order to get rewards. Its character upgrade system is needlessly complex and driven by randomized loot above anything fixed or permanent.

Power is gated by resources you are never supposed to be flush with. Its world is dictated by player level, forcing them to grind, farm, wait, and spend in order to keep pace with the inevitable endgame. And its characters are categorized in not one but two elemental systems, with the understated goal to keep things complicated. Access to power is in part dictated by the whims of the gacha, which is manifested as a circular board game and complicated through a deluge of alternate currencies. From a design perspective, it is so fussy and complicated that I can only describe it as categorically bad from any remotely decent perspective.

I have bad-mouthed gacha systems for being bad before, I will do it again, because I am right. I have over 2,500 gacha live service hours on record, not including spending dozens of hours discussing systems and over 200 hours redesigning one with a woefully comprehensive design document, so I know what I am talking about.

Concepts and mechanical glue are copied wholesale with little need to alter a proven system, but that’s not what I am here to discuss. What I am here to discuss is what lies underneath these deliberately crappy systems. Because if this game were built with different design goals but much of the same underlying stuff, if it had the confidence to just be an open world game, it could have been something special.

I recognized this fact pretty quickly upon finishing the first part of the prologue. I was cast into a segment of its broader world, and decided to do a little exploring. I head to a scenic train station and found myself able to walk onto the approaching train, sitting down. This itself is something I have never experienced in a game before, but I also have eschewed many more recent AAA titles. Regardless, it is a great addition to make a world feel more tangible and encourages a ground level exploration that is often trivialized through the use of drivable cars and fast travel.

…However, as I sat down on the train, the game bugged and the train itself became invisible. Immediately, I was in love. Bugs like this are ultimately harmless, yet do so much to endear me to games, to the humanity behind their construction, and to the idea that my experience is probably unique. While the sheer imagery of this situation, of seeing a properly yet lightly dressed young woman sit on an invisible train as it goes through tracks that venture into the sea itself before dropping her off at an isolated train station at the end of a dock, is the type of thing that just sticks with me. Forever.

After getting off the train, I was a full kilometer away from my destination, so I decided to turn off the tracking icon and just explore this world. I wandered through the woods, the rich foliage, finding a lone pink leaved tree lingering in a tuft of forestry cast side from a highway, and then casually walked through this nature as I allowed the soft lo-fi beats to inform the setting. I happened upon crows that dropped magic rocks. I encountered cubes that were tied to spawns of enemies several levels higher than my two characters. I picked up food products littered on tables and benches. I even stumbling onto lost items to turn into the cops in exchange for crime cookies. I was left to discover systems naturally, see the world at my own pace, go where I wanted to go, climb up mountains, and just vibe with the great big world the developers made here, appreciating it as a scrounger, searching for meaning, and finding it. No questlines necessary.

In my continued time with the title, I really came to appreciate the sheer volume of little things that populate this world. The cluttered rubbish in alleyways or backstreets, the realistic copy-pasting of apartment designs, the mixture of high urban density with quiet neighborhoods and woodlands that led into shrines. The mixture of car-centric highways that loop around this city and the fact that both trains and buses function as free public transit, letting you get to your destination in style, or see the world from a different, more reserved, perspective.

It’s also a world that gives the player no shortage of things to do, and not even in regards to structured quests, a hit list for enemies to be defeated, or the stamina burning pits. This is a game full of true side activities and with plenty of diversions or distractions to diversity your time in Hethereau.

**Her name is Chiz, pronounced like cheese. She is mouse.**

You can go on races against a small fake league of challengers. You can get stimulate the gig economy by becoming a taxi drive. You can go into a mahjong parlor to play virtual mahjong, because this is an Asian game. You can even start up a local chain coffeehouse and work the stands, preparing drinks and sandwiches for customers. There are several apartments that can be filled with a deluge of furniture, populated by skimpy anime babes who you can order around like the bitches they are. (Because the game needs to make MONEY off of the Gooner Class.)

The fact that you can Breath of the Wild climb through the city, and use a magic balloon to float, both with basically unlimited stamina, drastically changes your interact with the world— and for the better. You can shoplift, just because. There are literally hundreds of oddball items you can buy and find for impractical purposes, like minute-long buffs, but also to bribe your characters for affection. There are plenty of storefronts you can just wander into and chill in, grabbing a burger, or a sofa set for your second coffee shop. There’s an entire self-contained fishing economy with the worst fishing minigame I have ever seen. You literally do not reel in the fish, you just move a line across a HORIZONTAL bar. It sucks ass. It’s an insult to the well established art of video game fishing. I hate it. But it’s there, and the game is better for it.

I enjoy how there are randomized mini battle encounters that just happen throughout the city, where evil vending machines or shake-downing hoodlums just randomly appear for a quick bit of combat while traveling. You can abuse the power of an early party member’s government status to proposition cars from people, or just steal them if they say no. You can attack people and destroy property to get the cops to chase your ass, which is always FUN. There is a random playable piano hidden all the way at the end of a long stretch of beach, nearly consumed by the tide, and right below a gorgeous aurora. There is no mechanical reward for this other than a woefully minor achievement, but the fact someone put this here means that the people who made this world cared. They REALLY cared.

This compliment applies to both the world designers and the artists, as NTE is up there with my favorite looking games of all time, even running the game on medium settings. The immense detail its city is rendered with. The stunning sights achieved by its day, night, and weather system. The highly detailed anime character models with animations that do so much to add to their personality, even if they are probably going to be copy-pasted to hell and back as new characters are added.

**First Person Boobs. Kawaii Tsun’aho would approve.**

It’s actually a game where I found myself routinely switching between third and first person to better examine the finite detail. From the texture of the seeds on sunflower leaves, the detail of foliage, or how performance dictated that this or that sign be so low resolution. Admittedly, some of these up close bobbles look a bit rinky-dink, like they are vestiges of the PS3 era, but that’s actually a feature in my mind. I love seeing how developers make compromises like that while focusing on the broader image, on the skyline, while putting something, even if its low poly, in the corners, just to make the world feel more real. Personally, I think it’s great that they are still using flat 2D images of copy-pasted offices to fill up office buildings. If they actually modeled them, that would be stupid.

NTE is a game that gives the player a lot to do, a lot to explore, beyond its central story or quest systems, and I am happy that I spent most of my time with this title pursuing those systems, seeing the nooks and crannies of its world. It’s often not great at anything it does. Driving feels like controlling a slippery box with wheels, and the freebie moped with a max speed of 40 km/h is barely a motor vehicle.

Even combat just feels like a worse version of Zenless Zone Zero with overly aggressive enemies and a boring yet slightly convoluted elemental system. But it manages to nail a certain something that I love about urban sandbox games like this, and something that I feel we don’t see enough of in the broader world of gaming. (Thanks for killing your own genre, GTA.)

This alone makes me wish that NTE was not a gacha game, that it was just a product you could buy, own, and play for decades to come. Unfortunately, it isn’t. And also unfortunately, this exploration is by far the best part of the game. Just messing around, finding your own fun, and ignoring the story. Because the story… kind of blows. And not in a way that’s comparable to Genshin or Zenless Zone Zero or the segmented, episodic, narratives of any live service. NTE’s story sucks in its own special way.

Rundown 2 Preamble 2 Ramble:
Neverness to Ever Less is Bad at Storytelling

Okay, where to begin? Well, the start’s usually the best place for these sorts of things. The protagonist of Neverness to Ever Less is an amnesiac with a weighty and enigmatic past who has the power to see the magical creatures who manipulate the world around them. Some are good, functioning as productive members of a society with humans— catgirls, wolfmen, and other kemono critters. But anomalies make up the majority of the fodder that needs to be murdered for the greater good.

The game prompts the player to think that they are going to be part of some government organization about learning more about these anomalies, and even give them a free klutz of a catgirl for good measure. However, the moment the game lets the player run loose it slaps them with a veritable Scooby Gang of deadbeat ghostbusters. You’ve got drunken shrine lady-boss, over-competent butler-man, degenerate catgirl nerd girl, degenerate horned loli, overtly timid shota with a head full of literal books, and an otter with a TV for a head who only says his name, Taygedo, which is confusingly pronounced as tah-gee-do. They can be funny, have an affability imbued to them by their voice actors and animators, but as a group, they are neither functional nor a particularly entertaining mess, and the game does a pretty poor job of introducing them.

Almost immediately, I bounced off of the cast, wanted to get away from them, but the early game is firmly committed to story, to getting you to like and acknowledge these characters as a unit. I did not find any of them particularly endearing as individuals— they are a bunch of screw-ups consisting of cliche archetypes wedged together in a manner I’d once compare to the results of a focus group, but would now say they feel algorithmic. The cast is too big, too broad, and does not congeal into a well-rounded group. At least the klutzy catgirl was incompetent in a more overtly endearing way and a go-getter. I felt that only one of this merry crew actually wanted to do their damn job and I have no intuitive understanding of how half of them wound up working for a shambling specter scrambling business like this.

After the introductions, the game directs the player to their first job, meant to show what a standard investigation for these wannabe ghostbusters looks like. A photography studio owner finds his shop haunted, and the player must investigate by walking around, linearly finding clues, and having characters tell the story as they do so. It offers shades of mystery and provides a setting for plenty of observational commentary, allowing players to get to know these characters. Well, even though, at this point in The Culture, you know these characters’ whole-ass schtick just by looking at them.

While I think the setting of a three floor film studio for largely vanity photographs is, quite frankly, implausible in a game with haunted phone booths, it is a fully functional starting chapter. A little bit of faux investigation gameplay, novel set pieces, some mystery, enhanced by optional notes that you can read if you are the type of person who LIKES to read benign workplace drama between routine combat encounters. The way the game twists the environment into an estranged negative photograph world is both effective asset reuse and a compelling visual in its own right. And the boss battle that caps off this adventure is both compelling visually and gives a decent amount of mechanical pushback, requiring the player to dodge, counter, and use the elemental mechanics the game is still teaching you. It’s an effective tutorial battle that, if not for the pop-ups, would not feel like a tutorial.

It’s a workable intro and I could overlook certain storytelling stickiness, but before going into the rest of the game’s story I sampled, I want to talk about how it presents its talky-bits.

I do not envy anyone working on a live service title, period, and I especially do not envy the people responsible with presenting the story. Game production being what it is, the industry standard 6 week update deadlines being what they are, it is incredibly difficult to maintain a consistently high level of presentation quality when working on a game like NTE.

NTE has some of the most gorgeously, rambunctiously, and hyperactively animated cutscenes I have ever seen in a game. (Yes, I AM being serious.) Character movements are hyper fluid, camera cuts are incredibly frequent, there is an often lavish attention to the smallest details, and the game is eager to experiment with its medium. Where 3D assets are not expressive enough, they are replaced with looser 2D animation, 2D cutaways, or just a different way to render things entirely. There is also so much going on in these cutscenes can be hard to follow the actual story. It has the unhinged energy of a reanimated fan project and the polish of a production with enough fidelity to be a theatrical film.

Some cutscenes lack this pre-rendered TLC and are done in-engine, or at least appear to be, featuring bespoke animations but using the same assets and models as the rest of the game, and they look pretty good. Definitely more in-line with what I would expect from what is still technically a phone game. But most dialogue scenes are firmly what I affectionately call Bioware talky scenes. A lot of shot/reverse shot as speakers stand around, fully voiced, going through animations that are clearly part of an internal library, and going through the motions. It’s firmly good enough. Well, except for how this game needs to let certain animations play out before it can skip over to the next line of dialogue, a feature I have come to except since, I dunno, Mass Effect (2007).

However, the reason why I am going in so much detail is because when the game does not try, it delivers some of the worst talking scenes, ones that are so bad, so devoid of effort of personality, that they feel unfinished. Most of the game’s side quests are presented without voice acting and with minimal camera work. This is not necessarily a bad thing, lots of games have taken this approach over the decades, but NTE‘s presentation is especially poor.

**I LOVE YOU MR. BAG! YOU CAN DO ANYTHING!**

When dialogue is initiated, the camera freezes in a default unflattering angle as two characters speak to each other. There are no barks, no typewriter sound to resemble speech, not even a beep to indicate when text is spoken, and the English text crawl speed is incredibly slow. You cannot move the camera, you just need to look at two characters in their idle breathing animations, blankly staring at each other. No faux talking lip movements, no emotion, the characters are exuding as much character as two rocks found on the sidewalk.

This is so bad that I would rather the game not even bother with the fake subtitle-like dialogue box and just have dialogue boxes pop out of characters’ heads. I would rather the game shift to a visual novel presentation, because that would show some level of self-awareness. (Like in Zenless Zone Zero, which did that shit all the time!) Hell, this evident lack of self-awareness is why I think this is a worse presentation than a damn text adventure, because a text adventure is at least honest. For a game with a budget well into nine digits, this is an insult. This is the game telling me that these stories are not worth the effort of animating or voice acting.

Just a few months ago, I was talking about how lacking the presentation of Pokémon Legends: Z-A was, but if NTE is any indication, I was being too harsh. For all of its presentation foibles, PLZA at least has camera work during its benign side quests. Characters at least emote and move their lips. NTE simply does not do that, while dragging the player through the city as they pursue odd, almost nonsensical stories that I would hazard were written by or with the assistance of LLMs in order to fine-tune the pesky details. After playing, I DID learn that this game used AI generated assets, so I SHOULD suspect that!

Now, with side quests in games like this, I do not expect great side quest writing. I am fine with a flimsy justification to go around, kill enemies, visit places, and fetch crap for lazy layabouts. Just don’t waste my time by pretending to be anything more than that. They are excuses to engage with systems, ways to add little bits of character, and that is gudd-e-nuff. However, in my brief time with this game, I happened upon a side quest so bad that I had to keep playing this game.

While running ’bout the city, I happened across a talking dog, who I think is meant to be a Shiba, that’s actually an anomaly. The dog anomaly, named Ruddy, proudly declares himself to be an advertising superstar, inviting the protagonist to his latest photoshoot. I went there, saw Ruddy get rejected, get depressed, and then followed him to his rooftop home— don’t ask me how a dog lives on a rooftop— to peruse old photographs of his advertisement days. …Except they were not really for ads, they were just the types of funny dog photos that people would post on social media.

Depressed over these photos, and unable to find others, the protagonist is then sent to find Ruddy’s friend, Auddy, another Shiba anomaly, at the local drive-in theater. Upon meeting Auddy, he spouts some nonsense about a popcorn thieving and movie ticket snatching tanuki, spurring the protagonist to find their hideout.

With the tanuki defeated, and the tickets to a movie called “Gen Z” recovered, Auddy then tells the protagonist about how Ruddy always hated being photographed, and mentions that they should go out and find another Shiba anomaly, one with glasses named Buddy. Buddy off-handedly mentions something called a “Soultractor” before clarifying that all three of these Shiba anomalies were once friends, but split up for reasons. The protagonist then gathers up these three, has them meet up, watch a movie together off-screen, and then head off into the woods to dig up the Soultractor.

…Then the three Shiba anomalies explain that they used this Soultractor to divide themselves into three beings after some argument they had some time ago. Now that they have reconciled, they want to fuse, but cannot find the Soultractor to bring themselves back together. Then for reasons I could not follow, three green octopi appear and help the three Shibas fuse into a single three headed Border Collie named Aubury. Now they are back together… but can also apparently unfuse whenever they want, as I saw them marching around about an hour later. Das Ende.

I had to describe that in detail because… what the fuck even is this story? HOW did someone write it like this? WHY did they write it like this? If it sounds like I am just making shit up or describing a dream. It is structured like something generated by a damn LLM that was made up with each prompt.

Desperate for some quality storytelling, I played the first main mission after the prologue, where the protagonist and cohorts of anomaly hunters need to help Taygedo prepare for a date. Except it turns out with he lied to his date, an otter plush creature named Tako, making himself out to be a big shot involved in the criminal underworld, in order to appeal to her love of TV dramas. …This is a heavily recycled sitcom premise, probably in the top thirty plot concepts to get characters in wacky situations and play with existing power dynamics, and what ensues is basically what one would expect.

The characters go looking for gifts, visiting various stores before finding something called imaginadough, which is dough powered by imagination, allowing one to make anything, but with the properties of dough. Just roll with it. Taygedo also recruit his friends to pose as rowdy goons to impress Tako as they go to a couple of date spots, having them stage a street fight to impress Tako, even running from the cops after causing a scene. Characters also cover for the fact that Taygedo is a nervous dork and not the tough guy he is trying to be, and the two otter critters go through the city as part of a what is genuinely a dozen step questline before arriving at a romantic woodland festival area. (Which the dialogue calls Azure Vista, but is covered with signs that call this area BlueGaze.)

Taygedo prepares to confess to Tako, who is dumb and did not notice the obvious fumbles, by preparing a giant imaginadough present for her. Except Taygedo screws up, creates a goop monster, and Tako is narrowly saved by another character. The player defeats the goop monster through a boss battle that abruptly stopped halfway through, and the main cast need to spend SEVERAL DAYS cleaning up the mess. Then, after Taygedo made his confession, off-screen, Tako sends a letter addressed to the character who saved her, not Taygedo. Meaning this whole bloody affair, which takes over an hour of game time, amounted to nothing but an overly long sitcom episode with characters I did not like at the start and liked even less at the end.

Disappointed by the game’s attempt at proper storytelling, I decided to resume player-directed exploration, and happened across a hospital indicated on my map. There, I found an environmental anomaly that transported my party into an abandoned hospital, home to the trauma of some patient. This leads into a genuine horror stealth segment, showcasing the sheer level of diversity, ingenuity, and desire to do quirky out-there things for the sake of it. You go from exploring a beautiful city to digging through a spooky abandoned building, looking for clues, figuring out how to re-activate the generators, and eventually discovering a bandage monster who stalks the halls, able to immediately kill the player character, urging them to run or hide in a locker.

Its existence is impressive, as is the fact that the story actually has multiple endings. It is, effectively, a miniature horror game in an open world gacha GTA like, and that’s really cool. The problem I have with it is three-fold. One, it’s just a bad stealth section in multiple ways. The hospital is to the scale of an actual hospital, full of samey rooms you can just wander into, with only maybe eight having anything worthwhile, and figuring out where to go in this dark environment is a pain-in-the-ass.

Two, the stalking bandage monster does not operate under an easily understood set of rules. It is hard to track them visually because of the darkness, their footsteps are so loud they may as well be silent, and their ability to send the player back to the start of the map, while not wiping their progress, is only frightening precisely once. Also, you are meant to sit and read notes, but the monster can still stalk you while reading notes, meaning you are mechanically encouraged to NOT read the story.

Three, the save station, indicated by a floating floppy disc, did not work when I found it, and I did not realize it was a save station, meaning I would need to repeat this mundane process four times just to get the endings. Endings that are not voiced, yet are subtitled and move automatically. Which… I’m sorry, if you are going to the trouble of making this environment, telling this story, animating four final cutscenes, making bespoke death animations for this segment, you need to have voice acting. You literally only need ONE voice actor for this. What are we going here?

This was the final straw for me, and where I realized that NTE was the product of different people with different ideas, only some of which were good or developed to a fruition where they felt complete. If I bounced off this hard on so many things, it simply was not worth investing any more time into it. Plus, I kinda sorta had a novel to finish in… a month and a half. Uh… I’ll talk about that next week.

Also, it turns out that the screenshots that I took with the in-game photo mode were DELETED when I uninstalled the game. So if my screenshots seem a bit sparse, that’s why. Thanks, assholes!

Gaming Generation Wars
(No, The Worse Kind of Generations)

Something that bugs me is how common, accepted, and normalized the shift towards viewing groups of people as generations has been. How they have become substitutes for age groups, and how there’s this desire to assign rigid traits to these groups that are, presumably, meant to stick until they die. I dislike this trend because I view it as a trick from The Man to sew division between the majority working class population. Get people to view different age groups as enemies. And make people look away from the cornucopious quantity of systems that exist to oppress and manipulate.

Despite what people think when they hear the term Boomer, Millennial, Gen Xer, or Zoomies, née Gen Z, the behaviors and tastes of these generations have and will continue to shift over time. Well, except for the Boomers. They’re old, at the end of their history, and getting ret-2-coffin-up.

Perspectives and preferences shift over time as the people within these groups get older, as their life situation changes, and I tend to view someone’s age as being far in a way more important than their generation, as it tells you what sort of issues they are dealing with, what their goals are, and what their values are. In fact, here’s an oversimplified version to plaster on some PowerPoint:

People in their twenties are finishing up school, starting their careers, and trying to live independently in a world that is increasingly hostile to them. They are often going out, dating, making connections, and trying to figure out how they want to spend the rest of their lives, assuming they have the luxury to experiment.
People in their thirties are expected to have their shit straighter and to be working towards traditional Western hallmarks of adulthood. Owning property, attaining a spouse, manufacturing children to keep humanity at the coveted 2.1 replacement rate, achieving a middle to high position in their chosen field, and narrow their focuses.
People in their forties are supposed to have their shit on lock and be going through their life with a clear path ahead. They know what their career should be, barring a sudden shift, they typically have had their children, and are focused on maintaining what they have developed so far rather than rocking the boat too much, ‘cos they’re over the hill.
People in their fifties tend to slow down, take on more senior positions, offload work to others, and are looking into continued maintenance and saving for retirement. They pay off their debts, send their children off to the broader world— or at least to the point where they don’t need constant supervision— and begin focusing more on their self as they feel the grip of age and death clenching their hearts.
People in their sixties are supposed to wrap up their careers, maybe shift to a senior advisor type career teaching or mentoring the next generation. All while getting their affairs in order, enjoying an empty nest, and the wealth they had accrued.

This narrative has never been perfect— it’s informed by some bogus American dream shit. But as a 31-year-old with almost exclusively twentysomething friends who works primarily with sixtysomethings and for people ages 30 to 90, this is the general cultural expectation. People become less outgoing as they get older, they try to slow down their life, get more into stuff like reading over following trends, and focus less on the broader world and more on “what can I get for me and my family?”

Unfortunately, people, researchers include, choose to focus on people in the buckets of Gen X, Millennial, and Zoomies, acting as if behaviors are generational rather than dictated by age. Sometimes they are generational, especially with rising technology. But viewing things broadly, probably not.

Someone might think they are hot revolutionary shit at age 20, looking at fortysomethings actin’ all like “I ain’t never gonna be like that stuffy old hoser,” when, nah bitch, you is gun be like dem fo’ real-real on da realz.

Akumako: “For context, Natalie was channeling the vernacular of Black Gen Xers circa 1992 with that last line. It’s appropriated Gen X verbiage, but does that sound like something a person in their 50s would say, or something a person in their 20s would say?”

Anyway~!

Akumako: “Anyhow~!”

Here’s a cow!

Akumako: “…What?”

So, uh, what this segment is actually supposed to be about is a report from IGN in collaboration with Kantar and UC Berkeley, dubbed Generations in Play (full PDF here). The researchers surveyed 6,250 highly engaged IGN users from the US, UK, and Australia to determine how tastes and preferences vary across generations, i.e., age groups. With the criteria for participation being to spend at least 10 hours a week gaming, streaming, watching videos, or browsing social media.

Now, as always, I appreciate the SHIT out of every entity that conducts, funds, and publishes this data to people in the form of a visually appealing slideshow full of delicious snippets. Y’all are P. Dope in my book. However, IGN’s research immediately disagrees with my perspective that generations don’t matter, plainly stating as such:

“While demographics like age provide a baseline, the true driver of modern behavior is the generational ‘operating system’, the distinct media environment in which an audience learned to navigate culture.”

Now, the understated pretense for this whole venture is that they are examining how their audience interacts with their platforms, and if there is one element that differs among generations, it’s how they use digital tools. It’s the environment they were born into and how they interact with the internet. It’s what they are specifically looking for and how they intend on finding it. This matters a LOT to places like IGN, which rely on ad traffic, user retention, and endearing brand loyalty among people. They are so big they need to keep metric in mind and produce content for the audience they have RIGHT NOW, and not think about what people will want in one or three years.

Even considering this fact, in how they are choosing to use and interpret the data, I still have some serious problems with how they are framing and presenting things. It’s like this was meant to sew discourse and to view people of other generations as The Deplorable Other. So much of it circles back to the fact that people in different age groups, in different stages of their lives, want different things and interact with their passions differently. This is not weird, wrong, or twisted, it’s just a fact of life.

Yet in a culture obsessed with age demographics, where people are seldom given the ability to interact with people far outside of their age groups due to the nature of industry, and social media, there is an aversion of acknowledging the fact that… people get older. Their perspectives, desires, and preferences change as their physical bodies and life situations change. And that’s just fine. That’s fucking normal. You think I’ve stayed stationary since I started this website almost 14 years ago? If I did, that would be cringe as fuck, yo. Like KSM fr fr.

Maybe this is obvious to me because I spent my PEAK YOUTH (16 to 28) years (re)listening to a podcast about guys becoming middle-aged across 550 episodes (all of whom were IGN alumni, ironically). Or how I have worked with people significantly older than me for the past 12 years, observing how people change as they get older. But, uh, it’s not my fault that the rest of the world ain’t on my level. Catch up, ya frankle dinkle bogus blitzers.

Akumako: “You’re 1,200 words in and haven’t actually talked about the article.”

Shaddup, you! Or I’ll turn you into a cow! A Persian cow!

Akumako: “…What?”

Part 1: Natalie Actually Starts Discussing The Damn Presentation

Going through this presentation in order— ‘cos my thoughts are gonna be scattered enough— I have to immediately question the ways they are choosing to present these demographics. They are presented as absolutes, when really all of these traits can apply to all of these groups. For example, everybody can find things without effort thanks to algorithms, can discover things just by refreshing a FYP (for you page), the difference is who defaults to it more.

Xers scheduled around TV guides, but Zoomies schedule around when streamers are going live and when they need to go to work or extracurriculars. Everybody schedules things, including “live” entertainment.

Zoomies are claimed to be “a generation where entertainment and social experiences are the same thing.” Which does not make any sense to me, as I was a millennial watching events like E3 2008 alongside a bunch of other people on the internet, reading the comments, seeing the news, and being part of a shared experience that was lived with, while Gen Xers were communicating directly with the audience, writing these reports, and answering questions about what they saw to their readers. That was a connective experience. It was entertainment. It was communal. It was social, and that ish was already old news back then.

Collective (media) experiences became a thing as early as the 1950s when mass media became produced and distributed across nations, when sports became mainstream institutions. One of the most famous examples of a show bleeding into the real world, of watching it and talking about it being a connective experience, can be found in 1980, when the TV show Dallas ended their season three finale on a mystery of who shot a character. I don’t know what Dallas is even about, but “Who Shot J.R.” was such a powerful collective experience it transcended the media it was about.

Hell, I would argue that it was a bigger and wider social experience back then. Before the internet, everybody was expected to know what Dallas was, as it was watched by tens of millions of Americans, as there were only a handful of TV channels back then. The process of watching TV, watching sports, and then talking about it with people at work or school was an intrinsic part of enjoying media. With fewer options, wouldn’t you say it’s easier to achieve a state where “entertainment and social experience are the same thing?”

Other observations made just seem… really obvious to me. Zoomies, i.e., young people, tend to be more devoted and receptive to a communal or cultural consensus over what experts or institutions say, which… makes sense. Young people are in or fresh out of school, an environment where they are forced to abide by institutions, and get through it by socializing with people of their own age. Their lives are dictated by trends, and cultural standards are determined by who is the loudest and most compelling speaker in their proximity.

Youngesters also have far less familiarity with any institution. They have not been around enough to develop trust with any institution. They often have they developed the experience needed to suss out and desire the experts. After getting burned by bad consensus, people specialize in other people, deemed experts with perspectives that align with their own developed tastes. But as finding experts becomes too difficult, people often turn to institutions and legacy brands, because if they have been around for 30 years, they’re probably pretty good.

Young people liking the social experience of the theaters is nothing new. Theaters and movies have been appealing to teens since the 50s. So wanting to go to the theater for the theatrical, the group, and the experience is a Zoomie thing. It used to be a damn Boomer thing.

Older people were some of the biggest adopters of home video, so of course this trend is seen in this dataset. Older people LOVE staying at home, where they are comfortable, and being able to pause a movie whenever their phone rings or they need to help their kid with something. The ability to pause, to choose, and to assemble a collection or rent something to enjoy in the comfort of one’s home appealed to older demographics from the jump.

Young people are more susceptible to FOMO, less patient in general, and generally care more about experiences, as their lives lack meaningful experiences because they have not had the chance to do much living.

Reaction content, shock content, and exaggeration inherently targets a younger audience, and generally has less appeal to people as they get older because… they’ve seen it before. If you watch Nintendo Direct reaction streams for a decade, you’ll probably see the patterns in them and feel less hype for the next decade’s worth. And if you remember reaction content’s big introduction, it started by targetting Millennials. Then they got too old, so the target shifted over the Zoomies.

Young people like what’s in and with it, then what’s “in” changes, the future leaves them aside as a new youth culture takes over, and this happens to everybody. They become old. Cue Simpsons clip. This is something you can’t observe in one study. You need like ten studies to examine this shift.

Part 2: The Podcast (Target) Generation

The next section is about podcasts, and this is an area where I think it is really important to acknowledge the context around this data and that it is coming from IGN. Otherwise, it makes podcasts out to be a primarily Millennial thing.

In brief, podcasts were a growing medium during the iPod generation, a way to save and listen to a broadcast without connecting to the internet. In their initial form, they primarily targeted teens and young adults, i.e., Millennials. People at a curious and information hungry age who would want access to information and faux social connection by putting another person’s thoughts in their ears. I am sure there are some fluctuations between podcast listenership by generation, but I think any data gathered by IGN is going to be skewed by how IGN does not make podcasts for everyone.

IGN’s biggest and longest running podcasts were all established in the late 2000s or 2010, and you can tell that they were because of their names. Nintendo Voice Chat is a reference to the Wii Speak peripheral. Beyond is a reference to a PS3 marketing campaign. Unlocked is a reference to the phrase “Achievement Unlocked,” which was popularized because Xbox 360 was the first system to have platform-wide achievements. These podcasts were all hosted by dudes in their 20s and 30s who were targeting audiences of people in their teens and twenties— Millennials.

Millennials who listened to these podcasts circa 2010 listened to them because they either wanted the information or, more likely, because they enjoyed the personalities. So, people stayed for the personalities, maybe drifting around for a while, and any new listener unfamiliar with the podcast, or personalities, would need to contend with the fact that these podcasts have been going on for hundreds of episodes. Combine this with the fact that most IGN personalities and staff are Millennials, and it’s not surprising that 80% of Game Scoop, NVC, Unlocked, and Beyond listeners are also Millennials.

The conclusion to make is not that Millennials like podcasts. The conclusion is that when your podcasts have always targeted an aging audience, you are not going to appeal to an audience much older or younger than your hosts. And when you are surveying core IGN users about podcasts, you are going to get a disproportionate number of IGN podcast listeners.

I know I am just speculating here, telling the folks at UC Berkeley that “you’re reading the data wrong.” But I genuinely think they are not considering this factor and choosing to present the data in a way that fits a narrative.

Part 3: Stats & Subscriptions

FINALLY moving onto something more interesting, we have some statistics about IGN’s core users:

70% no longer purchase physical movies, shows, or music
62% no longer purchase full priced video games.
Over 70% have a Netflix Subscription
Over 53% have a Prime video subscription
Most unsubscribe from platforms to watch different shows
71% binge watch shows

These are all interesting stats that do much to paint the genres of person who are invested in media and regularly visit IGN. However, most of these are pretty much what I would have expected. Despite their stupid prices, Netflix is still dominant when it comes to streaming. Everybody has a Prime account, or Prime Business account. Subscription hopping has been the reg for about a decade now. Binging shows is popular with the genres of persons who look up info on shows, because they don’t wanna get spoiled. Physical media died over a decade ago, and the 30% who do buy stuff are probably resolute/casual collectors, which is a niche IGN appeals to. And the 62% of people don’t buy fully priced video games stat is… just sensible.

If you look at game prices on any storefront, you will see routine deep discounts and sales that happen every few months, sometimes even weeks. 50% off sales happen for loads of titles within a year of release, and while price drops are rare nowadays, you can get most $60 game for $20 if you want to wait. Combined with live services offering free (asterisk) entertainment, how people having massive backlogs of games, and the wave of cheap $5 to $40 games and you truly do not need to buy a $70/$100 title day one to have a good time. …Except for Nintendo games. Buy ’em now or buy ’em a decade later, the price will not shift, ma’am.

This price consciousness is reflected in how games subscriptions are viewed, with Zoomies being by far the highest users of subscription services, and Gen Xers being the least likely to subscribe. Nearly half of the surveyed Zoomies had PlayStation Plus, while less than 25% of Gen Xers had it. This makes sense when one remembers how kids treated their game collections back in the 90s and 2000s. They sold them to buy new games, new consoles, and new experiences.

Younger people, in general, are less concerned about retaining things and more attached to new experiences, to getting things they can use, enjoy, and then set aside. Clothing lasts less time for them, as they keep growing. Interests shift rapidly as they go through adolescence and Adolescence 2: The Twenties. As people without a job or much spending money, it is harder for them to care about the idea of accumulating a collection. Kids are transient beings who have yet to find stability in the world, so they are probably not going to get into collections. Well, unless they have Nintendork brainrot.

To someone who wants to try lots of games, plays lots of games, and isn’t doing much beyond school and/or a part-time job, a games subscription service makes a lot of sense. I know that I would have fucking LOVED PS+ or Game Pass if I was an unemployed 16-year-old, as I just wanted to play a lot of games back then. Hell, look at the deluge of games I reviewed when I was 17/18, where I played whatever for the expeirence. Subscription services offer loads of experiences, even if they are too expensive. As I’ve said for nearly a decade, game subscriptions are a great option for certain people, and the youths are often those people. …Also, if someone is playing online, and young folks like playing online, they have for decades, then a game subscription is just a higher tier.

Or in other words, as people get older, they buy and retain more stuff than younger people do. Ergo, subscriptions are something that works for Zoomies now, but probably won’t as they become able to just buy the things they want.

Part 4: Okay, Fine, Tastes May Be Shifting…

Next, we have an interesting cluster of data about how people access new games. I would expect the older crowd to be more willing to buy games at full price because they have disposable income, and contain a good chunk of NES kids who are at prime prostate exam age. Instead, twice as many Zoomies and Millennials buy games at full price compared to Gen Xers. A third less of Gen Xers play new games as part of a subscription— possibly because so few subscript to Game Pass. And 46% of all Gen Xers play free-to-play games at launch, with only 30% of Zoomies doing the same.

While I can understand the first factoid, as Gen Xers know to wait before they buy things at a high price, I would imagine that WAY more Zoomies would go the free-to-play route, especially with so many F2P games vying for players’ attention. Then again, 55% of all surveyed Gen Xers here play Monopoly Go!, so maybe there is something skewed with this population of people.

Then we have the prettiest graph in the entire presentation, the divide between single player and multiplayer. Which… I think is one of the more compelling areas to examine generational divide, and an area where I will concede that IGN may be onto something. Over the past year specifically, I have seen a lot of comments, content, and possible ragebait about how a fixation on single player games is something unique to older generations. That single player games are some unc shit. And a belief that Zoomies simply are not interested in single player games as they find them to be too quiet, lonely, and boring compared to a live game that will be updated, has people around, and a community they can opt into when not playing.

This is something where I have to say I genuinely do not know if this is a generational thing or if player tastes will change as time goes on. Competition is generally a young man’s game, as it requires time, commitment, and physical reflexes that all decline as one reaches the sunny side of 25. The appeal and allure of online communities, per my two decades of observation, fades as people grow older, and most people above 40 who are into online communities do so because they are lonely IRL or have been part of the community for so long it would feel bad to quit.

Younger people could transition from multiplayer to single player, but I do not know if there is much evidence of that. They could stick with multiplayer, transition over to games where they set the pace, or ditch gaming so they can do other stuff. All options are equally plausible in my mind, as I simply have not seen or heard enough to be sure one way or another.

The best I can offer is anecdotes about my uncles. They used to be into video games, playing Atari, Genesis, and Nintendo 64 when they were kids before shifting over to mostly multiplayer shooters and sports games and then moving on from gaming in the late 2010s. Some people just stop playing video games, are removed from this core population, and I would love to get some real multi-year data showing these trends. Alas, that’s beyond the scope of this study.

Moving onto the last major section, IGN highlights how trust varies based on people of different generations, though it really can be distilled down into familiar molds of age groups, like with most everything else. Middle-aged people value stability, consistency, established sources, and do not want to trust some random person’s recommendations. Thirtysomethings look into their purchases, look into what they invest in, doing research and consulting sources, while also being inclined to listen to communal sentiments. Twentysomethings tend to be more communal, relying less on proven expertise and more of what the culture feeling, what the vibes are, rather than what establishment says things should be.

As someone with a memory that stretches back a decade and change, this adds up. This is just a progression of people changing what they trust in based on age.

Though, I do need to highlight how this idea of “residency” may have some merit. Effectively, what IGN has noticed is that Zoomies put a higher value on hangoutability, the development of a meta, and the social interactions of games, unsurprising for people who were weened on social games from a young age. They view online games as a social space in and of themselves, rather than the more goal-oriented perspectives of people Millennials and Xers.

This older segment cares more about completing, understanding, achieving, and mastering something before moving onto something more. They are digital nomads of games, searching for new experiences, rather than residents trying to make friends. The data says that Zoomies care about having a fun time with games, while the older folks care about finishing them. Will this change as these Zoomies get older? Honestly, I have no idea.

Part 5: ♫Winter Wrap-Up Winter Wrap-Up♫

For the most part, I believe that this study is overblown by its insistence to discount age, how people change over time, and how alterations in lifestyle, mental development, life experience, income, and free time change people. Instead, it promotes this narrative that generations are inherently different, when that is largely only true in a cynical content-driven marketing sense.

I do, unfortunately, lack any good retort to the claim that most Zoomies play games for a decidedly social reason, with stronger emphasis on specifically online communities and to specifically play with othersto hang outut with them. They are arguably not falling in love with games themselves, but rather games as a tool for socialization. If these needs or desires are fulfilled in a medium outside of games, then they would lack much reason to return. They would leave the dataset.

If they leave, I do not view that as an inherently bad thing, but I do worry about the number of people playing single player games declining over time, as I have for… at least a decade. I’m eternally bitter towards multiplayer titles. I view them as fickle, finite, and abusable, and discount the experiences’ value due to how situational, variable, and unrepeatable they are. I think they are less efficient ways to engage with a game, incentivize route recitation of optimized rituals, and are inherently limited as works of art. Catch me when I’m bitter and I’ll flat out call them lesser, because I am ultimately an asocial, deeply cynical, misanthropic, disabled, marginalized person who never felt she belonged or was welcome in this world. Nor do I even want to feel as if I belong or am welcome.

The “death of single player games” is a narrative I always rejected, dismissing as the fetishistic edging of corporate stooges who wish to make fetch happen by verbalizing their thoughts and contaminating general discourse. I have dismissed it outright many times, and there is plentiful circumstantial evidence that they are not dead. However, tastes can change between generations, and I do worry if Zoomies, the systemically abused Alphas, and the “fucked from birth” Betas will just avoid single player games outright and view games as just an extension of using technology to achieve ore fluid socialization.

This is, of course, assuming that there is not an influx of asocial, deeply cynical, misanthropic, disabled, or marginalized persons who never feel they they belonged or were welcome in this world. …Or people who just want to do things by themselves, where it is quiet. Frankly, I have no idea, because my restraining order prevents me from getting within 20 meters from any public school.

Akumako: “…The fuck kind of ending is that? Screw it! Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, become a cow that goes moo!”

Moooo~!

Star Fox (2026) Announced
(It’s The Third Remake of Star Fox 64)

Oh, Nintendo. You just love rustling my jimmies sometimes, dontcha?

For the past few months, we have known that a new Star Fox game of some sort was coming, as if Fox McCloud’s role in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie wasn’t enough of a clue. This is a rather interesting concept, as it has been 20 years since Nintendo tried something notable with Star Fox. The series had a respectable initial run, spanning the technical showcase of Star Fox (1993), the “I got 90 minutes to burn classic” that is Star Fox 64 (1997), and the vaulted Star Fox 2 from Argonaut “Done Dirty” Games. Which was all followed with an era of experimentation between Star Fox Adventures on Dinosaur Planet (2002), Star Fox Namco Assault (2004), and Star Fox DS Command (2006).

The series was basically begging for a Wii release, as it is a rail shooter, and those were one of the few genres that the Wii excelled in, basically having a light gun for its default controller. If Nintendo was smart, they would have had Factor 5 develop one, but instead they tried to get them develop some Kid Icarus game, and they delivered cringe.

Star Fox was ultimately put on ice until 2011’s Star Fox 64 3D, which should have been one of the first in a long line of N64 remakes for the 3DS but, uh, wasn’t. As a remake, it was quite good. A faithful recreation of the original, informed by the original code, with significantly retooled visuals, better controls, and better game feel as a whole. While not always a direct upgrade, the N64 had, uh, problems.

Its environments were incredibly dark, fog was intense, and textures did not aspire much confidence in what this system could do. Comparing it to Star Wars Rogue Squadron or Sin & Punishment, it looks like a game that was slapped together, not a flagship title.

Star Fox 64’s underlying gameplay is also worth some similar scrutiny, as it’s a pretty plain rail shooter where the challenge mostly comes form the game limiting the player. The bad draw distance leads to bad collision with distant objects. The damn submarine level is miserable. Allies keep flying into harm’s way when you’re trying to shoot enemies. And the overall control of momentum is not that great.

With Star Fox ’93, you get why it moves like a wet dog’s ass. Because it’s doing REAL 3D on a 2D system. On original hardware Star Fox 64 is slow, and ran like butts on what was then shiny new hardware. And the ship’s pacing, condensed map size, and low draw distance, makes movement feel unusually slow. I actually tried playing through both the PC port and emulating the 3DS version to gauge my memory and… no, I was right. The game just does not feel as tight, refined, or consistent as, I dunno, Rez Infinite, which I played a few weeks ago.

In saying this, I am not trying to say that Star Fox 64 is bad, actually. I’m just saying that it very quickly became outmoded by other titles, and Nintendo had plenty of opportunities to make it better. Star Fox 64 3D was better, but was a bit too committed to the original to make any major changes. It’s still a fun game, a bit short, and a bit shallow when it comes to repeated replays— I got bored of the 3DS version after three playthroughs, which took like 7 hours, but one that really could use some sprucing up if it were to be given a revisit.

Then, in 2016, Nintendo released the Wii U swansong that was Star Fox Zero. A game that was meant to validate the mistake that was the Wii U Gamepad, but had… some major problems.

One, the game was a pain in the ass to play due to a problem created by the developers themselves. Rather than have a Star Fox game that functions as a Star Fox game, they had the player split their attention between the Gamepad and the TV screen. You moved and observed the environment per the TV and aimed using the Gamepad. This was a very “it’s 2006 and we’re making a DS game” approach to game design, and people generally hated it, as it simply made the game harder to play and made it harder for players to shoot the enemies in a rail shooter.

Two, rather than set out to be a wholly new experience, the title was largely a retread of Star Fox 64. The visual style of many environments seemed rooted in that era in the worst way. The plot was largely copied wholesale. And so many areas were spiritual or literal retreads that it was largely seen as a remake of Star Fox 64.

Three, the game kinda looked like a 2010 XBLA game, with simplistic environments, flat lighting, and pretty underwhelming effects. For 2016, people expected better. This is because the game is being rendered twice— on the gamepad and on the TV, but I don’t care. It still looks middling.

Four, the game was slow and short, which is the worst combination. (The best is fast and long, just like your wife.) It needs to be both of these due to the control issues, but again, this is a problem by design, If your game looks plain and is slow because of your revolutionary new control scheme… don’t. Just don’t!

So… what the HELL are you supposed to do about Star Fox at this point? Well, Ubisoft of all people was the first to ask this, as they had the harebrained idea of creating an open world spaceship game called Starlink: Battle for Atlas, and got Nintendo’s permission to put Star Fox stuff in the game, including some Nintendo exclusive Star Fox DLC. As a game, Starlink was not great, being the product of many Ubisoft-isms, but if you squint, play as Fox McCloud, and not bother with this dumb Toys to Life stuff… it was the best Star Fox game since Assault.

Nintendo could have schmoozed up to Ubisoft, asked the developers to make their own Star Fox game using the foundation of Starlink, since they had the core stuff needed to make one. But nah, they decided that would be too smart.

What’s a Nintendo to Ninten-do at a time like this? The internal team clearly has no new ideas for Star Fox at this point, having not developed an original title in-house since 1997. Crazy old marketing asset, Shigeru Miyamoto, refuses to let the series die yet has no new ideas for it. Nintendo could do anything with it, really, but instead they decided the best thing to do was to do a souped up facelift of the original Star Fox 64, simply called… Star Fox.

…You could have called it Star Fox: Lylat Wars, guys. The subtitle could have just been 64‘s European name, which had to be changed for legal reasons. But nope! It’s just Star Fox (2026).

From a mechanical and level design perspective, Star Fox (2026) is largely a one-to-one recreation of the original title, in the vein of Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy, just with more cutscenes, options, a shield/health system instead of a health system, and a brand new coat of paint. A coat of paint that… I think looks pretty unappealing. Both in regards to the character redesigns and the general look of the game.

Full disclosure, but I am unambiguously a furry— I just turned myself into a cow for what it’s worth— and am confident in saying that Fox McCloud is HOT. Falco too, but not as much, and Wolf is the sexiest of the three— obviously. And I’ve jerked off to AkuOreo’s Krystal TF sequences at least thrice. Not’ ‘cos to say I did it, but I’m committed.

Akumako: “In more ways than one…”

Star Fox is a horny game full of hot animal people, and this has been the series’ identity for a long time. Hell, ever since Krystal was introduced as a sex symbol who was accompanied by erotic saxophone music, the series has been firmly furry bait. Hell, I have to question how many furries Star Fox (mostly via Smash Bros.) awakened compared to something like Sonic. Or Pokemon. Or the totality of anime.

The character designs the series adopted in Star Fox 64 was admittedly a distinction from the original title, where the characters looked more like puppets— which is a niche sexy— so you could argue that a redesign is warranted. I’d say… sure. I think the new Donkey Kong design looks great while still being distinctly Donkey Kong, and I would appreciate a Star Fox game where all the characters look like photorealistic puppets.

However, the new Star Fox designs… don’t look like furries or puppets! It’s like they shifted the human/animal ratio from about 70/30 to something closer to 50/50. And… I do not like it. They do not look like humans with animal features as much as they look like animals in a humanoid shape. They hunch when they move. Their eyes are tiny compared to what I am inclined to expect from furries. Their faces are so animalistic and realistic that they look like animals first and characters second. Like, Falco, who had the most radical redesign, no longer looks like someone who can fly a plane. His eyes are too small, hands are too feathery— they would clog up the instruments!

Actually, I think the thing that really turns me off with these designs is that they took something that was clearly cartoonish, clearly exaggerated, and made it more realistic. This is a hard sell for me, as I think in cartoon vision, and consider Star Fox to an anime-flavored property. Characters might have realistic fur, but their proportions are that of kemono people. These new proportions, combined with the visual history of the series, makes it hard for me to get on board with the designs. If things were grosser and more freakish, and the game was not Star Fox, then I would be singing a different tune.

This character design shift is part of the remake’s general art direction, as Star Fox 2026 is one of those remakes. A remake more concerned with looking modern, realistic, and like a technical showcase over looking good. This is a rut that several remakes run into, especially when they are outsourced to a studio unfamiliar with the original game. Certain elements retain their more basic, cartoonish proportions, with big robot bosses still looking like big funny robots rather than gritty killing machines. However, the presentation as a whole deters to realism in a way that makes me stop and think… what exactly was Star Fox’s art direction anyway?

…Shit, this is just their attempt to make it look more unique, innit? Well… Did you have to do it with a remake of a game? If you want to overhaul how a series looks, then rebuilt it from scratch!

Then there are the cutscenes. Star Fox 2026’s largest contribution to the original game is the introduction of new cutscenes that expanding on the characters, general story, and better illustrate certain cinematic moments via… cinematics. They look good— quite good really— but are high fidelity cutscenes really what people want in a remake of a game with such a thin and cliche narrative? If you want to add more to the story of Star Fox 64 then… just make a damn Star Fox movie. It would not do well, but I would actually understand this visual pivot if it were a movie tie-in.

I think that Star Fox 2026 looks like a remake that is not adding much of substance and largely recycles something that has been re-released thrice and remade just as many times. If you want to play Star Fox 64, you can play it on Switch. You can play the definitive version on PC. If you want a prettier version… figure out how to play the 3DS game in a way that is not ass. There is no real need to remake the game other than to keep the brand “relevant” and as a remake, I find it patently uncreative.

The stages will be largely unchanged. Difficulty modes will be tweaked. Online play will be added for the pretty minimal multiplayer modes based on the 1997 original. To make use of the Switch 2 hardware, the game will both have a first-person mode where you aim and move with the Joy-Con mice. And the game will sport a Star Fox Zero style co-op mode where one player pilots and the other shooters. Those are cool little extras, but they do not warrant remaking a game that has been re-released thrice and remade just as many times.

If you are going to remake a game like this, DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT. Hell, having played through Star Fox 1993 earlier this year, I would actually be VERY interested in seeing the game transformed into a modern incarnation, and not just because the game has a frame rate of, like, eleven. I would RESPECT a remake of the first three games that tries to merge them into something comprehensive. Unfortunately, that would be too much work for a series that is clearly running on creative fumes.

In fact… who is even developing this game? Because it does not look like a Nintendo project. This looks like something they outsourced and put their name on. Nintendo does not do realism like this… Well, we should know who is responsible for Star Fox 2026 once it comes out exclusively for Switch 2 on June 25, 2026. The title will retail for $50 digital while the physical version will be subject an additional $10 component shortage fee, running at $60. Which is obviously too much for a souped up remake of a game that Nintendo was selling for $10 in 2007.

Atari Bought The First Five Wizardry Games
(Somehow, Some Way, And It’s CONFUSING!)

Okay, so this is a weird one. Wizardry is one of the two most commonly cited progenitors of the role-playing game genre, which goes something like this: Titles like Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness (1981) and Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (1981) were ambitious attempts at capturing the thrills and spectacle of fantasy tabletop games, i.e., Dungeons and Dragons, along with fantasy literature in the form of a video game. They targeted a niche of Apple II users, but gradually grew in popularity and were iterated on through a stream of additional releases.

Ultima went on to radically transform itself with each new release, often paving the way for what computer games could be or do, helping it earn a well documented place in the broader western gaming zeitgeist. See Majuular’s excellent documentary series on these titles for more information. There were attempts to bridge Ultima around the world, with ports to Japanese computers, console recreations that cut away a huge core of the game, and the series overall kind of crumbled in 1994 thanks to Electronic Arts’ insane mandates. Though, the series only getting a second wind with the foundational Ultima Online, the first in the lineage of huge MMOs, and one that is still technically going on to this day, somehow.

The Wizardry series is slightly more complicated though. Originally, it wasn’t so much as a series as a collection of scenarios built around the original 1981 release, which can be thought of as the granddaddy of all dungeon crawlers. You make a team, venture into a dungeon, get stuff, return to town, then go back to the dungeon with new knowledge in tow. The second game was effectively an expansion of the first meant for players who completed the campaign. The third was largely a time skip sequel where you played as the descendants of your characters. While the fourth was about playing as the big bad, trying to escape the dungeon from the bottom, and battling against the strongest players’ teams in the world. People shipped their character disks to the developer Sir-Tech who added them into Wizardry IV, and as a result, the game is fuck ridiculously hard. In fact, the first four games are damn hard as a rule, and required making a damn map on graph paper.

It is tempting to then go onto Wizardry V, which is where the series began forging a more fluid and advanced identity. This identity was expanded across three additional numbered sequel and one… whack-ass first-person adventure RPG before the original developer, Sir-Tech, went bankrupt. This is a history well and truly worth telling, as these games all made their own contributions to the rapidly growing genre of computer RPGs in the west. However, Wizardry is one of the few series to have parallel regional histories. It was home to an utter deluge of Japanese spin-offs, ports, remakes, and compilations as developers across the board were handed the license and spread Wizardry everywhere they could.

There are simply TOO MANY Wizardry games that only released in Japan for a westerner to earnestly care about every single one of them, but their sheer breadth is beyond impressive. There was a series of Game Boy games, multiple subseries spanning PS2, a bunch of cell phone games that are as dead as a box of clams. None of these titles reached the western market until Atlus published Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land (2001), which was around the time Sir-Tech was closing up shop and the Wizardry was in a murky IP trade-off.

Despite licensing oodles of Wizardry games for release in Japan, Sir-Tech had oodles of financial issues and the Wizardry IP rights well into the hands of a company named 1259190 Ontario Inc. As a tax accountant, holding company names like that are not uncommon. Ontario basically sat on the IP for a while, somehow continuing to license like a dozen games for Japan, before the rights were transferred to company by the name of Kabushiki Kaisha Aeria IPM, or Aeria IPM, or later just Aeria. Aeria was bought by Gamepot, Gamepot was bought by GMO Internet Group, Inc., and the series was eventually bought by Drecom in 2020. …At least I think so.

In the report announcing their IP acquisition, Drecom claimed they acquired the Wizardry IP, but curiously only highlighted how they owned Wizardry 6, 7, 8, and Gold. With Gold just being an enhanced version of 7. This was an odd way to announce the game, but Drecom seemed mostly interested in developing their gacha live service, Wizardry Variants Daphne (2024). Aside from Daphne, the past few years have been relatively quiet by Wizardry standards, only seeing re-releases of The Five Ordeals on modern platforms, and a comprehensive remake of the first game by Digital Eclipse.

This shift of ownership, and the fact there have been FAR more Japanese developed games than Western developed games, had led Wizardry to become, effectively, a Japanese game series. One with a lineage and history that is hard to properly map out. Looking up the series on Niche Barrier and Game Data Library, no single title sold over 100,000 titles, but when you consider what Wizardry is— that it is a dungeon crawling blobber— and where that genre flourishes… it’s not too hard to connect the dots.

I also think that it’s very funny that Wizardry became a Japanese game series after learning that one of its co-creators, Robert Woodhead, was also a co-founder of AnimEigo. For those not in the know, and why would you be, AnimEigo is one of the first anime licensing companies in America and current purveyor of some truly excellent interviews from the people responsible for paving the roads for anime distribution in North America and Britain.

So, not only did Woodhead pave the way for RPGs, co-create the first dungeon crawler, he license hood classics like Bubblegum Crisis and Otaku no Video for wretched Americans. Hell, that might be underselling the impact of him and other Wizardry devs, as they had a huge influence on the foundation of JRPGs and Japan’s particular interpretation of western fantasy.

It’s tempting to think that this interpretation of fantasy came from movies, tabletop games, and even badly translated fantasy novels— which all played a role. But the influence of video games cannot be understated, and I would confidently make claims like “we wouldn’t have Frieren without games like Wizardry.” Because history, the development of genre, the development of art, is just a series of people doing cool stuff that inspires other people, resulting in this mountain of art, of industry, and new generational ideas.

HOWEVER, there is a missing piece that is often overlooked in reciting this history, as neither Wizardry nor Ultima were widely available in Japan at launch. You would need to learn about them, through a man, through a magazine, ship them across the Pacific Ocean, and run them on an Apple II, which was not a very popular computer in Japan at the time. Japanese has their own computers. Instead, the first BIG RPG to hit Japan was actually The Black Onyx (1984), which can be thought of one of the first RPGs that the Japanese public actually played. Black Onyx came out in January 1984— months before Dragon Slayer (1984), before Hydlide (1984), and before Japanese releases of either Wizardry or Ultima.

So, who made Black Onyx and what were their inspirations? Well, the game was designed by Henk Rogers, an aspiring businessman who acknowledged the growing success of RPGs in the western markets while in Japan. He initially tried developing the game under Koei, but wound up using his own company, Bullet-Proof Software, to handle the game’s release. Black Onyx was remarkable when it came out, and left an impression on loads of people— including Shigeru Miyamoto, who once cited Black Onyx and Ultima an inspiration for The Legend of Zelda. (Wait, so that must mean that Miyamoto played an imported copy of Ultima?)

Though, arguably-arguably, the big-big game to make a splash in the RPG genre for Japan writ large was actually Falcom’s Dragon Slayer II: Xanadu in October 1985, which was owned, or played, by every Japanese computer gamer back in its heyday, paving the way for Wizardry in November 1985, Dragon Quest in February 1986 and… wait, when did Ultima come out in Japan? Uh, Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress was the first one to be localized in September 1985. Or maybe the FM-7 came out before then. You’d need to look up old Japanese PC magazines to figure that out and— HOLY SHIT! So Ultima II, Xanadu, and Wizardry released in the same QUARTER in Japan? Then Dragon Quest came out the next quarter? RPG fans were eating GOOD back then!

Akumako: “Natalie! WAKE UP! You’re lost in your thoughts again!”

Sorry~! I just love this snippet of history. I almost veered off into how Henk Rogers went to the USSR to get the rights to make Tetris for Game Boy and eventually became the co-founder of The Tetris Company alongside Alexey Pajitnov.

Akumako: “READ THE DAMN NEWS!“

Atari Interactive, Inc., a company with its own incredibly messy history, has announced they acquired the rights to the first five Wizardry games, aka Original Wizardry and The Llylgamyn Saga along with all of their related versions. This includes the PC, NES, SNES, and possibly other versions. Despite how prolific the series was at pumping out new games, none of these games have received any modern re-release, and have largely subsisted as abandonware for decades.

Atari plans to remedy this “through expanded digital and physical distribution and the creation of remasters, collections, and new releases” while also creating related materials including “merchandise, card and board games, books and comics, and TV and film projects.”

It makes all the sense in the world for Atari to try to revitalize Wizardry in the west. Nobody else is, they are going all in on retro gaming, and have bought experience with the IP. Atari owns Digital Eclipse, who remade the first game, doing a damn impressive job of it. And Atari also owns Night Dive, who brought Wizardry 6, 7, and 8 to GOG and Steam back in 2013.

However, insisting that they only have the rights to five games out of, like, fifty, is a bit perplexing. They definitely could not buy the IP outright, but I cannot recall a time when IP ownership was split like this, and it’s frankly confusing. This is not a licensing agreement, this is an acquisition, a purchase, of part of an IP based on a universe that, apparently, was discarded after five games.

What Atari bought is not very clear, not very clean, and there is reason to suspect that it could result in a big wet mess.

Also, Atari, what are you talking about? Making TV and film projects? You don’t have the money for that! You literally don’t! I checked. And if a Dungeons and Dragons film series cannot take off, then there’s no way a series that has been DEAD in the west for 25 years will be able to make ANY waves. Card games, comics, and books though? That’s cheap.

In conclusion… why is Atari making this more difficult and more confusing? I get the desire to resurrect forgotten or ignored IP or titles that just are not on storefronts, but why are you trying to split the rights to one of the most important games series of all time? Just license them and make Wizardry: The Llylgamyn Saga Collection. It worked for that Yu-Gi-Oh! collection, and the Tetris Forever collection— WAIT! Does that mean that Atari or Digital Eclipse can use their connections to potentially re-release Black Onyx? That way, people could learn how important it was to gaming history and the evolution of the RPG genre through an interactive documentary with Henk Rogers telling the story before he makes like a human and DIES?

Akumako: “…I guess once wasn’t enough for you! Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, become a cow that goes moo!”

Moooo~!

Nintendo Hikes Their Prices (Again)
(Affordable Gaming is DEAD)

I hasn’t even been two months since Sony raised the price of the PlayStation 5. Back when that story was relevant, I posited genuine concern about what this means for the future of gaming. Without inexpensive entry-level hardware, people have less reason to get into gaming in the first place. If their parents cannot buy them a console, then an entire generation of kids will go without one and will only know of gaming through social multiplayer applications. This will ultimately hurt console gaming, the games industry as a whole, and shrink the market for traditional or package gaming.

The more expensive gaming gets, the fewer people will opt in. The industry made great strides in keeping gaming affordable from the 1980s to 2019, but everything changed when the pandemic struck. Rampant inflation and growing costs of materials led companies to keep prices stable, or launch stealth price hikes in the form of revisions. This in and of itself would not be the worst move, but then America just had to fuck over everything for everybody, including Americans.

American AI companies have been buying up components in order to create data centers, raising the prices of pretty much all components at this point. Donald Trump began his campaign to destroy the post-WWII order by launching tariffs and throwing the global trade system into the blender. As a reminder, global trade was established by America for America’s benefit. And after a hissy-fit turned money hole, Trump is fucking with the supply chain of oil, and if oil becomes more scarce, then literally everything will get more expensive, as our world is run by oil.

The immense transfer of wealth experienced during the pandemic, where the rich got wildly richer.
The asocial conspiratorial paranoia that was mainstreamed by the pandemic and rising anti-vaccine movement.
The widespread lack of faith in political institutions that has led to a wave of contrarian anti-establishment politicians that want to strengthen the establishment.
The continued abuse of the supply chain, making everything scarcer and more expensive.
The normalized geopolitical unrest and renewed precedent that annexation is okay if you’re White.

All of these things have and are radically shifting the world, beginning a new dark era in humanity, and I just hate it. I hate how order is being destroyed by greedy petulant men who wish to only consume, only to control, because they view themselves as lords, as chosen to shape the world in their own image, when that image is fucking horrible for anyone who isn’t them.

Akumako: “Oi! This is a last minute bit! Focus or I’ll turn you into a cow a third time. Then this gag will REALLY be dead!”

Nintendo has announced that they are raising the price of Nintendo Switch 2 in all markets

The Nintendo Switch 2 will go from $450 to $500 in the United States, effective September 1, 2026
The Canadian price of the Nintendo Switch 2 is going up from $630 to $680, effective September 1, 2026
The European price of the Nintendo Switch 2 is going up from €470 to €500, effective September 1, 2026
The Nintendo Switch 2 Japanese-Language System, only available in Japan, is jumping from ¥49,980 to ¥59,980, effective May 25, 2026
European prices of the Nintendo Switch 2 will not be changed, for now

In addition to this, Nintendo is hitting Japan hard with their first ever price hikes for Nintendo Switch Online. Every JAPANESE Nintendo Switch Online plain only is going up by up to 24%. In addition, they are also raising the price of every Japanese Switch 1 system by ¥8,000 to ¥10,000. Why? Because the yen has not been doing so hot for the past few years, and with all the global tensions going on, there is reason to doubt the currency.

Because of these prices increases, Nintendo is expecting a decline in sales momentum of the Switch 2, but the system has maintained pretty strong sales for a system without its own Super Mario, Zelda, or Pokémon, reaching 19.86 million, which is basically 20 million.

As for games, Pokémon Pokopia has been had a surprisingly high sell-through rate of over 4 million units. The re-releases of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen also sold 4 million units, proving that if a retro game is big enough and presented the right way, it can sell objectively well. That’s $80 million in revenue less cost of sales for very little work. Whil Tomadachi Life: Livin’ Da Dream managed to sell 3.8 million within two weeks, which is impressive, especially for a social media game that lacks frictionless social sharing.

For the other console maker, Sony has shipped a total of 93.7 million PlayStation 5s, and seeing as how analysts expect Grand Theft Auto VI to sell something like 40 million units in a month, I’m sure they will handily hit 100 million before year-end.

These figures still look good, but it takes time for the effects of price shifts to really affect the market and, like with everything else nowadays, you can only expect things to get worse. What I fear is a generational decline, people just not getting into gaming, and the active buyers and players of non-live-service gaming dropping precipitously. Everything I am seeing seems to speak to this as an inevitability, and I find this shift so undesirable that I would rather see the industry effectively end.

Also, uh, in my mind this is the second price hike for Nintendo Switch 2 in North America. It should have been $400, but cost $450 because of the damn tariffs and Nintendo did not want to loose oodles of money, so they hiked the price before release. Thanks America. You just keep making the world worse and worse.

Progress Report 2026-05-10

Yeah, yeah, first time playing this game in 15 years and I didn’t get the right ending. I find the freeform flight jarring when it comes up, as it is SO different, and kept forgetting to U-Turn, as it is a button combo in the original, not a regular button.

I was going to put something here… but then I cut it because this Rundown was already TOO LONG.

2026-05-03: Another free day for me, but I similarly struggled to get into the groove, not helped by how I spent four hours doing stuff with Cassie. Love you Cassie! Still, I cranked out 3,200 words to finish off VD2.0 Ch 7-07, FINALLY, and started on the gaiden section of VD2.0 Ch 7-10, writing 2,000 words. I hope to complete it tomorrow.

2026-05-04: Finished VD2.0 Ch 7-10 with an extra… 6,800 words? Fuck me! How did this one silly side story wind up being over 15,000 words long? That’s a TSF Series! Aaaaahhhh! Not content with that, I decided I needed to get started on the final four part subplot before I can write the final two segments of the novel. Then I decided that was not enough and worked up 2,222 words (exactly, lol) for the FINAL major plotline with VD2.0 Ch 7-06. Time is warped and space is bendable! I did OVER 9,000 words on my day off. YEAH!

2026-05-05: I was busy working for day job stuff until midnight, as I was sick of a project that was lying around and wanted to get it to a good enough end-state. I dream of labor!

2026-05-06: Wrote 2,100 words for the Star Fox bit. THANKS NINA! Wrote 4,800 words for the IGN generations bit. FUCK YOU! Edited Neverness to Everness bits. LAME-ASS!

2026-05-07: Wrote the 2,100 word Wizardry bit, which took some researching. Then I edited the rest of the Rundown, so like 10k words of editing. And I tried playing Star Fox 64 before getting pissed off at the damn submarine stage. Admittedly, I just was not barrel rolling enough, but also, the submarine is ASS. Then I stopped being a baby and just beat the game.

2026-05-08: Wrote 1,000 word Switch 2 price hike segment. Wrote 3,400 words for VD2.0 Ch 7-06, finishing that chapter. Wrote 1,900 words for next week’s Rundown Preamble, not finishing it, but holding myself accountable all the same. Shit, this day was actually P. Good when it comes to productivity.

2026-05-09: Wrote 5,100 words for VD2.0 Ch 7-06. I had anime day with Cassie, had chores, so not as productive as I would like. Also, my jaw was kinda busted from mysterious swelling. NOT FUN!

Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 – Act III: Worldly Wonders
Progress Report

Current Word Count: 220,913

Estimated Word Count: 250,000

Words Edited: 0

Total Segments: 29

Segments Outlined: 29

Segments Drafted: 24

Segments Edited: 0

Header Images Made: 0

Days Until Deadline: 52

Makin’ progress, makin’ progress, makin’ good-good progress. Aaaaaahhhh! I’ll have some days off tomorrow, so please shaddup Gamindustri!

This Post Has 4 Comments

jj97tsf 05/10/2026 Reply

Natalie with a NTE truthbomb!! I like the game overall, but the criticisms you pointed out are super glaring. The writing is really, really bad, and there are a ton of interesting ideas/systems that are interesting but aren’t quite fleshed all the way out. I’m particularly torn about the extraction/heist mode, as someone who has played a lot of extraction shooters, because I really like the idea, but damn… The actual mode kinda sucks!

I also think of NTR whenever I think of the game name, so I’m glad I’m not the only one.
1. Natalie Neumann 05/10/2026 Reply
  
  NTE is so close to NTR that I am baffled then went with this name. Neverness to Everness is already the type of name that I cannot see making it out of any focus group unscathed, but to use an Abbreviation just a key away from NTR is wild to me.
  I never got far enough to experience the heist mode, hence why I didn’t bring it up. I was too busy getting BAFFLED by the storytelling. :P
Cassie 05/10/2026 Reply

This rundown mentions fox 59 times but Kon not once. Disgraceful!
1. Natalie Neumann 05/10/2026 Reply
  
  Star Fox doesn’t go “kon.” He just talks like a regular man.

Rundown Preamble Ramble:Neverness to Ever Less

Rundown 2 Preamble 2 Ramble:Neverness to Ever Less is Bad at Storytelling

Gaming Generation Wars(No, The Worse Kind of Generations)

Star Fox (2026) Announced(It’s The Third Remake of Star Fox 64)

Atari Bought The First Five Wizardry Games(Somehow, Some Way, And It’s CONFUSING!)

Nintendo Hikes Their Prices (Again)(Affordable Gaming is DEAD)

Progress Report 2026-05-10

Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 – Act III: Worldly WondersProgress Report

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